title list | over_18 list | post_content stringlengths 0 9.37k ⌀ | C1 list | C2 list | C3 list |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
[
"Did serotonin syndrome damage my brain? (X-Post from r/psychopharmacology)"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"The symptoms can last for a couple of days but will resolve, and how long it will take depends on the severity of the syndrome and the elimination rates of the two drugs (which are quite rapid in this case, a few days at most). Please do not change your life plans because of this event. There should be no permanen... | [
"What is it like to be you? I'm considering your career field. ",
"Sorry this isn't adding to the above question, I'm just curious and saw an opportunity to ask. "
] | [
"I did a B.Sc. in neuropsychology and neuropharmacology, and then decided research wasn't for me in my last year, so I finished the program and then got into pharmacy school. ",
"The main motivation behind the move was that I felt like I needed a lot of contact with, you know, human beings, other than my close ci... |
[
"A physics question; a hard one. All about lasers, absorption spectra and conservation of energy."
] | [
false
] | In my quantum physics lectures we have been told that for an atom to absorb a photon it does not require exactly the same energy as the energy gap. It can be slightly more, or slightly less; what does happen though is that the further away you are from the correct energy the less likely it is to happen. In the unlikely... | [
"I think this is related to ",
"doppler cooling",
".\nThe extra energy from the emitted photon comes from reducing the speed of the atom that emitted it.\nThe ",
"brief explanation",
" section seems similar to what you described."
] | [
"In the unlikely event that a photon with less energy than the energy gap IS absorbed, the electron will exist in an excited state for some amount of time and then emit a photon with slightly higher energy than the incident one.",
"Energy is conserved - the electron and the photon have the same total energy befor... | [
"Band gaps aren't always flat energy levels either. A phonon & photon combined can excite the energy level. This is called \"phonon assisted emission\", if I recall correctly. Though I think it is only for solids.",
"With regards to gases, Platypuskeeper is correct. A virtual absorption can occur, and the re-emit... |
[
"How did scientists determine the inner structure of molecules?"
] | [
false
] | When I look at something like , I always wonder: what tools did they use and how did they come to a specific conclusion? How can I reproduce results like these by myself? | [
"These days we have a whole range of analytical tools at our disposal, and they are referred to by a whole alphabet of names: NMR, IR, UV-Vis, GC-MS, LC-MS, X-Ray, MALDI, etc...the list goes on. Let's not get bogged down in all of these, it's a far more involved discussion than a comment allows for. ",
"Instea... | [
"TL;DR mass spectroscopy, IR spectroscopy, proton and C13 NMR and x-ray diffraction for larger molecules.",
"there are a wide variety of tools available for deducing the structures of molecules. for the smaller, organic molecules, you can use Proton NMR or C13 NMR in conjunction with IR and mass spectroscopy. usu... | [
"As mentioned by others, X-ray crystallography is a good way of revealing structure of crystals. However, the main constraint with that technique is that the molecule must be in crystal form. In fact, much of structural determination in proteins is ",
" the protein to form crystals.",
"There are other technique... |
[
"What exactly does a lobotomy do?"
] | [
false
] | I understand the basic concept behind a lobotomy, but I’m not sure what it severs inside your head, how that would affect a person, and wether or not this person would be self sufficient. How would it affect their day to day life, and what is it like inside the mind of a lobotomised person? | [
"The term \"lobotomy\" literally means to incise or to cut a segment of the brain apart from the rest. The brain is divided in parts called \"Lobes\" which are named after the adjecent corresponding bone (parietal, occippital, temporal, frontal).",
"\"Lobotomy\" as you've heard it said , probably referred to a fr... | [
"But anyway, a lobotomy is a terrible thing that should only be used as an absolute last resort if there is a greater threat present that would be avoided or controlled through this treatment.",
"JFC, no one has done a lobotomy since the late 60s. They were obsolete with the discovery of the first anti-psychotic... | [
"Thank you so much! Your answer was very in depth and informative!"
] |
[
"Spontaneous freezing of ice pop?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"Supercooling",
"."
] | [
"The fluid was ",
"supercooled",
".",
"Basically there was nowhere for ice crystals to form until you disturbed it."
] | [
"thanks!"
] |
[
"Would Earth have been able to support life if it was the size of Neptune? If so, what about Saturn or Jupiter?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"You need to clarify your question a little bit before you can expect a good answer.",
"\nWhen you say \"the size of\" i assume you mean radially etc, but do you also mean similar mass? or do you mean a planet composed of materials similar to earth that has the same radius as neptune/staurn/jupiter. "
] | [
"I'll try to clarify: Would a terrestrial planet the size of Neptune with the same geological/chemical makeup of our Earth be able to support any type if life, from micro organisms to complex life forms? ",
"Sorry if it is still vague, my knowledge of the workings and terminology of the universe is also vague"
] | [
"Fixed. I'm holding density constant, so it doesn't change my results."
] |
[
"If I focused on my heart hard enough, could I control my heartbeat?"
] | [
false
] | Even though the heart is an involuntary muscle, if I sat down and thought hard enough, would it be possible to control my heartbeat? If I can't, what prevents me from learning how to do this? EDIT: Since some people are talking about meditation, for an extreme, if I just said 'fuck this' can I give myself a heart attac... | [
"Sort of!",
"There are studies that have shown that meditation can slow a heartbeat. This is the result of the 'relaxing' mindset lowering the amount of cortisol being produced. Here's a link: ",
"Effect of Buddhist Meditation",
"I've also read some articles about monks that claim to be able to do this at wi... | [
"This is what some freedivers do to increase their performance. Reducing heart beats with meditation, they can resist longer without breathing. See, for example, Umberto Pelizzari ",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Pelizzari?wprov=sfla1"
] | [
"Absolutely yes. ",
"The actual heartbeat is involuntary and locally generated by the heart itself, but the heart rate is modulated by the vagus nerve and circulating neuroactive hormones, both of which can be controlled by the subconscious brain. ",
"But it takes much more than simply meditating or concentrati... |
[
"What causes gravity?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"First, a pedantic terminology point. Gravitation is the tendency of objects to accelerate toward on another. Gravity is \"the thing that causes gravitation\". So there are two questions you could be asking: 1) what causes gravitation, which is the same as what is gravity, or 2) what is the source of gravity, which... | [
"Okay so let's start with special relativity. If I am moving (uniformly: straight-line, constant speed) relative to you, you will see my length contract along the direction of motion and you will see my time dilate relative to you. All of this happens to make sure that we measure the speed of light to be c.",
"No... | [
"In a classical sense, ",
"gravitational mass",
" (this is what you consider mass). ",
"Go any deeper than that, however, and essentially nobody knows. It is currently a topic of hot debate among researchers. The two most successful models of our universe (General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics) are at o... |
[
"Saturns rings - are they \"temporary\"?"
] | [
false
] | I recently read "Bang!: The Complete History of the Universe" by May, Moore, Lintott and there was a casual mention that humanity is lucky to be around to see Saturn's rings. They implied that the rings had "recently" (astronomically speaking) formed or will "soon" dissipate. They mention something about the rings be... | [
"The solar system is temporary. What sort of time frame were you thinking?"
] | [
"I just thought it worth mentioning that Saturn is a bit of a special case because the moon Enceladus looks to be contributing mass to the outermost of Saturn's rings. In terms of the longevity of the planets, the rings are still a fleeting phenomenon. Yet they may be a little less fleeting because of this input.... | [
"I just thought it worth mentioning that Saturn is a bit of a special case because the moon Enceladus looks to be contributing mass to the outermost of Saturn's rings. In terms of the longevity of the planets, the rings are still a fleeting phenomenon. Yet they may be a little less fleeting because of this input.... |
[
"Going by Mendellian genetics, when two parents share a trait, is it almost a given that offspring share it?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Nice gif!",
"It wouldn't be safe to say it's a \"given\", since there a number of factors that can cause the offspring to differ from their parents:",
"Recessive genes: for instance, if Sheldon and Amy both carried recessive copies of the blond allele for hair color, there would be a 1/4 chance that their kid ... | [
"Minor bone to pick: Mendelian genetics as it is ",
" at the high school, and even undergraduate level, tends to ignore these considerations, but the field of quantitative genetics has been a very successful extension of the mendelian framework to polygenic traits."
] | [
"No, a simple Punnett Square exercise shows this is false.",
"A a\n",
"A AA Aa",
"a Aa aa",
"Assuming that the trait is simple and is controlled by one gene, and the parents have one dominant and one recessive allele, the child has 1/4 chance of not showing that trait."
] |
[
"Ask Anything Wednesday - Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science"
] | [
false
] | Welcome to our weekly feature, Ask Anything Wednesday - this week we are focusing on Do you have a question within these topics you weren't sure was worth submitting? Is something a bit too speculative for a typical post? No question is too big or small for AAW. In this thread you can ask any science-related question! ... | [
"One of the most impactful examples of this is the non-factorizability of prime numbers. Mathematicians have studied prime numbers for millenia, going all the way back to the ancient greeks. Primes have always been key in math as the building block of all numbers. ",
"With the advent of modern computing and crypt... | [
"Cyclists regularly measure power output - a Tour de France athlete might put out an average of ",
"350-450W of power",
". This is about enough to run 2 PlayStation 5s.",
"So what kind of power do you need for a datacenter? You can't exactly google a number for this, but what you can do is look at datacenter ... | [
"Fourier Series Approximations and Fourier Transformations didn't have much use when discovered but now it's often used in signal processing in things such as mobile data signals to wifi! ",
"3 Blue One Brown Video of Fourier\n Series"
] |
[
"If it were a frictionless environment, would there be any sound?"
] | [
false
] | This is a semi-stupid question, I know. I don't have very good discernment between vibrations and friction and their relation (if any). Could someone help answer this? | [
"As long as your definition of frictionless doesn't prevent molecules from colliding and bouncing off one another, there will still be sound. I believe that sound travels as waves of pressure, so if you have some flat surface vibrating perpendicular to your sound medium, it should be sending those waves of pressure... | [
"Well, I've only heard of frictionless used in terms of macroscopic objects, since really friction is a description for what is very complex behavior of millions of atomic collisions.",
"Don't get it backwards. Frictionless or not, molecules are colliding. "
] | [
"The animation on this page of longitudinal waves displays what I'm trying to describe: ",
"http://paws.kettering.edu/~drussell/Demos/waves/wavemotion.html"
] |
[
"Why isn't water a strong oxidizer?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Strong is a relative term. There are plenty of things that water will rip apart, like the alkali and alkali earth metals. ",
"It might be easier to answer better if you explained why you think water should be a strong oxidizer."
] | [
"In a sense, water isn't combustible because it's already burned. O2 is a strong oxidizer, and does pretty much whatever it can to turn into water. Once it does, it's done.",
"Peroxide actually isn't explosive because it's an oxidizer. Peroxide is unstable with respect to a process called ",
"disproportionat... | [
"Reduction and oxidation is about how many electrons an atom gains or loses in a reaction. First, removing electrons is called oxidation, while adding them is called reduction (charge of the atom is 'reduced' since electrons are negatively charged. The term 'oxidation' is chosen because throughout science history, ... |
[
"How can the constituents of carbon-12 add up to more than 12 u?"
] | [
false
] | The unified atomic mass unit (u) is defined as a twelfth the mass of a carbon-12 atom. According to Wikipedia and other sources, a proton is about 1.007 u and a neutron about 1.009 u. That means carbon-12 should be about 12.10 u, even though by definition it is exactly 12 u. Using more significant figures or accounting... | [
"The mass of a bound system is not the same as the sum of the masses of its constituents. If it were, it would not be energetically favorable for the constituents to bind together in the first place.",
"The difference between the mass of the system and the sum of the masses of the constituents is called the ",
... | [
"No, we say \"defect\"."
] | [
"\"Deficit\" is fine too. I just say \"defect\" because it's the convention that I learned. My undergraduate nuclear physics textbook was ",
"this one",
", and the author uses \"defect\".",
"Neither \"deficit\" nor \"defect\" is more descriptive than the other, according to their colloquial definitions."
] |
[
"If we listened to our planet's radio emissions, would we hear people talking and stuff or just eerie noises like the other planets?"
] | [
false
] | I'm wondering if our artificial radio emissions are strong enough for aliens to hear them if they had the same or better equipment we have to hear other planet's radio emissions. | [
"We don't hear radio emissions. Radio emissions are a form of electromagnetic wave (light) that has information encoded in it. When your radio receiver picks up that information, it decodes it and then plays it out on a speaker which oscillates to make sound waves in the air. Any time you \"hear\" radio emissions f... | [
"Define translate, if they use the same decoders that we do (because they have reverse engineered them for instance) they would get the same audio back that we do. If they used their own encoding standards it would be like opening an image file in audio player, you either get a lot of random noise or (more likely) ... | [
"If we presume that ",
" ",
" aliens follow the same basic technological path that we have (as opposed to inventing aerosol deodorant before the wheel), then there would be a comparatively brief period in which it would be even hypothetically possible for us to eavesdrop on them.",
"First, better technology i... |
[
"How difficult is it to create a machine to generate smell?"
] | [
false
] | There is Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen available in the air around us, why is it hard to create molecules that comprise these elements and create smell? | [
"The same level of difficulty as creating a machine that manufactures any material you want out of readily available atmospheric elements. Most of the complex molecules you smell are the result of very specific circumstances and processes. You would have to make something out of nothing- or have a little of everyth... | [
"I'm not sure if you're aware of it, but ",
"smell machines",
" are currently available. Among other things, they're used for military training (dead body, vomit, gunpowder, etc.) and in marketing (Cinnabon uses smell machines to produce their trademark smell when they're not baking)."
] | [
"Is it then correct to assume a machine like that will never be possible?"
] |
[
"Why is Rutherford backscattering analysis (RBS) so expensive?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Running a particle accelerator is generally expensive. "
] | [
"Yes, lots of power for the ion source, for the accelerator itself, for the cooling and operation of the magnets, etc. And manpower of course, for the accelerator and ion source operation, plus beam tuning, detector physicists, and whoever else is necessary."
] | [
"besides initial cost, what is the big cost factor here? power consumtion? cooling?"
] |
[
"Antimatter Reactions"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"It must be its own antiparticle.",
"Edit: ",
"Source",
" (second paragraph, first sentence)."
] | [
"Antiparticles only annihilate with their corresponding matter particle. ",
"If they didn't this would violate all sorts of conservation laws. "
] | [
"Wouldn't two of the antiquarks in the antineutron annihilate the two of the quarks in the proton? Or would they not interact? If they don't interact, would they be able to form a stable nucleus?"
] |
[
"How could Schrodinger know that he could only predict the probability of where an electron is in 1926 if Heisenberg's uncertainty principle wasn't discovered until 1927?"
] | [
false
] | One of my middle schoolers asked me this. I am surprised and I also can't figure it out. I think I am thinking too hard. | [
"It wasn't Schrödinger who first came up with the idea of interpreting the wavefunction as related to the particle's probability density function - it was Born. Born came up with this idea by solving the Schrödinger equation for a scattering problem and then realising that the results only made sense if the square ... | [
"Well, the uncertainty principle is a derived result of quantum mechanics and not a fundamental postulate of the theory. ",
"QM was developed in two parallel approaches in 1925-26 - the 'wave mechanics' of Schrödinger and the 'matrix mechanics' approach of Heisenberg, Born and Jordan. And after they were shown t... | [
"can be known",
"The uncertainty principle is not about our knowledge, it is intrinsic to the particles."
] |
[
"Can sound waves be polarized?"
] | [
false
] | I understand sound waves are longitudinal compared to transverse electromagnetic waves, so I would guess there might not be a directly equivalent property to polarization. However, is there any theoretical (or practical) analogue in sound that has similar properties? | [
"Sound waves in a fluid (liquid/gas/plasma) are longitudinal, and so the concept of polarization doesn't really apply. This is because fluids do not support shear waves, only compression.",
"Solids are a different story, though. Transverse mechanical waves in solids can also be considered to be sound waves, and c... | [
"Makes a lot of sense, also helps de-jargon some things I've read about seismology. ",
"Does the lack of polarization in a longitudinal wave mean it can carry less information than a transverse one? "
] | [
"In the ",
"Debye model of a solid",
", there are an equal number of phonon modes in the transverse vertical, transverse horizontal, and longitudinal orientations. So you can have twice the information in the transverse modes compared to the longitudinal modes."
] |
[
"Has any species other than humans been known to use a form of tangible currency?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Well, someone might want to put a much longer explanation out here, but \"yes.\"",
"First off, they can be taught:\n",
"http://ec.europa.eu/research/headlines/news/article_08_07_07_en.html",
"Secondly, though, more importantly, when you say \"tangible currency,\" one could easily define bringing tokens back ... | [
"Well, there's the example that ",
"/u/justscottaustin",
" pointed out, but in this instance these primates have been ",
" how to use tokens. They didn't come up with it independently. Money is still a uniquely human invention, and a relatively recent one at that.",
"The earliest form of money in the world ... | [
"Money is an abstraction of value. It's basically a pretty advanced tool. Other species don't use it for the same reason they don't use writing...cognitively they don't have the capacity to come up with it."
] |
[
"What causes light to be absorbed in an object?"
] | [
false
] | I understand that we can see color because the object absorbed some wavelength of light and reflect the rest to our eyes. Taking a step back, my question is: How does an object absorb light? | [
"Good answer, but you left out a key part. For an electron that is resonating with an electromagnetic field to actually absorb the energy and transform it, there must be something that interferes with the resonance. Materials like glass at visible wavelength contain electrons that resonate just fine with the light,... | [
"Basically, Light is an oscillating, traveling electric field. When it arrives onto a material, it actually penetrates slightly into the material, and the oscillating electric field interacts with the electrons in the material. The electrons follow the oscillations of the electric field, and they \"absorb\" the lig... | [
"What we interpret as light, is exchange of energy through electromagnetic fields. Somewhere, some charged object (most often an electron bound in an atom/solid) changed its configuration (by, let's say jumping between orbitals/bands) to a lower energy state and emitted an EM wave (he basically stored the excess en... |
[
"What is the ringing sounds in our ears at times ,what causes this and is this a good or bad thing?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Source: Military and civilian job courses on hearing protection and proper wearing of PPE.",
"As I recall, it is caused by a certain level of damage to the hairs/and or nerves, usually by loud noises. Lower levels of noise that do not cause permanent damage may still cause temporary ringing, but repeated exposur... | [
"Shit... guess that answers my question to FoghornAZ...."
] | [
"Shit... guess that answers my question to FoghornAZ...."
] |
[
"What makes matter (such as glass and water) transparent?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"I'll let ",
"Sixty Symbols",
" answer that. ",
"Basically, if photons have enough energy to bring electrons to a higher energy level, the photon gets absorbed (opaqueness). If the photon doesn't have enough energy to excite electrons to a higher electron level, it passes through (transparent). So, if the ... | [
"If light does not experience any absorption events when passing through a transparent medium, why does it's velocity drop below c?",
"Also, this would suggest that that the color of transparent materials must roughly line up with the progression of black-body colors. How then do we end up with absorption spectru... | [
"Wow, excellent video! I wish that had existed years ago when I first thought of this question.",
"Also, great responses everyone. This makes much more sense to me now."
] |
[
"Why do we have a colored area around our pupils? And why do different people have different colors?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"the iris is a sheet of pigmented tissue whose purpose is to block light from getting into the eye; it's flexible so that the amount of light getting to the retina can be adjusted dynamically.",
"the iris only needs to block light that can stimulate the retina, i.e. ",
" light, so the pigments in the tissue onl... | [
"Then why do albinos have pink eyes?"
] | [
"Because the iris contains blood vessels.",
"Everyone has pick color in their eyes. Most people have much brighter colors which overwhelm the pink."
] |
[
"How does the brain keep me from controlling my heart and other uncontrollable muscles?"
] | [
false
] | I know that some people are able to meditate and bring their heart rate down, but does that actually mean they are controlling it, or just tricking their mind into a relaxed state? | [
"tl;dr you do not have root privileges"
] | [
"Your major issue here is in thinking \"you\" are different from your brain. Real life isn't dualistic. You are your brain. Metaphysics and all that garbage aside, consciousness is just a convenient piece of software through which the brain runs data to try to decide what to do next. That software doesn't have cont... | [
"sudo /etc/init.d/heartbeat start\n"
] |
[
"How much complexity can nuclear pasta phases in neutron stars support? Could one potentially have strong-force-based life in a neutron star?"
] | [
false
] | Normally nuclear interactions don't come close to the complexity of chemistry, forming simple balls instead of complex molecules. But I've read that during the transition from the atom-dominated crust of a neutron star to the neutron-dominated interior much more complex structures called "nuclear pasta" exist, where nu... | [
"Could one potentially have strong-force-based life in a neutron star?",
"Maybe. No one knows. It's entirely speculative, but it may be plausible. Let me explain...",
"How much do we know about these phases? ",
"Quite a bit. Scientists have produced ",
"phase diagrams",
" (for a variety of models of nucle... | [
"Wow, I didn't expect such a detailed answer on an obscure topic like this. Thanks! I'll make sure to look through the Horowitz et al. paper you linked to. From what you write, I don't think the idea sounds bat shit insane, even if it is a far shot.",
"I was actually aware of The Dragon's Egg - it was became the ... | [
"The complexity does not approach that of carbon bonds and chemistry, no",
"Do we have a metric to measure complexity?"
] |
[
"Is the cause for the expansion of the universe same as the cause for the initial big bang inflation?"
] | [
false
] | Has the universe been expanding at an accelerated rate since the big bang? In a way the expanding universe is just a drawn out big bang? | [
"No. The current expansion of the universe is driven by ",
"dark energy",
". ",
"Inflation",
" is its own thing. To my knowledge, it's not at all seriously considered that dark energy also caused inflation. "
] | [
"This is correct. Inflation is a quantum process, whereas modern expansion is \"classical.\" Both are well documented and observed, but neither is well understood."
] | [
"Inflation is a general relativistic process. In GR, if you have a constant vacuum energy density, it will cause exponential expansion, which is what inflation is. The ",
" of said energy density is due to something that occurs at extremely high energies, but the reason that inflation happens is because of the me... |
[
"Why is DNA not in binary? Wouldn't one base pair be enough to code for genes?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"DNA is coded with four bases: A, T, C, and G which are independent units of information. They bind together to their complimentary pair, but only one side of the pair is read at a time. That means there aren't just (A+T) and (G+C) base pairs available to create a code, but (T+A) and (C+G), as well. ",
"It makes ... | [
"Base paring has nothing to do with the information encoded in DNA, base-pairing is only relevant in how DNA can form complementary strands and make a stable double helix.",
"DNA's information is in the form of codons. 3 bases code for an amino acid. There are 21 potential amino acids. 4 x 4 x 4 = 64 possible c... | [
"There are evolutionary advantages to having two base pairs. To start, \"base pairs\" are not the only DNA structures active in cells; there are other important structures, such as ",
"G-quadruplexes",
". Having two base pairs also allows for fine control of DNA melting temperature, as each of the two pairs pos... |
[
"Why does melting ice caps mean rising sea level?"
] | [
false
] | When you drop some ice in water, mark the water level, wait for it to melt, the water level will stay the same, but why will the polar caps be any different? Shouldn't the sea level stay the same like the glass and the ice cube? I hope I explained my question well and thanks in advance! | [
"You are describing ",
"Archimedes principle",
", but there are two points to consider:",
"1) First and foremost, there are quite significant portions of polar ice that are on land, i.e. consider the ",
"topography of Antarctica",
" (this is a bit misleading as this is what the topography would like after... | [
"Expanding a bit on what was already said, warmer water also has a lower density, so it actually takes up more space. There are a few effects which amplify melting ice as well. Snow reflects a lot of sunlight, so if snow melts, more sunlight is absorbed by the earth and this way the earth heats up even more. A warm... | [
"In the context of ",
"/u/CrustalTrudger",
" and ",
"/u/ArenLuxon",
" 's answers, it's also important to recognize that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are literally over a mile thick, so that's a lot of volume. The Antarctic Ice sheet, for example, covers about 2% of the surface area of the world, s... |
[
"What is the difference between cocaine and crack?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"One person described the process of making crack as converting the drug from water soluble to fat soluble, I have no idea what that means."
] | [
"Cocaine is normally found as a hydrochloride salt (making it water soluble). Have you ever heard of \"free basing\"? Well, crack is the free base form of cocaine. You react the cocaine salt with sodium bicarbonate, or some other base, and you can isolate crack, which, as an organic species, is lipid soluble.\n",
... | [
"Does this change the way the drug is metabolized? I understand crack is more intense, is this why?"
] |
[
"Can more than one planet in a solar system occupy the habitable zone?"
] | [
false
] | If another planet (or more) were to be in the same goldilocks zone as Earth I'd posit a guess that eventually they would collide. Do we know of any solar system that might allow for more than one planet to occupy this important orbit? Does this mean for each solar system only ONE planet can sustain life as we know it? | [
"Think about Venus. If it didn't have such a thick atmosphere (plus a runaway greenhouse effect), it's likely it would be in a habitable zone.",
"Also, if Mars were larger, it might have held on to its atmosphere, and it therefore might also be habitable."
] | [
"If another planet (or more) were to be in the same goldilocks zone as Earth I'd posit a guess that eventually they would collide.",
"That wouldn't be a terribly good guess. Although I think that the idea of \"habitable zones\" around stars is pretty dumb (there's lots of factors involved in habitability, solar i... | [
"Why does it have a thick atmosphere? Does it have anything to do with it's location? "
] |
[
"Do worms drink water?"
] | [
false
] | I know, it sounds super easy to Google, but I cannot for the life of me find the answer. All I've been able to find is that they need to eat, and they absorb oxygen from water through their skin. But do they need to ingest/absorb the water itself? Follow up question if they do, can they drink orange juice or will the c... | [
"Worms don't drink water. They actually don't need water so much as they need to be moist and have moisture. They absorb water in their skin to breathe when they are underground and actually come up to the ground after rain because there is too much water in the soil. I really did just google all that though and it... | [
"a lot of cases (for me included) people are just googling the wrong thing or have no idea what to google"
] | [
"Lol. Some people are not a fan of quick and easy information. If they could, they'd write the question via written letter to some far away university just so it takes forever."
] |
[
"What prevents the mouse cursor from moving off the screen infinitely in one direction?"
] | [
false
] | If I move my mouse to the left, so does the cursor onscreen. But the cursor stops moving left when it meets the left side of the screen, regardless of if I continue to move the mouse left. Why does it stop? How does it know that it has "hit the wall", so to speak? | [
"The programmer who wrote that part of your operating system wrote it to have that behavior. Every time your cursor moves, it performs a check to make sure it's on-screen.",
"Your screen is a coordinate system, with the coordinates being pixels. The origin (0,0) is in the upper-left, and the coordinate of your lo... | [
"You bottom right coordinate is (1979,1079) with the resolution you provided. Since there are 1980 pixels from left to right and 0 is the first coordinate point, \"1979\" is coordinate number 1980.",
"Also, are you sure you aren't running 1920x1080, which is a standard 16:9 resolution?"
] | [
"It was programmed to do that. If it kept moving it wouldn't be very useful.",
"The mouse's location is saved in memory as a 2D coordinate with (0, 0) in the top left and whatever your screen's resolution is in the bottom right.",
"When you move the mouse it will add the detected movement to that saved coordina... |
[
"Does reverse shaving cause the hair to grow thicker or faster? or is it a myth?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"Reverse shaving? Not sure what that is, but hair growing thicker or faster is always a myth. Hair grows at a certain rate and falls out at a certain rate. If you never shave your legs, for example, each hair on your legs will be at a different point in this life cycle, and each hair will have a thin, wispy tip, ma... | [
"Shaving doesn't cause your hair to grow thicker, but when it's cut the hair loses it's taper. Think of your hair like a cone, if you cut off the top part, it becomes 'thicker'. But really, it'll grow back out and taper, and be the exact same as before.",
"By reverse shaving I think you mean shaving against the g... | [
"Shaving does not cause terminal hair to grow back thicker or coarser or darker. This belief is because hair that has never been cut has a tapered end, whereas, after cutting, there is no taper. Thus, it appears thicker, and feels coarser due to the sharper, unworn edges. The fact that shorter hairs are \"harder\" ... |
[
"Why does the verb \"to be\" seem to be really irregular in a lot of languages?"
] | [
false
] | Maybe this isn't even true, and it's just been something I've noticed in the small number of languages I'm aware of. Edit: Wow, thank you everyone so much for your responses! I just randomly had this thought the other day I didn't think it would capture this much interest. I have some reading to do! | [
"...high token frequency correlates with irregularity (Bybee, 1985; 1995). As Bybee notes, isolated morphological exceptions require high token \nfrequency to be effectively accessed; low frequency irregulars are more likely to be regularized, presumably because they are not sufficiently entrenched. But this fact s... | [
"In English there's a specific reason: the current conjugations of \"to be\" are from two different verbs. In Old English, you had two verbs for \"to be\" much like Spanish. You had \"Beon\" and \"Weson\". Beon was used for permanent truths (like \"ser\" is in Modern Spanish), and Weson was used for the past tense ... | [
"The Goldberg quote isn't saying that high frequency words resist regularization so much as high frequency words are ",
" to resist regularization. It's hard to remember irregular behavior for low frequency words because you don't use them very often. But since you get so much practice with high frequency words, ... |
[
"Are predators on average smarter than herbivores?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Very good response, if you ask which is \"smarter\" or \"more intelligent\" the immediate response will be , how do you measure intelligence. Is intelligence, the ability to communicate, problem solve, remember/recognize objects, count objects etc... There are a lot of ways to qualify intelligence, it's both qua... | [
"Yeah, that's absolutely false. Most carnivores are successful ",
" That's how they deal with seasonal changes in prey populations. Herbivores, on the other hand, generally don't require complex strategies to get their food. They need evolved traits unrelated to cognition like thick molars and specialized dig... | [
"It varies substantially, and it very much depends on what you mean by \"smart,\" which is a pretty general term. Most people will probably reflexively lean towards carnivores being more intelligent, because of the hunting, but I don't know of any data that supports that widely.",
"There are major differences bet... |
[
"Where does the weight/mass of fat go when you burn it through exercise?"
] | [
false
] | How does that weight leave our body? | [
"Well, I'll try explaining it the best way I can from memory and logic so feel free to correct me.",
"Fat is made of fatty acids, and glycerol which together compose the storing unit of fat called triglyceride. So fat is a bunch of triglycerides together forming big storage bubbles polymers. When working out your... | [
"haha yeah, what helped me come to terms with that and another interesting example is that of plants and trees.They are actually in the end made out of air(CO2 which they then convert to organic compounds sugar etc) and water along with some ions. Even the hard wooden trunk! Nuts indeed"
] | [
"Whoa. So if I lose a pound of fat, I'm breathing out almost an extra pound of air? Nuts."
] |
[
"If in the ancestral environment hunter-gatherers humans lived in groups of 150-200 members, what caused the limit size or the consequent split?"
] | [
false
] | Anthropology. Sorry my english. | [
"The limit appears to be a function of the size ratio of the neocortex compared to the entire brain. The reason I say this is because there is a statistically significant relationship between this ratio and group size as compared across multiple taxa of primates. (For casual reading see ",
"Dunbar's number",
",... | [
"I’m wary of accounts that use Dunbar’s Number to explain why humans lived in groups of a certain size. The problem is that they privilege social interactions over other possible reasons, without offering any proof that social interactions were key to group size.",
"First, an explanation of what Dunbar’s Number r... | [
"The neurobiological reason is important -- but why would the brain evolve with that limit? Environmental pressures that were mostly beyond our control (at the time) -- availability of food and prevalence of disease."
] |
[
"If most medicines and vitamins contain a small percentage of active ingredient why am I swallowing such huge pills?"
] | [
false
] | Do they just need to digest slowly to absorb in your blood stream better or something? I took a calcium and vitamin D supplement earlier and it was a horse sized pill. | [
"A lot of pill is filler to help control drug delivery rates (so that it's not released all at once) or to help protect parts of the drug during digestion or to help keep the drug shelf-stable."
] | [
"Not to mention, if you needed, say, 50mg of some drug, and got a 50mg pill, then even the slightest chip or imperfection would have a relatively large effect on the dose. Making it into a larger pill means such small imperfections have a smaller effect on the dose of the active ingredient."
] | [
"Many antibiotics are higher doses. Two that immediately come to mind are augmentin, which is 500mg dose, and azithromycin, 1 gram."
] |
[
"Does an audio waveform, such as the type you can see in Audacity, contain absolutely all the information of that piece of audio?"
] | [
false
] | That is to say, if someone was monstrously familiar with looking at waveforms, would they theoretically be able to tell exactly what was in an audio file - right down to the words, notes, crashes, and bangs - just by looking at the visualisation? | [
"Theoretically? Yes. The signal that you see is what goes to the speakers. Practically, no assuming no prior knowledge of the song. ",
"The time domain of the signal would be especially difficult. Hearing is phase independent (for the most part). As a result same sound can be caused by multiple waveforms that loo... | [
" all? No. Not unless you're displaying it with (typically) 65536 vertical pixels (double that for stereo) and at least 1 horizontal pixel per 1/48000s.",
"That is to say",
"Well, that is ",
" to say, since you don't need ",
" the information to get ",
" information out of a visualisation. Could you ident... | [
"I'd add that the frequency response of a signal is only one feature (or domain to extract features from). There are additional domains and some features of the audio can be extracted purely in the time domain. "
] |
[
"Do gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn have a \"surface\" somewhere down there?"
] | [
false
] | The way I imagine it now is a moon sized super dense core surrounded by massive amounts of gas. I've always been confused about this. | [
"Deep down enough, the pressure of the hydrogen becomes great enough that it turns ",
"metallic",
", which is a sort of degenerate matter—meaning there is no clear separation between individual hydrogen atoms and molecules, and all the electrons in the atoms have been compressed into the nuclei such that the en... | [
"Mass and density analysis. We know the gravitational force of Jupiter at its cloud tops; we also know its radius and mass. If its composition were ",
" hydrogen, it would be less massive and less dense than it is now. The core is estimated to be some ten to twenty times as massive as Earth—not an insignificant f... | [
"I don't think it's 100% known yet. But here's my take on the current understanding:",
"Think of it more like transitioning from a gas to a solid, over a gradient rather than there being a surface. There is a rocky core, but it's surrounded by hydrogen. So much hydrogen that the densities are so great that as one... |
[
"String theory, what is its status as of now?"
] | [
false
] | String theory has been around for some time now and gets a lot of attention in popular science. It would be nice if the physicists here could tell me whats the status of string theory as of now *Has there been any experimental evidence so far or suggestion for the existence of strings? *Have we been able to work back f... | [
"*Has there been any experimental evidence so far or suggestion for the existence of strings?",
"No, and given the tiny distance scale on which string theory operates, it is hard to imagine what experimental evidence might even be feasible to obtain.",
"*Have we been able to work back from first principles to d... | [
"I'm going to piggyback on this answer and talk about how there are two aspects of string theory: string theory as a model of nature, and string theory as an alternative formalism to quantum field theory.",
"The latter doesn't depend on the former and has been useful, through holography, for figuring out physics ... | [
"Since as a tool it works, I think its a pretty good indication that the universe is stringy.",
"No, that doesn't follow. Let's consider an analogous situation in circuit analysis. It is useful, and makes certain calculations easier, to formulate things in terms of complex functions. But that doesn't mean the p... |
[
"If a Tsunami is coming inland would it be better to attempt to go upward into skyscraper, or try to go inland?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"That depends on your location on the beach, the structural integrity of the beach-side buildings and the size of the tsunami. ",
"Most tsunami travel a fairly short distance once beached, think of how quickly a big wave stops when walking on sand. The flooding can reach 300 meters or more from the coastline, the... | [
"Even minutes is not enough. Unless there is significantly more warning (think of how long it would take you to walk out of your city during rush hour with potentially thousands of panicked people running everywhere), you want to get higher. Think of it like this, in a city, the siren goes off. You decide, like ... | [
"As a person who has lived in Hawaii for almost my entire life, we deal with training for this regularly. You can't run from a tsunami. It's not a wave, it's a wall of force. It will run you down and the power behind it will take you. You are always better off going up. Get into the nearest building and get up... |
[
"If we can't distinguish anything visually above 60 frames per second, what resolution do we hear with our ears?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"He's asking about temporal resolution not frequency sensitivity.",
"Both are similar in this regard, ~15ms nominally with potentially ~5ms in particular situations. IIRC sound perception seems to be regarded as having higher temporal resolution, but no more than 2x."
] | [
"How do you mean we can't distinguish anything visually above 60fps? I can very clearly tell between 60fps and 120fps, and even distinguish 120fps from 144fps on my monitor.",
"I also think a better phrase for what you're describing would be something like \"sampling-frequency\", since \"resolution\" can imply so... | [
"even distinguish 120fps from 144fps on my monitor",
"You mean 72fps from 144fps, unless this experiment done was on a variable sync monitor in a compatible application"
] |
[
"Does blood type have any bearing on geographical origin?"
] | [
false
] | Would my blood type give me any clue as to where my ancestors orginated from? Or do all types occur regardless of the geographical origin? | [
"Wikipedia has a pretty decent chart to start with"
] | [
"That's mainly saying how blood type is distributed around the world now, which isn't quite what I asked."
] | [
"That's mainly saying how blood type is distributed around the world now, which isn't quite what I asked."
] |
[
"How come you can sometimes \"feel\" someone looking at you, and it's not because they're in your peripheral vision (for instance, your eyes are lowered or they're behind you)? And is there a name for this phenomenon?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"It's called coincidence and confirmation bias. Maybe you feel this way several times per day, and only remember the times you were right."
] | [
"It seems to be mostly pseudoscience at this point but one researcher is testing a ",
"theory",
". "
] | [
"Bunk. Eyes do not emit EM radiation any more than any other part of the body, though I suppose they would/could be more reflective."
] |
[
"What would it take to bring the atmosphere on Mars in line with the Earth's? Do we have that technology today? How long would it take?"
] | [
false
] | I just read this article about temperature on Mars which is surprisingly higher than scientists thought they'd be. With that said, there are still huge temperature swings because the atmosphere is very thin. So in the event we start a colonization/terraform goal for Mars - how would we get the atmosphere on Mars to be... | [
"I recall watching a ",
" episode on colonizing Mars. It was in their first season where they focused on the Planets. This is correct, see this link: ",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Universe_(TV_series)#Season_1:_2007",
"The idea was this: Artificially heat mars at its poles. Send satellites armed with l... | [
"Wikipedia has a decent article on terraforming Mars."
] | [
"I heard a NASA talk by Jim Mackay and he said a minimum of 40,000 years. And that's best case."
] |
[
"Are there predators in the microscopic world?"
] | [
false
] | I've been thinking a lot about how life is sustained on earth by consuming. There are top predators all the way down the food chain . I was wondering about microscopic world, are there any awesome predators in the microscopic world? | [
"The predator-prey relationship is pretty consistent across all life forms. In the microscopic world, there are bacteria that devour other bacteria and there are fungi that produce antibiotics to kill various bacteria. We can go a bit below the light microscopy world into the electron microscopy world and you will ... | [
"But viruses don't classify really as lifeform",
"I am by no means a Virology expert but I think it depends on your definition of lifeform. If you define lifeform as having intrinsic metabolic and homeostasis pathways, then yes, viruses don't classify as life forms.",
"But, if you think about it, viruses are re... | [
"I might consider the virus an infection rather than a predator. The bacterial coping mechanisms: restriction enzymes and CRISPR are thought of as a innate and adaptive immune system respectively. Getting rid of something already inside you is different than avoiding it all together."
] |
[
"Is there a scientifically best way to build muscle?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Different types of lifting work better for different people and different types of muscle build in different ways, but from a basic standpoint, there are some pretty universal rules.",
"\n1. Work the muscle: you want micro-tears, excursion, and soreness",
"\n2. Protein: People go absolutely apeshit over their ... | [
"If you look through the ",
"/r/Fitness",
" and ",
"/r/weightroom",
" FAQs you'll learn about the training methods that are generally used by strength atheletes. These aren't necessarily backed by peer reviewed studies, but they do have about 100 years of anecdotal results behind them."
] | [
"Mass? High intensity, low rep. "
] |
[
"Does the order of the atomic elements correspond to how frequently they are created?"
] | [
false
] | By "created" I mean by big cosmological processes. | [
"Yes and no. There is a general trend towards rarity as the elements get heavier, but there are regular fluctuations. ",
"This",
" graph shows relative abundance in the solar system by atomic number (with heavier elements than Uranium being artificial)."
] | [
"A short introduction to nuclear fusion should explain most of the fluctuations in that graph.",
"Stars normally work by \"burning\" hydrogen in their core. 4 hydrogen atoms combine to 1 helium atom. Late in their lifetime they run out of hydrogen in the core and start \"burning\" the helium instead. 3 helium ato... | [
"Nature also seems to really like the combination of 2 protons and 2 neutrons, so any even number of these tends to be favored. This also affects the way some of the fusion models progress."
] |
[
"When you’re hooked up to a hospital bed and it’s monitoring your “vitals”, which measurements are actually considered your vitals?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Vitals are typically:",
"Pulse/ox: Heart rate and blood oxygenation. You want heart rate to be between 60-100 and ox to be 97% or how higher.",
"Blood pressure: the pressure of the blood in your arteries. Too high is bad, too low is bad. It varies from person to person but you typically don't want to be higher... | [
"Different hospitals might include different things as their standard, but generally, the basic ‘Vital signs’ are: blood pressure, pulse rate, breathing rate, and body temperature.",
"For stable patients, they’ll usually just track your pulse rate, along with blood oxygen saturation, because it only takes a small... | [
"Art line pressure is almost always measured in the radial artery in my hospital. Is femoral art line a US thing? (Assuming you are US because of EKG, not ECG)"
] |
[
"How come inbreeding results in deleterious traits?"
] | [
false
] | I get the reasoning is that inbreeding increases homozygosity, therefore increasing the chance of expressing recessive traits, but how come you only hear about deleterious (Habsburg chin, haemophilia) or neutral (red hair, green eyes) recessive traits that result from inbreeding? If recessive traits can be either good,... | [
"I believe it can pass on the positive recessive alleles just as it does the negative recessive ones, but generally that inbreeding has a net negative effect for multiple reasons- the immune system will be weakened because there will be less diverse genetic information for the immune system to work off of, genes ma... | [
"This is primarily because of how selection acts on dominant / recessive alleles.",
"Consider one gene with two alleles, one positive and one negative. If the positive one is dominant (A) and the negative is recessive (a), it will spread through the population quickly due to positive selection for homozygous AA a... | [
"I think part of this comes from the fact that 'good traits' are less well defined. 'Bad' is easy because if the trait kills or disables someone then that's obviously a bad thing. Most other traits can be lumped in under neutral. 'Good' traits tend to be those that are quantitative, ie stronger, faster, more offspr... |
[
"What is the highest speed (in vacuum), we can achieve with current technology?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"The question is probably \"which velocity can a spaceship reach relative to earth given constraints such as fuel consumption and launching weight\", which is reasonable."
] | [
"Voyager I is moving away from us at 17 km/s. It had 4 gravitational assists when the giant planets were in an almost perfect positioning for this, so it would be hard to reach that speed using the same technique unless we wait for the next alignment (and considering that the outer planets move so slow...)",
"The... | [
"Do you mean the fastest we get macroscopic man made things like the rocket you mentioned and other vehicles? Or do you mean anything, including particles? The LHC accelerates protons to 0.999999991 c, or about 3 metres per second slower than the speed of light (c). ",
"I don't know really how fast we've gotten ... |
[
"What are the rates of false positives and false negatives with the different varieties of COVID testing?"
] | [
false
] | Hearing about the NFL and their 70+ false positives last weekend got me thinking about this and the data is surprisingly hard to find online. Many people discuss the effectiveness of these tests, but there's very little in the way of hard data. Considering that, percentage wise, a relatively tiny section of the populat... | [
"The terms you're looking for are \"specificity\" and \"sensitivity\": ",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity",
"From these and a guess of the actual prevalence of the disease you can calculate the positive and negative predictive values, which are the probabilities that a positive test i... | [
"Maybe someone familiar with the actual technology can answer why PCR is so remarkably specific.",
"PCR testing looks for the presence of a specific DNA* sequence. ",
"The thing that determines if the test is positive is a strand of DNA called a probe, created to exactly complement the target you're looking for... | [
"Be careful in suggesting that the instrument FPR is the real FPR. There are lots of steps in the process where false positives can be created that the instrument can't identify. ",
"A perfect RT-PCR instrument in a lab with poor sample handling practices, or even in a perfect lab that accepts samples from testi... |
[
"If I eat a nut, or kernal and it comes out whole in my stool. Do those calories count?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Whether or not your body can absorb the food is considered in the nutritional labeling. They used to make chips that were 0 calories, not because they contained no energy but because your body couldn't digest them. Unfortunately and somewhat obviously they caused a lot of digestion issues so they stopped making th... | [
"That's actually quite amazing. Damn, I would trade digestive issues for some diet chips. :) "
] | [
"Yes in fact they do in part get absorbed. Best analogy here that everyone understands is corn poop. Think of it like corn. Some of it is absorbed by your body, and the cellulose or fiber is what you poop out. Some absorbed, some not. Corn poop. "
] |
[
"Could an asteroid move fast enough to shoot straight through the earth?"
] | [
false
] | Look at the parent comment with a picture. Could something similar to that actually occur? | [
"No."
] | [
"No. The earth is essentially a huge ball of molten iron/nickel, with smaller amounts of other stuff mixed in. Asteroids are mostly rock, though some of them are also iron/nickel, and some have high silicon content. This means most asteroids are less dense than the earth's core.",
"When a large asteroid hits e... | [
"Planets and asteroids aren't as rigid as, say, rocks in the same proportions would be. It's more like trying to shoot a glob of water through a bigger glob."
] |
[
"I watched a documentary last night that said caloric intake was less important than insulin levels for weight loss. For a healthy person, how important is it to have a diet that considers insulin levels when trying to lose weight?"
] | [
true
] | [deleted] | [
"I treat mostly diabetes at my clinic and I can say this is not entirely true. Type 2 Diabetes occurs due to two mechanisms. One is the result of loss of beta cell function (your body cannot pump out enough insulin to cover for the food you are eating) and insulin resistance (insulin has trouble opening the gates... | [
"Also interested in the title, maybe it was Fat Head?",
"Btw, 'eat less' doesn't really work. If you tell someone to 'eat less', what they hear is 'eat the same crap that made you fat in the first place, but a little less of it' - that strategy barely ever works. It's more important to stress 'eat better'."
] | [
"Also interested in the title, maybe it was Fat Head?",
"Btw, 'eat less' doesn't really work. If you tell someone to 'eat less', what they hear is 'eat the same crap that made you fat in the first place, but a little less of it' - that strategy barely ever works. It's more important to stress 'eat better'."
] |
[
"Why was it so much harder for a welder to weld my 2 pieces of Aluminum together than for 2 equivalent pieces of basically any other popular metal?"
] | [
false
] | I recently had something welded for part of a project. 2 pieces of Aluminum. I talked to a local welder who said he wouldn't touch Aluminum but would have welded my design if it was stainless steel and that I needed to find someone else. Why is Aluminum so much more challenging to weld? What physical properties for Al ... | [
"It requires a special welding machine. TIG *\n(Tungsten Inert Gas). It requires a shielding gas (Argon). Aluminum oxide which forms over time on the surface of aluminum melts at a much higher temperatures than aluminum and must be removed with acetone prior to welding. Aluminum also has higher thermal conductivi... | [
"People seem to be talking about the machines and not the material.",
"Aluminum is a fantastic thermal conductor. This characteristic means that when you apply heat to a given area, it quickly dissipates. This is why it takes so much energy to weld aluminum, despite its low melting temperature. You're basically p... | [
"Even with TIG, welding aluminium is different from welding steel. You actually have to reverse the polarity of the electrical arc, and you're supposed to change the shape of the tip of the welder from a point to a ball. I'm less than a novice welder, but it really is a different thing with a slightly different ski... |
[
"Why does smell remain on your hands for some time even after you've washed them?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"So many italics made that a little difficult to read, lol ",
"That is interesting though. If it wont wash off with water/soap, should you worry about consuming or otherwise absorbing that substance? Sometimes I wonder if I’m eating bits of soap frangrance after handwashing"
] | [
"So many italics made that a little difficult to read, lol ",
"That is interesting though. If it wont wash off with water/soap, should you worry about consuming or otherwise absorbing that substance? Sometimes I wonder if I’m eating bits of soap frangrance after handwashing"
] | [
"The answer to your question is yes. Whenever you touch or handle things particles get trapped in the oil of your skin. If you smell something on your hands it means there are trapped particles that are slowly being released. So you can in fact be eating soap after you wash."
] |
[
"Can someone explain how sunscreen \"blocks\" harmful UV rays?"
] | [
false
] | I just put some SPF 50 on because...beach. But how does it actually block when it gets sprayed on? Is spray better than lotion style? | [
"See ",
"the /r/askscience guidelines regarding sources",
". Citing your own education status is not acceptable."
] | [
"The energy has to go somewhere. Does it become heat?"
] | [
"The energy has to go somewhere. Does it become heat?"
] |
[
"A question about the human digestive system and possibly nutrition."
] | [
false
] | Every once in a while (not very often), my digestive system seems to send me mixed signals. I feel simultaneously completely stuffed and still hungry. Not just "still hungry" -- quite hungry, almost as though I hadn't eaten. The feeling of completely stuffed makes sense: I just ate quite a bit of bulk and my stomach is... | [
"It may be the fat content.",
"Cholecystokinin",
" is a hormone released in response to the detection of fat in the stomach. It causes your gall bladder to squeeze (hence the name chole (gall) cysto (bladder) kinin (hormone)) and also appears to be one of the mechanisms by which hunger is suppressed.",
"Some... | [
"A fatty dinner (dal makhani and some muenster cheese) satiated me rather well and this morning I was satisfied with just a small breakfast. :-)",
"Your answer got me thinking about Prader-Willi syndrome. ",
"The Mayo Clinic Web site",
" mentions using human growth hormones to treat it. I wonder if other horm... | [
"A good question, and an upvote, I wish I had an answer to, as I often experience what you have described. I've just eaten, I know I'm full, yet I feel hungry? The differences from you is that I'm not vegetarian, and I would say I eat a slightly higher fat diet than average because I attempt my own wacked out ver... |
[
"What does a disinfectant actually do to bacteria and why do high concentrations kill more bacteria"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"We differentiate between disinfectants, sterilizers, antibiotics, and antiseptics. Though many agents fall into multiple categories.",
"Disinfectants are generally used on surfaces, antiseptics on living tissue, and antibiotics within living tissue. Sterilizing agents are extreme solutions such as heat or chem... | [
"It has less to do with their varying chemical mechanisms of action and more to do with where they're used and what/how much they destroy. ",
"\"Sterilization: The removal or destruction of all living cells, viable spores, viruses, and viroids.\"",
"\"Disinfection: The destruction or inhibition of PATHOGENS on ... | [
"Yes, you are. (See this CDC article, section under alcohol; mechanism: ",
"http://www.cdc.gov/hicpac/disinfection_sterilization/6_0disinfection.html",
"). ",
"They confirm your understanding and give the explanation that isopropyl denatures proteins, and that this happens more readily when proteins are diss... |
[
"Would the naked human body function in near-complete vacuum at the surface of the Earth at 22 degrees C?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"Just an FYI (because I don't know the physiological effects), the concept of temperature doesn't make sense in a vacuum. You can't have a vacuum at 22 degrees C, you can just have a vacuum.",
"Even if you were to assign a temperature to the sparse gas that remained, whatever temperature it was wouldn't affect th... | [
"I can provide ",
"several accounts",
" of leaks occuring on the pressure suits of people operating in low or zero pressure environments:",
"Another brush with low pressure occurred in 1960 when Joe Kittinger made his record-breaking skydive from an altitude of over 100,000 ft (30,480 m). The right hand of Ki... | [
"Living things have gases dissolved in their liquids (i.e.: blood) - like nitrogen and oxygen. In a vacuum, these start evaporating rapidly. They boil out of the liquids and the living thing dies.",
"You would die very quickly. It isn't the \"cold\" of space (someone pointed out that temperature isn't an appropri... |
[
"Why are the cables on suspenion bridges not taught?"
] | [
false
] | The cables always seem to sag, I realize a cable pulled taught would likely still sag under weight, but it seems the cable always sags really close to the bridge. Is there a reason for this? | [
"The tension in the cable is inversely proportional to the displacement at the centre of the span so as displacement approaches zero, the tension approaches infinity. The tension is also proportional to the vertical load (the weight of the cable), so there will be a point where increasing the thickness of the cable... | [
"A perfectly taut wire on a suspension bridge would have an obscene amount of tension, wouldn't it? If they were all taut it'd be hard to keep the bridge from pulling itself apart."
] | [
"A perfectly taut wire on a suspension bridge would have an obscene amount of tension, wouldn't it? If they were all taut it'd be hard to keep the bridge from pulling itself apart."
] |
[
"Earthquakes in Antarctica, do you feel them?"
] | [
false
] | If there is a large magnitude earthquake in Antarctica would somebody on the top of the icecap feel it or would the earthquakes forces be absorbed by the ice sheet? How much magnitude would get filtered out by the ice? eg. if it was a 5 at ground level it would be a what on top of the ice sheet? more specific | [
"They would feel the earthquake. The low frequency of earthquake waves would be somewhat attenuated by the rock-ice transition, but they would still be felt. Since the question isn't particularly specific I assume that the quake is a monstrous one, not small enough to be attenuated to the point of being unnoticed."... | [
"How much attenuation would occur?"
] | [
"I hate to answer a question with a question, but wouldn't the effects of the Earthquake be more noticeable as this point?",
"Say the shifting of the plates causes a tsunami of a sorts. Would seeing said wave counts as 'feeling the effects' of the Earthquake? Or are you simply referring to the tremors?"
] |
[
"Due to the curvature of the earth, your head will always travel faster and farther than your feet. Because passage through space and time are inversely related, how much slower are your feet aging than your head?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-09/superaccurate-clocks-prove-your-head-older-your-feet",
"The time difference adds up to about 90 billionths of a second over a 79-year lifetime"
] | [
"Funny question. But the theory is that the closer the velocity is to the speed of light the slower time moves. So your head would be aging more slowly, not your feet. If that rule even applies at earth speeds I would guess in would only be around a few picoseconds in a lifetime. I hope someone knows the math."
] | [
"This was the time difference between two clocks placed thirteen inches apart, not a whole person's height.",
"In one experiment, James Chin-Wen Chou and his colleagues placed one clock about 13 inches higher than its counterpart. The higher clock felt less gravity, because it was a teeny bit farther from Earth’s... |
[
"In correlation to the \"launch a satellite\" question, if I wanted to drill to the center of the Earth, what legal and scientific challenges am I up against?"
] | [
false
] | I was reading and I started wondering "what would it take to do the exact opposite?" What would it take to drill a hole through the crust, mantel, and into the core? How big would the hole have to be so that it would not collapse in on itself? Legally, is this feasible and what kind of legal loops would a person, com... | [
"I'm not an expert, but regardless of the type of drill you used, it would just compress and melt itself under the intense heat and pressure of the core. We could use some Unobtainium right about now. "
] | [
"Forget that, you need motors to run drills. That means either an electric motor or some sort of heat engine. ",
"You can't have permanent magnets down there. It's way past the ",
"Curie point",
" of anything out there. An internal combustion engine won't work because you can't get oxygen down there. You... | [
"Deep bore holes must be kept open with drilling mud, ",
"therefore..."
] |
[
"Does the caloric content of fat (said repeated to be 9kcal/g) change even slightly depending on the length of the fatty acid tail?"
] | [
false
] | Said repeatedly* for the title, my error. | [
"9kcal/g is an approximation, known as the ",
"Atwater coefficient",
". Individual triglycerides will have slightly different coefficients, but not so drastic as to be significant, especially considering the extreme meticulousness that would be necessary to calculate exact values for every given triglyceride."
... | [
"No.",
"Energy from triglycerides (fat) is obtained by breaking the 3 ester bonds between the glycerol and the 3 fatty acid components, which are the same for all triglycerides.",
"(Someone please correct me if I'm wrong)"
] | [
"Not sure if you get energy from the ester bonds, but you can definitely still metabolize the fatty acids themselves"
] |
[
"How legit is Xylem water filtration, and why has nobody thought of it until now?"
] | [
false
] | Its so simple. All you need is the xylem from a tree and a tube to filter water through. Removes 99% of bacteria from water. | [
"I assume you saw a news article about this recently? ",
"I tracked down the study - it's in PLoS One so it's open access.",
" ",
"It's not actually that intuitive to me that xylem would give sufficient filtration for pathogens. Xylem cells are dead - the plant isn't actively filtering the water. Living plant... | [
"I guess you are referring to this paper:\n",
"Water Filtration Using Plant Xylem",
"It seems legit to me. But making it practical is the hard part - and it still might be. There are several engineering challenges:",
"So someone had to test all of that. This research group proved the concept. There still is a... | [
"Yeah I had the same thoughts. Its such a simple concept, though I never would have thought of it. Its these kinds of discoveries that make you excited to see what we can do through studying biology and connecting new ideas with nature."
] |
[
"Why is alpha radiation more desctructive than gamma radiation although gamma radiation has more energy?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"A gamma ray does its damage by hitting a single electron and knocking it off at high speed, close to the speed of light. As that fast electron passes by other atoms, there's a chance that its electric field will yank other electrons off, usually gently. A single high-energy electron can ionize many thousands of ... | [
"Not sure what you mean by \"more destructive\", but if we're talking about health and radiation, a lot depends on the specifics of the exposure scenario. The fact that alphas deposit so much energy per path length means they are easily shielded against. On the other hand, an airborne alpha emitter like radon-222... | [
"gamma radiation has more energy",
"First, let me clarify a bit the meaning of \"energy\" in this context. You may mean:",
"The energy of each particle or photon. Typically alpha particles emitted by radioactive decay carry around 5MeV. Photons in the gamma spectrum typically range from a few hundred keV to 10 ... |
[
"Atoms will emit a photon during an electron transition from a higher shell to a lower shell. Will they emit one if electrons transfer from one subshell to another? (e.g. 2p --> 2s)"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Absolutely. For example, almost all the light we see from a sodium lamp comes from the transition from the 3p to the 3s levels. "
] | [
"I don't suppose you have any good reading resources on this? Most of the resources I'm able to find focus on Shell transitions, like the ",
"Hydrogen Spectral Series",
"."
] | [
"NIST has a database",
" that you can search that lists starting and ending electron energy levels, quite a lot of info in there if you can sort it out. There are also some things out there from universities like ",
"this",
" if you search for the right terms (this was \"sodium emission spectra\")."
] |
[
"#Geo - In a confluence of rivers, how do you determine which is the tributary or main stem?"
] | [
false
] | In a confluence of rivers, how do you determine which is the tributary or main stem? Usually the main stem gets to keep the name and flow to the sea, but in the case of Mississippi and Missouri, since Missouri + Mississipi (after their confluence) is bigger than Mississipi, why is the main stem Mississipi and not Misso... | [
"I worked as a hydrogeologist, and as far as I know, there isn't a rule (at least in the science of geology). The naming of a river is a cultural factor. The length of a river, as well as it's discharge are factors which, along the cultural one, may determine what is called the main stem.",
"Keep in mind, that wh... | [
"Thank you, makes sense, i thought there was a rule, but i'm not surprised that there isn't"
] | [
"I'm a geographer and I will attempt to answer this. I should point out that the geography of the United States is far from my specialty and so is physical geography. ",
"First of all, the average discharge of the Mississipi river is 593,000 cu ft/s compared to 87,520 cu ft/s for the Missouri river. Which means t... |
[
"How do you become stronger when there is adrenaline pumping through your body?"
] | [
false
] | And why can't this strength be accessed without adrenaline? | [
"Muscles are inherently capable of pulling with enough force to damage themselves. Normally, your body limits how much you flex them so you don't injure yourself. Adrenaline tells your muscles to ignore this, which is helpful for the immediate situation but harmful in the long run. But it's worth it if the alternat... | [
"Like I said before, adrenaline really has nothing to do with the direct mechanism. The direct mechanism is your brain sending an inhibitory signal. The thing that prevents muscles from normally ripping themselves off of the bone is a neuronal loop between the muscle and spinal cord. Signals get sent to the spinal ... | [
"Adrenaline \"docks\" with receptors present on many cells. When activated by adrenaline, the skeletal and heart muscle adrenaline receptors increase the cell's energy output, giving increased power and strength. Adrenaline receptors on smooth muscle in the digestive system actually decrease energy output.",
"Tha... |
[
"How do we know (estimate) the age of the universe ?"
] | [
false
] | As far as I understand, we have estimated the age of the universe by knowing the size of the observable universe and the rate at which universe is expanding. That is, how long it would it take to reach the current size give the rate of expansion. But we only know the size of the observable universe and there maybe a h... | [
"What's outside the observable universe doesn't matter for the age. In fact, we don't even need to know the size of the observable universe to get the age of it.",
"The expansion has units of speed per distance: The farther away you look the quicker the distances increase. If you look at something 10 megaparsec (... | [
"Thanks"
] | [
"The rest of the universe doesn’t matter \nBecause the rate of expansion is proportional to the size of the universe ( we take the velocity and the acceleration ) \nSo we can just estimate with what we have \nAnd it is still fairy accurate"
] |
[
"Is there a biological reason for teenage rebellion/angst?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"//I'm not an expert in anything, but...",
"it is easy to come up with evolutionary ",
"Just So Stories",
" for a bad relationship between teenagers and their parents. It is nature's way to \"kick us out of the nest\" and make us learn to provide for ourselves, but because we go to school for so many years we... | [
"Might want to use this link instead. ;)"
] | [
"Years back there was some anthropological study that showed this one Samoan tribe had complete oposite relations between teenagers and adults, then a few years later the teenagers admitted they were completely fucking with the anthropologist. It was a huge controversy and I'm sure others know of it. I'm trying to ... |
[
"How long do aftershocks last after an earthquake?"
] | [
false
] | Given the recent earthquake in Nepal, and the aftershocks that are still >5.0 about 12 hours later, I was wondering if there's a way to predict how long aftershocks can be expected to continue after a big quake. Is it a few days or longer? | [
"To add a little more detail, the statistics of aftershock occurrences have been used to generate two empirical laws which describe their probability with time and magnitude. Omori's law predicts that the number of aftershocks is related to the inverse of time since the main shock, which along with some constants, ... | [
"Well, the general rule of thumb is a month to a year, but it depends wildly on the earthquake type, location, and size, and even considering that it's difficult to predict. The bulk of aftershocks will occur within a few weeks of the primary earthquake rupture.",
"You can ",
"watch through an earthquake map fr... | [
"Does the type of the fault (reverse, normal or strike-slip) affect the applicability of Bath's law? In Greece I see that normal fault tend to produce stronger-than-expected aftershocks (and are frequently accompanied by foreshocks) while strike-slip earthquakes tend to produce very weak aftershocks and never fores... |
[
"Why does the earth have very few impact craters visible from space but other planetary bodies do?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Atmosphere and weather.",
"On one end, we have our atmosphere that most other inner planets lack, this causes a lot of would be meteorites to burn up upon entry meaning we actually do have less craters right off the bat.",
"We also have a wide range of weather patterns on our planet. This helps to erode and c... | [
"to add to ",
"u/triforce0218",
" comment:",
"\nOne reason also being that the the biggest impact event in our solar systems history was the ",
"late heavy bombardment",
" which the majority of big impact craters on other planets/objects come from",
"\nearth is one of the few planets that has/had plate ... | [
"Extending on this, even though many smaller crater have been eroded beyond the point where we can see an actual pit in the ground, there are other signs that give away the existence of a crater long after the visual cues are gone. One of the most fascinating ones, imho, are ",
". By very carefully tracking satel... |
[
"How is water able to evaporate if it is below the boiling temperature?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"The temperature of an object just relates to the ",
" kinetic energy of its molecules. Some molecules have higher energy than the average and some molecules have lower energy than the average. Think of closing your eyes and giving little pushes to a child swinging on a swing at random moments in time. Sometimes,... | [
"The temperature of an ",
" has a simple relationship to particle velocity, which is the only energetic degree of freedom in that case, and that relation defines ",
". ",
"But proper temperature itself is defined by the relationship between internal energy of a system and its entropy, and has no direct relati... | [
"The OP asked about temperature in the context of the evaporation of water under everyday conditions. In this context, temperature is directly proportional to average kinetic energy to an excellent approximation."
] |
[
"Hard and soft water have different interactions with other substances, e.g. the lather with detergents. Do ice and steam made from hard or soft water also have differences in the way they interact with the world?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"I'm certainly no expert, but just thinking about it logically:\nIce might. Ice is known to lock other materials in its structure, which might affect its properties.\nSteam almost certainly doesn't, because the water will boil much sooner than most contaminants. This is why a thin layer of crystal / powder is left ... | [
"Yes. Hard water is water with a lot of calcium carbonate in it. The calcium carbonate is actually the stuff that reacts with detergents. Steam from hard water will leave behind calcite in the boiler because you have done a distillation. You separated the water from the calcium carbonate by boiling the water away. ... | [
"An interesting example of an ice-trapping-things material to Google: Pykrete"
] |
[
"Can all animals be domesticated? If so things like zoos help us tame and domesticate them even if that's not the intention?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Quick definition: taming and domesticating are two different things. Taming is tempering a wild animal's behaviour so that it is easier to handle. This is usually done by raising animals from infancy in the presence of humans. Domesticating is breeding a species over many, many generations to be docile and useful ... | [
"You could probably domesticate any species given enough time an effort. IF we forced ourselves to raise certain species to be amenable to captive situations, we could domesticate them, but doing so would be a lot harder in lion than in chicken for example."
] | [
"I think there was a study, I can’t remember on what animal specifically, where scientists artificially bred an animal over multiple generations and they noticed that the resulting offspring had floppier ears and came in more colour variations than the parent generation. So yes animals can be domesticated over mult... |
[
"Dear /r/askscience. Just how accurate is the signal from pulsar stars? Could you literally set your watch to it?"
] | [
false
] | The question is pretty straight forward. How accurate is the "pulse" from pulsar stars? I have heard its pretty accurate. Does it lose its timing after a while? Thanks! | [
"Highly accurate in some cases. Way more accurate than your watch.",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar#Precise_clocks"
] | [
"The pulses are usually pretty regular, but the time between pulses is actually slowing increasing. Pulsars are neutron stars with very large magnetic dipole fields. The fields spin as the star spins and because of this the star emits radiation. The energy loss of this radiation is enough to cause the star to rotat... | [
"There is a theory that the neutron star does something similar called a starquake (ask me if you want to know more)",
"OK, I'll bite. From wikipedia article (I can't get the silly markup to work):\n",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starquake_(astrophysics)#Starquake",
"The largest recorded starquake occurred ... |
[
"What is molten ice? And how can it be expelled from cryovolcanoes on icy dwarf planets if everything is frozen?"
] | [
false
] | I've been reading about Pluto and Ceres and there's mention of finding 'cryovolcanoes' which expel 'molten ice' . What are cryovolcanoes? How do they erupt? What is molten ice? | [
"I'm pretty sure 'molten ice' isn't a technical term. ",
"Cryovolcanos are exactly what they sound like - ",
" They only occur on moons or dwarf planets where it is really cold. On these planets, chemicals that would normally be gasses on earth can be found in solid form - ices made of ammonia, methane, nitroge... | [
"The theory I've heard is a combination of those two ideas - the moons have warm cores that are kept warm by tidal heating. "
] | [
"That makes sense to me, but there's lots of things other than water ice, and gasses will certainly increase the pressure (for the reason you mention - lower density). "
] |
[
"What would happen if the Earth's oceans were replaced with fresh water?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Most macro sea life would die rather immediately. Land animals dependent on sea life could also face extinction",
"The heat capacity of fresh water is higher than that of salt water, which means the oceans could absorb more heat in the spring/summer and release in Autumn/winter while maintaining a more steady t... | [
"Salinity driven ocean circulation patterns would cease",
"Most notably the North Atlantic Drift, which brings warm water up from the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere to the North Sea. That would cause England to become as cold as northern Canada at that latitude, and all but uninhabitable."
] | [
"Nearly every salt water ecosystem would die off. In the resulting food shortage and mass emigration from communities that relied on fish the original fresh water ecosystems would likely also be in danger due to fishing demands shifting to whats left. The sudden decrease in the amoubt of salt in the world would mea... |
[
"Radioactivity near absolute zero -- stops?"
] | [
false
] | Models of the nucleus show that the protons and neutrons move around randomly. In situations where parts of the nucleus stretch away from the rest, the strong nuclear force can't hold it together and the nucleus fissions (or emits an alpha particle). Now, if this motion is due to thermal energy as it is with atoms and ... | [
"The motion isn't due to thermal energy. I'm not even sure you can visualize it like that, since it should just be a probability cloud. Radioactivity is due to quantum mechanical tunneling, which doesn't care about zero temperature (it makes a difference if you had REALLY high temperatures, like, Sun hot)."
] | [
"I think that what corvidae's saying is that the thermal energies are orders of magnitude smaller than the energies of the nuclear potential well, so they can't effect whether or not the nucleus stays together unless you get to really high temperatures.",
"corvidae may correct me on this, however."
] | [
"many forms of radioactivity aren't about deformations of the nucleus. Most of the low-mass elements are pretty much spherical IIRC. It's about whether permitted radioactive decays allow the nucleus to reach a state of less binding energy per nucleon."
] |
[
"Why is helium used as an RCS gas?"
] | [
false
] | If I'm correct RCS works on the impulse principle P=m⋅v. The energy required to lift an amount of gas is E≈m⋅g⋅h, and the volume to store it V=m⋅R⋅t/p/M. To me it seems like you could use any gas as long as it doesn't pose any engineering challenges (corrosion, diffusion, flammability, embrittlement of tank...). Why do... | [
"What you are missing is that the exhaust gas velocity depends on the gas molecular mass M. You can calculate it using ",
"this equation",
" of the exhaust gas velocity in chocked flow. Basically the lighter the gas the faster it can go and the more efficient with you mass you are. However for a given tank (ie ... | [
"You also have to consider the phase of the propellant in your tank, safety, cost and all that. Cold gas thruster are only really used because they are simple, cheap and light. At some point this kind of question become more of an engineering system optimization problem."
] | [
"thanks. Makes sense now! So an ideal gas would be as heavy as possible?"
] |
[
"If we want energy efficient homes, why not build them like large vacuum flasks / insulated thermos?"
] | [
false
] | It seems like an ideal design for insulation that is rarely used on a larger scale. | [
"It would be a matter of money. It would cost significantly more to build a house in two layers strong enough to resist a vacuum (would pretty much have to be solid metal for something with the support needs of a house as far as I can think) rather than by just using (relatively) cheap plywood and fiberglass insula... | [
"It would be a bad idea unless you had specific air-flow controls to allow air circulation, otherwise moisture would accumulate encouraging mold growth and carbon dioxide would accumulate as oxygen is depleted. ",
"Air exchanged would also have to be heated or cooled, so the extra costs in exchanging and controll... | [
"What about two sheets of metal with a vacuum inbetween to coat the house? Woud also make it sound proof!"
] |
[
"What happens to your body during sleep deprivation?"
] | [
false
] | Right now I'm feeling kind of light-headed. I also seem to be having hot flashes. | [
"You might find this interesting."
] | [
"I did a study of the physical effects of this once. You can expect a huge headache, your arms will not be fully functional (as in they won't be as strong as normal), and although It varies from person to person to person you may find that it will feel weird to swallow. \nI can't really remember anything else off ... | [
"Could someone explain ",
" one's arms get weak from sleep deprivation?"
] |
[
"Why aren't we all ambidextrous?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"Being ambidextrous was neither extra sexually attractive nor extra naturally beneficial in a way that those who weren't ambidextrous were completely unfit. To say a corollary there was not enough negative pressure on being one-handed to make being ambidextrous so much more fit that one-handed people couldn't compe... | [
"http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/search?q=ambidextrous&restrict_sr=on",
"Search function is your friend."
] | [
"it could also just be that the trait never arose. there are tons of parts of us that are hella inefficient."
] |
[
"Does one addiction reinforce the brain's Dopamine reward-loop for other addictions?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"What about gaming or shopping or other activity related addictions? I've heard in the past vulnerability to addiction is or can be hereditary, is there any truth to this?"
] | [
"What about gaming or shopping or other activity related addictions? I've heard in the past vulnerability to addiction is or can be hereditary, is there any truth to this?"
] | [
"That's not really how that works. ",
"Dopamine is not a reward signal. While some motivation-related circuits do happen to include some dopamine neurons, they also include a bunch of other types of neurons, and plenty of non-motivation related circuits include some number of dopaminergic neurons (e.g. the neuron... |
[
"Why is it recommended to wear compression socks while on a long flight (to prevent blood pooling and forming clots) but flying in tight pants (e.g., slim jeans) is considered bad?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Sure, the lowest pressure in the legs is at your feet. Compression socks/leggings have an increasing pressure as you go down to counter the natural pressure gradient. The exception is at the ankles where you need more flexibility, there isn't much pressure from the garment there. More pressure at the ankle wouldn'... | [
"Sure, the lowest pressure in the legs is at your feet. Compression socks/leggings have an increasing pressure as you go down to counter the natural pressure gradient. The exception is at the ankles where you need more flexibility, there isn't much pressure from the garment there. More pressure at the ankle wouldn'... | [
"Sure, the lowest pressure in the legs is at your feet. Compression socks/leggings have an increasing pressure as you go down to counter the natural pressure gradient. The exception is at the ankles where you need more flexibility, there isn't much pressure from the garment there. More pressure at the ankle wouldn'... |
[
"Ice cubes in a glass. (another global warming question)"
] | [
false
] | I recently asked a question about global warming in and got some great answers. My next question deals with sea levels. One of the biggest concerns about global warming is that it will cause a drastic increase in sea levels, affecting millions. However, how exactly would sea levels rise? I did some very brief research ... | [
"Ice floating in the water already displaces its own volume, so when it melts the level of the water will not rise. The concern is the melting of ice on land (such as in Antarctica), where the water is not floating (and hence not displacing water already), so will instead run off into the sea (raising the sea level... | [
"If just the ",
"Greenland ice sheet",
" melted:",
"If the entire 2,850,000 cubic kilometres (683,751 cu mi) of ice were to melt, it would lead to a global sea level rise of 7.2 m (23.6 ft).",
"If the ",
"West Antarctic ice sheet melts",
":",
"If the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet were to melt, this ... | [
"I wasn't aware that Antarctica was on land. I literally thought it was a giant iceberg or something. Thanks for clearing that up. ",
"What is the worst case scenario for the sea levels rising in terms of floods,etc?"
] |
[
"How does a rock like this even form?"
] | [
false
] | So my friend found this strange rock out by the Montauk Lighthouse and we have no idea how this happens. Is this a natural rock formation, or is this actually a rock within a rock? Pls halp. | [
"Fear not ... halp is on it's way ...",
"So ... what you have there is a rounded cobble with a bit of sequential history.",
"The material the rock is made of was formed ... somewhere, I don't know where, and I can't tell what it is just from the picture, but probably to the North or North-West of where you pic... | [
"Pretty much. I is a rock which was cemented to other rocks by a rust-rich mineral mixture which also probably contained some clays."
] | [
"So if I get this right, this is a rusted rock? Or a rock coated with rust?"
] |
[
"Are there different \"strengths\" of placebos?"
] | [
false
] | For example, let's say group 1 is told that they are taking aspirin, and group 2 is told that they are taking a revolutionary new drug. Both are taking sugar pills. Is it possible to get substantially different results? If so, how do we know that we are testing drugs against the most effective placebo? | [
"Obviously both placebos are really no different from each other, but yes there can be differences in the response to placebo based on what you tell the person and what the placebo \"looks\" like. For example, different colored pills seem to have different effects.",
"http://mindhacks.com/2006/10/10/red-pill-or-t... | [
"It doesn't really matter if you're testing it against 'the most effective placebo', because you're telling the people who are taking the drug and not taking the drug that they are taking the exact same thing. "
] | [
"In addition to what others are saying there are other variations. \nGiving 2 pills instead of one generally results in a stronger effect as does getting an injection."
] |
[
"Which species of animals or insects exhibit signs of trading or economy, if any?"
] | [
false
] | Do any creatures trade extra resources in exchange for other resources? Food types? Are humans the only beings who have traded amongst ourselves? | [
"Chimpanzees were once taught to use money in a token economy. They were given a small allotment of tokens, and tasks to do for which they could earn more tokens, which could be taken to another area to \"buy\" food, toys, and the like. They immediately began using money to get sex and sex to get money.",
"Man... | [
"Super delayed thank you!"
] | [
"Could you provide a source?"
] |
[
"Why do smooth pegs/cylinders move more easily when twisted?"
] | [
false
] | I'm referring to smooth cylinders such as pegs, not anything that has a groove or track to it. I noticed when I was inserting and removing some pieces of plastic figures that attached pieces via pegs that I could very easily insert and remove when I twisted to pull or push them out/in rather than trying straight out. T... | [
"The coefficient of static friction is usually greater than the coefficient of kinetic friction. This means that there is less force resisting your movement if the object is already moving."
] | [
"This, combined with the fact that it's easier to overcome static friction via twisting rather than pulling. Once the static friction has been overcome, translation of the object in any direction relies of kinetic friction."
] | [
"also the fuzzy logic of avoiding clashes (static friction) of the various microscopic hills and valleys produced by each surface touching in friction. the same reason jiggling helps some things like key into lock entry or allowing powerball balls from the lottery to not get jammed up in the tiny hole that only all... |
[
"Why do we always want what we don't have/the opposite of what we currently own?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Thank you for your submission! Unfortunately, your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):",
"/r/AskScience",
"For more information regarding this and similar issues, please see our ",
"guidelines.",
"If you disagree with this decision, please send a message to the moderators."
] | [
"Thank you for your submission! Unfortunately, your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):",
"/r/AskScience",
"For more information regarding this and similar issues, please see our ",
"guidelines.",
"If you disagree with this decision, please send a message to the moderators."
] | [
"Thank you for your submission! Unfortunately, your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):",
"/r/AskScience",
"For more information regarding this and similar issues, please see our ",
"guidelines.",
"If you disagree with this decision, please send a message to the moderators."
] |
[
"How do we know that far away galaxies aren't made from antimatter?"
] | [
false
] | Scientists say that at the time of the big bang, in theory, equal amount of matter and antimatter should've been created, but now we have the universe of only matter. But how do we know that exactly? If antimatter has the same properties and behaviors similarly, how do we know that some Galaxy far away isn't made out o... | [
"When matter and antimatter interact it produces gamma rays, very high energy radiation. If there were individual antimatter galaxies we would see a halo of gamma rays coming from them as dust from outside collides with them. If the universe were divided into a matter and antimatter at a larger scale we would see s... | [
"Also, as far as my understanding goes, the gamma rays produced by electron-positron annihilation have very specific energies. In the most common case the photon energy is equal to the rest mass of the electron/positron. Any emission peak in that range would be incredibly obvious."
] | [
"Galaxies interact with each other constantly, so if some were made of anti after they'd be constantly exploding and sending shittons of gamma radiation everywhere. Also it would be extremely confusing how some galaxies would have formed our of antimatter while some formed out of matter, considering that if matter ... |
[
"Why do computer problems very often get fixed by a restart?"
] | [
false
] | I'm a CS major, and I work in ITS. All my life I've just accepted the fact that restarting the computer may often fix the (usually minor) problem. Quite often when I answer a call I direct the user to go through with a restart - this is the default filter for fixing a problem. If the problem persists, then its not triv... | [
"Many of the answers imply some sort of hardware failure, but this is neither necessary nor common.",
"Almost all software is stateful, meaning it keeps some information around about its current status that is referenced every time it needs to do something. (Ie, holding the document you are working on in memory; ... | [
"shame on you for telling someone to do something without knowing why it works :P",
"when a program runs, it gets put into memory - very often problems arise from reading from or writing to the wrong section of memory, or some simillar, putting the system into a 'bad state' ",
"a reboot - stops the state, reloa... | [
"This is the simplest and most accurate answer I've seen in this thread.",
"Source: I've been a systems administrator for > 10 years (and worked my way up the ranks before that).",
"Edit: You brought up the (largely unavoidable) problem at the heart of the matter: \"Because the application ... assumes that its ... |
[
"[Quickie] Is gravity linear? I.e., if I combine two identical suns, will the result have twice as much gravity?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"In Newtonian gravity, yes.",
"In General Relativity, no."
] | [
"no ",
"How so? I'm rusty on the terms in the stress-energy tensor. At what scale does the linearity break down? "
] | [
"The stress-energy tensors add linearly, so the Einstein tensor will be a linear superposition, but remember that that's constructed of the metric and its first two derivatives in a ",
" non-linear way, so there's no obvious linear superposition in the metric."
] |
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