With all this talk about building walls, one thing I don't really see being discussed is the environmental impact of the wall. The Great Wall of China seems analogous and I was wondering if there were studies done on that.

Link here.

So, some animal gets buried in a mudslide or something--it's in one piece, and decays, presumably, in one piece--the meat keeps the bones more or less together. It's not like it gets chopped up and cast about. (...right?)

So how do we end up with so many partial fossils? How do we find, say, a 6th rib, and then an 8th rib? I imagine myself looking down in that hole in the few inch space between them thinking, "well, it really ought to be right here." I can't imagine some kind of physical process that would do such a thing with regularity, so is it more of a chemical process? If it was, how could conditions vary so much a few inches over in some mass of lithifying sediment to preserve one bone and not another?

EDIT: I think /u/BoneHeadJones seemed to have the fullest grasp of what I was trying to ask here and a lot of information to offer--he got in a little late, I think, so please scroll down to check out his really informative and notably excited comment

EDIT2: alright, that post rocketed to the top where it belonged. How bout that guy, right?

Here's and example, rhodopsin:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/41/Rhodopsin-transducin.png/826px-Rhodopsin-transducin.png
It's a monsterous molecule, is it done using mass spec? I'd imagine such a signal would be horrendous to reconstruct.

Wouldn't inhaling CO2 cause your blood CO2 levels to increase making if feel as if you were suffocating? Why aren't inert gasses such as N2 used? They would deprive the animals of oxygen but also allow them to regulate their blood CO2 levels as if they were breathing in air.

This video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yHIsQhVxGM ) was linked in /r/videos. In it, a sizable Octopus slowly squeezes through a seemingly small hole in order to escape back into the ocean.

After viewing, I'm left curious as to whether the octopus suffers any organ damage from the act. In particular, I'm curious about the brain and eyes. Granted, we don't know the exact size of the hole nor the octopus. I googled a bit to read about octopus anatomy and learned a bit about the distributed nature of the octopus brain, but never answered my original question.

I've always assumed the brain to be the most fragile of all organs. I believe that for humans, increased cranial pressure is potentially highly damaging to the brain. I'm aware that an octopus possess no solid cranium, so my natural assumption is that squeezing a relatively unprotected brain through a small hole is far more damaging than elevated cranial pressure.

Is the octopus brain small enough to not be compressed by squeezing through this opening? Or is the octopus brain capable of being compressed without harm? Given that vertebrates use skeletal structure to protect vital organs, how do invertebrates like the octopus cope with the lack of an organ protecting structure?

(Original video post - http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/2crwto/octopus_squeezes_through_tiny_gap_on_a_boat/ )

Also, how would it be possible to wake both halves at once by using a stimulant, say caffeine?