Connections Puzzle #1098
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Someone on earth vs someone on the ISS have different gravitational experiences for instance.

The experience is different because the person in the ISS is simply not close enough to Earth to be subjected to Earth’s gravity, in any practical amount. But that doesn’t mean gravity stopped existing for them.

Ooh, time for science pedantry! The ISS is plenty close enough to Earth to experience almost the same gravity from the planet as on its surface, which is why it has to be orbiting at such speed - falling sideways fast enough and at the right angle so as not to come crashing down!

Your original name was fine. The multiplier is one-sixth.

The very short, very bastardized version is that as objects move at speeds closer to the speed of light, the way everything else around them appears to be shaped and moving changes. A “stationary” object you pass seems less long than it should in the dimension parallel to your travel. The net result is that however two objects are moving relative to each other, their own speeds warp their experiences of the universe such that nothing else is observed to be doing something “illegal”.

The very best numbers, like no one has ever seen before. Big numbers, strong numbers, decimals streaming down their faces.

Null set. No Nazi can actually be punk.

Your original comment definitely said Asia.

So, it’s Nestlé behind things again.

Technically, the outer surface of a sphere is, itself, two-dimensional. It is, however, non-Euclidean and cannot be perfectly preserved in a Euclidean two-dimensional space.

Africa: 30.3 million km²

Asia: 44 million km²

Nowhere near the difference Mercator projection maps make it out to be, but Asia definitely is larger.

Estimate Me: 2025-12-04 (Nerds in container)
Rank #8 of 245
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🔗 https://estimate-me.aukspot.com/archive/2025-12-04

My final guess was off by, like, half a percent. Despite my other guesses being off by more like 50% each way.

Took me way too long to find a foothold into this one. Over 11 minutes.

I assume your comment is very tongue-in-cheek, in which case it was a fun read. What follows is my response if it isn’t.

Well, the top-level comment said μg, which was the basis of my questioning the second-level comment. Not sure where your millicentigrams came from.

Also, your math is weird. You wouldn’t multiply your exponents like that, you’d add them. As noted at the top, though, I suspect your whole comment is in jest and the math is meant to be the giveaway aimed at the literal-minded like me.

Are you using “mig” as milligram or microgram? For that to be a term you’d use, I assume you recognize you’re responding to a quantity in micrograms.

I dug around for a little bit, and it seems like the answer might be yes. Take what follows with a grain of salt, as I skimmed or read a few sources focused on different things and have done my best to reproduce a full picture.

First, some basic facts. Sponges anchor to the seabed (freshwater ones anchor to the dirt at the bottom of a lake/whatever). Sponge cells can move around each other and rearrange, part of their normal functioning, to keep water flowing through themselves efficiently for respiration and food capture.

Next, the mechanisms of reconstruction from a soup of sponge cells. As they bump into each other and recognize their own kind, sponge cells manage to hold together and hope for ground to attach to. They flatten out, presumably both to improve grip to the ground and to provide a large surface area for more cells to join. As long as the new colony ends up with enough of two specific kinds of cells (one makes connective mesohyl, the other makes everything else), it can grow.

The main thing I couldn’t (quickly) find is specific confirmation that two healthy, stable colonies coming from a single halved source sponge can reattach, or if the reaggregation process only works following injury or during some kind of stress. Since the cells normally move around, though, it seems reasonable that this could work.

Based on all that and assuming their aren’t other factors for sponge cells recognizing each other not entirely based on DNA, then presumably clones could also be attached.

Note that sponges don’t actually stop growing. Their main limits are resource needs and predation, since some sea life likes to take nibbles or bites out of them (that’s possibly a factor to why they are so adept at reorganization). So if your question involved cloning (rather than reattachment) only to get around a rough maximum size or early-life growth period that stops, it shouldn’t be necessary.

So, my assumption is: separated cells with the same genetic code, or some other biomarker of “individuality” that might not technically be unique, will attach to each other given the chance.

Super quick research suggests they don’t have organs or a nervous system, but do have specialized bits like flagella to move water through their pores/tunnels. The majority of the cells just … are. Sounds more like a colony of genetically identical cells than a single multi-cellular creature (to me), but I assume biologists have much more information and reason to consider them the way they do.

Right alongside Kombucha Combat

Probably some of each. Some few might be literal retellings, some are exaggerated, some are just made up.

Probably theyre just dappling in biology.