Split (3)

train · 3.46k rows

id stringlengths 10 10	question stringlengths 18 294	comment stringlengths 28 6.89k	passages list	presuppositions list	corrections list	labels list	raw_presuppositions list	raw_labels list	raw_corrections list
2018-01369	if light travels at a constant speed what does it mean when they say that physicists were able to slow light down to 38 mph and more recently all the way to a standstill?	Light travels at a constant speed in a vacuum. In other things, like glass, it has a different speed. Exotic materials can make the speed even lower.	[ "The simplest picture of light given by classical physics is of a wave or disturbance in the electromagnetic field. In a vacuum, Maxwell's equations predict that these disturbances will travel at a specific speed, denoted by the symbol . This well-known physical constant is commonly referred to as the speed of ligh...	[ "Light travels at a constant speed always." ]	[ "Light only travels at a constant speed in a vacuum. In any other medium it is slowed down. " ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Light travels at a constant speed always." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Light only travels at a constant speed in a vacuum. In any other medium it is slowed down. " ]
2018-01820	How do albums get leaked before the release date?	There are numerous people that hear a band's songs and have access to their raw files long before a record is released. If you are on a major label, there are likely dozens of people with the songs, from your R & D manager to the team doing the mastering, not to mention the interns who might've been responsible for getting the files from one person to the next. Any of them could be responsible for a leak. And there are probably more than a few examples of the band being responsible, as well.	[ "\"It was really immediate; that's why we loved putting out singles early on. We recorded some songs for Sympathy for the Record Industry, and two weeks later, we had some finished copies of them. The turnaround time was amazing. And by the time people were able to get them, it was still under a month. They're hear...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-22176	Why do baby animals have different fur than adults do?	The smaller animal has a higher surface area to volume ratio so would lose more heat and possibly needs better insulation. It also probably doesn't need the sort of tough fur able to withstand hunting prey through undergrowth etc. Adult animals still have soft fur layers for insulation but more durable hairs growing through to provide a tougher outside layer.	[ "Another aspect of the Woodlark cuscus' metatherian identity can be seen the composition of the mother's milk. As the young grow, the carbohydrate, lipid, and protein compositions in the mother's milk fluctuates in accordance to the stage the young \"Phalanger lullulae\" is in as it grows. The tiny young will feed ...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-01426	Why do needles only sometimes cause bruising?	The smaller injections most likely didn’t hit a vein, so you won’t get much bruising from those. The blood draw and IV lines do hit veins, so there’s always the possibility of blood leaking out of the veins into the surrounding tissue and causing a bruise. As far as why one bruised and the other didn’t, there could be many reasons why. 1) Needle size and style, the blood draw was done with a straight needle and the IV had a flexible catheter which doesn’t tear up the vein quite as much. 2) every puncture and every vein is different. You may have twitched a bit more on one or the nurse had a little harder time sticking you on that one. 3) the nurse didn’t put enough pressure when she backed the needle out to seal the vein long enough for it to close itself off.	[ "A needlestick injury is the penetration of the skin by a hypodermic needle or other sharp object, which has been in contact with blood, tissue or other body fluids before the exposure. Even though the acute physiological effects of a needlestick injury are generally negligible, these injuries can lead to transmiss...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-03771	Does bleach added to soil eventually break down into harmless substances?	[After use in household cleaning or laundry, sodium hypochlorite breaks down into 95–98% salt and water. The remaining 3–5% is easily handled/removed by either sewage treatment or a septic tank where it degrades like starting soil. Further, no liquid bleach enters the environment as it reacts with organic loads in pipes and is consumed long before it reaches sewage treatment]( URL_0 ) Can't say for 100 percent certainty but this would certainly imply it will eventually degrade back down into soil. i'm not sure what the last 3-5% is composed of.	[ "US Government regulations (21 CFR Part 178) allow food processing equipment and food contact surfaces to be sanitized with solutions containing bleach, provided that the solution is allowed to drain adequately before contact with food, and that the solutions do not exceed 200 parts per million (ppm) available chlo...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-03799	What is Cannibidiol (CBD) and why is it seemingly coming out of nowhere as an exceptional drug for many diseases and chronic illnesses, as well as improving all around focus and decreasing anxiety?	I probably would not explain anything about marijuana to a five year old, but, it's a component of marijuana. There are two "main" parts, THC and CBD. THC is the "weed high" portion and CBD is the medical stuff you mentioned, in a very general sense. An older-than-5 explanation (that I yanked from Google for you): URL_0 > Are there any downsides to CBD that are pushed under the rug I don't think they'd be swept under the rug as much as not yet known. It's new.	[ "Cannabidiol\n\nCannabidiol (CBD) is a phytocannabinoid discovered in 1940. It is one of some 113 identified cannabinoids in cannabis plants and accounts for up to 40% of the plant's extract. In 2018, clinical research on cannabidiol included preliminary studies of anxiety, cognition, movement disorders, and pain.\...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-03536	Why do trucks always say that they take wide rights, but not lefts?	If you drive on the right, as in the us, turning right normally will make you go over the curb. Left, there is a lane there, no curb to hit	[ "For regulatory reasons, generally only licensed carriers are allowed access to support structures, and to municipal rights of way.\n", "The doctrine was set forth by the United States Supreme Court in \"Eastern Railroad Presidents Conference v. Noerr Motor Freight, Inc.\" and \"United Mine Workers v. Pennington\...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-02371	Why sweetcorn stays primarily intact during the digestion process	It doesn't. Only the outside shell remains partially intact. This is because the shell is made of cellulose, a type of polysaccharide that our bodies lack the proper enzymes to digest.	[ "Section::::Production.\n\nThe process by which cecotropes are produced is called \"hindgut fermentation\". Food passes through the esophagus, stomach, small intestine, where nutrients are initially absorbed ineffectively, and then into the colon. Through reverse peristalsis, the food is forced back into the cecum ...	[ "Sweetcorn stays intact during digestion." ]	[ "It doesn't stay intact, the shell stays intact and the inside is digested. " ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Sweetcorn stays intact during digestion." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "It doesn't stay intact, the shell stays intact and the inside is digested. " ]
2018-20895	What does higher grade gas actually do to your car? Should I enter 93 octane into my Honda Civic, or stick to 87? Does it really matter?	Higher octane ratings burn slower and are used to prevent engine knock in cars that reach higher RPMs. You shouldn't have any adverse effects on your car by using high-octane fuel, but if the owner's manual doesn't call for high octane fuel, it won't actually help any either, and you're essentially just wasting money.	[ "That practice can be fine for \"cruising\" straight and level and in smooth air, but in case of the need to rapidly add power (sudden climb, headwind, etc), the additional \"insurance policy\" of excess octane in avgas helps prevent dangerously lean fuel-air mixtures from rapidly melting and physically \"burning\"...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-07251	Why is the urge to breathe based around CO2 and not oxygen?	> Since oxygen levels are what we need to stay alive, why aren't our bodies' reflexes based around that? Because evolution simply finds a solution that works well enough to let you reproduce. Not always the best one.	[ "Levels of CO rise in the blood when the metabolic use of O, and the production of CO is increased during, for example, exercise. The CO in the blood is transported largely as bicarbonate (HCO) ions, by conversion first to carbonic acid (HCO), by the enzyme carbonic anhydrase, and then by disassociation of this aci...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-00610	Why do clothes and towels smell bad when they 're left to dry crumpled up, but fine when hung or dried in a dryer?	The bad smell you are referring to comes from bacteria on the towel. Those bacteria thrive and reproduce more on a wet towel, than a dry towel. The more bacteria on the towel, the more it will smell. So the difference is that a crumpled towel has less surface area exposed to the air, and therefore less water evaporating. Since there is more water, there is more bacteria, and hence more stank. Edit: same goes with other clothes. The dryer a thing is, the less bacteria can thrive. Wrinkles allow moisture to stay longer.	[ "Environmental effects of laundry wastewater\n\nWastewater comes out of the laundry process with additional energy (heat), lint, soil, dyes, finishing agents, and other chemicals from detergents. Some laundry wastewater goes directly into the environment, due to the flaws of water infrastructure. The majority goes ...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-15867	How did humans discover music? Or is there music among animals as well?	"Or is there music among animals as well?" You - you've never heard of a bird?	[ "History of music\n\nMusic is found in every known culture, past and present, varying widely between times and places. Since all people of the world, including the most isolated tribal groups, have a form of music, it may be concluded that music is likely to have been present in the ancestral population prior to th...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-03592	Why do ducks and some other birds fly in patterns?	V-shape formations are more aerodynamically efficient for the group. The air directly behind a wing is pushed downwards (called downwash), and the air behind and to the side of a wing is pushed upwards (upwash). This is due to the vorticies formed on the wing tips. Flying in the downwash is harder, and flying in the upwash is easier, which is why ducks, geese, and aircraft flying in formation position themselves behind and to the side of the leading bird. [This diagram]( URL_0 ) shows this nicely.	[ "The standardwing was filmed for the first time in 1986 for the BBC nature documentary \"Birds for all Seasons\", when a cameraman Michael W Richards stationed in the canopy captured footage of a male bird displaying. Ten years later, David Attenborough observed a mass display of dozens of males for the BBC \"Natur...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-07109	why does ones eyes tear up when getting hit on the nose?	My thoughts are that it's because our eyes, ears and nose are all connected. We hold our nose and blow to equalise the air pressure in our ears. Eating spicy food makes our eyes and nose water. When we blow our nose hard our eyes will be affected and may tear up.	[ "Nerves and muscles may be trapped by broken bones; in these cases the bones need to be put back into their proper places quickly. For example, fractures of the orbital floor or medial orbital wall of the eye can entrap the medial rectus or inferior rectus muscles. In facial wounds, tear ducts and nerves of the fac...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-24401	Is it just humans that have such a hard time giving birth or is it just because we can Express it?	Childbirth for women has higher death rates by far than animals. It’s a price that is paid for walking upright which narrows the path of the birth canal. Evolution dictated that the benefits derived from being able to walk upright outweighed the higher mortality rate of a more difficult birth	[ "Human infants are also almost always born with assistance from other humans because of the way that the pelvis is shaped. Since the pelvis and opening of birth canal face backwards, humans have difficulty giving birth themselves because they cannot guide the baby out of the canal. Non-human primates seek seclusion...	[ "Humans are perceived to have a hard time giving birth because they are verbal about it." ]	[ "Childbirth for women has higher death rates by far than animals." ]	[ "false presupposition", "normal" ]	[ "Humans are perceived to have a hard time giving birth because they are verbal about it.", "Humans are perceived to have a hard time giving birth because they are verbal about it." ]	[ "false presupposition", "normal" ]	[ "Childbirth for women has higher death rates by far than animals.", "Childbirth for women has higher death rates by far than animals." ]
2018-00580	How were wooden ships made waterproof in ancient times?	Caulking such as horse hair, clay or cloth was poked between the wooden planks to fill gaps. Pitch or tar was applied to the outside to help waterproofing. Also boats then, like now, aren't water tight. The bilges would always collect some water. Bailers would use buckets to bail out the bilge water. Today this is done with pumps or stern hatches on some small dinghies/yachts.	[ "Section::::Evidence in Europe.\n\nShip armour is to be distinguished from the practice of hull sheathing for preservational reasons, namely the protection against marine wood-boring worms. Greek merchantmen were fitted with lead sheets for that purpose by the 5th century BCE. A notable Roman example were the excav...	[ "Wooden ships in ancient times were waterproof" ]	[ "Boats then, like now, aren't water tight." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Wooden ships in ancient times were waterproof" ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Boats then, like now, aren't water tight." ]
2018-02489	Why do cattle get nutrients from grass, but humans do not?	Because we dont have the digestive enzymes in our gut system to breakdown grass into nutrients while cattle do	[ "Commonly, CAFO wastewater and manure nutrients are applied to land at agronomic rates for use by forages or crops, and it is often assumed that various constituents of wastewater and manure, e.g. organic contaminants and pathogens, will be retained, inactivated or degraded on the land with application at such rate...	[ "If cattle are able to get nutrients from grass, humans should be able to also. " ]	[ "Humans don't possess the digestive enzymes to break down grass into nutrients like cattle do, therefore they can't obtain the same nutrients." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "If cattle are able to get nutrients from grass, humans should be able to also. ", "If cattle are able to get nutrients from grass, humans should be able to also. " ]	[ "normal", "false presupposition" ]	[ "Humans don't possess the digestive enzymes to break down grass into nutrients like cattle do, therefore they can't obtain the same nutrients.", "Humans don't possess the digestive enzymes to break down grass into nutrients like cattle do, therefore they can't obtain the same nutrients." ]
2018-15466	Could someone explain Godel's incompleteness theorem to me?	As a preface, he actually had several incompleteness theorems, all of them interrelated. Also, part of the profound triumph of his work is the formal structures he created (discovered? 😏) to describe his theorems. I won’t be able to do it justice in an ELI5, but hopefully I can at least convey the big ideas. “Incompleteness” is actually a bit of a shortening. A more complete title would be “incomplete or inconsistent”. Gödel was able to prove that any system which is powerful enough to express its own axioms is either incomplete (in that there are true statements which cannot be proven, such as the axioms) or inconsistent (in that there are false statements which have proofs). Inconsistent systems are weird because they allow you to prove everything (and nothing) by leveraging the fact that you have “false is true”, so most mathematicians steer clear of them. This is probably why we mostly focus on the “incompleteness” part of Gödel’s work. I like to think about concrete Incompleteness in the context of programming languages. There are many other applications, but this is a big and very visible one. All programming languages are formal systems. They have axioms (the syntax and evaluation rules of the language, usually encoded as a compiler) and theorems (the programs you write). Most code is written in languages which are “Turing complete”. This is a different (but related) notion of completeness. Any language which is Turing complete is capable of expressing all Turing computable programs. Now this is interesting for a number of reasons, but how does it relate to Gödel? As it turns out, the axioms of a programming language, expressed in terms of a programming language, is itself a Turing computable program! As mentioned above, this program is generally called a compiler (or an interpreter). Take Java, for example. Java is Turing complete, so it can encode all Turing computable programs. The compiler for Java is a Turing computable program, so we can write the compiler for Java… in Java! (this is called “bootstrapping”, btw) However, remember that the programs you write are theorems in the formal system of your language. Having a Java compiler written in Java is the same as saying we have the axioms for Java encoded in Java, and Gödel tells us something about that. It tells us that Java must be inconsistent. Somewhere, somehow, Java must enable us to prove a falsehood. And as it turns out, this isn’t difficult to do! It happens every time you write a recursive function which never returns. That function is a lie (it promises a result that it will never produce) but Java allows it (in that the function compiles and you can try to run it), thus proving the lie. There are languages which don’t have this dilemma. Agda, for example, is a programming language which does not allow you to write “non-total functions”. This restriction is quite strong and ensures that it is impossible to prove falsehoods. So Agda is consistent, but Gödel’s theorem tells us this implies it must be incomplete. And sure enough, it is: you cannot write a compiler for Agda in Agda. There are a lot of implications of Gödel’s work in other areas as well, this is just one example. Hopefully it builds some intuition about what incompleteness means. Edit: Also, uh, don’t do your friend’s homework for him. Especially a topic like this. If he’s in a higher level math course, the professor most definitely wants a more formal treatment of the matter than what I’ve given you.	[ "Section::::Formal systems: completeness, consistency, and effective axiomatization.:Completeness.\n", "Section::::The provability relation.\n", "Section::::First incompleteness theorem.:Truth of the Gödel sentence.\n", "Compared to the theorems stated in Gödel's 1931 paper, many contemporary statements of th...	[ "There is only one Godel's incompleteness theorem to be explained." ]	[ "There are several Godel's incompleteness theorems that are interrelated which can be explained." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "There is only one Godel's incompleteness theorem to be explained.", "There is only one Godel's incompleteness theorem." ]	[ "false presupposition", "normal" ]	[ "There are several Godel's incompleteness theorems that are interrelated which can be explained.", "There are several Godel's incompleteness theorems" ]
2018-01114	Why does Google maps sometimes suggest a slower route as the first preference?	I am guessing, that other than the obvious stuff like tolls and/or bridges etc... It might be making traffic predictions that there MIGHT be traffic during the trip, so it avoids the route.	[ "BULLET::::- In early test versions of Google Maps, searching for a route between locations separated by expanses of water (for example, Paris and New York City) provided road directions to the coast of the embarkation country (in this case, the west coast of France) before suggesting \"Swim the Atlantic Ocean (3,5...	[ "Google is suggesting a slower route." ]	[ "Google is predicting traffic in the future based on historical data. The predictions lead to choosing a different route." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Google is suggesting a slower route." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Google is predicting traffic in the future based on historical data. The predictions lead to choosing a different route." ]
2018-01923	How were scientists able to take a photo of an atom?	the atom is being held in place by a magnetic field, also the element chosen has light emitting properties. Without the light from inside the atom itself(absorbed from a high powered laser focused directly on it and set to our visible spectrum) it would not be visible, that's my basic understanding.	[ "The first photographed atom was discovered in 2012 by physicists at Griffith University, Australia. They used an electric field to trap an \"Ion\" of the element, Ytterbium. The image was recorded on a CCD, an electronic photographic film.\n\nSection::::Social and cultural implications.\n", "Around the beginning...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-01922	why are those infrared lasers in movies that guard things/areas arranged in a seemingly random pattern that people are capable of maneuvering through? Why wouldn't you design an impenetrable laser field that Catherine Zeta Jones could not sexy her way through?	Because otherwise the hero wouldn't be able to sneak through. Movies are not reality. They're written in a way so it works out exactly the way the writer wants it to.	[ "Before Grant started the myth, he stated that he found that the highly visible, brightly colored light beams seen in movies do not exist in the real world, as not only would it defeat the purpose of making the laser system hard to get around, but real light moves far too quickly to be seen by the naked eye, thereb...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[ "Movies should be logical and not allow for people to slip through laser defenses." ]	[ "false presupposition", "normal" ]	[ "Movies are made to work perfectly for the story. That involves putting logic to the side sometimes. " ]
2018-04199	What’s happening when computers “freeze”? (Non internet related)	A program will attempt to do something, and it cannot. Its looking for information but it simply is not there, or it is there but is in a form that makes no sense to it. It doesn't know what to do and has no way to continue running with the problem, to the point that it can't even close itself. so it just stops.	[ "BULLET::::- Computer security researchers at Graz University of Technology and Catholic University of Leuven, in a coordinated disclosure with Intel, announce the discovery of a group of Microarchitectural Data Sampling vulnerabilities, affecting millions of Intel microprocessors, which they named Fallout, RIDL (R...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-01172	Why do so many African Americans have Welsh surnames?	That former slaves took on their previous owners' surnames is a widespread myth: the one thing they didn't often do was to assume the names of their former oppressors. They usually named themselves after other famous Americans, especially those they regarded as heroes of the anti-slavery movement: thus African Americans called "Brown" are named not after the slave-owner Jerrett Brown, but the abolitionist John Brown. I don't know that Welsh surnames are particularly prevalent among black Americans. It's very difficult to judge, though, because the Welsh didn't have surnames until they were forced to adopt them by the English. As a result, the most common Welsh surname, Jones, is actually English in origin, and picked by many families simply because it was already a common surname in England. (In fact, the letter J is foreign to Welsh, used only for words borrowed from English.) Looking at [a list of the most common surnames among black Americans]( URL_0 ), the first one that is undoubtedly Welsh in origin is Davis (referring to St David, the patron saint of Wales). That's an interesting one because the one Davis most closely connected with slavery is Jefferson Davis, who was a fierce advocate of slavery, so unless I'm missing something that does break the usual pattern. You have to go all the way down to the 38th most common, Evans, to find the next unambiguously Welsh name. Names like "Williams" and "Thomas" are common in Wales, but in origin they are English -- and in any case mean nothing more than "son of William" and "son of Thomas", so could simply have been chosen for that reason (alternatively, Thomas could refer to Thomas Jefferson). "Davis", of course, can also mean simply "son of David".	[ "In 2016, an analysis of the geography of Welsh surnames commissioned by the Welsh Government found that 718,000 people (nearly 35% of the Welsh population) have a family name of Welsh origin, compared with 5.3% in the rest of the United Kingdom, 4.7% in New Zealand, 4.1% in Australia, and 3.8% in the United States...	[ "Welsh surnames are common in African Americans." ]	[ "Welsh surnames are not that common to African Americans. " ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Welsh surnames are common in African Americans." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Welsh surnames are not that common to African Americans. " ]
2018-04023	Why is medicine dosage measured in half-life if half the medicine is still in the body?	It's not used to purely say when a patient has "0" of any drug in their system, it's more to help when giving "Top Up" doses, say you have a patient on Morphine that needs an extra dose, knowing the half life helps Doctors/Nurses decide of they're able to give them a slight dose if they need it. It's also used when calculating Antibiotic doses, as you need a minimum level in the body to acheive the desired effect, but balanced with potentially overdosing. For example, if 50mg is the minimum requirement, but each tablet is 100mg, with a one hour half life, the dosage would be: 100mg, wait an hour for it to drop to 50mg, another 100mg which takes it to 150mg, so the next hour/half life only takes it down to 75mg, so if the patient had another dose they would have 175mg in their body and so on. So, if this wasn't kept in check they would soon be potentially overdosing.	[ "The half-life of the drug refers to the drug's elimination from the bloodstream which can be caused by metabolism, urine, and other forms of excretion. If the active compound has a long half-life (over 6 hours), it is sustained on its own. If the active compound has a short half-life, it would require a large amou...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-00624	Why do things taste different when I'm sick?	The tastebuds do an angry. Actually it has to do with your sense of smell being impaired by mucous buildup and clogged sinuses. (I think)	[ "BULLET::::4. Owing to the \"circumstances, conditions or dispositions,\" the same objects appear different. The same temperature, as established by instrument, feels very different after an extended period of cold winter weather (it feels warm) than after mild weather in the autumn (it feels cold). Time appears sl...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-11391	Why we often say that it is harmful to eyes if you watch TV in a dark room but not the same case if you watch movie in a dark theater?	It's a misconception, it's not true. Watching TV in a dark room won't hurt your eyes. Neither will watching a movie in a dark theater.	[ "Among others, Christopher Nolan has criticized the huge brightness loss: \"You're not that aware of it because once you're 'in that world,' your eye compensates, but having struggled for years to get theaters up to the proper brightness, we're not sticking polarized filters in everything.\"\n", "Medical research...	[ "It is harmful to eyes if you watch TV in a dark room.", "It is harmful to eyes to watch TV in a dark room." ]	[ "Watching TV in a dark room will not damage the human eye.", "It is not harmful to eyes to watch TV in a dark room." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "It is harmful to eyes if you watch TV in a dark room.", "It is harmful to eyes to watch TV in a dark room." ]	[ "false presupposition", "false presupposition" ]	[ "Watching TV in a dark room will not damage the human eye.", "It is not harmful to eyes to watch TV in a dark room." ]
2018-16019	How is a phone or portable charger or other device designed so that it knows how much it’s charged?	It doesn't know, it gives an estimate. There's several methods to ddetermine this estimate but most common is coulomb counting, which is very ELI5 in itself. It is literally counting the number of electrons that flow in the battery (charging) and then count the electrons that flow out. Now your device does not do this by itself, rather it knows a table which maps voltage levels to the number of electrons in the battery. This isn't a 1:1 match, which is why you sometimes (especially on much used batteries) see that after heavy usage and the device is put away for a while you can see the charge estimate go up! These tables are made in the factory and programmed to your phone, when your battery starts to degrade the table is no longer accurate. Typical behavior are sudden drops in the % estimate, no longer charging to 100% or turning off above 0%. TL;DR so how does it know it is charged? It doesn't, it just assumes that a certain voltage equals a certain charge.	[ "Once the simulated battery voltage is set, the user connects the charger to be tested to the input of the simulator. The charger will detect that a battery has been connected and the charging process will begin. The simulator keeps the voltage constant at the set value, while the analogue ammeter indicates the cha...	[ "A phone or portable or other device is designed to know how much it's charged.", "A charger knows how much is charged." ]	[ "Devices like cell phones and portable chargers do not know exactly how much they are charged, but they make an estimate, by coulomb counting for example.", "A charger only has an estimate of how much is charged." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "A phone or portable or other device is designed to know how much it's charged.", "A charger knows how much is charged." ]	[ "false presupposition", "false presupposition" ]	[ "Devices like cell phones and portable chargers do not know exactly how much they are charged, but they make an estimate, by coulomb counting for example.", "A charger only has an estimate of how much is charged." ]
2018-00649	How does the human brain makes a difference between when one's pretty close to remembering something and when one is probably not going to remember that something? Why does it 'feel' different?	The feeling of not quite being able to remember a word is called the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon. I'm just going to quote the [Wikipedia page]( URL_0 ) because there's no need to reinvent the wheel here. > People experiencing the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon can often recall one or more features of the target word, such as the first letter, its syllabic stress, and words similar in sound and/or meaning.[3] Individuals report a feeling of being seized by the state, feeling something like mild anguish while searching for the word, and a sense of relief when the word is found.[3][7] While many aspects of the tip-of-the-tongue state remain unclear, there are two major competing explanations for its occurrence, the direct-access view and the inferential view. > The direct-access view of the tip of the tongue phenomenon postulates that TOTs are experienced when memory strength for the item, while not strong enough to be recalled, has sufficient strength to signal a TOT state.[2] That is, the rememberer has direct access to the target word's presence in memory, even though it cannot be immediately recalled. > The inferential view of TOTs claims that TOTs arise from clues about the target that the rememberer can piece together.[2] This is to say that the rememberer infers their knowledge of the target word, and the imminence of retrieval depends upon the information that they are able to access about the target word from their memory. The TLDR is that the human brain is still a mystery, especially the way the memories work. There are a couple of competing theories on how you can know you know something, without actually being able to remember that thing, but we're not sure. They both center on the idea that your brain pieces together a memory from a vastly complicated network of firing neurons, and a partially completed memory is substantial enough to make you aware of its existence, but not complete enough for you to consciously interpret, which gives you a frustrating case of mental blue balls.	[ "Section::::Functional sensitivity.\n\nThe canonical characteristics described above of the Dm effect give a general description of the component; however, the strength, timing, topographical distribution and even whether or not the effect is seen is sensitive to a variety of experimental manipulations.\n\nSection:...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-03150	What exactly is happening when you stand up too fast or have a big stretch and your body feels like it's going to shut down?	The blood pressure in your body needs to readjust. When standing up too fast the blood rushes from your brain (where its doing some very vital work)	[ "Normally, the body compensates, but in the presence of other factors, e.g. hypovolemia, diseases and medications, this response may not be sufficient.\n\nThere are medications to treat hypotension. In addition, there are many lifestyle advices. Many of them, however, are specific for a certain cause of orthostatic...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-23464	Why does wine is used regularly in formal occasions?	> Why can't you drink vodka in a diplomatic party You kind of can. I'll explain what I mean. Wine is pretty difficult to cultivate. It's a high effort product. Takes years to get a plant to produce enough grape. Knowing which plant species works best in certain conditions. There is a trick and a lot of science in barrel storage. Therefor, it has become something that different cultures and different countries "compete" in producing (I have no source to backup this claim, but I'm gonna guess that it's all the Romans fault. They spread a lot of their culture around when they were about and did their thing) and that noblemen started to collect produce from different parts of the world. The idea that wine can taste different and have different characteristics must have come from a lot of...uh... comparable analysis. Someone literally had access to wine from a lot of different places and could compare. In some climates it's difficult, if not impossible, to grow wine. And in those places, it's pretty common with distilleries of various kinds instead. Which has created all the other spirit products you find in the specialised stores. Which leads me to my point. There are some very, very expensive vodkas out there too. The kind you can expect to be offered in a diplomatic meeting in one of those countries that take pride in their vodka. The difference, I suppose, is that most people will be very, very drunk after sharing a bottle of vodka. But still able to stick to a serious conversation after sharing a bottle of wine. If you look careful, you'll notice that there are very expensive beers, whiskey's, vodka's, cognac's and ciders out there. It's not strange that wine too has a posh tendency to some of its products.	[ "With the advent of modern electric lights, tastevins have very little practical use, although sommeliers often wear them on a ribbon or chain around the neck as a nod to tradition.\n", "Wine is a popular and important drink that accompanies and enhances a wide range of cuisines, from the simple and traditional s...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-07675	How do we determine that an animal is as intelligent as a X year old child?	When babies are born, they are severely under developed. They can't control their muscles, and there is very little conscious control over the body. As the child develops, there are certain indicators to look for to see how they are coming along, and they usually arrive at a similar time for all children. For instance babies don't talk, but toddlers start to. Babies latch onto faces out of instinct and can't control it, toddlers can look away, and control their body consciously. Further development might be language, or a concept of self such as recognizing the person in the mirror is you. Much farther along, a child can start to realize that other people know things they don't, or begin to read body language. So you can do a test. You place 3 cups upside down on a table and under one cup is a piece of candy. The child is brought in and allowed to pick 1 cup to look under. Before they choose, one of the researchers points their finger at the correct cup. Below a certain developmental threshold, the child doesn't recognize what pointing means. Above the threshold they understand that pointing means to look at something or to pick that one. They can do the same experiment with animals like dogs, cats, chimpanzees, and see which ones understand what finger pointing means. Amazingly, dogs do. Cats don't get it, a lot of chimpanzees don't get it, but dogs pick up on it quickly because they have tremendous social intelligence. They rely on others for information. So the age that most children would get this test correct, if a dog gets it correct, they can say that the dog has the intelligence of an X year old.	[ "In the UK from 1993 to 2012, the common octopus (\"Octopus vulgaris\") was the only invertebrate protected under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986.\n\nCephalopods are the only invertebrates protected under the 2010 European Union directive \"on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes\".\n...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-04694	how multimeters work	What part would you like to know more about? Voltage detection is pretty simple and can be accomplished digitally, albeit through a few voltage dividers to get the voltage into a range where the chip can read it. (Likely 0V-battery voltage) Inside the chip, it will compare the incoming voltage with a known voltage from the battery. If the battery is 9 V, and the comparison is 50% of 9 V, then the chip knows that it is 4.5 V. It also knows which voltage dividers it has used so from that it can calculate the actual voltage. (If it was using a 10x divider and measured 4.5 V, then it knows it's actually 45 V.) Current is very similar. To measure current the multimeter passes the current through a very low resistance "shunt" (aka a resistor that can handle lots of current.) The multimeter will measure the voltage on both sides of the current shunt, calculate the voltage drop (V=IR) across the resistor, then back calculate the amperage from there (because the resistance is known.) As for the other functions, I'm not entirely sure. :)	[ "Section::::Power supply.\n", "Section::::Safety.\n", "The resolution of a multimeter is the smallest part of the scale which can be shown, which is scale dependent. On some digital multimeters it can be configured, with higher resolution measurements taking longer to complete. For example, a multimeter that ha...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-04724	what happens to oils after they are absorbed by skin? Where does it go and how does it affect the body?	First comment is not true. Skin is not (just a little bit) permeable by water, but kind of permeable (a bit more) by fats. After absorbing with you skin it gets to the bloodstream and distributes through body. It also depends on the amounts of oil. If it is just a speckle, then it is likely to be consumed by skin cells, as they need fats as any other cell in your body. [wiki]( URL_0 on skin absorption	[ "Section::::Factors influencing absorption.\n\nAlong with inhalation, ingestion and injection, dermal absorption is a route of exposure for bioactive substances including medications. Absorption of substances through the skin depends on a number of factors:\n\nBULLET::::- Concentration\n\nBULLET::::- Molecular Weig...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[ "Oils are absorbed by the skin and moves on to the body." ]	[ "false presupposition", "normal" ]	[ "Not all oil is absorbed by the skin. Some oil that is absorbed by skin is used in skin cells." ]
2018-01427	How does hibernation work? Do they stay in the same position the entirety of winter? If so how do they recover so quickly and how is it different from sleep?	There are many forms of hibernation, so not every animal that hibernates does so in the exact same way. Some animals like bats for example sleep deeply and don't wake up during hibernation, others such as marmots get up from time to time. Also they don't sleep all the time, but wake up and then sleep again - they don't stay in the same position, they might turn around and move arms and legs to be comfortable. What they all have in common is that the hibernation initiates a very passive and reduced state. During the months or weeks of hibernation, the animals don't eat, so their metabolism is reduced, their body temperature lowered, as is their heart and breathing rate. This is what makes hibernation different from normal sleep. It affects the whole body. To wake up they need a lot of energy as the body fires up the "engines" again. If a hibernating animal is disturbed during hibernation and has to wake up often, it might die (it will starve during a hibernation phase as it does not have enough energy reserves to survive). The waking up process is also driven by hormones and can occur during hibernation (if the animal gets disturbed or has to flee/move).	[ "Winter rest in an animal is different from true hibernation, since the metabolism is not reduced drastically. The body temperature is not significantly lowered, however the heart rate is reduced. This means that animals like the raccoon can quickly become active again if temperatures rise or the snow melts. Other ...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-04092	How come we get super sleepy in a hot car, but can't fall asleep if our bedrooms are hot?	The difference is your body temperature. Hot core+hot air=miserable. Cold air+cold core= freezing. Hot air+cold core= relaxing and cold air+hot core= refreshing. Your body prefers to sleep with a colder core and in a warmer environment.	[ "Miller and Rattner left from New York in October 1940, driving south towards Florida before heading west. Miller brought along a few of his favorite books, including \"Mysteries\" by Knut Hamsun and \"Leaves of Grass\" by Walt Whitman. Miller wrote to Nin that he let Rattner do most of the driving, despite the fac...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-17060	Why don’t high performance cars put turbos on higher displacement engines and get much more power	The bigger the engine, the more fuel it burns at a given power setting. When you cram more air into the cylinders, you tend to lean out the mixture, which, on the severe end of the continuum, causes detonation (knocking) that will destroy your engine. To combat this, when adding a supercharger or turbosupercharger, the mixture is made richer than normal. Added to the added fuel burn for a bigger engine, it gets ridiculous pretty quick. A larger engine also generates more heat at a given power setting, requiring s larger cooling system. As you force more air into the cylinder, you also have to enrich the mixture to prevent detonation. This means you have a larger mass of duel burning in the cylinder, which means you generate more heat, which means you need an even bigger cooling system, which means a heavier car, which means you have to burn even more fuel to maintain a given speed, on top of the displacement penalty and the turbo penalty...	[ "BULLET::::2. Carbon build up behind the intake valves. Since fuel is directly injected inside the combustion chamber, it never gets a chance to wash any contaminants behind the valves. This results in excessive carbon build up over time, hindering performance. Some cars (like the Toyota 2GR-FSE engine in the Lexus...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-00955	Why do some foods put you at an increased risk for cancer?	The foods might contain tiny amounts of some kind of substance that is capable of disrupting DNA. [Smoked foods]( URL_1 ) are an example of this. From the smoke, they can contain carcinogenic (cancer causing) [polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons]( URL_0 ). These can cause cancer by breaking the DNA. Your cells are able to repair DNA, but if they miss a spot, or don't repair it the way it was before, it leads to a mutation. Mutations in the wrong spot cause cancer. Cancer is like winning the lottery, and eating these foods is like buying more lottery tickets. [Here is a detailed, but not very layman friendly]( URL_2 ) list of different types of carcinogens that appear in food. It may not be the food itself, but some kind of contamination or method of preserving the food that creates the carcinogen. Aflatoxin from a fungus that infects grains and nuts is an example, and the Chinese-style salted fish are another one from the list. Note that the list is in descending order of the amount of evidence we have that the particular compound is carcinogenic. The ones near the bottom are suspected of being carcinogens, but we don't yet know for sure that they are.	[ "Some specific foods are linked to specific cancers. A high-salt diet is linked to gastric cancer. Aflatoxin B1, a frequent food contaminant, causes liver cancer. Betel nut chewing can cause oral cancer. National differences in dietary practices may partly explain differences in cancer incidence. For example, gastr...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-00614	Why can't we recollect memories from what we did when we were babies?	It's called [childhood amnesia]( URL_0 ) and the answer is "we don't know", just like with almost everything relating to intelligence and sentience.	[ "Results from another recent study suggest that fetuses were able to form both short and long term memories. This conclusion was drawn from the fact that habituation rates (number of stimuli needed to habituate) were higher in babies in the neonatal stage that had not previously undergone fetal stimulations when co...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-01742	Why can't light penetrate walls but radio waves can?	It has to do with how EM radiation interacts with materials, and on how that depends on wavelength/frequency/energy of it. Quick little excursion into quantum mechanics. Photons come in discrete packets (quanta), and the energy of the photon determines its wavelength and frequency. The reverse statement is also true, if you have a photon of a certain wavelength/frequency then it must have the corresponding energy. 100 MHz radio means the photons have ~4*10^-7 electronVolts of energy. Red visible light photons meanwhile has an energy about 2 eV. Very high energy gamma rays can push 100 Tera electron Volts. Shorter wavelength/higher frequency=more energy Energy when dealing with subatomic particles is also quantized. Atoms and molecules absorb energy in discrete packets (quanta) and can only deal with energy that comes in packets of the right size. If a photon doesn't have enough energy to cause it's state to jump from a lower energy to a higher energy, it doesn't sit around waiting for another photon to come along and then add the energy of the two photons, it just doesn't interact at all. I should probably mention conducting materials as well. If you have an oscillating electromagnetic field (which is what EM radiation is) near something conductive, you'll find a current develops in the conducting material in response. This takes energy out of the electromagnetic field, reducing the intensity of the radiation. This is how antenna work, but anything conductive in the way will do the same, which is why your wifi is a bit spotty in the bathroom (all those pipes). Radio waves are very low energy. This means they simply fail to interact with most material. It can, but it will take quite a bit of it to do so. While conductive material in the walls will reduce it's intensity, radio waves wavelength can be quite large (that 100 Mhz is has a wavelength 3 meters ) which effectively lets it go around things like concrete pillars with rebar in them, or some pipes. Visible light meanwhile is much more energetic, and can interact with most solid material. So it gets absorbed and either gets scattered off randomly. It just can't make it through. However you can also create situations where radio waves can't get in, but light can. [A Faraday Cage]( URL_0 ) is the classic example. The complete cage of metal bars means it's impossible for radio waves to go around, so it interacts with the metal in the cage, and can't make it through. Visible light meanwhile has a wavelength much much much smaller than the holes in the cage, allowing it to pass right through the holes and never notice the cage is there.	[ "Terahertz radiation can penetrate thin layers of materials but is blocked by thicker objects. THz beams transmitted through materials can be used for material characterization, layer inspection, and as an alternative to X-rays for producing high resolution images of the interior of solid objects.\n", "Most mater...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[ "Light cannot penetrate walls but radio waves can." ]	[ "false presupposition", "normal" ]	[ "Radio waves are a form of light, just not on the visible spectrum. Therefore light can pass through walls, just not light in the visible spectrum. " ]
2018-20798	How does our sun work and why does it burn?	The Sun is a huge ball of mostly hydrogen. It's so big that the centre is under enormous pressure, so enormous that it squeezes the hydrogen atoms together to form helium. This process releases a huge amount of energy. That's where the heat and light comes from - it's not burning like a fire. To get an idea of the size of the sun: it converts 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium _every second_. Even at that rate, there is still enough to material for the sun to keep fusing for another 5 billion years.	[ "The Earth's mean distance from the Sun is approximately , though the distance varies as the Earth moves from perihelion in January to aphelion in July. At this average distance, light travels from the Sun to Earth in about 8 minutes, 19 seconds. The energy of this sunlight supports almost all life on Earth by phot...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-03695	– what are the causes of sudden nose bleed?	The main culprit is usually dry air. Dry air causes your nasal membranes to crust up pretty much in the same way skin gets dry too. The nasal membranes can crack when they're dry through some movement in the nose or even randomly, which causes the bleeding.	[ "Nosebleeds can occur due to a variety of reasons. Some of the most common causes include trauma from nose picking, blunt trauma (such as a motor vehicle accident), or insertion of a foreign object (more likely in children). Relative humidity (including centrally heated buildings), respiratory tract infections, chr...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-18307	Is the chance of getting food poisoning correlated with the amount of bad food eaten?	Yes. For example a contaminated food is essentially full of poison and the amount of exposure affects how badly the person will be impacted if at all. Dipping a toothpick into a spoiled food isn't the same as eating the entire thing of course.	[ "Section::::Regulations by jurisdiction and agency.:Australia.\n\nFood Standards Australia New Zealand requires all food businesses to implement food safety systems. These systems are designed to ensure food is safe to consume and halt the increasing incidence of food poisoning, and they include basic food safety t...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-04761	How can 2 switches wired to the same light be able to turn it on and off no matter the state of the other switch?	In household electric wiring, a three-way switch setup (common term) often involves wiring two double-pole switches a line, with the power source connected to one and the lamp connected to each other. In this case, each switch has two positions, and the circuit can be completed [or broken] by moving by moving either switch to a position that completes the circuit (or breaks it), as the current can flow from either position of the first switch. [This picture is worth a lot of words ]( URL_0 )	[ "In the traveler system, also called the \"common\" system, the power line (hot, shown in red) is fed into the common terminal of one of the switches; the switches are then connected to each other by a pair of wires called \"travelers\" (or \"strappers\" in the UK), and the lamp is connected to the common line of t...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-06471	Why, in movie and TV credits, do "Casting" people always have letters after their name?	Because the person is a member of a casting guild or association. Like this one here in the United States URL_0	[ "An early last billing credit in a film's opening simply listed a question mark (?) as portraying the monster in the 1931 classic \"Frankenstein\", which still lists it that way today, although the reissued prints seen today add actor Boris Karloff to the end credit listings, as the film made him a huge star such t...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-19663	If turning your engine on consumes fuel, how does stop/start technology save fuel?	Modern engines can start very easily and also when they do the stop/start they are already warm so don't need the additional fuel a cold engine would need. With older engines and carburettor and early fuel injection systems it was harder to start them.	[ "In 2011, Mazda announced i-ELOOP, a system which uses a variable-voltage alternator to convert kinetic energy to electric power during deceleration. The energy stored in a double-layer capacitor, is used to supply power needed by vehicle electrical systems. When used in conjunction with Mazda’s start-stop system, ...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[ "Automobile stop/start technology may not save fuel." ]	[ "false presupposition", "normal" ]	[ "Modern engines start very easily and they are already warm when using start/stop technology so they don't need the additional fuel that a cold engine would need." ]
2018-10651	Since oil & water don't mix, how are essential oil soaks helpful?	As far as I know there is no scientific proof that essential oils work anyway, but yes your skin can only absorb so much.	[ "GRAS Substances According to the FDA\n\nSection::::Dilution.\n\nEssential oils are usually lipophilic (literally: \"\"oil-loving\"\") compounds that usually are not miscible with water. They can be diluted in solvents like pure ethanol and polyethylene glycol.\n\nThe most common way to safely dilute essential oils...	[ "Oil isn't good for skin because oil and water don't mix" ]	[ "Oil can be absorbed into skin." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Oil isn't good for skin because oil and water don't mix", "Oil isn't good for skin because oil and water don't mix" ]	[ "normal", "false presupposition" ]	[ "Oil can be absorbed into skin.", "Oil can be absorbed into skin." ]
2018-01433	Why is there coconut oil AND coconut water?	Coconut water is as you've said; it's the liquid inside the cavity of the coconut. Coconut oil is pressed from the coconut meat (the white, edible stuff). Just as you're capable of secreting water and producing oil, so to can coconut.	[ "In Southeast Asia, coconut milk is used to make many traditional drinks. \"Cendol\" is a popular iced drink from this region containing chilled coconut milk and green jellies made of rice flour. Coconut milk is also used in hot drinks such as \"bandrek\" and \"bajigur\", two popular drinks from Indonesia. Sweetene...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-00933	How does your cars heat work?	Your car engine makes a lot of heat, that's why there is the big radiator up front. When the engine gets warm it opens a valve and starts the water pump so coolant flows through the engine and to radiator to move heat out of the engine The coolant also flows through a small radiator called the "heater core". When you want hot air, it blows through this heater core and into the passenger compartment. The delay is because until the engine gets warm enough to need cooling the coolant doesn't flow so the heater core doesn't warm up(neither does the radiator)	[ "Also known as a \"bogie hearth\", the car furnace is an extremely large batch furnace. The floor is constructed as an insulated movable car that is moved in and out of the furnace for loading and unloading. The car is usually sealed using sand seals or solid seals when in position. Due to the difficulty in getting...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-04873	Why is popping bubble wrap so satisfying?	well, the desire to pop, and sweet satisfaction of popping bubble wrap stems from something known as instinctive ancestral addiction. It has been suggested that doing a fiddly task triggers instinctual memories of repetitive grooming and insect-squishing performed by our ape ancestors. perhaps there is even something within the action of popping a bubble that triggers our hunter instinct, we enjoy that moment of feeling the bubble resist our applied pressure, and then give in... humanity craves power and when we pop a bubble, that is just a tiny expression of us demonstrating the power we have over that bubble.	[ "Section::::Uses.\n\nThe \"Annual Bubble Wrap Competition For Young Inventors\" was hosted by Sealed Air from 2006 to 2008, in which children were encouraged to design products made out of bubble wrap that had uses outside of the packaging industry. Inventions included a \"Bubble Wrap Car Door Cover\", a \"Bubble W...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-18410	How are alcoholic drinks related abv wise?	So a bottle of beer at 10% ABV is on average around 350mL. The ABV stands for alcohol by volume, so 10% of that total volume is alcohol. In this case 350 (0.10) is 35 mL of alcohol. An average shot glass is around 40 mL depending where you are. 80 proof is equal to 40% ABV. So a 40mL shot of 80 proof bourbon contains 40(0.40) or 16 mL of alcohol. You example was a very high alcohol beer, so for a normal beer the ratio of 1 shot = 1 beer would be about right.	[ "Wine is a fermented beverage produced from grapes and sometimes other fruits. Wine involves a longer fermentation process than beer and a long aging process (months or years), resulting in an alcohol content of 9%–16% ABV.\n\n\"Fruit wines\" are made from fruits other than grapes, such as plums, cherries, or apple...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-04290	Why does laughing so much hurt?	The sound of joy and laughter is so sharp and alien that it bounces off of the dark, empty chasm inside of you causing reverberations, or echoes, that put tiny cracks in the cold mask you show the outside world. Or it could also be muscles and stuff contracting and causing lactic acid to build up not unlike doing a lot of happy situps. Breathing out sharply and tightening your stomach muscles also forces blood into your head, causing slight headache due to increased blood pressure.	[ "BULLET::::- At the end of the film \"Mary Poppins\", Mr. Dawes, Sr. is said to have died laughing after being told a joke. Unlike most examples, this is presented as a positive, his son stating that he \"had never look so happy in all his life.\"\n\nBULLET::::- In the musical and film \"Little Shop of Horrors\", a...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-05242	how and why animals age differently to humans, and how we are able to calculate their age equivalence?	If by "Age equivalence" you mean something like "dog years" that's simply a rough approximation. If a human lives 10 times longer than a dog, on average, then 1 'human year' is 10 'dog years.' It really has no particular accuracy beyond a rough demonstration of lifespan, and tends to be wildly off on things like 'maturity' or what not.	[ "In fact, the aging of a dog varies by breed (larger breeds tend to have shorter lifespans than small and medium-sized breeds); dogs also develop faster and have longer adulthoods relative to their total life span than humans. Most dogs are sexually mature by 1 year old, which corresponds to perhaps 13 years old in...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-01286	How do cables like HDMI and USB keep increasing data throughput regularly while keeping similar connectors?	The cables just carries patterns of electricity. The more important part is the stuff on the end that interprets the patterns. Newer standards can read shorter, more compressed signals. Think of it like writing on a piece of paper. With the same size paper, you could fit more data if the person writing could write very small letters and the person reading had a magnifying glass. You could fit even more data by overlapping different colors ([like this]( URL_0 )) as long as the reader can filter out one color at a time. It's all still the same sized paper, and it fits in the same envelope but one carries more data than the other.	[ "According to a USB-IF chairman, \"at least 10 to 15 percent of the stated peak 60 MB/s (480 Mbit/s) of Hi-Speed USB goes to overhead—the communication protocol between the card and the peripheral. Overhead is a component of all connectivity standards\". Tables illustrating the transfer limits are shown in Chapter ...	[ "Cables are increasing throughput without changing size.", "If cables like USB and HDMI use similar connectors they should not be able to continously keep increasing data throughout regularly. " ]	[ "Software that encodes/decodes the data is getting better and allowing for more data to be transferred. ", "Newer standards can read shorter more compressed signals, whilst the cables just carry patterns of electricity." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Cables are increasing throughput without changing size.", "If cables like USB and HDMI use similar connectors they should not be able to continously keep increasing data throughout regularly. " ]	[ "false presupposition", "false presupposition" ]	[ "Software that encodes/decodes the data is getting better and allowing for more data to be transferred. ", "Newer standards can read shorter more compressed signals, whilst the cables just carry patterns of electricity." ]
2018-01127	After a long time of no use why does it take multiple pumps for anything to come out of a spray bottle?	Spray bottles have a pump at the top and a tube that extends to the bottom of the bottle. When you press the handle, the pump creates a vacuum that, after enough presses, sucks liquid to the top and eventually out the nozzle. In theory, the pump should be completely airtight, which would mean that when you're not using it, the liquid in the tube should stay right where it is. (This is the same thing that keeps liquid in a straw if you cover the open end with your finger and lift it out of a glass.) In practice, a small amount of air gets through the seal in the pump and slowly lets the liquid flow back down into the bottle. If you pick it up the next day, not much of that has happened and you still get most of a pump's worth of spray. The longer you let it sit, the more liquid flows out of the tube and the more times you have to pump it to get it back up to the nozzle.	[ "While spray bottles existed long before the middle of the 20th century, they used a rubber bulb which was squeezed to produce the spray; the quickly-moving air siphoned fluid from the bottle. The rapid improvement in plastics after World War II increased the range of fluids that could be dispensed, and reduced the...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-04675	Does Gothic (as in clothing, rock, architecture, fonts etc.) come from the Gothic Tribes? Why/Why not?	Very indirectly. The Goth subculture ultimately derives its name from the Gothic literary movement of the 18th and 19th century, which was a darker offshoot of the Romantic movement (think Frankenstein, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and the works of Edgar Allen Poe). The literary genre takes its name from Gothic art and architecture from the middle ages, since the stories were stereotypically set in castles and other medieval buildings. That name itself originated as a pejorative coined during the Renaissance (the style was in its time called "French") and was compared to the Goths, barbarous Germanic invaders who supposedly destroyed Rome and erected their "Gothic" architecture across Northern Europe before the resurgence of classical style during the Renaissance. Basically, it was meant as a synonym for "barbarian."	[ "The words for \"to sacrifice\" and for \"sacrificer\" were \"blotan\" and \"blostreis\", used in Biblical Gothic in the sense of \"Christian worship\" and \"Christian priest\".\n", "The roots of the Gothic style lie in those towns that, since the 11th century, had been enjoying increased prosperity and growth al...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-24431	why do your head and lungs fill up with snot/flem when you get a chest and head cold, where does it all come from?	The phlegm and snot you feel is actually part of your body’s innate immune system. When a bacteria or a virus enters your body, your immune system secretes mucous from your nose and lungs that sticks to a lot of these pathogens. Your natural tendency is to swallow this mucous, sending the pathogens to your stomach where they die due to the extreme acidity. So if you’re sick and infected with something like the flu, your body will keep producing mucous until it thinks the pathogen is gone and you’ll feel a buildup of mucous in your lungs and sinuses.	[ "Increased mucus production in the respiratory tract is a symptom of many common illnesses, such as the common cold and influenza. \n\nSection::::Respiratory system.:Upper respiratory tract.\n", "Section::::Epidemiology.\n", "During cold, dry seasons, the mucus lining nasal passages tends to dry out, meaning th...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-14981	Why do some letters have a completely different character when written in uppercase (A/a, R/r, E/e, etc), whereas others simply have a larger version of themselves (S/s, P/p, W/w, etc)?	First of all, let's talk about the words 'uppercase' and 'lowercase'. These words come from the early history of printing, when a person called a typesetter would assemble each page of a book letter by letter. Each letter was a profile on a piece of lead, called a sort. The sorts were kept in boxes called [typecases]( URL_7 ), which had compartments for each letter. There would be a typecase for each font (also called a fount), which was a typeface at a specific size, at a specific weight (bold, medium, etc.), in a specific shape (upright, italic, etc.). A typeface is what we nowadays call a font on computers. There were actually two typecases for each font, and they were kept one on top of the other. The one on top was called the upper case, and contained the 'majuscule' letters; the one on the bottom was called the lower case, and contained the 'minuscule' letters. So the proper names for 'uppercase' and 'lowercase' are 'majuscule' and 'minuscule', respectively. Now, on to your actual question. Letters are just simple drawings that have phonetic meanings. (In other words, the symbols represent sounds.) The nature of the symbols is affected by the thing the symbols are written on. For example, one of the earliest writing symbols we have is [cuneiform]( URL_2 ), which was written by making marks with a stylus in a piece of clay. The shape of cuneiform marks is strongly determined by the shape of the stylus. This is important, because the majuscules and minuscules were originally two forms of the Latin alphabet that were used for writing on different materials, and the same thing applies to the Greek alphabet. Majuscule letters were originally inscriptional, which means they were carved into stone. The Roman emperor Trajan had his military victories depicted on a carved stone column called [Trajan's column]( URL_5 ); at the base of this column is some writing, in the style of [Roman square capitals]( URL_3 ): this style is common on Roman monuments, but Trajan's column is one of the best known examples. These letters were designed by a scribe painting them on to the stone with a brush; a stonemason would then carve out the painted areas. The motion of the brush created little flairs at the beginning at end of each brush stroke; these flairs are now known as serifs. However, Romans writing out documents would use [Roman cursive]( URL_4 ). Roman cursive, like all cursive writing forms, is basically a bunch of shortcuts in writing the 'proper' letters. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Roman culture continued to hold considerable sway amongst the barbarians. The same writing styles were preserved, until the Carolingian Renaissance under Charlemagne (Charles the Great) in the Frankish Empire (now France) in the 800s. Charlemagne was a great believer in literacy, and despite never learning to read himself, ordered the creation of a single style of handwriting to be used across his empire, to prevent documents from being misinterpreted. The end result was a pairing of these two writing styles into the majuscule and minuscule letters of a unified alphabet. The minuscule letters, being easier to write quickly, were use normally, but the majuscule letters, with their grand and elegant forms, were used for proper nouns and emphasis. Over the succeeding thousand years, different nations would slowly adapt these letter forms and the relationships between them to their needs: the Italians developed the [Humanist minuscule]( URL_0 ), which later became the italic script; the Germanic peoples developed the [blackletter]( URL_1 ) scripts; the Irish developed the [insular script]( URL_6 ). This development continues today, with hundreds of typefaces released each year by type designers.	[ "The glyphs of lower-case letters can resemble smaller forms of the upper-case glyphs restricted to the base band (e.g. \"C/c\" and \"S/s\", cf. small caps) or can look hardly related (e.g. \"D/d\" and \"G/g\"). Here is a comparison of the upper and lower case variants of each letter included in the English alphabe...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-00948	Why does meat to stick to cooking surfaces?	Anything that goes from being viscous to being rigid will act like glue, because it'll first conform to whatever surface it's touching, getting into all the nooks and crannies. Once it hardens, it'll grab on to said nooks and crannies, and be more or less difficult to remove.	[ "When meat cooks, the proteins on the surface of the meat denature because of the heat. This means that many of the secondary bonds that give the proteins their shape are broken. The protein molecules want to reform those interactions to return to their most thermodynamically stable state. Two opportune locations f...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-22016	Why do the metal parts that plug into wall outlets have holes in them?	Assuming you are talking about the 120VAC American wall outlet plugs, then there are really two main reasons for the holes: 1) They are there to have a "bump wiper" fit into the hole. A bump wiper is usually a small, flexible copper conductor that has a small bump on the end which fits into the hole on the plug. When the plug goes into the outlet slot, the wiper moves to the side and the bump goes into the hole giving better grip. 2) Another reason is for lock-out-tag-out procedures. A small lock can be fitted into the holes to prevent another person from plugging in the object on the other side of the plug to prevent accidental shock. But this is a pretty recent use of the holes. LOTO wasn't a big thing until well after the design of the plug was introduced. Edit: to clarify, the bump wipers would be inside of the wall outlet assembly.	[ "Section::::Fixed resistor.:Lead arrangements.\n\nThrough-hole components typically have \"leads\" (pronounced ) leaving the body \"axially,\" that is, on a line parallel with the part's longest axis. Others have leads coming off their body \"radially\" instead. Other components may be SMT (surface mount technology...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-21463	What difference in the sky causes hail instead of snow ?	When enough force of hot air rising meets the cold air, it's strong enough to keep rain particles from falling. This causes them to collect moisture and than freeze. Than come back down to collect more moisture than go up and freeze. They keep yo-yoing like that until they become too heavy for that hot air that's rising, than they fall.	[ "Depths of up to have been reported. A landscape covered in accumulated hail generally resembles one covered in accumulated snow and any significant accumulation of hail has the same restrictive effects as snow accumulation, albeit over a smaller area, on transport and infrastructure. Accumulated hail can also caus...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-01960	How are people contagious with a virus or bacteria without having any symptoms?	For many diseases, symptoms come not from the infection itself, but from the immune system's attempts to stop the infection before it gets out of control. Some organisms have ways to evade the immune system, at least for a little while. If these organisms can grow while they're doing this, then they can be spread.	[ "Humans are the only known reservoirs of \"M. tuberculosis\". A misconception is that \"M. tuberculosis\" can be spread by shaking hands, making contact with toilet seats, sharing food or drink, sharing toothbrushes, or kissing. It can only be spread through air droplets originating from a person who has the diseas...	[ "Asymptomatic people should not be able to spread a virus or disease." ]	[ "An asymptomatic person with a disease or virus is carrying a virus that has gone undetected by the immune system, therefore it can be spread to others." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Asymptomatic people should not be able to spread a virus or disease.", "Asymptomatic people should not be able to spread a virus or disease." ]	[ "normal", "false presupposition" ]	[ "An asymptomatic person with a disease or virus is carrying a virus that has gone undetected by the immune system, therefore it can be spread to others.", "An asymptomatic person with a disease or virus is carrying a virus that has gone undetected by the immune system, therefore it can be spread to others." ]
2018-01498	Why do chicken cock-a-doodle-doo in the morning?	It happens in the morning because it's the first thing roosters do after they wake up. And then they keep doing it every 15 minutes all damn day. What I'm trying to say is that roosters are real annoying.	[ "In the laboratory, mummichogs have yielded clear examples of free-running circadian rhythms, in both body colour and swimming activity. For the latter, clear rhythms were obtained in single individuals as well as in groups of 5 or 25 individuals. Evidence of free-running semi-lunar rhythms have also been obtained ...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-06548	How did suffixes for differing nationalities come to be named as such (-ese, -ean, -ish)	This is only a partial answer, but you're actually correct about “French.” Around the time of the Holy Roman Empire, there was a group of people in France called the Franks, or Frankish, and in the year 800 AD the Pope crowned their king Charlemagne the first Holy Roman Emperor. Even in modern German the word for the country France is Frankreich, literally “Land of Franks”. Over decades and centuries “Frankish” was corrupted into “French,” like in the telephone game where people in a line repeat a message and it usually is different at the end from how it started. Also, it's possible that -ese as in “Chinese” and “Japanese” derives from the Latin -ensis, which is used to indicate place of origin. The word for this is “demonym.”	[ "Adjectives ending \"-ish\" can be used as collective demonyms (e.g. \"the English, the Cornish\"). So can those ending in \"-ch\" / \"-tch\" (e.g. \"the French\", \"the Dutch\") provided they are pronounced with a 'ch' sound (e.g. the adjective \"Czech\" does not qualify).\n\nWhere an adjective is a link, the link...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-02634	Why do some genetic illness only show up when you're adult or middle aged?	Genes that severely impact your survival early in life tend to get bred out quickly, like many generations ago. Defects that show up after you've spawned offspring don't see the same editing process because you've passed your genes on before you have symptoms.	[ "Germ-line mutations are often at least in part the cause of disease onset at an earlier age. Though many germ-line mutations are deleterious, the genetic lens through which they may be viewed may provide insights to treatment, possibly through genetic counseling.\n", "Diseases are often categorized by their ages...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-04717	Kid shampoo are made to not sting in the eyes. But why isn't grown-up shampoo the same? It seems like something that would be beneficial for all ages.	From what I remember it's a mild detergent vs adult normal strength so it's about strength. You could always buy the kids stuff	[ "Shampoo for infants and young children is formulated so that it is less irritating and usually less prone to produce a stinging or burning sensation if it were to get into the eyes. For example, Johnson & Johnson advertises Johnson's baby Shampoo under the premise of \"No More Tears\". This is accomplished by one ...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-00621	why do things explode in a hydraulic press?	Explosions are just the result of pressure building up until an object can no longer contain them. Think about putting air into a balloon - at some point, it will pop because there's too much pressure. Everything has a breaking point at which it can no longer handle the stress placed on it. Frequently, when this breaking point is reached, all the energy stored up in the object is spontaneously released in all directions, causing an explosion.	[ "Additionally, this might reduce the process speed and availability of process equipment. The main mechanical problem tends to be when foam enters the system as air is a poor lubricant, meaning metal to metal contact can occur.\n\nSection::::Industrial problems.:Mechanical problem factors.\n\nMechanical factors tha...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-05522	What causes a lake to freeze into icy scales like this?	Wind and waves break the ice as it forms. If the temperature is close enough to 0 (as it is in ontario right now), it won't flash freeze, its a slow process that can be broken by waves in the deeper water.	[ "A proliferation of supraglacial lakes preceded the collapse of the Antarctic Larsen B ice shelf in 2001, and may have been connected.\n\nSuch lakes are also prominent in Greenland, where they have recently been understood to contribute somewhat to ice movement.\n\nSection::::Sediments.\n", "When these crevasses ...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-14181	why concrete roads (and sidewalks) have seams but asphalt is laid in a seamless stretch?	Because asphalt is bendy and stretchy, elastic, so thermal expansion isn’t that much of an issue, but concrete is very brittle (breaks and cracks easily) so it needs expansion joints	[ "Contemporary sidewalks are most often made of concrete in North America, while tarmac, asphalt, brick, stone, slab and (increasingly) rubber are more common in Europe. Different materials are more or less friendly environmentally: pumice-based trass, for example, when used as an extender is less energy-intensive t...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-02449	How do spiders avoid getting stuck in their own webs?	Some spiders produce oil that makes their legs more slippery while at the same time they have small hairs that get smaller at the ends to allow for less surface adhesion. Other spiders it is still unknown. Technically, they do get stuck to their web but they can get unstuck kind of easy.	[ "Spiders do not usually adhere to their own webs, because they are able to spin both sticky and non-sticky types of silk, and are careful to travel across only non-sticky portions of the web. However, they are not immune to their own glue. Some of the strands of the web are sticky, and others are not. For example, ...	[ "Spiders should get stuck in their own web." ]	[ "Spiders produce an oil that makes their legs slippery." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Spiders should get stuck in their own web." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Spiders produce an oil that makes their legs slippery." ]
2018-02818	What is the fin-shaped object mid way up the proposed BFR Rocket design? Is it a form of fin or does it serve another purpose?	That's the second stage delta wing with split-flap. It's used for pitch and roll control of the second stage, like a directional spoiler. Probably also an awesome camera mounting location.	[ "In 2014, SpaceX tested grid fins on a first-stage demonstration test vehicle of its reusable Falcon 9 rocket, and on December 21, 2015 they were used during the high-velocity atmospheric portion of the reentry to help guide a commercial Falcon 9 first stage back to land for the first successful orbital booster lan...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-03637	the difference between men's and women's deodorant, aside from price	> and thirdly, does that drive the price difference at all No. The price difference is almost entirely due to marketing. The main differences between mens and womens is the scent and the packaging. It's the packaging you're paying more for in womens deodorant.	[ "Early product innovations were driven by the principle that men and women may have different needs when it comes to odor protection, but women should never have to compromise on efficacy. The slogan “Strong Enough for a Man, Made for a Woman” was developed in the early 1970s and grew to become one of Secret’s most...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-00248	Stainless Steel is hard. Meat is soft. You take a stainless steel knife that is very sharp and start to cut meat and the knife gets blunt very fast. Why? How can something so soft destroy the sharpness of stainless steel or other metals?	I sold cutco knives for a brief period of time so I actually know the answer to this. The answer is that very little food actually dulls your knife. It's usually your cutting board. Wood, plastic, stone, ceramic. All of these dull your knife edge very quickly. The "trick" to cutco knives is that the actually cutting part never makes contact with the cutting board.	[ "BULLET::::- Stainless steel is an alloy of iron, approximately 10–15% chromium, possibly nickel, and molybdenum, with only a small amount of carbon. Typical stainless steel knives are made of 420 stainless, a high-chromium stainless steel alloy often used in flatware. Stainless steel may be softer than carbon stee...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[ "Cutting meat makes knives dull." ]	[ "false presupposition", "normal" ]	[ "Hitting the cutting board makes knives dull." ]
2018-00037	Why were straws invented?	From what I'm aware of, straws were invented in order to avoid the residue at the bottom. They were first invented to drink beer (by the Sumerians I believe) - and used so that the consumer would not end up drinking the byproducts as well (which would accumulate at the bottom). The more modern straw was invented because prior to it, straws made out of grass were used and coming into contact with a liquid would make them soft/pulp-like thereby rendering it useless. There's an article on The Atlantic that traces the origins of the straw that might fit your question more. Im on the mobile for now, will link it once I'm on the PC.	[ "The drinking straw is a tube used for transferring a liquid to the mouth, usually a drink from one location to another. The first crude forms of drinking straws were made of dry, hollow, rye grass. Marvin Stone is the inventor of the drinking straw. Stone, who worked in a factory that made paper cigarette holders,...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-19985	Why are the Billboard Hot 100 so disconnected from other countries' record charts?	Generally speaking, other countries (particularly non English speaking) have a wider breadth of contemporary popular music in circulation than the US. This is because, aside from the US and UK music, these countries listen to local music, regional music, foreign music in their language and foreign music in other languages. This means that the distribution of listeners is far more sparce, so the peak song will usually have only marginally more plays than the second ranked, top 5 and so on. Another reason: lyric is a very important part of most music. Many countries (populations really) will put more emphasis on the lyrics from their native language than English lyrics, but they may all converge on a catchy, rhythmic song and cause it to peak. US and UK can think the lyric of that song is lackluster, or not as relatable, and listen to other songs instead.	[ "BULLET::::- The first number one hit not to be sung in English was Falco's \"Rock Me Amadeus\" in 1986. In its original recording, the song's lyrics are entirely in German, though the show would sometimes play a mix that omitted the verses in favor of a timeline (narrated in English) of the life of Wolfgang Amadeu...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-02781	How are corrective lenses sometimes able to correct a lazy eye?	Often the reason for a lazy eye is that it is producing blurry or otherwise unusable images compared to the other, normally functioning eye. The brain recognizes that the input from that eye is not up to par and so it puts less effort into positioning it properly. This can be seen by blocking the vision of the good eye with one hand while telling the individual to focus on a specific point. The brain is now only receiving input from the bad eye so it attempts to position it to focus on the target. Once you remove the hand, the good eye will focus on the target and the brain will lose interest in the bad eye again and it will return to its lazy position. If the vision in the bad eye is corrected the brain will again recognize its usefulness and always attempt to position the eye properly. This is not the cause of all lazy eyes, so this fix does not always work.	[ "Section::::Lens types.:Plano.\n\nA corrective lens with a power of zero is called a plano lens. These lenses are used when one or both eyes do not require correction of a refractive error. Some people with good natural eyesight like to wear eyeglasses as a style accessory, or want to change the appearance of their...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-20169	How are somatic cells turned back into pluripotent stem cells?	They don't because somatic cells are already differentiated. When you have somatic cells beginning to exhibit stem cell functions (independence from surrounding tissue) you have cancer. Is this question based off of something you have read recently? I'm interested.	[ "Another approach is the use of iPS cells derived from patients to identify therapeutic drugs able to rescue a phenotype. For instance, iPS cell lines derived from patients affected by ectodermal dysplasia syndrome (EEC), in which the p63 gene is mutated, display abnormal epithelial commitment that could be partial...	[ "Somatic cells revert back into pluripotent stem cells." ]	[ "Somatic cells are already differentiated, therefore they don't revert back to stem cells. If they do, this would indicate the individual has cancer." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Somatic cells revert back into pluripotent stem cells." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Somatic cells are already differentiated, therefore they don't revert back to stem cells. If they do, this would indicate the individual has cancer." ]
2018-03559	How do insect and bug sprays kill insects but don't harm us	> How do insect and bug sprays kill insects but don't harm us Most insecticides target specific aspects of the insect nervous system which are different from those of humans and mammals in general. These neurotoxins have various different types so getting into the details can be quite complex, but the general idea is that insects are sufficiently different for specialized substances to be toxic to them and not really for humans.	[ "Section::::Chemical defenses.\n\nUnlike pheromones, allomones harm the receiver at the benefit of the producer. This grouping encompasses the chemical arsenal that numerous insects employ. Insects with chemical weaponry usually make their presence known through aposematism. Aposematism is utilized by non-palatable...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-02668	Why scientists still couldn't figure out how trees turn co2 to oxygen?	Knowing how something works and being able to recreate it are not the same thing. See: Leonardo da Vinci.	[ "Research of artificial photosynthesis is experiencing a boom at the beginning of the 21st century. During 2000, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) researchers publicized their intent to emphasize carbon dioxide capture and its conversion to hydrocarbons. In 2003, the Brookhaven Na...	[ "Scientists can't figure out how trees turn c02 to oxygen." ]	[ "They have figured ouyt how it works, but that doesn't mean you can recreate it. " ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Scientists can't figure out how trees turn c02 to oxygen." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "They have figured ouyt how it works, but that doesn't mean you can recreate it. " ]
2018-03684	Why do documents/books have pages that are intentionally left blank?	It's for ease of printing and formatting. Each page isn't printed one by one, in consecutive order. The printer uses both front and back of a page, usually starting on an odd number. This means that at least one "page" has to be blank (because it's the back/front of Page1). After that, you've got formatting issues, where if they don't leave a page blank, the previous chapter will end off on a weird spot on the page and the following chapter would default to a spot at the bottom of the page, so the printers/editors tweak things from there.	[ "In digital documents, pages are intentionally left blank so that the document can be printed correctly in double-sided format, rather than have new chapters start on the backs of pages. Intentionally blank pages have also been used in documents distributed in ring binders. The intention is to leave room for expans...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-04945	why are 1,080 vertical pixels considered to be HD?	Because that's the name the marketing people came up with. For the first fifty years or so of television, TV had 480 or 576 vertical pixels depending on which standard you were using. So when they came out with new TV standards that supported more pixels - 720 and 1080- they called them "high definition".	[ "Japan had the earliest working HDTV system, with design efforts going back to 1979. The country began broadcasting wideband analog high-definition video signals in the late 1980s using an interlaced resolution of 1035 or 1080-lines active (\"1035i\") or 1125-lines total supported by the Sony HDVS line of equipment...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-04249	Why do oranges have / grow a smaller orange inside of them.	That's a navel orange, and no, it's not normal -- they're mutants, and the particular mutation only dates back to the early 1800s. They're popular because they have no seeds, but because of this, every navel orange tree has to be grown from cuttings and they're all genetically identical: URL_0	[ "In plants, the pectins form a unified and continuous layer between adjacent cells. Frequently, it is difficult to distinguish the middle lamella from the primary wall, especially in cells that develop thick secondary walls. In such cases, the two adjacent primary walls and the middle lamella, and perhaps the first...	[ "All oranges grow a smaller orange inside of them.", "Oranges grow smaller oranges inside of them." ]	[ "This is a mutation and is not normal.", "Not every single orange grows a smaller orange inside of it, organges that have an orange inside are considered mutant oranges." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "All oranges grow a smaller orange inside of them.", "Oranges grow smaller oranges inside of them." ]	[ "false presupposition", "false presupposition" ]	[ "This is a mutation and is not normal.", "Not every single orange grows a smaller orange inside of it, organges that have an orange inside are considered mutant oranges." ]
2018-04488	Might be a repost but - if heat denatures protein, why does over cooking meat make it tough and chewy	Here's a question for you. Can you rip the shirt you're wearing off of you? If you're wearing a cotton t-shirt, the answer is probably yes. The reason is that the shearing force relative to the fibrous density is high. Now imagine taking that same shirt and twisting it up before you try to rip it in two. It's significantly harder because you've changed the density of its fibrous make-up. You're right that heat denatures protein. Given enough heat, cells will rupture and leak their gooey contents into the tissue. But your tissue isn't just made up of cells. It's also made up of a fibrous scaffolding (stroma) that supports those cells and keeps them in place. As you change the ratio of plump juicy cells to stringy fibrous scaffolding, an otherwise succulent steak turns into a rubbery mess fit only for eating with ketchup in the oval office. EDIT: Words	[ "When food is cooked, some of its proteins become denatured. This is why boiled eggs become hard and cooked meat becomes firm.\n", "Toughness in meat is derived from several proteins, such as actin, myosin and collagen, that combined form the structure of the muscle tissue. Heating these proteins causes them to d...	[ "Meat is made up only of cells." ]	[ "Meat is made up of cells and stringy fibrous stroma." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Meat is made up only of cells." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Meat is made up of cells and stringy fibrous stroma." ]
2018-19063	If mobile processors are now (in some cases) overtaking laptop and desktop processors in terms of power why aren't they universally adopted into all laptops and you could make the battery last 10 times longer?	Your premise is wrong, mobile processors don't outperform desktop processors. Not by a long shot.	[ "BULLET::::- Security standards: When working mobile, one is dependent on public networks, requiring careful use of VPN. Security is a major concern while concerning the mobile computing standards on the fleet. One can easily attack the VPN through a huge number of networks interconnected through the line.\n\nBULLE...	[ "Mobile processors are overtaking laptop/desktop processors re: power." ]	[ "Mobile processors don't outperform desktop processors." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Mobile processors are overtaking laptop/desktop processors re: power." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "Mobile processors don't outperform desktop processors." ]
2018-03421	if it's possible to survive with only one half of the brain, why damaging it in other ways usually means instant death?	Think you may need to rephrase the question. There are specific areas of the brain responsible for specific functions. Also if you destroy half the brain at once there is no time to adapt. With slow or progressive damage, the brain has a limited ability to adapt by forging new pathways. There would be a difference in answering your question based on whether you are referring to the left half vs right half, or the top half vs bottom half. You would likely have catastrophic impairment either way. If the brain stem remains intact (bottom half), theoretically you'd still be able to breath w/o use of a ventilator. If half the brain stem is removed I'd imagine you wouldn't continue breathing on your own.	[ "Due to the functional mapping of the corpus callosum, a partial callosotomy has less detrimental effects because it leaves parts of the corpus callosum intact. There is little functional plasticity observed in partial and complete callosotomies on adults, the most neuroplasticity is seen in young children but not ...	[ "You can survive with one half of the brain." ]	[ "The brain can adapt to slow or progressive damage but cannot adapt if half is destroyed at one time." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "You can survive with one half of the brain." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "The brain can adapt to slow or progressive damage but cannot adapt if half is destroyed at one time." ]
2018-20231	Why are public toilets so much harder to clog than private toilets?	Public toilets usually have access to much higher volume water supplies than at homes. This is due to the amount of people they are expected to be able to service; your home unit likely has a tank where water is stored for the next flush and is slowly replenished. But public toilets may need to be flushed often and without the failure points of the tank mechanism. Instead the public toilets can flush with a blast of a larger amount of water than the domestic piping can handle, and this also serves to blast stuff down the drain with more force. Also they really want to avoid clogs so they can make the drains bigger too.	[ "In some countries, clogging has become more frequent due to regulations that require the use of small-tanked low-flush toilets in attempt to conserve water. Sometimes, three to four flushes periodically during the use of a low-flush toilet may be required to prevent clogging, thus using more water than larger-tank...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-02942	Why does changing the speed of audio affect the pitch too?	Pitch is a function of a soundwave's frequency as measured in hertz. Hertz is a measurement of cycles per second. If you take a soundwave of someone talking for 10 seconds and they are Ben Stein and talk in a monotone 150 hertz (I don't know if this is the frequency of Ben Stein's voice, but go with it) you have a soundwave that oscillates 1,500 times. (that is, 1500 peaks and valleys if you visualize the sound wave like you would in Audacity or some sound-editing program). If you play that back at 2x the speed, that 1500 oscillations is now happening in 5 seconds, so you end up at 300 hertz for your frequency, and now Ben Stein goes from sounding like an adult male to a very fast-talking child, what is commonly referred to as the "chipmunk" effect. All this is a really fancy way of saying that a sound's pitch is entirely a function of how fast it is, with higher pitches being faster. Therefore when you speed up the playback, you also raise the pitch.	[ "Temporal Theory posits that the cause is from looking at the phase locking to tell what the pitch is. This theory has a hard time explaining diplacusis. There are some examples of pitch which don’t have an \"edge\" on the basilar membrane, which this would account for—i.e. white noise, clicks, etc. (need a referen...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-03383	How does climate control work in subway stations?	Honestly, it's probably just really good insulation. (I tried to look this up, I really did, but all google gave me was how badly NYC MTA failed on their promise for climate-controlled stations, so....) We all know that hot air rises and cold air sinks, and the cold that most of us feel doesn't come from temperature itself, but from the wind. So, for summers, the station is probably deep enough underground and constructed in a way that keeps the heat out. Kind of like a basement in the summer. Mine is half-underground and half-above, but it'll be like...70 degrees F down there when it's almost 80 outside. (70 is also hot sometimes, but anything is cool when upstairs feels like 90.) So that's one way to keep the underground cool, in addition to needing very good ventilation for the heat produced by the trains. As for the winters, I'd like to ask you to see if you feel any wind the next time you're in the station. Chances are the entrances, despite a lack of doors, are designed in such a way that wind has a hard time getting down there. For a lot of NYC subways where the entrance is literally stairs and no doors, the path between the stairs and the platform involves a few turns. This helps keep the wind out, and the fact that it's below ground so the wind kind of just goes over above it. Of course, then there's the actual cold, but it's winter and you're bundled up anyway so you don't really freeze.	[ "In August 2006, the MTA announced that all future subway stations, which include 34th Street–Hudson Yards, South Ferry, and all Second Avenue Subway stations, will have platforms outfitted with air-cooling systems. The existing Grand Central–42nd Street station also has these cooling systems; however, for the most...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-18673	with how regularly electric toothbrushes get charged while wet, how is there never a short circuit?	Because they either use very low voltage (which doesn't transfer through water very well), or magnetic induction (which sends power right through air and plastic with no exposed metal places to get wet).	[ "Modern electric toothbrushes run on low voltage, 12v or less. A few units use a step-down transformer to power the brush, but most use a battery, usually but not always rechargeable and non-replaceable, fitted inside the handle, which is hermetically sealed to prevent water damage. While early NiCd battery toothbr...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-03872	Is there a legitimate reason that a police squad car will flash its lights for a second to get through a stop light and then turn them off immediately afterwards?	Yes, of course. Some responses are urgent, but don't require lights--or require that lights and sirens be kept off. Flashing your lights to go through the intersection allows them to quickly reach their destination without potentially warning someone that the cops are on their way. All of that said, though, that does not prevent someone from doing it just to abuse their authority.	[ "Under the Road Vehicle Lighting Regulations 1989, police vehicles may display blue flashing lights to alert other road users to their presence or when the driver feels that the journey needs to be undertaken urgently. These lights are usually mounted on the roof and incorporated into the standard vehicle system of...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-06181	Why are carbonated beverages so popular?	I think (opinion without backing here) that it's a texture thing. Taste is only half of the experience, food and drinks would be terrible without different textures. Think of the difference between a glass of water, a glass of milk, a delicious thick milkshake, and something carbonated - they feel very different on the tongue. On a slightly related note, carbonated milk is one of the most unpleasant things in the world, as anyone with a SodaStream will be able to attest. Also pain goes along with food and drink in lots of ways, from horribly acidic juices and wines through to chili burns and hot cheesy goodness.	[ "Carbonated water is a key ingredient in soft drinks: sweet beverages that typically consist of carbonated water, a sweetener and a flavoring, such as cola, root beer, or orange soda. Plain carbonated water is often consumed as an alternative to soft drinks; some brands, such as La Croix, produce unsweetened seltze...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-18328	What is the difference between a bushing and a liner?	Above is correct. A bushing would be on something like a rotating object. A liner such as a cylinder liner protects the cylinder wall from up and down friction and gives the piston rings something to seal on.	[ "Drill bushings can generally be classified as: \"press fit\" bushings or \"renewable\" bushings. Other classification methods include by head type, by use, and by liner type (or lack thereof).\n\nSection::::Types.:Press-fit bushings.\n\nPress fit are available in two types with liners or without (\"wearing\" bushi...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-04057	How is jumping of a bridge as suicide deadly, while many divers jump from even higher than most bridges?	It’s about how you enter the water. From the heights we’re talking about you have to be very skilled to enter the water in a straight-on dive so as not to hurt yourself or die from impact.	[ "The presence of a combination of several hazards simultaneously is common in diving, and the effect is generally increased risk to the diver, particularly where the occurrence of an incident due to one hazard triggers other hazards with a resulting cascade of incidents. Many diving fatalities are the result of a c...	[ "If divers dive from much higher heights than bridges and survive, then jumping from a bridge should not be considered suicidal." ]	[ "Professional divers are very well skilled and know how to dive into the water at extreme heights without causing damage to themselves." ]	[ "false presupposition" ]	[ "If divers dive from much higher heights than bridges and survive, then jumping from a bridge should not be considered suicidal.", "If divers dive from much higher heights than bridges and survive, then jumping from a bridge should not be considered suicidal." ]	[ "normal", "false presupposition" ]	[ "Professional divers are very well skilled and know how to dive into the water at extreme heights without causing damage to themselves.", "Professional divers are very well skilled and know how to dive into the water at extreme heights without causing damage to themselves." ]
2018-17286	What makes an isotope stable, and what determines which subatomic particle they lose?	The nucleus of an atom is held together by the strong nuclear force. Without this force, there would be no atoms as [all the protons in the nucleus repel each other.]( URL_0 ) Now, the strong nuclear force is very strong, but only works on small scales. This means that atoms with large nuclei are inherently less stable and decrease in stability as their size reaches the practical limits of the strong nuclear force. Additionally, the relative spins of the protons and neutrons in the nuclei can affect how strong the nuclear force is between them. This means that more protons and neutrons means more of a chance that there is some configuration where the strong nuclear force is weak enough to make it unstable. As far as what type of particle... that is more complicated. There are three types of radioactive decay: alpha, beta, and gamma. Alpha decay is when the nucleus emits a proton an alpha particle (which is just two protons and two neutrons; e.g. a helium nucleus). Why? Well, if the problem of radioactive decay is a nucleus is too large with too many protons and neutrons, then the easy solution is to make it smaller by getting rid of protons and neutrons! Why two protons and two neutrons specifically? Well, this is a bit technical but, a helium nucleus is a highly efficient configuration. That is, it's simply easier for an unstable nucleus to emit an alpha particle as opposed to other configurations of protons and neutrons. Beta Decay is a consequence of the weak nuclear force and basically allows protons and neutrons to convert into one another. So if the issue is the specific configuration of protons and neutrons, it's possible for this to be solved by changing one to the other. Beta Decay accomplishes this by either: causing a proton to emit an electron, thereby turning into a neutron; or causing a neutron to emit a positron, thereby turning into a proton. Lastly, we have Gamma Decay which is usually just a consequence of the above two happening. After they decay, the nucleus is in an excited state and it gives off energy in the form of a high energy photon.	[ "Stability of isotopes is affected by the ratio of protons to neutrons, and also by presence of certain magic numbers of neutrons or protons which represent closed and filled quantum shells. These quantum shells correspond to a set of energy levels within the shell model of the nucleus; filled shells, such as the f...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-01207	Why is it bad to pop zits? Isn't better to get the pus and nasty stuff out rather than keep it in your skin?	I was troubled with zits from early pubescent childhood. Like really bad. And through my aprox 15 years of popping zits like Mike Tyson, I’ve gathered a pretty good recipe on how to, if possible, get rid of them with them efficiently. Zits may sometime go away on their own, but big ones that are aching on your skin and poking into your vision need to be handled regardless. So anyway: How to pop zits like a pro: - only pop before bed - never touch a zit unless to pop it. Touching will irritate the zit and make it worse - never pop a zit while your skin is cold/room temperature - heat and dampen your skin thoroughly. i.e with a hot damp cloth until pores are open and your skin is warm - only pop ready ones. Where the white is showing well - use tissues when squeezing. Makes for better grip and less mess. Your skin won’t get slippery - squeeze until all the white stuff is out, followed by a drop of blood. It will hurt. Don’t squeeze TOO hard - after finishing popping, gently wash and/or scrub your face - you may have to double back at a couple. Some zits require two runs. If so, was/scrub again on/around selected zit/s - gently dab dry your face. - apply creams/oils - your face is now like a newly painted wall. Nothing should touch it - for big zits, bring a tissue to bed to sometimes absorb new ooze that may come out later - now sleep (the best remedy) The zit bulge will be pretty much gone, and the zit will be all gone in 1-2 days Next day - wash/scrub face - apply creams/oils - no more touching that day - Repeat at night Hope this helps somebody	[ "The standard treatment for an uncomplicated skin or soft tissue abscess is opening and draining. There does not appear to be any benefit from also using antibiotics in most cases. A small amount of evidence did not find benefit from packing the abscess with gauze.\n\nSection::::Treatment.:Incision and drainage.\n\...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[ "Bad to pop zits." ]	[ "false presupposition", "normal" ]	[ "It can be ok to pop zits if you do it cleanly and when it is ready. " ]
2018-03262	Does a bullet shot up in the air maintain its lethality when falling down?	If it's fired straight upwards (or close to it) then it will generally end up stopping and start tumbling. You'd definitely feel it hit you, but it wouldn't really cause any real injury. If you fire it at an angle, then it can maintain lethal velocity and spin and can kill someone if it strikes them.	[ "Higher speeds can be attained if the skydiver pulls in his or her limbs (see also freeflying). In this case, the terminal velocity increases to about 320 km/h (200 mph or 90 m/s), which is almost the terminal velocity of the peregrine falcon diving down on its prey. The same terminal velocity is reached for a typi...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-03059	are all planets in our solar system orbiting on the same plane (more or less)? Why?	It's not exactly the same plane but it is quite flat. Most orbits in our solar system are within 2.5 degrees of the Earth's; Mercury's is the furthest off at about 7 degrees. As for why, I recommend [this video]( URL_0 ) because it's a hard thing to explain without a visual aid.	[ "BULLET::::- For an orbit outside the Solar System, the plane through the primary perpendicular to a line through the observer and the primary (called the \"plane of the sky\").\n\nSection::::Node distinction.\n", "In most cases, the Laplace plane is very close to the equatorial plane of its primary planet (if th...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-08798	How does the human body prevent bacteria in feces from infecting the colon and spreading throughout the body?	(this explanation is better with the music from Ocean's 11, URL_1 ) The gut has defenses that make Fort Knox look like a piggy bank. If you want in, listen up. First, you go towards the gut wall. Strike one--you're stuck in mucus up to the waist. Get past that, and you're at the gut wall. Not only is it solid, the doormen are picky about who gets in. It's littered with guards flinging poison or tagging you with antibodies. And the wall is covered in goop like lectin to stop you from latching on. But hey, let's pretend you get past it anyway. You're in the bloodstream and you think it's easy street. Nope. That road leads right to the liver, and a small army of Kupffer cells. These guys are veteran beat cop macrophages, who know every name and face that belongs inside. If you don't look right, they will eat you alive. So at long last you're into the main circulation, ready to raise hell. Joke's on you, buddy. The bloodstream has more than enough white cells to kill off a few bacteria--hell, people get that by chewing gum! If you really want to cause sepsis in this town, you'd better bring some serious virulence factors, or else get ready for a bumpy ride. URL_0	[ "Soon after birth, the gastrointestinal tract is colonized with bacteria, which, on the basis of models with animals raised in a germ-free environment, have beneficial effects on function of the gastrointestinal tract. There are 500-1000 different species of bacteria that reside in the bowel. However, if the flora ...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-01078	Why is it more tiresome to climb up stairs than walk the same distance?	You have to do work to push your body up stairs because you're gaining energy from your increased height. No slope, you don't have to do all that work.	[ "On average in this study, infants learned to crawl and cruise before learning to ascend stairs independently. Infants were able to climb up the stairs before they could walk, but walking tended to come before independent stair descent. While most of the infants had prior stair experience, the presence or absence o...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]
2018-00094	Why do kids' shows frequently have an "ask and response" component (ie Dora the Explorer)? Do the kids believe the characters understand them?	Very young children have an under-developed model of how the world works. In some cases they may literally believe they are heard. In other cases they may simply enjoy playing along as if they are being heard -- a game.	[ "BULLET::::- Dutch – The Dutch language version broadcasts on Nickelodeon and Nick. Jr, It is presented in Dutch-English. The voice actors are Lottie Hellingman as Dora and Dieter Jansen as Boots.\n\nBULLET::::- French – The French language version, \"Dora l'exploratrice\", broadcasts on TF1 in France and Télé-Québ...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal", "normal" ]	[]
2018-01428	How does Hyperkalemia cause bradycardia and Hypokalemia cause Arrythmias?	Part of the mechanism that allows contractions to occur is caused by the movement of positively charged potassium ions out of the cell thereby depolarising the interior of the cell. In a case of Hyperkalemia there are already lots of potassium ions outside the cell and so more work needs to be done to move potassium ions from the inside to the outside of the cell. Increasing the time depolarisation takes and how frequently contractions occur. The reverse is true with hypokalemia where the external concentration of potassium ions is low making it easier/quicker to depolarise the cell.	[ "Metabolic acidosis is a cause of hyperkalemia because increase in hydrogen ions in the cells can displace potassium out of the cells, causing a rise of serum potassium levels. However, in organic acidosis such as lactic acidosis, ketoacidosis, the effect on serum potassium levels are absent possibly because of the...	[]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]	[ "normal" ]	[]

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