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how do materials in an alloy create a substance that has different properties to the base materials, even though no chemical reaction takes place between the materials? | Steel is a good example. It's made of iron and carbon. Iron atoms are relatively large compared to carbon atoms. If all you have are iron atoms, they pack together, but there are small spaces between the atoms. If you add carbon to the mix, the smaller carbon atoms can fit into the spaces, making the alloy much sturdier than pure iron. | [
"In the context of composite metals is an alloy. A blend of a metal with one or more metallic or nonmetallic materials is an alloy. The components of an alloy do not combine chemically but, rather, are very finely mixed. An alloy might be homogeneous or might contain small particles of components that can be viewed... |
why do cheap cars look cheap and expensive cars look expensive? | No, there's no agreement between the carmakers, and it's not a cost-based thing. If Honda wanted, they *could* make an accord look crazy and sell it for the same price, but here's the reason: it wouldn't sell.
You have to look at the market for each car company to see why the cars look like they do. Especially between companies as far apart as Honda and Ferrari, they are not both simply car companies selling cars, they each sell products specifically designed for two very different groups.
Honda's market are buyers that want something that can be driven every day, for years, easily with good safety and good visibility. Style matters, but as long as it's not offensively ugly, it'll be fine. They also want something cheaper to maintain and keep up. This means less complicated bodywork and a more generic look to appeal to a greater audience.
Ferrari's market is much different. Their target buyer is likely looking for something that will make a serious statement. Ferraris are also capable of much higher performance, and you'd be surprised by how much that plays into looks. A lot of vents, duct work, and lines in those supercars are just as much about keeping it stable at 150+ mph as they are about looks.
So in the end, they're both just trying to make cars that appeal to their target buyer as much as possible. For Ferrari and the like, there's an emphasis on being unique, overstated, and borderline vulgar. Because Honda and those companies are playing a numbers game to sell as many as possible, they want looks that many many people can like, or at least live with on a day to day basis. | [
"There are many examples of inferior goods. A number of economists have suggested that shopping at large discount chains such as Walmart and rent-to-own establishments vastly represent a large percentage of goods referred to as \"inferior\". Cheaper cars are examples of the inferior goods. Consumers will generally ... |
how come the north pole is considered the "top of the world" and the south pole, the bottom? | The first map makers and globe artists lived in the northern hemisphere. They opted to depict their land on top. | [
"The North Pole, also known as the Geographic North Pole or Terrestrial North Pole, is the point in the Northern Hemisphere where Earth's axis of rotation meets its surface. This point is distinct from Earth's North Magnetic Pole. The South Pole is the other point where Earth's axis of rotation intersects its surfa... |
What does it mean for worker bees to be "female"? | They are female, because even the workers can lay eggs, but just male eggs, because the sperm is missing.
Every female bee is the same (So every worker is a queen), the workers are just "castrated" throught the queens pheromones and the diet in the larva-stadium. | [
"A worker bee is any female (eusocial) bee that lacks the full reproductive capacity of the colony's queen bee; under most circumstances, this is correlated to an increase in certain non-reproductive activities relative to a queen, as well. Worker bees occur in many bumble bee Bombus species other than honey bees, ... |
new yorks hate for encrypted smartphones | The state government wants to ban them to make it easier for the NSA (and similar agencies) to intercept texts. Any claims of terrorism prevention are excuses to distract from the real reason. | [
"After it was revealed that the US government was able to intercept encrypted communications from smartphones, Mißfelder declared that the situation was not one for politicians to engage in, but instead \"is a topic between the American government, the NSA and the producers (of the phones)\".\n",
"Tim Cook respon... |
the process by which co2 turns into tree | CO2 is made from carbon and oxygen.
Although there are many, many steps in between, the basic chemistry of what's happening is that the tree uses energy from sunlight to split CO2 into carbon and oxygen. Oxygen is released into the air. Carbon is combined with nutrients from the ground to make a tree.
Seriously over-simplified...... | [
"Trees sequester carbon through photosynthesis, converting carbon dioxide and water into molecular dioxygen (O) and plant organic matter, such as carbohydrates (e.g., cellulose). Hence, forests that grow in area or density and thus increase in organic biomass will reduce atmospheric CO levels. (Carbon is released a... |
1 Besides the theory, What are the practicalities in the processes of shotgun sequencing? | > When it comes to sequencing all the segments, to find the crossovers, the primers used to initiate the sequencing, are they universal primers?
Yes. You can see the basic process in [this picture](_URL_1_). After you break up the DNA into smaller pieces, each piece has adapters ligated to each end. Primers are designed to bind at specific spots in these adapters so you can sequence the piece of DNA.
> Is the same restriction enzymes used to cleave the clone out and they are then seperated? Is the BAC sequence already known? Or are primers designed base on the known sequences of the sticky ends?
Now a BAC is a bacterial plasmid that has had a non-bacterial sequence inserted into it and then has been put into live bacterial cells so that you can store and grow up as much of the DNA sequence as you need. See [this picture](_URL_0_) for a diagram. The sequence of the BAC is not already known in this hierarchical sequencing method (that's what you're trying to find out after all), but the plasmid sequence is known. So when you digest the plasmid in a particular spot and then ligate in other DNA, you now know the sequence on either side of the inserted DNA. You can use that to sequence the ends of the inserted DNA by Sanger sequencing by designing primers just outside the inserted DNA.
Edit: In case you weren't clear on the rest of hierarchical sequencing, the rest of the protocol is similar to modern whole genome sequencing. You break up the BACs into smaller fragments, sequence them, and then reassemble to get the sequence of the entire BAC. Once you have the sequences of all the BACs, you assemble that into the sequence for the whole genome. | [
"Shotgun sequencing is a sequencing method designed for analysis of DNA sequences longer than 1000 base pairs, up to and including entire chromosomes. It is named by analogy with the rapidly expanding, quasi-random firing pattern of a shotgun. Since gel electrophoresis sequencing can only be used for fairly short s... |
why do you always see things about break throughs in medical science (aids, cancer, etc.) but hear almost nothing about it being practically applied? | Because people like to talk about things too early. Then the thing that could potentially be a magic breakthrough gets tested further and it turns out that it's either unsafe, impractical, doesn't work, or some mix of those. Or maybe it does work, but it has to go through multiple years of refining and testing and by the time it becomes widespread it isn't like magic anymore. | [
"A concept that was once accepted by the mainstream scientific community may become fringe science because of a later evaluation of previous research. For example, focal infection theory, which held that focal infections of the tonsils or teeth are a primary cause of systemic disease, was once considered to be medi... |
why do we have to buy domain names from companies instead of just claiming it ourselves for free? | Back in the day, before everyone and his uncle wanted a domain name, before the world wide web, before google, you *could* just ask for a domain name and get it for free. Who did you ask? The National Science Foundation, of all things.
When domains started getting more popular, the National Science Foundation got tired of doing it, and farmed the process out to anyone who wanted to be a "domain registrar."
Turns out it's quite a bit of work.
| [
"While the ACPA contemplated the purchase of domain names for resale to trademark owners, it did not contemplate the more modern practice of domaining. Domaining is the business of registering a domain name and parking it or placing pay-per-click ads on it. Domainers rely on type-in traffic, which is when Internet ... |
whatever happened to the baby boomers bust we were told was going to destroy our economy? | They've only just begun to reach retirement age (those born in 1945-1948). When the majority are retired and pulling social security, this will be a more noticeable issue. | [
"In 2010 \"What Did the Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us?\" was published by Biteback. The book claims that the baby boomer generation inherited the good years, and pulled the ladder up after them. \"Blair Inc: The Man Behind The Mask\", co-written with David Hencke and Nick Kochan, was published in March 2015.\n",
"G... |
Do eukaryotic genes without introns exist? | This is more tangential than eukaryotic genes that have evolved for millions of years without introns, but I don't have any scholarly resources for that situation.
However, a class of microscopic animals called bdelloid rotifers has been discovered to have some amazing properties. An interesting property of bdelloids is that they can survive complete dessication - absence of water - at any stage of their life cycle. Most organisms can only survive dessication at certain life cycles (like plant seeds). This appears to be the result of truly amazing DNA repair capabilities.
How does this tie into eukaryotic genes without introns? Well, when bdelloid rotifers dry out, their cell membranes split open, much like with many other organisms. When water comes along and they spring up, it appears that fragmented DNA from other dried-up organisms sometimes gets washed into the bdelloids, and the amazing DNA repair mechanisms simply integrate this DNA into the bdelloid genome.
The result is that modern bdelloids have relatively modern versions of genes from drastically distantly-related organisms, including plants, fungi, and even bacteria. Some genes are broken, others appear to be functional but not used, and others yield active protein products in the living bdelloids. Amazingly, there is one case of a gene that is virtually identical to a gene from e. coli ... except that it has hand an intron *inserted* into it by the bdelloids. In transcription, the bdelloids remove the intron and it yields a functional enzyme. Presumably, at one point, this was a gene that functioned without any introns.
Read [this](_URL_0_) paper for more. | [
"These authors were able to predict that the distinctions between the prokaryote and the eukaryote were so profound that the prokaryote to eukaryote evolution was not tenable, and that both had different origins. However, other than the speculations that the precellular RNA genes must have had introns, they did not... |
Can a metal detector detect a higher amount of iron in our blood? | The answer to your question is yes, but not from food intake. There is a disorder called Hemochromatosis which results in a higher than normal iron content in the body. A normal person has ~4 grams of iron in their body, while someone suffering from Hemochromatosis might have up to 50 grams in their body. These extreme cases have been known to set off standard metal detectors, such as those found in airports.
For reference, a 3oz portion of mussels contains ~6mg of iron. You would have to eat thousands of mussels in one sitting before the level of iron in your body would be high enough to set off a detector. | [
"65% of the iron in the body is bound up in hemoglobin molecules in red blood cells. About 4% is bound up in myoglobin molecules. Around 30% of the iron in the body is stored as ferritin or hemosiderin in the spleen, the bone marrow and the liver. Small amounts of iron can be found in other molecules in cells throu... |
What is the history of gun ownership in America? How did things change over the 20th century? | This is a pretty controversial subject, and studies on it aren't helped [by a lack of hard data before the 1970s and 1980s.](_URL_0_?)
In general, however, **the number of guns has gone up, while the number of gun owners has gone down.** Fewer people are owning more guns.
We can look at [Gallup's long-term series of polls about gun ownership](_URL_1_) for evidence of this (there are many other, similar polls that provide data that differs in precise detail but not the trend. In July 1959, for example, 49 percent of respondents said they had a gun in their home. In the latest poll, conducted in October last year, that figure was 41 percent.
The NORC at the University of Chicago has, at regular intervals since 1972, conducted [its "General Social Survey,"](_URL_7_) which asks Americans a variety of questions and tracks the changes over time. The survey was conducted every year until 1990, when it switched to a biennial basis. The newest survey is being conducted this year. The survey contains many questions about guns. In 2014, NORC [published a study entitled "Trends in Gun Ownership in the United States, 1972-2014"](_URL_8_).
This study found "that 31.0% of households reported having a firearm in 2014, essentially tying with 2010 for the lowest level of gun ownership in the last 40-some years. This is a decline of about 17 percentage points from the peak ownership years in 1977-1980."
If a respondent indicated there was a gun in the home, the survey asked (in 25 of the 30 years the survey has been conducted) whether there was at least one (and these were asked in separate questions) [shotgun](_URL_5_), [rifle](_URL_2_), or [pistol](_URL_6_) in the home. Pistols included both revolvers and semiautomatic handguns.
What the results showed was a faster decline in the number of shotguns and rifles than the number of pistols.
Why?
As the United States has urbanized over the 20th century, fewer Americans are going hunting, and more Americans are seeking pistols for personal protection or recreation. Since 1955, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has conducted a ["National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation"](_URL_3_). The survey takes place every five years and is published the following year. The latest survey has not yet been published, but I expect it sometime this year. In any event the 2011 data is the latest available.
According to the 1955 survey, 10 percent of the American population 12 years and older hunted. This proportion rose to 11.2 percent in 1960 but fell to 8.4 percent by 1985. The survey changed somewhat starting in 1990, and started to be restricted to respondents 16 years and older. By the 2010 survey, only 6 percent of Americans reported hunting.
This decline matches the trend recorded by the General Social Survey. In 1977, the survey found that 31.6 percent of respondents said they hunted, their spouse hunted, or both did. By 2014, that rate had fallen to 15.4 percent.
If hunting is on the decline, why has the number of guns gone up?
Well, let's look at figures from the department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which keeps that data. The 2015 ["Firearms Commerce in the United States"](_URL_4_) report includes the number of firearms manufactured, imported and exported in/to/from the United States between 1986 and 2013.
The ATF report doesn't account for firearms sold on the secondary market, but it's a good guideline for *trends* in firearms sales. What you see are big spikes in sales and imports right around the time of the 1992 election of Bill Clinton, the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, and the 2008 election of Barack Obama.
This is venturing into 20-year territory, but I think it's important to explain. Another moderator can check me and I'll edit if necessary.
In 1986, there were approximately 3 million firearms manufactured in the United States. This rose to 4.4 million by 1989 but fell to 3.6 million by 1991. Then we start to see a surge again, all the way to 5 million in 1993 and 5.1 million in 1994. Exports remained relatively constant during this period, rising only 30,000 between 1991 and 1993, and actually *declining* between 1993 and 1994, meaning most of that new production was destined for the domestic market. Similarly, firearms imports *surged* between 1991 and 1994. In 1991, only 720,000 firearms were imported to the United States. By the next year, that figure had risen to 2.8 million. In 1993, it was over 3 million.
Then, as suddenly as imports and production had surged, they fell. By 1996, the time of Clinton's second election, only 882,000 firearms were imported. Production was down to 3.8 million.
Production figures stayed low, while import figures began a steady rise, due to Americans' growing fondness for foreign firearms. (Before the 1980s, the United States imported almost no firearms.) In 2008, and again in 2012, we see surges in both production and importation. In 2008, 2.6 million firearms were imported. That rose to 4.8 million by 2012. Production-wise, the United States produced 4.5 million firearms in 2008, and production kept rising -- steeply. It hit 8.6 million in 2012 and 10.8 million in 2013.
The United States now produces more firearms than ever before, and in 2013 alone manufactured one firearm for every 32 Americans.
| [
"American attitudes on gun ownership date back to the American Revolutionary War, and find an origin also in the hunting/sporting ethos, and the militia/frontier ethos that draw from the country's early history.\n",
"Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture is a discredited 2000 book by historian Mic... |
what is cloud mining? | Cryptocurrency 'mining' is using computer power to perform work that helps run the cryptocurrency. To reward people for doing this work, a small percentage of the time work will result in a worker being given some of that currency. Trying to make money this way is called "mining."
Cloud mining is like cloud computing. You pay someone else to do work on your behalf. You get any cryptocurrency generated by that work, and they get paid to do the mining for you. | [
"Cloud Mining is the process of bitcoin mining utilizing a remote datacenter with shared processing power. This type of cloud mining enables users to mine bitcoins or alternative cryptocurrencies without managing the hardware. The mining rigs are housed and maintained in a facility owned by mining company and the c... |
why do they tell us to save water when we actually use the same water over and over, just purified? | Actually, in very few locations you use the same water over and over again.
In most places, water is gathered from rivers, or underground, and after being used is purified sufficiently to be dumped back in those rivers.
Besides, even if the water is recycled, the recycling infrastructure is limited and costs money. | [
"Purified water has many uses, largely in the production of medications, in science and engineering laboratories and industries, and is produced in a range of purities. It can be produced on site for immediate use or purchased in containers. Purified water in colloquial English can also refer to water which has bee... |
why reddit auto-downvotes? | It is to stop people from using bots to up vote their own posts. What it does specifically is stops them from knowing if their vote has been ignored or not.
If they had a bot, and up-voted a post, and the post number stayed the same. Then it would be obvious that the bot was ignored and then they could work towards circumventing it.
However, if instead of just ignoring it, it gives the post one up-vote and one down-vote. They wouldn't be able to tell if someone just down voted it, or if it was the number fuzzing program.
So put simply:
It constantly moves the numbers around so you can't tell if your vote actually counted or not, but it totally does count unless you have blocked by spam protection.
| [
"Autocomplete can have an adverse effect on individuals and businesses when negative search terms are suggested when a search takes place. Autocomplete has now become a part of reputation management as companies linked to negative search terms such as scam, complaints and fraud seek to alter the results. Google in ... |
How did ideas of masculinity evolve in Victorian Britain? | I don't believe I can answer this question fully, but I can certainly address one aspect of it.
There was a growing fear of degeneration during the Victorian Era, and this fear went hand in hand with the idea that men were becoming weaker, or more effeminate.
That idea then also contributed to the fear of the 'New Woman', who was a more masculine, independent, educated woman. She was often typified as wearing ties, riding suits, and cycling! The New Woman is more of a stereotype, though, but suffragettes certainly did exist, and the idea of women gaining more power often seemed like a threat to men.
As Sarah Grand wrote in her essay, ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’:
> Man is… apt to accuse us of wishing to ape him. Of old if a woman ventured to be at all unconventional, man was allowed to slander her with the imputation that she must be abandoned, and he really believed it because with him liberty meant license. He has never accused us of trying to emulate him in any noble, manly quality, because the cultivation of noble qualities has not hitherto been a favourite pursuit of his…
From: The North American Review, 158.448 (1894), pp. 270-276 (p. 273).
Edit: formatting. | [
"The study of Victorian masculinity is based on the assumption that \"the construction of male consciousness must be seen as historically specific.\" As a result, men increasingly formed secret societies, such as the Masons and the Oddfellows. The Victorians saw manliness as good, a form of control over maleness, w... |
Did the Vikings refer to themselves as Vikings or did that name come later? | That depends on who your reffering to as vikings. the people who lived in scandinavia called people who was out raiding and pirating for vikings or that they where out doing viking. Meaning that viking was more of a verb than something you would call others. | [
"Various theories have been offered that the word \"viking\" may be derived from this place name, meaning \"a person from Viken\". According to this theory, originally the word \"viking\" simply described persons from this area, and that it is only in the last few centuries that it has taken on the broader sense of... |
Which time period did drinking tavern/inns become a thing in Europe as depicted in fantasy stories such as LOTR? | * [Medieval Pubs: Ireland](_URL_2_) by /u/gothwalk
* [I'm a peasant visiting a 14th century alehouse. How would I be charged for my drinks and how easily could I skip the bill?](_URL_0_) by /u/sunagainstgold
* [What wrong ideas about medieval Europe might one get from popular works of "medieval fantasy"?](_URL_1_) by /u/vonadler
... But I couldn't find the post I was actually looking for, which was about medieval irish inns and how they existed to put up traveling aristocrats, and didn't charge but rather operated on prestige and rubbing elbows (iirc). | [
"BULLET::::- \"The Eighteenth-century English Inn: a transient \"Golden Age\" \" in B. Kümin & B.A. Tlusty (Eds.) (2002) \"The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe\", Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 205-226.\n",
"A Night of Serious Drinking (1938) is an allegorical novel by the French surrealist writ... |
Since when do pies exist? | you may want to xpost this over at /r/askfoodhistorians | [
"Piggot (1983) states that PIE contains words for technologies that make their first appearance in the archaeological record in the Late Neolithic, in some cases bordering on the early Bronze Age, some belonging to the oldest layers of PIE. The lexicon includes words relating to agriculture (dated to 7500 BC), stoc... |
why did languages that developed independantly like japanese, romance languages, and hindi all base the names of the days of the week off the planets, and in the exact same order? | This is a pretty complicated question, because it spans language and geography during a time where historical records are difficult to trace. However, to get the feel for it, you can see the [Japanese explanation here](_URL_0_). In short: they didn't **independently** come up with the same scheme; they adopted it from each other. It just happened so long ago that it *seems* like it was separate.
The article has this to say:
*"The most commonly accepted theory is that the use of the seven planets originated in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, was adopted by the Greeks and Romans, and then found its way to China.*
*Although there were several routes of transmission into China, it appears that the Indian route was the direct source of the Japanese names for days of the week. In 806, the famous Japanese monk, Kobo Daishi, bought writings back to Japan along with a huge quantity of other Buddhist scriptures. Great interest was taken in the astrological work, with the result that the planetary names found their way into Japanese calendars of the time."* | [
"Albanian adopted the Latin terms for Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday, adopted translations of the Latin terms for Sunday and Monday, and kept native terms for Thursday and Friday. Other languages adopted the week together with the Latin (Romance) names for the days of the week in the colonial period. Some construc... |
Can fish live (or at least breathe) in liquids that are not water? For example milk | No. Fish can’t even live in water that has the wrong amount of salt or dissolved oxygen in it. Putting a fish in a liquid other than the correct water would be like putting a human in the Venus atmosphere. Sure it’s “air” but the concentration of oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, etc are all wrong. Every animal, especially fish, are evolved to very specific environments, and putting them in something they are not adapted to survive in will kill them | [
"Freshwater fish differ physiologically from salt water fish in several respects. Their gills must be able to diffuse dissolved gasses while keeping the salts in the body fluids inside. Their scales reduce water diffusion through the skin: freshwater fish that have lost too many scales will die. They also have well... |
As Germany's military situation deteriotated, why was there never a popular uprising against Hitler? | Well, the answer to that question is rather multifaceted and also still debated in scholarship. To simplify it a bit, here are some factors scholarship of the topic agrees on that they played a role:
* The potential political leaders for such an uprising were dead, exiled or imprisoned
Germany did experience Nazi rule longer than any other country. Nazism was homegrown in Germany and one of the first steps the Nazis did take in 1933 was to arrest or force to flee prominent politicians that would oppose them, primarily social democrats and communists. When the war started in 1939 and when measures such as the Holocaust was implemented from 1941 onwards, there weren't many people left who would have been able to lead a popular uprising. While we see opposition for example from the Churches, especially the Catholic one in connection to the T4 program for the murder of the physically and mentally handicapped, it is unlikely that the Chruches would have emerged as the leaders of a popular uprising. Similarly, when we see protests, such as the Rosenstrasse protest against the deportations of Jews married to Aryans, most of them were very localized and quickly brought down. Underground movements like in many occupied European territories only existed on a very small and localized scale. Plus, there hardly was any social institution that enjoyed the necessary legitimacy in the eyes of the populace to lead such an uprising, that was not thoroughly nazified (again, excluding the Churches but again, these would make unlikely candidates). And while the military might have enjoyed have worked on garnering the necessary legitimacy, it too was a nazified institutions with a certain distain for the "plebs" (as was evident in the July 20, 1944 plans). Furthermore, the next point that is important to consider is that
* There was popular support for the Nazis and many people at least passively supported the regime
Again it is hard to gauge the exact numbers but it is a fair point that the German people did support the Nazi regime and its policies, at least passively. Fear of communsim, the success of the early war, especially against France, antisemitism, and the idea of a German hegemony for Europe had been all rather popular within the German populace even before the Nazis' rise to power. And during the war, many people felt that their ultimate fate was tied into the success of the war. Especially when the Soviets started advancing on German territory, it was a general sentiment that the Nazis' war efforts had to succeed in order to avoid coming under Bolshevik rule. The sentiment can probably best be summarized by "better this than the Russians", especially after news of how Soviet troops behaved in the Eastern territories spread (often with help and exaggeration from Nazi propaganda). Being at least vaguely aware of what German troops had done in the occupied Soviet Union -- through relatives writing form the front and so on --, there was the fear that they would do the same thing to the Germans. Felix Römer and other have studied this phenomenon with Wehrmacht soldiers in Western Allied captivity and a lot of them claimed that their motivation to continue the fight was that they had experienced or even exacted Nazi policy in the occupied Eastern territories. And thirdly,
* The Nazis were very good in avoiding the factors that lead to the revolt at the end of WWI and the memory of that was also still fresh with most Germans
The Nazi leadership as well as most of the German populace was very aware of what had happened in 1918. Being very conscious about the end of WWI with its mutiny in the Navy and Army and its social and political uprising, it was a high priority for the Nazi leadership to avoid the same conditions. Especially food policy and keeping the Germans fed was a very important goal. This was achieved by the ruthless economic exploitation of the occupied territories. After the US, the German population was the best-fed of any major warring party, mainly because countries like Greece were left starving. The Germans lived in comparative luxury even to the British people during the war, exactly because the Nazis wanted to avoid popular uprisings. Also, most people remembered what had happened at the end of WWI rather vividly. The complete break-down of the established social order, Socialists in power, armed Communists roaming the streets, fighting between the Freikorps and the communists, the Munich Soviet Republic and the massive violence that resulted from it -- all this was relatively fresh in people's minds. Even though, an unrealistic possibility, this was what most people associated with popular uprisings to end a war. Plus, due to the Nazi Germany policy of exploiting the occupied territories to a degree that it lead to mass starvation, discontent in the German populace simply was not strong enough to motivate them to rise up (like it had been in Russia in 1917). The German people felt the real consequences of war with food shortages, mass homelessness and destruction only in the last months or even weeks of the war and sometimes not until Allied troops were only kilometers away.
Because of all these factors, a popular uprising was highly unlikely and where resistance among the Germans materialized at the end of the war (like it did e.g. in Innsbruck), this was due to Allied troops being basically outside of their doorstep.
Sources:
* Mark Mazower: Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (Allen Lane, 2008)
* Adam Tooze: The Wages of Destruction.
* Ian Kershaw: Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich. Bavaria, 1933–45, (Oxford, 1983, rev. 2002).
* Ian Kershaw: The 'Hitler Myth'. Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987, rev. 2001).
* Ian Kershaw: Hitler, The Germans, and the Final Solution (Yale, 2008).
* Richard Evans' Third Reich triology. | [
"Improvised protests also occurred if rarely in Nazi Germany, and represent a form of resistance not wholly researched, Sybil Milton wrote already in 1984. Hitler and National Socialism’s perceived dependence on the mass mobilization of his people, the “racial” Germans, along with the belief that Germany had lost W... |
why do airlines charge less for flights out of small cities (stopping over in a major hub) and more just from that major city? | It has to do with competition. A flight from city A to city B to city C is not competing with flights from city B to city C. It’s competing with A-D-C with different stopovers and A-C nonstop. If one airline dominates airport B (which is the case for many large US airports; just not the few largest like NY’s and LA’s) that will make flights out of B more expensive. But that doesn’t apply to other flights using B as a stopover, so if airport A has more competition between airlines than B, then A-B-C will often be cheaper than B-C. | [
"Some destination cities lie relatively far from the airports that low-cost airlines use to save costs. Examples of this are Hahn, Weeze and Girona airports—which low-cost airlines advertise as the destinations for Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, and Barcelona, respectively—even though these airports are 50 to 90 kilometres... |
what is the differencies between motherboards? | Okay. So practicality aside, since of course you could just use the motherboard that fits your needs instead of being the most decked out board ever. That is a given and should always be considered when building a PC.
However, there are good reasons to buy the pricier boards. The biggest are Warranty, Value, and Quality.
More expensive boards (typically) have the better warranty, and better quality parts that have higher life spans and better protective capabilities for the PC itself, while offering better speeds or other such benefits. This in itself is what gives these board value.
Cheap boards on the other hand, can be good boards, but are typically the entry level boards, or older high end models which can be equated to the newer low end models anyways.
In short, if you buy cheap, you are getting cheap parts and cheap breaks sooner (usually), which leads to a crappier warranty and less overall value. (More oft than not.)
Thats why it is better to shell out the extra 50-100$ to get the high end board in comparison to the low end one. Even if building a super cheap rig, because people ALWAYS want to try to upgrade the damn thing at some point, and having a motherboard that is behind the times is a sure fire way to ruin any possible upgrading. | [
"Motherboards are produced in a variety of sizes and shape called computer form factor, some of which are specific to individual computer manufacturers. However, the motherboards used in IBM-compatible systems are designed to fit various case sizes. , most desktop computer motherboards use the ATX standard form fac... |
How were the ends of trench lines terminated during WW1? | Here are some photos and info that might be what you're looking for.
- The Western Front trench system ended at "[Kilometer Zero](_URL_0_)" on the the Swiss border, with the trenches literally running up to a barbed wire border and a Swiss bunker overlooking them to ensure that Swiss neutrality was not violated.
- The other end of the trench system literally [ran out to the sand](_URL_1_) on the beach in Belgium near Nieuport. In contrast to the Swiss end, this terminus of the front saw more activity and fighting, mostly because of British plans for an amphibious outflanking maneuver (this never came to fruition) and German counter-maneuvers. | [
"At the end of the Second World War, many bridges were blown up by the Wehrmacht. The reconstruction went on for several years until 1948, when the whole line had been fully restored to traffic. The Lissendorf–Jünkerath section was shut down and dismantled after 1945, with traffic directed over the parallel Eifel l... |
why do radios have such bad audio but phones often have perfect audio | radio uses analog transmissions which doesn't allow error correction or detection. Transmission errors will affect the signal.
Mobiles use digital transmission with high data rates. And even if a transmission error occurs you can figure out which bit is faulty and correct it.
You can correct digital signals because there's only two values 1 and 0 if you receive a 0.9 you know there was an error and you can correct it. On the other hand there's analog if you receive a 0.9 it could be 0.9 or 1 or any other value. That makes it impossible to figure out the exact audio in analog and allows you to perfectly rebuild the audio signals.
BUT there are digital radios too. They should work just as good depending on how much time and effort was spend engineering them.
Another big reason why radios are worse is, that most of them use "free for all" frequencies everyone can just send signals around which results in lots of other signals that interfere with your radio. While the phone standards are protected, if you use them for radio or similar things you'll get sued. | [
"Wireless speakers receive considerable criticism from high-end audiophiles because of the potential for RF interference with other signal sources, like cordless phones, as well as for the relatively low sound quality some models deliver. Despite the criticism, wireless speakers have gained popularity with consumer... |
given the sc ruling on roe v. wade, how is it ok for ok to make abortion illegal? | There is a purpose behind it that isn't just red meat for conservatives. The purpose behind a lot of these laws is to take them to the Supreme Court. They want to be sued so they can have a chance for the Supreme Court to rehear arguments on abortion.
It is also important to note that there are 2 abortion clinics left in Oklahoma, abortion for the Midwest is like guns for California, even if they pass something clearly unconstitutional, they want to test the limits of how far they can restrict it before the courts get involved.
| [
"\"Roe v. Wade\" struck down state laws banning abortion in 1973. Over 20 have addressed abortion law in the United States, all of which upheld \"Roe v. Wade\". Since \"Roe\", abortion has been legal throughout the country, but states have placed varying regulations on it, from requiring parental involvement in a m... |
Is the TATA box transcribed? | No, the TATA box is typically a few dozen bp upstream of the gene. Only about 25% of human genes have a TATA sequence in their promoter regions.
Source: Molecular Biologist; wikipedia for that 25% statistic. Seriously though, the answer to this question is the third sentence of the wikipedia article. | [
"T-box refers to a group of transcription factors involved in embryonic limb and heart development. Every T-box protein has a relatively large DNA-binding domain, generally comprising about a third of the entire protein that is both necessary and sufficient for sequence-specific DNA binding. All members of the T-bo... |
multiple hairs out of the same follicle. | It's a weird, but not harmful, genetic disorder. Google "Pili multigemini" if you want more detail. | [
"Within the hair follicle, \"D. folliculorum\" is found above the sebaceous gland, positioned head downwards, with the end of abdomen often protruding from the hair follicle. Infested follicles usually contain 2–6 mites, but greater numbers can occur. \n",
"A follicle is a small spherical or vase-like group of ce... |
how is it possible that we still have a full head of hair everyday even though a handful (esp. females) can fall out while showering? | Your hair grows fast enough to replace it. Your hair is practically always growing. The strands you can see are growing longer, and the follicles you can't see are growing new strands. | [
"People have between 100,000 and 150,000 hairs on their head. The number of strands normally lost in a day varies but on average is 100. In order to maintain a normal volume, hair must be replaced at the same rate at which it is lost. The first signs of hair thinning that people will often notice are more hairs tha... |
why do videos freeze up when entering and exiting full-screen mode? | Some video players will attempt to raise or lower the resolution of the video if you enter or exit full screen mode, which can cause the video to freeze while the different resolution footage is requested from the server.
On a really slow machine the process of switching in and out of split screen can also be taxing by itself. This is especially true for machines that don't have graphics cards, since the processing power is being shared between the video player, and the rest of the computer.
It could also just be a bug in the video player. Playing videos is a pretty complicated problem in computer programing, and writing huge programs without bugs is pretty hard. | [
"Video can be seen in windowed mode or full screen mode; it is possible to switch the mode during the viewing of any video without reloading it because of the full-screen function of Adobe Systems Flash Player 9.\n",
"In many applications, a notable exception being YouTube, playing videos can be shrunk down into ... |
If I leave a mouthful of water in my mouth for a long period of time, will my mouth soak it up? | Yes, it will.
The pure water will cause the ions in your cells and extracellular fluid to diffuse into your oral cavity (where the pure water is) until the two concentrations equilibrate. Simultaneously, the water will move into your cells/extracellular space via osmosis. Eventually, the water will be absorbed by your tissues and the extra fluid will be pumped into the veins and redistributed about your body. | [
"Before pouring the water, torturers often inserted an iron prong (known as the \"bostezo\") into a victim's mouth to keep it open, as well as a strip of linen (known as the \"toca\") on which the victim would choke and suffocate while swallowing the water.\n",
"Mouth infections spread from the root of the infect... |
Why does marijuana exist? | I don't know why this is getting down-voted. Perfectly legit question. | [
"Marijuana, also known as cannabis, is a euphoriant and hallucinogenic drug prepared from the dried leaves of the strong-smelling plant \"Cannabis sativa\". Marijuana is a commonly used drug, legal in many states.\n",
"Marijuana is a preparation of the Cannabis plant intended for use as a recreational drug and as... |
When I put two tea bags in my cup of hot water, does this lead to a significant increase in concentration of tea or does one bag already saturate the water? | Essentially you will produce tea that is twice as strong, but there are some more complicated things happening.
Firstly, if we look at caffeine we can see that the solubility of caffeine in water at 20 degrees C is about 20 g/L, which is a lot considering a normal cup of tea has at most about 400 mg/L of caffeine (solubility and tea number sources). You could theoretically have up to 8x strength tea, and probably even greater since hot water should have a greater caffeine solubility limit.
However, there is a potential rate issue at play here. The rate of dissolution of the caffeine from the tea leaves will be dependent on the concentration of the caffeine in the solution in contact with the tea leaves. Theoretically, the higher the local caffeine concentration next to the leaves the slower the dissolution. What this means is that if you put 4 tea bags into the cup you would not get 4 times the caffeine out of them as there would be a much larger caffeine concentration surrounding the bags which slows down the rate.
Note that this is assuming no stirring and normal steeping time. If you stir the cup or let the tea bags steep longer you could essentially eliminate this issue.
This same argument applies for all the components in the tea, not just the caffeine. It is possible there might be a solubility limit you could hit for some molecule, but none that I know of at the moment.
Finally, the change in dissolution rate for a compound in tea in the concentrations we are talking about and with normal steeping times is probably minimal. So as I said in the first sentence brewing two tea bags at once will likely give you 2x strength tea with only extremely minor deviations.
[Source](_URL_0_) | [
"BULLET::::- \"Humidity\" : The higher the humidity, the faster the tea will age. Liquid water accumulating on tea may accelerate the aging process but can also cause the growth of mold or make the flavor of the tea less desirable. 60–85% humidity is recommended. It is argued whether tea quality is adversely affect... |
what are the black dots that a human sees swimming in vision when suddenly standing up after lying down for a while (not sleeping) ? | Your retinas need an abundance of oxygen to function properly. When you are sitting for long periods of time and/or get up quickly your blood pressure lowers and it is harder for blood to reach your brain after standing up abruptly. Your brain then priorities itself over, in this case your retinas, the oxygen that could make it up. This lack of oxygen to the retinas causes the spots. | [
"The young have a white background with round black spots and are continuously swimming head down. The adults have a body colouration with variances of grey and beige with darker blotches variable in size on the body. Small black spots cover the whole body.\n",
"These spots are often followed within a few days or... |
Is the United Nations more effective than the League of Nations in preventing wars? If so, what made it so? | Well, what's a "war?" I don't know that it is, depending on your definition. If we're purely talking large-scale, land-based conflicts, like WW1 and WW2, then yes, we've had fewer wars in the UN era than the brief League of Nations era.
However...
Perhaps more important than the structure or existence of the League of Nations versus the United Nations was the advent of nuclear weapons.
Obviously there were no nuclear weapons in the League of Nations era. Principles of mutually assured destruction function at a very obvious level to prevent a nuclear war from breaking out. At a secondary level, it helps to prevent conflicts that could lead to a nuclear war. Thus, while the US and USSR, could have theoretically gone to war without using nukes, the risk and likelihood of the war evolving to a nuclear level was high. Similarly, major proxy conflicts, such as a war between, oh, say, West and East Germany, was similarly unlikely. | [
"Wars have often been provoked by international incidents, and diplomatic efforts to prevent international incidents from growing into full-scale armed conflicts often have been unsuccessful. In the aftermath of the First World War, the League of Nations was established to help nations who were parties to an intern... |
Fascinated by stargazing/astronomy, worth investing in a telescope? | I answer questions like this all the time over at /r/astronomy
While you will almost always get better views outside of a major city/town, there are a lot of people who do amateur astronomy from their backyard. You'd be surprised just how much astronomy you can do, even in a light polluted area.
For starters, I'd want to know what your budget is: For some "expensive" is $50, and for others "expensive" is a few grand.
I wouldn't suggest a telescope to a beginner that is more than $500, and in most cases I suggest something in the $100 range for newcomers.
Other question I have for you: Are there any astronomy clubs in your area? If so, drop by on one of their "public" viewing nights. In many cases, club members will let the public use their telescopes. It's a great way to get a feel for what kind of telescope you might like.
There are a number of excellent "starter" telescoeps you can get in the $100 - $500 range, but I can't suggest a specific model without knowing your budget. | [
"The objective of the exhibition was to spread the knowledge regarding the astronomical observatories with large telescopes. In 1609, Galileo Galilei used telescope for astronomical purpose for the first time and since then the telescope observatories are becoming bigger and more advance. The exhibition provided in... |
how exactly is data electronically stored on tiny devices like micro sd cards? | Flash memory is stored in little devices called floating gate transistors.
Transistors are the little electrical switches that computers use to process things and amplifiers use to amplify signals. They have three terminals, a source, drain, and gate. The voltage applied to the gate controls whether current can flow from the source to drain, the gate is the switch. A high voltage opens or turns on the transistor, this is what computers use as binary "1". No voltage closes or turns off the transistor, this is a binary "0". All digital data is stored as 1s amd 0s, and computers process it as 1s and 0s using these transistor switches. As you can tell here, the switches work great for running a computer or even sitting data in the computers RAM, but to stay on or open they need a voltage, so the second you remove the power the voltage disappears and any data is lost.
A floating gate transistors works the same way, but the gate is highly insulated. Electrons that get into it get stuck, and hence the voltage can be held when the power is removed. Any transistors trapping electrons are left open holding a 1, while any without trapped electrons are left closed holding a 0. This allows flash memory to store data without power. To get the electrons through the insulation and get trapped in the first place, a really high voltage (computer high, not powerline high) is "flashed" to groups of transistors, hence **flash** memory.
A microSD card has billions of these transistors, and their sizes range in the nanometres (nm). A piece of paper has a thickness of 0.1mm, that's thin but still 100,000 nm. Transistors have measurements on the order of about 100-10nm. When a microSD card has 64 GB, that means it has somewhere around 500 billion transistors in it. | [
"Recently, electronic devices such as digital cameras, MP3 players, cellular phones, etc., are required with larger capacity of storage to store data. A memory card, such as a Micro SD card, a MMC card, etc., which has larger capacity of storage and a small size, is extensively used to expend the capacity of storag... |
why, even though i used to be tiny and have a fast metabolism, did quitting prozac (antidepressants) cause me to gain nearly 50 pounds in two months? | It most likely affected your appetite causing you to eat more than you used to. Have you had any changes in how active you are? | [
"Preclinical and clinical research indicates that drugs inhibiting the reuptake of all three of these neurotransmitters can produce a more rapid onset of action and greater efficacy than traditional antidepressants.\n",
"The therapeutic effects of antidepressants typically do not continue once the course of medic... |
What do the small temperature fluctuations in the CMB map tell us about the conditions in the early universe? | I would start [here.](_URL_0_)
Also, if you are interested in how different cosmological parameters are affected by the power spectrum, [these movies](_URL_1_) are useful. | [
"The prediction that the CMB temperature was higher in the past has been experimentally supported by observations of very low temperature absorption lines in gas clouds at high redshift. This prediction also implies that the amplitude of the Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect in clusters of galaxies does not depend directly... |
On what points did Adlai Steveson criticize such a respected and popular public figure as Eisenhower in the 1952 presidential election? | In 1952, Stevenson campaigned on the record of the Democratic Party since 1932. The argument was basically that it would be better to trust the legacy of the New Deal to the party that created it than to the GOP, which they called the "Party of Hoover." The problem with that strategy is that it was the same one from 1948. While it was a very good argument then, Eisenhower had soundly defeated the most conservative element of the Republican Party during the primary and convention process, i.e. that led by Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio.
[Here's a handy poster from the election summarizing most of Stevenson's arguments](_URL_0_). | [
"Eisenhower retained his enormous personal popularity from his leading role in World War II, and huge crowds turned out to see him around the nation. His campaign slogan, \"I Like Ike,\" was one of the most popular in American history. Stevenson attracted the support of the young, emergent postwar intellectual clas... |
how bose noise cancellation work | It doesn't deflect the noise, it literally cancels the noise out by playing the opposite noise through the headphones.
Sound travels as a wave. If you play a sound 180 degrees out of phase (aka, the opposite sound), it effectively cancels out and creates silence. [This is a really simple graph showing the concept.](_URL_0_). If the blue wave is noise, and the red wave is what the headphones play, the yellow line is what we hear (silence).
Noise cancelling headphones have a microphone that picks up the ambient noise. With a simple audio processor, it reverses the phase and plays it back through the headphones, cancelling out the noise. | [
"Noise gating works well when the static is steady and either narrowly confined in frequency (e.g. hum from AC power) or well below the main signal level (15 dB minimum is desirable). In cases where the signal merges with the background static (for example, the brushed drum sounds in the Sun King track on the Beatl... |
Does the 9.81 meters per second per second acceleration rate decrease the father from the earth's surface you drop an object? | The gravitational acceleration is GM/R^(2), where M = mass of earth and R = distance from center of Earth. So the acceleration is smaller the farther you are from Earth. If you are close to the surface of Earth, you can just use *g* = 9.8 m/s^(2). To put this into perspective, the acceleration doesn't drop by 1% until you reach a height of about 25 miles above the surface. | [
"In SI units this acceleration is measured in metres per second squared (in symbols, m/s or m·s) or equivalently in newtons per kilogram (N/kg or N·kg). Near Earth's surface, gravitational acceleration is approximately 9.8 m/s, which means that, ignoring the effects of air resistance, the speed of an object falling... |
if grocery stores are said to have a markup of 10-15%, how do they afford to run sales of up to 50% off? | Former Buyer here. There are a couple of things that make these sales worth while. First, the average profit may be 10-15%, but it varies widely by item. Items like Seasonal, Produce, Private label and HBA can make far More than 10-15%. Commodity items like milk and eggs make far less, and may be below cost when on sale. However, when milk is on sale, customers will come in and buy milk and many other things. Milk is used as a loss leader so they can capture profit on all the other things customers buy. Turkeys are a good example of this. They almost give them away before Thanksgiving so they can capture all the profitable sales that go along with it. Finally, vendors pay retailers to run sales. Chips is a good example. They may retail for $4.29. And they may run them on sale at 2 for $5.00, but if the retailers cost is $2.75 a bag (I’m guessing here) then Frito Lay will pat the retailer $.50 for every bag sold on sale. It’s called scanbacks. There are many other things that drive profits (Exclusive Deals, slotting allowances, fixture allowances, and ad fees that all make it a profitable business). | [
"There are a few other \"cost-plus\" stores, however, that add about ten percent at checkout, using the lower shelf price to trick consumers into erroneous comparison shopping. At Food Depot and other smaller low-end chain stores like this, the shelf price may be $1.95, when the shopper will actually be charged $2.... |
how are musical prodigies able to play instruments with little or no instructions? | I wouldn't quite say they sit down and play perfectly without ever being exposed before... It's more like they have an extremely high aptitude for it and learn the patterns very very quickly. | [
"Embouchure is controlled by way of the instrument's mouths, not the player's mouth such that the player can sing along with the hydraulophone (i.e. a player can sing and play the instrument at the same time). Moreover, the instrument provides the unique capability of polyphonic embouchure, where a player can dynam... |
what's the difference between a low end motherboard and a high end motherboard? | Better solder
Better parts in general
Better/stronger material
Better heat/conductivity
| [
"The original AT motherboard, later known as \"Full AT\", is , which means it will not fit in \"mini desktop\" or \"minitower cases\". The board's size also means that it takes up space behind the drive bays, making installation of new drives more difficult. (In IBM's original heavy-gauge steel case, the two 5-1/4\... |
if all produce is grown in an open climate, why does some produce like broccoli need to be stored in a fridge, while some produce like avocados can be stored at room temperature? how come some can be stored either way also, like strawberries or grapes? | When fruits/vegetables are growing, they're part of a living plant. When you harvest them, they're no longer being supported by a living plant & you want to keep them in an environment that prolongs their freshness.
Look at a slab of meat. That used to be an animal. Animals are fine *until you kill them and cut them up* and then they start to rot fairly quickly unless you do something to preserve the meat.
| [
"City dwellers can also produce fresh home grown fruit and vegetables in pot gardens or miniature indoor greenhouses. Tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, peas, strawberries, and several types of herbs can all thrive in pots. Jim Merkel says that a person \"could sprout seeds. They are tasty, incredibly nutriti... |
Why do clothes unwrinkle when heat is applied? | PhD Chemist here, and: huh, I don't actually know. It's a good question though. In fairness, I'm not a polymer chemist.
To hazard a guess, when you iron or press clothes, you need the fibers in the weave to rearrange back to a layout that naturally keeps the material flat: all the heat is doing is softening the fibers allowing them to flow/slip past each other into a less stressed arrangement. The unwrinkling results from the mechanical pressure of pressing down with the iron while the material is hot so that the the fibers will end up arranged in a way that keeps the material flat. Heat alone doesn't unwrinkle, as evidenced by the state of one's dress clothes when they come out of the dryer.
Not sure what the steam is for, but according to the settings on my iron, it only seems to be used on natural fibers rather than synthetics, and there I guess the natural fibers are hydrophilic (naturally attract water) because they're biological (probably mostly made of long protein chains) while the synthetics are more hydrophobic (don't attract water). It's possible the water actually weakens the natural fibers via chemical change (actual breaking and making of new bonds) but I suspect it's more like the heat: its presence essentially just tweaks the mechanical properties of biopolymers allowing the fibers to rearrange more easily. | [
"Novice users of modern laundry machines sometimes experience accidental shrinkage of garments, especially when applying heat. For wool garments, this is due to scales on the fibers, which heat and agitation cause to stick together. In cold countries they dry it with their fireplaces, others just have many or buy m... |
Which metal is stronger pure rather than alloyed? | OK. Basically you have to think about why alloying makes metals harden. In order for a metal to harden you need to make it harder for dislocations to move and for slip to occur (lets neglect twinning or other plasticity mechanisms for this discussion). For a metal to harden by alloying, yhere are two basic processes
1) Solid solution hardening - There is a size difference between the atoms (ions) of the base metal and the alloying elements. Depending on the ratio the alloying elements can replace a base metal element in the crystal lattice (substional solid solution) or if the alloying element is small enough (C in Fe) it can go between the base metal elements and form an interstitial solution. Now these odd size atoms can hold back dislocations like grains of sand on sandpaper. Now the effect is not equal for both cases, and is strongly dependent on the size of the alloying element. Interstials cause an anisotropic distortion in the lattice in the crystal whereas a substition induces a spherical or isotropic distortion so they interact with dislications in different ways.
2) Precipitation hardening - The alloying elements come out of solution when given a special heat treatment. Basically the solution is not in thermodynamic equilibrium, and a new phase is nucleating and growing. These second phase particles are like big rocks in the road and pin dislocations in place. Typically the elements are miscible in the liquid phase but become immescible in the solid phase. When it cools the alloying elemts want to come out of solution. This doesn't readily happen at room temp, but if you heat the metal up below the melting point sufficient diffusion can occur to grow the second phase. Now of course the effect is going to be highly dependent on the size of the particles and their spatial distirbution within the metals. Most of the time you want a uniform dispersion of fine participates.
So to answer your question. Now to make an alloy that is weaker than the base metal you would need to make dislication glide easier. than in the base metal. Doesn't happen, you can see that basically anything you add is going to hinder dislocations. There might be an oddball somewhere in solid state physics, but none for structural metals or anything remotely useful. | [
"Most pure metals are either too soft, brittle or chemically reactive for practical use. Combining different ratios of metals as alloys modifies the properties of pure metals to produce desirable characteristics. The aim of making alloys is generally to make them less brittle, harder, resistant to corrosion, or hav... |
In WWII, what was the Allie's reaction to the Tiger II? Did they fear it more than the Tiger I? Was the knowledge of the tank as widespread as the Tiger I? | The first battle of King Tiger tanks was against British forces in France, on July 18th, 1944. Three King Tiger tanks were lost in this fight, including one that was stuck in a bomb crater, but it doesn't seem like the British took particular note of the new tank. A little while later, the Soviets encountered this tank on the Eastern Front, at the Sandomierz Foothold. King Tiger tanks were first used in combat here on August 11th. The Soviet forces also did not initially notice that they were fighting new tanks, mistaking the enemy for Panthers. The mistake was discovered only after the battle, when one of the tanks that the Germans abandoned intact was inspected, and a full set of documentation was found.
It would appear that the Americans were the last to discover anything at all about this tank. On October 4th, Major General John R. Deane wrote to the Soviet GABTU, asking about information on the "Tiger Imperial". Since full trials of the captured tanks were not yet performed, little useful information was returned, if any. The American 1st Army captured a functional tank at Duren, which yielded some information, at least the basic measurements of the tank, such as weight and top speed.
The British had some trouble with finding a tank for trials, even though they had a chance to get one first. Finally, on September 20th, they found a so called "Porsche" turreted King Tiger (in reality, Porsche had nothing to do with the turret, but it's a common mistake) at Plessis that could be examined. Unfortunately, all they had was the turret, but that allowed them to make some conclusions about the tank. The armour quality was poor, and there were sections on the front of the turret vulnerable to even relatively low caliber guns, such as the 2-pounder mounting the Littlejohn Adaptor, 75 mm gun firing HEAT, and 6-pounder firing APDS. An interesting feature of the turret that was noted by the examination commission was the interlocking of plates. This solution was deemed too complicated and time consuming to implement in British production.
By the time the report was completed, the British found out that this type of turret was a minority. Another type of turret was captured at Beauvais, but this time it came with the whole tank. The tank was not in running order, but the hull could be inspected. The conclusions were not radically different from those drawn before: German armour was still considered poor in quality, and the tank shared some weaknesses of the Panther and Tiger, namely that the sponsons could be knocked out by HE rounds that hit above the tracks, which would almost certainly trigger an ammunition fire. The quality of the welding was also poor. However, the King Tiger got rid of one of the weaknesses of the Panther, namely the ease with which one could ricochet shells off the gun mantlet and into the roof of the driver's compartment. However, the new gun mantlet offered poor protection from splash from the right side at certain depression angles. The upper front plate was also found to be invulnerable to British weapons, but the front and sides of the turret presented a more tempting target anyway.
On the inside, the tank showed more weaknesses. The crew positions were uncomfortable, with mechanisms placed poorly. The loader and gunner fared especially badly. A loader taller than 5'4" hit his head on the hatch handle, a loader shorter than that would be unable to reach some of the ammunition in the ready racks. Due to the heavy and awkward ammunition, as well as bad design of the breech guard rail, the loading process was slow. The gunner sat in an awkward position, had issues operating the flywheels or power traverse pedals, and had nothing to look into other than the gun sight, which meant that target acquisition was tedious.
Unlike the British, the Americans did take steps in response to the appearance of the new German tank. The HVAP T30E16 round, introduced for the M3 90 mm gun, was specifically designed for handling tough armour of the "big cats". The manual for that type of ammunition specifically mentions that it can penetrate even the upper front plate or the gun mantlet of the King Tiger.
Even though the Soviets were the first of the Allies to receive a working tank, a complete report was only available in February of 1945. Even then, the trials were brief, as the tank broke down constantly, and spare parts were unavailable. Trials showed that, even in the best of times, the performance of the tank was far less than what its manual claimed that it was capable of. The report concludes that the tank's running gear and drivetrain were very fragile and unreliable. The gun, on the other hand, was deemed good, but the semiautomatic mechanism broke down after 58 shots.
Firing on the tank showed that Soviet guns were more than capable of dealing with it. Even nonpenetrating impacts from 122 and 152 mm shells against the front armour resulted in cracking and spalling that would disable the tank. Like the British, Soviet trials concluded that the armour quality was poor.
Sources:
W. Schneider. Tigers in Combat. Vol.1 – Stackpole Books, 2004
Armour Branch Report on Armour Quality & Vulnerability of «Tiger» II Turret
Armour Branch Report on Armour Quality & Vulnerability of Royal Tiger
Armor Piercing Ammunition for Gun, 90-mm, M3
BIOS Final Report No. 614 Item No. 18 Welding Design & Fabrication of German Tank Hulls and Turrets
[IS-2 vs. the German Big Cats](_URL_0_)
[SU/ISU-152 vs the German Big Cats](_URL_1_)
[Tiger II mobility trials](_URL_2_)
[Tiger II gunnery trials](_URL_3_) | [
"The battalion took the Tiger I into combat for the first time on 16 September 1942 south of Lake Ladoga near Leningrad. On 22 September, after crossing a causeway, a Tiger became bogged down in the mud, due to enemy fire the tank could not be recovered despite a number of attempts; the tank was destroyed on 25 Nov... |
What happened to Roman soldiers who were non-fatally injured, but who couldn't keep up with the pace of the legion when marching? | Not to discourage any further answers but you'll probably enjoy
[You are a Roman solider marching a long distance. Your leg breaks for whatever reason; what happens?](_URL_0_)
[How likely would a Roman soldier be to survive injury on the battlefield?](_URL_1_)
By /u/Celebreth | [
"This time the Romans did not stay behind their fortifications. They marched out of their camp, formed battle lines, and cast their pila (the Roman throwing spears) to good effect at the charging Ambrones, killing several warriors or rendering their shields useless. The legionaries then drew their swords and advanc... |
what would happen if every countries interest rate were to go to 0% | If every country's interest rates went to 0% *because all the countries were unable to get out of local recessions at higher interest rates*, then the entire world would be in a "liquidity trap": that is, a nasty kind of depression that can't be cured with monetary policy because people are so freaked out by the bad business climate that they are willing to stockpile huge amounts of money. Since in a normal depression (even a very bad, liquidity-trap kind) one way for a country to recover is by exporting goods to countries which are booming, it would be a *terrible* depression if this happened globally - much worse than the Great Depression. Ideally, governments would respond to this with a global fiscal policy pact (all agreeing to embark on deficit-financed spending in their countries simultaneously), but the last time around, each country took a course that made the crisis harder for everyone.
Now, if countries where there is currently inflation even at relatively high interest rates cut their rates to 0% just for funsies, there would be runaway inflation in those countries, but I assume that isn't what you're asking. (Interest rates are sort of like the speed of a car: if someone says that a car is going 80mph, you assume that's because the car is on the highway, not because the driver is on a DUI-rampage through a quiet suburban neighborhood with windy roads.) | [
"Let us assume that the real interest rate is equal across two countries (the US and Germany for example) due to capital mobility, such that formula_8. Then substituting the approximate relationship above into the relative purchasing power parity formula results in the formal equation for the International Fisher e... |
Do animals have meal times? | I study monkeys, and yes there are diurnal patterns to foraging. Depending on the species there can be 2-3 feeding peaks per day - typically midmorning, before or after the midday rest, and then right before sleeping. It has to do with energy needed (fruit is eaten for quick sugar boosts, leaves for more protein) at various points in the day. Can expand if you're interested! | [
"Meals are often eaten whole, thus the size of their meals may depend on the size of the animals. Many of the small species feed mostly on insects, with some being small lizard experts. Many of the medium to large species will feed on whatever prey items they can catch. This includes eggs, fish (\"V. mertensi\"), b... |
Why weren't the Maori of New Zealand effected by Old World diseases unlike the native Americans and Australians? | They were.
"Introduced diseases were the major reason for the Māori population decrease. In the 1890s the Māori population had fallen to about 40% of its pre-contact size. Decline accelerated after the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840 and settlers began to arrive in greater numbers. This influx of people exposed Māori to new diseases, leading to severe epidemics."
_URL_0_ | [
"At the same time, the Māori suffered high mortality rates from Eurasian infectious diseases, such as influenza, smallpox and measles, which killed an unknown number of Māori: estimates vary between ten and fifty per cent. The spread of epidemics resulted largely from the Māori lacking acquired immunity to the new ... |
Why did Baptist denominations become the most prevalent form of Christianity in the American South? | Churches acted as more than spiritual centers in early American cities up until the mid-19th Century. Simply put, different classes went to different churches to rub elbows together. Baptist and Methodist churches were where the lower and working classes went, and where you have a lot of lower and working class people, you have a lot of Baptist and Methodist churches. This is the simplest explanation I can recall, but it has been some time since I studied this. | [
"Baptists seem to have first appeared in North America in the early 18th century. Through the influence of the Philadelphia Baptist Association (org. 1707), the influx of members to the churches from the Great Awakenings, and the union of the disparate Regular and Separate Baptists, by the early 19th century Baptis... |
How far can the light from a traditional keychain laser pointer reach? | The light keeps going forever unless absorbed or scattered by something. However, the intensity of the beam will decrease as it widens over distance. All lasers have beam divergence, so a simple keychain laser will become as wide as house a few miles away and very dim to your small eyes. | [
"To unlock the counter-rotating light beams, laser gyros either have independent light paths for the two directions (usually in fiber optic gyros), or the laser gyro is mounted on a piezo-electric dither motor that rapidly vibrates the laser ring back and forth about its input axis through the lock-in region to dec... |
throughout history, what led people to use different writing systems and alphabets? what influenced their choice of script and language? | they were invented independently. there is no real answer to "why it looks like this". | [
"It is thought that the first consonantal alphabetic writing appeared before 2000 BC, as a representation of language developed by Semitic tribes in the Sinai-peninsula (see History of the alphabet). Most other alphabets in the world today either descended from this one innovation, many via the Phoenician alphabet,... |
Does the dark side of the Moon overall receive more light than the light side? | By a very very small amount (about 0.5%), because when there is a new moon and the far side is illuminated, it is closer to the sun than when there is a full moon and the near side is illuminated. | [
"The phrase \"dark side of the Moon\" does not refer to \"dark\" as in the absence of light, but rather \"dark\" as in unknown: until humans were able to send spacecraft around the Moon, this area had never been seen. While many misconstrue this to think that the \"dark side\" receives little to no sunlight, in rea... |
Is it possible to burn ice? | Well, ice and ice cream aren't flammable, even at room temperature... So no. But if you froze a flammable substance, like alcohol (albeit, it only freezes at extremely low temperatures), could you burn the frozen alcohol? Yes you could. Temperature or physical properties have nothing to do with how flammable a substance is. Remember, fire is a *chemical* reaction. | [
"Control of ice plants can be attempted by pulling out individual plants by hand, or with the use of earth-moving machinery such as a skid-steer or tractor, though it is necessary to remove buried stems, and mulch the soil to prevent re-establishment. For chemical control, glyphosate herbicides are used. Because of... |
On Earth we have salt water and fresh water - are there planets with other sorts of water? Are they possible? | Water is capable of dissolving a huge variety of compounds and elements, not to mention its ability to form mixtures with many liquids. I'd say yes, as the different waters you referred to just refer to how much and what kind of "stuff" is dissolved in it. Salt water has lots of salt, fresh water has less, acid rain has lots of acid, oxygenated water has oxygen, radioactive water has radioactive materiel. If the planet had water, I'd expect it to have a fair amount of whatever is around it dissolved. | [
"With oceanic water covering 71% of its surface, Earth is the only planet known to have stable bodies of liquid water on its surface, and liquid water is essential to all known life forms on Earth. The presence of water on the surface of Earth is a product of its atmospheric pressure and a stable orbit in the Sun's... |
is there light in a closed box? | The light would bounce around in on the walls in the box. Every time a bounce occurs, most of the light's energy is transferred to heat in the walls. And since the light moves at the speed of light, it will very quickly bounce many times, and all of its energy will be absorbed by the box in the form of heat. It will seem instantaneous to us.
So there will be no light in the box. | [
"A soft box is a type of photographic lighting device, one of a number of photographic soft light devices. All the various soft light types create even and diffused light by transmitting light through some scattering material, or by reflecting light off a second surface to diffuse the light. The best known form of ... |
can we yawn while sleeping ? | While we are asleep our brain still has control over our muscles. Yawning is an involuntary reflex meaning, it just happens. Scientifically speaking yawning is one of the more challenging mammal traits we have. It provides no discernible benefits to the functioning of the body nor does it give any physiological benefit to the brain. It's safe to say that yawning is an indicator of lethargy or the desire to rest. Adding that all up together yes any mammal that yawns can also do it while sleeping. It might be less likely to occur while sleeping as there isn't a true need for it, but I can tell you from sleep studies people do yawn quite a bit when they sleep. | [
"Yawning is commonly associated with imminent sleep, but it seems to be a measure to maintain arousal when sleepy and so prevents sleep rather than inducing it. Yawning may be a cue that the body is tired and ready for sleep, but deliberate attempts to yawn may have the opposite effect of sleep induction.\n",
"Ya... |
Is it possible to create Prince Rupert's drops from other materials, and if so, what properties would they have? | From my elementary understanding of glass, I don't think so. Glass is dense, but still very fragile. Steel is dense, but is not as fragile as glass. The same shape might could be achieved with steel, but I don't think it would be under as much tension as glass, with tension being what makes the drops tail so unstable. | [
"Prince Rupert's drops are produced by dropping molten glass drops into cold water. The water rapidly cools and solidifies the glass from the outside inward. This thermal quenching may be described using a simplified model of a rapidly cooled sphere. Prince Rupert's drops have remained a scientific curiosity for ne... |
What makes a pulsar spin? | Conservation of angular momentum. The star that the pulsar formed from was already rotating, and when the core collapsed to such a tiny size (most neutron stars have radii of around 10 km) the rotation rate increased dramatically in order to conserve angular momentum.
In some cases, neutron stars may have a companion from which they tidally strip gas. This infalling gas can add to the angular momentum of the pulsar and cause it to spin up. | [
"Pulsars are rotating neutron stars that have a magnetic field. A narrow beam of electromagnetic radiation is emitted from the poles of rotating pulsars. If the beam sweeps past the direction of the Solar System then the pulsar will produce a periodic pulse that can be detected from the Earth. The energy radiated b... |
why financial year starts at july instead of january? | The fiscal year is *not* always July to June. The US government's fiscal year, to pick an example, is October to September. Apple Inc. uses the same fiscal year, while Walmart uses February-January, and Exxon Mobile's is January-December.
Ignoring the matter of taxation, a company's fiscal year is *purely* arbitrary. There's absolutely no reason to choose any one period of time over any other, absent externalities. When you figure taxes into it, companies that pay taxes on a fiscal-year calendar have to do some juggling regarding deadlines and stuff, but that's all easy enough to figure out, and once you've done it once, you don't have to go back and redo it.
So because there's no good reason — in general — to pick one calendar over another, a pretty common practice is for *new* businesses to start their fiscal calendar on the first day of whatever their first month of operation is. If the company is incorporated in March with a start-of-business date of April 1, then that company's fiscal year goes from April to March and there's no particular reason ever to change it. | [
"The first month of the year was considered the modern August and was called Navasard by Armenians. Likewise start-of-year positions affected economic and cultural capitals adding difficulties to certain trading deals, especially ones done in wintertime. Therefore, after the end of the century XVI (approximately ar... |
During the cold war, how did the U.S. manage to place its own missiles in Turkey aimed at USSR? | Turkey joined NATO, since the Turkish government was worried about Soviet-backed communist instigators in their own nation (Greece joined NATO for the same reason).
The placement of [Jupiter](_URL_0_) mid-range nuclear missiles in Turkey, as well as Italy, was one of the main reasons why the USSR sought to place their own nuclear missiles in Cuba, sparking the Cuban Missile Crisis. The crisis was ended when, among other things, the US agreed to withdraw those missiles from Italy and Turkey. This was done in secret, however, which is why the US, and President Kennedy, was - and still often is - seen as the "winner" of those negotiations. Even today, many textbook histories of the Cuban Missile Crisis ignore those Turkish and Italian missiles. | [
"During the Cold War, the primary target of saturation attacks from the Soviet Naval Aviation, were the United States Navy aircraft carriers. In response the United States adopted the doctrine of attempting to destroy the Soviet missile aircraft before they could launch their missiles, this led to the Douglas F6D M... |
If you could get to the centre of a black hole, would you just freeze in time? | [Here](_URL_1_) is RobotRollCall's comment on that topic which you might enjoy reading.
Also, BH questions come up fairly regularly here, so there is a wealth of knowledge on the topic in the /r/AskScience [search archive](_URL_0_). | [
"The time reversal of a black hole would be a hypothetical object known as a white hole. From the outside they appear similar. While a black hole has a beginning and is inescapable, a white hole has an ending and cannot be entered. The forward light-cones of a white hole are directed outward; and its backward light... |
if anyone can access the "deep web" by downloading tor, how are illegal sites not getting shut down immediately? | Just because you can access a site on TOR does not mean you can find out where the server(s) hosting the site is. That's actually sort of the whole point of TOR: no one knows where anyone else is but everyone can still communicate.
If you can't find the server the site is hosted on, it's very hard to shut it down.
Add to this, that even when you do find the server, you're unlikely to find more than a few of the people operating it. Since they don't know who each other are, you get one or two people and the others just get a new server and are back up and running within a week or two. | [
"There are risks to using circumvention software or other methods to bypass Internet censorship. In some countries, individuals that gain access to otherwise restricted content may be violating the law and if caught can be expelled, fired, jailed, or subject to other punishments and loss of access.\n",
"Operators... |
Light and atoms | Mostly. It can absorb and scatter some light, but if it's only a single atom thick, there's a pretty large probability the light will simply pass through it. Already gold leaf, the thinnest metal you'll easily produce, is fairly transparent, and it's on the order of thousands of atoms thick. (0.1 micrometers)
A layer that thin also won't have the same absorption properties as the bulk material. Once you get down to the nano-scale, the size of the material has a large effect on how it absorbs. ([image](_URL_0_) of the diameter dependence of the color in gold nanoparticles)
| [
"Atoms emit and absorb light at characteristic energies. This produces \"emission lines\" in the spectrum of each atom. Emission can be spontaneous, as in light-emitting diodes, gas discharge lamps (such as neon lamps and neon signs, mercury-vapor lamps, etc.), and flames (light from the hot gas itself—so, for exam... |
Are there any estimates or statistics for how many Americans continued to drink alcohol during Prohibition? | Alcohol consumption fell, at first, to approximately 30 percent of its pre-Prohibition level; but, over the next several years, increased to about 60-70 percent of its proir-prohibition level. At least 10,000 people died from alcohol poisoning | [
"In 1930 the Prohibition Commissioner estimated that in 1919, the year before the Volstead Act became law, the average drinking American spent $17 per year on alcoholic beverages. By 1930, because enforcement diminished the supply, spending had increased to $35 per year (there was no inflation in this period). The ... |
Do animals seek a variety in their diet? | This largely depends on the animal! Some animals, like the leatherback turtle, whose diet consists solely of jellyfish, are specialists that lack variety in diet. Animals that DO eat several food sources generally do so because of two main reasons.
First off, many food sources are only seasonally available. Many animals exhibit diet switching as different fruits and animals become more abundant! Birds often feed their chicks a regimen of food based on the age of the chick (i.e. insects - > berries); i'd lump this into the same category.
The second reason is food availability. If you eat more types of food, there is more food. Just look at animals like racoons and seagulls!
Hope this answers the question | [
"All of these animals are omnivores, yet still fall into special niches in terms of feeding behavior and preferred foods. Being omnivores gives these animals more food security in stressful times or makes possible living in less consistent environments.\n",
"While their dietary preferences have not been studied i... |
What happens to fish that die near the poles? | It is not actually freezing at the ocean floor, so they would not be preserved like you're thinking. The temperature down there is 0-3 °C (_URL_0_). Metabolism slows down at that temperature, but there are various micro- and macro-creatures there to break down the carcass. | [
"Heavy infestations in fish stocks can lead to large-scale losses. Major outbreaks in rainbow trout fisheries in the United Kingdom have resulted in total losses. Carp aquaculture in Russia has experienced infestations in which fish were coated in \"several hundred\" parasites before dying. Parasites infested 100% ... |
Trade in Bronze Age Mesopotamia | The best documented site for Bronze Age trade is Kanesh in Central Anatolia. This site has yielded approximately 12,000 tablets and 4,000 of them have been published, giving a great deal of detail on the Middle Bronze Age textile trade from the Mesopotamian city of Ashur and the small kingdoms in Central Turkey. Kanesh was a trading entrepot. It was not yet under the control of the Kingdom of Hatti, and at the time (circa 1600 BC) Ashur was a marginally powerful city state, not the capital of a major empire. There are also tablets from Mari and Ashur that, while significantly fewer in number, cross-refrence well with the Kanesh tablets. We know from this information that the Assyrian traders used pack animals, asses or similar species, and moved in fairly large caravans. We also know that family owned businesses operated this trade, and in one case, a woman owned the business, although she was the widow of a sucessful trader, and her son was the caravan leader who made the trip to Kanesh. | [
"Levantine sites previously showed evidence of trade links with Mesopotamia (Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia), Anatolia (Hattia, Hurria, Luwia and later the Hittites), Egypt and the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age. Evidence at Ugarit shows that the destruction there occurred after the reign of Merneptah (ruled 12... |
I understand 'shooting stars' are actually meteorites, but how fast would a star at say 4 lightyears have to travel to appear to be shooting? | Using trigonometry... much much much much much faster than the speed of light.
Let's say this "shooting star" covered half the night sky over the course of one minute, ok?
Let's also assume the star was 4 ly from Earth at the start and and the end of its trajectory, and that the trajectory is a straight line.
This allows us to draw an isosceles right triangle with the Earth at the right angle, and with the short sides 4 ly long. The star's trajectory then lies along the hypotenuse, which is over 5.5 ly in length (rough mental estimate).
So the star traveled roughly 5.5 ly per minute, or maybe 3 million times faster than the speed of light.
*Roughly.* | [
"RX J0822−4300, often referred to as a \"Cosmic Cannonball\", is a radio-quiet neutron star currently moving away from the center of the Puppis A supernova remnant at over 3 million miles per hour (5 400 000 km/h; 1500 km/s; ~0.5% the speed of light), making it one of the fastest moving stars ever found. Astronomer... |
what makes up the price of a gallon of gas? | The Department of Energy has a web site that lists the breakdown.
_URL_0_
In short, for Sept 2011, 63% of the price was crude oil, 14% refining, 12% distribution/marketing, and 11% taxes. | [
"The price of natural gas varies greatly depending on location and type of consumer. In 2007, a price of $7 per 1000 cubic feet () was typical in the United States. The typical caloric value of natural gas is roughly 1,000 BTU per cubic foot, depending on gas composition. This corresponds to around $7 per million B... |
why do cops weave back and forth across lanes on the freeway? | You said it. To slow down all of the traffic. I have seen them do it in San Diego, to slow traffic prior to an accident further down the road. Considering California traffic, it makes a lot of sense. Might be that there's a chase or something down the road and they want to keep people away. Or all the traffic is going way over the speed limit, and they can slow them all down rather than just pulling one or two over for a ticket. | [
"Traffic exiting the freeway to the arterial road is provided with a long, relatively straight exit ramp, preventing most speed-related rollovers. These exit ramps are also frequently multi-laned to accommodate traffic turning left, right, or going straight ahead in some cases. Traffic signals are commonly installe... |
If you dissolve a compressed spring in an acid where does the energy go? | The energy is converted to heat.
Many people are stymied by this question because they assume that it's possible to hold a spring in one position while it is entirely dissolved away. This won't happen.
As the spring is slowly dissolved away, it won't be as well contained by whatever mechanism was once holding it in a compressed state. As this occurs, areas of the spring will relax. By the time all of it is oxidized, all stress will have been released. The spring will pop or jostle as material is removed, and the energy contained is released as kinetic energy (motion) which is then converted to heat.
But what if you keep compressing it so it can't move? Well, you can't. Even if you had a clamp and kept tightening it down to keep the spring "motionless", the atoms that make up the crystal structure of the spring are still able to move. When the spring is compressed, energy is stored in the bonds between each atom in the crystal structure. As each of those atoms are oxidized and removed from the structure, the bonds around it relax - this relaxation is the release of energy as motion or heat (the two terms are basically interchangeable at the atomic scale.)
TL:DR, the energy goes to motion/heat. It doesn't happen all at once, but gradually as the metal is oxidized away. | [
"When the spring is stretched or compressed, kinetic energy of the mass gets converted into potential energy of the spring. By conservation of energy, assuming the datum is defined at the equilibrium position, when the spring reaches its maximal potential energy, the kinetic energy of the mass is zero. When the spr... |
What did Medieval soldiers do during sieges waiting for the fort/castle/city to starve? | I can give you an idea of what a crusader army was doing and you may be surprised by how much activity was necessary to keep a besieging army in the field, even when it was static.
**Food and water**: Although we might think of those trapped within a city as being desperate for food, it was often the other way round in reality. A good-sized Medieval army was unlikely to take a settlement by surprise; during certain stretches of the march through Palestine the Europeans were managing well under 10 miles per day. This meant, when you came before the walls, your enemy was inside with food and you were outside with precious little.
The force which [laid siege to Jerusalem in 1099](_URL_8_), for example, probably contained at least 16,000 men, not counting the myriad other followers, pilgrims, churchmen, attendants etc. The arid surroundings, often hostile local populations and stifling heat of summer made provisioning the host difficult.
Which brings us to our first answer: soldiers would be actively foraging for food sources and establishing supplies of fresh water. Foraging parties would seek out whatever sustenance they could for the besieging army, which could be slim-pickings if your foe had been expecting you. It was also dangerous; in September 1191 a foraging expedition of the [Third Crusade](_URL_4_) ran into a detachment of [Saladin's](_URL_0_) army in an orchard. [Richard I of England](_URL_3_) rode out to their aid and was only just able to extricate himself to safety.
Likewise, water supplies could not be relied upon with great certainty while in the field. The siege of Jerusalem required 'elaborate schemes of water-carrying over large distances' and any such resources had to be maintained and also defended (Tyerman, p.155). To just keep a large host fed and watered in hostile territory will therefore have occupied a great deal of the time of many in a Medieval army.
**Combat**: It may seem obvious but a considerable deal of fighting could be expected during sieges, regardless of whether a storm or assault was in progress. Settlements with requisite supplies and manpower would often launch raids or 'forays' out of their fortifications to inflict surprise injuries against the besieging force. For this reason, even an army at rest outside the walls of a city frequently required active defense and patrol.
Take for example the [siege of Antioch in 1097-98](_URL_7_). At no point was the entirety of the city blockaded by the crusaders because of the scale of the fortifications, which meant soldiers had to be constantly vigilant to movements in and out of the city. Defenders could ambush their attackers or assault them with missiles with a considerable degree of freedom. The somewhat traditional view of static and unchanging battle lines in siege warfare is quite often inaccurate.
Sometimes the state of affairs was more fractious still. If we consider the [siege of Acre in 1189-91](_URL_6_), during which a Muslim garrison was besieged by [Guy de Lusignan](_URL_1_) who himself in turn was besieged by Saladin, soldiers will have been spending a great deal of time creating and manning trenches, counter-trenches and other fortifications. No-man's land and territorial demarcations shifted. The experience here for the fighting men was less that of inactivity and more one of 'frequent raids and close-combat skirmishes' (Tyerman, p.411).
**Siege engines and ladders**: Of course a well-provisioned and defended settlement has the luxury of time for inactivity, if they so choose, because it is the besieging force's duty to ultimately take by assault what cannot be taken by blockade. To this end, Medieval soldiers at siege would spend time building, maintaining and deploying siege engines.
It obviously follows that the materials for these weapons, such as wood, also needed to be foraged for, as with food and water sources mentioned above. This was a serous logistical undertaking in terms of manpower, with the Frankish army 'ferrying in timber by the camel-load' as the First Crusade reached its climax (Asbridge, p.95).
[Godfrey de Bouillon's](_URL_2_) siege tower had to be assembled from smaller, collapsible pieces to aid in its mobility. The soldiers were also engaged in building a huge iron-clad battering ram with which to assault the outer fortifications, under supervision from Genoese craftsmen. Together with catapults and ladders, this undertaking represented 'a furious programme of construction' over three weeks (Asbridge, p.95).
**Sex**
This is not my particular area, certainly others will know far more about women in siege camps, but considerable numbers of prostitutes would gather wherever a field army assembled, to engage in their business. This was acknowledged (and often loathed) by chroniclers: Gillingham quotes [Ambroise](_URL_5_) on the Third Crusade army, 'Back to the host the women came, To ply their trade of lust and shame'. We may say that from antiquity to the modern day that death and sex are often found in the same places, being the oldest professions as they are.
Hopefully this was a useful flavour of how much activity could be observed in a besieging army, as well as the sheer logistical efforts needed to keep it functioning. Other people might be able to impart additional information on things like religious services in camp, or perhaps leisure/gambling? These were some of the more pragmatic realities of sieges from campaigns I'm familiar with.
**Read more**:
C. Tyerman, *God's War* (2007)
I. Gillingham, *Richard I* (2002)
T. Asbridge, *The Crusades* (2012)
R. C. Smail, *Crusading Warfare* (1995)
Edit: Formatting. | [
"The most common practice of siege warfare was to lay siege and just wait for the surrender of the enemies inside or, quite commonly, to coerce someone inside to betray the fortification. During the medieval period, negotiations would frequently take place during the early part of the siege. An attacker – aware of ... |
Do scientists understand the internal anatomy of Dinosaurs or only the skeletal system? | The skeletal system gives strong hints about the internal anatomy, and in rare instances internal organs have been preserved to some extent.
Examples of fossilized organs include a [brain](_URL_3_), [liver and intestines](_URL_7_), and ["guts"](_URL_6_). [Here](_URL_0_) is an article briefly talking about how these can be preserved.
But even without direct fossilized evidence, there's a lot that can be inferred about organs from skeletons. Brain shape can be inferred from the [shape of the skull](_URL_4_) (even when the brain doesn't completely fill the skull cavity, its shape can be estimated). Lung structure and function can be inferred from several aspects of the skeleton (like the [uncinate processes](_URL_2_)) in [dinosaurs](_URL_8_) and [pterosaurs](_URL_1_). [Nerve pathways](_URL_5_) can be traced through bone. And so on.
So there's both direct evidence and indirect evidence, as well as the evidence from living dinosaurs (birds) and relatives (crocodiles) that helps triangulate the anatomy. But there's still a lot that isn't well understood, and new fossils and new techniques are helping explain that all the time. | [
"A variety of other skeletal features are shared by dinosaurs. However, because they are either common to other groups of archosaurs or were not present in all early dinosaurs, these features are not considered to be synapomorphies. For example, as diapsids, dinosaurs ancestrally had two pairs of temporal fenestrae... |
if you can see the sun and the moon at the same time, what happens on the other side of the world? | So, despite the artistic clichés, the Moon is up during the day just as much as it's up during the night. You can have the moon up all day, or you could have the moon underground all night.
In this situation, someone on the opposite side of the world would just have a moonless night, which is common and normal.
So: why do we associate the Moon with night-time, if it's above the horizon for an equal amount of day and night?
It turns out that while the Moon isn't above the horizon more at night, it *is* fuller and more visible. When the Moon is opposite the Sun in the sky, it's more fully illuminated - it's a Full Moon. When it's near the Sun in the sky, it's only partially illuminated - we aren't seeing the fully "lit" side of the Moon. The closer the Moon is to the Sun in the sky, the more we're seeing the shadowed side of the Moon. When the Moon is very close to the Sun, it's a thin crescent, and is barely visible in the bright daylight.
So: the Moon is up for equal amounts of both daytime and nighttime, and down for equal amounts of both daytime and nighttime, but you don't notice it so much during the day because the Moon is dimmer when it's close to the Sun (and it has to compete with the bright sunlight at the same time). But moonless nights are still totally normal. | [
"The earth is not in the centre of the Sun’s orbit nor at the centre of the universe, but in the centre of its companion elements, and united with them. And any one standing on the moon, when it and the sun are both beneath us, would see this our earth and the element of water upon it just as we see the moon, and t... |
Will drinking alcohol while sick make worsen my symptoms or slow my recovery? | You may have some temporary relief of symptoms from the direct effects of alcohol ingestion. Also, there is conflicting information on alcohol's effect on the immune system. While there is evidence of dysregulation of cytokine pathways being a factor in hangovers, this [study](_URL_0_) shows no effect from moderate drinking on immune function (in healthy subjects).
In actuality, the effect from drinking a couple drinks isn't going to be significant, but, if you get drunk and dehydrated, you're really kicking your body while it's down. | [
"To best manage symptoms, refraining from consuming alcohol is essential. Abstinence from alcohol encourages proper diet and helps prevent progression or recurrence of the neuropathy. Once an individual stops consuming alcohol it is important to make sure they understand that substantial recovery usually isn't seen... |
why is this mars landing so much more hyped than the last few? | Hyped is a bad word for the excitement of people, bbbuuuttt, in the past we have landed rovers by inflating a series of balloon around them, the rover will bounce and eventually land. This time how ever the rover was too heavy to do this, so instead the MSL had to go from 13000 mph to 1000 mph by Apollo style heat shield, then from 1000 mph to about 100 mph via the largest supersonic parachute ever designed, after all that the rover is dropped from its heat shielding while still about 100s of feet above the surface, once falling a array of jets kick on and slow the MSL to stop, after that it is lowered the final 21 feet via a crane mounted to the jet system, and safely placed on the surface. It does this all by itself with no communication from Earth, and worse yet we don't know what has happened for 15 minutes due to it happening 360+ million miles away(or 15 light minute), also the $14 billion price tag doesn't help.
tl;dr: this landing is many many times more complex than anything humanity has ever done in space(maybe even in all of history). Imagine shooting a target 50miles^2 large from 360 million miles away, in a location the target won't get to for 8.5 months. | [
"Mars proves to be inhospitable, and they struggle to survive with their decreased water supply. Earth's correct orbital position for a return trip is one year away. While glumly celebrating their first Christmas on Mars, a sudden snowstorm blows in, allowing them to replenish their water supply. As their launch wi... |
Is Jordan a Palestinian State? | The argument related to this is multi-faceted. I will explain each component, and then explain the counterargument.
**Jordan is Palestinian-Populated**
Jordan, as a result of Palestinian refugees from 1948 staying in the country, has had a large Palestinian population. In fact, some estimates have placed the Palestinian proportion of the population at over 50% in the past (and possibly present). This would make the state "ethnically" Palestinian (assuming Palestinian is an ethnic group, which is actually a quite complicated question that scholars argue over), and as such the claim is that Jordan is a Palestinian state by definition.
This claim is weakened by the way that Jordan is run. It is run by a king, who has never been a Palestinian himself (in the history of Jordanian kings). If the state were a democracy, Palestinians would have had a distinct chance at running the state, and thus would have been a "Palestinian" state where Palestinian self-determination could be exercised. However, this has never historically been the case.
**Jordan was part of Palestine**
This argument rests on the pre-1920s definition of "Palestine". As a geographic region, Palestine was never administratively defined by the Ottoman Empire with distinct borders. However, it is very likely that popular consideration of what the region "Palestine" was also included at least part of Jordan. This is made somewhat clear by the British Mandate granted by the League of Nations. In Article 25, it says:
> In the territories lying **between the Jordan and the eastern boundary of Palestine as ultimately determined**
"The Jordan" refers to the Jordan river, which means that Palestine had uncertain boundaries and thus extended into Jordan. Indeed, for around 8 months, Palestine included (in the British Mandate for Palestine) Jordan, until it was separated rather arbitrarily. The initial thinking, many argue, was that the Jewish state would be west of the Jordan river, while the Arab-Palestinian state would be east of the Jordan river. The thinking goes that this was not implemented with the change of heart engendered by the [Churchill White Paper](_URL_0_), which said that the Balfour Declaration did not entitle Jews to "Palestine", but rather to a national home *within Palestine*, which meant divisions of it.
Of course, whether or not Jordan was part of historic Palestine means little in the grand scheme of things to Palestinians today. Again, they seek self-determination on the basis of Palestinian nationalism, and Jordanians (who might once have been considered "Palestinian" under the British Mandate in the early 1920s, or earlier) do not consider themselves Palestinian. Palestinians have a national movement, whose goals are debated, but there's no debating that Palestinians are not subscribing to the view that their national aspirations are satisfied by Jordan's existence, and do not regard Jordan as a state of their own.
**Jordan Should Be Palestinian**
This argument comes primarily from some groups, among them Israeli politicians and formerly powerful Palestinian militant organizations. The king of Jordan would also show solidarity with Palestinians by claiming "Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan", which fed into this narrative. Jordan, of course, sought to control the West Bank, but formally gave up its claim before the turn of the 21st century for various reasons, including that it remained unlikely it would ever reoccupy the territory. Pan-Arabists like George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) would often claim that "the road to Tel Aviv runs through Damascus, Baghdad, Amman, and Cairo", though the Amman phrase was quite common. The PFLP and other groups believed that Jordan, and other Arab monarchies, stood in the way of Palestinian victory over Israel, but the slogan is sometimes distorted to mean that Amman should become Palestinian-controlled to allow Palestinians to destroy Israel and "rejoin" the historic region of "Palestine".
That's a brief overview. If you want to hear the arguments that Jordan is Palestinian as written by some, you can read the claims by Raphael Israeli, in his article ["Is Jordan Palestine?"](_URL_1_). You can evaluate the arguments with the basis I've given you, and Google can help explain more counterarguments and arguments about the topic. But the claim that Jordan is a Palestinian state remains fringe. | [
"Jordan is an Arab kingdom in the Middle East, on the East Bank of the River Jordan, and extending into the historic region of Palestine. Jordan borders Saudi Arabia to the south and east, Iraq to the north-east, Syria to the north and Israel to the west, sharing control of the Dead Sea with the latter. It consists... |
Water as a faraday cage | The conductivity of good conductive metals is more than [10000000 = 10^7 times that of sea water](_URL_0_).
[The depth to which E/M waves penetrate a conductor](_URL_1_) is inversely proportional to the the square root of the conductivity (as well as the frequency of the E/M wave). So water will have a sizeable skin depth compared to aluminum. At least 1000 times more - meaning that E/M radiation goes a distance 1000 times greater in water compared to metals.
| [
"A Faraday cage operates because an external electrical field causes the electric charges within the cage's conducting material to be distributed so that they cancel the field's effect in the cage's interior. This phenomenon is used to protect sensitive electronic equipment (for example RF receivers) from external ... |
why is the philippines are prone to be hit by major typhoons? | Geography. The same way that the nations/states/territories in the Gulf of Mexico get slammed by hurricanes every year, the Philippines has to deal with typhoons.
Warm ocean currents mix with wind along the water's surface to produce these weather patterns in particular parts of the world, and move along a generally predictable path. Whoever lives in the regions in which these storms form is guaranteed to have to deal with them every year. Unless the currents or geography change (an incredibly slow process) there is no avoiding these annual storms. | [
"The Philippines' evident risk to natural disasters is due to its location. Being a country that lies in the Pacific Ring of Fire, it is prone to earthquake and volcanic eruptions. In addition, the country is surrounded by large bodies of water and facing the Pacific Ocean where 60% of the world's typhoons are made... |
How does brain translate nerve activity into conscious experience? | This, my friend, is the holy grail of neuroscience. For a start, try reading Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran | [
"The brain and the spinal cord are the essential components of the central nervous system and it is responsible for the integration of the signals received from the afferent nerves and initiates action. The nerve cells, known as neurons, carry impulses throughout the body and the nerve impulses are carried along th... |
[Astronomy] Is the water on Europa all fresh water? | It would almost definitely be salt water. Over-time when water makes contact with the crust of a planetary body it becomes gradually more and more salty. The only reason all the water on earth isn't salt water is because we have a water cycle that allows salt water to evaporate leaving the salt behind and falling as rain. | [
"Europa is thought to have a liquid water ocean underneath its icy exterior. Access to this liquid water ocean is a major difficulty, but the abundance of water on Europa is a benefit to any considerations for colonization. Not only can water provide for colonists' drinking needs, it also can be broken down to prov... |
why hasn't youtube/google made it possible to play sound from videos with the app closed? | YouTube is not a charity, they exist to show you ads, that's their only reason. They cannot show ads if you just play sound.
Now, they could play audio ads then, but you would not like that, would you?
However, sites that let you download YouTube videos usually have the option of getting just the soundtrack. I would not be surprised to find some app that just plays sound from YouTube videos without downloading anything to the disc. | [
"The YouTube app, which had been a default app on iOS developed by Apple, was removed. Apple told \"The Verge\" that the reason for the removal was due to an expired license, but that YouTube users could still view videos through the Safari web browser. The company also confirmed that Google, which owns YouTube, wa... |
why do athletes make significantly more money than people like the president who have greater responsibilities in society? | It's mainly the economics surrounding sports. Sports bring in billions of dollars through ticket sales, broadcasting deals, jersey sales, endorsements, etc. If getting a better player helps the team and leads to more money coming in, teams will pay more to improve the team. Needless to say, if a player can make the team millions more, he will get paid millions of dollars.
It's not a matter of importance so much as it's the fact that that athletes more directly lead to huge profits for their organizations.
As for someone like the president, I wouldn't worry about him. Presidents tend to already have wealth, get a decent salary, have incredible benefits like guards and helpers available 24/7, guaranteed fame and publicity, etc. They also are pretty much guaranteed high profits from book sales and speeches after they're done serving. Not only that, but do you really need to offer someone a large salary to convince someone that it would be cool to be a president? | [
"BULLET::::- Quirk, James P., and Rodney Fort, “Why Do Pro Athletes Make So Much Money?” in Frontier Issues in Economic Thought, vol. 51, The Political Economy of Inequality” (William Moomaw and Neva Goodwin, editors) 2000.\n",
"The personal finances of professional American athletes is a subject of widespread di... |
What would happen if you were hit by a beam from a particle accelerator? | It depends on the accelerator. It could be deadly, or it could just give you a large, non-fatal dose of radiation. But for an example, see what happened to [Anatoli Bugorski](_URL_0_). | [
"BULLET::::- Particle accelerators produce high energy protons and electrons, and the secondary particles produced by their interactions produce significant radiation damage on sensitive control and particle detector components, of the order of magnitude of 10 MRad[Si]/year for systems such as the Large Hadron Coll... |
How sure are we that the Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mayan Symbols are actually what we think they are? | I can't speak for Mayan texts, but Egyptian being completely wrong is basically impossible. We have such an understanding of Egyptian text and language that we can tell when an Egyptian scribe makes a mistake. There may be elements that are incorrect regarding a particular glyph, but completely wrong is highly improbable. I know when you look at hieroglyphs they look like they couldn't possibly contain any meaning, but they really aren't that bizarre when you've learnt even just the basics. I find Egyptian much easier to translate than languages like Latin, even though that uses the same alphabet as us.
We are so confident we can read them correctly that we can notice things like shifts in the spoken language from say, Old Kingdom to New Kingdom, based on variations in spellings (Loprieno, Ancient Egyptian, a linguistic introduction). We can also track the development of the language over time. A text from around 2600 BCE, like the Pyramid texts, would be easily distinguishable in grammar and vocabulary from one of the New Kingdom in the mid to late 2nd millennium BCE.
Considering the similarities between Coptic, a known language, and Egyptian, plus principles of linguistics regarding consonant shifts, there is too much evidence that we are right. The grammar is consistent with related languages, such as verbal systems in other ancient and modern languages.
Egyptian is partially uniliteral, meaning there are symbols for single consonants. Thus, we can track names that have been passed down through known languages, such as for countries, peoples, or kings. Indeed, this is how Champollion managed to decode it in the first place, by taking the names of Ptolemaic royalty and known Egyptian names and working backwards (Allen - Middle Egyptian).
The existence of texts with both Egyptian and other language versions. Obviously, there is the Rosetta Stone, but there are other extant examples such as the Treaty between Hattusili III of Hatti and Ramesses II, of which there are Akkadian, Hittite and Egyptian language versions (Beckman Hittite Diplomatic Texts, p96; See Breasted AR for the Egyptian version). These versions have slight differences but the fact that they all say basically the exact same thing is proof that three difference languages convey the same meaning.
Another rather interesting little tidbit is the onomatopoeic nature of Egyptian animals, which gives a really good indication of the sounds represented by the symbols conforming to reality. The Egyptian word for cat is mjw, pronounced 'mioo'. Remind you of anything? How about this one, donkey is a3/'3, originally ja3/j'3, pronounced 'ee-a-ah'. My favourite is lion, rw, pronounced 'roo'.
If we had it wrong, there is no way, considering the vast corpus of Egyptian texts, that we could have gotten so far without noticing grammatical and lexical contradictions within these texts. | [
"The Egyptian hieroglyphs had been well known to scholars of the ancient world for centuries, but few had made any attempts to understand them. Many based their speculations about the script in the writings of Horapollon who considered the symbols to be ideographic, not representing any specific spoken language. At... |
why can't the government take back alcatraz from the park service and rehab it into a modern prison for gitmo detainees? | Gitmo is located in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. so that it exists outside the juristiction of the American Constitution.
This allows long term incarceration without trial and conviction and interrogation techniques that would be considered "Cruel and unusual" in the USA.
Alcatraz is very much within the USA. | [
"The Central Arizona Detention Center is a privately owned and operated managed prison for men located in Florence, Pinal County, Arizona, run by the Corrections Corporation of America housing prisoners for the United States Marshals Service, TransCor America LLC, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Pas... |
What would be required for an AI to be considered mentally "alive" or sentient? | People who actually work with AI do not come up with such requirements, because the field of study called artificial intelligence does not have the tools, ability, or desire to decide what does or doesn't count as sentience. You have to ask the philosophers. | [
"Computer scientist Pedro Domingos writes: \"AIs are like autistic savants and will remain so for the foreseeable future... AIs lack common sense and can easily make errors that a human never would... They are also liable to take our instructions too literally, giving us precisely what we asked for instead of what ... |
Is every black hole surrounded by a spinning disk of matter and heat? | Nope, their are black holes with no disk but they are nearly impossible to find them since the disk is the reason we can see them, their are also theoretical atom sized dark holes all over the universe. As for your other question, it depends on the size of the dark hole and the amount of mater around it. If the plasma disk is to large it will cook you beffore you enter, some black holes are so large that scientis believe you can "fall" past the event horizon and survive but then you red shift and slowly fade away (it can take a long time), but the gravity will most likely stretch you like gum. | [
"By Mach's principle, spacetime is dragged along with mass-energy, with the distant stars on cosmological scales or with a black hole in close proximity. Thus, matter tends to spin-up around rotating black holes, for the same reason that pulsars spin down by shedding angular momentum in radiation to infinity. A maj... |
AskHistorians Podcast 123 - Historical Linguistics in the Balkans | Very interesting. Fun fact about /u/rusoved, he may be the only person who is both a panelist on /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians.
I have some poorly phrased questions about the intersections of linguistics and nationalism.
It seems over the 20th century there was a trend of smaller Slavic nations throwing in their lot together to form nations independent of the Ottomans or Habsburgs, countries like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. This in turn involved claiming a unified language (e.g. Yugoslavian). However with the fall of Soviet communism in the late 20th century a lot of these nations declared independence from each other, and then suddenly each country had its own language again (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, etc) even though these are mostly intelligible. Anyway, I guess my question here is, how did this amalgamation and de-amalgamation of nations and languages affect their evolution?
A totally unrelated question, which I've tried to ask on here before but haven't gotten a reply. In the late 19th century there was a lot of shitty pseudoscientific nationalism trying to claim that X nation was the home of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Now that the PIE homeland has been pretty firmly located around Ukraine and the Caucasus, have there been any nationalist movements in that region that draw upon this?
Once again unrelated, but is it known where exactly the ancestral Slavic (and Baltic?) speakers were during Graeco-Roman antiquity? My mental reckoning roughly places the Romans, Greeks, Gauls, and Germanic tribes on a map of Europe, but I'm not sure where the future Slavs were, at least not until Cyril and Methodius tried to convert them much later. | [
"In Spring 2017, Maiah Ocando and Gabriel Torrelles, created one of the first hourlong podcasts in Spanish language in the US. The podcast \"No sé, dime tú\" (I don't know, you tell me) comments on pop culture, current events and their lives as a couple of immigrants fighting for the American dream in Los Angeles. ... |
whats worst that can happen if i don't get enough sleep? | The worst? Death. Chronic sleep deprivation can kill you.
Most likely you aren't anywhere close to that point but it can also lead to a host of negative health effects to the point of taking years off your life. Quantifying exactly what the consequences of an individual getting too little sleep will result in is impossible though. | [
"It has been estimated that over 20% of adults suffer from some form of sleep deprivation. Insomnia and sleep deprivation are common symptoms of depression and can be an indication of other mental disorders. The consequences of not getting enough sleep could have dire results; not only to the health of the individu... |
How do cells that are touching not fuse together like soap bubbles? | They do and they don't. There isn't enough force to fuse them normally, but cell membranes do fuse during cell division. Normally, though, the hydrophilic phospholipid heads repel each other. This is why tight junctions need separate proteins to bind two adjacent cells to each other. | [
"A soap bubble is an extremely thin film of soapy water enclosing air that forms a hollow sphere with an iridescent surface. Soap bubbles usually last for only a few seconds before bursting, either on their own or on contact with another object. They are often used for children's enjoyment, but they are also used i... |
Which Roman emperor do we know the least about, which emperor is spoken about the least in primary sources? | There are many Emperors whom nearly nothing is known about. But the majority of these cases are Emperors whom only ruled for a few months, or were co-emperors who held little actual power Sometimes both, such as in the case of Gordian II, who's only noteworthy achievement is being the brother of Gordian I. Of noteworthy emperors, Emperor Trajan's long rule is surprisingly lacking in detail, and there are few primary sources about it. Most of what we know about Trajan's reign comes from Historians after his death, who are simply summarizing it. The lack of Primary sources is likely due to the last generation of Historians dying off shortly before(edit: Tacitus during Trajan's reign and Suetonius shortly after) Trajan's reign, and the next generation not beginning to write until after it. This being said, we still do know a lot about Trajan from summaries and monuments, particularly Trajan's column, which details his conquest of Dacia. | [
"The book still provides valuable information on the heritage, personal habits, physical appearance, lives, and political careers of the first Roman emperors. It mentions details which other sources do not. For example, Suetonius is the main source on the lives of Caligula, his uncle Claudius, and the heritage of V... |
How does the new air purifier in China work? It’s apparently working incredibly well and is probably a bio-engineering marvel. | The base of the tower is constructed like a greenhouse, which traps heat and warms air. The warm air then flows up through a series of filters in the tower. This induces convection, which draws more cool air into the base, which is then heated.
Similar towers are used all over the world as cooling towers, where the heat is seen as an unwanted byproduct of power generation or industrial processes. These use convection to draw cool air into the base of the tower, heat is exchanged, and then warm air flows out the top.
_URL_0_ | [
"An air purifier or air cleaner is a device which removes contaminants from the air in a room to improve indoor air quality. These devices are commonly marketed as being beneficial to allergy sufferers and asthmatics, and at reducing or eliminating second-hand tobacco smoke. The commercially graded air purifiers ar... |
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