title list | over_18 list | post_content stringlengths 0 9.37k ⌀ | C1 list | C2 list | C3 list |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
[
"How much does diet as a young person affect someone's health later in life?"
] | [
false
] | Like many college students, I don't always pay attention to what I eat. I consume a lot of pizza, fried food, soft drinks, etc. It doesn't seem to affect my health much right now, since my body fat percentage, blood pressure and cholesterol levels are all very good. But could I be quietly doing damage that will later lead to health trouble? For example, is heart disease related to diet and exercise in a person's later years only, or the product of an entire lifetime? I'm not asking about the habit of eating junk food, by the way. I only mean the long term biological effects of that junk food. | [
"Regarding cholesterol specifically, there is evidence that suggests that a lifetime's exposure to cholesterol influences heart attacks. Some people in the Dallas Heart Study have particular PCSK9 mutations that cause them to have low LDL-cholesterol for their entire lives. These people have a lower risk of develop... | [
"not an expert, but an example might be that certain nutrients such as vitamins and minerals are required for correct dna function, that would be an explanation as to why diet would caude you problems later on, with dna damage or errors being cumulative not really being noticeable until middle age and onwards perha... | [
"There was a ",
"recent study",
" published that has linked poor diet to lower IQ.",
"A predominantly processed-food diet at the age of three is directly associated with a lower IQ at the age of eight and a half.."
] |
[
"Leap Years and time difference"
] | [
false
] | If every year is about 365.2425 days... how come after a year passes the time still matches the sunlight? Shouldn't it be behind six hours? And after two years we would be 12 hours behind and have opposite night/day? | [
"Here, check out this ",
"previous discussion",
" "
] | [
"Thanks. And sorry, didn't realize this was a repost"
] | [
"No. This is two different mechanisms. The day/night cycles is simply the day revolving around itself once. This takes 24 hours, and is what we call a day. ",
"A year is the earth moving once around the sun. This isn't perfectly dividable into days, so we need leap years to make sure we don't lose days. If we los... |
[
"What is the probability of a couple having identical non-twins?"
] | [
false
] | Scenario: A couple plans on having 2 children which are not twins. What is the probability that the two children will have the exact same genetics? | [
"Here's ",
"my answer",
" to this question from about a month ago. The figures I give are for the probability of being unrelated (or rather of being substantially less related than the expectation), but the calculation is symmetric, so those probabilities are the same for the other half of the distribution.",
... | [
"Thanks for the reply!"
] | [
"Looking at this from a basic biological perspective:",
"If you ignore crossover, each parent can form 2",
" different gametes, resulting in 2",
" (70 368 744 177 664) different zygotes. The odds of forming two identical zygotes in a row is 1/2",
" which is 2.0 x 10",
" .",
"It's obviously not that simp... |
[
"Instead of the universe expanding at an increasing rate which is accounted for with the term dark energy, could there be an outside force pulling the universe and as the galaxies get closer the pull gets stronger, causing them to speed up?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Yes. You can imagine that by chance we are just living in an underdense region, which would expand faster than the rest of the Universe.",
"The problem is that the expansion seems to be isotropic (=the same in all the directions). So it would mean we are almost at the center of this bubble. It's highly unlikely ... | [
"Is expansion uniform and does it expand at the same rate in all direction?"
] | [
"As far as we can observe, it seems to be."
] |
[
"How strong would an induction coil have to be to heat up the iron in your blood significantly, if that is possible?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Inductive heating only operates on conductors, and the ionic iron in your blood is a completely different form of the element than the metallic form that you find in a hunk of metal. "
] | [
"Your blood is salty though.",
"Iron is a fraction of a percent of your body by weight and bound to proteins. Salts are free to disassociate and make you very slightly electrically conductive..."
] | [
"An alternating magnetic field doesn't heat materials via magnetism but via the eddy current. So any conducting material will do; it doesn't have to be magnetic. Since the fluids in the body are conducting it is possible to heat them up in an alternating magnetic field. But I can't give you numbers."
] |
[
"Does Protandim do anything? If so, how does it work?"
] | [
false
] | My Dad keeps going on and on about it. It just seems like a scam to me. Is it better than eating fruits and vegetables? | [
"Your body has evolved in an environment where it processes natural foods. Dietary supplements can be useful if you're lacking some specific substance, but I'd say that in general, you're better off eating the original source of the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, etc."
] | [
"Why? Please provide support for your claims and explain how this works."
] | [
"Humans developed in a world without artificially-produced substances. Your body is used to certain ratios of nutrients. There are well-known facts (like ",
"calcium inhibits absorption of iron",
" ) that supplement companies will ignore so they can have both iron and calcium on their bottle.",
"Read the ",
... |
[
"What is the probability of my cards adding up to a prime number. I stick my hand into a full deck and pull out a stack (could be 1 card, could be all 52)."
] | [
false
] | Pulling a random # of cards out of a deck, what is the probabilty of these cards adding up to a prime number? | [
"I assumed that all possibilities to draw a stack of cards had the same probability, including the empty stack of cards. A Jack counts for 11, a Queen for 12, and a King for 13. I found a (roughly) 18,4% probability for the sum to be prime.",
"I don't think there is any good theory which would give the answer rig... | [
"The number of all k-combinations for all k: 0 <= k <= n is n",
" . (EDIT: REALLY TIRED THIS PROBABLY ISN'T TRUE IN DECK OF CARDS CASE BUT IT'S PROBABLY STILL HUGE",
"EDIT: JUST KIDDING THIS IS STILL CORRECT) So, if we're looking to brute force this approach and assume that checking a combination takes a millis... | [
"I'll check back in a year to see if you're done yet ;)"
] |
[
"What sort of negative consequences could result from a desert ecosystem suddenly receiving an exorbitantly large increase in rainfall?"
] | [
false
] | By this I mean say, frequent small showers, perhaps the occasional storm. Weather patterns in wetter parts of the world. EDIT: 11 comments, but only 3 are displayed. What gives? | [
"Desert dirt is usually VERY hard and has a hard time absorbing moisture. When there is suddenly water, it mostly just flows creating large flooded areas and mudslides. I live in a desert area and any time it rains we get flood warnings and roads close because they get flooded. When I was a kid, there was a time... | [
"Desert soil can be impermeable (leading to flash floods as you say) but it doesn't have to be. Sand, for example, is quite permeable. "
] | [
"In general systems always tend to assume a form of equilibrium. The moisture in air and ground is one example of this. However if it suddenly starts rainning too much the ground will become oversaturated and can't take up any more water. The water will then stay on the surface flowing towards lower ground. This wi... |
[
"I am an astronaut. Part of my ship/station spins to create artificial gravity, part of it does not. What happens when I move from non-spinning portion of the ship to the spinning portion (and vice versa)?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"You'd have to do more than jump. You'd have to run fast enough to counteract the motion of the spinning portion. If you could do that, though, then yes."
] | [
"Not until you came in contact with the floor. Well, the air there is likely moving very slowly towards the outer wall of the spinning portion, so you'd very slowly drift. But without some way to transmit the force you would experience from the spin, you wouldn't experience the force, and thus wouldn't fall."
] | [
"That's not true. Check out the formula. Coriolis force is cross product of vector of angular speed and vector of your speed. Both vectors are perpendicular in the situation I've described earlier so there has to be coriolis force."
] |
[
"How does aging work? Did people age the same way 100 or 1000 years ago?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Aging was pretty much the same 100 and 1000 years ago. It's not exactly true that people didn't live as long hundreds of years ago. What's true is that the life expectancy was lower, but that was mainly due to much higher rates of death during infancy and childhood, and the lack of medicine to prevent people from ... | [
"Biologically people would age the same way. But the less advanced medicine would also mean that non life threatening injuries and illnesses would not heal as well as they do now. Many people would be left with bad scarring, there'd be more people with stiff or crippled limbs from earloer injuries, all these thing... | [
"I think the fact that we now have a vastly improved diet has certainly altered the way we age. If you eat things which have oils or nutrients which are good for the skin then physically I imagine you would look younger."
] |
[
"What exactly detracts humans and other animals from cannibalism?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Well, from one evolutionary standpoint, it's more likely for disease to jump from human to human than from an animal to a human. "
] | [
"This. Members of the same species share almost identical immune systems so a disease that is capable of surviving in the victim is more likely to find the cannibals immune system hospitable than a prey with a dissimilar immune system."
] | [
"In addition to what others have said, you can look at it like this: ",
"It is more beneficial to a community to increase its population than decrease it. More members means more work, more food, and more protection. Cannibalism would decrease population, not to mention it would limit trust, which is generally es... |
[
"I saw a dead wasp being picked up by another wasp who flew away with it. Why would a wasp do this? Is this typical behavior?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Food. Most wasps are carnivorous, meat is meat.",
"Edit: Since people are asking, I was giving a vague but accurate answer to a vague question. I don't know what kind of wasp he saw, but I assume it's a standard yellowjacket (",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_jacket",
") which will eat... well lots of ... | [
"Insectologist here,",
"While adult wasps don't eat much meat based product (though some have been known to from time to time) their young do need meat which the adults obviously have to find.",
"Depending on where you saw the dead wasp it was either picked up to be taken and used as food or alternatively taken... | [
"carnivorous ants are a threat to all other insects (and a few invertebrates) except for the very, very few that prey on or parasitize them.",
"the 'Zerg Rush' is an extremely effective strategy in the insect world."
] |
[
"What is the most probable physical distance between you and a random person on the internet?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"I imagine you'll need to provide a specific starting point before anybody can answer that question.",
"Simplest answer would be total land area divided by population: per Google, 510.1m/7.442b = 0.0685 people per sq. km.",
"EDIT: Ah, that's not quite right, that'd be average distance to nearest person at all. ... | [
"As the crow flies? Or as the neutrino travels?",
"Simplifying the earth somewhat as a sphere 6378 km in radius...",
"As a crow flies -- Maximum distance traveling along a great circle geodesic would be pi*6378 km. Or about 20,000 kilometers. So somewhere between zero and twenty thousand kilometers. My WAG is t... | [
"Interestingly, every non-uniform distribution will lead to a smaller average distance than a uniform distribution. And the internet users have an extremely nonuniform distribution - nearly all of them are in the northern hemisphere, for example."
] |
[
"What is the root cause of odd phobias?"
] | [
false
] | Like fear of clowns or cotton. What makes a small percentage of people scream in terror from these harmless things? | [
"Phobias are caused by operant conditioning and heuristics. In other words, humans experience a stimuli and then coincidentally the circumstances are such that it surprises them and induces a fear response. This then is paired and develops into what we call a phobia. For example, a toddler is sitting enjoying the c... | [
"maybe...but why do people have such perfect matching reasons for it.",
"Like cotton phobia almost everyone with it hates the smell, the sound it makes when moved and the way i works. If that theory is correct wouldn't the hate it for different reasons?"
] | [
"For it to be a genuine phobia the person has to fear and hate the stimuli. For example, wincing at the sound of fingernails on a chalk board is not really a phobia, so much as it is an annoying stimuli. ",
"If someone has a phobia to the sound of something, it's rooted in fear and anxiety to that particular soun... |
[
"Why do thunder and lightning not occur during a snowstorm?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"It happens. I've experienced it during a blizzard in the 90's. "
] | [
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundersnow"
] | [
"I don't know why bitternIdontcare got downvoted. It ",
"does happen",
", and I've seen it several times."
] |
[
"How do we know what the inside of the Earth is like?"
] | [
false
] | As far as I know, we've never drilled past the crust of the Earth right? So how exactly do we know what the mantle and core are like? | [
"You're absolutely correct - the deepest we've ever drilled is about ",
"12km",
".",
"So everything we know about the rest of the earth's internal structure has to be inferred from a variety of remote-sensing techniques, experiment, comparison to analogues, and then numerical models into which all this data i... | [
"Hello there!",
"No-one has ever penetrated Earth's mantle to reach the core to investigate what it is made of, so much of what we \"know\" is theory based on intelligent deduction. Some deductions are based on good empirical (based on observation or experiment) data obtained by analyzing the seismic waves that a... | [
"Additional detail: P-waves (primary or compressional waves) can propagate through both solid and liquid media, while ",
"S-waves",
" (secondary or shear waves) only propagate through solids because liquids don't have the shear strength to propagate them. We can tell that S-waves don't propagate through the out... |
[
"If I place two bowls of water in a freezer and one bowl is stagnant and the other is being stirred, will both bodies of water become frozen at same or different rates?"
] | [
false
] | Just curious to see if the friction of the water is enough to impact how water becomes ice. | [
"Mixing generally enhances crystal nucleation rates by increasing the number of critical concentration fluctuations. So I would say the stirred bowl will freeze quicker.",
"Why don't you try the experiment yourself and report back your findings."
] | [
"Going back to my fluid mechanics days....",
"When water velocity goes up, the pressure goes down. Lower pressure means you need to be even colder to freeze water.",
"At the molecular level, there is additional kinetic energy which would require the temperature to be lower as well.",
"That being said, I dont ... | [
"In addition to what several others said, the turbulence of the stirring has the effect of keeping the liquid at an even temperature throughout. In stagnant water, the water near the edges can get colder than that in the middle of the bowl, which reduces the temperature delta between the liquid and bowl, which redu... |
[
"Is there really a difference between adult and child medicine?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"YES. There is a difference. Children are not just \"tiny adults\", and some medications have completely different effects in children vs adults. Similarly, many diseases are more common in particular age groups. This goes beyond a dosage phenomenon, there are many important differences in pediatric medicine. "
] | [
"Having just covered this topic in anti-infectives. Many medicines will not be prescribed to children due to their indirect actions. A fascinating phenomena is metal chelation, where a molecule will chelate/sequester metal ions due to lone pair of electrons (in ketones, amides, acids etc) donating to polyvalent ion... | [
"Yes. The difference is also more than just size--children are not just small adults.",
"For example, the brains and bodies of children are, in some ways, more plastic and resilient than those of adults. They have a better chance of recovery from some types of injuries. An extreme example is the hemispherectom... |
[
"What is the actual mechanism behind the symptoms that are caused by trisomy?"
] | [
false
] | I’m not thinking of any specific chromosome but for example let’s say trisomy 21. What is about having a third 21st chromosome that affects the person in that particular way? | [
"Having an extra chromosome changes the balance of synthesized proteins. The different genes coding for one trait (say face shape) are not located on a single chromosome but one several different chromozomes.",
"Having an additional chromozomes adds genetic material that is processed by the cells. Phenotypes (man... | [
"The general phenomenon is called gene dosage. This is also why we only observe trisomies from smaller chromosomes because the larger chromosomes have so many genes that the presence of an extra one is invariably embryonic lethal. ",
"https://www.weizmann.ac.il/molgen/Groner/research-activities/trisomy-21-gene-do... | [
"Trisomes for X, 13, and 18 are not \"invariably embryonic lethal\".",
"Those are not the larger chromosomes, they are smaller than average (except X). And the X chromosome is special because there's a mechanism to shut down all but one X chromosome in each cell. That's there specifically to correct the gene dosa... |
[
"Why are bright colors in nature associated with \"poisonous\" and how did poisonous animals develop these bright colors?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"It is called conspicuous coloration. It is a means of communicating that you are poisonous. A brightly colored butterfly is eaten by a bird, that bird gets sick because it is a poisonous insect. The next time the bird sees a brightly colored insect, it won't eat it. ",
"What is interesting is that species will e... | [
"It is also called aposematic coloration. It is associated with animals that are poisonous (bad for you if you eat it) and venomous (bad for you if it bites you). Bright coloration with high contrast (frequently against black) warns predators not to mess with it. ",
"The coral snake has black, yellow and black ba... | [
"The other nonpoisonous species evolve to the poisonous color because the bird won't eat any nonpoisonous yellow ones either. Yellow accidentally becomes an advantage. "
] |
[
"How did Schrodinger come up with the wave equation, if he didn't derive it?"
] | [
false
] | I am from India and conservative people often boast about how Schrodinger got his wave equation from Hinduism. They say Schrodinger, because he used to study Hindu scriptures, got the equation inspired from Vedanta. Now, I know this is pseudoscience, so I tried to see how Schrodinger derived it. Google search says the equation can't be derived and is axiomatic. Then...how did he make this equation? Did his mind just produce this equation out of sheer intuition? I thought maybe its like how Newton got F=dp/dt, but again, this equation is far too complex to just come out of nothing. So...what's happening? | [
"axoimatic basically means he looked at what was measured and built an equation from what was observed. he knows he was right because his equation correctly predicts measurements, not because it is derived from other equations.",
"F=ma is kind of similar"
] | [
"true experimentally",
"So Schrodinger put this all together and set out to find a wave equation description of the electronic states within the potential of the hydrogen atom. ",
"This wave equation correctly predicted the energies and intensities of spectral lines for the hydrogen atom.",
"See his ",
"per... | [
"Hey thanks! That was a very detailed response. Also, thanks for showing me his own article. Didn't expect that as a citation"
] |
[
"What causes the appearance of pixelation in the spot emitted by a laser?"
] | [
false
] | has a decent drawing of what I'm talking about. I've long wondered about this, it appears to move with the laser not the surface when the beam is moved, so it must be a feature of the laser itself.. | [
"It's called \"laser speckle,\" and the answer to your question is interference. ",
"Laser light is not like ordinary light; all the photons are in phase. Two photons in the laser, bouncing off two adjacent spots on your target, will travel slightly different distances before returning to your eye. This path leng... | [
"Another cool thing is using the speckle to do eye testing",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_testing_using_speckle"
] | [
"Thank you for this one. I had played with the effect and determined that somehow the pattern is a property of my eye since the pattern moves with the eye and is not stationary."
] |
[
"In an AC, series LC circuit, how can the inductor voltage be higher than the supply?"
] | [
false
] | I understand how this is mathematically possible. Since the inductor and the capacitor voltage and impedence are in phase opposition, their combined impdence is the difference of the 2. Physically, I am having a hard time coming up with where the extra voltage comes from. | [
"KVL should hold true - the sum of the voltages around a loop should equal zero.",
"In an AC circuit, some voltages can be negative, that allows other voltages to be greater than the supply."
] | [
"You can have a circuit where a component can have a higher voltage drop than the source. This is very common in split phase induction motors. In many cases, the start winding voltage will be greater than the supply. This is also why start and run capacitors are rated for such high voltage."
] | [
"First off voltage isn't a conserved quantity, so don't freak out if you see circuits like that in the future. Recall that the voltage across an inductor is defined as:",
"\n",
"v(t) = L * di(t)/dt",
"\nIf you aren't operating in steady-state then it's very easy to see how the voltage can reach larger-then-su... |
[
"Why do metal pots and pans (or even the occasional stranded fork or spoon) not short out kitchen electric burners? Shouldn't crossing several of the individual \"wires\" in the twisted element cause a short circuit?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"The actual electrical conductors (resistors) in your stove aren't exposed. They're inside the heating element, enveloped in ceramic (non conducting), and then covered in the metal you see glow bright orange. They're totally insulated. Open up your stove and pull one out. Look at the plug and you can see the compos... | [
"Electric stovetops are metal wire clad in ceramic insulator clad in an outer protective layer of metal. The ceramic keeps it from electrocuting you and the steel on the outside keeps you from accidentally damaging the ceramic."
] | [
"Nope. Those toaster and radiant heater elements are often bare \nnichrome wire and depending on where you contact them can deliver \na substantial part of the voltage applied to them."
] |
[
"What is it that causes sweat to generally smell bad?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"It's not actually the sweat that smells bad, it is the bacteria living around the sweat glands. You'll notice that not all sweat smells bad, either -- sweat that forms on your forehead is not stinky. ",
"The sweat that smells bad is sweat that comes from apocrine sweat glands, which are associated with hair foll... | [
"Really not much. They're there because they can be. However, like anywhere on our body, a colonization of non-harmful bacteria do help to prevent pathogenic bacteria from finding a foothold, so they do provide that benefit. There is also a theory that some odors caused by these bacteria act as pheromones and may h... | [
"Really not much. They're there because they can be. However, like anywhere on our body, a colonization of non-harmful bacteria do help to prevent pathogenic bacteria from finding a foothold, so they do provide that benefit. There is also a theory that some odors caused by these bacteria act as pheromones and may h... |
[
"Converting Magnetic Field Strengths - Ampere-Turns to Tesla"
] | [
false
] | A friend of mine wants to recharge a magnet in an old 1919 car engine. The internet has told him that he needs a field strength of 20,000 Ampere-Turns to do so. We have a magnetic field generator we think will work and even a measurement system in our lab. But we're going to take the measurement in Tesla (or Gauss). So how does one convert from this weird "Ampere-Turn" to Tesla? We googled the hell out of it, found only shady sources, and concluded that we need 40 TRILLION Telsa (which is patently ridiculous). So google has failed us. Does anyone know a good resource relating the plethora of magnetic field measurement systems? : an AT is a measure of magnetomotive force, but a Tesla is a measure of magnetic induction. The two must be related by something more complicated than a unit conversion. | [
" Holy smokes, I found a really cool Abstract to a paper that is likely talking about a magnet very similar to yours. Read ",
"On K.S. Magnet Steel",
" and check out one of the earliest scientific papers on the magnet. They used a ",
"-field of 0.13 Tesla for their hysteresis curve, which should have gone pas... | [
"The internet has told him that he needs a field strength of 20,000 Ampere-Turns to do so. ",
"Is it possible that the source was indicating using a solenoid rated at 20,000 Ampere-Turn? Meaning, a solenoid with 20,000 loops coupled to a 1 Ampere source current?"
] | [
"For an ideal ",
"solenoid",
", the relationship is ",
", where N is the number of loops, I is the current, L is the length of the solenoid, and µ is the ",
"magnetic permeability",
" of the core material. Your 20000 Ampere-turns would be the value of NI.",
"Note that (as some others have mentioned) 200... |
[
"Since the nervous system uses some form of electricity to transfer messages, is it possible to short it and what would happen if so?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Yes its possible. A neuron has a dendrite, a cell body and an axon. The dendrite takes the action potential of other neurons (through synapses) - it is a bit difficult because it often changes between a chemical signal and an electric signal - then the signal runs through the cell body (the middle part of the neur... | [
"Well if you inject salt into the blood stream, that actually shorts the most muscles, because action potentials which are used to propagate the signal don't function anymore, because plus minus potential between cells outside and inside is no longer in balance. Salt contains positive ions and your system works by ... | [
"As far as what happens, I think MS would be a good example."
] |
[
"How does a hypodermic needle versus a sewing needle pierce the skin differently from each other?"
] | [
false
] | I’m just wondering since I found out that sewing needles are apparently thinner. Why would a medical needle be less “sharp?” than a sewing needle? | [
"A sewing needle is a solid piece of metal that tapers to a point. It needs to be strong enough to pierce through whatever kind of fabric it's being used to sew, and hold its shape for a lot of hours of use. If you look at it under magnification, the point is centred over the shaft. ",
"A medical needle is hollo... | [
"Yep. Getting a blood sample taken uses a noticeably thinner needle than donating blood. I presume this is to increase flow to speed up the donation process."
] | [
"That's part of it, but the main reason is shear forces on blood cells. The thinner the needle, the more blood cells get damaged by shear forces as they pass through. This is usually irrelevant when taking a blood sample for analysis, but it's important to minimise when you want the donated blood to last well in st... |
[
"Are there any galaxies in the \"edge\" of the observable universe which we can't fully observe because part of it is unobservable?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"It just doesn't work that way. Keep in mind that seeing farther away is equivalent to seeing farther into the past. And it is that phenomenon combined with the finite age of the universe which creates the limits to the observable Universe. For a very old/far away galaxy the image of the close side might be a hundr... | [
"None currently known. The furthest galaxy ever discovered (and just announced yesterday) is SXDF-NB1006-2 at 12.91 billion light years from earth.",
"Read more here"
] | [
"I, and I believe the OP, were discussing the observational sphere - that is, as something moves from inside our observational sphere to outside... or something that is partially inside our observational sphere."
] |
[
"What about a bug bite makes skin swell / itch?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"This occurs as part of your innate immune response. This means that it is short-term and non-specific. It is this non-specific response that will cause your initial swelling on site.",
"Basically something called cytokine proteins are made in response to the invasion of a recognized foreign body. Cytokines ar... | [
"As a followup, does that mean that if you use an anti histamine (or something similar) it is portentially makong your body more vulnerable to whatever foreign bodies caused the initial reaction? "
] | [
"Thanks for the answer!"
] |
[
"What causes morning grogginess?"
] | [
false
] | I'm basically retarded when I wake up. What causes that? Does the brain wake up in a certain order, i.e. motor functions before language comprehension? | [
"You have a natural cycle of melatonin levels in your brain. Melatonin is a hormone that is made in the pineal organ (which responds to light through an array of different nuclei ultimately stemming from input from the retina). This is known as the circadian rhythm. It determines when you feel tired and when you fe... | [
"That doesn't quite make sense to me, wouldn't your brain be active before your body, in that case?",
"Interestingly enough, I used to be a very active sleeper, and did not have this issue. Now I sleep very still, and experience the grogginess a lot. However, I thrashed around a lot when I was like, 12. So there'... | [
"I have the same problem when my alarm clock gets me up, but not so much on the weekend. I've always attributed it to waking mid REM cycle rather than naturally waking up when the cycle is complete. I've read that your brain releases paralytic neurochemicals during dreams to keep you from acting out you dreams. Bef... |
[
"Does bees' honey concentrate or filter out toxins from the original flowers?"
] | [
false
] | I was thinking of this recently when reading an article on the main page about NYC beekeepers. In a pollution-heavy area, where flowers might be exposed to toxins in the ground/water/air, can those toxins concentrate into honey? Or is pollen and/or honey somehow insulated from toxins by some mechanism? Since I imagine it will be asked, we can break them out into earthly/local contaminants (heavy metals in the soil, agricultural runoff, etc) and air pollution from cars/trucks/smog/etc. | [
"I don't know about \"concentrate\" but toxins from the environment are certainly found in honey. Note this doesn't just relate to the bees' ability to filter toxins from nectar before producing honey - it also relates to the flowers' ability to filter toxins from water and soil before producing nectar.",
"Specif... | [
"Yes honey ",
"can have toxins in it",
". This can be from the environment, a feature of the nectar itself as produced by the plant, or as a result of post extraction processing. From the environment the plants themselves do a lot of filtering before the bees collect the nectar or pollen so just because the p... | [
"though heavy metal concentrations occasionally peak over recommended safety limits.",
"Without reading anything about this, I'd question whether that's a big deal. Few people eat a teaspoon of honey a day, most likely, and most probably eat a teaspoon per month on average. ",
"So it's a far bigger issue to hav... |
[
"If an object could absorb all light."
] | [
false
] | If I was holding a sphere, say the size of a tennis ball, that absorbed all the visible light that hit it, what would I see if I looked down at my hand ? | [
"An object that flawlessly absorbs all light, in contrast to reflecting it, is known in physics as a ",
"Black Body",
". An idealized black body will absorb any incident photon, regardless of energy level; however, this ",
" mean that the body will appear, as a black hole, to be completely pitch black. For a ... | [
"You would see a very deep black ball. Black is what we \"see\" when little to no visible light is present. "
] | [
"The closest example that actually exists would be a black hole, as they come very close to a perfect black body. "
] |
[
"What makes common core so controversial?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Do we have any hard evidence that this seemingly complicated, and from most stand points unnecessary, alternative to traditional teaching has any merit?",
"I think you are confused. ",
"Common core is a set of standards.",
". It is not some alternative or un-necessary. It simply lays out the subjects ch... | [
"Then why are parents and faculty fighting it with such rigor? "
] | [
"Because it controls when each subject is taught at the federal level.",
"Here is a good article.",
"It is the adoption of the new Common Core assessments that is giving teachers heartburn. Actually, it isn't even the assessments so much as the collision between the assessments and another, parallel initiative,... |
[
"Are the studies about the dog guilt response really based on good science?"
] | [
false
] | Over the last year or so, I've seen a lot of these studies saying that dogs don't really feel guilt, they are just responding to the owner's behavior and the so-called "guilty look" they get are either imagined or just a response to being scolded. Here's an example: It always seems like the studies are framed to produce this result. For example, in the one that I linked, the method is to have the owner leave a room and a dog is either given a "forbidden" treat or not. Then the owner comes back into the room and is told the dog took it or not, and they respond to that information, but it is typically wrong. Now first of all, there is no actual circumstance for the dog to feel real guilt in this situation because there is no instance of them actually taking the treat. Also, aren't humans similar in that they will also sometimes display irrational guilt, particularly as children, if they are innocent of an offense but are still scolded harshly? Does anyone know of a study of this nature with very good methods or would you consider one like the linked to be sufficient to make such a claim? | [
"Being told once not to do something is not the same as being told a thousand times not to do something.",
"Would dogs feel guilt if they did something, like sit on the couch, which they have been trained to not do?"
] | [
"Firstly, there is a lot of anthropomorphizing that happens with the popular media and especially dog owners. Just because a dog 'looks guilty' doesn't mean that the dog actually ",
" guilt. It may just have a facial expression that humans interpret as such. That's just how humans are wired, and the wolves that c... | [
"That's sort of what I'm wondering too. ",
"I recall learning in psychology way back just from the textbook where there was some study where dogs were allowed to carry no basket, a basket, or a basket belonging to their owner, and they determined that dogs can feel pride when allowed to \"flaunt\" their owner in ... |
[
"Would a mole of individually frozen water molecules which were then placed in a container together behave as a liquid?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"\"Individually frozen water molecules\" doesn't make much sense, since phases are a property of bulk materials. However, you are essentially describing the process of making ",
"low-density amorphous ice",
", essentially a glassy solid made out of low-energy disordered water molecules."
] | [
"I agree with what ",
"/u/xenneract",
" said. Asking about individually frozen water molecules doesn't really have any meaning; the freezing process of water deals with changes in the way that multiple molecules pack relative to each other. If you only have one water molecule, it isn't really a solid or a liqui... | [
"You would probably end up with a super-cooled liquid that, when disturbed, rearranged into a solid. The state is defined by the amount of energy in the molecules and their orientation to one another. If you just set a bunch of low-energy molecules in a space together, they would have the energy of a solid, but the... |
[
"Can we convert Hydrogen to Helium like scientists did with Nitrogen to Oxygen? if yes how do we do it? if no then why not?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Ah yes, that makes sense. If you can manage to produce ",
"N by bombarding ",
"N with neutrons it will undergo beta decay to produce ",
"O. The decay is rather quick, with a half life of ~ 7 s.",
"Something similar can happen in the case of hydrogen. The isotope ",
"H (tritium) undergoes beta decay to pr... | [
"This conversion process happens in the sun all the time, and it is what people attempt to do in nuclear fusion reactors on earth. The problem is that you need incredibly hot plasma for the reaction to occur, which is difficult to contain without melting the reactor."
] | [
"We can, just as with any other nuclear transformations. You can bombard nitrogen with protons and if a proton enters nucleus the atom will become oxygen. Rutherford was using alpha particles (helium nucleus) for this resulting in turning nitrogen into oxygen and hydrogen.",
"The general problem with this is that... |
[
"What is antimatter?"
] | [
false
] | I've heard it thrown around in science fiction, and seen a couple of posts talking about it. What exactly is it? | [
"Antimatter is a type of material composed of particles that, while having the same mass as normal matter particles, have opposite charge and other physical properities.",
"To explain, consider first the normal sort of matter we encounter everyday; it is composed of atoms, which, in turn, are made up of three typ... | [
"I've heard antimatter can be thought of as going backwards in time. What does this mean?"
] | [
"There's a symmetry in physics called CPT symmetry (the acronym stands for charge conjugation, parity inversion, and time reversal). In short, it says that if you replace all particles with antiparticles (charge conjugation), flip the sign on all of your spatial coordinates (parity inversion e.g. x -> -x), and run... |
[
"Does COVID viruses stay dormant in your body after you recover?"
] | [
false
] | Hi all, just wondering can COVID viruses stay dormant in your body even after you have recovered from it? I know cold sores & chickenpox can stay in the body for long periods of time without being activated, and I was wondering since all of these are all categorized as a viral infection, could this apply to COVID as well? Thanks in advance guys, genuinely curious about this. | [
"Not in the same way. SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus. It has to keep replicating to stick around. So it's not dormant. Chicken pox and wart virus can splice their genome into our genome and just wait. Later the virus genome is activated and starts replicating again."
] | [
"This sounds a lot like an theory designed to avoid experimental validation.",
"No matter how much you test, if you don't find it is either too small to be detected and/or somewhere else. ",
"This would mean that there virus is in a location where the immune system cannot reach. Not impossible, but unusual."
] | [
"I think that Herpesviruses don't actually splice their genomes into ours. Their DNA is indeed present in the nucleus, but actually integrating int our own linear DNA would interfere with their replication and DNA packaging. ",
"They are not like HBV (which does it sometimes) or HIV (which does it routinely). Th... |
[
"How do we determine where a sound is coming from?"
] | [
false
] | I was sitting on the bus and realized that I knew pretty much exactly where a girl behind me was sitting, just because I could hear her talk. How do we do that? Edit: Thanks for the answers, guys. Damn, nature's awesome. | [
"Sound localization",
" happens because our brains are able to interpret the differences in sound coming from both of our ears and use it to locate the source of the sound."
] | [
"Just wanted to quibble because the answers have been slightly vague (not wrong, just vague) so far. ",
"There are a few animals (humans not usually listed among them), that use a neural ",
"tap-delay-line",
" in their midbrain structures to very precisely time when sounds arrive at different ears. This sys... | [
"Which leads to really cool things, like ",
"holophonic sounds",
"."
] |
[
"What makes a star grow from white to yellow, then red, then blue?"
] | [
false
] | Sorry if I got the order wrong. More specifically, why do stars grow bigger and start to fuse helium into heavier elements over time? | [
"Wow ok, I was wayyy off. I was under the impression that a star stages from dwarf up to hypergiant and follows a sequence of colors because of the fact that when our star will eventually run out of fuel, it will start to expand and become red. I thought that when a star ran out of hydrogen it started fusing the he... | [
"Wow ok, I was wayyy off. ",
"I think, i didn't explain it very well, because you are more or less correct. You said: ",
"I was under the impression that a star stages from dwarf up to hypergiant ",
"Dwarf stars, which are basically the same like main sequence stars, do evolve to giant stars. But as i said... | [
"Ok, the pictures do help a lot. Sorry for my lack of understanding. So I'm curious, what causes a star to begin to evolve? From your explanation, I know that a star begins to fuse Helium when it becomes massive enough, but what causes the star to become more massive? "
] |
[
"Linguists of Reddit: do any written languages (real or fictional) take into account pitch? Length? Volume?"
] | [
false
] | In other words, is it feasible to have a written language that conveys emotions as they are spoken? How ridiculously complex would this language be? | [
"Many Chinese languages, including Mandarin and Cantonese, are tonal."
] | [
"Many Chinese languages, including Mandarin and Cantonese, are tonal."
] | [
"I guess I was trying to explain how speech combines so many different things to create wholes that can be drastically different from one another, even if they're simple. For example, saying \"That's nice.\" It can sound sincere, insincere, enthusiastic, apathetic, depressed, sarcastic. As far as I can tell, unless... |
[
"How is it possible to detect where the impact between particles occurs inside of an accelerator?"
] | [
false
] | If my understanding is correct, the uncertainty principle limits our ability to know the exact position of a particle in space. If that is the case, how are we able to detect their position inside of accelerators accurately enough to get them to smash into each other as well as detect the position of the impact to record the results? | [
"I think you are overthinking a bit too much. Simply, we don't detect every particle position.",
"To answer your title question- when people use accelerators, we use magnets to guide the particles. Why? Because protons are charged particles and react to an EM field. To crash these atoms, places like the LHC have ... | [
"Imagine this collision like two missiles colliding with other.",
"Actually, it's like shooting two needles across the atlantic ocean and hoping that they collide. But if you shoot 100 billion needles at once a collision becomes fairly likely."
] | [
"Can you be more specific? Are you talking about physics experiment- crashing protons together for elementary particle studies- or new element synthesis-crashing heavy ions together?"
] |
[
"What is \"gimbal lock\" as it pertains to spacecraft, and why is it such a big deal?"
] | [
false
] | I've tried reading but probably need an easier to understand explanation. I recall watching the movie Apollo 13 and they were always afraid of gimbal lock, but I never understood why, and why it was such a bad thing. Is it still an issue in today's spacecraft? Thanks! I read up on and think I understand what's going on: the gyroscopes provide information about orientation much like how if you close your eyes in a car you can feel the car turning right or left, and if you know your orientation when you started, you can know which way the car is facing based on this. Thus if the gimbals "lock" together, you no longer have the ability to tell your orientation and thus your ability to navigate is ruined. | [
"Gyroscopes make use of nested gimbals and a flywheel, which allow a craft to measure its orientation in 3D space because the gyroscope remains in a fixed position because of its angular momentum. However, when using a 3 gimbal system (one rotating about the x, y, and z axes) there is a problem where the rings can ... | [
"Gimbal lock is actually a much deeper phenomenon than you described",
"Modern gyroscopes don't actually use spinning flywheels or gimbals. Common ones (like the ones you might find in a cell phone or quad rotor) use microscopic vibrating bits to measure the coriolis force and really fancy ones (like in military ... | [
"thing of note to easily understand gimbal lock: imagine you are playing a first person shooter and you point your gun vertically at 90°: you are no longer able to point the gun left and right, moving the mouse sideways only rotates alongside the gun's axis. You have two axes locked in the same attitude providing t... |
[
"Why is there no layer that distributes instructions to CPU cores equally?"
] | [
false
] | Right now, the program's gotta make sure all cores are utilized evenly. Why is there no layer that does this as default? | [
"Because this would not be beneficial at all. On the contrary really. If your program is using threads then the operating system will distribute computations between the cores, but if your program is monolithic it would be very difficult to make this work. ",
"Some data would have to be constantly passed between ... | [
"This is already done to an extent. Modern processors are generally superscalar, meaning they can executive multiple instructions at once, and feature out of order execution. However, there's a limit to how much this can help. ",
"Most programs have code that depends on the results of other sections of code. It's... | [
"A program's basically a linear list of instructions presented to the CPU. Later instructions often depend on the results of earlier instructions. If you ran the instructions on multiple cores, say an earlier part running on core #1 and a later part running on core #2, then core #2 would have to wait until core #... |
[
"Would more salt dissolve in hotter water heated under higher pressure? what's the limiting factor stopping more salt from being dissolved at greater and greater temperatures and pressures?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Based on the trend linked, one can reasonably expect NaCl solubility to increase at over 100°C. So while pressure should not directly effect solubility, raising it is the only way to get water past 100°C."
] | [
"Based on the trend linked, one can reasonably expect NaCl solubility to increase at over 100°C. So while pressure should not directly effect solubility, raising it is the only way to get water past 100°C."
] | [
"Water can become supercritical in deep sea hydrothermal vent systems and we actually use the brine separation from the super critical fluid enriched in dissolved gasses as a proxy for understanding the sub-seafloor temperature."
] |
[
"I have a cold. Why is there a \"threshold\" for sneezes?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"It's this type of thinking which leads one to believe ",
"webbed feet are normal.",
"is an autosomal dominant hereditary trait which causes sneezing, possibly many times consecutively (due to naso-ocular reflex [3]) when suddenly exposed to bright light. The condition affects 18-35% of the human population."
] | [
"Now you know how it feels to be a chick during sex. "
] | [
"Look up into a bright light when you have this problem, it will never trouble you again."
] |
[
"How can a car's breaks work if the engine is still running without either the engine breaking or the break pads wearing down?"
] | [
false
] | Break pads use friction to stop the wheels from turning, but if the engine is still running, the spark plugs are firing, the gears are turning, which are trying to turn the wheels. So, it seems like if this is the case, something should break. What am I missing? | [
"Picture a turning shaft coming from the engine with a flat disk attached to the end. Now picture a second shaft coming from the rear axle, and also ending with a flat disk attached to the end.",
"The two flat disks are very close together, facing each other.",
"Press the two disks together, and the engine is c... | [
"The use of the phrase \"internal clutching devices\" was intended as an oversimplified means of explaining....The torque converter performs the function of a slip clutch....but explaining the specifics of that mechanism would only cloud the explanation where simplifying it to \"clutching devices\" allows the easie... | [
"It appears that you are missing the clutch.",
"The clutch acts as a dynamic disconnect point between the drive shaft and the axles. There are some other things involved, like the transmission and differential(s), but for the sake of simplicity let's just reduce the the system to the driving shaft and the driven ... |
[
"Can muons be used to \"boost\" hot fusion reactors?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"The temperature of the plasma in fusion reactors is on the same order of magnitude or greater than the binding energies of muons in muonic atoms, so many of them likely won't even occupy bound states."
] | [
"Could you create muonic atoms first and then do magnetic compression while the muonic atoms are still fusing to boost the muonic fusion?"
] | [
"Maybe, but an idea like this can't be fully fleshed-out in Reddit comments."
] |
[
"What criteria allows a polygon to tessellate on a sphere?"
] | [
false
] | I roughly know the criteria for tessellating a polygon on a plane. Follow-up: Can a polygon tessellate on a paraboloid or hyperboloid? If so, how? | [
"Do you mean to ask about regular polygons?",
"It seems to me that if you were able to tile a sphere with regular polygons (that is, shapes on the surface of the sphere whose edges are composed of segments of great circles), that you'd be able to fairly easily project inwards and obtain some sort of polygonal sol... | [
"that sounds right - if you simply retain the vertices of the sphere tiling and replace all the great circle arcs by straight lines in euclidean space, you have a solid all of whose faces are identical polygons. i am not sure if there are any solids other than the five platonic solids that have all their faces iden... | [
"There are not, indeed. There are many ways to prove it, but I don't know any ways I can quickly type out here on my phone. They're easy to look up, or I can respond later if you prefer. "
] |
[
"So multiple galaxies colliding create quasars, what do multiple collisions of quasars create?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"(Astrophysicist here)",
"Quasars aren't formed by galaxies colliding. When galaxies collide it triggers intense star formation (look at ",
"Arp 220",
", for example) which is extended over a region many thousands of light years across.",
"Conversely, a quasar is a point source; this means that it is small,... | [
"Couldn't you get two quasars to be formed in the same galaxy? and then have them (over time) attract each-other and collide?",
"I thought there were models for colliding black holes, but maybe I'm mistaken."
] | [
"Quasars are basically the vomit of giant blacks holes, and nobody knows for sure what happens when two black holes collide. You'll probably get one hell of a show though."
] |
[
"Does gravity have a speed?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"Yes gravity propagates at the same speed as light.",
"This leads to ",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave",
" (s)"
] | [
"Not an expert. But I think it travels at the speed of light. Can we even test that?"
] | [
"According to general relativity, gravitational deformations in space-time propagate at the speed of light (they must in order to preserve causality). Therefore, to the best of our knowledge, it would take at least 8 minutes until after the sun dissapeared for us to notice, electromagnetically ",
" gravitationall... |
[
"What would happen if it was possible to split a proton using a quark?"
] | [
false
] | I’d like to preface by saying I’m extremely new to splitting atoms and the technology behind it. I’ve been doing some research into nuclear energy and I think I understand the very basic concept of a neutron is fired at an atom which causes a chain reaction of the atom continuously splitting which creates energy. I know that inside protons are quarks, not too familiar with those but I’m learning. My question is if we could capture quarks and fire them at a proton would that create the same amount of energy, or any energy at all? | [
"Quarks are subject to confinement, so there's no way to produce a beam of individual quarks, only bound hadrons.",
"But anyway, we already ",
" \"split apart\" protons. For example, the LHC, which collides two proton beams."
] | [
"The force that holds quarks together works the opposite of most forces, like gravity or electromagnetism gets weaker the farther apart things are. The strong nuclear force that holds quarks together gets stronger the more you move the parts apart, so you need more and more energy to get them apart. ",
"Worse b... | [
"Sort of, with the added detail that as you pull the two quarks apart you add energy to the bond between them, and because the force pulling them together has a minimum value (around the weight of ten tons, as I recall!) the potential energy in the bond quickly exceeds the mass-energy needed to create two more quar... |
[
"How fast would you have to drive west to keep the sun at the same spot on the horizon?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Take the cosine of your latitude, multiply by the mean circumference of the Earth, which is 24,874 miles, and divide by 24 hours."
] | [
"It depends on your latitude. At the equator you would need to circle the Earth in 24h so about 1,500km/h. At the North pole you would pretty much just need to keep facing the Sun so pretty much zero.",
"edit: multiplied by 3"
] | [
"Boom",
"."
] |
[
"At what point can we definitively say that a moving object has left our solar system?"
] | [
false
] | What is the boundary of our solar system and how do we determine it? Is there a gray area and if there is, how large is it? Or have we assigned a distinct boundary to our solar system and if you go one meter beyond it, then you've left the solar system? | [
"The recent articles about the Voyager stated clearly that it is defined based on not being able to detect either the solar wind or the magnetic field of our solar system, and that the amount of gray area is basically unknown, and will only be known after Voyager goes much further and no longer detects any solar wi... | [
"the amount of gray area ... will only be known after Voyager ... no longer detects any solar wind and none of the magnetic field from our solar system ...",
"Wouldn't this distance be affected by how powerful the spacecraft's on board detectors are?"
] | [
"The decay of the strength of a radiation source decreases as a square of the distance from the source. From this, and from the rate of decay it is possible to observe the data converging towards a final value representing essentially the background radiation from interstellar space. Usually criteria can be set whi... |
[
"How do genes \"encodes\" the geometry of the body of a specie ?"
] | [
false
] | All species have different shapes, proportions of their limbs and bodies. Also, we know how to read genes and how ATGC codes enable other proteins to produce some kinds of other cells or molecular structures. I can understand it can change over time because of evolution, but how will the fetus begin to build some embryonic shapes like the spinal cord, the organs, the bones ? What dictates or rules cells or proteins to say "spawn a stomach here" or "spawn 3 fingers with 3 phalanx" or "make sure this body have those proportions" or "make sure this bat's arms have wings" ? Pardon my logic, because I'm more fond of maths and programming, but if geneticists mapped a genome, can't they make an elephant with 6 legs, make human have horns or wings ? Again sorry for the ignorance, but I know X-men is plain fictional and non-sense to me, but what do we know about the geometry of life being and the relation with their genes ? | [
"How DNA encodes the geometry of an organism is the central problem of ",
"Developmental Biology",
".",
"One key part that isn't completely understood yet is the transcriptional regulatory system. Certain DNA sequences, which do not encode amino acid sequences, act as on/off switches for producing these amin... | [
"I'll try and give you a short, but broad outline of how development works. When you get down to it, the cells of your body grow the way they do because they are told to by specific signals. ",
"Signals are transmitted through the interaction of proteins with DNA, RNA, or other proteins. The most important kind o... | [
"but if geneticists mapped a genome, can't they make an elephant with 6 legs, make human have horns or wings ?",
"Depending on how exactly you define \"mapping a genome\", geneticists really haven't mapped genomes, they've sequenced them. We can tell you the sequence of all 3 billion bases (A's, T's, G's and C's... |
[
"Why do infinity mirror tunnels appear to curve off in the distance as opposed to keeping in a straight line?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"It's very hard to align mirrors to be perfectly parallel and any deviation, no matter how minor, will be multiplied over and over. The net result is that almost any hall of mirrors will always appear to bend off in one direction or another.",
"(Edited for autocorrect mess)"
] | [
"Because the mirror aren't perfectly parallel so the light doesn't bounce straight back and forth. It is possible to get straight or nearly straight tunnels but no one puts in the time or effort to make a perfect one."
] | [
"Though, because the bending tells you exactly what direction the mirrors are off, it's pretty easy to align them until the bending is almost totally gone... ",
" they can be adjusted at all, most mirrors just aren't built to be adjustable. "
] |
[
"is it possible to boil a pot of water simply by the act of stirring?"
] | [
false
] | my understanding is that heat is the random movement of atoms and that the faster the movement the hotter they are. so my question is, it possible to boil a pot of water simply by the act of stirring? and if so how much stirring would it take to boil a liter of water? | [
"Yes. You have to add the heat faster than it can dissipate (by evaporation or radiation), so you'll need to stir it very quickly. A stirring machine can accomplish this for you. Science joking aside, top-tier blenders can boil water."
] | [
"I wanted to call BS on the blender thing, but it appears you are right. I would have thought the speeds would need to be a lot higher."
] | [
"If the motor is generating that much heat, it would be a really shitty motor."
] |
[
"How can a storm which packs 60+ mph winds only be moving at 25 mph?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Like swinging a rope in a circle overhead at 20 km/h while walking at 5 km/h."
] | [
"The wind is going 60 mph in a circular tornado. The eye of the tornado is moving 25 mph, but the winds creating the tornado itself are 60 mph."
] | [
"Great analogy!"
] |
[
"How do bugs hibernate for so long if they have a short lifespan?"
] | [
false
] | I always wondered how bugs come back every year and I kind of assumed they migrated. Apparently some do but also some hibernate, like mosquitoes. But I only see them during the summer. How do bugs with short lifespans not go extinct every winter? | [
"I'll address mosquitoes specifically, they do one of three things:",
"Mosquito females lay eggs in late fall. They lay them in moist ground, which promptly freezes at the start of winter. This freezing renders the egg dormant, and little to no biological activity happens at this stage. In the spring, when con... | [
"Some insects do migrate, but most species living in temperate climates overwinter. How they overwinter depends on the species; some as eggs, some as immature stages (nymphs, larvae, or pupae), and some as adults. Insects can live for longer than many people realize. Species with only 1 generation per year live for... | [
"Ok, I work in aging research so I'll give this a shot. There are animals that can enter a seemingly non-aging diapause stage. By non-aging I mean that no matter how long they are in this stage, their post-diapause lifespan remains the same. How they do this is completely unknown, but really, this reflects the fact... |
[
"Not sure where to categorize this: Is information infinite?"
] | [
false
] | Bear with me here, this is not a philosophical question. And I'm not high or otherwise mentally altered. People think of information and the potential body for all information as something that is infinite. But if information is stored in digital bits, written texts and synapses between neurons, then it is finite as it exists in matter in energy. . Does this mean that there is a potential limit for the universe's capacity for information? Could we exceed 10 bits of information? If so, in what medium could it exist? Have we already exceeded that amount, rendering my question moot (if so, fair enough, just ELI5 because I'm obviously dumb). Or is information finite, and if so, what is the universe's potential capacity for information? | [
"The computational capacity of the universe is finite, and you can relate it to the number of particles in the universe and their individual degrees of freedom. ",
"Here is a paper which estimates there to be around 10",
" bits available in the universe",
"."
] | [
"Information in the observable universe is finite. ",
"Seth Loyd: Computational capacity of the universe, Physical Review Letters 88 (23):237901.",
"\n",
"http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0110141",
" "
] | [
"You can get the paper from arxiv. Another poster was kind enough to post the link.",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16e4xl/not_sure_where_to_categorize_this_is_information/c7v6kyy"
] |
[
"Ask Anything Wednesday - Physics, Astronomy, Earth and Planetary 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! Things like: "What would happen if...", "How will the future...", "If all the rules for 'X' were different...", "Why does my...". Please post your question as a top-level response to this, and our team of panellists will be here to answer and discuss your questions. The other topic areas will appear in future Ask Anything Wednesdays, so if you have other questions not covered by this weeks theme please either hold on to it until those topics come around, or go and post over in our sister subreddit , where every day is Ask Anything Wednesday! Off-theme questions in this post will be removed to try and keep the thread a manageable size for both our readers and panellists. Please only answer a posted question if you are an expert in the field. . In short, this is a moderated subreddit, and responses which do not meet our quality guidelines will be removed. Remember, peer reviewed sources are always appreciated, and anecdotes are absolutely not appropriate. In general if your answer begins with 'I think', or 'I've heard', then it's not suitable for . If you would like to become a member of the AskScience panel, . Past AskAnythingWednesday posts . Ask away! | [
"The laws of physics don't change as things get small. The same laws of physics apply on all scales. You just typically only notice quantum effects in \"small\" systems."
] | [
"Is there any way for a planet to have a gas moon?"
] | [
"Natural climate change happens over extremely long periods of time giving Earth and it's various life forms time to adapt. The climate change caused by humans in the last 100yrs would take thousands of years to occur naturally. Plus we should be in a cooling phase if humans hadn't caused warming.",
"Source: ",
... |
[
"How does information transmission via circuit and/or airwaves work?"
] | [
false
] | When it comes to our computers, radios, etc. there is information of particular formats that is transferred by a particular means between two or more points. I'm having a tough time picturing waves of some sort or impulses or 1s and 0s being shot across wires at lightning speed. I always think of it as a very complicated light switch. Things going on and off and somehow enough on and offs create an operating system. Or enough ups and downs recorded correctly are your voice which can be translated to some sort of data. I'd like to get this all cleared up. It seems to be a mix of electrical engineering and physics or something like that. I imagine transmitting information via circuit or airwave is very different for each, but it does seem to be a variation of somewhat the same thing. Thanks! Edit: A lot of reading/research to do. You guys are posting some amazing relies that are definitely answering the question well so bravo to the brains of reddit | [
"It's a ",
"huge tower of abstractions",
". I'm just going to talk about wires to simplify, and I'm going to leave off a bunch of essential but distracting bits. Let's imagine you've got a couple of computers and your network cable is that lightswitch and light bulb.",
"First off, agree on what ",
" and ",
... | [
"A cool thing about that idea of asynchronous serial signalling using start and stop bits is that it is much older than you'd expect - it was in commercial use by 1919, for teleprinters sending typed text over telegraph lines. Exactly as described above, except using only five bits for each character instead of eig... | [
"Encoding binary information in circuits is simple - you vary the voltage between two levels. Low voltage represents the digit 'zero', slightly higher voltage (5 volts, for example) represents the digit 'one'.",
"With digital signals over radio, things can get much more complicated since there are concerns about ... |
[
"Was the development team of the first atomic bomb surprised by the size of the explosion or had they calculated how much energy would be released before the first explosion?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"The size of the explosion of a nuclear fission bomb is directly a result of the efficiency of the fission reaction. Will you fission 5% of the total fissile material, or 10%, or 20%, or what? In the case of the Trinity \"Gadget,\" this efficiency was related largely to the amount and symmetry of the compression of... | [
"EDIT: My post is currently at the top, but you should skip straight to ",
"/u/restricteddata",
"'s much better one: ",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9zrl1q/was_the_development_team_of_the_first_atomic_bomb/eabstj1/?utm_content=permalink&utm_medium=front&utm_source=reddit&utm_name=askscience",... | [
"The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday s... |
[
"Why do I get headaches if I concentrate too hard? How can I prevent this?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Sorry, this is definitely heading tdown the ,no medical advice' rule on reddit. A medical professional is the only appropriate person to ask this kind of question."
] | [
"Hmm. I guess I was focusing more on the first question than on the second, but I see where that would be in violation of Reddit's ToS. Honest mistake; my apologies. I will rethink these kinds of questions in the future before I post them."
] | [
"There's certainly a question in there you could repost. Something along the lines of 'Can concentration cause headaches? If so, how?'"
] |
[
"How do Na+ and Cl- ions conduct electricity in salty water?"
] | [
false
] | So when two electrodes are placed in a salty solution, on becomes a cathode (+) and the other an anode (-). The Na+ ions are attracted to the anode and Cl- to the cathode. How does this form a closed circuit? I don't understand. I also found that when the ions are at the electrode, they lose/gain an electron, but I still don't see how that forms an electric current | [
"You almost said it yourself. Electricity is defined as the constant flow of electrons or electrically charged particles through a substance. Since sodium chloride is soluble in water, you get those two ions with differing charges, in the same ratio. Sodium ions flow to the anode and chloride to the cathode, like y... | [
"so they move across the bridge of ions",
"How is this done? I'm pretty sure this was the question OP asked.",
"give their electrons to the ion that prefers to be negative (in this case, chloride), therefore reducing the chloride. ",
"Chloride is already negatively charged. How can you reduce chloride (-1) if... | [
"This post",
" has a good, detailed way of describing the process (including pictures, yay!), as it isn't as simple as how I stated it. There are a few intermediate steps happening along the way, like production of H2 gas at the anode, leaving behind an OH- (the \"electron\" I referred to). This OH- wants to trav... |
[
"are there any animals that cannot swim?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"\" I called the mammal curator of the Rio Grande Zoo in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Tom Silva (you remember him from my \"Can elephants jump\" column). According to Tom, most large primates such as gorillas and orangutans cannot swim, partly because their centers of gravity are in their necks and sternums. \"They sin... | [
"Plenty of people are unable to swim."
] | [
"butterfly comes to mind",
"heavy/dense birds maybe, ostrich?"
] |
[
"AskScience AMA Series: I am a forensic anthropologist at the University of Florida who will be excavating for human remains in Tulsa, Oklahoma during the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. AMA!"
] | [
false
] | Hi Reddit, my name is Phoebe Stubblefield! I am a forensic anthropologist, a research assistant scientist and interim director of the C. A. Pound Human Identification Lab at the University of Florida. During the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, I will continue to excavate with the Physical Investigation Team at the Oaklawn Cemetery in Tulsa, Oklahoma to identify victims from the violence in 1921. I'm here to answer your questions about the intersection of cultural anthropology with forensic sciences and our work in uncovering some of the history behind the Tulsa Race Massacre, a devastating attack on what was once known as Tulsa's thriving Black Community. My research interests at the University of Florida are: More about me: In 2002, I received my Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Florida where I was the last graduate student of Dr. William R. Maples, founder of the C.A. Pound Human ID Lab. As an associate professor at the University of North Dakota for 12 years, I directed the Forensic Science Program, created a trace evidence teaching laboratory and helped undergraduate students learn more about careers in forensic science. I have also served as forensic consultant for the North Dakota State Historical Society, the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and with different medical examiner districts throughout Florida. I will be on at 2p.m. ET (18 UT) to answer your questions, AMA! Username: | [
"I have a more personal question - how does this work impact you emotionally? I mean from the the actual human moment you have when interacting with a deceased person? Do you have support when you need it? Does your profession have things in place to prepare you for that? Are you expected to just toughen up? Do you... | [
"Thanks for joining us here in AskScience! How do you go about identifying particular victims in a setting like this? Is it context + the general info you can get from the skeleton like gender, height, and age range? Or is there more detailed info you can get from individual skeletons that narrow down the identity ... | [
"Thanks for asking a question! My contract is to do all I can to achieve identity, indicate context (associated with the race massacre/not associated/not determinable), and document the cause of death, traumatic or otherwise. I'm being cautious about the prospects of publication. Academia has a long history of u... |
[
"Why can we not reach absolute zero?"
] | [
false
] | I understand we can get to within billionths of a degree of it, but what stops us being able to actually achieve absolute zero? | [
"No, they did not achieve at temperature of T=0! They realized negative temperatures, which is an effect unique to quantum systems, but it is not the absolute zero. ",
"Also, there are some theorists that actually dispute the fact that there can be negative temperatures and attribute this to mathematical inaccura... | [
"No. At absolute zero a quantum system is in its ground state. The ground state of a free particle is simply uniform everywhere. That's pretty unrealistic since there are always potential wells which would create bound states, but there's no logical problem."
] | [
"We cannot achieve absolute zero because there is no place in the universe that is absolute zero, therefore heat will be transferred into any object that has such a low temperature. For example, imagine you have a steal box and within it you have some sort of gadget that is trying to bring the temperature down to a... |
[
"Why are chemical and nutrition tests always performed on rats?"
] | [
false
] | When we want to know how something applies to us humans, wouldn't it make more sense to test other primates, like chimpanzees? Is is just the cost difference between a rat and a monkey that has determined this? | [
"The brain chemistry between rats and humans is very similar in the way it reacts and deals with new substances making it suitable to run preliminary tests. Another benefit is the growth cycle of a rat to maturity is a lot faster than that of a chimp or monkey allowing studies to be performed on the effects of che... | [
"Rats are mammals, so a lot of their physiology is similar to humans. It is not exact by any means (or even all that close). But rats are cheap to house in large numbers, easy to breed, and simple to take care of. Legally, there are many exceptions for rats and mice that do not apply to animal testing on dogs, cats... | [
"Yay, a topic that is totally up my alley! I'm actually currently studying veterinary medicine with a goal of working on an IACUC and have worked with mice/rats/others for about 10 years in various capacities.",
"First, I want to say that ",
"/u/baloo_the_bear",
" is right on the money, but I'd like to add m... |
[
"If the collision of antimatter and matter results in lots of energy. Would creating matter out of energy also create antimatter?"
] | [
false
] | I know I'm severely simplifying a complex situation, but that's the best way I could think of phrasing it. | [
"Yes. ",
"Pair Production",
" creates both a particle and an anti-particle from energy, but it requires very high energy photons and typically happens in a heavy nucleus."
] | [
"Yes, creating matter out of photons, etc also creates an equal amount of antimatter. This is because there's a symmetry in the standard model associated with lepton number and baryon number, which means that the total number of baryons (leptons) minus antibaryons (antileptons) will not change. I.e. if you create... | [
"If by \"energy\" you mean \"photons\", then yes:",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_production"
] |
[
"Would a larger cerebellum give you greater self control?"
] | [
false
] | I remember going over it in class and the cerebellum is responsible for most voluntary actions. So would a larger cerebellum give you more self control whether it be over things like motor skills, or impulsive behavior? | [
"Although the cerebellum is important in motor control, it is not the region of the brain that initiates movement (The direct motor control comes from the Motor Cortex region in the Cerebral Cortex). The cerebellum is responsible for coordination, precision and timing. It receives sensory inputs, processes the info... | [
"So from what I remember from my course in neurophysiology that I took several years back, the \"control\" the cerebellum gives is non-concious corrections. Ie: your brain decides to move the tip of your finger somewhere, and it knows how to roughly control the muscles to do so. The cerebellum takes these rough com... | [
"the cerebellum is basically the brain's ",
"transmission",
". it doesn't do a lot on its own - the cerebrum is largely responsible for your volition."
] |
[
"Why does grapefruit change the way a persons body metabolizes medicine/drugs?"
] | [
false
] | What is in it that does this? Do other fruits and foods do this? | [
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapefruit_drug_interactions"
] | [
"Your body releases enzymes from the liver called cytochrome p450 enzymes. These are responsible for breaking down drugs. Some drugs (or foods) cause an increase or inhibition of these enzymes. In the case of grapefruit, there is an inhibition. Less breaking down of meds occurs and so more chance for side effects t... | [
"Can this also be clinically used to increase the good effects of a drug? Could they combine a small dose of an expensive drug with grapefruit enzymes to effectively imitate a larger dose?"
] |
[
"Why doesn't cancer lead to the creation of another organ?"
] | [
false
] | From what i get, cancer is when a cell reproduces crazily, but if there are different types of cells(heart, liver,lung) why does it make a tumor instead of whatever that type of cell is supposed to be part of? | [
"For example if some lung tissue became cancerous, it isn't lung cells that are proliferating, it's cancer cells. The DNA mutations completely change the cell and makes it no longer work for the host.",
"\nIt's really just a mush of cells that do nothing apart from use your body's resources to divide. "
] | [
"Thanks!!!!!!!!!! You made it really clear! "
] | [
"You have a lot of different types of cells in each organ, which are organized in a specific way to do their jobs properly. One of the main requirements for cells to become cancerous is that they stop responding to the signals that are supposed to regulate where/when/how they grow.",
"So if you get lung cancer, ... |
[
"When we talk about previous ice ages, how widespread was the cold? Did it cover the whole planet?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Aren't we still technically on an ice age by some definitions?"
] | [
"There is a distinction to be made between global or near global glaciations in the deep geological past vs. periods of permanent ice at the poles vs. the advance of said polar ice due to orbital variation. ",
": In the past there have been instances (Sturtian, Marinoan, and possibly Ediacaran) of near-global gl... | [
"There have been a number of \"Ice Ages\" of varying severity. ",
"probably the most severe [\"Ice Age\"] of the last billion years, occurred from 850 to 630 million years ago (the Cryogenian period) [before there was complex multicellular life or life on land] and may have produced a ",
"Snowball Earth",
... |
[
"Why are cancer survivors more likely to 'relapse' (get cancer again) than someone who has never had it? Are their surviving cells more susceptible to damage?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"Three main reasons.",
"That person could have had a genetic mutation that causes them to be more likely to get certain cancers. ",
"The treatment could have been incomplete. In theory, even if one cancer cell survives treatment or is missed by surgery the tumor could regrow.",
"the cancer may have already un... | [
"When some cancer cells aren't killed by treatment methods, they can resume division. This creates a new tumor, which, if you've taken away all the cancerous tissue you can find, looks like getting cancer again."
] | [
"http://xkcd.com/931/"
] |
[
"In a deck of playing cards, drawing 1 card at a time, how do you calculate the probability of drawing the King of Diamonds before the Two of Spades?"
] | [
false
] | You do NOT replace the cards you take. Also, what if you had a deck of 21 cards with 10s and up (aces high) plus a Joker, and you were calculating the odds of drawing the King of Diamonds before the Joker? What if it was of drawing all four kings before the Joker? | [
"This is a lot easier than you think, I guess.",
"The probability of any permutation of cards is equal. Due to symmetry, half of them will have the king of diamonds before the two of spades, and the other half of them will have the two cards the other order around. So for the question in the title, the probabilit... | [
"To lay out what TheBB said more simply:",
"All of the other cards have nothing to do with the problem. Each draw of an irrelevant card is like you might as well have never drawn the card. Just pretend all of the other cards aren't there, because they don't matter.",
"For the first problem there are two possibl... | [
"Thanks, it seemed so much harder. I was thinking \"okay, 1 in 21 chance of king right away, 1 in 21 of joker. If you don't get either, try again with 1 in 20 odds of both, etc. This seems hard, let's ask some people. My friends don't know, let's google it. I can't find what I'm looking for, let's ask someone else.... |
[
"If you measure how much smaller an object is in a reflection, is it possible to calculate the distance to the mirror?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Absolutely, if you know the size of the object in real life.",
"Edit: The simplest way to do this is via trigonometry, based on the basic principle that angle of incidence is the same as angle of reflection.",
"With a flat mirror, the object appears the same size as if it were at a distance equal to its distan... | [
"Well, if you know the curvature of the mirror it can be done as well!"
] | [
"You would also need to be sure the mirror was not curved."
] |
[
"What is the mechanism of quantum entanglement?"
] | [
false
] | I know the basics, tickle quantum widget A, and over there, instantly, quantum widget B laughs. I know it can't be used for communications since we can't know the original state, so we can't measure a change. My question is what force or phenomenon is transmitting state change between from A to B? Is it anything that is even describable? | [
"It's describable since it's a prediction from quantum mechanics. The basic idea is that if A and B are entangled then they are only one object. Entanglement means you can't consider AB as two different objects A and B. So that's why tickling the A part of the object AB can make the B part laugh."
] | [
"If by \"mechanism\" you mean \"intuitive picture that doesn't involve mathematics\" and if by \"physically\" you mean \"something I can understand with my mind which is designed for classical physics\", then yes, nobody understands quantum physics. But we do have a good description of it."
] | [
"No, it can't be described. That's why Einstein called it \"spooky action at a distance\". It's also important to note that nothing is being \"transmitted\" - the \"spooky action\" is instantaneous."
] |
[
"Since Neptune and Pluto have intersecting orbits, will they ever collide? If not, what's the closest they will ever be to each other?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"These questions are answered by ",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto#Relationship_with_Neptune"
] | [
"Wow, I think it's even more interesting that even over millions of years, they will never collide due to how stable their orbits are. Thank you"
] | [
"No prob!"
] |
[
"I have a Brita filter that leaks, which I catch in a small container on the shelf below. The water in that container freezes, but nothing else in the refrigerator does. Why?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Wind chill can speed cooling and result in the perception of lower temperatures, but it cannot actually cool below its intrinsic temperature."
] | [
"Cold air would apply windchill I presume, and that would lower the temperature just below the freezing point? "
] | [
"Remember that salt water lowers the freezing point of water; other minerals behave similarly. If the filter removes minerals in your water it could make it freeze at a slightly lower temperature.",
"The location probably plays a large part as well, if it is in a thin layer and falls through cold air it would fre... |
[
"How can the universe be 150 billion light-years across and only 13.7 billion years old?"
] | [
false
] | A coworkers and I had this discussion Friday and we may very well have confused ourselves into missing something obvious. Taking the fact that the universe is 150 billion light-years across and estimated to be 13.7 billion light-years old how is this possible? Knowing that a light-year is the distance traveled over a year it should just be a 1:1 ratio correct? Couldn't the max radius of the universe be 13.7 billion light-years while the full universe would be 27.4 billion lightyears? We spent a half an hour in passionate debate about this and I went as far as to convert distances, calculate the speed of light in miles/year and find out how many actual miles light would travel during the age of the universe. The more we discussed the topic the more we were stumped...it seems so straight forward and yet so illogical, we could very well just both be missing something obvious. This all started with this article, and my coworker asking the age of the the universe then stating "how can anything be 18 billion light-years away if there have only been 14 billion years of expansion?". So what obvious conversion or explanation did we miss? Sources: | [
"Light rays can reach us from a distance greater than 13.7 billion light-years because the universe has been expanding while the light ray has been travelling. While the ray of light itself can't have travelled further than 13.7 billion light-years, the universe is still expanding ",
" it, so by the time it reach... | [
"\"While special relativity constrains objects in the universe from moving faster than the speed of light with respect to each other, there is no such theoretical constraint when space itself is expanding. It is thus possible for two very distant objects to be expanding away from each other at a speed greater than ... | [
"because space is expanding everywhere, not just at an \"edge\" which is how you may be invisioning it. "
] |
[
"Does food need to constantly rotate in microwaves ? If so ,why ?"
] | [
false
] | I know this might be a stupid question ,but why does food need to rotate in a microwave ? If the principle is to use radiation to heat the food shouldn't it work while the object is stationary ? | [
"Microwaves are resonant cavities, so you get standing waves in them. This means that the energy apported to whatever you have inside is not spatially homogeneous, not even averaging over time, and as the radiation for microwaves is in the cm range (if it were in the sub-mm range it wouldn't be noticeable for pract... | [
"No, but it helps to cook it more evenly.",
"Early microwaves didn't have turntables. We had to open the door part way through cooking and rotate it manually. If we didn't, it wasn't unusual to pull out a TV dinner that was really hot in some spots, and cool in others. ",
"The turntable just automates the proce... | [
"Um. The source you provided says the exact opposite. From that source:",
"When microwaves pass through water the water molecules absorb some of the microwave energy and as a result they twist and turn, writhing around, as the radiation passes by. However after the microwaves have gone the molecules stop moving... |
[
"Why are adverse reactions to vaccines more common in younger people than older people?"
] | [
false
] | I was looking through the adverse reactions to the COVID vaccines, and I found it interesting that the CDC report that younger people are more likely to experience (or at the very least report) an adverse reaction to the COVID vaccines than if you were older. I would have thought it would be the opposite (due to older people having weaker immune systems)? Can someone explain this phenomenon? Is this something of all vaccines? What's the biological mechanism here? Refer to table 1 of : 64.9% of 18 to 49 report an adverse reaction. I thought perhaps it was to do with unequal category sizes (18 to 49, versus say 50 to 64), but I don't think it is as this represents 2/3 of the total. P.S. I really don't want to get into a debate about whether or not people should take the vaccine or not (I think people at risk, definitely should). I simply want to understand why vaccines effect different age groups in different ways. (For some reason moderators removed this post... This is a legitimate medicinal question, but for some reason I'm not even allowed to ask it) | [
"Keep in mind that the data that you're looking at is collected by VAERS, which is a voluntary self-reporting online tool. Looking at this table, you can see that 64.9% of people who reported an adverse reaction to VAERS are ages 18 to 49. The survey pool here is limited to those who reported, it's not indicative... | [
"Keep in mind that the data that you're looking at is collected by VAERS, which is a voluntary self-reporting online tool.",
"On this note, here's a guy who successfully submitted a report to VAERS that the Flu vaccine transformed him into The Hulk: ",
"The chief problem with the VAERS data is that reports can ... | [
"Extremely rare and serious adverse reactions aside, most \"side effects\" from a vaccine are generally just due to your own immune response. ",
"It's a well established fact that with almost all vaccines, older people will have a less severe reaction, because they have a weaker immune system. Which also means th... |
[
"The liver is the only Human organ capable of regeneration. Is it possible to donate your liver multiple times?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"No, it's not possible. The liver can regrow but doesn't create the proper structure required. In other words, you're growing more cells, but they're not able to function as well as the original liver because the cells are not structured into lobules the way they originally were. We are not able to duplicate organo... | [
"Not an expert on this; but its probably possible but not ideal. The criteria never mention anything about not being a past donor.",
"However, every surgery is risky (~0.5-1% risk of death) and the liver may not regrow to full size after each surgery. I wouldn't be surprised if the regrown liver still has scars... | [
"IIRC, you can live on half of your liver because after the donation it will eventually be able to function at the same level it did before. Not growing back to normal size."
] |
[
"Why aren't planets positioned from greatest mass to least mass in relation to the sun?"
] | [
false
] | I was talking to someone religious (nothing crazy) and something they said caught my attention. They said that how come Earth's positioning and our solar system in general is positioned so perfect to sustain life for millions of years. Furthermore, they said that planets technically should form in order of greatest mass to least mass and our solar system isn't like that, thus there have to be some kind of divine intervention. | [
"There's really no reason they should be. Planet formation is a complex process, but if anything it should be the opposite because the stellar wind can inhibit the formation of gas envelopes around protoplanets. ",
"If we look at the known stellar systems with more than six planets",
", none of them have the or... | [
"but if anything it should be the opposite because the stellar wind can inhibit the formation of gas envelopes around protoplanets",
"What we should be observing is actually an increase in mass as the planets move away from the star, and then a decrease again as we get towards the outer edge of the system, where ... | [
"Earth: 1 Earth mass",
"I DEMAND to know where you are getting these figures. This sounds preposterous! "
] |
[
"Where would I have to stand on the earth the next coming midnight GMT to be able to look directly upwards and see the galactic core of the Milky Way?"
] | [
false
] | Question arose after reading a chapter in Carl Sagans 'Cosmos' and spending a few weeks in the Ukrainian countryside where I was able to take photos like this: Any relevant maths appreciated. | [
"Based on the fact it's ",
"near Sagittarius",
", playing around with this ",
"http://neave.com/planetarium/",
" puts you somewhere in the Atlantic ocean off the NW coast of Africa."
] | [
"http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/SagittariusCC.jpg"
] | [
"Do you really want to tie the time to GMT? if you're GMT midnight and the galactic core isn't above that time zone you could be asking for day-lit sky. I think you may be wanting to ask \"where is the next place I could stand to have the galactic core at 90° elevation at local midnight?\""
] |
[
"Aren't the statistical methods used in medical research lead to a loss of lots of useful data ?"
] | [
false
] | Usually most medical studies and certainly high quality ones(like systematic reviews and cochrane) , use some statistical method to generalize an answer over a group of people. But in the process , don't we lose information about specific sub group who have a different reaction(sometimes much better) from the average, to said treatment ? And what does medicine and medical interpretation do to still extract that data and not lose it ? | [
"Science works like this; You make a hypothesis, then you test it. If you collect data, then look for a pattern that makes that data work, that can be useful- but you need to test that newly hypothesized pattern on different data.",
"This is because the likelihood of data having SOMEthing that appears like a pa... | [
"1) When any mathematical operation is performed on any data, there is a loss. To keep it to a simple, a mean does not have the value of the original dataset. Adding an SD may help, or it may not. While many consider the segment of the data set of the mean +/- 1 sigma to include 68% of the population as cant, it i... | [
"If you plan in advance, you can do something like Bonferroni correction, but you still need to plan your methodology and state your hypothesis before looking at the data.)",
"Isn't the idea of post hoc tests that you can do them without having planned to do them beforehand? If they take into account the higher ... |
[
"Is there a clear definition of what distinguishes sentient creatures from non-sentient creatures?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Interestingly, I recently attended a seminar on this topic.",
"Most scientists argue a lot about this topic. Generally, from the literature, vertebrate animals (those with a backbone) and some invertebrates (octopi & squid) are considered to have a certain level of consciousness.",
"The 'mirror test' has long ... | [
"It all depends on interpretation. As I wrote above, ",
" was able to \"pass\" the mark test but they are not considered to be sentient .",
"It really depends on who is interpreting the behaviours that they are seeing the animal perform. Some might say the behaviours they witness indicate self consciousness, wh... | [
"Ants have passed the mirror test, so can they be considered sentient?"
] |
[
"What is actually happening when soap \"lathers\", and why is water so crucial for a good lather?"
] | [
false
] | Also, why do some soaps lather more easily, with less water, than others? I was just in the shower, and my body wash wasn't lathering as much as I wanted it to on my loofah. So I stuck it under the water for a second, and then of course it did a much better job of lathering. And I started wondering why some soaps need more water than others to lather well, why (liquid) soaps need water to lather at all, and what lathering actually . The only example I could think of, for a soap that doesn't need water added to lather well, is chlorhexidine. (I'm a veterinary technician, and we use chlorhex as a surgical scrub. Not sure what is commonly used in human medicine). Anyway, you can lather up a gauze sponge with chlorhexidine scrub really well, without adding any water at all. Why is this? Edit: I know this is really stupid, but hopefully I categorized this acceptably. I was (am) trying to decide if it belongs in Physics or Chemistry... | [
"As the other user posted. Lather is just a gimmick. Studies have been done with market groups to determine how individuals FEEL about lather and what is the right amount. Chemists are constantly manipulating contents of conditioners, soaps and shampoos depending on their target market's feelings about the physical... | [
"Shampoos and such usually contain sodium laureth/lauryl sulfate, ",
".",
"No. ",
"Sodium laureth is an extremely effective foaming agent by in addition to being an anionic surfactant."
] | [
"Is it the same with shaving soap? I was under the impression that the density of the lather was important to keep the hair standing up or something."
] |
[
"How are complex instinctual behaviors (like how beavers know how to build dams) encoded into DNA?"
] | [
false
] | It seems like many animal behaviors (mating rituals, beavers/birds building nest, ants creating colonies etc) would be things that are so complex that they would have to be learned through example or observation, and yet somehow most of these skills are hardwired into their DNA. I don't understand how DNA, which I think of as the blueprints for the physical construction of living things, can also contain such incredibly specific behavioral routines. I hope I am explaining this question clearly, because I would be fascinated to hear the answer. Thanks in advance! | [
"Well, it's not 100% of the mechanics behind dam construction, but a major component appears to be that beavers have a compulsion to pile sticks on the sound of flowing water until they can't hear it any more. If you stick a speaker playing the sounds of running water in the middle of a field, they will pile stick... | [
"That is amazing. I think this may be the single coolest fact that I've learned from askscience. Can you provide a link/citation to back that up?"
] | [
"Mentioned on page 43, without a citation to back the claim up in this thesis.",
"After extensive google-scholar-fu I found the following passage:",
"It has been shown that beavers do not plan their dam. Young beavers were reared in isolation from adults, and were never exposed to a beavers' dam. Nevertheless t... |
[
"What is stopping us from creating a physical test to determine a person's age?"
] | [
false
] | Most cells in your body have a limited lifespan and they are replaced over a particular period of time. Some of the cells are not changed but it is probably extremely difficult at this point to take any information regarding age from them. I guess these are the main reasons for the lack of a such test. I know there are some tests that can give a rough estimation. How accurate can they be? Will we ever be able to come up with a completely accurate test? | [
"I'm not knowledgeable on this topic, but I do remember reading about this paper a couple years ago. The paper is about a method the authors claim can accurately age people using DNA: ",
"http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(10)01286-8",
"In the present study, we demonstrate that human indivi... | [
"The rate of \"damage\" would vary depending on the person's genetics, environmental exposure, diet, etc."
] | [
"The rate of \"damage\" would vary depending on the person's genetics, environmental exposure, diet, etc."
] |
[
"If a man or woman didn't go through puberty due to medical/genetic causes, is there a cutoff age when it can no longer be induced?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"Nope! Ask any trans* person who's undergone hormone replacement therapy as an adult - the process is virtually identical to puberty. They develop all the secondary sex characteristics of the gender they're taking hormones to match (including breast tissue - a lot of transwomen who go on HRT develop sufficient brea... | [
"One thing that can't occur later in life is bone development - for example the hip bones are shaped quite differently between ",
"males",
" and ",
"females",
"."
] | [
"Just a correction, trans women will not lose their facial hair from HRT alone. There may be some lightening of colour at best, and body hair will grow in thinner and lighter as well, but facial hair usually has to be removed via laser or electrolysis, or both."
] |
[
"Reddit, why do archaeologists still have to dig? Why don't we have \"ground scanners\" that can peer into a site and tell us what's there?"
] | [
false
] | I realize it's not that easy or straightforward, but... | [
"Hello, archaeologist here.",
"There are a few reasons.",
"1) There are multiple layers of things. If a ground scanner can see something, it would block whatever's behind it.",
"2) Differentiation. How could you tell the difference between a rock and earthenware, or a rock and worked rock? Or even tougher:... | [
"There's also an issue of funding. Archaeologists frequently don't get nice toys because they are expensive, and we are poor. It's amazing how tiny-budget a lot of these digs are.",
"Power also becomes an issue sometimes."
] | [
"There's also an issue of funding. Archaeologists frequently don't get nice toys because they are expensive, and we are poor. It's amazing how tiny-budget a lot of these digs are.",
"Power also becomes an issue sometimes."
] |
[
"Do wolves or wild dogs wag their tails? What is tail-wagging for?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"Tail wagging is one of many forms of non-verbal communication dogs engage in. Wolves, like dogs, also wag their tails. ",
"Source",
" ",
"Source2"
] | [
"Dogs and wolves also wag their tales to disperse hormones and odors throughout a territory."
] | [
"Of course. All dogs wag their tails as a form of communication. Just like all birds chirp as a form of communication (or maybe not all of them idk-there are a shit ton of really fuckin' weird birds)."
] |
[
"[biology] what do jellyfish eat?"
] | [
false
] | null | [
"From Wikipedia:\nJellies are carnivorous, feeding on plankton, crustaceans, fish eggs, small fish and other jellyfish, ingesting and voiding through the same hole in the middle of the bell. Jellies hunt passively using their tentacles as drift nets. Their swimming technique also helps them to capture prey; when th... | [
"Jellyfish are pretty primitive animals, they have an opening underneath the \"umbrella\" which is their \"mouth\" and leads to a cavity (\"stomach\") covered by cell layer named gastrodermis. Water + living things in it such as plankton are ingested into this cavity and degraded there, after which nutrients are \"... | [
"Jellyfish are cnidarians and cnidarians are classified by a specialized cell know as the cnidocyte which are located on the jellyfish's tentacles (Medusa and Polyp phase). Cnidocytes are pretty much coiled \"harpoons\" which when prey (plankton, small crustaceans) are close my they shoot out and inject a toxin, th... |
[
"Could you perfectly preserve a human body by bombarding it with gamma rays to destroy the bacteria?"
] | [
false
] | Killing the bacteria that decomposes your body should preserve your body.... (assuming you could keep it in a perfectly sterile environment) Right? | [
"I presume you mean preserve a dead body, for intense radiation will certainly kill you.",
"Firstly, even in the absence of other living organisms to decompose you, your body will break down after death. When you are alive the cells in your body continually work to maintain themselves. Once your heart stops all t... | [
"There have been freeze-drying services for dead pets for decades now. The results are pretty startling:",
"http://www.livescience.com/18784-gallery-freeze-dried-pets.html"
] | [
"Pretty much what lopel said, but with the addition of thinking of what happens to people who get radiation therapy for their cancer. This uses a weaker type of radiation, but is still capable of ionizing stuff to radical species (free radical damage). The end result is cellular damage caused by chemicals (protein,... |
[
"Is human response to music cultural? All societies have some form of rhythm, but if I were to find some previously uncontacted Papua New Guinean tribe and play them Adagio For Strings would they feel sad?"
] | [
false
] | Would Ode To Joy make them feel happy? Would Approaching Menace make them feel tense? | [
"Yes. Uncontacted tribes have been shown clips of music usually associated with fear like the shrieking strings from the Psycho murder scene and they only experience joy because music is a joyous occasion in their culture."
] | [
"There are sonorous aspects to music that are more natural than cultural. Music that is \"tense\" may contain many dissonances, whereas consonance is prevalent in \"uplifting\" songs. Both of these relate to natural sound production: consonance achieved with sonorities that jive with superparticular ratios, disso... | [
"I think this is a complex subject. Human beings in general do have an innate appreciation for music. I think even throughout all animals a certain vibe of emotion can be experienced through music, especially through consonance and dissonance. ",
"But rhythm seems to be more specific to human beings. I've never s... |
[
"What is the right way to think about particles in quantum field theory?"
] | [
false
] | [deleted] | [
"So theres a complex relationship between the classical fields and the \"Hilbert space\" which represents the quantum particles. ",
"This is an EXTREMELY subtle concept that students who pass two semesters of QFT don't always comprehend. And it's also incredibly abstract. Also, it's not particularly going to sati... | [
"Yes, exactly. The momentum is derived from the Lagrangian using the definition of the momentum from the Hamiltonian formulation. π(x) = ∂ℒ/∂(∂φ(x)/∂t) where ℒ = 1/2 (∂φ)",
". It turns out to be ∂φ/∂t. ",
"Also note, that the field momentum is not quantum mechanical. Fields have momentum classically and this mo... | [
"This is more or less the right way to think about it, with a few caveats. One is that everything is quantum, so the picture of a field vibrating like water waves is just that, a picture. In reality the field does not have a definite value. ",
"Another is that what we usually call \"particles\" in QFT are momentu... |
[
"Do CPUs make noise?"
] | [
false
] | I've always wondered what's the noise (something like crunching nuts) that PCs make during heavy load. That's particularly evident during Windows boot, but totally absent in OS X. I'm pretty sure that's not HD vibrations because I heard this sound coming from SSD PCs. | [
"All those high-pitched whines you hear coming from electronics come from the vibrating cores of transformers and inductors. There is a name for this phenomenon that I always forget. Basically though, the changing magnetic field of the current passing through the inductor/transformer causes its core to rapidly vibr... | [
"Nothing that you can hear from the actually CPU chip.",
"There are fans on the CPU and case fans that can be noisy, especially if the bearings are bad. Some power supplies can make noise as well. The power supply on the laptop I'm using sounds like someone eating cereal.",
"I'm guessing you are hearing somet... | [
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostriction",
" ",
"and",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetostriction",
"This is what you are talking about. I've made parts that make this noise while switching voltages. Surprises you at first!"
] |
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