FOOTNOTES

[i]  “…prehensile…”

“The word is derived from the Latin term prehendere, meaning “to grasp.”  It is the quality of an organ that has adapted for grasping or holding. Examples of prehensile body parts include the tails of New World monkeys and opossums, the trunks of elephants, the tongues of giraffes, the lips of horses and the proboscides of tapir. The hands of primates are all prehensile to varying degrees, and many species (even a few humans) have prehensile feet as well. The claws of cats are also prehensile. Many extant lizards have prehensile tails (geckos, chameleons, and a species of skink). The fossil record shows prehensile tails in lizards (Simiosauria) going back many million years to the Triassic period .

Prehensility is an evolutionary adaptation that has afforded species a great natural advantage in manipulating their environment for feeding, digging, and defense. It enables many animals, such as primates, to use tools in order to complete tasks that would otherwise be impossible without highly specialized anatomy. For example, chimpanzees have the ability to use sticks to fish for termites and grubs. However, not all prehensile organs are applied to tool use- the giraffe tongue, for instance, is instead used in feeding and self-cleaning behaviors.”

— Reference:  Wikipedia.org

[ii] “… able to detect waves or particles beyond the visual spectrum of light.”

The visible spectrum (or sometimes called the optical spectrum) is the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to (can be detected by) the human eye. Electromagnetic radiation in this range of wavelengths is called visible light or simply light. A typical human eye will respond to wavelengths in air from about 380 to 750 nm. The corresponding wavelengths in water and other media are reduced by a factor equal to the refractive index. In terms of frequency, this corresponds to a band in the vicinity of 400-790 terahertz. A light-adapted eye generally has its maximum sensitivity at around 555 nm (540 THz), in the green region of the optical spectrum. The spectrum does not, however, contain all the corlors that the human eyes and brain can distinguish. Brown, pink, and magenta are absent, for example, because they need a mix of multiple wavelengths, preferably shades of red.

Wavelengths visible to the eye also pass through the “optical window”, the region of the electromagnetic spectrum which passes largely unattenuated through the Earth’s atmosphere (although blue light is scattered more than red light, which is the reason the sky is blue). The response of the human eye is defined by subjective testing, but the atmospheric windows are defined by physical measurement. The “visible window” is so called because it overlaps the human visible response spectrum; the near infrared windows lie just out of human response window, and the Medium Wavelength and Long Wavelength or Far Infrared are far beyond the human response region.

The eyes of many species perceive wavelengths different from the spectrum visible to the human eye. For example, many insects, such as bees, can see light in the ultraviolet, which is useful for finding nectar in flowers. For this reason, plant species whose life cycles are linked to insect pollination may owe their reproductive success to their appearance in ultraviolet light, rather than how colorful they appear to our eyes.”

— Reference:  Wikipedia.org

[iii] “… this may have included the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum…”

“The electromagnetic spectrum is the range of all possible electromagnetic radiation. The “electromagnetic spectrum” (usually just spectrum) of an object is the characteristic distribution of electromagnetic radiation from that object.

The electromagnetic spectrum extends from below the frequencies used for modern radio (at the long-wavelength end) through gamma radiation (at the short-wavelength end), covering wavelengths from thousands of kilometres down to a fraction the size of an atom. It’s thought that the short wavelength limit is the vicinity of the Planck length, and the long wavelength limit is the size of the universe itself, although in principle the spectrum is infinite and continuous.”

— Reference:  Wikipedia.org

[iv] “… her gaze seemed to penetrate right through me, as though she had “x-ray vision”. 

“In fictional stories, X-ray vision has generally been portrayed as the ability to see through layers of objects at the discretion of the holder of this superpower. People often pretend to have this ability through the use of X-ray glasses, which are a special type of “joke-around” or prank-gag toys with the secret of its “x-ray properties” being unknown. The goal is usually to see through clothing, usually to determine if someone is carrying a concealed weapon, but sometimes for purpose of seeing a person’s private parts. In the non-fictional realm, X-rays have many practical uses in the fields of science and medicine. While there are devices currently extant which can “see” through clothing (using terahertz waves), most are quite bulky. However, there are night vision equipped video cameras that can be modified to see through clothing at a frequency just below visible light.”

— Source Reference:  Wikipedia.org

[v] …”Technically, from a medical standpoint, I would say that Airl’s body could not even be called “alive”. ”

“The word “organism” may broadly be defined as an assembly of molecules that function as a more or less stable whole and has the properties of life. However, many sources, lexical and scientific, add conditions that are problematic to defining the word.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines an organism as “[an] individual animal, plant, or single-celled life form”^. This definition problematically excludes non-animal and plant multi-cellular life forms such as some fungi and protista. Less controversially, perhaps, it excludes viruses and theoretically-possible man-made non-organic life forms.

Chambers Online Reference provides a much broader definition: “any living structure, such as a plant, animal, fungus or bacterium, capable of growth and reproduction”. The definition “any life form capable of independent reproduction, organic or otherwise” would encompass all cellular life, as well as the possibility of synthetic life capable of independent reproduction, but would exclude viruses, which are dependent on the biochemical machinery of a host cell for reproduction. Some may use a definition that would also include viruses.”

— Source Reference:  Wikipedia.org

[vi] “…in space there is not gravity…”

“The terms gravitation and gravity are mostly interchangeable in everyday use, but in scientific usage a distinction may be made. “Gravitation” is a general term describing the attractive influence that all objects with mass exert on each other, while “gravity” specifically refers to a force that is supposed in some theories (such as Newton’s) to be the cause of this attraction. By contrast, in general relativity gravitation is due to space-time curvatures that cause inertially moving objects to accelerate towards each other.

Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation is a physical law describing the gravitational attraction between bodies with mass. It is a part of classical mechanics and was first formulated in Newton’s work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687. In modern language it states the following:

Every point mass attracts every other point mass by a force pointing along the line intersecting both points. The force is proportional to the product of the two masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the point masses:

where:

• F is the magnitude of the gravitational force between the two point masses,
• G is the gravitational constant,
• m₁ is the mass of the first point mass,
• m₂ is the mass of the second point mass,
• r is the distance between the two point masses.”

— Reference:  Wikipedia.org