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na1avd | Biology | Why does reheated meat have to get to 75°C core but you could just eat the cold meat? When you reheat mince or a burger the advice is to reheat to a core of 75°C. What is the difference between eating the meat cold vs reheating to only 40/50°C assuming the warmed meat is consumed right away. Surely the bacterial growth in the few minutes from fridge to microwave to mouth to stomach wouldn't matter much? | Bacteria are like Goldilocks. They like food that isn't too hot, isn't too cold, but is just right. The longer food is in that danger zone, the more bacteria will grow in the food. If you're going to reheat it, you have to heat it past this danger zone and into the "too hot for bacteria" zone. | 2 |
8yostr | Chemistry | Why isn't bread soggy when frozen and then thawed out? | There's no water in the bread when you freeze it. Thus it's not accumulating ice. Your just cooling the bread itself down really cold them worming it back up. Thus there is not water involved. | 3 |
i03ah5 | Physics | if Hawaii is in the middle of the pacific tectonic plate, why does it have so much volcanic activity? | the same thing which a lot of ppl explained here has also been discovered on some planet of the solar system. i cant remember which one, but its nice to know the venus or mercury are having the same things that affect hawaii | 9 |
9k3i0y | Technology | Why does the pitch of voices go up or down when you speed up or slow down a video? | Pitch is based on the frequency of sound waves, or how often those waves hit your ear. When you speed up a video, the waves come faster; likewise, when you slow it down, they come slower. This has the same effect as a higher or lower pitch | 1 |
5ofhqt | Biology | If black soaks up heat, how do pure black birds like crows and ravens not overheat and suffer/die? (also I'd *love* to read any papers on this if anyone has researched it more thoroughly... Google Scholar didn't turn up much.) Edit: someone posted an article that referenced "Animal coat color and radiative heat gain" - Walsberg, Campbell, & King, 1978. J. Comp. Physiol. 126B: 211-222. If anyone knows where I can read that for free I'd love it. I really want to read it, but not €43 want to read it! | Hair and feathers don't transfer heat well, an example is if you're outside on a hot day and you feel your hair it's very hot but your scalp isn't. | 3 |
li384w | Biology | when the baby is in the womb. Its drowned in liquid. But the moment the baby comes out, it needs air to breath. How does the sudden transition work? And how did the lung didn't just fill up with liquid all that time. | MD here During the fetal stage there is a special type of circulation that carries nutrients to the fetus but maintains gas exchange (what we commonly call respiration) without function, it is at birth that the newborn must be stimulated (the now prohibited spanking) so that through the increased pressure within the thorax, lung surfactant (a liquid that keeps the lungs inflated and lubricated) that the circulation changes and starts the gas exchange as a being from this planet sorry for my english, but it's not my first language | 10 |
kofk8q | Biology | How are our bodies able to differentiate between cuts, burns, punctures, bruises, scratches etc through pain and how do they heal differently? | Physical phenomena are detected by protein in cells of an organism. They signal to other proteins that leads to biological interactions which result in a cellular response. This is coordinated across multiple cells termed tissue. | 6 |
94d9p5 | Chemistry | why does the foam from a fountain soda start to disappear when touched by your finger? | Oils of all types are a potent anti-foaming agent. Things generally like to stick to water, or to oil (polar vs nonpolar liquids), and if you can convince a tiny portion of the non-water content of a bubble to stick to oil, the bubble pops. | 6 |
iptbbm | Other | When I’m about to go do something, and then someone tells me to do it, why does it suddenly become the last thing I want to do? | I feel the opposite, if it’s just something I want, it doesn’t feel valuable. If someone asks me to do something that I intend to do, it feels like confirmation that the thing is important. Curious, do you work in a traditional management structure? | 5 |
6wte3r | Biology | Why can both heat and cold be used to treat pain? What are the differences between their effects? | Cold causes blood vessels to constrict, so cold is usually used in immediate injuries to help prevent excessive swelling. Less swelling means less pressure on the area which can lessen pain. Cold can also have a numbing effect on nerves to dull the pain. Heat on the other hand causes blood vessels to expand, increasing blood flow. This is typically used in existing injuries to aid in the healing process by letting the extra blood flow to clear out the byproducts from the healing process more quickly, allowing the area to heal faster and reduce the pain caused by that injury more quickly. Heat can also help muscles to loosen up more easily to help relieve pain caused by tense muscles | 2 |
69ryyz | Biology | What causes us to get hiccups | It's similar to the process [amphibians use when breathing with gills instead of lungs]( URL_0 ). So hiccups may be part of your brain trying to breathe through gills that your ancestors haven't had for hundreds of millions of years. | 2 |
5lcl43 | Technology | Why do we fail to do realistic human CGI (like in SW Rouge One) yet we do it so great on non-human beings (like in Warcraft)? Title pretty much, thanks for answers in advance! | Probably because we are so adapted to human skin/tone/etc. that our brains can pick out what is real and what is fake. Since we can't actually conceptualize what alien skin would be, real or fake is no different to us. Think about it like being scared as a child by a man dressed in a costume, over time we learn and accept that it is fake and not a threat (except clowns fuck that shit). | 4 |
faodi3 | Biology | How does your ears effect your Equilibrium? I recently saw a boxing match between Wilder and Tyson Fury. Wilder sustained an injury to his left ear (possibly blown ear drum). The announcers kept mentioning that this was the reason why he was stumbling all over the place because the injury to his ear effected his equilibrium. | Just inside of your ears there are loop shaped ducts that are filled with fluid. The inside of these tubes is covered with tiny hair like sensory cells. These can move based on the pressure of the fluid. If you tilt back the hairs similarly are pulled back due to the fluid pressure, the opposite if you tilt forward these hairs are also moved forward. These sensors determine how you interpret balance. A good knock on your head can cause severe sideways or at least unwanted pressure. This causes the inner tubular hairs to go haywire and give of mixed signals that cause you to lose your balance since your equilibrium cannot be established. | 1 |
7tbdvh | Biology | Can you get tired just thinking? I think I know the awnser to this one but say you spend the entire day solving a hard math problem, would you feel tired and out of energy even if you didnt move so much? | Yes. Just like it takes energy to move your body, it takes energy for your brain to function. A long day of thinking will make you feel tired. | 4 |
7vq926 | Other | Why are jeans bad at keeping legs warm during the winter? | I work in an outdoor/mountaineering shop and it is common knowledge among climbers that you shouldnt wear cotton clothing into the hills especially when It is cold. The reason being that cotton takes forever to dry. This is because the fibers of cotton are hollow and are very good at retaining water, so if you sweat you will stay wet. Being wet doesnt matter so much in warm climates, but in cold weather this can be quite dangerous. | 3 |
bgqdnf | Technology | How phones still can call ambulance when there's no simcard put? | The antenna isn't actually in the Sim card it's in your phone. No sim card, to your phone, just means you haven't paid for access to a phone network, it doesn't make the phone physically unable to dial into one. For emergency calls it will make an exception. It's also why you can make emergency calls if you have no reception on your network, because they can be dialed into **any** network, so as long as your withing coverage of a phone network, it doesn't mater if it's your own or not, you can always make an emergency call | 2 |
5t55h3 | Repost | what happens to all those amazing discoveries on reddit like "scientists come up with omega antibiotic, or a cure for cancer, or professor founds protein to cure alzheimer, or high school students create $5 epipen, that we never hear of any of them ever again? | Survival rates for a lot of diseases are up compared with 10 years ago. We have super-computers that fit in our pockets. We have cars that drive themselves and run on batteries. The future doesn't arrives in big jumps, but it arrives on non-impressive small steps. It is so slow that you get used to most incredible and amazing technologies without realizing it. Medicine is not different from the rest. Keep investing in education and research, wait for it. :D | 27 |
8m3iat | Engineering | What decides the maximum altitude a plane can fly? | It is a combination of lift (there needs to be enough air density to keep the aircraft up), speed (moving faster through less dense air can provide more lift), and structural limits of the engine. Moving very fast in order to provide sufficient lift from the wings and enough air for the engine to function means the air must be compressed very much in order to feed the engine. That compression heats the air which only gets hotter during combustion of the fuel, potentially melting the engine components. So the limit for a particular aircraft might be defined by any of several factors. For example an aircraft might lack wing surface or speed depending on how you look at it, as more of either would allow it to go higher. | 2 |
70nbb5 | Other | Why is it that in many states, an accident that occurs while turning left is automatically the fault of the driver turning left? | There is no such thing as "automatically at fault." At most, there is a rebuttable presumption. Source = legal degree and many years of practice. | 5 |
id61ev | Technology | what’s the difference between and Intel 5,7 and 9 processor? What do those numbers actually mean | The numbers themselves don't mean anything. It's just marketing, really. Depending on what task you are trying to perform, ones with lower numbers can out-perform ones with higher numbers, but usually it's the other way around. & #x200B; There was a time when the different names meant at least \*some\* discernable characteristic - 3's and 5's weren't Hyperthreaded whereas 7's and 9's were - but it's even blurrier now. & #x200B; Your best bet if you're looking to buy one or put together a machine is to determine what you want to actually use the machine for, find benchmarks that are a decent representation of that, and forget about the names. | 3 |
6f38zj | Other | What happens when 911 callers don't speak English? | My step-mom worked as a 911 translator. She would log in, and be available for a set number of hours. This was in LA, so there was a high demand for a lot of languages. Getting a translator on the line happened quickly, so I don't think people ended up any worse off for not speaking English. | 5 |
i7ubqp | Other | Why do we use Jesus's birth (3000 BC, for example) as a metric for keeping track of time and years? Have always wondered why dates preceding the birth of Jesus Christ were known as 'BC' rather than just having a time beginning to present day. | Nations used to keep dates based on the reign of the current ruler. It’s year 9 of Caesar or year 12 of Trajan. 1500 years ago, the Catholic Church had spread its influence throughout multiple nations and was seeking a way to better keep dates over long periods rather than dealing with calendars that changed every few years and at every feudal age border. They tasked a monk with researching the date of Christ’s birth so that they could set a supreme calendar based on the supreme ruler: God. He returned the date 525, and the “Anno Domini” system slowly spread through Europe. | 5 |
6doax2 | Physics | Why do we need the Moon? | The moon stabilizes Earth's axis so that it doesn't wobble too much. It essentially acts as a weight, pulling on the Earth and keeping it on a fairly uniform rotation. This means that we have regular and consistent seasons and temperatures, which allow for agriculture, modern civilization, and all that fun stuff. Possibly even life itself because it's kind of hard to grow in a region when you can't predict what environment you'll be in within a year. | 5 |
8c3awv | Other | The difference between affect and effect | Affect is a verb, effect is generally a noun (don't worry about when it's not) Eating poorly greatly AFFECTS my health Eating poorly has a negative EFFECT on my health | 2 |
bkqw1i | Culture | why is Andy Warhol’s Campbell soup can painting so highly esteemed? | Warhol's thing was taking an iconic image and through repetition, made it meaningless. It was the basis for Shepard Fairey's "OBEY" campaign which propelled him to his current stardom today. It's kind of like why you're asking about it now. SOUP CANS. SOUP CANS. SOUP CANS. WTF is it about these SOUP CANS???? That's what Shep did and it worked. You wanted to know. WHAT is this and WHY is this? That's called art. Made you ask a question right? A painting made you ask a question to yourself. I think that's art. | 10 |
bpp34u | Other | Why did Japan allied with Nazi Germany during WWII? | Essentially Japan saw it as a way to gain more territory, and they were successful, until they weren't. | 4 |
7h9mp8 | Chemistry | How does graphite stay on paper? | Graphite is relatively soft, and as you scrape it along a surface, tiny bits of it crumble away and stay behind. These bits are insaaanely individually tiny and make up an extremely fine powder. Paper is not as smooth as you might think. It's covered in ridges and pores and little valleys. So as you are dragging the graphite along a piece of paper and leaving the trail of ultra fine powder behind it, you're also applying a bit of pressure between the pencil tip and the paper, effectively packing the graphite dust into all those grooves and pores and ridges in the paper. Erasers work because they're soft and also extremely porous, wich allows them to sink into the textures along the surface of the paper and collect that graphite dust up in it's own surface, taking it from the paper. As you can imagine this process doesn't work perfectly every swipe, which is why erasers sometimes leave smudges behind. | 1 |
5qzn07 | Culture | Back when the Indian caste system was stronger, why couldn't people of lower castes just move to a place where no one knew them and lie about which caste they were in? | There is a great book called White Tiger which talks about this. The answer is: Sometimes they did, but with great difficulty; and mostly they didn't because it's so difficult. Caste isn't just a label. It's somewhat morphological (you can see differences between castes) and very much intertwined with culture. It's like asking why doesn't a cockney Londoner pretend to be royalty. Their behaviour will give them away. Plus it's not just about caste, its social. The higher castes own land and run businesses. If their life was good why would they move? This would make toy highly suspect of a guy who rolled into town, nobody knowing them, with no money, a funny accent, who's claiming to be posh. And remember, social mobility in India is basically a way street. It goes down, but very rarely up. There are a vast number of ways to lose rank, even just by having cow's blood thrown on you, or by marrying out of your caste; and the only way to ascend is to die and be born again better off. This means that anyone from out of town claiming to be someone high caste isn't necessarily going to confer benefits. You'd be likely to think they were even more suspect (if he's Brahmin, what must he have done!?). Source: Lived in India for 5 years and wrote a research paper on Indian culture. | 44 |
fzkuho | Biology | Why do parrots learn human language and how do they do it? | To socialize! My birb likes to copy me and cuddle with me as a bonding mechanism. Or so I think. But certain species of parrots have been shown to display other socializing behavior (such as grief over flock members who were hunted down). Parrots are both social and intelligent creatures who use their intelligence to the best of their ability to develop bonds among their own. | 1 |
9hxy76 | Biology | what are macromolecules? | They're just what their name suggests, large molecules. Molecule size can be measured in the number of atoms making them up. A small molecule can have just 2 atoms, like oxygen (the more precise name of the gas being dioxygen), 3 like water H2O. Methanol has 5. Amino acids have seeing a dozen atoms each, but to make a protein you need hundreds or thousands of amino acids (Google tells me known human proteins count between 44 and 34,350 amino acids), so they are huge compared to water for example. | 1 |
ghy3ks | Other | Occam’s Razor | Occam's Razor in its basic form is the idea that if you have two competing theories that make the exact same prediction, the simpler one is the better one, because it's easier to test and utilize. It's been expanded a lot in modern thought to also include problem solving: we often say that the simplest explanation is more likely to be correct than a more complex one. People often use it incorrectly and say that the simplest explanation is *usually* true, but this isn't always the case. It's better to say that the simplest explanation is a better starting point, unless more evidence comes along. If we wanted to use a simple example, let's say that I go to the restroom and when I come back to my desk, and the muffin that I left on the desk is now gone, while my dog is sitting in the corner of the room looking upset. A simple explanation would be that my dog ate my muffin and is now worried that he'll get in trouble (and he will). A more complicated explanation might be that a bird flew in through a window and stole my muffin, upsetting my dog. Or that a burglar broke in and stole my muffin and nothing else, scaring my dog. Or even that my muffin spontaneously combusted, leaving no evidence that it ever existed. Occam's razor tells me that before I start worrying about open windows or broken locks, I should just sniff my dog's breath to see if it smells like blueberries or see if there's crumbs on his face, because that would be a very simple explanation. If it doesn't fit, then I might have to start looking for other solutions (checking for open windows, making sure my door is locked, re-evaluating my knowledge of physics...), but I shouldn't start with those more complicated scenarios and ignore the simple one. They all require more assumptions to make sense, so we should start wherever the fewest assumptions should be made. My dog theory only requires one assumption - dogs like food. Let's start there. | 3 |
lla4e7 | Biology | Can humans digest coal? | We can not digest coal. However unless there is any toxic materials in the coal we can eat it. However it does not do much within our intestines and exits the body in more or less the same form as it entered. So in general eating coal does not require you to seek medical attention unless your are presenting with symptoms. But it is not advisable to test this out. There is even one medical use for coal. If you have eaten a toxin then you might follow it up by eating some clean activated charcoal which will hopefully bind up some of the toxins and let them pass harmlessly through your digestion system without getting digested. | 2 |
5xr9pq | Physics | How can we know the age of the universe (based on the observable universe) when the size of the entire universe is unkown? | That's why nobody talks about "The age of the universe", but only, "The age of the observable universe". | 1 |
aak3lj | Chemistry | essential oils. Just that. | They're the extracted/refined "essence" of plants, condensed down to an oil. Some people think they have all sorts of amazing healing properties but there's not a whole lot of science behind that. Currently, it's somewhat of a hot topic because a few big MLM schemes are marketing them fairly aggressively. | 3 |
688buq | Technology | What is SDK?What is API? Hello friends I would like to know what is SDK and what is an API and how they related or the difference between them. P.S. Noob question. | An SDK is a *software development kit* and API stands for application *application programming interface*. You can think of an SDK of a box of tools to help you work with a particular product. One of the tools in that box may or may not involve some pre-built stuff for the API pf the product. An API is just way for programs to talk with each other, it is a predefined list of commands or queries that can be sent to the program in some way and an explanation of what the answers mean. If you want to built your own product to interact with someone elses software you either need to know exactly how the software works on the inside and hope they never ever change anything (this does not really work in real life) or you need access to the API. Many software makers release the full documentation on the API on their products to the public or select parts of the public to give them the ability to make programs that work with their software. Sometimes they go a bit father and release some pre-written libraries of commands to use that API, so that every developer who wants to work with it doesn't have to rewrite everything from scratch. Those libraries may be part of a software development kit. The SDK may also include other tools to help you write software for their product. | 4 |
ahhtl2 | Mathematics | the pareto principle | It is some times called the Law of the Few or the 80/20 Rule. The idea is that 80% of the effect comes from 20% of the causes. In my job in manufacturing, it comes up as 80% of the problems during manufacturing are caused by 20% of the parts. So you focus your effort on that 20% to get the most results for your effort. There are other examples that show it is loosely true. | 3 |
l8fatp | Economics | what would happen if we all closed our credit cards from any one bank? | Keep in mind that many credit card users rarely pay interest. But even considering that, the loss of revenue from their cut of merchant fees alone would be annoying for the bank. | 1 |
euxkgu | Biology | Why are cancers such common occurrence nowadays? | Because people were not meant to live as long as they do now. So the cell mechanisms that make sure replications don’t wrong slowly age themselves and our DNA accumulates more and more damage. | 7 |
nky3ic | Chemistry | Uranium-234 has a half-life of 246,000 years. How did we measure that if the technology to do that hasn't been around that long? | In 246,000 years, half a sample will decay. But if you have 492,000 atoms, there’s a good chance that one of them will go *this* year. In a gram of uranium there’s ~10^21 atoms, and so even though any individual atom is likely to last for a hundred millennia, there will be a detectable rate of decay over a much shorter period of time. You count how many decay events your Geiger counter picks up in an hour and extrapolate that out. | 3 |
9s85zt | Economics | what exactly is red hat, what do they do and how do they make money? | They are a computer software company, more-or-less like Microsoft. The difference is that they develop "open source" software, which means that it is freely available for anyone to modify, or, really, do anything they want with it. While you can run the software they sell without paying any money^*, they largely make money by selling support for computers running that software. \* RedHat has certain trademarks that they don't allow to be freely distributed, but these are largely cosmetic. | 1 |
6uo8ax | Repost | Why do we make faces when we are doing something that requires more dexterity (i.e fine motor function) than usual? This refers to things that include threading a needle, working with miniature things etc. | Animating a face requires many muscles to work in tandem - complex stuff. I see it more as the LACK of making a face. Your mind is too focused on the task to even partially care if it's smiling or where your eyebrows are, slumping into a neutral energy-preserving state. But as a perpetual disinterested scowler, I'm hardly a professional in this field. | 13 |
6vb8aq | Physics | Why do wind turbines have such thin blades. Logic dictates that a larger surface area would receive more wind energy. For instance, a fan usually has large blades to displace more air. Is it to do with some weird fluid dynamic effect or more about the limitations of materials | I build these windmills. Union ironworker. And I'm not an engineer but judging by how critical wind is in their construction (if it's blowing we sit and wait for it to stop before sending up the blade) id venture a guess to say larger blades would be impossible to mount. Let alone have it stay standing without blowing the entire structure down. The base of the structure alone takes immensely reinforced concrete (very large rebar). In my lack of education all I can guess is that there's a lot of physics-based issues with larger blades. | 6 |
97ia4b | Technology | What is file compression and how does it work? | It works by replacing patterns for smaller equivalents while maintaining a table for reversing the encoded message later: "Mary had a little lamb. Mary got hungry and ate the lamb. The lamb is now dead and Mary is not hungry anymore. Mary grew up and bought more lamb. Mary them all." Mary = 1 lamb = 2 hungry = 3 and = 4 is = 5 "1had a little lamb. 1got 3 4 ate the 2. The 2 5 now dead 4 1 5 not 3 anymore. 1 grew up 4 bought more 2. 1 ate them all." | 11 |
ep1hks | Economics | Why is 2% inflation rate good, and what would happen if the rate falls below this? Would people notice sudden changes in daily life? | VeniVediVelcro hit the nail on the head but just imagine the opposite scenario. Let's say there is a 2% deflation rate. Money is getting more and more valuable every year! That's great! Except now banks and corporations and anyone with a good chunk of change has incentive to do absolutely nothing with the money. They can just sit on it and they will make money actually. Economies are like water. You want lots of fluidity and swishy swashy moving around. Not a stagnate still pool | 9 |
6a71a3 | Other | Why is Stephen Colbert under investigation for indecency by the FCC but every news agency or show that replays the clip isn't facing the same scrutiny? | Every complaint filed with he FCC generates an investigation. At this point,it doesn't really mean anything,just useless posturing. And in this case someone reported it. | 4 |
690y9j | Culture | Is there any merit behind the idea that global warming could create more usable farmland in the northern regions of North America/Asia, like Canada/Russia? | It might, but it will also render existing farm land unusable and the kind of farmland that would be created is land we already have no shortage of... we may have some more land to grow wheat but we may lose access to all sorts of tropical produce. Additionally, while regions may warm, there is also evidence of wider swings in precipitation... so some years may get too much rain and flood (which could ruin crops) and some years there will be draught (which could ruin crops), so even with more land available there is still greater risk of crop loss. | 3 |
o5ja1r | Economics | Why are hotel prices seemingly random and different? | It’s largely due to hotel occupancy. Even if it’s the middle of the week in the middle of nowhere, if a hotel is at 90% occupancy the rates are going to be inflated. On the flip side, if a hotel is at 10% occupancy then the room rates will be extra low for the purpose of raising occupancy. There are other factors as well but this is a major force behind room rates. Source: I was a hotel manager for 5 years | 3 |
czi7uh | Biology | Why were creatures in the dinosaur era predisposed to being SO large, where as by comparison there are currently so few animals that measure up in terms of size? | Follow-up question: how sure are we that "dinosaurs = big" isn't (at least partially) because we're just more likely to find fossils of the big ones? | 14 |
frh41d | Technology | How are IP addresses identifiable by location? How is it that services are able to know the exact real-world location of a public IP address? Is there some prefix or suffix that gets linked to that location, ISP, or organization? Do these services just perform a WHOIS lookup? | Blocks of IP addresses are assigned to organizations on request by a handful of non-profit organizations responsible for maintaining the IP space. These are the Regional Internet Registries. In North America this organization is ARIN, in Europe its RIPE, in Asia it's APNIC, etc These organizations each have certain number of IPv4 and IPv6 ranges that they can issue to companies upon request. When you get an IP range assigned to your company or organization it's registered into their database along with your head office location. That's what defines those IP ranges as belonging to a certain country + state + town. We don't usually think about top-level organizations like ARIN though, because most people and companies get their IP's assigned to them by an ISP. But the ISPs in turn get their IP ranges from ARIN, RIPE, etc Only very large organizations tend to get dedicated IP ranges all to themselves. Apple, HP, and the US government for example have massive IP ranges that belong to their organizations. | 2 |
6wfq50 | Chemistry | How does two or three feet of rainfall result in flooding so severe people are stranded on their roofs? | Thanks everyone. That makes all the sense. I thought maybe it meant 2-3 feet every hour or something, but now I get it. | 5 |
edu2ti | Biology | How Does Narcan Work? | Opioids are mostly μ-opioid receptor *agonists*, which essentially means they increase the function of that receptor. Narcan is a μ-opioid receptor *antagonist*, so it does the opposite to those same receptors. When using opioids, in addition to the reasons for abuse, your brain also stops telling your body to do normal body things, like breathe. Narcan counteracts that, and brings your brain back to functioning well enough to not let it's host die. It's important to note that it's temporary, some opioids might have longer half-lives than narcan, and they'll go back to overdosing once the narcan leaves their system. Source: I used to be a toxicologist, it's been a while, so there might be new information out there, but this should be the gist of it. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. | 2 |
8f74tt | Biology | Why has the potency of marijuana increased over the past few decades? Will the potency continue to increase? | It used to be more popular to buy a raw product that had minimal trimming and had seeds and stems all included with that potency. Now when you buy weed, it tends to be seedless with minimal stems. Selective breeding, nutrient lines made specifically for cannabis, hydroponics, indoor gardening, and Co2 injection have also made a big impact on THC levels. | 8 |
ax2n4l | Biology | Why does snot continue to form during a cold or sinus infection? | It serves a purpose. The extra mucous isn't there to irritate you, it's to flush out foreign particles, protect your tissues (as in sinuses, not as in Kleenex). Mucous is your first line of defense against airborne pathogens. They get stuck in it and have a harder time infecting anything else. They keep producing until all signs of invaders are gone. As annoying as it is, the alternative is to give every microbe that passes by free access to your respiratory tract. And that ain't good. | 1 |
ihc0t1 | Technology | In the USA, why do emergency broadcast warnings sound like absolute garbage? It’s usually a robotic sounding voice that sounds like they are reporting from the middle of a static storm. Why is there so much extra noise in these recordings? I’m referring to the actual message, not the warning tones at the beginning. :) | Low fidelity, high amplification. They need to get the message to as many people as possible. Systems with the ability to reproduce a broad frequency range and that have a wide footprint exist but the better these two qualities get, the more expensive the system. Emergency alert systems need to have a large audio footprint, and be able to be clearly understood by everyone within said footprint. That’s it. They don’t need to be able to reproduce a wide range of frequencies like you’d want high quality headphones or speakers at home to be able to do. | 14 |
l4oozb | Biology | Can you swallow a pill down into your lungs? | Yes you can. It’s called “aspiration” when something (presumably solid) goes down the wrong pipe and in to your lungs. I’m no doctor, but IMO just an aspirin should be fine, quick googling says it should dissolve on its own within a few hours, you’ll probably have a cough and discomfort until then. | 6 |
i86w59 | Other | Why can't we just clean up the enormous masses of garbage in the ocean? TIL about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a huge and growing collection of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean. Since we've already identified the location and size of the patch, why hasn't it already been cleaned out? | A lot of people think that the garbage patch is just a giant centralized pile of garbage floating in the ocean. While there certainly is large debris, the majority of the garbage is very fine particles of plastic that range from the size of [sand to even smaller microscopic particles]( URL_0 ) - these form when plastics degrade in the direct sunlight. These particles form a sort of suspension in the water and so it becomes incredibly difficult to effectively remove them. Despite what you see in photos (which often pictures the large debris), there are huge portions of the patch that you wouldn't even think was polluted because of how fine these particles are. Additionally, you need to consider the size of the patch. It really depends on what source you look at but estimates put it anywhere between the size of Texas and North America. Even if you assume Texas to be most accurate, that's a massive amount of area to cover. Couple that with the distance from land, and the resources needed to get there and back, it becomes very difficult to clean the patch. That said, there are plenty of initiatives currently trying to tackle this problem. Check out "the ocean cleanup". They've been in the press quite a lot over the last few years for various advancements they've made. | 11 |
6lhwg5 | Biology | How do babies scream for so long without 'losing their voice'? If I go to a gig or a club and sing all night I'll usually lose my voice by the end of it whereas my baby can scream at the top of her lungs for almost two days straight and she hasn't lost hers. | Babies are born with natural, perfect resonating ability. Through parenting, imitation, and socialization, some of us move away from the natural instinct towards a "good" standard. Babies don't tire their voices because their voices are not working--they're just resonating. I'd wager you lose your voice after a gig because your technique is less than ideal. Watch how a baby laughs or cries. See the way their stomachs move in (in!) when inhaling before laughing or crying and out during the vocalization. Look at their mouth positions: all smiles in the "ah" shape. A baby does not manufacture a sound, it just sounds. Basically: babies have perfect vocal technique through instinct. I'd discuss this with your voice teacher or find one of you don't have one. Source: Masters in Voice | 1 |
fesuh2 | Biology | Why are our fingers all different lengths? | Evolution probably. Its a good configuration for picking up food (fruits, seeds, nuts), picking up and throwing rocks, making a cup to drink water (impossible if they were all aligned and equal length). Mostly though my guess would be because we’re descendants from aquatic species and our hands used to be flippers that needs more streamlined shape in the water. | 1 |
ha41jy | Technology | - Why do older movies/shows/news/recordings have a much different "tone" of voice and feel to them? Like if you watch old movies like "It's a Wonderful Life" or hear any of Kennedy/FDR's speeches, it sounds so different than the voices on tv today? Sorry for the awful explanation... Edit: Thank you everyone for the detailed and thorough explanations! | There were a couple of accents that were considered acceptable/mainstream, and pretty much anyone who was on film/tv/radio used those - in the US, the main one was a "Mid-Atlantic" accent (a blend of received pronunciation and New England "upper crust" speech patterns), while in the UK, the standard was received pronunciation. Over time, there's been more acceptance of regional dialects/accents, but the "generic" accent for American film has shifted to much more of a Californian accent (perhaps with slightly crisper enunciation than the average person uses day-to-day). | 4 |
6z2ukw | Culture | Why didn't the industrial revolution take place a 1000 years ago,Why was our progress so exponential in the last 400 years? | This is a huge question in many areas of social science and it seems far from being resolved. Some just look at the pure technology as driving its own growth, others look to changes in social, economic, and governance structures, others look at simple population size and how that relates to trade and the exchange of ideas. The cause likely has multiple interacting factors and we don't know what alternate possibilities exist. The best answer is that something happened and people developed a few ideas which worked very well and enabled more people to come up with more ideas. Good ideas seem obvious in retrospect and it causes us to discount how difficult they can be to develop. | 28 |
dq7sxj | Other | Why can’t a phone screen at close distance feel like a cinema? Why is it that even when using a really nice high quality phone screen, and holding it a distance from your face that matches the field of view of a Cinema Display from a distance, it still doesn’t feel the same? It seems more difficult to pick out small details and feels less immersive. If it’s taking the same fov and it’s the same quality, why is it harder to see details and why does it feel less immersive? | Well, for one thing, eye focus and parallax. If you're holding your phone so close to your face that it takes up the FOV of a cinema, your eyes probably can't quite focus on it. Not only that, but your eyes are looking at it from two very different angles. This is an efficient way to ruin your immersion. | 1 |
ac6fd9 | Physics | How can the same side of the moon always face earth? Doesn't it rotate? The fact that the Chinese just landed on the dark side makes it seem stranger. | The moon is "tidally locked" to the Earth, which is a fancy way of saying that as the moon orbits the earth, it rotates so that exactly the same face is always facing the middle of its orbit. We think this happens whenever a planet or a moon has fluids (think the ocean or the molten core of the Earth) that make it not perfectly symmetrical. Basically, our oceans have "stolen" the rotation speed from the moon over millions of years, bit by bit, until from the Earth's point of view, it doesn't rotate at all. And of course there's a bunch of math for all of that. | 115 |
cl3ni5 | Biology | Why are bug bites itchy? | Your body uses sensation to tell your brain what is going on. An itch is a sign that a foreign substance has entered your body, but unlike "pain", there's no wound or significant damage. When a bug bites you, contamination is introduced. Sometimes it's the stuff on their sucker (pollen, dust, etc), sometimes it's their saliva (depends on the specific bug), but one way or another, foreign junk is getting into and under your skin. Once your body detects this, the warning signal is an itch. Your body will also push more blood to the area (so it'll swell up and turn red) in an attempt to flush the contaminates out. As those contaminates are taken away by blood, the itch goes away, the swelling disappears, and you're back to normal. This doesn't just apply to bugs. From briar pokes, to poison ivy, to fiberglass, the same process is going on. | 1 |
akq609 | Other | What is the logic as to why we do not have universal health care in the United States? | The notion is that a capitalistic approach produces better results overall. By having many buyers and many suppliers you engender competition that drives innovation and pushes prices down. The specific concern with healthcare moving to a centralized/single payer/socialized system is that individual consumers will lose choice and access, particularly to specialists, regardless of how much you’re willing to pay. One might look at the VA as an example of what universal health care might look like. Horror stories of waits and poor care. There’s also a fear that physicians and patients would lose control of health care decisions, because of the only entity that can pay the doctor (the government) decides treatment A isn’t right for you, then you’re not getting treatment A. We already see this a bit with the private insurance system we have now. Finally I think there’s some sense that universal anything is anathema to American values of liberty. | 2 |
c7gpme | Technology | Why don’t law enforcement officers use tranquilizer guns to subdue perpetrators? Stun guns require close contact with potentially dangerous individuals, and tasers require both of their prongs to make contact to actually work. Why are tranquilizer guns (like those used to sedate animals) not used on people? | You know in the movies where someone gets shot by a dart or injected with a syringe then pass out in 3 seconds, yea that is not real life. & #x200B; Usually even in animals you shoot an animal and it takes 5-10 minutes before it passes out and falls asleep. Also its pretty dangerous to do , if the dose is too low the animal doesn't pass out or is sedated enough were it can still move but ends up injuring itself or its too strong and it dies. Also it would be hard to dose it on the fly and it could also interact with any drugs the person is on. & #x200B; Example if the person is drunk , it may be dangerous to give them another sedative | 4 |
756y4a | Biology | Why do birds fly south for the winter instead of just staying where its warmer all the time? | Two reasons: summer days are longer near the poles compared to the tropics, meaning more time for activity; and springtime sees an absolute explosion of food resources (insect and plant population growth) so the birds that fly back north get access to it, whereas the birds that would stay down south continue having to compete for a standard amount of resources. Basically, seasonal variation makes for some months with an overabundance of food (ie spring) and some months with a dearth of food (ie winter). They fly south to avoid the lack of food. | 4 |
mcihk5 | Biology | How do we really know that animals express and feel emotions? | from the way they interact and react to their enviroment. By looking at how an animal reacts to its surroundings over time you are able to deduce what emotions arise. If you mean literally how do humans detect emotions in different species: humans are hard wired to be extremely sensitive to changes in mood and expression due to how we evolved. we are sensitive enough that we can detect these changes in other creatures once familiar with their habits. if you looked up a random photo of a person on google right now you would be able to look at them amd have a basic idea of their feelings at that moment. as a cat person i can tell you i could probably do the same with a cat picture. | 2 |
mjo6ja | Other | Why do stars flash blue green and red? When I look at the stars on a clear night and really focus on their twinkling, they flash red, blue, green; not at the same time but one at a time. Why is that? | Several things the earth's atmosphere which is already mentioned. Fun fact if it's not flickering than it's a planet! Also we have rods and cones in our eyes. Cones see color and fine detail rods detect light. There are more cones in center of retina and more rods in peripheral. Since stars are dim and far away it is better to look at them with rods/peripheral. If you directly look at dim stars the stars seem to disappear from view. So that could be causing the flashing. Also the light from stars is different colors. This is linked to surface temperature of stars. The hotter the star the more blue the cooler they will be more red. But you shouldn't see any stars that are green colored. Because green is the color in the middle of the spectrum of visible light so that means the star is emitting light from all possible colors so we will see the light as white. | 2 |
hw3i12 | Technology | Who gives certain websites the authority to sell domain names? Say I wanted to make a website with the domain name, URL_1 . Why do I have to buy the name from a company like URL_2 , or URL_0 ? Who gives them permission to sell domains? Do companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Samsung need to use these sites to keep their domains online? If not, how do they do it free of charge? | The highest level of domains are so-called “top-level domains” (com, .edu, .org, etc). Each TLD has a single organization responsible for maintaining a database of names within it. To register a domain name, the average person has to go through a middleman, who communicates with the TLD to register the name. That is what GoDaddy does. | 2 |
ba28sy | Other | Why can't homes in tornado prone areas be built under ground? | Over the course of 100 years, it is still very unlikely to be hit by a tornado, why would anyone want to live in a bunker. It is far more sunny and bright to build a home above ground and if afraid, build a small box as a shelter underground, just encase it gets scary. With insurance, things are replaceable. The cost of insurance is balanced by the risk and the risk is not so high as to cause insurance to cost so much as to make people build underground. | 5 |
nt15ql | Biology | How do very young or verbally challenged children get fitted for glasses if they are unable to verbally indicate that their vision is much clearer? | There is actually a relatively recent invention which allows this. It uses low intensity laser light that it shines through your eyes in order to determine the shape of the lens and how your eyes tries to naturally focus. This is far from accurate and is unable to determine many different type of vision defects but it is very quick and automatic. So you can issue prescription glasses to people who are unable to verbally speak or help with the examination in any way. Some shops are even installing these machines for use by their customers if they do not remember their prescription or think it have changed. | 4 |
ibnp93 | Biology | If a bubble in the bloodstream can easily kill you, how come we don't risk death everytime we accidentally cut ourselves? | The blood oozing out prevents air from getting in. Like how you wouldn't expect air to get into a water hose that's spewing out water. | 5 |
9fxps9 | Culture | 99% of Americans would support legislation blocking spam calls and email, but government won't do anything about it. Is this a technical or political issue? | I'd say technical. With a VPN and phone number spoofing, there's really no way to track them down. | 7 |
d2xlda | Biology | Why are insects drawn to light sources? They can't feed off the light, so why do they go there? | They're trying to use the light to fly in a constant direction by keeping the light at a constant angle. This works if the light is the moon and you fly with the moon at, say, 45 & deg; to your left. In the modern world the light is more likely to be a light bulb; keeping it a constant 45 & deg; to your left results in you spiralling in and hitting the bulb. Insects evolved when there were no light bulbs and a bright light at night was almost certainly the moon. | 2 |
5tzczd | Other | Why do some clothes smell if they haven't dried properly, even if they're clean? | If the clothes are damp for a long time, then bacteria can grow in the water that is trapped in the fabric, giving off a foul smell. | 2 |
6yoxsb | Biology | Why do our voices become lower as we run out of breath? | You are sending a much greater volume of air through when you are breathing hard and fast. This makes it difficult to control or excite the higher frequencies in your larynx. High frequencies are not as efficient when there is too much air mass being moved. Lower frequencies however have no problem with and even require huge volumes of air in the first place. | 1 |
nr9eaj | Other | Recording years before Christ. | Hebrews counted “from the creation of the world”, and Hebrew calendar still does. Ancient Egyptians, over 3000 years had many calendars but typically counted years in the reign of a pharaoh. Rome counted years “ab urbe condita” or from the founding of Rome. Mind you, Western Europe didn’t widely start counting “form the birth of Christ” until the 9the century. | 5 |
7gb82y | Biology | What is that lump that forms in the throat when someone is about to cry? Why does it happen just before crying? | Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained: 1. [ELI5: Why do we get a "lump" in the throat when we get really emotional? ]( URL_3 ) 1. [ELI5: Why do we feel a lump in our throat when we hear upsetting news? ]( URL_7 ) 1. [ELI5: When you hold back tears, why does your throat hurt? ]( URL_1 ) 1. [ELI5: Why Do We Get a Lump in Our Throats Before We Cry? ]( URL_4 ) 1. [ELI5: Why do I get a lump in my throat when I'm about to cry? ]( URL_5 ) 1. [ELI5: What is the lump in your throat feeling you get when you are sad or mad? ]( URL_0 ) 1. [ELI5: Why do our throats choke up when we feel sad or emotional about something? ]( URL_6 ) 1. [What actually happens when you get a lump in your throat? ]( URL_8 ) 1. [ELI5: Lump in your throat ]( URL_2 ) | 2 |
kxa4uj | Technology | How does Google know the difference between me riding my motorbike and driving my car? Just got my 2020 Google timeline email and it tells me how many miles I've done on my motorbike and how many I've done in my car. How does Google know this? I can understand how it knows the difference between walking, cycling, driving ect but a motorbike and a car? How? | It uses it's best guess based on unique factors between the two. When you're in a car, you're unlikely to be leaning left and right so your phone stays relatively stable whether in your pocket, in a mounting device, etc. If you're on a motorcycle you're going to be leaning at least a little, and depending on where in the world you are you might be lane splitting (can't do that in a car) and might generally move faster than other traffic (because you can weave and switch lanes more easily). I'd imagine it isn't 100% accurate, and might show some weird things if you compare it to actual data, but it's close enough to *look* like it always knows when you're on a bike vs in a car. | 2 |
gw4gyv | Physics | Can't we create artificial gravity in the ISS to prevent bones and muscles problems? | True artificial gravity is still only in science fiction. We don't fully understand what carries the force of gravity across space, and have no idea how to generate that force artificially. The closest thing we can approximate is centrifugal force on the inside wall of a spinning hollow ring (see 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Martian for a perfect example). Anyone in contact with the centrifugal ring will experience a force similar to gravity but not quite the same. However, it's difficult to build and maintain even a stationary object in space, let alone a giant spinning ring with life support, thus far large scale implementation has not been feasible. | 4 |
ljmoby | Biology | Why can bones heal but teeth can not? | Teeth hardly have any cells unlike other bones in the body that do so cannot heal themselves. | 5 |
5q3mrc | Economics | If the petroleum industry receives over $4 billion in annual government subsidies (on average), why is there a tax on fossil fuels? Wouldn't these cash flows 'cancel out?' ELI5: If the petroleum industry receives over $4 billion in annual government subsidies (on average), why is there a tax on petroleum? Wouldn't these cash flows 'cancel out?' To my understanding, the subsidies decrease the cost of petroleum products, and taxes increase the cost. What's the point? Is this a vicious circle? | Anti capitalists are doing a good job of fooling you. They don't tax you AS MUCH as they could have so they act like they're giving you something. So they raise your taxes by $100 then give you a $20 deduction and claim that you got $20 in government subsidies. Same with budget cuts. Some govt agency or union will ask for a wage increase of 12%. They'll actually get an 8% raise and then cry about having their wages cut by 4%. | 14 |
7xtfqc | Other | What are the grammatical differences between parentheses "( )", square brackets "[ ]", and squiggly brackets "{ }"? When should one override the use of another? | Square brackets are used as /u/Ebola_Burrito (man I'm hungry!) described, and also in translated works to show the original word in the context of the translation. Wiki's example is "He is trained in the way of the open hand [karate]." I assume you know what parentheses are for. Curly brackets don't have a standard use in formal writing, but is used heavily in mathematics, computer programming, and you may see it occasionally used much like parentheses in writing that's already heavy in parentheses, to clear up ambiguity. | 5 |
kl6wf5 | Technology | If the internet is primarily dependent on cables that run through oceans connecting different countries and continents. During a war, anyone can cut off a country's access to the internet. Are there any backup or mitigant in place to avoid this? What happens if you cut the cable? | In modern times, there are backups to the intercontinental cabling, with satellite based internet able to serve when the cables get cut off, plus there are more than just the one set of cables connecting everything. Even without those cables or a backup, the internet would work just fine, you just wouldn't be able to access other countries' networks. It would splinter the internet into fragments, with China's Internet unable to connect to America's Internet, which in turn would be unable to connect to Europe. But Microsoft could build a server farm in America and allow people to play their XBOX just fine. As for why they use these cables instead of satellites normally, it's because the distances are greatly increased beaming the signal up into space to be bounced around the planet, and latency would be increased to an intolerable level, so satellite internet is currently limited in scope for remote areas, where sending cables and fiber optics are not feasible. | 16 |
6qscx4 | Repost | Why is counting cards in Blackjack so heavily frowned against or punished if all you're using is your mind. Are you not allowed to calculate with your brain when playing a game? | It's not illegal to count cards, however casinos reserve the right to refuse admittance to anyone they choose. If they suspect you of counting cards, first they'll wait and see how good you are at it despite distractions, free liquor, interruptions, etc, because counting cards incorrectly (losing count) actually makes someone lose faster than an average player. They love players who have a system but keep making mistakes. Those are favorites. But if the player persists and does well, then the casino will happily pay out their winnings and tell them never to come back again, because they've demonstrated that they'll cost the casino money again the next time. No charges laid in either direction, because both parties are doing things (mentally counting cards, adding someone to the blacklist) that are perfectly legal and within their rights. | 3 |
ft0ln9 | Biology | Why eating salty food makes you retain liquids, but drinking ocean water would kill you from dehydration? | 1 cup has almost 9 grams of salt. a salt packet from standard fast food places is around .75 grams so around 10 salt packets into 1 cup of water is how salty it is. sea water is almost deceptively salty but it's not even thirst quenching. | 6 |
h03trb | Biology | Would it be healthier for me to go to bed whenever I'm sleepy instead of going to bed because I have work tomorrow? | I had this discussion with a PhD around "sleep science" as I'm a night owl type. Ultimately the result of the discussion was that living by your natural sleep cycle is best for your health. Forcing people into bad cycles (such as rotating shift schedule) reduces lifespan due to negative impacts on health. Being a night owl and fighting it your whole life to wake with the early birds may also likely have negative impacts to lifespan as well, though it's not clearly understood how significantly though. At least this is what I recall from the conversation. Your sleep preferences are a genetic thing at the end of the day, and you can't easily switch between, but you can adapt with only mild effects. I say this as I'm struggling to sleep at 3am, being the night owl type. Need to work tomorrow, at 8am!!! | 10 |
f0lsuf | Biology | If the ears, nose and throat are connected, why don’t filter masks need to cover the ears too? | Your ear drum (tympanic membrane) covers your ears. The eustacian tube in your throat connects to the area behind the ear drum. | 1 |
he9iuj | Physics | Can humans have their own orbit? | In theory, yes, since everything needed are 2 objects with mass and some relative tangential velocity. But in practise, not really. 1) in the presence of a much larger object (which you're both orbiting, e.g. the Earth), orbits tend to degrade since the gravitational field on one side of the orbit is stronger (because closer to the large body) than on the other, so it slowly pulls the object away. Good video about that effect: URL_0 2) a human is very non-spherical, so you can't just assume all the mass is at a center point like you can with round planets/stars. So most likely an orbiting object would smash into you because some parts sticks out into its orbit. | 3 |
frxszw | Biology | Why is it so hard and uncommon for a disease to jump from an animal to a human, but once it does it can be highly contagious? Whenever a new disease comes from an animal it seems to be highly contagious. How can such a disease be so common in animals for so long without spreading to humans? | While science can't really answer questions about why (it can only explain what and how), there is a lot of research regarding how hosts and pathogens interact. From a purely practical standpoint, it doesn't make sense for a disease to want to kill its host. Viruses in particular aren't really even functional unless they have a host, whereas many bacteria and yeasts can live in the environment. So viruses seem to have two main strategies for "survival." They can evolve to be very contagious, so that even if they kill their host or the host's immune system successfully wards them off, they are likely to find other hosts to continue replicating. OR, they can evolve to co-exist with their host and cause as little damage as possible. Herpes is a perfect example of a family of viruses that are excellent at causing infection and then hiding out in the body, coming out every so often as genital sores, cold sores, or shingles, depending on the strain of herpes virus so that they might have a shot at infecting a new host. If a virus is *too* lethal, it runs the risk of blowing through the entire population and risking its own extinction, so it's really to a virus' advantage to be more contagious than deadly. Novel viruses that haven't had sufficient time to learn how to "tone it down," are likely to be more lethal at first, but once they've killed off the vulnerable population, natural selection will favor viruses that are better adapted to infecting a host but not killing it. | 2 |
6ih9oq | Engineering | why do cars always have those special car outlets? Those little circular 12volt cigarette ports, why do cars always have those instead of just switching over to regular wall outlets? | Think of the "plug" as a way that two devices state their expectations. The shape of an outlet is saying "hey I supply power in this way". Plugs that fit that outlet shape are saying "okay, I'm designed to work with that". That way, it prevents you from plugging things into outlets and having potentially disastrous results! A wall outlet is shaped in a certain way that's associated with AC power of a certain voltage and amperage that is common for houses powered by your electrical grid. Cars are powered by an engine doing other stuff and a 12V battery and traditionally have only had to power low voltage, tiny electronics, so they have been designed to supply a different power profile. While cars *can* be made to have regular wall outlets (and some do) it's costly and complicated for minimal gains. They also increasingly have powered USB ports. As for why the port is the shape it is, that seems to date about to cigarette lighters. They were in basically all cars and needed power anyways, so their functionality duplicated as a power plug. Then as lighters became less common, that part was removed and now they're just power ports. | 3 |
jfbkb2 | Biology | Why do humans feel the “high” from a drug inhaled on the exhale? For example: weed, nicotine, nitrous. I believe this is a pretty universal experience. For example, if one takes a hit of marijuana they typically will not feel the onset of the high until the exhale. AFAIK, drugs inhaled are absorbed [through the lungs and absorbed into the bloodstream]( URL_0 ). Why does the high only onset only after the exhale? | It's just coincidence. It takes about 60 seconds for blood to make a full trip around our body, so it's going to take probably 10 to 15 seconds for the drug to go from our lungs to our brain. | 1 |
o1sz6h | Biology | How do our eyes "get used to the dark"? | Your pupil dilates, meaning it enlarges and allows more light to enter. It can take a few minutes, but once more light is allowed to enter, you're able to see more. If you shine a bright light on someone's eye, you'll see the pupil quickly shrink. Fun fact, pirates wore an eye patch because it meant when they went from the bright deck to the dark inside, they would have one eye already adjusted to the dark so they wouldn't be blind for a few minutes while their eyes adjust. Edit: I am not entirely correct. a)The pirate thing appears to be based on zero evidence. Apologies for propagating a myth. b) pupil dilation is a seconds long process, and only part of the story when it comes to night vision. | 4 |
i24kxf | Technology | Why are video games region-locked? What's the difference between NTSC and PAL? Are PC games region-locked? If I move to another country (region), will my PC games be affected in any way? I hope I'm using the right flair. Edit: thank you, everyone!! I think I got the necessary information to begin and dig deeper into this rabbit hole. Thank you kindly!! | On Steam PC games are region-locked in an interesting way. If you are from Russia/CIS, you cannot buy games from other countries (by changing your location) and vice versa. Steam actively bans users who try to use VPN to region hop. That's because prices in Russia are typically lower than in, say, US. When Russian currency (rouble) plummeted back in 2015, all prices, which are connected to dollars (video games too), suddenly rose. To counter that, and to allow large Russian gamer community to keep playing, Steam somehow managed to lower the prices somewhat. And Steam doesn't like to make lesser profits either. For example, if I buy a game (I live in Russia), I can't gift it to my friend from the US. Some games explicitly state, that they cannot be played in certain regions, but that's mostly because of censorship. Of course, you can change your location on Steam, once per 14 days, provided, that you didn't make any purchases in several days. | 3 |
6xu07q | Technology | Why do we instinctively seem to hit machines / devices that aren't functioning properly? Where did this come from? | As far as describing the emotional aspect of it: In behaviorism, this is known as an extinction burst, and is a side-effect of extinction, or not receiving reinforcement from behavior that had previously been reinforced. e.g. Pushing a button used to produce results, suddenly it doesn't. So you push it more, getting increasingly angry. It is behavior that generalizes across items/machines as well as settings. | 19 |
bj4bga | Other | Why do you never see pens with brown ink? It seems like such a common color in nature | The UniBall Vision Elite used to have a really great brown, it's my favorite ink color. I can't seem to find it by itself though, which is a bummer. | 16 |
bj99ba | Other | Why is lumber sold based the size it was before it went into the planer? | Because "two by four" is easier to say than "one and a half by three and a half". Long ago, the wood was just raw cut from the sawmill and whanged together into a house. But raw wet wood has bugs and moisture. As it dries it warps. Consumers don't like warped houses or bugs, so to satisfy demand they started pressing, straightening and drying the wood before hand. But they never changed the size or jigs of the saws that cut the wood out of the log, which is always wet. Carpenters, happy to not have to deal with warped buggy wood simply adjusted to the fact that a 2x4 was really 1.5x3.5, and made the corresponding adjustments when they were drawing out their framing etc.** Any carpenter or framer who is any good knows the true dimensions of a board and can deal with it probably without even thinking about it. Us weekend warriors though have to be careful to do real world lumber math. Having said that you can get true size treated lumber (a 2x4 that is actually 2x4) but it will cost you a fortune. **and this adjustment happened so long ago and just became "standard" accepted practise that noone ever bothered to go back and change it. | 6 |
in9htg | Technology | Why do people make their axes razor sharp? Doesn't that make the tip thinner and more prone to chips and damage? | Splitting cut lengths with the grain rarely requires sharpness, a sharp axe will sink into the wood, and may be difficult to remove for the next strike. Cross-cuts, like when cutting down a tree, or limbing it after it's down, a sharp axe is MUCH better. A cross-cut with an axe is a V-shaped notch, where the axe slices across the grain obliquely in one direction, then the axe is used on the other side of the V to cut the grain on the other end, releasing a chunk of wood. Repeat until there is less wood than is necessary to hold the tree together. Speaking crossly to the tree may help separate it from it's other half, but will result in hard feelings on both sides and is best avoided for most deciduous flora, therefore a gentle persuading tap with the axe in just the right place is the most effective solution employed by the best lumberjacks. | 5 |
9quc8c | Biology | When giving mouth-to-mouth, how does the other person receive oxygen instead of CO2? | You don't use even *most* of the oxygen in the air you inhale. There is more than enough to sustain a person who is already unconscious. This is especially true when you take a deep breath and immediately breath it out into them. Regardless, even a reduced amount of oxygen is better than the zero amount they're getting from the stale air in their lungs that aren't moving. | 13 |
dtftsn | Other | Why is Saturn's "sound" so eerie? | These obviously aren't sounds. What the EM waves "sound like" after being converted to sound depends **entirely** on the algorithms used to convert them. Were the same algorithms used for **all** the planets? Or are the differences in sound mostly or entirely due to different encoding methods? | 7 |