title list | over_18 list | post_content stringlengths 0 9.37k ⌀ | C1 list | C2 list | C3 list |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
[
"Does earth's center of gravity shift as the topography changes (mountains, tides)? Does the core move?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"The Earth's mass distribution is constantly changing at an infinitesimal rate, but gross and sudden changes occasionally occur as a result of particularly massive earthquakes.",
"For example, the mass shift which caused the Dec 26, 2004 megathrust earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean is believed to have:",
"spe... | [
"yes, I mean, theoretically the earths center of gravity shifts when I walk across the street.",
"but the variances in the surface of our earth are still a trivial peice of the total mass. Sometimes particularly violent earthquakes might produce a measurable change."
] | [
"To add to your great answer, we could consider the rate of change of Earth's gravitational field distribution at an \"infinitesimal rate\" with the shift of the tectonic plates. "
] |
[
"How do nuclear reactors control the reaction inside the core once it has started, and how does a reactor shut down in case of emergency?"
] | [
false
] | While reading about how nuclear reactors work, I am confused exactly how they start and stop or slow the reaction at will. If I understand it correctly, both process involve exposing the rods to water, and the fuel rods are non-reactive outside the core. How does a reactor shut down in an emergency if the rods are wet? | [
"Can confirm. There are other types of reactors but this is how it's done the majority of the time."
] | [
"Can confirm. There are other types of reactors but this is how it's done the majority of the time."
] | [
"Yup, newer reactor designs have some rather creative ways of doing the same things. There are more than a couple of designs out there that can't actually go into meltdown!"
] |
[
"How are we able to locate and measure planets hundreds of light years away yet unable to see the hypothesized planet beyond Pluto?"
] | [
false
] | Based on gravitational pull some scientists have proposed a possible 10th planet that lies beyond Pluto which should have a sizable mass. Given this technique has been used successfully in the past to discover Neptune before we had been able to see it, that would suggest it is somewhat plausible there is something addi... | [
"The way we observe exoplanets is quite different from how we observe planets in our own solar system.",
"For a planet in our own solar system, we either have to observe it directly by registering the light coming from it, or deduce its presence because of the impact its gravity has on objects that we can see dir... | [
"We can measure the radial velocity of other stars good enough to find a planet that changes it by ~1 m/s. In some cases we can detect smaller variations, but not that much smaller.",
"Jupiter leads to a change of +-12 m/s, so if we observe other stars for many years (orbital period of Jupiter is 11 years) we can... | [
"It's a bit complicated. A 9th planet was predicted based on percieved anomalies in the orbits of Uranus/Neptune, which lead to the search that discovered Pluto. However, it (much later) turned out that those anomalies were the result of having an inaccurate estimate of Neptune's mass, and even if they had existed,... |
[
"If you can heat up air like you would using an electric burner, why can't you do the same with cooling the air? Within reason what would it take to make something like this possible?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"To follow up... heat is kinetic energy (particles moving around very fast), where cold is basically the lack of heat. It's quite hard to remove kinetic energy beyond putting the gas in a high pressure chamber or otherwise transferring heat to another substance."
] | [
"The reason why this is impossible is that there is no such thing as \"cold radiation\". There is only heat, and less heat. It is easy to add heat to the air with a burner, because heat flows from hot places to cooler places. The only way to cool the air would be to add something cold, so that heat would flow from ... | [
"First thing you need to know is that heat flows from hot to cold. So to heat a room up, all we would need is one thing that is hotter than everything else so that its heat just transfers around the room. To make a room cooler, we would need to make all the heat in the room flow to an object that is cooler than eve... |
[
"AskScience AMA Series- IAMA neuroscientists studying learning and memory"
] | [
false
] | We are neuroscientists studying different aspects of learning and memory and are all at different stages in our careers. Ask us about neuroscience, academic careers, or graduate school. MicturitionSyncope I am a PhD level scientist doing postdoctoral research on the molecular mechanisms of learning and memory. We are s... | [
"That thread isn't the best for answering your question, but I will try to expand a little and give a broad overview and you can ask any other specific questions you have. I actually edited this from an answer I gave to a similar thread a while ago.",
"The short answer is that we don't have a complete understandi... | [
"Just a reminder that the typical AskScience rules apply even in AMA's, specifically that ",
". Doing so goes against the Reddit user agreement, and really puts these experts in a tough spot (there can be legal repercussions for giving medical advice on the internet). Thanks everyone, all the best! "
] | [
"It's because memory is not like a video camera, recording everything we see. It is filtered by our attention, our emotional state, our past experiences, etc. For example, any experience with a strong emotional component is much more likely to be stored. Also, if we are learning something related to what we already... |
[
"Does abstinence increase testosterone levels?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"relevant study: ",
"http://www.zju.edu.cn/jzus/2003/0302/030219.pdf",
"relevant graph: ",
"http://i.imgur.com/vjOSV.png",
"relevant subreddit: ",
"/r/NoFap",
" "
] | [
"A few months ago there was an article that said a week of no fap increases testosterone levels by a certain percent (i don't remember the exact number).\nSo it just depends on how much you abstain... If you still fap, then no it does not."
] | [
"This study",
" posted by kloetersound, despite how people seem to be reading it, says no.",
"The study showed that there was a peak of testosterone on the 7th day after ejaculating, which then decreased back down to normal levels on the 8th day and stayed at the normal level.",
"Furthermore, it says that thi... |
[
"Photons and the light spectrum"
] | [
false
] | I have a general understanding of photons as the "force carrier" for light but is that for ALL waves of light(visible or otherwise)? Is that fact or theory and in the case that it is fact what do our theories about the properties of the photons say? I also have heard that Light is too blunt an instrument to see on the ... | [
"To your first question: physics doesn't distinguish qualitatively between visible light and other wavelengths. Only our eyes do :)"
] | [
"Photons are light. Quantum mechanics says everything exists in discrete, individual levels, and photons are the discrete, individual energy packets that light exists as. Additionally, all forces are mediated by some particle. For the electromagnetic force, this mediator particle is also photons.",
"For this, thi... | [
"This is an incredibly important point in a lot of concepts (i will relate to EMR in the following example). Electromagnetic radiation photons differ in energy/wavelength (intrinsically related) and our definitions of 'visible light' and the various colors only human made - and somewhat arbitrary - words represent... |
[
"How does a successful advertising affect our brain?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Geoffrey Miller:",
"From my perspective as an evolutionary psychologist, this is how consumerist capitalism really works: it makes us forget our natural adaptations for showing off desirable fitness-related traits. It deludes us into thinking that artificial products work much better than they really do for sho... | [
"there's a really good PBS (i know) special on this called \"The Persuaders\" you might check it out. I think It's on there website"
] | [
"At least in some cases, advertising plays on our natural perceptual abilities. For example, fast food restaurants will often use the color red in their advertisements, buildings, and packaging. This is because people seem to have a natural proclivity to the color red.",
"Now, we know that newborns are better a... |
[
"How can potential energy be relative?"
] | [
false
] | This has bothered me for some time, but I haven't thought about asking and been on reddit at the same time until now. So, taking voltage for example. Every prof I've had has said that voltage was relative, and none gave me a satisfactory answer as to why. My understanding is if you have an empty universe with a charged... | [
"Voltage is not potential energy, it is potential. A charge has to be introduced into the potential in order for there to be \"potential energy\", and it is the charge that contains the potential energy, not the potential itself.",
"However, if you can do that, why can you not just test 2 points that are infinite... | [
"However, if you can do that, why can you not just test 2 points that are infinitely far away from your test charge, and call that potential difference zero, and use that as an absolute scale?",
"The important part here is the word 'can'. Potential is a relative quantity because there is a degree of freedom we ha... | [
"I will try to expand just a little bit on why voltage is a relative quantity. In electrostatics, voltage is defined as a scalar potential V such that gradient(V) = -E, where E is the electric field (a vector field). The gradient operator is unaffected by the reference state, meaning that reference states can be ch... |
[
"Would the entire human population of Earth fit within the borders of a very small country (i.e. Bahrain, or Jamaica)?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Faroe Islands if you assume everyone takes up 2 square feet.",
"EDIT I think 1.7 ft",
" is reasonable, so Hong Kong."
] | [
"Can we stack them vertically?"
] | [
"That made me laugh, and realize my mistake. Time for an edit"
] |
[
"How does one die of old age?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"It's not a real cause of death, more than just the explanation of death through atrophy and accumulated damage.\nAs you age, your muscles, organs and your brain start degenerating (which starts as early as 25 in the case of your brain!)\nThis process is dramatically sped up when you let these parts atrophy or even... | [
"Your body wears out because your cells are replicating at a much slower rate as you get older. One of your systems fails eventually- heart, lungs, brain, kidneys, or you develop a disease like cancer caused by your cells replicating incorrectly. There is usually a cause of death on the death certificate- in the f... | [
"According to the CDC the leading causes of death among (american) people over 65 are heart attacks, cancer (via affecting the normal function of vital organs), and chronic lower respiratory disease (inadequate exchange of oxygen and co2 due to injury/illness of lung tissue). Basically, \"dying of old age\" means ... |
[
"What's the Role of the Northbridge Chip to Access Memory in Modern PCs?"
] | [
false
] | I'm familiar with building computers using a system bus: connecting data, address and control buses directly to all the components in a motherboard. I can see how the Southbridge brings something to the table, by providing a standard clock and common bus independent of different CPUs, but what does the Northbridge do? ... | [
"Modern platforms don't really have a northbridge anymore as the functionality has been incorporated into the CPU for the exact reason you brought up: Performance. Integrating the memory controller in the CPU allows for much lower memory latency than having to go through a separate northbridge chip."
] | [
"/u/Rannasha",
" is entirely correct but here's some additional historical context. As transistors get smaller you can put more of them on a chip economically. Back in the day you couldn't even fit an entire processor on a single chip, part of the appeal of the RISC design philosophy was that chips were getting... | [
"Agreed, modern chipsets are one single chip, there is no Northbridge/Southbridge distinction. the memory controller is on the CPU die and it is not connected to the chipset. The chipset connects to the databus of the CPU and provides all the computers basic I/O methods, ",
"see the block diagram here",
". So t... |
[
"If you downloaded every single thing on the Internet, web pages, torrents, files, games, etc, EVERYTHING, how much space would it take up? 1,000 Terabytes? 1,000,000 Terabytes?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Wolfram alpha says 91 Petabytes, but I think it's most likely more if you could downloading everything and not just webpages.",
"http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=91+petabytes&lk=1"
] | [
"This is just me plugging \"Amount of information available in the deep web\" into Wolfram Alpha. It's not solid science and I should probably be downvoted. But I was just trying to help."
] | [
"You might have trouble with the download though. Assuming you sprung for Google Fiber at 1024Mb/s, and assuming I didn't screw up the math on my phone's calculator, that's about 23 years if you could download it all at once at maximum speed."
] |
[
"Is there a correlation of small baby size and them growing into smaller adults?"
] | [
false
] | After seeing some posts on popular I've been wondering if there's any correlation between small baby size or premature babies and how tall/ big they grow up to be as adults. I couldn't really find anything modern besides anecdotes and group discussions, nothing actually scientific. | [
"Yes absolutely. It's well known that low birth weight is correlated with short adult stature. Here are the first few examples from a Google scholar search. You can find many more:",
"Ibánez, L., Ferrer, A., Marcos, M. V., Hierro, F. R., & de Zegher, F. (2000). Early puberty: rapid progression and reduced final ... | [
"After skimming quickly through these, I find the studies intriguing because I was born 11 weeks premature at 3.3lbs with no apparent consequences (yet). I'll have to really read through each one when I get home today for more info, but thank you for the links to these. 👍"
] | [
"But within the normal birth weight spectrum, a healthy baby without complications, there's no significant correlation between size at birth and adult height. A ton of people are born at the low end of the normal spectrum and end up average or taller, and a ton at the top of the spectrum end up average or lower."
] |
[
"Would a grandfather clock keep time in an elevator?"
] | [
false
] | The pendulum will be heavier accelerating up but lighter accelerating down. Do they cancel out so the clock will work? | [
"Simple answer is no. First of all, when the gravity changes during the period is very important. If the accelerations are quick and happen near the bottom of the pendulum swing, there would be no impact on period (and large impact on amplitude), but at the top of the swing it would have the largest impact on per... | [
"When the pendulum swings, the weights push on the escapement (a gear that ticks every swing) which pushes very lightly on the pendulum itself. How the weight drives the pendulum should have little to no effect here. The pendulum wants to reach a certain steady state amplitude from the weights, and this amplitude... | [
"But while the pendulum is what keeps the time, what actually drives the clock are the ",
"weights.",
" Would they be affected?"
] |
[
"Why is it not possible for a rover to send back hi-res video of other planets/moons?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Interplanetary communication bit-rates are low. So data transfer time is at a premium.",
"Data is scheduled for transmission based on its value scientifically. More important data is prioritised whereas data, that is perhaps duplicated in previous transfers, is queued.",
"High def video at 60fps is essentially... | [
"It is possible. But the question is, to what end? Space probes are designed with scientific purpose. They take images either to facilitate their operation (e.g. hazard/navigation/framing cameras) or to collect scientific data. For those reasons it's generally better to optimize towards collecting the best individu... | [
"We had live TV from the Moon 45 years ago. The quality was pretty dicey on Apollo 11 in 1969, but by the later missions, it was high quality (but of course it was not HD). Watching people walking (and driving) around on the Moon, live (of course delayed by the speed of light), was mesmerizing, even for a nerdy t... |
[
"Honest question: How is \"life\" any different from chemistry?"
] | [
false
] | Is there a scientific reason that we have a classification between life and chemcial reactions? Are the bodies of humans, plants, and animals not just self-sustaining chemical reactions not unlike the sun? | [
"This is something I always wonder about. Effectively, human beings are nothing but highly complex and complicated biological automata that are entirely driven by electrical impulses and chemical reactions. There is no evidence whatsoever that would support the existence of something like a spirit or soul.",
"Is ... | [
"You're right about this, and I didn't mean this to become a philosophical debate. I think it's more interesting to see this from a scientific point of view. Where exactly is the point where science has (yet) to pass and let philosophy take over? Up to where can we explain our own bodily existence and its processes... | [
"Well, it's probably not the best idea to have this be a philosophical thread in ",
"/r/askscience",
", that line of thinking is a driving force behind this question. One that keeps me up at night. I'm wondering if there is some clear dividing line or reasoning that that scientists truly say something is life a... |
[
"What does IQ measure, and how accurate is it st measuring that thing?"
] | [
false
] | This seems to be something where people can't give a straight answer and nobody seems to agree. Some people seem to say it is a great measure of intelligence and good at predicting performace in intellectually demanding tasks, others say it is absolute bunk and doesn't measure anything useful. Both groups seem to claim... | [
"Some of why you can't get a straight answer is on account of IQ being a quotient, which therefore depends on what the test itself is based on. ",
"There are several tests of intelligence, and some are based on different theories of intelligence. The predominant theory right now is the ",
"Cattell-Horn-Carrol... | [
"IQ tests pattern regocnition and ability to analyse information from the perspective of the moment and culture the test was made. The bit people forget is time and culture. Which is why the tests and scores are regularly adjusted. ",
"IQ test are not reliable especially when they involve language. Because langua... | [
"Really the most basic answer is an IQ test measures your score on that test in relation to everyone it was normed against."
] |
[
"Is it actually possible to hypnotize people and if so, to what degree?"
] | [
false
] | We've all seen the where some guy or gal hypnotize people from the audience, or someone else that has volunteered. Are any of these shows real? | [
"No, stage hypnosis is ",
"generally not real",
". Hypnotherapy is real, however is nothing like what you see in videos and on movies. ",
"Edit: Not sure what the confusion is here. Hypnosis is a distinct brain state, unlike sleep, and unlike normal awake rhythms. This is shown reliably on EEG and fMRI st... | [
"This is actually solid science. I'm not sure why it is being downvoted. Everything Brain_Doc82 said is accurate, the citation is relevant, and it answers part of the question asked directly. "
] | [
"You know, I actually laughed aloud when I read that part of the abstract, because I'd never even thought about it as a method for this \"trickery\", but it's really quite genius. Long story short, we have things called baroreceptors that essentially work as a feedback system for blood pressure (when pressure gets... |
[
"1 gram of fat contains ~9 calories of energy. If you eat 9 more calories than you need, will you put on 1 gram of fat?"
] | [
false
] | Or, a more realistic scenario. Let's say over the course of a month you eat 4,248 (1lb * 16 oz/lb * 29.5 g/oz * 9 calories/g) more calories than you burn in your daily activities. Would you gain a pound of fat, or would something else happen to those excess calories? | [
"Pretty much. Fat is mostly carbon. Calories from food come primarily from your body's ability to break it down and use the oxidation of carbon to make ATP. Fat has a lot of calories because it mainly consists of long chains of CH2, which 85% carbon. Sugars are about 40% carbon. If you do the math, you can actually... | [
"Yeah the majority is going to go into fat, but its not a simple linear relationship. There are a lot of factors influencing how much is going to become body fat, glycogen stores, how much will be excreted in the urine and feces, etc. Depending on the activity level of the person, their health status (ie, diabetic)... | [
"The majority by far. Glycogen stores are only 200 to 500 grams, the amount of carbon excreted in urine and feces is quite small. The body's daily uptake of protein is only about 50 grams for the average person. "
] |
[
"Is the consumption of animal proteins beneficial to humans?"
] | [
false
] | Are there any clear benefits in any areas( such as muscle building, physical growth in young people...) that come from the consumption of animal proteins(meat or other animal products) as opposed to plant-based protein? | [
"Not directly.",
"Proteins are like LEGO models, where you have some 20 or so possible blocks to work from. All proteins are formed from strands (called polypeptides) that are long chains of thousands of amino acids. When you digest a protein, the bonds between these amino acids are broken, and the individual ami... | [
"Vegans must obtain their vitamin B12 from food that's been artificially fortified or supplements. There are no plant based sources of B12 that you could obtain sufficient vitamin to live off. ",
"However absolutely loads of vegan things (like soy milk) are fortified.",
"Vegetarians of course can get B12 from m... | [
"Great answer, but I thought we needed proteins from 3 different types of plants - grains, pulses and nuts/seeds - to get the complete protein set?",
"And isn't there a critical B Vitamin that you can't get without supplementing, since it's not in usual food other than meat?",
"Do vegetarian diets supply enough... |
[
"how bad is the light pollution caused by SpaceX's starlink satellites?"
] | [
false
] | Many people have been complaining about all the light pollution thas is caused and will be caused by the starlink satellites of which 242 are in orbit right now (I might be wrong about the number) with thousents of more on their way. My question is how bad will the light pollution really be, would it be bad or barely o... | [
"This is becoming a frequent enough question that we should consider putting it in the FAQ, but it's not there yet so here is the statement from the ",
"American Astronomical Society",
" last summer:",
"The American Astronomical Society notes with concern the impending deployment of very large constellations ... | [
"Starlink in particular has two very different phases. They are deployed to a low altitude because that (a) increases the maximal mass sent to orbit and (b) makes broken satellites deorbit on their own quickly. The satellites are put into an orientation that minimizes drag and then they start raising their orbit. T... | [
"Let's hope the albedo reduction works well. The thing is that while say magnitude 10 is way below naked eye visibility, it's still plenty bright enough to affect professional astronomical observations. And although higher satellites appear dimmer when they're lit, they're lit during more of their orbit - and high ... |
[
"In astronomy, how do you know a star or galaxy is redshifted and not just red?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Red shifted doesn't refer to the color of the object.",
"It's like the Doppler shift. The spectrum of light is determined by passing it through a spectroscope. This breaks the light up similar to a prism.",
"Each object has a unique spectrum based on absorption bands and emission bands.",
"So if an object is... | [
"Light is emitted and absorbed when electrons jump across energy leveles in atoms, and the wavelength of the light is proportional to the difference between the energy levels. Because quantum mechanics dictate that only ",
"certain energy levels",
" are possible every element has a form of fingerprint that we c... | [
"How do you know that its a second or third generation star?"
] |
[
"Why does getting water up your nose burn?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Water is hypotonic relative to the contents of your cells (meaning it has less dissolved stuff). Due to osmosis, this will cause your cells to swell and potentially burst. The painful sensation comes from osmotic stress on the cells inside your nose.",
"Neti-pots use saline instead of water for this reason."
] | [
"There isn't really \"skin\" inside your nose in the same way there is on the outside of your body. It's just a mucus membrane.",
"The more interesting question is: why don't you get the same sensation when water is in your mouth? I actually don't know the answer to this, but I expect that saliva would play some ... | [
"Thanks for your answer kind stranger, is there any particular reason that the skin inside your nose is so thin, what is the purpose of this?"
] |
[
"How far inland are hurricanes classified as hurricanes?"
] | [
false
] | An employee I work with said "hurricane huge hit Charlotte and did tons of damage" Charlotte is 3 hours inland from the coast and it was my understanding that they stopped being called hurricanes after they reached land. | [
"Hurricanes are defined by ",
" above 74 mph. Hurricanes feed off of warm ocean water so they tend to start weakening after making landfall, however they are still defined as hurricanes as long as the surface wind speed meets the criteria. "
] | [
"Just confirming the above. Wind speed dictates what class of storm you're dealing with: ",
"http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutsshws.php"
] | [
"They would probably be called extratropical cyclones.",
"Hurricanes refer to tropical cyclones originating in the Atlantic and the Eastern Pacific only."
] |
[
"Does gradual cold exposure(cold showers, ice baths,etc.) Increase your blood circulation over time?"
] | [
false
] | It seems to spike your metabolic rate, at least that is what I heard. Anyone know if it helps with blood circulation as well? | [
"It most certainly does. The reason why your metabolic rate increases, is because your body is trying to keep as warm as possible, (through pilo erections (goosebumps) and minute muscle contractions. This all requires ATP, and produces heat. So your metabolic rate tends to increase. When you're exposed to the cold,... | [
"If you did repeated ice baths would this kind of conditioning improve your 'base' blood circulation over time?"
] | [
"Just a note: If your blood circulation is bad because you have a bad heart or bad and clogged blood vessels to other parts of the body, then please, please don't take cold showers/ice baths to improve them. Not going to happen and very dangerous for people with these kind of conditions."
] |
[
"How accurate is \"The Origin of Species\" by Charles Darwin?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"Well Darwin didn't know about genetics , so he had to guess about a heritability system. He also didn't have all the fossils we have now and mentions that the lack of fossils is a problem. But you could see both of those more as predictions that came true rather than mistakes."
] | [
"Very little of what is in the book could be considering blatantly \"Incorrect\". A lot seems to be a little speculatory, the aforementioned genetics and fossil problems spring to mind, but this isn't really a problem considering the period in which it was written. What Darwin proposed was a method by which nature ... | [
"Very little of what is in the book could be considering blatantly \"Incorrect\". A lot seems to be a little speculatory, the aforementioned genetics and fossil problems spring to mind, but this isn't really a problem considering the period in which it was written. What Darwin proposed was a method by which nature ... |
[
"How is energy in the universe preserved despite randomly appearing virtual particles?"
] | [
false
] | It just seems to me that when a particle and its antiparticle appear and immediately annihilate each other there would be a large release of energy, which would violate our current understanding of preservation of energy. These spontaneously appearing particles (such as those which would cause Hawking radiation) would ... | [
"This is not true.",
"This is a misinterpretation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle when it is written in terms of energy/time that is commonly taught in undergraduate physics.",
"As far as we know, every interaction in physics respects conservation of energy.",
"I went through this recently in this dis... | [
"This is not true.",
"This is a misinterpretation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle when it is written in terms of energy/time that is commonly taught in undergraduate physics.",
"As far as we know, every interaction in physics respects conservation of energy.",
"I went through this recently in this dis... | [
"Because there are the same number of virtual particles being \"created\" and \"annihilated\" every instant, with the same distribution of energy, so it cancels out.",
"The ",
" of vacuum bubbles (Feynman diagram with no external legs, i.e. where all lines are virtual particles) ",
" change the energy of the ... |
[
"Can a mariotte bottle maintain constant flow if tilted?"
] | [
false
] | I understand the flow is dictated by the height between the outlet and air inlet, however is it irrespective of the tilt of the bottle? | [
"3 major conditions must be met:",
"So, depending how you tilt the bottle, you may end up raising the outlet above that of the free surface in the bottle, and then there would be no net elevation change to allow gravity to pull fluid out of the bottle.",
" Tilting the bottle could also potentially change the r... | [
"Then as a follow up. Are there any methods besides a mariotte bottle that can provide a high flow rate regardless of tilt and be passive?"
] | [
"I'm sure there are tons. It just depends what your process is. If you are dealing with water and air and you don't care about contamination, then the only thing that the bottle provides you with is a buffered flow rate.",
"I'm not sure what you mean by \"high\" flow rate. The bottle is more of a constant flow... |
[
"If someone is dyslexic in English, would they not be dyslexic while reading a right to left language like Hebrew?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"dyslexia is not 'seeing words backwards'. dyslexia is difficulty in reliably mapping phonology to visual characters, and/or vice versa. since someone with dyslexia has this problem with the mapping, when they go to write something down, they will make errors - mixing up letter order, or printing a character backtw... | [
"Thank you! That's so fascinating. I dated this girl a couple of years ago who is dyslexic and she could never quite explain it to me past, \"It just looks... wrong.\""
] | [
"Great answer! On the cultural side of things, people with dyslexia who read languages that have straight-forward pronunciation rules, like Italian, tend to be less impaired than those with dyslexia who must read languages with trickier, variable pronunciation rules, like English.",
"One source: ",
"http://www.... |
[
"How does glasses for colorblind people work?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"They didn’t work for me. The company claims it works well for some. I’ve also seen claims that they just don’t work at all. ",
"What I’ll say is this: as a protanope-type color blind dude (color deficient really), there are colors that have no distinction for me, that are distinct to a normie:\nBrown and green\n... | [
"Most people who are so-called color blind are not completely unable to see colors. Rather, their eyes are deficient in one of the three types of color receptors, which are generally called red, green and blue. Most commonly, it's either the red or the green receptors that are deficient or simply not present. beca... | [
"If you add some tinted glasses you can shift which colors get through to those two receptors. For example if you have a receptor that response to both red and a green, you can filter out the green and make it only respond to red. now the person who couldn't distinguish between red and green can. But you have also ... |
[
"Why do so many people have the O Blood Type?"
] | [
false
] | Seeing as the phenotype of O consists of the genotype OO, which is heterozygous recessive, shouldn't it be the least common or not as common as blood types A and B? | [
"Type O blood is recessive as you said. If you have one of the A or B alleles, you get A or B blood (or AB, if you get both). But that doesn't mean they're common. In fact, if you've got a large majority of O, you'll tend to keep to be mostly O, which is the case in the human population.",
"The A and B alleles st... | [
"If a marriage has one OO person and one BO person, you'll get 25% BO children and 75% OO children.",
"The first parent listed will always contribute an O, but the second parent will contribute a B (yielding a BO child) or and O (yielding an OO child), each with a 50% frequency, not a 25/75 distribution."
] | [
"It's important to remember that dominant and recessive have absolutely nothing to do with more or less common. For example, the allele for achondroplasia dwarfism is dominant, but the huge majority of humanity still has the ordinary allele. Some dominant alleles (like A and B) are just less common than their rec... |
[
"Anyone experiencing a generalized body itch after taking Chinese Sinopharm vaccine?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"We do not offer any medical, health, dietary, nutritional, or really any sort of advice on this sub. Please see the guidelines. If you have a concern, please speak with a physician."
] | [
"This is just silly, I am trying to find people with similar symptoms, I am not looking for a medical advice. what you guys are doing is trying to cover up the vaccine side effects knowledge from the rest of the world..."
] | [
"This is not the right sub to poll for people with similar symptoms nor do we allow the posting of personal medical information. Perhaps try ",
"/r/askreddit",
" or another sub."
] |
[
"Because of the difference between sides of the brain, does that mean one ear may react to sounds differently than another (make different associations)?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Yes, for example there is evidence that in most people the right ear is better at processing language and the left ear better at processing music. "
] | [
"Most studies of lateralization are overinterpreted. What happened was that this neurosurgeon in Rochester NY developed a surgery to help control epilepsy. He split the brains of patients by severing the connections between the cerebral cortices (and a few other places). Roger Sperry then led studies that studied t... | [
"I heard of a myth that even the ancient Greeks knew of this, and hence,\n when the great philosophers were trying to win somebody over, they'd lean in and whisper into their right ear. ",
"Weird, yet kind of corroborating. "
] |
[
"What causes this neon glow bulb to flicker slightly when the power is disconnected from one side (AC power source)?"
] | [
false
] | Video is , when you hear the click, a switch is being turned off, but the power source (DC-->AC power inverter) is still on. I set up the circuit like . Any ideas how this is happening when one side of the circuit is totally severed? | [
"Speculating since I don't have much information to work with, but if the wire length * drift velocity is close to an integer multiple of 60Hz, you might get some sort of resonant beat due to reflected signals from the disconnected end of the wire. If the detuning is about 2Hz, it could explain the periodicity in t... | [
"I definitely simplified the circuit diagram in my post to what I thought was relevant. It sounds like you might need all the information.",
"here",
" is a picture of the actual set up. There are resistors all over the place and a higher resistance argon glow bulb in parallel. The neon bulb is the one on the le... | [
"Here is my guess:\nNeon lamps work with just a few mA of current.\nWhen you are dealing with AC circuits you have to consider capacitiv couppling, especially at high frequencies. While for a DC signal the circuit seems open, AC signals could still flow. Touching the wires changes this coupling and therfore the bri... |
[
"What happens to our brain during anesthesia?"
] | [
false
] | I'm mainly curious about how do we induce the sleep by anesthesia - or is it even considered sleep? How can one be awaken while under the effect? How do we not feel anything? | [
"As a masters student Pharmacy I think I can explain.\nThis is quite a complicated concept to explain but I'll try. ",
"There are different drugs to induce anesthesia. One of the more commonly used drugs are benzodiazepines and barbiturates.\nThe central nerve system consists of millions of nerves that communicat... | [
"I study consciousness during anaesthesia. We do not really know the mechanism of action of the various drugs used to induce anaesthesia, and the various different induction agents probably don't work have the same mechanisms (e.g. the EEG signal of a patient under ketamine is significantly different from one under... | [
"That's actually the danger of these drugs, especially with barbiturates as they work slightly different than benzodiazepines. They both cause respiratory depression and an overdose of barbiturates will end in death, mainly caused by lack of breathing."
] |
[
"How far can you actually see when looking at the sky?"
] | [
false
] | I have been directed from to post this question here. | [
"A good first approximation would be to calculate the ",
"mean free path",
" of a photon in Earth's atmosphere.",
"Mean free path is",
"L = 1/(sigma*n),",
"where n is the number density of scatterers and sigma is the scattering cross section. The dominant mechanism for scattering in the atmosphere is ",
... | [
"If you are instead looking straight up at night, ",
"it depends on how good your eyes are and when you're doing it",
", but it looks like somewhere between 2.25 million light years and 12 million light years, if you've got good eyes, or ",
"7.5 billion light years",
" if you do it on exactly the right nigh... | [
"Holy crap, thats a really in depth answer, thanks "
] |
[
"Can light ever become another state such as a liquid turning solid or as a gas?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"There are some scenarios in which light behaves sort of like a state of matter. The simplest example is what's called the photon gas, which is what happens if you have a box with mirrored walls that get really hot. Light can also be trapped in more complex phases, including Bose-Einstein condensates and Luttinger ... | [
"It depends a lot on what you want to call \"light\". Light as a stream of photons in a vacuum doesn't do anything particularly interesting because photons don't (directly) interact with one another. Without interactions there can't really be much in the way of collective behaviour (i.e. forming a phase). Thus t... | [
"What would these \"states\" look like? Does that question even make sense to ask? Can a BEC be large enough to be visible? "
] |
[
"Has anyone attempted to transplant chloroplasts into animal cells?"
] | [
false
] | (Apologies if this is too specific of a question for this subreddit.) Much is often said about how chloroplasts are responsible for photosynthesis and are only found in plants. But they are often said to have originated as separate organisms, as did mitochondria. As such, it is not unreasonable to consider what would h... | [
"some animals ",
"have done this naturally"
] | [
"No, humans use ",
"photochemistry",
" for vitamin D production. ",
"Photosynthesis",
" is a type of photochemistry but we do not even remotely perform photosynthesis ourselves.",
"No ",
"chlorophyll",
" means no photosynthesis."
] | [
"Oh, awesome! That's precisely what I was hoping for."
] |
[
"Does the bending of space-time due to gravity at the center of a star have an effect on the rate of fusion?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Are you asking about how strong gravitational fields affect the fusion of hydrogen?"
] | [
"Yes. Does the compression of space-time allow fusion to happen more easily? I know pressure/temperature is important for getting the atoms close enough to fuse. Does space-time have any effect on that?"
] | [
"You're really overcomplicating things with this spacetime talk. The gravitational field is necessary to get to hydrogen to a high enough pressure and temperature (through the Kelvin-Helmholtz mechanism) that it can begin fusion."
] |
[
"How important is it to really drink a FULL glass of water when the directions for pills indicate to do so? Are they much less effective if drinking just enough water to swallow them?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Generally it is to make sure the pill travels all the way down into your stomach, so it doesn't sit somewhere along your throat/esophagus and cause damage (this is based off a recent conversation with my doctor).. not to improve effectiveness "
] | [
"While this is the primary reason, also having more liquid in your stomach to dilute the drug and its binding agents also helps reduce irritation on the stomach lining.",
"People often get heartburn from the binding agents... myself being one of those people. Although the drug itself is the same, generic brands o... | [
"Yes, the main purpose is to prevent \"pill esophagitis\". A common culprit is doxycycline taken by teens to prevent acne. People will take this without water and it can press against the esophagus and can potentially erode into the esophagus. \n",
"http://www.mypacs.net/cases/DOXYCYCLINE-INDUCED-ESOPHAGITIS-1734... |
[
"What would happen if all the nukes on Earth, blew up where they are at right now?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Hi T4blespoon thank you for submitting to ",
"/r/Askscience",
".",
" Please add flair to your post. ",
"Your post will be removed permanently if flair is not added within one hour. You can flair this post by replying to this message with your flair choice. It must be an exact match to one of the foll... | [
"Such hypothetical questions are better suited for our new-ish sister sub ",
"/r/asksciencediscussion",
". Please consider reposting there instead."
] | [
"So did you disable people's ability to see this post?"
] |
[
"Whats with the noise that happens when your cell phone is close to your computer speakers?"
] | [
false
] | When I have a text message or a call, and my phone is kind of close to my speakers, I hear an odd noise from the speakers. Just curious to what causes it. | [
"I've seen this most often with GSM phones (or GPRS or EDGEwhich are all more or less built on top of GSM). ",
"GSM",
" is a TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) system. This means several phones share a frequency range and you phone just gets one out of eight timeslots. Each timeslot lasts 0.577ms. With eight ... | [
"Any copper/metallic mesh (or just sheeting like aluminum foil) with hole diameters smaller than the wavelength of the frequencies you're wishing to shield from. That's why you can look inside a microwave oven. That metallic mesh they put over the front panel has holes significantly smaller than the wavelength of t... | [
"This only works with older microwaves. The newer ones modulate the frequency to cook the food more evenly."
] |
[
"If all the polar ice caps melted, would the ocean become less salty?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Physical oceanographer here.\nThere was an article published in Science 7 years ago answering this exact a question using Paleo oceanographic evidence from the last deglaciation (Synchronous deglacial overturning and water mass source changes by Natalie Roberts and others).",
"Deglaciation does, by simple mat... | [
"Short answer: Yes, salinity would be affected which also affects density. The combination of temperature and density variation in the oceans is what maintains the ocean currents. This is another reason why melting ice caps are dangerous as we cannot survive unless our oceans have these currents. ",
"Stanford lec... | [
"These are all really good points but are you actually telling me that the saltiness of water is called spicyness."
] |
[
"Are there regions of space with many stars very close together?"
] | [
false
] | Specifically I'm wondering if there are areas with hundreds of star systems within a few lights years of each other. | [
"Oh yes, definitely. The first such area that comes to mind is a Globular Cluster. These are dense spheres of stars floating around the outside regions of galaxies. The center of these can be very packed with stars, hundreds of times more dense than our local region of the galaxy. Another potential area of dense st... | [
"Darn. See. I'm now to reddit and I don't know how to post an image, or I would make one with a scale bar so you could see how dense globular clusters are. Do a google image search for \"globular cluster.\" Typical scale is 100 light years diameter but this varies greatly, and stars are often within a light yea... | [
"Close flybys can disturb the orbits of planets - or asteroids/comets that might crash into planets later. That is bad for life."
] |
[
"How bullshit is the infographic on sitting that gets passed around?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Ok, right off the bat: check out the sources at the bottom of the graphic. See how the vast majority of them are urls? And \".com\" at that? I'm not implying this necessarily means the claims made aren't accurate, but this does mean that we need to be critical and even skeptical of the claims until we look further... | [
"Am I in my mid 20s 40% more likely to die before I'm 35 because I sit? ",
"This means that if there is an 0.1% chance that someone who's not sedentary will die before they are 35, then there is a 0.14% chance that a sedentary person will die before they are 35. And so on through the ages, if you're 70 years old,... | [
"Sitting still may cause premature death. The risk is higher among those that sit still more than 4 hours per day. ",
" The more still, the higher risk of chronic diseases. People that sit still more than 11 hours per day have a 40 percent higher risk than those that sit fewer than 4 hours per day. However those ... |
[
"How was Pi \"discovered\" and how was it plugged into formulae correctly? How was it able to be used before the invention of calculators?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"Take a length of rope. Tie one end to a pole and to the other end attach a stick. Pull the rope taut and use it to draw a circle in the sand. Measure how many rope lengths the perimeter of the circle is. Get the answer \"roughly six\" (so about three times the ",
"). Be happy for a while. Quoting the Old Testame... | [
"The other explanation is already very good.",
"Pi is circumference divided by diameter.",
"You can just measure both values for a small circle and divide them and you get Pi. Now if you know one measurement of any circle, you don't have to take the other measurement anymore, you can just derive it with a formu... | [
"Don't computers use infinite series to calculate pi, instead of simulating a circle?"
] |
[
"Why is the natural logarithm function used in the thermodynamic definition of entropy, rather than base 2 or 10 or anything else?"
] | [
false
] | To get from shannons entropy to boltzmanns, first you assume every microstate equiprobable to cancel out the sum, then you normalize using boltzmanns constant, then you change the log base from 2 to natural. Why do you do this? | [
"Once you're using a logarithm, the base is pretty much up to you -- it'll just add a constant of proportionality if you change the base. So the choice of the base of the logarithm is one you make about what's useful in the context in which you are working.",
"In thermodynamics, the mathematical simplicity of th... | [
"The reason we use the natural logarithm rather than any other logarithm is basically because physicists are lazy, but here's a more full explanation. ",
"It doesn't actually matter which logarithm you take because all logs are basically the same within a factor of a constant. Explicitly, for all positive real nu... | [
"The Boltzmann constant is the constant of proportionality for the ideal gas laws if you count based on particles instead of moles. Given a gas, it's the pressure times the volume of the gas divided by the number of molecules times the temperature of the gas.",
"Using the ideal gas laws, you can derive all the en... |
[
"I have a question about an article i just saw on r/physics"
] | [
false
] | Is The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle still the best established scientific law... or did they just sort of break it? | [
"They didn't break it."
] | [
"The uncertainty principle (as was explained to me) is a mathematical truth, in that it falls out directly from analysis of wave mechanics in their most general form. It's not that just haven't discovered how to measure momentum and position at once, it's impossible to do on a much deeper level than just \"we don'... | [
"You're correct. ",
"As it turns out, the position-momentum uncertainty principle is a special case of a purely mathematical theorem which applies to any two operators (think \"mathematical object that tells you about what can happen when you measure a state\") corresponding to observables. The only physical inpu... |
[
"Is it safe to mix some highlighter fluid with 99.9% Isopropyl Alcohol so that the particle tracks in a cloud chamber light up with black lights?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Read up on ",
"this patent",
" for ink compositions. I don't see any glaring counterindications, it looks like mostly propylene glycol (an alcohol used in smoke machines), a moderate acid, and some dyes.",
"Also, the article I linked above states this:",
"As noted above, ink-jet inks are solvent based inks... | [
"Awesome! Thank you so much for the reply. ",
"I'll post about the experiment next week when the materials arrive."
] | [
"Only if you post pictures here when you do it! =0)"
] |
[
"how do microchips know time?"
] | [
false
] | I know wrist watches use a piezo quartz vibrating to maintain time. But how do other chips, from the processors in our computers to more simple chips that might just make an LED in a circuit flash, work out delays and time? | [
"Crystal oscillators\n",
"Wikipedia",
"A crystal oscillator is an electronic oscillator circuit that uses the mechanical resonance of a vibrating crystal of piezoelectric material to create an electrical signal with a very precise frequency. This frequency is commonly used to keep track of time (as in quartz wr... | [
"This frequency is commonly used to keep track of time",
"Also, just so there's no confusion they don't actually ",
" what time it is, they just are able to keep track of it. The specific time itself is a human-entered variable."
] | [
"CPUs use a clock signal as sort of a metronome to control the signal flow. The clock signal is produced using a crystal oscillator circuit."
] |
[
"Does the rotational speed of a planet have influence on the perceived gravity?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Interesting! That would imply that objects at the equator weigh less if I am not mistaken?"
] | [
"Interesting! That would imply that objects at the equator weigh less if I am not mistaken?"
] | [
"Note that this difference is very small - much less than a pound of weight"
] |
[
"The Grandparent Conundrum - Why does the math suggest that our population would have to be impossibly large for each of us to exist today?"
] | [
false
] | I’ve recently stumbled into an area of mathematics and ancestry that doesn’t sync well with the knowledge that humans have been around for approximately 1M+ years and that our population level has only recently begun to spike. I’m hoping the community can help me reconcile this all. The problem stems from the number of... | [
"You’ve rediscovered ",
"Pedigree collapse",
" (Wiki link). ",
"This paradox is explained by shared ancestors, referred to as pedigree collapse. Instead of consisting of all different individuals, a tree may have multiple places occupied by a single individual. This typically happens when the parents of an an... | [
"And here's a further interesting fact: most of those people didn't actually give you any genetic material. Because chromosomes are inherited as units (albeit with some recombination), if you go back about 9 generations it starts becoming likely that a given ancestor did not give you any DNA. Source: ",
"https://... | [
"The assumption that each progenitor (parent, grandparent, etc) is a unique person is false. People had offspring with somewhat related people, even if it was several generations back, and people had offspring with more than one other person as well. ",
"You could theoretically set up a situation where you start ... |
[
"Can we produce ozone?"
] | [
false
] | As far as I know, it's just another chemical, so why can't we just make more of it? | [
"Short answer: Yes we can and we do produce it. I'm guessing you are asking in relation to replenishing the ozone layer though. In that case we can produce it but no where near enough of it to replace the natural production of ozone. ",
"Longer answer: The US EPA has a decent article that is fairly easy to under... | [
"Ozone is easy to make. Smog has a large ozone component, so we even make it accidentally. If you are thinking we should just run ozone generators and fix any part of the atmosphere, yeah, not that easy. Unless you want to transport it up in rocket ships, it is easier to stop destroying it than to transport the ozo... | [
"In fact ozone is created by smog aka pollution in the troposphere. Also ozone is produced in pine forest. It is reactive and is regarded as pollutant and is harmful to us. Because of its reactivity, the tropospheric ozone is never transported to the stratosphere to add into the ozone layer. "
] |
[
"What makes white dwarfs emit light? Is it continued fusion of elements?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"White dwarfs emit light because they are very, very hot. No more fusion happens; that's why it's a dead star in the first place, and not a live star. But the remains emit black body radiation, like everything that is above absolute zero. As they age, they will cool, and eventually become black dwarfs: no longer fu... | [
"White dwarfs are extremely massive and dense. They may have between 0.5 and 1.4 \"solar masses\" but have a radius comparable only to the size of mars or earth. ",
"(Although they are not as dense as neutron stars.)",
"As a consequence they have extremely high specific heat capacity, but very low surface area ... | [
"I read that it takes about a quadrillion years for a white dwarf to become a black dwarf. That's such an inconceivable about of time!"
] |
[
"Can microwave technology get better, or have we reached the peak speed and power of what a standard outlet will provide?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"What is considered an improvement? Making it arbitrarily more powerful? That we can do. We can make a 100kW microwave oven - but it'd basically ruin most things you stick in it. The ~1kW we have now is a good balance between control and cooking time.",
"Efficiency-wise? Probably not so much better. They are arou... | [
"Well, not really. The 1400W limit we have now is based on 80% loading of a 15A receptacle by code. ",
"I'm in a european 230V country, and have 16A in my kitchen - allowing for ~3kW @ 80% loading. Yet I have a 800W microwave. Part of the reason may of course be that it's simpler to make one appliance for all of ... | [
"Making it arbitrarily more powerful? That we can do. We can make a 100kW microwave oven - but it'd basically ruin most things you stick in it. The ~1kW we have now is a good balance between control and cooking time.",
"Well, not really. The 1400W limit we have now is based on 80% loading of a 15A receptacle by c... |
[
"How does a police scanner work? (better questions in post)"
] | [
false
] | How exactly does a police scanner work? I ask because I've heard they cannot be used accurately if the officer is moving in his cruiser. Does the speed of the driver/ if he is moving have any effect on the readings? | [
"A scanner is usually the word used to describe an amateur radio receiver which is used to search for police radio channels outside of the citizen band.",
"You seem to be asking about how radar works. It sends out multiple waves from the gun which bounce off the target and come back to hit the receiver again. T... | [
"A radar gun does not work this way; it relies on the Doppler shift to determine the velocity of the target with respect to the gun. ",
"A LIDAR based speed gun works as you described, by bouncing light pulses off the target and using time of flight measurements to measure distance, and then using those measureme... | [
"It bounces a radio beam on the target vehicle and measures the time it takes to make it back, measuring the distance. It then repeats the process, to find the change in distance, and from that it calculates the speed of the vehicle, relative to the radar gun. Normally it does this several times and averages the ... |
[
"What physiological changes occur in an endurance athlete?"
] | [
false
] | Take a runner for example. As he or she trains and watches their miles increase and time decrease, what exactly is physically changing in their body to be able to do this? | [
"Lots of things. Perhaps the one most relevant to performance is increased blood volume. Accompanying that is decreased hematocrit (so it is mostly plasma proteins). But there are changes in bone, connective tissue, vascularization of muscle, and cross-sectional composition of muscle as well. "
] | [
"Lung performance (as in its role in blood oxygenation) is not very close to performance limiting. "
] | [
"I thought the most notable change would be in the lungs?"
] |
[
"Does water freeze differently while under pressure?"
] | [
false
] | If you were to pressurize ordinary, non carbonated, unflavored water to 100 psi in a bottle, would it be easier or more difficult to freeze? Or would it just be the same? | [
"Water can indeed form different types of ice based upon the temperature and pressure, although you need a pressure a lot higher than 100 psi to do so.",
"You can find this information in it's Phase Diagram:",
"https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phase_diagram_of_water.svg",
"Edit: I will also note that... | [
"If you pressurize water you drop it's freezing point to a lower temperature. Water is one of the few common substances that actually does this. Most materials freeze at a higher temperature if you pressurize it. ",
"Of course if you really pressurize the hell out of it you can get different types of ice. "
] | [
"Also - for reference - look up a triple cell of water, weally quite facinating. But then water, is actually an anomoly, not many material behave like water does."
] |
[
"DNA testing of ancient remains"
] | [
false
] | Quick science question: How does DNA help in the King Richard 4th scenario? I understand if you have some sort of current DNA sample because then you can just cross reference. But with this stuff, since there's no cotton swab with his spit on it lying in a lab somewhere, how do they confirm it that it actually is him u... | [
"According to the ",
"BBC",
" they compared the DNA to those of known descendents and used them to verify his identity.",
"From the article:",
"There is a DNA match between the maternal DNA of the descendants of the family of Richard III and the skeletal remains we found at the Greyfriars dig."
] | [
"Specifically, the type of DNA they used was mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). ",
"We inherit our mtDNA ",
" from our mother (through the egg), so you can trace a maternal line through time. ",
"The remains were compared to a direct descendent of Anne of York, sister of Richard III. So Anne and Richard would share t... | [
"Thank you very much! I've always wondered about this stuff."
] |
[
"Can wasp spray be used effectively against an attacker in place of pepper spray?"
] | [
false
] | I just read through a chain letter my father sent my way that advocated using wasp spray to defend against a home attacker because it was more accurate at longer distances and achieved similar effects. What little I know about wasp spray is that it contains nuerotoxins that incapacitate the critters, how does that tr... | [
"Relevent ",
"Snopes",
" article. Generally it says it could be used, but you may get in trouble with the law for using it as a self-defense weapon, it may not work as effectively as pepper spray, and you can get just as good of range with some pepper spray canisters."
] | [
"Not all neurotoxins that effect insects have the same affect on humans. "
] | [
"It would probably sting and cause some respiratory discomfort, but the neurotoxin would not have any effect.",
"Think of it this way: would a powerful neurotoxin which was effective on humans be for sale at Walmart? Think of the legal liability costs."
] |
[
"Do birds cross breed? Is it possible for birds to cross breed like cats and dogs do? Or has evolution stopped this from occurring?"
] | [
false
] | Is it possible for birds to cross breed, like dogs/cats do? From my observations, I don't recall seeing any hybrid birds that may have been the result of cross breeding, like an owl with parrot colours. Is this because of the evolutionary drive of these animals being so ingrained that they have no desire to cross breed... | [
"One thing to remember when you talk about dogs cross breeding- they are all the same species- basically a domesticated sub species of Gray Wolves. The vast differences in physical appearance (phenotype) between, say, a chihuahua and a great Dane have been selectively chosen by humans over a fairly short amount of ... | [
"Yes, actually. About 16% of wild birds are actually hybrids of more than one type of bird, with as high as 22% of all birds when you include captive bird.",
"Among them, mallard ducks are particularly common to mingle, with over 40 known mallard hybrids and a number of other duck species at threat of extinction ... | [
"if they are actually different species at all, or variants of the same species",
"It's worth noting that \"species\" is a human invention. The real world is much messier than to allow such strict categorisation.",
"After all mules have been known about for years, can be successfully bred from horses and donkey... |
[
"How does phase transition improve heat transfer? (Heat Pipe)"
] | [
false
] | Below is an portion from a wiki link. A heat pipe is a heat-transfer device that combines the principles of both thermal conductivity and phase transition to effectively transfer heat between two solid interfaces. Due to the very high heat transfer coefficients for boiling and condensation, heat pipes are highly effect... | [
"Evaporation of a liquid drains a fairly large amount of heat from the liquid and any material touching it through heat conduction. A heat pipe makes use of this effect by evaporating a liquid on the hot component, extracting heat from it, and then moving the vapor to a different location where the process is rever... | [
"A fluid undergoing a phase transition can absorb or deliver a lot of heat from a surface. Comparatively 'a lot' doesn't begin to do it justice compared to say free convection. When a liquid boils is absorbs heat, and when it condenses it releases heat. Water because of it's high latent heat of evaporation is parti... | [
"You actually didn't ask what phase transition is, but it's already been explained anyway.",
"The simple answer to your question is temperature delta(differential). Heat transfer is a simple matter of insulation vs temperature delta. By manipulating phase transition, we can ensure that the cooling side of a heat ... |
[
"Why does Benadryl make you drowsy?"
] | [
false
] | I know the simple answer is that drowsiness is a side effect of antihistamines, but I'd like to know what antihistamines specifically do to make you feel tired. | [
"Histamine is very neat chemical found in the body. Its functions vary, but notably it plays a big role in ",
"When an allergen enters the body, it binds to a special class of antibodies--immunoglobulin E (IgE). These antibodies communicate with other cells (most importantly, mast cells) and causes a huge release... | [
"Not necessarily all antihistamines but namely diphenhydramine which is the main active ingredient in Benadryl. Diphenhydramine doesn't differentiate which histamine receptors to block (effect of antihistamines is to block histamine receptors) so they tend to block others receptor sites namely in the brain which ca... | [
"benadryl is more effective at crossing the blood-brain barrier than other antihistamines, and will reach a greater concentration in the brain than others. therefore has a greater effect on the histamine receptors in the brain and causing drowsiness "
] |
[
"I recently learned that Bernoulli's Principle does not fully explains what allows a plane to fly. Is this true? and if so, how do planes fly?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Bernouilli's principle is correct and important for understanding lift from an airfoil. The air at the top of an airfoil IS travelling faster than the air at the bottom of an airfoil so, according Bernoulli's principle, lift is generated.",
"The bit people get wrong is explaining REASON why the air should travel... | [
"Two questions: First, what kinds of planes have these wings? Are they only used for air shows and similar events, or would fighter jets have them? We often see fighter pilots flying upside down in movies, but I'm thinking now that that's probably not actually possible.",
"Second, these wings must need to be rota... | [
"\"Stunt\" planes and fighters, as you mentioned. There's often a limit on the duration you can maintain inverted flight, say 30 seconds, but that's due to engine limitations, such as the cooling and oil systems. They don't operate that well flying at -1G. That being said, you can fly upside down as long as you wan... |
[
"If electrons can teleport, does that means all their mass can go in and out of existence"
] | [
false
] | I understand that electrons like like have a wave-particle duality depending on observation. However here is where i have a conceptual problem. Electrons propagate through space as waves (unless directly observed right?) which as I understand is basically a fluctuation between being in and out of position relevant to t... | [
"Electrons' wavelike or particle like properties don't depend on observation. They always have features of both. So, when an electron propagates it doesn't in some sense transform from particle to wave and back to particle—there's no 'teleportation' as you're calling it. It's always a wavelike and particlelike obje... | [
"What's oscillating when an electron propagates is the probability of locating the electron at some location r. The probability that the electron is somewhere in the universe (when normalized) is 1 at all times ( |\\Psi(r,t)|",
" =1 ). There is never a time when the electron is not in the universe, what changes i... | [
"That has absolutely nothing to do with this question. Even if we work in the CI framework, wavefunction collapse doesn't mean the wavefunction ceases to exist. It means that, on measurement, it evolves non-unitarily. If you could make a perfect position measurement, the wavefunction would collapse to a perfectly l... |
[
"Is there an evolutionary/practical reason for males to have a sexual refractory period?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"It's clearly not enough of a disadvantage to select against it.",
"Here's a guess: If I recall correctly, there are some post-orgasm hormone releases that are supposedly connected to pair-bonding, which presumably has an advantage, and it would be hard for the body to know if this was the last go or not. Interes... | [
"To quote PZ Myers, ",
"the actual research cited for this is underwhelming",
"."
] | [
"So we don't spend all our time copulating. "
] |
[
"Do our brains model or respond to \"places\" like reddit.com or google.com in the same way as real locations?"
] | [
false
] | Colloquially, we talk about "going to" reddit, google, etc. They are web "sites", indicating they are places you can visit. When we're surfing, do our brains model this in the same way as they would a physical place? If I were forum-reading in an MRI, would the same patterns of recognition be firing as if I were in a r... | [
"This is actually an interesting question, and might not have been addressed yet. Here are my thoughts, which are certainly not complete since I don't study this immediate topic and I'm not an expert. I hope dearly that there's someone who knows a ton more about this and can point to some research along this theme.... | [
"As argonaute said: this is a really interesting question.",
"I don't think there is an answer, but if we do see them as places, I would expect the parahippocampal place area to exhibit some activation ",
", as opposed to real places. Furthermore, though, I would expect semantic processing areas further along i... | [
"Layman's insight: ",
"I used to play Everquest... a lot. There were times when I would be playing guitar while questing, auto-following or during down time -- anyway, on multiple occasions, I would move my guitar IRL vertically in order to squeeze through a door that my toon was passing through... ",
"Then, ad... |
[
"Is the Ethiopian Lion (Panthera leo roosevelti) a valid subspecies of lion or is it a part of Panthera leo nubica?"
] | [
false
] | The Ethiopian Lion is also known as the Abyssinian Lion or the Addis Ababa Lion. I'm reading so much conflicting descriptions online, so I'd love if an expert could chime in. Thanks! | [
"The most comprehensive discussion of this question that I can find is in ",
"Kitchener et al. 2017",
" (page 71-72). They discuss the various lion subspecies which have been proposed over time, including a grand total of 11 outlined in Wilson and Reeder's \"",
"Mammal Species of the World",
"\".",
"Howe... | [
"Doing a literature search, I'm finding little evidence that the modern scientific community recognizes a subspecies called ",
". ",
"This 2012 paper",
" found that the population of lions at the zoo in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia were genetically distinct, but did not use any language suggesting they should be a... | [
"I too am intrigued? May want to ask a zoology sub or I know there is a scientist who does YouTube’s of taxonomy of every species ever he may be some one to try to reach out to on the paleontology sub."
] |
[
"How would you express this in quantum/bra-ket notation?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Ah, yeesh. What's the proper etiquette here? Close this thread and just copy and paste the question over there?"
] | [
"A good home for this question would be ",
"/r/AskScienceDiscussion",
"."
] | [
"You can just post another one to ASD and leave this one here, no problem."
] |
[
"If someone gets a kidney taken out what happens to the hole?"
] | [
false
] | Do they just have a big hole or does muscle fill it up or what? | [
"I just wanted to thank you for letting me know the \"google body browser\" exists... looks great! I'm passing this to the kids now, they'll enjoy and learn from it;)"
] | [
"I just wanted to thank you for letting me know the \"google body browser\" exists... looks great! I'm passing this to the kids now, they'll enjoy and learn from it;)"
] | [
"Fun fact: When someone gets a kidney transplant, a lot of the time they leave the old kidneys in there (the patient ends up with a total of 3 kidneys for those of you who are bad at math) ",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidney_transplantation#Procedure"
] |
[
"Sneezing=Closest thing to a female orgasm?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"As a woman who both sneezes and orgasms, I must say no. They are not at all alike, in my experience."
] | [
"It is closely related in that sneezing garners about 1/7 of the physical relief of a female orgasm. It is not nearly as enjoyable, though."
] | [
"Not even close."
] |
[
"Numerically there have been more deaths from the common flu than from the new Corona virus, but that is because it is still contained at the moment. Just how deadly is it compared to the established influenza strains? And SARS? And the swine flu?"
] | [
false
] | Can we estimate the fatality rate of COVID-19 well enough for comparisons, yet? (The , but it has evidently dropped some with better care.) And if so, how does it compare? Would it make flu season significantly more deadly if it isn't contained? Or is that even the best metric? Maybe the number of new people each p... | [
"Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation article covers it pretty well ",
"https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/How-to-respond-to-COVID-19",
"“There are two reasons that COVID-19 is such a threat. First, it can kill healthy adults in addition to elderly people with existing health problems. The data so far suggests that t... | [
"Second, COVID-19 is transmitted quite efficiently",
"This is the greatest danger to undeveloped countries and even developed ones. It will overwhelm a country's medical infrastructure to the point where hospitals can no longer take in any more patients.",
"A virus with 1% death rate and 15% hospitalization rat... | [
"WHO estimates 2-3%, but it infected 500 million people. Those who died were also skewed more towards young, healthy adults than typical flu. Many of the deaths were from immune system ",
", so it hit those with healthy, strong immune systems harder than expected. 50% of US deaths from the Spanish flu were ages 2... |
[
"Why aren't decimals countable? Couldn't you count them by listing the one-digit decimals, then the two-digit decimals, etc etc"
] | [
false
] | The way it was explained to me was that decimals are not countable because there's not systematic way to list every single decimal. But what if we did it this way: List one digit decimals: 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, etc two-digit decimals: 0.01, 0.02, 0.03, etc three-digit decimals: 0.001, 0.002 It seems like doing it th... | [
"If your list is complete, then 0.33333...... should be on it somewhere. But it's not. Your list will contain all decimals that end, or all finite length decimals. In fact, the Nth element on your list will only have (about) log",
"(N) digits, so you'll never get to the infinite length digits. ",
"Here",
" is... | [
"This is a nice and succinct answer. To expand a little:",
"You have shown your list is countable, but it is only a subset of all the real numbers between 0 and 1 since it lacks decimals with an infinite number of digits.",
"Your list is a subset of the rational numbers, which are also countable. These still do... | [
"This is ",
"Cantor's Diagonal Argument",
".",
"Suppose that the real numbers (i.e. decimal numbers) are countable. If they're countable then given enough time we can write a list that contains all the real numbers, starting something like this:",
"I picked these numbers randomly. It doesn't matter what ord... |
[
"I heard the Body Mass Index is bunk. What other scientific measurements are better to determine what a healthy normal weight is?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"It's not bunk; it just works better for some categories of people than for others."
] | [
"Usually cited is body-fat measurement; ",
"this",
" looks like an ok discussion on it.",
"Edit: Relationship between BMI and health isn't \"bunk\" per se; it's a correlation, and as a correlation it's noisy, and doesn't look at direct mechanisms like body fat does. On the other hand, it's the easiest thin... | [
"It's not bunk.",
"It's a two-parameter model (height/weight) used to describe a complex system. It does quite a good job of describing that system, probably accounting for somewhere around 70% of the variation. If BMI is misclasifying you - AKA says you are obese - it is very unlikely to be more than a category... |
[
"Is it possible to mentally stimulate the release of adrenaline?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"Sure. Ever think really hard about something, maybe the outcome of a certain decision, and suddenly feel your heart racing when you contemplate a bad outcome? The heart racing is due to your brain stimulating your sympathetic nervous system; when the adrenal glands receive sympathetic stimulation, it causes a rele... | [
"Depending on what you mean by physically unstimulated, i.e if you have been in a scary/dangerous situation before then by thinking about it or thinking of possible consequences could easily cause a reaction. On the other hand, if you have had a relatively calm life it would be very difficult to invent a situation ... | [
"It took me a bit to dig this up. ",
"http://phys.org/news/2010-10-halloween-special-anatomy-fright.html",
". This article helps explain how fear works chemically in the brain. There's a bit in there that talks about the brain perceiving a threat as real or not. If the threat is real the fear response kicks... |
[
"What Kind of Spider Is This?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Please post ID questions to ",
"/r/whatisthisbug",
" or there might be a spider specific ID sub"
] | [
"i thought i did? i have to check"
] | [
"This is ",
"/r/askscience",
"..."
] |
[
"How does the discovery that the universe is expanding more rapidly than previously thought affect the \"Big Crunch\" theory?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"Instead of a big crunch, there could be a ",
"big freeze",
". A big rip is also plausible.",
"In about a trillion years, it will appear that the Milky Way is alone in the universe, except perhaps with some of its neighbors."
] | [
"It pretty much rules it out (if you're referring to the accelerated expansion observations of the late 1990s)."
] | [
"What would be a substitute theory, for lack of a better phrase?\nWe never learned about it at all in school, so I'm clueless. "
] |
[
"Are there any organic materials that harden over time or when exposed to the air?"
] | [
false
] | There’s a certain fantasy element I’d like to explain to myself; it’s the Nergigante. A fantasy dragon covered in soft white spines that harden and turn black after a short period exposed to the air. | [
"An insect's exoskeleton is made of chitin, which hardens upon contact with the air. It doesn't continuously harden, it gets to a certain toughness then proceeds no farther.",
"The problem with something continuously hardening over time is that as it hardens it will become brittle. Most organic materials requir... | [
"Nergigante does have a work-around with those constantly growing spikes/scales. It gnaws at them and removes overgrown spikes. The Chitin thing does help me a lot though, thanks!"
] | [
"A poison dart frog kept in captivity will no longer be poisonous when kept on a diet of superworms and crickets. They become poisonous from what they eat. ",
"Aluminum becomes harder when it oxidizes to the point that we use aluminum oxides as the grit in sand paper. Maybe the dragon somehow processes natural al... |
[
"How is the water held together in this video? (in space)"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Water is held together by attractive forces between molecules such as ",
"hydrogen bonding",
" and ",
"Van der Waals forces",
"."
] | [
"surface tension"
] | [
"It's more correct to say \"cohesion,\" rather than to point to a related phenomenon that's really only a result of cohesion.",
"It's like when someone ask \"why did this group of people decide to link arms?\", and you answered \"because Bob couldn't get through the linked arms.\" You've described the ",
" of a... |
[
"Is our solar system stationary within the Milky Way or do the stars move around within the system?"
] | [
false
] | Thank you. Follow up question: is the Milky Way orbiting something even bigger? Is there anyway to ever know if there is an actual center of the universe? | [
"The plane of the solar system is inclined about 60° ti the plane of the galaxy. That's why the band of stars we call the Milky Way is not aligned with the ecliptic (the path of the Sun in the sky). "
] | [
"is our system at risk of slowly being sucked into the black hole?",
"No, black holes don't magically start sucking in everything around them. At reasonable distances from the event horizon, they act like any other gravitational body of equivalent mass. For instance, if you suddenly replaced the Sun with a 1 sola... | [
"All star systems in the disk including our solar system is orbiting the core of our galaxy. The stars in the core itself have unstable orbits due to the structure of the core. The innermost stars orbit the central black hole. "
] |
[
"Why does POV footage of running always seem so shaky whereas when I run, my vision remains quite steady?"
] | [
false
] | When I run (or walk for that matter), my vision doesn't seem as shaky as POV footage always is. And I assume that the camera moves exactly like his head does since it is attached to his head. Why does this happen? Does our brain automatically do the "stabilizing" for us? | [
"Does our brain automatically do the \"stabilizing\" for us?",
"Yes.",
"Your brain does a lot of processing of the visual signals your eyes produce - it fills in blind spots, for example, and as you've noticed, also steadies the image. The ",
"visual cortex",
" is the single largest system in the human bra... | [
"I think you should credit the eyes a bit more. A camera strapped to a persons head or body will only point in that exact direction, which is moving around a lot. The eyes tend to stay fixated on certain points ahead even though the body moves around, stabilizing the \"image\" quite a lot before it gets to the bra... | [
"What you're looking for is called the vestibulo-ocular reflex. We automatically compensate for head movement with our eyes.",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestibulo-ocular_reflex"
] |
[
"Have any languages developed that assign gender based on the person speaking rather than on the word itself?"
] | [
false
] | Let me try and make that clearer: I'm an American currently trying to learn Portuguese and Russian (I know a bit of Spanish). So, in both of those languages, possessives and adjectives change their endings based on the gender of the noun, right? It's usually pretty intuitive- mother is feminine, father is masculine, ... | [
"You might find a wider exploration of this topic in ",
"/r/linguistics",
"."
] | [
"Thanks! I just posted it there. What's the etiquette for ",
"/r/askscience",
" ? Should I delete now that I xposted?"
] | [
"Nah, it's fine. There just aren't as many here that are focused in that area, so it might do better there, but as far as I know there's no rule against cross-posting a question."
] |
[
"If something huge hit the Earth, would humans and objects on the opposite side of the planet go flying up in the air?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"The earth is quite squishy on the big scale. It would be like hitting a water balloon i think. A gigantic shock wave would propagate around the earth from the impact location. If the object is big enough, the earth's crust would be thrown into space and the earth would turn into a giant ball of lava."
] | [
"Hey thanks, I needed more apocalyptic nightmares!"
] | [
"Relevant: \"Antipodal chaotic terrain\" is one effect associated with the Caloris Basin impact on Mercury, ",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caloris_Basin"
] |
[
"Are mass and weight directly related?"
] | [
false
] | Say you have an object, and you want it to become heavier, without changing its mass (adding external objects). Example: a handheld object for a virtual reality device, in order to achieve a more realistic experience, they controllers need to add weight. Is this somehow possible? Just a random question | [
"You would need to provide haptic feedback via some type of actuator that imparts external forces onto the handheld object in order to simulate the gravitational and/or inertial forces that would act on a heavier object. Something ",
"like this",
"."
] | [
"This is the only real answer if you're talking about how to make it \"feel\" heavy. Force has to be added in some way. Acceleration is the key. You can create this feeling by adding mass to an object or tiny rockets attached to someone's fingers and hands. Maybe some kind of crazy electromagnetic gyroscopic array.... | [
"Hi Jpalermo99 thank you for submitting to ",
"/r/Askscience",
".",
" Please add flair to your post. ",
"Your post will be removed permanently if flair is not added within one hour. You can flair this post by replying to this message with your flair choice. It must be an exact match to one of the foll... |
[
"Why don't more CPU's have a greater number of cores? Is there a maximum size that a chip can be?"
] | [
false
] | I recently saw news that AMD is working on a 16 core CPU. What exactly are the challenges of increasing the number of cores in a CPU? I feel like you could just chain a bunch of quad-core processors together and call it a 16-core, but it can't be that simple. From there, it seems to beg the question, why do processors ... | [
"There isn't really a single maximum limit to the size of a chip. There are multiple factors. ",
"One that has been mentioned is the power density, leading to heat. You can deal with this in various ways. If you limit the switching speed you can limit the dynamic power; if you limit the voltage used you can lim... | [
"It boils down to Amdahl's Law ",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law",
" \" .... It is often used in parallel computing to predict the theoretical maximum speedup using multiple processors.\"",
"within the context that only certain classes of problems can be fully parallelized (graphic problems be... | [
"The drain, source and channel are made of Si. The gate used to be polysilicon; now it is a metal. The things that connect them to each other, the \"interconnect\", are metals (mostly Cu these days). ",
"The exception is when two transistors are immediately next to each other. In cases like this, an area of dop... |
[
"Does the type of calorie matter in terms of weight gain/loss?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"It is more complex than you are making it. Your body needs amino acids that it gets from protein, as well as energy in the form of long carbon chains (carbs and fats). So, if you could, please re-phrase your question. Do you mean is one easier/harder to digest? Easier/harder to absorb? "
] | [
"ScienceMuddahFuckah is exactly right. The Calories written on the label of some food is only an approximation for amount of Calories your body will extract from it. You will extract more Calories from a juiced carrot than a raw carrot. Raw meat yields fewer extractable Calories than an equivalent amount of cooked ... | [
"The type of calorie doesn't matter as far as weight loss is concerned, but of course you would die from malnutrition if you didn't get any protein or fat, or minerals and vitamins for that matter.",
"What's really going on is that a calorie is a proxy for carbon. Fat is about 75-80% carbon. When people lose weig... |
[
"How did the caterpillar to butterfly transition come to be through evolution?"
] | [
false
] | How did it come about in the first place? | [
"This is one of the great unanswered questions in biology. Here's a recent scientific American article on the subject.",
"http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=insect-metamorphosis-evolution"
] | [
"Metamorphosis is a common biological process in many insects, amphibians and fish. It is not exclusive to butterflies. ",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphosis",
"As far as the evolution of it goes, all I can say is that it is evolutionary advantageousness to have very different forms and behaviours that... | [
"Quality, thanks."
] |
[
"How did a fallen high voltage power line create carbon monoxide in my soil which then leaked in to my house?"
] | [
false
] | On Sunday night a 2000 volt line landed in my grass. It sat there live for about 30 minutes. About 2 hours later the co detector when off. I checked all the pilot lights and everything was working properly. Call the fire department and they made us evacuate as co in our house was 260 ppm. The energy company pin pointed... | [
"Carbon monoxide is created by incomplete combustion which occurs in an environment which doesn't contain enough oxygen. Complete combustion would make carbon dioxide. So my guess, the electricity flowed though the ground (not much oxygen in there), heated up the organic material till it started smouldering and f... | [
"What does burnt dirt look like anyway? "
] | [
"Just because nothing looked burnt to the naked eye doesn't imply that things weren't burnt."
] |
[
"How do plant cuttings know to form roots?"
] | [
false
] | If the plant has already arranged the cells to be "branch" cells, how are they able to change their function and become "root" cells? | [
"Roots come from buds at the nodes. This is why cutting instructions require you to include several leaves or buds in your cuttings. The transformation of nodes into either root, branch, or reproductive structures is hormone-based. Some species are exceedingly good at rooting by themselves (just try to stop basi... | [
"I couldn't begin to answer this question fully, but I would imagine it is a combination of all those factors. If you look at something like a jade plant, it will begin rooting branches if the branch merely goes horizontal enough to reach the soil, so there could be a moisture, light, or even gravitropic effect in... | [
"Awesome answer, thanks! As a followup, how do the nodes \"perceive\" that they're now in dirt? Do they respond to the moisture, the soil chemistry, the lack of sunlight, or some combination therein?"
] |
[
"Is it possible to blow yourself up by drinking nitroglycerin?"
] | [
false
] | I was browsing around online, and saw a story about a guy in Detroit who got hammered on vodka and downed quite a few nitroglycerin pills. He then decided to run repeatedly into a wall in an attempt to "set himself off". Obviously, he failed. My question is pretty simple though. Can you drink nitroglycerin (the explosi... | [
"(Ex military intelligence analyst)",
"Well, let's first assume a couple of scenarios.",
"Chemically desensitized nitroglycerin is what you're attempting to consume. ",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene_glycol_dinitrate",
"Nitroglycerin at room temperature is what you're attempting to consume.",
"Col... | [
"Well, if you're drinking it, and for argument's sake, let's say you're using a small dropper (with a little more than 2mL in it)... probably only your head will explode, as soon as the liquid warms up. ",
"The expansion of the gas is the problem, \"detonation of nitroglycerin generates gases that would occupy ... | [
"Is this the video you're talking about? ",
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r17czTWHFmU"
] |
[
"Is there any truth to the idea of, \"we've already been exposed, might as well not avoid it now.\""
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"Your probability of infection can increase with more exposure to a pathogen. For example with HIV infection you have a relatively small probability of infection with each exposure to an infected individual, and the risk goes up with subsequent exposure. See e.g. ",
"http://www.catie.ca/pif/summer-2012/putting-n... | [
"It is true in some cases that if you're already ",
" there's no point in avoiding it. For instance if there are epidemics of contagious diseases, e.g. viruses causing diarrhoea, or respiratory viruses, specifically those that cause bronchiolitis in babies, you can test to see what virus they have and then put pa... | [
"Source? "
] |
[
"How do black holes 1,000 times bigger than the sun exist and haven’t killed us yet?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Hi PETAcirclejerk thank you for submitting to ",
"/r/Askscience",
".",
" Please add flair to your post. ",
"Your post will be removed permanently if flair is not added within one hour. You can flair this post by replying to this message with your flair choice. It must be an exact match to one of the ... | [
"Planetary Sci"
] | [
"Thank you for your submission! Unfortunately, your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):",
"The question is too broad or too vague. Please conduct some background research and resubmit a more specific question.",
"For more information regarding this and similar issues, please see our ",
"g... |
[
"During spiral galaxy formation, how does gas collapsing into a disc minimize the energy configuration?"
] | [
false
] | As explained here: | [
"To reduce the kinetic energy of the system, you want the particles to lose as much speed as possible. The gas and stars in a sphere have upwards and downwards motion, inwards and outwards motion, and circular motion. You can't get rid of the circular motion, because angular momentum is conserved. Once you get redu... | [
"Ellipticals are not rotationally supported like disk galaxies - they're supported by the kinetic motions of the stars (I can't think of the word right now for some reason). They're similar to globular clusters which are quite old."
] | [
"Well, to get to the minimum energy, you need a way to get rid of energy. If you have a lot of gas, this is easy - gas particles bump into each other and move each other's electrons up and down energy levels, allowing energy to radiate out.",
"Stars don't get rid of energy so well. A group of stars don't really h... |
[
"Why are most recent data transfer standards serial, rather than parallel?"
] | [
false
] | We have Universal Bus, AT Attachment, Attached SCSI, PCI Express which is also a serial standard, HDMI, DP, and so on. It appears the transition from parallel communication to serial generally occurred over the 2000s, but why? What were the driving factors behind this change? And given the speed and processing power of... | [
"I'll start straight from the underlying misconception and go from there.",
"A serial protocol is slower than a parallel protocol ",
". What we would otherwise put as \"all other things being equal\".",
"So let's account the limitations parallel protocols faced back in 2002, when the world was actively shifti... | [
"It is summarised in the ",
"linked article",
": each PCIe lane is a pair of traces (1 rx pair, 1 tx pair), to a switch. The designation PCIe xN denotes the number of lanes to the switch. The full specification is ",
"here",
", you want section 4.",
"...sounds like a bunch of serial lines in a parallel ar... | [
"Thank you, that was interesting.",
"How do the PCIe lanes work? That sounds like a bunch of serial lines in a parallel arrangement."
] |
[
"What are some of the weirdest design choices in the human body and how would you improve it?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Thank you for your submission! Unfortunately, your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):",
"A good home for this question is our sister subreddit ",
"/r/AskScienceDiscussion",
". It might be too open-ended or speculative for ",
"/r/askscience",
". ",
"/r/AskScienceDiscussion",
" is... | [
"I'd definitely suggest swapping out \"design choice\" for your wording there, though, because the human body isn't designed."
] | [
"Very true, I was asking this with character design on the mind haha"
] |
[
"Warp Drives to end of the universe and beyond!"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"A flat universe doesn't imply that it has an edge, it implies that it's most likely infinite. The Hubble sphere is where the recession velocity of galaxies equals the speed of light. It's not a physical thing and it's by no means the 'edge of the universe', not even the edge of the ",
" universe (which is differ... | [
"Though it is not yet proven, it's commonly thought that the universe extends infinitely through space (curvature = 0). Anything else would be a violation of the ",
"cosmological principle",
".",
"When people talk about the size of the universe, they mean the ",
", which is a sphere centered at your curren... | [
"Please read the /r/AskScience posting guidelines.",
"The Universe is boundless, though not necessarily ",
". The Earth's surface offers a good analogy. You can go as far north as you like, but eventually you'll be traveling south again without ever having changed direction—",
", that is.",
"Flying your bas... |
[
"Does fiber optic fibers transport all elements of light? As in, could I get sunburned from the other end of a fiber pointed to the sun?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Fiber optic cables usually have relatively high absorption for UV light (The type of light that causes sunburn). This means that yes, the light from the sun (which is a white light source with roughly even power across the visible spectrum) would travel through a fiber optic cable, but after journeying through th... | [
"In the interest of teaching - ",
"1) From the sidebar:",
"\nPlease keep discussion...",
"Scientific (i.e. based on repeatable analysis published in a peer reviewed journal)",
"Free of layman speculation",
"2) All forms of light (visible, IR, RF, microwave, etc) are forms of radiation. However, the lig... | [
"In the interest of teaching - ",
"1) From the sidebar:",
"\nPlease keep discussion...",
"Scientific (i.e. based on repeatable analysis published in a peer reviewed journal)",
"Free of layman speculation",
"2) All forms of light (visible, IR, RF, microwave, etc) are forms of radiation. However, the lig... |
[
"Is Cherenkov Radiation harmful?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"While Cherenkov radiation cannot enter the xray and gamma ray portion of the spectrum, most of it IS ultraviolet and, therefore, it can be harmful to someone who has taken no precautions to shield themselves.",
"As an aside, that Cherenkov radiation is the sonic boom particles with respect to light is pretty ama... | [
"The sun emits 32 W/m",
" of UV. If you are near any particle beam which can output that much Cerenkov radiation I would be much more concerned about the particles than the Cerenkov radiation. Also the Cherenkov spectrum is maximum at 340 nm, well within the UVA band. Although UVA does some damage to humans it is... | [
"Cherenkov radiation occurs when a particle is traveling slower than c but FASTER than light travels in that specific medium. ",
"For instance, light travels at approximately 0.75c through water. If a particle were to be traveling at 0.9c through water, then it would emit radiation the same way that a rocket trav... |
[
"What is the volume of all the protons neutrons and electrons in the visible universe?"
] | [
false
] | If we were to compress the whole universe together like sand, about how big would it be? | [
"If all the mass in the observable universe were to form a black hole, it would be about 15 billion lightyears in radius (this is not the same as the radius of the visible universe)."
] | [
"I think you need to specify explicit limits on compression in order to answer this question. Volume only has meaning at a specific density, and the existence of neutron stars and possibly singularities at the centres of supermassive black holes, there may not be an easily identifiable upper limit."
] | [
"The way you phrase the body text leads to a black hole and iorgfeflkd's answer. However, to answer your title question, based on a proton+neutron number of about 10",
" and radius of about 1 fm (they're actually fuzzy without a well-defined edge), you get about 4 x 10",
" m",
" for the total volume, which i... |
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