Question: If a lot of stars are colored and we also can see some planets with the naked eye, why do we only see them as white?

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 If a lot of stars are colored and we also can see some planets with the naked eye, why do we only see them as white?

Im our eyes there are different types of cells that react to light. There are cone cells which allow you to see color, but are less sensitive to light. And there are rod cells, which are way more sensitive, but can't preceive color. If the light is not bright enough, only your rod cells trigger and things appear black and white or grey-ish. That is also the reason why, as the saying goes, all cats are grey in the dark.


Question: Can the unemployment rate of a country go to 0%, if not, why?

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 Can the unemployment rate of a country go to 0%, if not, why?

One unemployment only counts people looking for work, so if no one had a job, but on one worked it would still be 0%. Equally hypothetically if everyone who had a job who wanted one, regardless of how many jobs openings there are, unemployment would be 0%. Now in practical terms you will neither see nor should you want 0% unemployment. First on the employee side there are people who quit or are forced out of their old job who are looking for new ones and haven't found them yet, this is called frictional unemployment. There will always be some of this sine the economy changes over time. Second if there is 0% unemployment that means any business looking to expand will need to draw workers away from other companies, which will mean their ability to grow is severely limited. Even the increased wages you would expect for workers wouldn't help the situation much because there would not be a sufficiently expanding number of goods for them to spend it on.


Question: Why is silicon used extensively in electronics and aerospace if it's a naturally bad conductor?

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 Why is silicon used extensively in electronics and aerospace if it's a naturally bad conductor?

As far as electronics goes, it's because it's a semiconductor and that's the desirable feature of it. It doesn't always conduct like gold or copper does. But it's not completely insulating either. You can usually control its conductivity to some degree with certain processes. Also worth noting is that unlike metals, where conductivity decreases with increases in temperature, conductivity in silicon actually increases as temperatures increase. I assume this is the specific desirable property in this scenario, though to be fair I can't factually claim that's the case.


Question: If the universe is full of stars, why is space completely black and not bright?

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 If the universe is full of stars, why is space completely black and not bright?

This is an age-old question known as [Olber's paradox]( URL_0 ). In short: the stars have not been around forever, and light takes time to travel. Any star that is far enough away will be invisible to us, since none of its light has yet reached us. The space that we can see and the stars within it are both finite, and most lines of sight within that space do not intersect with a star.


Question: What is the Calthrate Gun hypothesis and how does it relate to the “methane fountain” recently discovered in the East Siberian Sea?

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 What is the Calthrate Gun hypothesis and how does it relate to the “methane fountain” recently discovered in the East Siberian Sea?

The clathrate gun hypothesis is the idea that warming oceans, which can lead to undersea ice melting, will exponentially amplify greenhouse gas emissionsby freeing pockets of methane trapped in that ice. This methane has been hanging out deep undersea for many thousands of years, where it could not contribute to greenhouse effects. Melting the ice realeases it into the ocean, from which it can make its way into the atmosphere (direct effects on the ocean notwithstanding). Basically, enough ocean warming = lots of extra methane we did not previously account for in modeing climate change = shit gets worse faster = more warming = more methane and so on in a positive feedback loop. The East Siberian sea methane discovery is the largest such undersea methane release to date, as far as I am aware.


Question: Why do we hallucinate? What's happening during it?

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 Why do we hallucinate? What's happening during it?

The portions of our brains responsible for interpreting our senses are generating their own signals or interpreting signals incorrectly. Sight, for example, is just the interpretation of light radiation sent as a chemical/electrical signal from our optic nerves to our occipital lobe. If, for some reason, our occipital lobe generates it's own chemical/electrical signal, we'll "see" things that aren't actually there. You can perform a quick "pseudo hallucination" by closing your eyes and pressing gently on your eyelids. A bunch of lights will appear. Other common pseudo hallucinations are thoughts and dreams.


Question: Honey Smacks / Golden Crisp cereals once were the only cereals that came in a foil bag, but that's no longer the case. What was the purpose of the foil bag and why isn't it used anymore?

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 Honey Smacks / Golden Crisp cereals once were the only cereals that came in a foil bag, but that's no longer the case. What was the purpose of the foil bag and why isn't it used anymore?

Foods with a sweet semi-syrupy coating are hygroscopic: they have a strong desire to absorb more water. If you leave the box of Corn Pops (the cereal I remember that came in a foil bag) open, it goes from crunchy to annoyingly chewy in a day or so because it will absorb moisture from the air. However, water vapor can also pass through the bag itself, albeit much more slowly. Manufacturers really want their food to still be "fresh" for the consumer for as long as possible so they will perceive it as being a quality product and not have to throw away "expired" stock. A very effective moisture barrier is metal foil, so that's why it was used in the past, but more advanced plastics and manufacturing techniques have allowed non-foil bags to be just as good or better at repelling water vapor at a reduced cost. "Barrier films" is the term of industry if you want to know more.


Question: Why is the big bang seen as a singular event, and not a continuous event among most scientists?

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 Why is the big bang seen as a singular event, and not a continuous event among most scientists?

It was originally though that yes the expansion would slow down and then reverse because of gravity. But it's not the case. When you look at far away star we see a redshift of the light, meaning that those star are going away from us. And even more importantly, the further a star is from us, the more redshift we see. Meaning that the further a star is the faster it's going away from us. So the expansion isn't slowing down, it's accelerating. This mean that there is a repulsive force (the inverse of gravity), accelerating the expansion of the universe. This force is called Dark Energy because we don't know much about it. But it basically expand the fabric of space, carrying stars and galaxy with it. This force is really small, but it's in every volume of space. So when stars and galaxies are close enough, gravity is stronger. But as distance increase between matter, gravity become weaker and weaker, while the Dark Energy become stronger (since there is more space that expand between these object). So galaxies close to each other merge over time, but those further expand further away from each other. So gravity won't create a big crunch like we used to think before.


Question: Die randomness affected by number placement?

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 Die randomness affected by number placement?

Technically speaking it's still 'random', but the real reason you want to use an evenly distributed d20 is that it becomes easy to manipulate rolls with careful rolling of a spindown d20. With a bit of practice you can roll a spindown d20 to, if not get a 20, consistently get a high number, since all the high numbers are concentrated in the same area on the dice. It's not a matter of randomness, it's a matter of dice sharking.


Question: To whom did the shares bought by the public during an IPO originally belong to?

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 To whom did the shares bought by the public during an IPO originally belong to?

They didn't exist. What happens is you take the value of the company and break it into chunks. It might have been owned previously by a single person, a family, a consortium of financiers, or some other type of group. But 100% of the company was once 'owned' by named people or groups, and there were no shares at all, just some sort of legal company definition. Now you create a whole bunch of little bits of the company that are each worth something, called "shares". These are then sold in an Initial Public Offering to anyone that wants those bits, and the company gets their purchase price. So you sell 100,000 shares at an average price of $10 each, say. That's up to 100,000 additional owners of your company now (although the original owners will probably keep a bunch of those shares for themselves) each having a $10 stake in it, but you've created $1M in cash for your company to use in return for losing some control over what the company does. On ownership: The previous owners CAN cash out and transfer all control to the Board of Directors, sure. But they often get some shares in return for surrendering part of their ownership, and that they will want to (or in some cases must, for a period of time) hold onto. If a company was successful enough to IPO, stakeholders are usually going to want to keep the people responsible for that success from leaving, so they incent them to stay with extra shares and stuff.


Question: Why is it so easy to rip scotch tape once a tear has been started?

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 Why is it so easy to rip scotch tape once a tear has been started?

It's something called crack propagation. The pulling forces concentrate on this weak point. Imagine the atoms connected on a bigger scale: let's imagine them as a bunch of octopuses holding tentacles/hands with their neighboring octopuses. You will find that if you try to pull on two sides of this bunch of octopuses at some point (both spacially and in time as you increase pulling force) they can't hold onto their tentacles anymore. The weakest point (where there are the least tentacle bonds to other octopuses) will fail first and the more tentacle bonds break the weaker the connection is and more bonds will break as the force is concentrated at even fewer tentacles.


Question: How does a cryptocurrency design itself to be ASIC resistant?

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 How does a cryptocurrency design itself to be ASIC resistant?

> What special programming needs to be done so that it can 'detect' that it's being mined by an ASIC or other specialised device, rather than a general compute device? A cryptocurrency that's been designed to be hard to mine on an ASIC doesn't have a specification that says "if running on an ASIC, go slower", such a thing isn't really possible because a computing device can always pretend to be something else. The idea is to make the underlying algorithm hard to do. For example scrypt (used by litecoin) is hard because it requires a lot of memory to store values required for computations. On an ASIC, this means that memory will take up space instead of computational elements, making it slower. On the other hand, it is possible instead to compute these values on the fly, but if you have more computational elements instead of memory, they get used up to compute the values that would be stored in memory so you aren't gaining anything. Either way you go, what you gain is cancelled out by what you lose.


Question: How come we can see red and violet blend together, when in reality they represent two ends of the visible spectrum of light? Red should continue to the infrared, violet to the ultraviolet; but somehow our brain represents them using two colours which can seamlessly mix together?

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 How come we can see red and violet blend together, when in reality they represent two ends of the visible spectrum of light? Red should continue to the infrared, violet to the ultraviolet; but somehow our brain represents them using two colours which can seamlessly mix together?

We perceive color by the relative excitement of the 3 color cones in our eyes. Our eyes have no way or reason to know that "red+violet" is different than a single color directly between them. We just know that our red and blue cones are excited but not out green cones, and we perceive it as what we call magenta.


Question: Why do ads on paid subscriptions play better than the shows themselves?

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 Why do ads on paid subscriptions play better than the shows themselves?

Everyone in a given area gets the same set of ads so they are kept handy by the servers. Not everyone watches the same shows so they might be stored in a more distant, slower location. An analogy is a hardware store with rows and rows of different parts you can order, with a stack of flyers at the front counter. The flyers are always faster to get than any arbitrary part because everyone gets a flyer.


Question: What is the practical difference between png and jpg/jpeg files?

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 What is the practical difference between png and jpg/jpeg files?

There are two significant differences between PNG and JPG for the common user: compression, and transparency. PNG uses a lossless compression algorithm, meaning that no data in the original image is lost or discarded. BMP is another lossless image format, but BMP images aren't compressed. If you save an image in both PNG and BMP format, the PNG will be significantly smaller. The compression used in PNG is best at compressing images with a lot of repeating data, so an image consisting of one solid color saved as both PNG and JPG will result in a small PNG file and a large JPG file. JPG uses a lossy compression algorithm, meaning that some data from the original image is discarded. JPG compression was designed with photographs of real life objects in mind. When you take a picture of a tree, or a ball, or the sea, there are a lot of colors in the resulting image that look identical but aren't quite the same. Think of the thousands of shades of blue that might appear in a picture of the sea, JPG summarizes that by discarding some data that may not be perceivable by the human eye. Because of this lossy compression, a photograph saved in both JPG and PNG will result in a smaller JPG file and a larger PNG file. The downside of using a lossy compression is sometimes important data is lost, this can result in a fuzziness or distortion known as JPG artifacts. If you do a web search for "JPG artifacts" you will see some practical examples of this. Images of things like typeface or web art are particularly susceptible to artifacts. The final important distinction between the two is transparency. PNG has support for an "alpha channel," which allows certain regions of the image to be partially or totally transparent. You can think of the alpha channel like the blue screen or green screen used by film producers, an image with transparency can be overlayed on top of another image at a later date. JPG does not support transparency.


Question: In the United States, why are positions like Attorney General, Secretary of State, etc. appointed by the president at the federal level but elected by the people at the state level? Had it ever been proposed to do this differently?

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 In the United States, why are positions like Attorney General, Secretary of State, etc. appointed by the president at the federal level but elected by the people at the state level? Had it ever been proposed to do this differently?

The federal government was designed to primarily be a representative of the States, while the States would represent the People. This is apparent in how the Federal Senate was initially chosen by the state legislatures (prior to a constitutional ammendment), and the Electoral College was initially also selected independent of the popular vote (that's screwy ATM because of state-level laws). Indeed, the House of Representatives still gets 0 say in federal nominations, appointments, or treaties. As the State governments were viewed to be much closer and more relevant to the People, their state constitutions generally reflected this in directly voting in many more positions.


Question: How do we make the letters "B" and "P" sound different when annunciating the letter even though we move our mouth the same way?

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[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 How do we make the letters "B" and "P" sound different when annunciating the letter even though we move our mouth the same way?

Several answers already, and between them they've arrived at the answer. It's basically two things: "voicing" and "aspiration". "Voicing" is whether or not you use your vocal cords when pronouncing the sound. If you rest your fingertips on your throat, just below the Adam's apple, and say "zzzzzz" (the sound of the letter "z", not the sound of snoring), you should feel the vocal cords vibrating: we say that [z] is a voiced consonant -- the square brackets show that this is what's called a "phonetic transcription", but don't let that worry you. If instead you say "ssssss", the vocal cords won't vibrate -- we say that [s] is an unvoiced or voiceless consonant. That's one difference between [b] -- voiced -- and [p] -- unvoiced. The other difference is aspiration. Both [b] and [p] are "stops", meaning that when we say them, we actually stop the air coming out of the mouth for a split second. If the consonant is followed by a vowel, we have to release the air again. When we say [p], we do this in a very sudden puff of air. You can detect this by putting your hand right in front of your mouth and saying "bar" and "par". When you say "bar", you'll not feel much of a puff of air at all; when you say "par", you'll feel it quite strongly. So we say that [b] is unaspirated, and [p] is aspirated. In the notation I am using, you can indicate aspiration with a superscript "h", so you can indicate the sound of the "p" with [pʰ]. (Anyone who says that if I am writing a phonetic transcription I must always indicate aspiration has badly misunderstood what it is that makes a phonetic transcription distinct from a phonemic transcription. It's not what you apparently think.) So, basically, the two consonants sound different because of the different voicing and aspiration: * [b] is *voiced* and *unaspirated* * [p] is *unvoiced* and, if it comes before a vowel, *aspirated*. There are some languages that have, for example, an unaspirated "p" -- an unvoiced bilabial (meaning "with both lips") stop, but not aspirated like our "p" (this sound can be written [p˭] in a phonetic transcription, but it's usually just [p]). This is the case with some languages on the Indian subcontinent, such as Punjabi and Gujarati, which is the origin of the stereotype of Indians and Pakistanis pronouncing their Ps like Bs. Also, you may have noticed that in the recording studio, professional singers often have a round filter in front of the mic. This is called a "pop" filter, and it prevents that puff of air from aspirated consonants making a loud "popping" noise as it hits the mic.


Question: Why do deep-water fish need eyes and what do they use them for?

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 Why do deep-water fish need eyes and what do they use them for?

Mostly those eyes are vestigial (without function) however for many species they allow for bio luminescent communication or other tricks, such as anglers who can use their lure light to detect the motion of prey as it comes close. For many species however, including cave dwellers, the eyes remain but become functionless. Like our human appendix, it doesn't hurt your survival chances to have functionless eyes in the pitch dark, even if it is a tad wasteful on calorie intake


Question: Why does the moon show colors in some high resolution photos but looks solely grey in others?

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 Why does the moon show colors in some high resolution photos but looks solely grey in others?

There are three reasons: 1. Camera filter 2. Photoshop 3. Changes in the atmosphere, which leads to a color shift in the moonlight. If, for example, red desert sand gets high into the atmosphere, then from certain angles it can look like the moon is red. Or when the moon is still partially in the shadow of the earth, then the moon also can become "red" - > [Blood moon]( URL_0 ). The same applies to fire or smoke, the particles in the air change the way light is represented and suddenly the moon appears darker, brighter, red or pink or even green.


Question: How is quicksand naturally formed and is it really that dangerous?

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 How is quicksand naturally formed and is it really that dangerous?

Quicksand is basically really wet sandy soil. But there needs to be the right mixture of water and sand. If there's too much water it's just sandy water. And if there's too much sand it's just wet sand. It usually forms when there is an underground water spring pumping water into a sandy area but it also forms during earthquakes. And those two things contibute the other element required which is some kind of movement to mix the sand and water just right so that the sand particles are fully coated by the water and sliding or slipping across and around each other. It's that mixture and movement that makes quicksand dangerous. It's always changing between almost liquid and actually liquid. And when a person or animal falls into it they can push against it one second and fall further into it the next second. But it's not like what you see in cartoons. It's not impossible to escape from it. Like the other comment says, struggling makes things worse and that's because you're allowing more water to coat the sand and make it more liquid. Less movement is better and more surface area (by laying on your back) is best.


Question: When is someone officialy considered dead and how do we know he is dead ?

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 When is someone officialy considered dead and how do we know he is dead ?

We don't "know." We assign clinical death based upon the person meeting certain criteria, be it circulation, or brain activity, or a combination of factors. If the person turns out to be "not dead" (they wake up, for instance),then the medical practitioner was wrong and that person was never actually dead. Even when pronounced dead, and we aren't wrong, parts of the body remain alive for some time (Well, assuming they weren't incinerated or something). So there's not necessarily a sharp line between "Alive person" and "dead person"


Question: Why cant we copy the text from an image file through notepad then paste and save as image file and not get the original image?

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 Why cant we copy the text from an image file through notepad then paste and save as image file and not get the original image?

Notepad is a text editor. When you open a file that isn't text Notepad does its best to try to display it but it doesn't always work; there are many bytes that don't code to anything as far as Notepad is concerned. When you paste/save, Notepad doesn't know how to deal with all the non-text stuff and you don't get a perfect copy. If you opened the file in a binary editor that directly reads the binary code (typically as hexadecimal, 0-9/A-F), then you can do exactly what you're describing.


Question: Why do vehicles make those pinging and popping sounds when you turn them off after driving for a while?

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 Why do vehicles make those pinging and popping sounds when you turn them off after driving for a while?

Vehicles have lots of moving and tight-fitting parts, those parts heat up (expand) due to friction as you drive. When you stop and turn the car off, parts cool (at different rates due to differing materials and such). As they cool they shrink again, the popping happens when two parts snug against each other cool and reach a point where the static friction points (the specific points where the parts touch) slide past each other, creating sound.


Question: Why does medicines taste bitter and why can't they just add sugar to make them taste better?

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 Why does medicines taste bitter and why can't they just add sugar to make them taste better?

Pharmacist here. A lot of drugs are alkaline, and alkaline compounds taste bitter. And believe me, we *do* add sugar, but there's only so much sugar can dissolve. Metronidazole is going to be bitter as hell no matter what you do, for example. And for things in tablet form, we don't care- you're not expected to taste them much.


Question: How does 'fuel efficiency' work with electric cars? I keep seeing Wh/Mi, but what does that mean? Is a high wh/mi better than a low, or is it the other way around?

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 How does 'fuel efficiency' work with electric cars? I keep seeing Wh/Mi, but what does that mean? Is a high wh/mi better than a low, or is it the other way around?

Watt hours are like gas. If you had a battery with 100Wh then you could hook a 100 Watt light bulb to it and the bulb would run for 1 hour. 200 Wh battery would last 2 hours in the same setup. 100Wh/mi means that you can drive 1 mile on that 100Wh battery. 200Wh/mi means that you can only drive half a mile on that same battery. (Or 1 mile on a 200Wh battery) Lower Wh/mi is better.


Question: Why is it considered treacherous for the US to restore relations with Russia?

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 Why is it considered treacherous for the US to restore relations with Russia?

It's because the best word to describe Russia's attitude towards neighboring countries is "Predatory." The US has obligations to protect some of those states, and as long as the US continues to do so Russia will not be on good terms with the US. If Russia does become friendlier with the US, then that means that USA is taking a more relaxed approach with guarding the countries it has to guard and a lot of people see this as stabbing them in the back. Russia also has a oppressive attitude towards civil rights for minority groups, but with current US leadership that is probably not a point of conflict between the two countries.


Question: What do the parenthesis in historical quotes represent?

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 What do the parenthesis in historical quotes represent?

Usually, it means that the person quoting has added or changed words to make the quote more clear. You commonly see it in newspapers, where the person being quoted may make a generic reference in the quote (like he or she) but the reported adds the name of the person being referenced for clarity. For example: The direct quote is, "He will be at the office on Monday" but the reporter changes it to, "[Mr. Davis] will be at the office on Monday". The added clarity is necessary to understand the context of the quote, but the reporter wants to make it clear that this is **not** exactly what was originally said. You can also use it to substitute a word or phrase in place of another word or phrase to increase clarity, such a replacing a non-English word in favor of its English translation. It is also worth nothing that while some people use parenthesis (), you are supposed to use brackets [].


Question: What was the benefit of the US landing on the moon first?

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 What was the benefit of the US landing on the moon first?

The Apollo missions returned samples of the lunar soil and several tons of moon rocks. This has allowed scientists to study both their composition and age. The missions also placed scientific experiments such as extremely precise mirrors which, along with lasers on the earth, can be used to measure the distance from the earth to the moon (this has proved that the moon is slowly moving away from the earth, possibly strengthening theories that the moon was created when a large object hit the earth many billions of years ago). Other experiments included seismographs and machines which can detect solar particles EDIT: Your question asks what the US gained, so maybe it's important to note that all scientific data from the Apollo program was shared with the rest of the world


Question: What is a CPU core and thread? Why do they matter?

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 What is a CPU core and thread? Why do they matter?

Modern CPUs basically are several small CPUs in one package. These are called cores. A CPU with more cores can do more things at the same time. Threads can refer to two distinct but related things: * Software threads: these are instruction sequences that can execute on the CPU. Programs can have one or more threads. * Hardware threads: these are instruction sequences that a CPU core can execute *at the same time*. Some cores only have one hardware thread and thus can only run one instruction sequence (ie: software thread) at a given time. Some core have 2 (and sometimes 4) hardware threads and thus can run 2 (or 4) software threads at a time. More hardware threads usually means better performance in highly multi-threaded workloads. Consumer CPUs usually have in the order of 4 cores and 8 threads. ************** All hardware threads running on a core actually share most of the core's resources and will sometimes have to compete with each others to run. This means that in a CPU with 4c/8t will be outperformed with a 8c/8t at full load (but will be cheaper).


Question: Why does our skin prickle when we start to sweat?

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 Why does our skin prickle when we start to sweat?

Judging from the other comments, this must be far from a universal thing, but I know what you're talking about, OP. I have psoriasis, and I frequently get a terrible feeling of itchiness when I am in humid conditions and sweaty. I also get it after taking a shower. Why? No idea. My cause may be different from your cause, as I noted, I think mine is related to psoriasis somehow.


Question: why does it feel like we see clearer when we look at an HD picture?

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 why does it feel like we see clearer when we look at an HD picture?

When you look at an HD photo, vs a non HD photo (assuming they're on the same scale on the same display) the HD photo is actually clearer, because it has a higher pixel density. If you compare an HD photo to real life, it may appear clearer to you if the camera used to snap the photo preforms better under those conditions then your eye.


Question: How would a particle collision at CERN be experienced by our senses; would it have feeling, smell, sounds, looks, etc, or would you die from the explosion, or is it so small you'd not notice anything?

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 How would a particle collision at CERN be experienced by our senses; would it have feeling, smell, sounds, looks, etc, or would you die from the explosion, or is it so small you'd not notice anything?

You mean if you were in the path of a collision? We have a rough idea because something similar happened to someone in the past. In 1978, a Russian scientist named Anatoli Bugorski was accidentally hit in the head with a proton beam moving at close to the speed of light from a particle accelerator. He saw a flash "brighter than a thousand suns" but didn't feel any pain. Afterwards, his face swelled up and began to peel along the path the particles took. His intellectual capacity is intact but he as a result he has deafness in his left ear, paralysis of left half of his face, occasional seizures, and he gets tired easily. Despite this, he was able to complete his PhD and continued to work. He's still alive today. He received more than enough radiation to kill him, but because the beam was so tiny, it simply passed right through him. The catch is that the LHC at CERN is 200 times more powerful than the accelerator he was working on. Also, he was lucky enough that the beam passed through non-vital areas of his brain. If it had passed through a vital area or some other part of his body, he might have been killed.


Question: Where do meteors come from?

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</answer>
 Where do meteors come from?

Once upon a time, instead of a solar system, there was just a big chunk of space full of gas and dust. Really, the part that became our solar system was just a small part of an even bigger chunk of space full of gas and dust. And inside that chunk, the little bits of gas and dust wandered around pretty randomly, occasionally bumping into each other and swaying with rare collisions with particles from distant stars, or swinging around magnetic particles in the dust, and very very occasionally, they'd stick together. After a very long time, all this random bumping and swinging and sticking led to one part of the cloud being more dense: having more *stuff* in it. As the dense part got bigger, it gathered more gravity, and that gravity started pulling in more of the stuff around them. Because all of the stuff was already moving around, a lot of it didn't hit the center directly, but it got close and started to circle around, like water going down a drain. So, the center of our stuff-cloud began to spin, and as it spun, the it started dragging the entire cloud around in circles, too. After a very *very* long time, the stuff falling into the very center built up so much weight that the smallest parts got crushed into each other by gravity, which caused a huge explosion, which set off even more explosions, which continue to this day: our sun. But not all of the stuff made it into the sun. Even at the edges of the cloud, the stuff was still clumping together the same way the sun did. The biggest clumps are now known as planets. Most of them have a few small clumps nearby we call moons. And there are many, many very tiny clumps we call asteroids or comets. Comets are clumps with a lot of ice on them, and are usually found at the farthest edges of the cloud (if they were closer, they'd melt and fall apart!). Asteroids are mostly rocks or balls of dust or gravel, and a lot of them are in a ring between Mars and Jupiter. Sometimes, comets and asteroids fall in towards the sun from where they were. Maybe one got bumped by another, or a bigger object got too close and gave it a tiiiny tug of gravity that pulled it out of its comfortable orbit. But once it starts falling, it gets stuck making speedy oval laps around the sun, swooping between planets instead of staying in a safe circle(ish) orbit. Eventually, those comets or asteroids will run into something. Like the sun. Or a planet. And when they strike Earth, they usually burn into dust as they fall through our atmosphere, and we call that burst of light a **meteor.** (And when they don't burn up, things get hurt (or killed, RIP dinosaurs) because that rock was moving pretty dang fast.)


Question: “: what is the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion?

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 “: what is the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion?

Tax avoidance is using the legal means within the tax codes to pay less money in taxes. As a simple example, if I took $2,000 and donated it to charity today, I would not have to pay taxes on that $2,000 on next year's taxes. I'm paying less in taxes than I would have if I'd kept that money, or if I'd spent it on a nice shiny TV. There's nothing wrong with this sort of thing in normal circumstances, because the system is set up to encourage stuff like that. Though of course because of the enormity of the tax codes and all of the ways that it's possible to reduce a person or company's tax burden, it's possible for enormous companies with huge incomes to pay very little in taxes - which isn't always what's intended. Tax evasion is finding other, illegal ways to hide money or otherwise evade paying taxes on it. If I took $2,000 for doing a contract job and then didn't report it on my insurance forms at the end of the year, I'm committing tax evasion, because there's no fair reason I shouldn't be paying taxes on that, I'm just cheating and hiding my income. That's actually a crime, and if the IRS finds out, I'll be in trouble.


Question: Considering that bent CPU/socket pins are a major problem, why do CPUs/sockets still have pins instead of them being two surfaces with only very short pins or completely flat with contact pads?

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 Considering that bent CPU/socket pins are a major problem, why do CPUs/sockets still have pins instead of them being two surfaces with only very short pins or completely flat with contact pads?

It's nearly impossible to make good contact between two surfaces with hundreds of connection points if every mating connection is rigidly fixed. This means you need to use some sort of spring-loaded mating system for each individual connection. In case of LGA (Land Grid Array, flat CPU package and pins in socket), the socket pins are basically small springy levers that the CPU is pushed against by the socket retention frame. For PGA (Pin Grid Array, pins on CPU, holes on socket), the pins sink into the socket holes where they are captured between metal "pincers" that are held against the pin with force.


Question: Why are the elderly more vulnerable to scams?

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 Why are the elderly more vulnerable to scams?

Much of it is the technological aspect. The leaps and bounds we’ve made in tech and how involved it is in our day-to-day lives over the last two decades or so is staggering compared to any other time in history. The lack of familiarity the elderly have with these technologies, which are to them very new and complicated, means it’s easy for someone to take advantage of their naivety. This is where most scams on the elderly happen; in the electronic realm. And yes, some of it is also linked to cognitive decline.


Question: Why do Tsunamis pull back the water when they start getting closer to land?

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 Why do Tsunamis pull back the water when they start getting closer to land?

A sea wave is an upward and downward movement of water. To illustrate, go pinch the middle of your bedsheet and pull it upward. Watch what happens to the edge of the sheet. Edit: As suggested by u/lightupsketchers the key thing I left out is that water molecules pull on their neighboring molecules, which makes them act like a sheet, for the purposes of this model.


Question: Why Does it seem like every single country sells arms to Saudi Arabia, and why does Saudi Arabia need so many in the first place?

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 Why Does it seem like every single country sells arms to Saudi Arabia, and why does Saudi Arabia need so many in the first place?

Most advanced western nations, particularly and overwhelmingly the US, sell weapons to just about everyone willing to pay, and if they are even willing to sell you weapons, you get all the money together to buy them because they are so wildly good that you will never be able to produce them yourself even in 50 years. It’s that wild. These weapons are worth far more than their weight in gold. We sure rename “Weight in gold” to “weight in US weapons”, it’s better than gold, silver, diamonds, anything. It jumps your military up decades in an instant. Saudi Arabia has tons and tons of money. They also have minimal domestic military production. But they want to field a modern military. So they use that money to buy weapons (they can’t make their own) from everyone who is selling them, and as much as they are willing to sell.


Question: How does opening your eyes under water affect your eyes?

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 How does opening your eyes under water affect your eyes?

It depends, on the water. Water in a swimming pool is purified, so there are "anti-life" chemicals in it that can irritate your eyes. Most swimmers get used to it, because the benefits of seeing outweigh the sting, or they wear goggles. The ocean is full of salt, so the sting there tells you something different. There is more salt in the ocean that your body prefers. Polluted water can have very serious consequences for your eyes.


Question: How does an Organic-Matter Pollution Filtering bench, like the one most recently installed near Picadilly Circus in London, work to reduce Carbon-Dioxide as much as a small forest?

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 How does an Organic-Matter Pollution Filtering bench, like the one most recently installed near Picadilly Circus in London, work to reduce Carbon-Dioxide as much as a small forest?

sounds very questionable. this line: > Although only small, this device claims to have the same benefit of up to 275 real trees by filtering the air of up to 240 tonnes (265 tons) of carbon dioxide per year Note that it isn't saying it removes 265 tons of CO2. That would require 265 tons of matter to be removed from the site. It says it *filters* 265 tons, saying nothing about the efficiency of removal of any particulate. There's no way this moss would be as efficient at certain processes as a small forest. For one, the forest is simply going to produce more biomass, which means more CO2 is removed. The amount of CO2 removed from the air is directly proportional to the mass of the tree or moss added. As for other pollutants, that would require a ton of testing that has not been done.


Question: What the fuck causes the wind to keep changing direction every 30 seconds?

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 What the fuck causes the wind to keep changing direction every 30 seconds?

You appear to be describing turbulence. That is, the chaotic nature of a fluid (the wind in this case) passing through and around obstructions. My guess is that you're in an area with buildings or natural obstructions that will cause the smooth flow of the wind to be broken up into turbulent flows. On a flat plain or the ocean there is a lot less turbulence because there are less obstructions to deflect the wind.


Question: Why does pills (eg. painkillers) have an expiration date? Aren’t they usable after that date?

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 Why does pills (eg. painkillers) have an expiration date? Aren’t they usable after that date?

The FDA requires that all medications have an expiration date of no more than 2 years following the date of manufacture. Medications are guaranteed to remain effective until that date, assuming that you properly stored them. Medications do lose potency over time, eventually they will stop working altogether. The US military did a study on this and found that, properly stored, most medications retained their effectiveness for at least 5 years. You can safely use painkillers after their expiration date but you shouldn't try to guess at how much of the effectiveness has been lost - getting your guess wrong could cause you to OD on some medications. But if the painkiller is working then there's no reason not to continue to take it. Antibiotics shouldn't be taken past the expiration date because you don't know how much of the effectiveness has been lost and the loss of even a small amount may render them ineffective. Medications *cannot* become unsafe to use over time. If you take a medication 10, 20, of infinity years after its expiration date it will not harm you. If the medication would harm you after a certain period of time then the FDA will not approve it. The worst thing that will happen is it just won't work or may have turned to vinegar if its suspended in alcohol (such as something like Nyquil).


Question: Why can't person A hear themselves during a phone call when person B has them on speaker phone?

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 Why can't person A hear themselves during a phone call when person B has them on speaker phone?

Most phones have sound processing functions. One function is where they turn off the microphone during times when sound is coming from the speaker during calls. You can notice this when you are talking to someone and there is wind on the other end - sometimes the sound will cut in and you can hear the wind on their end. But the system is dynamic, meaning that it attempts to figure out what sounds it should be allowing to pass while blocking others. There is a lot of programming that goes into this process, so there is a lot to go wrong with it as well. There is also a function that processes the sounds it is amplifying. This function recognizes sounds that it recently amplified through the speaker and attempts to ignore them by filtering them out of the microphone input. This is based on my knowledge of electronics (Electrical Engineer) and observation of how the phones act when in certain situations.


Question: Why do long car rides make us sleepy?

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 Why do long car rides make us sleepy?

Depending on the position your in will effect how sleepy you get. The driver's body is in a position of rest, while the brain is concentrated on the road in front. This leads to mental fatigue, and with the body at a state of rest, normally causes drovers to become sleepy. Add to thay the rythmic hum and movement of the car (if on a highway or a straight road) and it basically makes for a hodgepodge of tiredness


Question: How do we get 'zoned' when we are focused and immersed in a really good book?

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 How do we get 'zoned' when we are focused and immersed in a really good book?

When you are bored your mind wanders to other subjects. "Zoned" is the opposite- the book is so interesting that your mind tunes out everything else, like turning down the volume on the rest of the world. When you "snap out of" a focused state, you realize things have been happening (like someone asking you a question) that you didn't even notice. That's because your brain filtered them out as unimportant while it focused on whatever held your attention. So your brain knows a good book is more important than anything!


Question: How does the US tax system work? Why is it so complicated? Why aren't they simplifying it?

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 How does the US tax system work? Why is it so complicated? Why aren't they simplifying it?

Over time, just about any system will get more and more complicated because things are added to it for various reasons, some because of necessity, some for good reasons, some for not so noble reasons. A tax can be used to disincentivize undesired behaviors and tax deductions used to incentivize desired ones. Tobacco for example is heavily taxed to disincentivize its use because of the negative health consequences and the costs associated with it, while work expenses can be deducted. But different people believe different things to be taxed or not taxed and there's a lot of negotiations to get things into the tax code which is what complicates it. What exactly counts as a work expense? What behaviors should be disincentivized? Neither is inherently good or bad. Encouraging the development of a new industry in an emerging technology could be extremely beneficial in the long run as can discouraging behavior with very costly side effects. But the same tools can be used to prop up a dying industry while sending emerging ones elsewhere or encourage behavior that causes a lot of harm. And of course some are simply put in for greed, but they'll always give the reason as trying to incentivize or disincentivize something. There have been rounds of simplification in the past. In the 1950s there were a *lot* of tax brackets but that part was greatly simplified in the 1980s. But additional complications just keep being added so it ends up being cyclical.