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If all elements were created from Hydrogen, why isn't it possible to split a higher element to a lower one, eg. Oxygen into Carbon and Helium? | It is possible. It just takes a tremendous amount of energy - the same amount that was generated when carbon and helium fused into oxygen in the first place. Fusing a single atom of carbon and hydrogen into a single atom of oxygen produces 7.16 MeV of energy, which is a *lot* of energy. Breaking down a pound of oxygen ... |
What am I, as a male, actually feeling during an orgasm? | A reward from your brain for impregnating another sock an orgasm. It involves rhythmic muscular contractions in the pelvic region, and the release of neurohormones oxytocin, prolactin, and various endorphins. |
Why I'm better at everything when I'm drunk | At different levels of consumption, alcohol affects different functions of your brain. The first aspect of the brain altered is your inhibitions. Simply put, when you are drunk, or even just buzzed, you feel less limited and more powerful. In other words, your confidence increases dramatically. For most tasks, regardle... |
Why does removing the dead skin around a paper cut seem to alleviate pain? | I'll take a stab at this: I have eczema, like REALLY bad so I'm quite knowledgeable about alleviating pain in cuts by picking. When your cut heals it's, from my understanding, these things called platelets in your blood which cause clotting. Well, scabs are kinda hard right? Not very soft and pliable. Imagine pushing i... |
Why do we have PIN numbers for debit cards and not for credit cards? | Actually this was an issue with credit cards, that debit cards fixed, as a legacy of an older era where security of credit cards was less important. As of now, most credit cards around the world are transition to credit cards being chip and pinThe credit card predates computerized POS systems so there was no place to e... |
Why do people say it's impossible to build muscle and lose fat at the same time? | The human body evolved in a time when you never knew where your next meal was coming from. In times of plenty, the body packed on as much fat as it could, which was hardly ever enough to actually be considered fat. In times of less, the body begrudgingly burned fat for energy and reduces or completely shuts down some b... |
Lets say an elephant dies while being at a zoo, what do they do with the corpse? | First, a necropsy is performed, and then the remains are cremated. The carcasses of all animals that die at the National Zoo—including those that wander into the park from outside—are brought to an on-site pathology lab for thorough examination. Zoo staffers identify the cause of death and preserve tissue samples that ... |
So what technology would it take to make a "Smell-o-Scope" from Futurama? | It's not possible. To smell things, many molecules would need to reach your nose. However, with the vastness of space, that would be impossible. Also, things would have to get from the thing, travel *vast* distances, make it to earth, and make it to your Smelloscope. So yeah, completely silly idea, which isn't all that... |
Why are all "As Seen on TV" commercials so similar to each other? | These companies carefully study what works -- even trying different versions of an ad to see what brings in more orders. What you see now is the optimal format -- the one that brings in the most orders -- so everyone tries to use it. |
Which is more beneficial, working out on a soft surface or a hard surface? | A surface as forgiving as your mattress would probably be a bad idea. You generally want to exercise the muscle through its entire range. When you've got an incredibly springy surface, you're likely to end up with an exercise pattern where you give a surge of effort in one part of the motion and coast through the rest ... |
Why is it so pleasurable to listen to music at volumes that are potentially damaging to my ears? | I think it's basically to make the experience more engrossing. More volume creates more powerful vibrations which add to what you can feel. It also lessens the chance of other sounds detracting from your focus on the song. Also why some people like closing their eyes when they listen to music. Less visual noise to take... |
Is the current banning of subs like /r/fatpeoplehate actually protecting anyone or is it only restricting the free speech users have grown to expect? | It's not stopping your freedom of speech. It's just the "people" here don't want to hear it and are telling them to "move on" _URL_0_ |
What is Vantablack and how did we create it? | Vertically Aligned NanoTube Arrays Some nerds got together and used carbon nanotubes to make a substance that absorbs almost all light in the visible spectrum. _URL_0_Douglas Adams described this years before it was invented. It was a paint job on a spaceship in his Hitch Hikers Guide series: "That," he said, "that is ... |
Why do my coughs sound raspy when I'm sick? | From what I understand, it's phlegm in your throat and the air passing around it makes your cough sound different. Also, in my experience, if you cough it up, the raspiness stops |
What happened/is happening in Darfur? | Let's pretend there are groups of squirrels and chipmunks. A long time ago, the squirrels and chipmunks were put together in one forest and a squirrel was put in charge. The squirrels have all the acorns, and they pick on the chipmunks and don't let them share in the very few acorns that are around- and there's not man... |
Why does 50 degrees feel warm in the spring and cold in the fall? | Your sensory threshold moves around over time. People aren't tuned to find one range of temperature cold all the time and another range hot, instead they adapt to their surroundings as their surroundings change. The same 40 degree day that might feel like torture in November ends up being routine by January, because yo... |
What is Trip Hop? | [Here] is an example of the genre. Wikipedia will give you good info, but as a young sub-genre deriving influence from an eclectic blend of other genres, it can be loose and very hard to define. |
would someone who ate an excess of healthy foods be healthier than someone who ate an excess of unhealthy food? | Both would end up seriously overweight if they kept up that diet. The person eating a more varied diet including fruits and vegetables would likely be marginally healthier due to nutrition and cholesterol as you noted. |
Do your eyes turn off when you sleep or are you still able to see? | My understanding of current research is that vision still gets processed at a basic level, but it doesn't register in your consciousness unless it's very important . You could say your entire vision is subliminal when you're asleep.You have a basic level of vision while sleeping. There are studies where researchers hav... |
Why is the United States middle class shrinking? | The cost of living is going up but the wages that people are getting are not. That means that the middle class is slipping down into the lower class, and the lower class are slipping below the poverty lineThe middle class was a really large income spectrum. Using 2005 dollars, lower middle class was $32,500 to $60,000.... |
Why did the ''crack epidemic'' in the US of the 80s' occur? | Cocaine started becoming popular in the 70s and 80s initially because drug cartels in South America were able to produce it in large enough quantities that the supply started to outweigh the demand. AS it became cheaper, cocaine become the drug of choice because it could be found more readily than other hard drugs such... |
The difference between Pork, Ham and Bacon? | Pork is any part of the hog unaltered. Ham is a cut of hog that is smoked or cured. And bacon a cut of hog that is smokedDad! Those all come from the same animal! Yeah right, Lisa. A wonderful, *magical* animal!Pork is any edible meat attainable from a pig. Ham is a cured piece of pork normally taken from the thigh or ... |
Why does the internet tend to be mostly liberal ? (Especially on sites like reddit.) | Because internet usage tends to skew young and young people tend to be liberal.Reddit used to be very libertarian, in fact I'm still not convinced its truly liberal instead of just anti-right wing. I see a lot of conservative type stuff get upvoted, especially when it involves minorities or women and there is virtually... |
If you can buy a 64 GB thumb drive for around 40 bucks why does Apple charge several hundred dollars more for the 64 GB iPhone or iPad compared to the base models? | Because people will pay that much more. Having said that, it's not like they're just gluing a 64GB thumb drive onto their base model and calling it a day. Phones and tablets have the vast majority of their available space dedicated to things that aren't storage; the space they need to fit 64GB into is probably smaller ... |
How is Bosch's stock trending around $19,000 per share? | The absolute cost per share of a stock is a relatively meaningless number. You can divide a company into whatever number of shares you like, and that number can change over time . If a company has a high price per share, it basically just means that they haven't done very many stock splits in the past, so there are rel... |
What is the difference between an homage or an allusion, and plagiarism or a rip-off? | Intent is the primary difference. With an homage, you want the audience to know what you're imitating. Ideally, you're providing your own spin on it to stand in contrast. With plagiarism, you're hoping the audience doesn't know what you're imitating. You want them to think it's your own idea. |
What is the consequence of a bank run in Greece for the Greek people? | A bank run occurs when people are scared about a bank or banks being able to issue them physical cash from their accounts. This can happen for a variety of reasons. In the Greek case, it is because people are worried about 1) the banks running out of money and 2) their accounts being forcefully converted to a new curre... |
Why do we get excited when we take a poop? | Now I wonder if I'm doing this wrong am I supposed to be getting excited when I poo?", 'Because when we poop, it is the equivalent of a free massage on our insides. Everyone gets excited for a free massage.Just a shot in the dark here . But maybe because it's some people's biggest accomplishment that day. |
How are traditional film-based movies duplicated for mass distribution? | Photography! The original bit that the camera makes is a negative of the image it recorded. Passing light through that negative doesn't noticeably degrade the original in the slightest bit, and allows you to make a perfect copy of the original onto some new film. You've got 1000 feet of movie? Get 1000 feet of unexpose... |
Why is Russia seemingly so interested in protecting Syria? They have sent weapons and are now sending two naval ships? | Let me link you to a [comment] I made in another thread. Its in Rusian national intrests for Syria to stay the way it is.It's also a different international policy approach. They think that regime change in another country = bad. Maybe they fear that they can be next, maybe there are other reasons. But bottom line, the... |
How Nikola Tesla's Radiant Energy Apparatus works and why we don't hear anything about radiant energy nowadays. | [Check again]. One of the main obstacles is to get a collimated beam as to prevent transmission losses. There are other proposals of [wireless energy transfer].When energy radiates outward, it radiates in all directions. Some goes straight up. Some goes up at an angle. Some goes horizontally. Some goes straight down. S... |
Nationality (for lack of a better title) | When people are describing themselves in the manner you presented, they are actually referring to their ethnic make-up. An ethnicity is group of people with a common ancestry who identify with each other through their traditions, a common culture, a common language, and most of the time a common religion/ideology. The ... |
Why do we smile when we're happy? | Smiling is not a reflex, meaning we don't just immediately know how to do it out of the womb because of our genes. It is a learned behavior, or habit, that we learn from other people as we see them smile. If we put a newborn into a facility that took care of it through the use of expressionless robots, it might be able... |
Theresa May's announcement of the snap election | May's Blue party think they're currently doing a lot better than Jeremy's Red party. Because the Blue party are in charge of the tree house just now, they've decided to hold the next election earlier than they need to, which is called a 'snap' election. All the members of the tree house get to vote in whether or not th... |
how do documentaries like planet Earth get the camera shots they do? | They have special cameras. Over the last 20 years camera technology has come a long way. They will typically use a combination of drones, steady cams, helicopter mounted cameras, and camouflaged tripods. Vox put out a [great video] a couple days that goes over it in more detail. |
How Serbian Air Defense using 70's missile tech was able to bring down a stealth fighter (F-117) ? | _URL_0_ > Unknown to NATO, Yugoslav air defenses operators had found they could detect F-117s with their "obsolete" Soviet radars after some modifications.[2] In 2005, Colonel Zoltán Dani confirmed in an interview suggested that those modifications involved using long wavelengths.[3] In addition, the Serbs had also int... |
Why are most bright coloured hair dyes only semi-permenant, when bright RED is available in a permenant dye? | Supply and demand. The vast majority of people who dye their hair do it to accentuate a with a natural color, and most businesses do not want their employees coming in with non-natural-colored hair anyway. This is combined with the fact that it's hard to get your hair white enough to make a color like blue or green sti... |
How is it possible that every country is in debt? | Mostly private investors. If you own savings bonds, then you're one of the people the government owes money to. Debt spending is a major public finance tool. The trick is not to borrow too much |
Why does Google chrome use so much RAM? | Because you have it. Chrome is designed to make optimal use of available resources. If your computer has memory available, Chrome will use it. This is why there is so much variation when people report how much RAM Chrome is using. It runs fluidly on everything from 2 GB Chromebooks to 64 GB gaming rigs, in each case op... |
Are there species of animal younger than humans on Earth? | Polar bears are thought to have split from brown bears around 150,000 years ago, while modern humans are roughly 200,000 years oldhumans created dogs through selective breeding of wolves so maybe that counts |
LI5: The structure of the US government? | The federal government is split into three branches: * **The Legislative Branch** is responsible for proposing bills and voting them into law. It's made up of two houses: the Senate and the House of Representatives. There are two Senators from each state, and one Representative for about every 600,000 people. To approv... |
Why don't we mass produce animals going extinct like we do cows and chickens? | It's hard to reintroduce a condor to the wild if it's never flown. The conditions animals live in prior to being butchered isn't really conducive to longterm life, let alone teaching animals how to cut it in the wild. There are also issues with animals like the panda, which have very low reproductive rates. It's hard t... |
what the deductible in a health insurance plan means and when you have to pay it | Hello, former insurance sales man, happy to help you out.First thing first, you should be super happy that they are offering you health insurance. If you were to get a plan on your own, it can be quite expensive. Question to keep in mind, how healthy are you? Do you have any medical conditions in which you need to see ... |
Does the thickness of a wire effect how much electricity can go through it like the thickness of a pipe does with water? | Yes. The thickness of a wire, referred to as the gauge, determines how much current that wire can carry. If you try to force too current down too thin a wire, the wire will overheat and can melt, potentially starting a fire. |
How do all laptop screens work immediately, compared to other hardware which requires drivers? | Uh what? Your laptop display is just a dumb display which is driven by a GPU/RAMDAC much like your desktop PC. It works when turned on without an OS because the GPU has a standard operating mode which the BIOS knows how to program. If you want to do anything more fancy than planar/linear 2d graphics on a limited subset... |
If homosexuality is not a choice and determined at birth, is Pedophilia not also? | There isnt really enough research out there on the topic but yes many argue that Pedophilia is more or less out of the persons control . As such we shouldnt shun pedophiles as long as they aren't acting on said urges. Theres even groups out there of self identified pedophiles who band together to help eachother never a... |
Why do we call countries 'First World' or 'Third World'? | Back during the Cold War there were three basic blocks/alliances of countries. US + its Allies: First World USSR + its Allies: Second World Non-Aligned Powers : Third World With the fall of communism the second world term fell out of use but you still had the relatively wealthy capitalist countries of the first world a... |
Why does autocorrect have such a difficult time if the first letter is wrong (vs anything after)? | Imagine you're playing a game with a friend: * You have a Polish language dictionary in your hand.* Your friend thinks of some Polish word.* He tells you the first letter of the word, and then just a bunch of letters, most of them matching the word he means, some others not.* You get more points the faster you deliver ... |
How exactly do pirates in their tiny boats manage to get aboard such large vessels to take it hostage? | With a ladder and guns. Ever see that movie Captain Phillips? Go watch that.Well, a larger boat doesn't mean a better boat in terms of fighting out on the ocean. If your tiny boat is faster, more manoeuvrable, has a bunch of guns, and is filled with fighting-ready pirates, then you might have the edge over a big and sl... |
Why pornstars enter the business looking nice, and end up ruining their looks with makeup and plastic surgery. | I can imagine they think that a procedure or two look good and hell, maybe the first few come out great, and then more procedures later shit hits the fan', "It happens with celebrities in general. Especially celebrities who are only famous for their looks, as opposed to having actual talent. Tom Hanks has had cosmetic ... |
why do cockroaches die upside down? | When a cockroach dies, its neurons release chemicals that cause its muscles to spasm. This usually results in the bug getting flipped on its back, since that's a stable position for the legs to flail and not much to happen. |
Can someone explain that feeling of "being watched", even when alone? | It is more that your brain is unaware of what is around you, and gets you to look around to check that there are no tigers sneaking up on you. |
How to record a live acoustic show? | How simple and how inexpensive? If you want to record the channels separately, I would probably do it on a laptop with a [relatively cheap audio interface] - I can't speak to the quality of that interface, since I don't own one, and spending more would probably get you something a bit more reliable and nicer, but that'... |
Why does the sinking of the Titanic still fascinate children, adults, educators, and researchers globally? | I don't know about researchers, I think the actual facts are fairly well established. However, I believe it fascinates us for the sheer scale of the disaster. We are speaking about a ship literally billed as unsinkable. Its sinkage was a big deal, especially the media attention it received. So, in short, I'd say the sc... |
Why can't you eat nuts even *near* some people with nut allergies? | The oils in nuts, and many foods, evaporate. Once airborne someone nearby who is severely allergic can breathe them in and have a reaction. Additionally these oils can transfer to things that you touch after you eat them, so if the person allergic touches that item too they can have a reaction. And finally with kids, i... |
WTF is the number after classes in the US? Informatics 101, etc. | 100 and 200 level class are general education and introductary classes to a subject. Usually they can be taken by anyone regardless of major. 300 and 400 level classes are more advanced classes and are generally only for the people who are involved in a major for those classes. All 100 to 400 level classes are for unde... |
How does tuberculosis make scars on lungs? Do these scars have any effect on lungs? | Tuberculosis bacteria are *very* slow growing, but also *extraordinarily* tough. If you are exposed to the disease, it will often go latent and not cause disease for possibly decades. But it's still there, in your lungs, in an arms race with your immune system! Inside the lungs, tuberculosis bacteria will end up surrou... |
How do cell phones work? How does a cell tower know which phone to send a message to, and why don't other phones receive the message too? | You power your phone on. Once the radio boots up, it brings to seek a signal from the strongest cellular tower. Your phone finds a strong signal and sends, in layman a terms, a handshake with identifying information about your device. "Hey. I'm a Verizon device. Here's my identification. Can I get in here?" The tower r... |
What causes grey/white hairs? | The hair gets its color from a pigment that the body produces called melanin. As the years pass by, the body produce less and less of this pigment. That is why people loose the color in their hair. The melanin also gives color to the skin and the eyes. Albino people have all their hair white and that characteristic ski... |
What's the point of a rebate? Why not discount the price in the store and save everyone the hassle? | Because they hope you'll forget to send your rebate in thus losing the discount.Because many people will forget to mail in a rebate. Also they usually get your address and they can send you marketing crap', "Because the company knows a fair amount of people won't take the time to do the rebate. So instead of having to ... |
how coilguns and railguns work | Railguns use a magnetic field to accelerate a huge piece of metal and throw it at a target. f=ma , have a large m and a and you get an even larger f |
Why, in films and TV shows, does the audio come in a second before the scene changes on the screen? | It's a stylistic choice. It often helps "carry" the scene, to make a change less abrupt and help the movie feel like it flows better. Or it could have thematic elements. Basically, it's done on purpose for a variety of reasons, that may or may not be "good" reasons, but it's always done on purpose for a specific reason... |
how do stab/cut proof shirts work? | The threads are made out of Kevlar in many protective fabrics. They are knitted into a loop-locking fabric so that there aren't slots for the knife to get through. It's not a cool as chain mail, but much lighter.What brand are those shirts? I would like one! |
What are the rules for dual citizens holding US government office? | Dual citizens aren't barred by law from holding any elected office that I know of; certainly not any of the federal offices , whose qualifications are spelled out in the Constitution. It's up to the voters. But it's politically touchy to maintain dual citizenship, so candidates for high office have been known to renoun... |
Why does my job, by default, take superfluous income out of my pay for taxes, so that at the end of the year I have to file for return? | > is the main reason people don't do this because most people are horrible at budgeting, and they will not have the required funds when their taxes are due at the end of the year? *Bingo* It's *safer* to have the basic federal state and local taxes subtracted from your paycheck up front. There are fewer possibilities o... |
How does mathematical modeling work? | Mathematical modelling is a broad topic, but the basic principle is that you use data to estimate relationships between variables, and can then use those relationships to predict how changing one variable will change another. A very simple example would be looking at a graph of age against height. You can imagine takin... |
Why do we get bags under our eyes when we don't get enough sleep? | Looks /u/LucidiK is partly right. From some quick research gravity is a major factor and sleep is not such a large factor. Bags under ones eyes get worse as you age. Fat and skin are pulled down by gravity and pool up right below your eyes, being help up my your lower eyelid I can assume. It also looks like when you la... |
Why is it more satisfying to say "Black and White" than "White and Black" | Because the expression has momentum. The English language is built with words, but how certain words relate to each other imparts more meaning. Depending on the sentence you're using it in , the phrase "black and white" can have more meaning than the three words \'black\', \'and\' and \'white\' do by themselves. So we ... |
How can there be a infinite number of prime numbers? Shouldn't you eventually completely run out? | Nope. And this is actually a fact that is quite easy to prove in an ELI5 way! Let's say you were right, and you had a list of all the prime numbers. Let's call them p_1, p_2, p_3 all the way to p_n. Maybe n is very large , but it's still a finite number. Our goal is to show that if you're right, we get a contradiction,... |
why do men get random boners. | Sometimes the tissue just needs to have blood flow through it to make sure everything is working correctlyLots of things can cause physical arousal, even if the mental side isn't there. Like yeah, maybe a breeze that hits you just the right way. Or here's a weird thing-- sometimes it's subconscious, even relating to so... |
Why is it that I often see in for example horror movies, that it is thunderstorms and strong windstorms simoultanously, but I have never seen that in real life? | You probably live somewhere with more mild weather. Most horror movies generally don't take place in cities, because the proximity with other people and civilization is comforting. You ever been to Missouri? Thunder, wind, hella rain, and a lot of "middle of nowhere" podunk places that murderers might hang out at.Becau... |
What is the Kansas City Shuffle and why is it called that? | It's where you feign to be something that lures your opponent into a false sense of security; then you abuse their belief in your facade to attack/manipulate/violate/exploit them. E.g. I pretend to be a cripple. They assume I cannot walk. I bet them $10 I am faster than them. They agree. I sprint and win the race. As t... |
Why does eating after taking a pill help the pill take effect? | Sometimes it's actually because the designers want the pill to take effect *slower* than it would on an empty stomach. Drug and alcohol users know from experience that taking things on an empty stomach will make the things hit harder and faster. When you have food in your stomach, things are absorbed a little bit slowe... |
why is C-4 or plastic explosives so powerful for being so small? | [RDX] is the actual explosive used in C-4 and all other plastic explosives . What makes C-4 C-4 is the fact that they mix in plasticizers with various properties to give the explosive the desired traits . To answer your core question, 'why is it so powerful', well, for reasons I don't understand, the most powerful expl... |
You can put chemicals together, you can heat them together. What other things can you do between two chemicals? | If you think about it, heating chemicals together is just the same idea of putting them together but in a different ambient environment. Similarly you might put chemicals together and cool them. You can pass electricity through them. You can put them together with a catalyst. You can apply pressure to them. You can bom... |
Why can some court cases be delayed years until they are actually carried out? | > If I'm not mistaken, the sixth amendment provides the right for those involved in criminal prosecutions to a speedy trial. You can waive this right, and most defense lawyers do. This gives the defense time to prepare . |
The difference between psychopath, sociopath, and narcisstic personality disorder. | First things first, the newest edition of the DSM says that psychopaths and sociopaths share common traits, these traits are: > A disregard for laws and social moresA disregard for the rights of othersA failure to feel remorse or guiltA tendency to display violent behavior The key difference between these two is that s... |
Brick and mortar stores going out of business while Apple stores continue to thrive? | Apple products are sold at a much higher profit margin than most retail products, because Apple is ruthless about punishing retailers that discount their products. The USA in particular has tried to prevent such punishment so that retailers are free to discount, but Apple's lawyers have found clever ways to get around ... |
Why is there no machine that creates electricity by converting heat energy from ambient air? | energy isn't like money that you can just move from one account to another. there has to be a feasible way to harness it. for example when mechanical energy is turned into electrical energy you are moving a coil in a magnetic field thus getting a current to flow.There are stirling engines that can extract heat energy f... |
Why would anyone choose Nolo Contendere over “Not Guilty” or “Guilty”? | It's a way of saying that they would rather take the punishment because they don't think they will win. But it's not an admission of guilt. |
This video on the Banach-Tarski Paradox | Basically infinity does not work the same way that numbers do. If I have an infinite set of points, and I take one point away, I still have an infinite set of points left. I can keep taking away points and sill have an infinite number left. If those points are on the surface of a sphere, I can essentially take "half" o... |
How do motorcycle gears work? | Getting a stationary object moving is the hardest bit. It's therefore essential that you can generate lots of force at this point, and that's why low gears exist. In a low gear, transmission of the bike can produce lots of force at the wheel to get it going, but with the trade-off that it can't go very fast. As you ris... |
what exactly is so special about ash's pikachu? | It was in the second episode. Pikachu let out a massive thunder shock attack while team rocket were trying to steal pokemon from the pokemon center that literally blew the whole place to pieces. They didn't want him before that. |
how does Euler’s formula connect real and imaginary numbers? | The best explanation I've ever seen is in Feynman's lectures on physics. One of the chapters is a condensed and exceptionally written presentation of algebra. It ends with the equivalences between complex exponents and trigonometric functions. _URL_0_ |
Why during the middle of the night do i hear a sudden cracking noise coming from an appliance? | It's probably temperature changes. When things cool down at night or after you turn them off, the materials they are made of contract . When different materials contract at different speeds, they can slip against one another, moving suddenly and making a cracking noise. |
Can really small things be drastically affected by the surface gravity of the human body? | Gravity is an incredibly weak force, but one with a long reach. The typical human's gravitational pull would be orders of magnitude weaker than other local forces like electrostatic attraction/repulsion between molecules on the surface and impacts from incoming light and stray air molecules. If you were able to perfect... |
Why are human beings inclined to hate (or reluctant to instantly accept) what is different? | Because to our primitive ancestors, different usually meant bad. That tuber smells different? Probably rotten, don't eat it. Your dog acting weird? Might have rabies, stay away. That stranger looks different than you? Probably from a rival tribe, and up to no good.There are many factors, but one is biological. We have ... |
What is the profit breakdown of professional sports jersey sales? | The actual cuts are going to vary depending on a number of factors, but Reebok, the league in question, and the team all get a cut. The player *may* get a cut depending on the terms of the league and team contracts. The more famous a player and the more recently he or she signed their employment contracts, the more lik... |
Why is everyone getting 'error loading' pages? What's the deal with Reddit? | Short "kid friendly" answer: Because too many people are asking Reddit something. It's kinda like if a couple of people started asking you stuff in real life. Now imagine a couple hundred at the same time you would just breakdown the same thing is happening to Reddit at peak traffic hours. |
What happens when the universe 'dies'? | Basically all energy will be in the form of heat scattered around, which isn't very useful. It's part of the laws of thermodynamics that you can't create order from disorder in a closed system , so there will never be a way to "put back" all that heat into useful forms of energy, like starsBasically **nothing**. The "d... |
Why is graphic violence allowed on American tv but one showing of a female breast is enough to send the nation into moral panic? | Graphic violence is very very rarely shown on tv. Just make believe pretend stuff. There would be a huge outcry if they started showing any actual violence. We even edit it out of the news a lot of the time. |
In this day and age of plenty what has caused a famine in Sudan? | War and drought. War is usually the main cause of famine these days, where fighting displaces people so they can't grow food, and blocks access of humanitarian efforts to provide food. Shipping food to people in a war zone is the main problem, not finding donated food. |
How did we come to develop modern computers from just natural resources? | It's going to be relatively difficult to sum up the complete history of invention and technological advancement in anything less than a number of books, I'd think. |
Do I look the same as I do in a mirror? | No, you don't look the same as you do in a mirror. In the mirror you see your image flipped, so essentially you see yourself in reverse. That's why you seem to look different in photographs compared to how you're used to seeing yourself because a picture of you is your "true" appearance, whereas a mirror's image of you... |
Why does the US have such strong protections for free speech, to the point where it applies even to neo-Nazis? | Most countries free speech laws are "positive", i.e. "Citizens CAN express ideas", which leaves room for the government to make restrictions against hate speech and such. The U.S. has a "negative" free speech law, i.e. "The government can NOT infringe upon a citizens speech". We 've agreed that restrictions regarding v... |
the conflict between China and Taiwan and how and why the US is involved | From 1927-1950, China fought an extended civil war. The fighters were Mao Zedong's Communists and Chiang Kai-Shek's authoritarian KMT, the ruling party of the Republic of China. In 1949, the Communists completely stomped Kai-Shek, forcing him to run to the island of Taiwan. In Taiwan, Kai-Shek continued to claim to rig... |
Why do we have limited reading speed? | Yes, it was a course book. It involved a metronome and scanning the rows at increasing speeds without stopping your eyes on any words. And eventually you start to actually understand and "read"what your scanning right over. It took work but was amazing when it started to workThis is a corporate website, not explicitly ... |
Melting a cup half filled with water over flames | Water is really good at absorbing heat, and it can take a lot of it. The heat that is being absorbed by the bottom of the cup is quickly absorbed by the water. It will continue this way until the water is removed or the heat would have to be so hot that the water cannot absorb it fast enough. Then, a hole would melt th... |
Why is it that I never get sick now that I'm an adult? | Children get sick more easily. It has to do with the way how our immune system works. Imagine you have a library full of mug shots of criminals. Children don't have many mug shots aka antibodies. Every time they get "robbed", infected by bacteria or virus, they take a "mug shot", cells which remembrer the intruder deve... |
Why don't we vote for president by popular vote? | There are two main reasons. The first is that originally states were supposed to be much more powerful. Think of the EU - a bunch of countries got together and decided to work together, but they still have their own governments. That's what the US was supposed to be - a bunch of governments with a central government th... |
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