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Why are churches in the U.S. tax exempt? | They are a non-profit organization. Non-profit organizations can be tax exempt. True it's easier for them to get it then non-religious organizations but it's the same rationale. We tax profits, if there aren't profits we generally don't tax it. |
Why hasn't there been a manned mission to the moon for so long? | Moon base would be at the top of a gravity well. The moon has virtually no atmosphere. The science that could be done there and the military advantage to be gained far, far outweigh the costs. The reason that we haven't been back is that far too many humans are too short-sighted, ignorant, and/or generally stupid to un... |
Why are bugs attracted to light, especially my lamp at night, but not attracted to the sun in the same way? | Biologist here! An organism's attraction to light is called *phototaxis*. Positively attracted organisms, and I think you mostly mean moths here, are attracted to light. Navigation: A well known theory is that unnatural light sources interfere with an insect's ability to navigate. Before we introduced lights nocturnal ... |
Why do people have Deja vu for things that clearly never happened? In other words, what happens in your brain when you experience deja vu? | I think it's the same process the brain goes through when it makes fake memories where your brain takes different information a day puts all these random bits of information together as one solid memory so then it almost becomes a reality.sorry for my bad explanation maybe someone with better knowledge can elaborate |
Why does it hurt so much when guys get kicked in the balls? | Testicles are viscera. It's like getting hit in any other viscera like a kidney, spleen, stomach, ovaries etc. It's just that they're just outside of your abdominal cavity so they get hit a lot easier. |
How did the pilots not get affected when they dropped the bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? | The plane climbed to a very high altitude before dropping the bomb. This kept it high above the blast, and also allowed enough time to get farther away from the bombing site, as it took 43 seconds for the bomb to reach the detonation altitude of 1,900 feet. The bomb's shockwave did reach the plane, but at this point it... |
Why didn't the British get involved in the American civil war? | The North made it very clear that the civil war was an internal matter and that if Britain was to recognize the Confederate States as an independent nation that it would most likely lead to war with Britain. Britain did rely on cotton imports from the Confederate States, it wasn't willing to risk a war over it and real... |
How and why was Ellen Pao appointed as the interim CEO of Reddit. | A couple of thoughts: As /u/mukt says, CEO of Reddit is a step down from her previous job in terms of money and prestige. Ellen Pao was at a really elite venture firm job. Just because she didn't ultimately succeed there doesn't mean she doesn't have the skills to succeed here. To use an analogy, a failed Congressperso... |
What is this illuminati? | Some people believe the richest people in the world control the whole earth and society. It's actually pretty interesting. |
dinosaurs existed on earth for many millions of years longer than we have. Why did they never produce an intelligent species like us? | Intelligence is a risky evolutionary strategy, one that few species selected for over their evolutionary lives. Humans may be super smart but we are not exceptionally quick, or well armored. We have the ability to make tools, but we have virtually no natural weapons and pound for pound are not that strong. We have long... |
If we can clone animals, why is there a danger that many species might go extinct? | That's assuming that animals are 100% nature and 0% nurture. There's a reason why most animals that are raised in captivity can never be returned to the wild. So yeah, if they're all dead, we can revive them. But all they'll ever be good for is derping in zoos. |
If Jupiter is mostly gas and gases aren't dense, how does it have so much gravitational pull? | You're correct that gas giants aren't typically very dense; Jupiter has less than one-quarter the average density of Earth. However, Jupiter is so huge that even though it's not very dense, it still exerts a larger gravitational force. |
why don't we just clone near extinct animals? | Setting aside the difficulty of the science the big thing is that cloning doesn't address the reasons why animals go extinct. Until humans resolves issues like habitat loss, poaching, pollution, and others then you can make all the animals you want and they would keep on dying. You would only be using science to buy ti... |
Instead of building a spacecraft to travel from planet to planet on earth, why don't we build it in space where aerodynamics wont matter? | No, because you're building two spaceships at once; one that's getting built in space and another that's bringing all that crap up to space in the first place.You would still have to transport all of the raw materials from Earth to spaceWhat are you going to build it out of? |
Why don't animals need to brush their teeth? | * Domestic and [wild] animals certainly suffer from dental disease including [gingivitis], [periodontal disease], cracked teeth, worn teeth, cavities, and [this - caution gross]. Another [picture of a dogs mouth]. Handy [graphic] of different stages of oral disease in dogs, not unlike our own stages. If possible, you s... |
How can a computer generate a "random" number | The computer picks numbers from mechanical processes that are difficult to anticipate on some types of diodes), and mixes them together with what is called a *one-way function*, which is a functiin that has been demonstrated to make it either impossible or extremely, extremely difficult to reverse from the result to th... |
If even light cannot escape a black hole's gravity, how can we see them? | We don't. [Look at some images on wikipedia to get an idea of how Black Holes twist the light behind them.] |
Can jet fuel melt steel beams? | Without getting too technical, steel has many transitional states between solid and liquid. You do not need to liquefy steel for it to lose it's structural rigidity.No. Jet fuel burns at a temperature lower than the melting point of any structural steel . However, it can soften steel, causing it to lose structural inte... |
Why do some planes leave vapor-trails (contrails) while other planes flying at the same time do not? | They're flying at different altitudes. It's hard to tell from the ground, but they are most likely 1000's of feet apart. |
why does only one nostril get blocked when you have a stuffy nose? | Under normal operation, one nostril is slower than the other. You've got erectile tissue in there that swells up to partly close off one side. At any given time, one side is swollen and the other side is doing most of the breathing. It does this to aid with smelling things. When you're sick, this still occurs, but ther... |
The Deep Web & The Dark Web | Deep web is weather databases, password protected sites generated on demand sites, and other large data stores that don't have much common appeal. They're hosted by government agencies, universities, and corporations. Many are open access. The dark net are various networks that are built to make anonymity harder to unw... |
Sometimes when I'm drinking a beverage a swallow is painful, almost like the liquid has turned solid and getting stuck in my throat. What gives? | Oh man, this is the worst. You can even feel when it's about to happen, but at that point it's too late.This may be an esophageal spasm, which is distinctly painful. There are several types of spasm but all block food from continuing into the stomach past the esophageal sphincter. Most sufferers can avoid them by: drin... |
What characteristic of sperm, egg, or DNA determines if different types of animals can cross-breed? | This is waaaay beyond ELI5 kind of question but imagine, if you will, that the egg has one side of a funky looking zipper and the sperm has another side of a funky looking zipper. If the zippers can be zipped together nicely enough, voila you made a baby with very little deformity. If the zippers don't fit well enough ... |
we have theories of what would happen while approaching the speed of light. but what about being absolutely still in spacetime? | There's no such thing. The whole point of Einstein's theories of relativity is that there's no frame of reference that gets any kind of special treatment, meaning that you can only talk about how things move *relative* to each other. So all those theories about travelling close to the speed of light are from the point ... |
why didn't the spanish die of native american diseases but the other way around? | Native Americans hadn't been in large, city-building societies long enough to develop any really horrific mass-murdering plagues. All human diseases came originally from animals, and it takes time for those diseases to make ths jump to humans and then become adapted specifically for humans. The only major disease Nativ... |
Why are planets and moons always round? | Planets are round because of gravity. Gravity gathers pieces of gas and dust into clumps which grow larger and larger and eventually become planets. When these particles collide it caused the newly formed planets to become hot and molten. Gravity continues to pull the molten material inwards towards the planet's center... |
Why is the first episode of a tv-series called the "Pilot"? | _URL_0_to quote: Actual answer: 'Pilot' comes from the Greek 'pedon' and denoted a person who steered the ship. From there it took on the meaning as anyone who leads the way on a journey, like the pilot in a plane. That usage is what gives rise to pilot holes, small holds drilled in woodworking to ease the job of a lar... |
Why does inbreeding so often cause birth defects? | A lot of mutant genes don't cause problems if you only have one copy , but can cause serious illness or deformity if you have two copies . Each of these genes is incredibly rare , but most people have a few. Your siblings are far more likely to have the same mutant genes , so the odds of a baby being born with two copi... |
How fast does electricity move? | Kind of slow, the potential and material affects the speed of electrons a lot. Light sensors, Diodes and Lasers use special materials and structures to control the speed of electrons. But a single electron doesn't have to move a lot, the conductor is filled with electrons and each of them just has to move a little to m... |
When we say that black absorbs light, what is actually happening to the photons hitting the black object? Also, does black also absorb other EM radiation such as radar? | Just a quick distinction. Black doesn't absorb light. A material appears black because the material absorbs light well over the whole visible spectrum. Where does the light go? It is absorbed by the electrons in the material, causing them to go into excited states. These excited states are not stable for long periods o... |
What is the Riemann Hypothesis and why is it important? | I've no business in this thread but if anybody could link me to somewhere I could learn more about it I'd be great full. |
How do elevators work? | The basics that I've gathered is that there's a counterweight attached to a steel cable which is connected to the lift. The cable is placed on a circular motor which spins depending on which direction the lift is heading. This is set up so that one side of the cable is hanging on one side of the motor, and the other on... |
If light particles have no mass, why can they be affected by gravity (i.e. be taken into a black hole)? | 1. Escape velocity is how fast something needs to go to escape the gravitational pull of a body. 2. A black hole's escape velocity is greater than the speed of light. So mass, or not, photon's aren't moving quickly enough.Light travels through space, gravity can bend space. Bend space enough and light will travel along... |
Why is it easier to push than pull? | You can even get into kinesiology here and talk about the differing forces each movement has. If you're pulling a door, generally it's a lot of biceps, back and some shoulders. If you're pulling hard you brace your feet and pull back against them. When you push you're using your shoulders, chest, triceps, some back and... |
Why do people buy gift cards? | From a business's stand point gift cards rock. Unredeemed gift card=free money. Cash with a nice thank you/ whatever conveying your thought much better way to give a gift IMHO. |
How are streets named? | Depends on the street. Some times a developer who builds a community of homes names the street. Sometimes it's named after a famous person such as Martin Luther King street at the request of the locals who live there. Sometimes the local planning commission names the street. Sometimes it's named by a road building crew... |
If microwaves are harmless (non-ionizing raditions) how come the food is heated but it does not affect us ? | They are not harmless to us. Microwave ovens have to be shielded or they can damage you. Having said that microwaves aren't trapped in the food and they can't 'poison' you after it's been cooked. I'm not certain but I get the impression that people are worried when they hear microwave radiation and think that they will... |
Why doesn't honey expire? | 1. Lack of water. Honey is many just sugar, so any microbe that lands in it wont have much water to work with and will actually lose water to the honey. Kind of like how salt can suck up moisture. 2. Acidity. Honey has a pH of around 3 or 4 which is lower than most microbes like. There are some that can deal but they a... |
how do they measure light years and know how far a distant star is 50 million light years away, is it give or take a million light years? | As mentioned earlier, parallax works up to a certain distance. For distant galaxies they can get a good idea when they detect a certain kind of supernova, an exploding star. There are certain explosions that happen with a very specific brightness every time. By measuring how bright that explosion looks from here, they ... |
Why does hot tap water look cloudy, while cold tap water is clear? | Here's a cool science test you can use: Get a clear glass and fill it with cloudy water. Set it down, and watch from the side. If the cloudiness floats up, it's air bubbles, if the cloudiness sinks down, it's sediment. /u/relenq has the best answer about what is probably causing it, though. |
If identical twins have the same DNA, how come they are not 100% perfectly identical? | DNAs are like recipes. If you follow the same recipes twice, you won't get the exact same cake. But the two cakes would be more similar than if you had followed 2 different recipes. |
If the Earth is closest to the sun in January, does that mean that southern hemisphere summers are warmer than a northern hemisphere summer? | Aphelion and Parihelion, when the Earth is furthest and farthest away, have very very little effect of how the temperature is for certain seasons in the year. The seasons and their temperatures are really there because of the Earth's atmoshphere and which side is getting more light. The more light, the hotter it is . B... |
Why do objects with the same mass but different volumes have different gravitational forces? | According to one of Isaac Newton's law, the shorter the distance between masses, the stronger the gravitational pull. The closer, the stronger. For example, picture 20 feet. Object A is on one corner, object B is on the another corner and have the same masses. Object A is 5 feet long and object B is 5 feet long. The sp... |
Why is Mars so cold when its atmosphere is almost completely CO2, the greenhouse gas that is warming our planet | it's warming our planet because there is a ton of CO2, even if it's a fraction of our total atmosphere. Mars has VERY VERY VERY VERY little atmosphere, but most of what is there is CO2. the amount of CO2 isn't enough to heat mars up, there is much less than on earth. |
even if we could terraform Mars, wouldn't its lack of magnetic field mean cosmic radiation would continually bombard whatever is living on the surface? | Yes, the lack of a magnetosphere would be a big problem on Mars. That said, if we were able to deal with the other problems relating to colonizing a planet we could solve this one. NASA has even gone far enough to suggest long vertical rock covered shafts already present on the surface of Mars could offer some protecti... |
why we only see 30 or 60 FPS in most games? | Your monitor refreshes at 60hz. A 30fps game still refreshes at 60hz, but only updates the image every other frame. That gives the game twice as long to render each frame. You could, in theory, do 40 fps by only drawing two out of three frames, but that would look a bit choppy and more importantly 2/3 of your frames wo... |
Why does unplugging then plugging it back in work? | As electronics age, the pathways change. Heat can cause this, oxidation, humidity, etc. This can cause circuits to get unstable if they depend on doing multiple tasks in a very short time. If one of those tasks gets finished too early or too late, it can wedge the whole system. The answer is that it's usually due to in... |
Why does light travel 299,792,458 m/s, what makes light travel at that speed, why did it get that number, why not something higher like 1,000,000,000 m/s? | It's arbitrary, based on how we chose to define the meter and the second . In General relativity, where distance and time are the same unit, the speed of light is simply 1. |
How do YouTubers make money? Is it a combination of subscribers, views per video, ads? | Several ways, the most basic is the ad revenue from the monetized videos. It's not much per view but those who are living off of YouTube are racking up millions of views per video. They also make money and other profits by sponsoring. For example I believe PewDiePie is somehow in association with Disney, Tobuscus has d... |
What happened to Google Glass? | The other answers here are correct, so I'll just add a bit more color. Google Glass was one of the first major product that came out of [Google X], Google's division devoted to developing next generation technologies . It was really just a functioning prototype for a new type of interaction - wearable, heads up display... |
How does 3D in movies work? Why are the glasses not red and blue any more? | All 3D technology works by fixing it so that your eyes see two different images. This tricks your brain into perceiving the slight differences in perspective between the two images as depth. Originally, 3D movies worked by layering the two images on top of each other and tinting one red and one blue. When you wear the ... |
why do objects rotating in one direction appear to start spinning in the opposite direction once a certain speed of rotation is reached? | When you watch a movie or TV show, you're not watching smooth motion, you're watching a series of frames. So what happens if, between one frame and the next, the wheel moves *just the right amount* so the spokes end up in the exact same place in the next frame? Now the wheel looks like it's standing still. And if it mo... |
If we found an object with a mirror-like surface far away from earth, could we then look at it with a telescope and see past? | Yes, though it would need to be a huge mirror and a better telescope than any we currently have. If we could see a mirror one light year away, then the image would be of Earth two years ago since the light has spent a year getting to the mirror and a year getting back. You wouldn't really be able to see the Earth from ... |
Why do microwave waves disrupt WiFi ones? Are they similar enough to interfere with each other? And are there any other types of wave that interfere with each other? | They are very similar to each other. The frequency of a microwave oven is about 2,450 Mhz whereas the frequency that WiFi uses is between 2,412 and 2,484. The reason that WiFi uses those frequencies is because you don't need a license to operate a radio in them. That's precisely because microwave ovens cause so much in... |
Why is the human stomach so much weaker than other animals'? Is this of any evolutionary advantage? | Dogs and pigs risk disease too if they are eating rotten contaminated foods. Many wild animals are infested with parasites. But they don't write a news story when 'Fred the Fox' dies of intestinal parasitism. If you ate clean, uncontaminated raw meat, your body won't produce germs out of the material. |
Why do people with british accents seem to lose their accents when they sing? | Ummm all accents go neutral when singing not just British. Do you Americans really think the world is trying to copy you, even you're singing accent? Crazy. |
Why do the planets revolve around the sun on the same horizontal plane? Why don't some of them orbit in a more latitudinal way? | planets are conformist bastards the sun is pulling you towards it, but so are other planets. For example, if you were orbiting the sun outside of our plane, jupiter and friends would be pulling you 'down' every time you were 'above' them and 'up' every time you were below them, dragging you closer and closer to the pla... |
Why are we searching so hard for water on other planets? Can't life exist without water? | By focusing on planets that may have water, we believe we're more likely to find life because we're looking for life that we know can exist, instead of spending energy looking for anything that might exist. We have limited resources to explore a vast universe and we have to take our best guess at how to make our effort... |
- Why does time seem to go by faster the older you get? | Generally, the older you become, the less active you are. Since we know now that memories are stimuli based , it's logical to infer that the less active you are, the less you are able to embed in your memory. Therefore making the days appear more bland and similar, therefore appearing as they have gone by faster. |
How are creatures like seals, whales, and other aquatic mammals able to hold their breath for so long and move much more whereas we can't? | They have bigger lungs, and bodies that are optimized for travel in water. The human body isn't exactly streamlined. There's a reason that there aren't any sea creatures with four long, thin limbs. |
How can the Universe be infinite and expand at the same time? | The issue at hand really is that we don't know what the edges of our universe are like, if any. Our current model suggests that the universe is 13.8 Billion years old, because that's as far as our instruments can show us. The universe could have boundaries, it could not. All of our understanding of the universe comes f... |
What is the difference between College and University in the USA? | Typically they are the same thing. When someone says college it's implied they're talking about a 4-year university/degree program. |
How are private prisons legal? | The government provides a lot of services through contractors. Instead of having an actual government agency provide services, they pay a private company to do it. Prisons are one of these. Instead of the government running the prison, they pay a private company to run it . This is usually justified on the basis of cos... |
Why Doesn't Communism Work | It perverts human motivation. Capitalism doesn't work also, the best years in capitalism were when there was most socialism injected into it. As the restraints on capital fade from the laws, you see more and more inequality, not only social wise but in the market also. Greed is good but one must put some limit on it.Wi... |
What actually happens when you crack knuckles and other joints. | Can anyone address the other joints. my ankles pop a lot, and I hurt my shoulder a couple of months ago and not that's cracking too. |
What is the green light under escalators? | it cancels out IR lighting that would reveal all the blood from people who didn't make it up/down the escalator. true story |
How TV Ratings Work? | Other than get other people to watch the show, there's nothing you can do to help the ratings. They don't sample everyone's set; TV ratings are done on a scientific survey basis, with a specific group of selected households representing the viewing public. As for what is good enough, it depends on the budget of the sho... |
Why UPS drivers do not turn left. How are 3-4 right turns equivalent to one left turn (in terms of gas) | The short answer is, they don't make 3 right turns in place of a left. They use routing software to make routes that minimize or eliminate left turns in the first place. They do this because idling uses up way more gas than most people realize.UPS and FedEx make lefts going into my workplace parking lot. They also make... |
what makes yawning contagious? | Vsauce made a video talking about this a while back. Here is a link if you would like to see _URL_0_ |
Why do we sometimes "feel" when someone enters the room even though we dont see/hear them? | I think there are a number of possible things that you can literally feel when someone enters a room, and so it might be different from person to person. I'm pretty sure that for me, the hairs on my arms, the back of my neck, etc. are feeling a slight breeze or pressure change - if the person entered quickly enough, of... |
How do radio waves transmit information? | They don't transmit information inherently. The way that information is transmitted depends on the encoding being used, but in general, there are two ways to do it: frequency modulation and amplitude modulation . Using the frequency modulation technique, the data is encoded in the frequency of the wave. The waves compr... |
Why don't stars on the sky move like the sun as Earth's axis tilts through the year? | They do move. You just don't watch closely enough to notice. The stars in the center of this tilt, so they're always on the same plane as the sun, are called the [zodiac]. |
If hot air rises, why is it colder at higher altitudes? At what point (altitude) does the temperature getting colder at higher altitudes outweigh the fact that hot air rises? | Temperature is not the only thing to consider here. You have to consider the weight of the air and the pressure acting on it as well. Hot air rises because it weighs less than cold air. As the air rises, it expands. It expands because there is less pressure acting on it from the rest of the atmosphere surrounding it. B... |
How did the Europeans learn to communicate with Native Americans? | You can rapidly build a basic vocabulary by gestures and miming what you want to get across. If I hold up a bowl and say 'bowl', you'd get the idea pretty quick. People who traded between the two peoples developed a type of 'pigdin' or 'lingua franca', a common improvised language based on the two speaker's native lang... |
How does radiation actually damage our cells and kill you if you're exposed to enough of it. And why doesn't it kill us all the time, since there's always background radiation. | Ionising radiation causes chemical reactions in the body which lead to mutations in DNA at low levels and potentially cell death at higher levels. Background radiation can be harmful - say, skin cancer from spending too much time in the sun - but most of the time, the body's protective processes mean that damaged cells... |
Why do North Americans have different accents than the countries that colonized us | Language is fluid and always changing, the Brits who settled Virginia in 1607 won't sound the same as Brits today. |
How can a singularity be infinitely small? | If you solve Einstien's equations for a black hole, you find something curious. If you track an object in a black hole, the object will accelerate to one point, and then the path through space and time that the object is taking ends. When I say the path ends, I don't mean that the object reaches the center and then sta... |
What's the deal with Western Sahara? | Basically its a fairly lowly populated area of Africa that was colonized by Spain in the 1700's. During Spanish rule, it was governed by Spanish Morocco. During decolonization, they ruled that both Morocco and Mauritania had historical rights to the region, but the people living there wanted independence. Algeria, poss... |
If plane wings are designed create lift in one direction, why doesn't a plane flying upside down plummet to the ground? | The key to lift isn't wing shape so much as angle of attack. The greater the angle compared to the direction of motion, the greater the lift, until you reach the stall point, then it falls off quickly. You can use the shape of the wing to cheat a little, and have better lift in one orientation than the other, but you c... |
how an object can have zero velocity but still have acceleration | For something to accelerate, it just has to be increasing in speed - and if an object has zero velocity, it can speed up! Acceleration is just measuring how fast something is speeding up or slowing down, and an object that isn't moving can have a non-zero acceleration by moving - its speed is increasing. |
If two rockets move away from each other at 0.75 the speed of light, would each appear to be going faster than the speed of light from the other rocket? | Here's a question:Suppose someone is on a rocket travelling close to the speed of light for a few years. As I understand it, when they return, they will have aged less than everyone else. Is this correct? What I don't understand is that surely, relative to the traveller, the whole world had been travelling at close to ... |
What mass an object should have so objects start orbiting it? | To answer your other questions: 1. Yes, it will move forever, because there is no resistance from air or something. 2. Yes, the speed of radio waves is slightly different. Radio waves are just a form of light, so radio waves move with the speed of light. As with any wave, the speed of that wave depends on the stuff it ... |
Why don't electrons stick to the nucleus? | This is a good question, and it's [a question that led to the development of quantum mechanics in the early 1900s], because the pre-QM theories did suggest that electrons ought to just fall in to the nucleus. Here's another perspective on the answer, to build on the good answers that Daerdemandt and Afinkawan have give... |
If we can see Earth-like planets from millions of miles away, why can't we see their surface? | Millions of miles doesn't even get you to the outer planets in the Solar System. Try trillions of miles. Actually, this is science, try metric. :D We infer that planets are in orbit around other stars by their gravitational effects on the parent star. |
What it would take for me to remain still while everything around me continues to spin with the planets rotation. | At the equator, the earth is rotating at about 1000mph. To 'stay still' relative to the surface rotation you'd essentially have to travel west at 1000mph. Part of this depends on what your definition of 'stay still' is. Motion is relative to some other thing. So when you say 'stay still with regards to the Earth' it de... |
What are the real life applications of imaginary numbers? | You can transform information in the time domain to frequency domain and vice versa. You can express different types of waves different ways; for instance you can easily express a wave that is traveling instead of just considering standing waves . You can easily consider and manipulate vector quantities; that is to say... |
why can't humans eat raw meat like other meat-eating animals? | Sushi, tartar, ceviche, oysters, clams, roe, eggs that's just off the top of my head. as others have said, we can eat raw meat, we just don't grow up being exposed to it for the most part. |
How far is, As far as the eye can see? | You see the sun, right? It is 92 millions miles away. And you can see other stars that are light years away. So no, there is no maximum distance your eyes can see, provide the thing you are looking at big and bight enough. However, the expression is probably referring to things on the Earth. In which case, you are limi... |
Why we have different blood types? | Variety is important in maintaining a healthy species. As just a small example, if a virus developed that could wipe out everyone with type A blood, you'd want to have type B, AB, and O, or else everyone would die from the virus. Basically, the more diversity in the species, the harder the species will be to kill off. ... |
Answer an ELI5 FAQ - Why do planets, asteroids, rings, and other astronomical objects orbit, aligned, in the same plane? | Our solar system was formed from the remnants of a star that exploded. That star exploded, spreading its contents over a huge area; after the explosion, the guts of the star remain as an enormous gaseous cloud. Some part of this cloud will be denser than other parts, and so the denser part starts to pull the gas around... |
if greenhouse gasses increase the average temperature by trapping energy from the sun in our atmosphere, why don't they keep out the sun's rays as well? | Visible light can go through them. It strikes the surface of the Earth, and is partially absorbed. This partially absorbed energy can be re radiated as heat back into the atmosphere. This heat *cannot* go through greenhouse gasses as easily as visible light. It is absorbed, and reradiated in a random direction, up, dow... |
- Elephant's foot in Chernobyl Power Plant | It's a solidified mass of corium, somewhere in the basement of Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant . Corium itself is a mass of molten uranium, sand, concrete, and whatever happened to be in the reactor at the time of the accident. |
Why do we blink with both eyes at same time? | I don't know but I've been alternating between blinking each one of my eyes for the past two minutes and I feel like a lizard or something. |
How do we know that the "walls" of our universe are expanding when we can't observe that far? | The universe is not thought to have walls. It's widely believed to be infinite in extent. What is expanding is the space between things in the universe. > We assume that our ENTIRE universe is expanding because we have observed galaxies move further away from each other, but why does that has to mean that the universe ... |
What do the scientists mean when they say the universe is flat? | This is a really hard thing for the human brain to comprehend, but space can be warped by various things so that an object traveling in what's a straight line from its own perspective could appear to be a curved line from an outside perspective. One of the questions that cosmologists have been trying to figure out is i... |
Why does the expansion of space effect us? Why doesn't mass that takes up this space expand with it? | the problem with 'dots' are that they are actually *part* of space on a balloon. a better analogy would be a small bead glued to the balloon. The bead won't expand since the balloon material isn't strong enough to tear it apart. Instead of a line you would need an actual piece of string connecting two beads. The glue h... |
Why does the human body eat muscle before fat when it's in starvation mode? | As it was explained to me, fat can't be poofed into energy instantly or quickly. It's a long burn for minimal reward that really is more beneficial because fats don't need much upkeep for storing. Muscles on the other hand are basically made of easy to break down energy and when you're in starvation mode you don't want... |
Why do people think we can transform mars when it has no magnetic field? | > As far as I know, a prerequisite to having a habitable planet is that it has a magnetic field to prevent solar wind from stripping the atmosphere Atmospheric bottling *is* a problem, but it's a long-term problem. The short-term problem of no planetary magnetic field is that planetary magnetic fields shield the surfac... |
Venus and Mars both have atmospheres of ~96% carbon dioxide. So why are the planets so drastically different? | Venus has a very thick atmosphere , and mars has a very thin one . Venus' thick atmosphere traps a lot of heat and puts a lot of pressure on its surface. Mars' is too thin to have the same effect. |
If a planet is within the sun's orbit, how does gravity prevent the planet from falling into the sun? | The easiest way to think of an orbit is that you -are- moving towards the object, but you're moving so -fast- laterally that you're constantly missing. The moon is definitely attracted to the planet, but it's moving so fast that it's 'climbing' at the same rate gravity is pulling it in. It's not going anywhere up or do... |
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