id stringlengths 5 6 | input stringlengths 3 301 | output list | meta null |
|---|---|---|---|
2wdqan | how is it that i remember hundreds of lyrics when i sing along to songs, but i mix them up or forget parts when i try to sing a capella or to instrumental song versions? | [
{
"answer": "Because you are actually singing with a very very small delay to the actual lyrics, at least the beginning of each line or so, because you can probably finish the lyrics if you have he beginning.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": null,
"provenance": [
{
"wikipedia_id... | null |
4d5bzc | Why exactly do migrating birds move from north to south or vice versa in one long event, rather than gradually moving around throughout the year? | [
{
"answer": "Well, first of all, there are several types of migration, and there are some forms that are more similar to your description. Those are usually called Irruptive Migrations. But basically, most Migration depends on food amounts. Birds typically migrate when there is no more food in their current env... | null |
2r33qe | If I were to strike a tuning fork in space(without dampening from air), would the metal vibrate indefinitely? Would this be an effective way to store energy? | [
{
"answer": "No, the attenuation caused by the vibrating material would eat up the energy. You might heat up the object a bit as a result, or cause some plastic deformation.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "While there's no friction between the surface of the fork and the surrounding space, ther... | null |
1ewujo | Who is our evolutionary "common ancestor"? | [
{
"answer": "The problem with your question is, our most recent common ancestor with whom? With each other? The most recent common common ancestor of all humans (*Homo sapiens sapiens*) is by definition *Homo sapiens sapiens*. Are you asking when the most recent speciation event happened in the human lineage? T... | null |
6jcvy9 | why do humans get headaches? is there a sole reason or is it a combination of factors? and does the factor(s) also cause migraines? | [
{
"answer": "The exact mechanism that causes headaches isn't/aren't yet fully understood. All we know is that there are many known factors that can trigger it. Like blood vessel constriction/dilation, and a change in hormone levels. (And that's also why more women suffer headaches than men.)\n\n\nCertain patter... | null |
6fr19u | Looking for WW1 combat reports from units issued body armor | [
{
"answer": "You'd have to dig in the archives for actual military documents, but you might take a look at Bashford Dean's [Helmets and Body Armor in Modern Warfare](_URL_0_) (1920), which covers many types of body armor used by different nations in WWI, including some data from empirical testing, reports from ... | null |
nijzn | Is it possible for humans, in the far future, to colonize a planet moving at such a speed that time moves 50% slower than at Earth? | [
{
"answer": "Well, that means it's moving at 86% the speed of light relative to some frame (let's say, the CMB anisotropy frame). That's really fast. The fastest known orbital system is the star S2 which orbits the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy, and it moves about 2% the speed of light. So... | null |
63z1m2 | the assad regime | [
{
"answer": "Heads up, there are serious conspiracy theorists on both sides of this issue right now from T_D and Trump/Putin truthers.\nIf you want to learn about geopolitics, this NOT the place. If you want an ELI5 you WILL get garbage. Even if it is a long explanation or seems to make a lot of sense, you need... | null |
75nqx7 | How realistic was Churchills plans to invade Russia in WW2? Could it have succeeded? | [
{
"answer": "Which plan of Churchill are you asking about? Both the planned [Operation Pike](_URL_0_) and [Operation Unthinkable](_URL_1_) would have involved offensive operations against the Soviet Union. There were also [Franco-British plans to intervene in the Winter War](_URL_2_) against the Soviet Union.",... | null |
alq28q | How old is the oldest DNA/RNA that has been extracted? Is it the same as the molecules all living organisms have in their cells now? Did nucleic acids evolve or are they the same as they were when life began 4 billion years ago. | [
{
"answer": "DNA will break down over time. The oldest DNA ever reliably recovered was a couple hundred thousand years old, so fantasies of recovering 100 million year old dinosaur DNA are not realistic.\n\nEven in creatures that have stayed relatively unchanged over time (like crocodiles) their DNA continues t... | null |
18kjh2 | what this tesla model s thing is about? | [
{
"answer": "Journalist smears Tesla.\n\nTesla responds with telemetry showing journalist lied about events in article.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "A New York Times journalist wrote an [unflattering article](_URL_1_[AttTgt,LbIcsa,1])\nabout the Model S. The gist of his claim was that most l... | null |
2o8eao | if the french helped us with the american revolution, gifted us the statue of liberty, and we liberated them from the nazi's, why is there a mutual dislike of eachother? | [
{
"answer": "1. Americans invent the insult \"cheese eating surrender monkeys\", to describe the French.\n\n2. The term was used by Jonah Goldberg, a conservative American National Review journalist in April 1999 as the title of a column called \"Top Ten Reasons to Hate the French\".\n\n3. In the run-up to and ... | null |
2t9kg8 | can somebody please explain what /r/galacticpeacekeepers and all the associated subreddits are? | [
{
"answer": "/r/galacticpeacekeepers\n\nA link to help out. Since OP obviously doesn't care about you.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "Red, Green, and Blue took over The Seventh World and enslaved its inhabitants. The Galactic Peacekeepers are trying to free them.",
"provenance": null
},... | null |
8ijx7a | what property in substances cause light to speed up or slow down | [
{
"answer": "Light is an electromagnetic wave. The atoms in a substance act as barriers to the propagation of the wave. At each barrier, the wave bends and interferes with other parts of the wave. All-in-all the wave will interfere with itself in such a way as to bend AND slow down the resulting wave crests,... | null |
9ktvfj | Why was Vietnam able to transition to capitalism from a failing socialist state when the USSR collapsed attempting to do so? | [
{
"answer": "First, the USSR under Gorbachev in no way tried to transition to capitalism. Gorbachev was, by all counts, a committed communist who believe that the USSR needed reform but that reform could make socialism* work.\n\nSo that means your question has to be either (A) why did the soviet union suffer ... | null |
e9hc2g | What was Gettysburg all about? | [
{
"answer": "Lee was coming off an absolutely devastating victory over the Union army under Hooker at the Battle of Chancellorsville. His decision to invade the north was based on a few things:\n\n* He avidly read antiwar (\"Copperhead\") newspapers from the North, which led him to believe that the Union popula... | null |
5oy9b8 | What's up with this postcard? | [
{
"answer": "Was it common for Japanese soldiers to carry postcards into battle? What does the postcard say? For some context, this was taken off of a Japanese soldier during WW2 by a friend of mine's grandfather during his time in the Pacific theatre. ",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": null,
... | null |
2j7bxl | How were ancient oral epics like the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Gilgamesh epic, etc. recited? | [
{
"answer": "Your guesses are spot on. These epics are broken into pretty discrete episodes, and you'll see scholars referring to \"The Song of Diomedes\" as a unit of the Iliad (that being the section where Diomededs leads the Greeks and wounds Venus). The rhapsodes who performed these pieces would choose an e... | null |
40utmo | how cloud storage systems (email, google drive, onedrive) don't run out of storage | [
{
"answer": "The very simple answer is that they can always add mode storage as usage grows. Same way you can add storage to your home system. ",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "Cloud providers run specialized storage software that allows for any amount of data to be served by clusters of many, m... | null |
1c122g | How strong is the force that repels electrons? | [
{
"answer": "Strong enough to keep you from falling through whatever you're sitting on right now.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "The force that repels electrons is called the electromagnetic force, and it's repulsive in this case because electrons all have the same signed charge (that is, nega... | null |
9zwqer | Why/how do fish demonstrate vigor at temperatures that render reptiles and amphibians immobile? | [
{
"answer": "I am admittedly not a physiologist so my answer is a bit limited in scope, but I can get us started.\n\nOn average, water is much colder than the air temperatures of areas that reptiles and amphibians inhabit. Because of this, the fish’s enzymes and metabolism have evolved to operate at these low t... | null |
1qi7uf | the two dollar bill. | [
{
"answer": "I'm going to assume you're from the US.\n\nTwo dollar bills make up a small amount of the notes in circulation, but they are still being produced so they aren't \"rare\" like old prints and other collectable currency.\n\nIf you consider the other denominations they seem like a sensible fit: $1, $2,... | null |
5lz4kl | why do american corporations have the same constitutional rights as citizens? isn't this the reason they are able to become so corrupt and able to get all their power and control? | [
{
"answer": " > The basis for allowing corporations to assert protection under the U.S. Constitution is that they are organizations of people, and the people should not be deprived of their constitutional rights when they act collectively. In this view, treating corporations as \"persons\" is a convenient lega... | null |
2nepbc | why don't web pages refresh automatically after failing to load the first time? | [
{
"answer": "A browser doesn't necessarily know what's slowing down the network. All it knows is that the server has told it more data is coming, but has not yet been provided.\n\nA few reasons that the data isn't there yet:\n\n* It hasn't been generated yet\n* It is stuck on a slow transit (satellite)\n* The ... | null |
2vbgpk | does being under anesthesia "count" as sleep to your body? | [
{
"answer": "What if you're put under anaesthesia whilst asleep?",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "No it does not. As I had it explained to me once after I inquired why I was so tired after being under, basically your body knows it's unnatural and is fighting it. ",
"provenance": null
},
... | null |
37bxw8 | why is it so difficult to delete online accounts? | [
{
"answer": "Firstly, it's because your data is the most valuable thing about you. Your accounts contain all sorts of information from the obvious (your email address) to the unusual (how often you go between log-ins). Companies need this data more than they need you as a user. They can either use it to work ou... | null |
141b19 | what a "non-member observer state" is? | [
{
"answer": "State = The UN recognizes Palestine as a country\n\nObserver = Palestine can send a representative to listen to UN meetings\n\nNon-member = Palestine's representative can't vote on UN issues",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": null,
"provenance": [
{
"wikipedia_id": "1... | null |
77mqhs | What is the most realistic answer to the question of how earlier humans consistently (or inconsistently) made fire without proper fire making tools? | [
{
"answer": "Hi there -- while this question may garner some answers here, you may also want to crosspost it to r/askanthropology. ",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "I don't have an answer, but I'd appreciate if I could ask for some specific detail around this question, when someone does answer i... | null |
1toimf | Cooling without fridge? | [
{
"answer": "How much cooling do you need? You can cool small objects a few degrees by wetting them and letting the water (alcohol works better) evaporate.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "Dissolving saltpeter (potassium nitrate) in water.\n\n_URL_0_",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answe... | null |
eeczus | What did Medieval people think about elves? | [
{
"answer": "Hi! /u/sagathain, /u/Itsallfolklore and I addressed a very similar question to this [here](_URL_0_). I hope it helps.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "This question is *extremely* difficult to answer for two reasons:\n\n1) the evidence for how people conceived of elves is very, very... | null |
159f1r | From an engineering perspective, why don't recreational boats have a transmission? | [
{
"answer": "Do recreational boats perhaps use [controllable pitch propellers](_URL_0_)?",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "High speed recreational boats do have transmissions. [Most have 2 speed](_URL_0_)\n\nFor the following reasons:\n\n* Efficiency\n* Prevents prop cavitation (damages propeller... | null |
6ar0t9 | How did the Sassanid Empire deal with Huns? Why were they able to resist them while the Romans weren't ? | [
{
"answer": "There were several waves of Hunnic people the Sasanians faced beginning with those known in the Latin sources as the Chionites but including the Kidarites and Hephthalites as well. The short story is that they did not resist them very well. From the limited sources we know of many campaigns in the ... | null |
szijv | What civilisations spent their entire history as Nomadic or semi-nomadic? | [
{
"answer": "What do you consider a civilization? Consider all the people who lived in and around the Central Asian steppes -- Scythians, Sarmatians, Mongols, etc. Also some of the Plains Indians in the Americas.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "Some would argue that if a group of people doesn'... | null |
1fioms | why do low-resolution videos viewed in full-screen look blurry and not pixelated? | [
{
"answer": "Because the program you're using decided that it would handle stretching videos by blending colors together instead of pixelating it.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "Because most modern video players use a method of post-processing that takes chunks of pixels from one area and anot... | null |
2mvb8e | what is group velocity and how can it be faster than the speed of light? | [
{
"answer": "Physics Grad Student here.\n\nSo what is important is the assumption that \"nothing can move faster than light\". This is something you always hear which, however is not actually true. The speed of light as a maximum limit of speed is only restricted to the transmission of *information*. The correc... | null |
dhanb0 | What, besides the ship skin, protects cosmonauts from solar radiation during the long stay in space? | [
{
"answer": "It is probably the case that some elevated level of radiation exposure is going to be necessary for interplanetary travel. The primary defense against radiation-induced harm is to track individual astronauts' radiation exposure over their entire lifetime and design missions that are short enough so... | null |
7ls2ik | why is salmon the only fish that is smoked? | [
{
"answer": "It's not. My favorite is smoked haddock aka finnan haddie. Smoked whitefish is a standard at Jewish delis. Smoked trout, smoked herring (kippers)...and of course smoked oysters.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "It's not. You can smoke any fish. Other commonly smoked fishes are whit... | null |
yxpcs | why society shelters children from knowing about sexuality | [
{
"answer": "Because Jesus doesn't like it. And if you ask me again God's gonna punish you. Now go to your room.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "I think mostly its a generational thing, their parents didn't tell them so they don't know 'how' or they feel awkward about it. throw back a couple ... | null |
68wswd | how do the toasters at subway get a crispy toast so fast | [
{
"answer": "Used to work at Subway, those ovens are always around 500°. Like melt your glove to your hand hot. That's why we used a paddle to insert/remove subs.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": null,
"provenance": [
{
"wikipedia_id": "5910111",
"title": "Toaster Strude... | null |
5796sn | why is the earth elliptical? | [
{
"answer": "The earth spins on its axis so it bulges in the middle. That's pretty much the whole story. Jupiter and Saturn are much larger and rotate even faster so you can see how oval they are in a telescope or in pictures. The earth is so nearly circular that the eye can't see the equatorial bulge.\n\nNo... | null |
4l4gn6 | why do some games have a problem with cheaters(cs:go) and some don't(rocket league)? | [
{
"answer": "For one, you need a good easy way to cheat. You can do this by either giving you an unfair advantage, (Like giving you more info than the opponent) or by letting the computer do stuff for you its very good at, that humans are bad at.\n\nSo in Counter Strike, you can have the computer give you an un... | null |
3b338h | What happened to Russian citizens after the purchase of Alaska? | [
{
"answer": "I don't want to discourage people from adding additonal information here, but [someone asked the same question yesterday,](_URL_0_) so maybe you'll find the answers there helpful.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "Howdy!\n\nWhen the United States purchased Alaska from the Russian Emp... | null |
1jmlxx | why isn't catherine, dutchess of cambridge called princess catherine? | [
{
"answer": "I believe because she does not have royal blood - she married into royalty.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "There are two kinds of princesses: female princes and the wives of princes. The second kind of princess is not *really* a princess, but we sometimes call them that to be poli... | null |
d31yav | Are there horror stories that come from the middle ages? | [
{
"answer": "Thank you for the interesting question! I'll preface this by stating that I focus on the 12th Century in England and France.\n\nLots of chroniclers included anecdotes that contain supernatural elements, some of which are similar to stories we tell now. However, these were largely reported as prophe... | null |
44jczj | what makes dog years different from human years+ | [
{
"answer": "There's really no such thing as \"dog years\". It's just a way to give a rough estimate of how old a dog is compared to a human lifespan. Humans live roughly seven times a long as dogs (though it varies widely based on breed), so a dog that is 5 years old has lived roughly the same percentage of ... | null |
8hzq4o | At a cellular level, is there a difference between mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles? | [
{
"answer": "If you are talking the contents of a cell, they roughly have the same features \\(i.e. organelles, cytoskeleton\\). All will have a nucleus with DNA. All will have mitochondria. You would have a hard time distinguishing cells as mentioned by kernco. In fact, an untrained eye would have a diffic... | null |
5c7chf | What was the extent of the Known world in ancient Egypt? | [
{
"answer": "Do you have a specific date or dynasty? ",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "This is my first post, so I hope that I'm doing this correctly :)\n\nI'm going to assume that you are asking from Egypt's point of view as opposed to the entire world. \nDue to the fact that my interests prim... | null |
3ahmck | why cars don't have built in breathalyzers to prevent drunk driving. | [
{
"answer": "Because it'd be weirdly invasive to try and force people to buy cars with what amounts to a monitoring system and it wouldn't be effective; you can't police everybody full time and make sure nobody tampers with it to deactivate it or give false readings. ",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answ... | null |
2lsj4a | Was Lenin that bad? | [
{
"answer": "I'd have to be really frustrating and say this isn't really an answerable question. If we were to simplify it and just compare Lenin to Stalin, the thing is that Lenin and Stalin were operating in very different times, under different constraints. We don't know what Lenin would have done if faced w... | null |
lte78 | What is the efficacy of these alarm clocks which use some sort of head-band scanner (I assume EEG) to select the time to wake you? (example linked to in comments) | [
{
"answer": "The method has been [validated](_URL_1_), however the efficacy of the device to improve sleep [has not been](_URL_0_).\n\n",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "I'm sure you know about brain waves and stages of sleep ([pdf](_URL_0_)). So I wondered if such a device could actually measure... | null |
4w40ih | Why is blue light the first to get absorbed into the atmosphere through rayleigh scattering, but it penetrates water deeper than other colors? | [
{
"answer": "Blue light gets scattered the most in the atmosphere, that is why the sky looks blue. The exact same is true for water, except that in the atmosphere, red and green light simply passe through easier, whereas in water, red and green are absorbed more easily. Since other colors of light are absorbed,... | null |
7r0mk6 | why does radiation spike and roam | [
{
"answer": "What is radiating are tiny radioactive particles. Like dust, they can accumulate in certain places because of natural forces such as wind or rain. In your house or flat, dust usually accumulates in certain places, yes? That happens to radioactive particles too. Sometimes spikes emerge from such spo... | null |
702m13 | How would high medieval spearmen handle other infantry armed with swords and shields? | [
{
"answer": "Hey, I know your larp!\n\nFirst, let's establish some historical baselines. Spear and shield was common in the early middle ages, especially in the 5th and 6th centuries. After that, swords gained ground steadily as metallurgy improved and economic ties across Europe + the emergence of more and mor... | null |
1bnb94 | Why do most insulins advise strongly against mixing with other insulins? What would happen if a mixed injection was taken? | [
{
"answer": "Some insulins can be mixed. Examples are Regular and NPH or an ultra short like Lispro and NPH, which get mixed all the time in hospitals, and even come premixed (Novolin 70/30, Novolog 70/30). The ultra longs are the only ones that I'm aware of that you don't mix (glargine aka Lantus), but as to w... | null |
fj3sno | why can your body stop the bleeding from a small cut over the course of a few minutes, but bruises can continue to develop and worsen over the course of a few days? | [
{
"answer": "What you're seeing isn't the bruise getting worse but the blood spreading out. When you get a cut say on your finger, the blood leaves your body and the wound closes. A bruise is a localized, internal bleed, so even after the capillaries close off, there's nowhere for the blood that's already leake... | null |
fb0g4z | why does covid-19 hurt the market? | [
{
"answer": "If China makes a product for the US and the factory shuts down Because of the virus then there are no products being made. Which means people lose money since they can't sell their product. With the stock market you are investing into companies and such. When the company you're investing into halts... | null |
c2gklj | the difference between paraphilia and fetish | [
{
"answer": "A paraphilia is something that is harmful to oneself or others and is needed to achieve orgasm. Paraphilias and fetishes are similar, but not every fetish is harmful, and all paraphilias are in some way. These disorders can cause distress or impairment (and those are the only kind recognized in the... | null |
xj73x | why would a working class person want to vote for a candidate who favors tax breaks for the wealthy? | [
{
"answer": "Because you dont vote for someone based on 1 opinion. Politics dont just boil down to one issue, you look at all of the issues and vote on whomever you agree with more. ",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "Well it matters. Some don't understand economic policies, and just hear tax cuts... | null |
40ohik | why are possible gravitational waves at ligo significant? | [
{
"answer": "Stunning confirmation of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Not that other things haven't already been measured, but is another confirmation of a specific prediction, which helps confirm that his theory is correct. Its another stepping stone in the search for understanding gravity and the bi... | null |
fn6xet | Martin Meredith's "The Fortunes of Africa": A good source on the subject? | [
{
"answer": "It's a decent introduction to the subject of African history, though if you're looking for detail on certain specific civilizations or events, I'd suggest looking elsewhere. It's a legitimately good broad overview of the history of the continent and providing sources for further reading. It does fe... | null |
fa4s2q | Why is g constant regardless of the mass of an object on a planet, but the mass of the planet does matter? | [
{
"answer": "From Newton's universal law of gravity, we have\n\nF=GMm/r^2\n\nwhere we can say M is the Earth's mass, and m is the object's mass.\n\nNewton's 2nd law is:\n\na = F/mass\n\nFor the acceleration of the object by the Earth, we set mass=m and F=GMm/r^(2), which gives us a=GM/r^(2) - it depends on the ... | null |
5tg8es | How do you know the limit of something as x approaches infinity? | [
{
"answer": " > To take the derivative, it seems as if you would need to have infinte precision? It's seems as if though the whole of calculus is based around this infinite precision thing. Integrals use rectangles to approximate the area under a function right? And then you increase the numbers of rectangles a... | null |
x82xp | Animals, e.g. (wild) cats, have loads of anonymous sex and know nothing about protection or medicine. Why aren't they decimated by cat aids? | [
{
"answer": "FYI, the life expectancy of a wild cat is much lower than that of a domesticated cat.\n\n_URL_0_",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "FIV is much less deadly than HIV. \n\nCats have been dealing with FIV for a long time, somewhere in the 10's of millions of years. Overtime they have bui... | null |
3s86i3 | why aren't animals like gorillas who are very strong released back to the wild? | [
{
"answer": "Even silverbacks need to belong to a \"tribe\" of sorts. Outside of the protected tribe, they will die from either predators or even social anxiety. Think its the same for pretty much all wildlife with some exceptions like wolverines or mink. Social interaction is almost mandatory for all species ... | null |
2d5b3q | why do we have to cook things with a low flame for a long time. why not a high flame for a short amount of time? | [
{
"answer": "Large flame means high temperature. High temperature means the outer layer of food might burn before the inside has been heated up.\n\nLow temperature takes more time, but gives you much more even cooking.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "So the heat disperses throughout the item. T... | null |
3qzyml | why does the mixing of alcoholic beverages seemingly get you drunker quicker/why is it seen as such a bad thing? | [
{
"answer": "Mixing alcoholic beverages doesn't get you drunk quicker. Drinking more alcohol gets you drunk quicker. People tend to drink quicker when they're drinking different things.\n\nGenerally, drinking with the intent of getting drunk is considered bad. ",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": ... | null |
5kk12w | - why do public restrooms have automatic soap dispensers if you will wash your hands directly after applying the soap? | [
{
"answer": "Perceived convince and portion control. \n\n A huge problem for businesses is users who take way more of bathroom goods that they actually would need, wasting goods and leading to more frequent empty situations. \n\nAutomatic dispensers usually have some delay between dispensing portions of a pr... | null |
ojqkq | why two unrelated movies, songs or books can have the same title but video game titles are vigorously protected? | [
{
"answer": "Because in most cases, a game's title is the strongest and most valuable part of its brand, which is often not true for books and especially music.\n\nIn books and music, it is the artist/author which is the stronger part of the brand. For example, the album name \"Midnight Love\" may not mean much... | null |
5o135n | why do so many books have two to three blank pages at the start? | [
{
"answer": "Books are assembled in groups of pages called signatures. To make signatures even, or to fit a prescribed size, pages are sometimes added at front or back. ",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "Imagine I took a standard piece of paper. I could fold it into 4 pieces, then cut the top an... | null |
7uoc2c | how do tv commercials that mention “amazon alexa” prevent the activation of devices? | [
{
"answer": "I don't have an Alexa, but I literally JUST watched [this video](_URL_0_) before coming to this sub, which mentioned that Alexa doesn't differentiate between your voice and anyone else's. So it can be activated by your kid, someone on the TV, or even a pet parrot (there are youtube vids of parrots ... | null |
4i6qn4 | does the black hole at the center of the milky way have a diameter? | [
{
"answer": "It's the singularity that has no diameter. Yes, black holes have event horizons accretion disks which can be measured up to the singularity.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "Black holes are typically described by the size of their event horizon, as their true size is so tied up in t... | null |
3d5eyz | Was the United States the first country to have money called "dollar"? Where did the name come from? Why was it chosen? Why have so many countries adopted the name? | [
{
"answer": "No, the word \"dollar\" is quite a bit older than the US government's unit of currency. It is an anglicised form of \"thaler\", which was the name given to coins first minted in 1519 from silver mined in Joachimsthal in Bohemia. Thaler is a shortened form of the term by which the coin was originall... | null |
je8r3 | what is fcc rules part 15, and why must my devices "accept all interference including interference that may cause undesired operation"? | [
{
"answer": "Moreover, what does it mean to accept or reject interference\n?",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "electricity is just magnetism seen from a different point of view, and magnetism travels through the air. So any electric device creates (induces) electric current in other nearby electr... | null |
srrfc | How does the cold war 'communism' scare compare to today's 'war on terror'? | [
{
"answer": "*Nothing is so irretrievably lost to a society as the sense of fear it felt about a grave danger that was subsequently coped with.* -- George Will.\n\nReddit's demographic skews young, and people here don't often have the experience to be able to compare the modern \"war on terror\" to the \"war on... | null |
37202y | Do frozen methane clouds on Titan retain a static shape? | [
{
"answer": "The is a big difference between a solid chunk of methane versus a thin accumulation of crystalline droplets. On Earth, some clouds are made of water droplets and others are made of ice. On Titan, the ice methane clouds would behave similarly to the ice clouds on Earth or Mars. Here's some more info... | null |
4cdswe | Did the illuminati have a role in the french revolution? (yes, this is serious) | [
{
"answer": "The Illuminati, as Augustin Barruel describes it, is fictional. He ties together branches of enlightenment philosophy with various secret societies and claims that it's all one big group. [This link](_URL_0_) has excerpts from an essay that debunks specific claims. \n\nMost of the supposed Illumina... | null |
gcs4o | What keeps Jupiter, a gas giant, from collapsing under its own gravity and becoming a dense solid? | [
{
"answer": "Hydrostatic equilibrium is what you want to look into. It's what keeps big round things round, from planets to stars.\n\nIn Jupiter's case, the gas at the center is hot from the extreme pressure exerted by gravity. The heat and pressure causes the gas to rise, so there's an equilibrium between grav... | null |
12hkfv | When I look at a projector image on a wall and move my eyes from one end of the image to the other fast, I can see individual RGB lines (a few cm wide). Why? | [
{
"answer": "not really a science based question, but your projector is DLP (digital light processor) based, meaning it has a chip where each pixel is a microscopic little mirror on a tiny hinge, the projector reflects off the chip, \n\neach mirror switches on/off by tilting off axis (a tilted mirror cant refle... | null |
oam5g | Red-shift, Blue Shift and Cosmic Expansion. If the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang, and if the further we look out into space the further back in time we are seeing, shouldn't objects appear to be moving closer to each other and to us and thus be blue shifted, NOT red-shifted? | [
{
"answer": "The reason we're \"looking back in time\" is that light just reaching us from the objects at which we're looking left them a long, long time ago. In the meantime, this light has been traversing expanding space, which has acted to increase it's wavelength—i.e., to redshift it.",
"provenance": nu... | null |
1dho4h | why can't we feel our bodies gaining weight, growing taller, etc.? | [
{
"answer": "It happens really slowly. REALLLLLY SLOWLY.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "You mean like [growing pains?](_URL_0_) (Although it says right in the article that it probably isn't directly associated with growth)",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": null,
"provenance":... | null |
9ckptr | how do people afford to live in venezuela if a monthly salary is 3$? | [
{
"answer": "The first thing to go are any valuable items like jeweler, then electronics. They sell these, live off of the money as far as possible (not very long) and then resort to scavenging, stealing, eating the lowest quality food possible (its cheap or free). \n\nThey have literally no expenses that a nor... | null |
1p82nz | how astronomers can find a galaxy 30 billion light-years away, twice as far as the universe is old. | [
{
"answer": "Space is expanding. The galaxy in question was actually much closer when the photons we're now receiving left it.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "The initial expansion of the universe (the Big Bang) caused space to expand at a rate that was initially faster than the speed of light*... | null |
1d0mtf | How many Germans actually supported Hitler in his endeavors? | [
{
"answer": "If you have the time, and a library card, *War and Genocide* Bergen covers what you want to know.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "Define support.\n\nActively endorsing Nazi ideology and joining the party or security forces? Chanting slogans along with everyone else at rallies? Don'... | null |
4jk7c1 | do photons age? | [
{
"answer": "Photons do not experience time, so they do not age as we understand it. They do 'die' whenever they are absorbed. Every photon emitted by your monitor 'dies' in your retina (converted to electrical impulses) so you can read this answer.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "Photons don't... | null |
83lexh | if gravity has a quantum manifestation of itself (gravitons), how does anti-matter relate to it? would there be some kind of anti-graviton particle? | [
{
"answer": "The expectation is that gravitons are their own antiparticle, similar to how photons are their own antiparticle. So no, there probably isn't another such particle unless we have things very wrong.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": null,
"provenance": [
{
"wikipedia_i... | null |
bfufxm | How does Aloe Vera help with sunburns? | [
{
"answer": "[It probably doesn't.](_URL_0_) Gels and creams feel cool against the skin, because they're room temperature liquids against warm skin, so they relieve some of the pain, but aloe vera probably doesn't do anything different than gels or creams that don't contain aloe.",
"provenance": null
},
... | null |
1jt4qq | why do businesses build skyscrapers in cities when it would be much cheaper to build their offices further out where land is cheaper? | [
{
"answer": "There are a lot of advantages to having an office in a central downtown area like this.\n\n1) Free advertising \n2) Good public transit/ease of access for employees \n3) You can rent out unused floors and are likely to fill them as the space is in higher demand \n4) Skyscrapers can be more effic... | null |
3ci01f | how can you know when you've had enough sleep? if you can fall back asleep, are you not done? | [
{
"answer": "I can contribute to answer the second question.\n\nWhen you sleep, you have the hormone melatonin in you, that makes you sleepy. When you go to sleep, it can be difficult because there isn't enough melatonin yet and when you wake up, you still have much of it in you. That makes it hard to get up.\n... | null |
27n1v8 | why are crossfitters looked down upon by the bodybuilding community? | [
{
"answer": "[Because of these kinds of things](_URL_0_)",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "Crossfit gets a bad rap because of a few different reasons\n\n1) Their teachers only require a weekend certification course, and as such oftentimes give their students subpar lessons on form. This leads to ... | null |
2koauw | why do we ask for autographs when we meet famous people? | [
{
"answer": "To remember the encounter and to prove to people that we really met them. And to an extent, because the autograph might be worth something one day. ",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "It's just a memento, something to remind us and prove to others that you met that person. It's like a... | null |
320x01 | why was the concept of the month developed/accepted? why don't we count the date as "day 275" of the year, for example? | [
{
"answer": "The concept of the month was based on the cycles of the moon, which last about 29 days. The English word \"month\" comes from the word \"moon\".",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "I feel stupid as hell now, I knew that already",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": null,
... | null |
1zqdom | In a constant environment at 0 degrees Celsius, will water molecules freeze or melt? | [
{
"answer": "In a water/ice mixture, molecules are both 'sticking' to the ice if they have too little energy to overcome the attraction of the water molecules in the ice, and liberating themselves from it if they have enough energy to break free. \n\nAt 0 C both those things occurs at the same rate, so whicheve... | null |
7o5fyc | Is there evidence that the founders included cannons and bombs in defending the 2nd Amendment? | [
{
"answer": "The 2nd Amendement is not terribly concerned with individual ownership of weaponry, it's concerned with civilian oversight of the military. It is impossible to separate the writing of the 2nd Amendment from the militia laws, and the political beliefs that surrounded them.\n\nIn brief: the framers b... | null |
2q5upk | If DNA stores information of how to make proteins, where is the information for what to do with the proteins stored? | [
{
"answer": "its horribly complicated and we dont know completely yet. I'll keep to the basics. also have to be careful by what you think of as information\n\nfirst off, DNA codes for more than just proteins, it also has regulatory sequences in it (promoters, inhibitors, protein binding regions).\n\nmoreover, t... | null |
5501af | If heavy elements are formed due to supernovae, how come we have so much of them on Earth if supernovae are relatively rare events? | [
{
"answer": "The elements which only can be formed by supernovae, elements heavier than Nickel, together account for about 0.05 ppm (parts per million) of the matter in the universe - for every ton (1000 kg) of matter, there is 0.05 g of heavy elements. That is not a lot.\n\nHowever, there's more of them here o... | null |
6fjahm | Was China trying to kill the 14th Dalai Lama in 1959? Or were they just generally going for Tibet? | [
{
"answer": "Hi there, sorry I'm late. \n\nYour question seems to imply a misunderstanding of the timeline. \n\nThe People's Liberation Army launched their invasion/liberation of Tibet in October 1950. Tibet was then led under the name of Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama, who was only fourteen years old at the tim... | null |
33abnl | if plants produce oxygen, then is breathing in a garden "easier" or better for you than breathing inside a building? | [
{
"answer": "You don't use a lot of the oxygen you inhale in either case. We generally inhale about 21% oxygen from the atmosphere. The air we exhale is about 16% oxygen. ",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "Not significantly. Oxygen diffuses through the atmosphere very quickly, and each individual... | null |
1ptjl0 | what exactly is a "double-blind" study? | [
{
"answer": "The tester and the subject are both 'blind'. If you're doing a cola taste test double blind then the person presenting the drinks and recording the data doesn't know which is Pepsi and which is Coke, and neither does the person being tested.",
"provenance": null
},
{
"answer": "The peop... | null |
2xuire | Is water pressure the same regardless of the volume of water? | [
{
"answer": "Liquid pressure (P) is dependent upon three things:\n\n1) density (p)\n2) gravity (g)\n3) height aka depth (h)\n\nRepresent by the equation P = pgh.\n\nSo the pressures would be the exact same in your scenario.\n\nAlthough if you're talking about TOTAL pressure you have to include the pressure if t... | null |
35bdj5 | Is there a limit to the amount of languages a person can learn? | [
{
"answer": "I've labelled this submission \"Sources Required\", which means that top level replies should be able to directly cite some scientific research on this topic. Top level replies which do not do so are acceptable if and only if they explain why such research is unlikely to exist.\n\nedit: yes, there ... | null |
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