• Question: Ok, so I'm in love with cells and acid type of science (also in love with science) but I was wondering - is it possible to defy the law of science (physics) by turning big animals small,and small animals big? Thanks!!!!

    Asked by luvinscience1202 to Ed, Hayley, Jason, Nathan, Sophie on 11 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Jason King

      Jason King answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      Like some kind of shrinking ray? that would be cool, but probably impossible. All animals are made out of cells, which are roughly the same size. Small animals just have less cells. To shrink something you would have to make all the bits smaller, including the cells and all the atoms they are made from. Sadly, you just can’t make atoms smaller without totally changing them and making them behave differently.

    • Photo: Hayley Evers-King

      Hayley Evers-King answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      There’s lots of fossils of very big insects and a lot of scientists think that they could grow bigger in the past because of different oxygen concentrations. So you could possibly grow bigger insects in higher oxygen….but that would probably be very bad for the rest of us (lots more chance of fires for example!).

      You could also selectively breed animals to make them smaller or bigger – this is exactly whats happened with dogs! It may be hard to believe but tiny daschunds and huge great danes actually share the same ancestors!

      None of this would happen immediately though and is all well within the known laws of science/physics!

    • Photo: Edward Bovill

      Edward Bovill answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Unfortunately, with the technology we have today it would be impossible to shrink or enlarge anything very much. This is because atoms, which make up everything around us, cannot be shrunk down or enlarged. If you shrunk an elephant down to 1/10 it’s size, you would be shrinking all of the atoms that made it to 1/10 of their size too – which isn’t possible.
      If you could make animals larger, you would find that past a certain point their bones would not be able to take the weight of their larger body. This is because if I double in size, my weight increases by 8x, but my bones only increase in strength by 4x. Eventually, as I increased in size, my leg bones would break from all the extra weight!

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