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How whiskers help maintain a cat's balance.
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You may have confused the purpose of whiskers and the tail. A cat's tail helps with balance because they can move it to shift their weight, just like a person will move their arms side to side to keep from falling off a balance beam. Cats have all their paws on the ground, though, so their tails remain mobile to do this.
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Because dogs and cats need super quick reflexes when their prey is inches from their mouth. the whiskers great sense of touch lets them know exactly when to chomp down.
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I've heard that Tian men square massacre didn't happen, what is meant by this?
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You would have to ask whoever said that to you, otherwise it's hard to know what they meant by it. It wouldn't surprise me if there were PRC apologists who deny/minimize it, although I don't think I've heard anyone do that.
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The Chinese government wants to imply a extradition law between HK-China, so they can extradite people from HK to China for trial and sentencing. The problem is that the law in China is basically a joke; for example an artist has just been jailed for 10 years just for writing a BL (male homosexual) novel. If the law passes, China can basically just make up any excuse and kidnap people from HK, be them Hong Kongers or foreigners. Many suspect China is rushing to pass this law so they can kidnap the rich and "confiscate" their property, allowed under the communist Chinese law. The political parties, especially the activists are especially against it, as China literally has a "National Security" laws allowing it to jail before who are against the government. There isn't such a law in HK yet. It is not looking good in the legislation council either, as since several pan-democrats have been dis-qualified, there are now far more pro-China seats than democrats. Once it is passed, goodbye to all freedom.
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Why must I boil my water before cooking anything? Can't I just dump my dumplings into the cold water and just start from there?
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No you absolutely cannot because of the dumplings gradually reach the temperature of the water and that will be all soft and mushy and you will not be able to enjoy the food as you creators had expected you to do it so just follow the damn instructions and pour the dumplings in boiling water dammit
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Regardless of efficiency, it is safer to take cold water and boil it. Hot water allows for more things to be dissolved in it, and depending on your pipes, you could be increasing intake of unwanted substances.
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Is it possible to kill a star by introducing enough foreign iron to it?
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Interesting question! For a low mass star, this will only lead to the star imploding once you reach 3 solar masses. Now, where will you get > 2 solar masses of iron? For a high mass main sequence star, it will be difficult to add iron given the star will simply blow it away by powerful stellar winds. Say you can magically expel it into the photosphere of said star, we still don't know how long the iron will sink into the core to produce your expected supernova event. For an even higher mass evolved star, they will simply expel it violently through an episodic mass loss like that of a supernova impostor event due to a more violent spin like exceeding 450km/sec.
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The ball of gas that makes up your star would quickly disperse without performing any fusion at all, as there wouldn't be enough mass to form a gravitationally bound object, and definitely not enough mass to reach the required temperature and pressure for fusion to occur.
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Why is it that upgrading a phone or a computer to a newer operating system typically results in the device performing worse or slower?
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Because phone companies use planned-obsolescence to slow down older devices artificially in order to push newer devices. OR Because newer software is more taxing on the hardware than older versions was. Both of these have some truth in them, I recall several instances where it was claimed that around the release of newer generation hardware, many smartphone manufacturers utilise the first method, while the second option is almost a passive process as apps become larger and more complicated. Edit: I should note that the intentional sabotaging of older generation devices is often referred to as a conspiracy theory, with little corroborating evidence. It is likely that poor optimisation and growing complexity of apps and growing reliance on constant connectivity is the main driving force behind the increased strain on your hardware.
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Because each new update uses more and more power that your phone does not have. They do this A: to advance technology and compete with other companies and B: to make you feel like your phone is slow so you go buy another
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Why is it okay for us to eat raw eggs but not raw chicken?
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It is not okay to eat raw eggs in every part of the world. Some places have the same salmonella problems with eggs as they do with chicken. It is not universally safe to eat raw eggs in the US.
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An egg is chemically different from chicken breast. The muscle that you eat has processed proteins into structures that we eat. The egg is the raw ingredients. It's like how eating a load of yeast is bad but you can happily eat bread. It becomes processed into very different things. These are the base blocks of the whole chicken and I imagine the immune system freaks out at some of these like those in nuts people react to.
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If an object was 100% transparent, would it be possible to cut it with a laser?
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One thing to keep in mind is that something like glass is only transparent to a narrow band of wavelengths. Glass, for instance, is really good at blocking UV light (normally we think of this as a good thing, why we don't get burnt while driving in a car in the bright sun). So, the material would have to be transparent to the wavelength of the laser. If it were transparent to the wavelength of the laser, then no- the laser would not cut it. Of course, in reality, nothing is 100% transparent to any wavelength. So, with a powerful enough laser you'd be able to cut the material even if you thought the material was transparent to that wavelength.
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No because you would need an absolute perfect device. 100% Reflective and no medium in the middle that absorbs the laser beam. Since there will always be something mucking it up you'll never get it to stick around forever.
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How do people who throw knives and axes really well always manage to hit the target with the sharp bit instead of the handle of the thrown object?
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I know the answer to this! Because last year one of my bestest friends bought me axe throwing lessons for my birthday. You practice until your throw is consistent, and you adjust the distance from the target to match the way you throw. It takes a great deal more work to learn to adjust your throw for a little more or less rotation.
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A lot of primates are good at this, and infamously so in the case of feces-flinging monkeys. It probably relates to adaptations for living in trees, and could easily be an accidental byproduct of those. We have grasping limbs, binocular vision, etc, which are very useful for judging distances and throwing. In the case of humans, there are also obvious benefits in terms of hunting, defence, and so forth, so there are quite possibly specific adaptations related to this skill in addition to what we've inherited from our private ancestors.
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What does the newly announced Reddit changes mean and why is The_donald freaking out?
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It's because they're changing the way /r/all is setup so their shitposting circlejerking propaganda will be a lot less visible.
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Most likely they are replacing/upgrading something. They could be replacing the server (or part of the server) that hold the website's data. They could be replacing the software that runs the site. According to their [announcement](_URL_0_), they performed maintenance on the [memcache infrastructure](_URL_1_), which is a component in the site's backend.
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I know this is ELI5, but can people stop moaning about answers having high-school vocabulary words and just use their head a bit?
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I don't think people are moaning because someone used an SAT word, but rather because people are trying to explain things the same way they would if they were in (e.g.) /r/askscience. Many people are asking for help here because they're out of their depth in the field in question (economics, science, philosophy, whatever) and need a special sort of answer that assumes they know nothing. If I asked a question here about economics, I wouldn't be bothered if someone used the word "monetary," but I would be bothered if someone talked about "quantitative easing" and paused only briefly to define it.
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These are things that get done back in like elementary school. They're also frankly not that important. Being a good writer is about more than memorizing what arbitrary category words fall into.
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What about water extinguishes fire?
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1) Water has a high specific heat; it can absorb plenty of energy from the fire, quenching that part of the fire triangle. 2) Water turns to vapor at high heat, producing steam; this displaces oxygen, which quenches a second leg of the fire triangle- an oxidizer is needed to burn fuels. 3) Enough water, applied correctly, can physically separate the fuels from the oxidizer, which constitutes the third leg of the fire triangle. Water does not interfere with the fourth requirement for fire- the self-sustaining chemical reaction. Halon extinguishers do this. For the purposes of firefighting, the "fire triangle" has become the "fire tetrahedron," with its four sides: heat, oxidizer, fuel, and chemical chain reactions.
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If you're having a difficult time wrapping your head around u/cdb03b or u/WRSaunders answers, try thinking about it more abstractly. We use water to "kill" fire. If a building catches on fire, we call the firemen. The fireman puts out the fire with water. The fireman/water does not also repair the damage already caused by the fire, it just kills the fire. The roof caved in and all the contents are utterly destroyed by the fire, but at least the fire is gone now.
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What causes large objects like planes to seem like they’re going slower than they actually are?
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In general we know that things close to us move faster than objects far away. We use this as a visual clue to determine distance. This is known as motion parallax. Imagine sitting in a car and looking at distant hills. A line of fence posts near the road has the fence posts quickly snapping by. A line of fence posts far from the road do not snap by so quickly. The farther from the road the posts are the slower they appear to go by even though they go by at the same rate. With the plane, the plane is in motion and you are stationary.
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Its because perception of time and speed are relative. Yes, you may be going extremely fast, but compared to the items around you (the seats, the floor, the ceiling) you are only going a few MPH faster. Since this is your entire frame of reference, you feel that you are going a speed relative to theirs.
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Why is it that when people in very prestigious positions lose their jobs, they have to tender a resignation, but in everyday jobs, you just get fired?
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Most jobs in the USA are at-will; this means that either side can terminate the relationship at any time. You can quit whenever, and you can be fired whenever, for nearly any reason or no reason. Most upper management positions, however, are on contract. This means that the employee and the company sign an agreement that the person can only be fired for certain reasons. If there's disagreement over those reasons, a firing might lead to a lawsuit. So instead, the organization and the employee negotiate an end to the contract. If they agree, the employee resigns and agrees not to sue for termination of the contract.
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They are given paid leave because they are simply under investigation. They may have done nothing wrong. Itd be bad to just take a week or more of someones pay if they did nothing wrong. What do you mean other occupations have nothing similar? I cant think of a situation thats similar that could arise in another occupation.
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Why is the concept of single-payer or socialized healthcare controversial when we have similar concepts with Fire Departments and Police Departments?
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It's little more than a quirk of history. Americans think public fire and police departments are normal because they're used to them. Meanwhile, they think public healthcare is "socialist" because they're not used to it (and because of the Red Scare...) Meanwhile, in Britain, public healthcare is considered essential because we've had it for 65 years...
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Not to nit-pick but when you say socialized medicine, is the NHS your idea of that? I don't think the Canadian, German, Swiss system etc. would be considered "socialized medicine." I'm no expert but there seems to be a lot of nuance in health care policy with differences between the NHS-style system, single-payer, the swiss mandate system etc.
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What is that clicking sound that nuclear radiation detectors make?
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The noise is because of how [Geiger Counters](_URL_0_) function. The Geiger counter has a chamber filled with an inert gas, like helium, and a high voltage applied to it. If high energy radiation hits the helium gas, it gives enough energy to the Helium atoms to bump electrons off their orbitals, so the atoms become non-inert (electrically charged), and thus react to the high voltage, and there's a small discharge of the electricity. This discharge sounds like a "pop" if you hook it up to a speaker, because it's like a mini-lightning (thunder).
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I'm not sure exactly which "clickity clacks" you are referring to, but it is most likely metal that was hot from the engine running, but is now cooling down and contracting. As metal contracts (or expands) it can make noises -- similar to the "clacking" that an electric baseboard radiator in your home will make when it is turned on and just starting to warm up (or cool down).
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Hadoop and how it fits in with Amazon EC2, S3, and Amazon Map Reduce
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MapReduce is a technique for handling large amounts of data. You get a bunch of computers (usually virtual- in the case of Amazon Elastic Map Reduce, you're using EC2 machines) and send part of the data to each of the machines. MapReduce gets its name from two important functions used in functional programming: map, which takes a function and applies it to every item in the list, and reduce, which groups items in a list together based on some criteria. If you're not dealing with large amounts of data (and by large I mean it should be measured at least in gigabytes, if not terabytes or petabytes), it's probably not worth it to use map reduce because it has a lot of overhead moving stuff between machines- you'll be better off shoving the data into a database and using that.
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Map/Reduce is a method of processing large data first pioneered by Google. Hadoop is the major open source system that implements map/reduce. Map and reduce are two functions that are pretty familiar to anyone coming from a functional programming background. "Map" takes a list and a function and runs that function on every item in the list. "Reduce" groups the items together by some property and then runs a function over every item in the group (something like Sum() or Count() is common in a reducer).
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A child has 50% of their genetic make up from each parent, is the selection random or particular? Is half the traits that each parent possess lost?
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The selection of genes from each parent is more-or-less random - but that doesn't mean that I have half of my dad's traits and half of my mom's traits. A lot of our genes have several "alleles," or variants - these can sometimes be dominant or recessive to each other. A good example is my chin - my dad has a cleft chin (or a butt chin) like Superman, while my mom doesn't. The gene for a normal chin is dominant over the cleft chin gene - which means that I inherited both genes, cleft and no-cleft, and the no-cleft gene expresses itself anyways. So the traits that you earn aren't necessarily 50/50, but depend on what traits can be dominated by other traits. This is part of the reason why some kids look just like one parent and not much like the other - one parent's traits can be dominant over some of their partner's distinctive traits.
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You get around 50% of each parent's genes. Which genes you get from which parent is random. So a sibling probably won't get the same combination of genes you do. About half will be the same ones you got, and about half will be from the other parent.
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how are daily contact lenses made?
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Contact lenses are injection molded like any other plastic product. They are made from a highly detailable PDMS material.
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The old style contact lenses actually had a two stage process where you put the lenses into a strong cleanser overnight then rinsed them in a wash solution to get rid of it before putting them in your eyes. If you forgot part 2, for example because you'd just woken up, it was apparently an extremely painful mistake to make.
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Why is the flag of Switzerland square?
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The soldiers from all differnt cantons decided on unifing the crosses with a red background. In 1815, swiss batallions created flags with the white cross and the red background. As the sign on the clothings was square they took the square form to the flag. Honoring this, the swiss flag kept being square.
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hi! this question might be a job for flag-obsessed /r/vexillology, but several people in this sub have taken a crack at related questions - see these for previous responses * [Why is the rectangular flag the standard? When did it become so? Why is it only Switzerland and Nepal that break this trend?](_URL_3_) * [How did flags as we know them come to be?](_URL_2_) * [Why does every country have a flag? How did this tradition start?](_URL_0_) * [When were flags first used as a way to identify different regions and cultures?](_URL_1_)
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Do expensive sunglasses like Oakleys actually provide better protection from the sun compared to dollar store glasses?
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The answers here are all over the place. Yes, you are paying for name/marketing, but you are also paying for correctly oriented polarized lenses. There is also UV protection, but you can find that on cheap pairs too. What makes Oakleys preferable is that the polarized lenses (which reduce glare) are oriented in the same direction. If they are not oriented the same direction, your brain will have difficulty correcting the slight distortions, which will eventually make it uncomfortable to wear them.
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Luxottica owns over 80% of the eyewear market. They own Lenscrafters, Sunglass Hut, Pearle Vision, Sears Optical, Target Optical, Eyemed vision care plan, and _URL_0_ As far as sunglasses, they own Ray-Ban, Persol, and Oakley. They make frames for most designer brands like Chanel, Prada, Giorgio Armani, Burberry, Versace, Dolce and Gabbana, Miu Miu, Donna Karan, Stella McCartney and many others. With over 80% marketshare, its damn near a monopoly on the eyewear market. Owning that much allows them to set the price curve.
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If the world slowed or stopped spinning, would gravity be affected?
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Your weight would change but gravity wouldn't. As it rotates, you're slightly lighter due to centrifugal forces. This is known as the [Eotvos effect](_URL_0_) and means you weight slightly less at the equator than at the poles. If the rotation stops, you would only feel the gravity of the Earth.
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Technically, there should be a difference in gravity at any given point on earth since they are all at different distances from the center of earth. There is also a phenomenon we're the needle of a compass will supposedly spin around in circles. I have yet to test this personally so I cannot be certain.
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Can cats tell the difference between dry cat food and cat treats?
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I would say so. I always leave the cat food box near his bowl. He has never attacked the box to get at the food. He has on occasion pried my desk draw open to gain access to treats, and the proceeded to destory the packaging and eat treats until he vomited.
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ELI5 : Cats have really poor vision for details, everything they look at is fuzzy and doesn't have as many colours as we have. Their eyes are however good at tracking motion (think T-Rex from the first Jurassic Park), which is why they can chase things so well. So when things are just being lazy & relaxed, a cat can survey its territory using it's awesome nose to find out if anything has been nearby recently, if there are any little mice to eat or if another cat has been trespassing on it's territory. They also have awesome hearing which you will notice every time you try to open a can of tuna.
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Why can't we put some sort of filter over the exhaust of a car to reduce harmful emissions?
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We do, it's called a catalytic converter. It catalyzes the harmful products in the exhaust and breaks them down into far less harmful ones.
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From what I have read (I have a 2013 Golf TDI), VW knowingly added in a defeat device to their diesel vehicles to turn on the clean filtering system for the exhaust when monitoring equipment was hooked up to the cars. When the testing equipment is not hooked up, the cars give off emissions that are WAY above the legal limit. Some initial estimates are that the emissions are 10-40x the legal limits when the filters aren't running. The reason they did this, from what I understand, is that the cars are actually FAR less efficient when they are filtering properly, making their EPA fuel economy estimates completely bogus and giving people no reason to purchase a diesel vehicle in the first place. I bought mine because it was supposedly a super low emissions vehicle that had great fuel economy (42 hwy, 33 city IRL). Turns out this was a big lie and now I'm stuck with a car that no one will want and will no longer have good fuel economy once I get this issue fixed. Sucks.
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Why can't we put some sort of filter over the exhaust of a car to reduce harmful emissions?
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We already kind of do that with the catalytic converters. They are like sponges through which exhaust gas have to pass. The metal sponge is coated with catalysts like platinum that helps break down harmful combustion products like NOx, CO and unburned fuel. They are typically broken down into oxygen, water and CO2 which are a lot less toxic.
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From what I have read (I have a 2013 Golf TDI), VW knowingly added in a defeat device to their diesel vehicles to turn on the clean filtering system for the exhaust when monitoring equipment was hooked up to the cars. When the testing equipment is not hooked up, the cars give off emissions that are WAY above the legal limit. Some initial estimates are that the emissions are 10-40x the legal limits when the filters aren't running. The reason they did this, from what I understand, is that the cars are actually FAR less efficient when they are filtering properly, making their EPA fuel economy estimates completely bogus and giving people no reason to purchase a diesel vehicle in the first place. I bought mine because it was supposedly a super low emissions vehicle that had great fuel economy (42 hwy, 33 city IRL). Turns out this was a big lie and now I'm stuck with a car that no one will want and will no longer have good fuel economy once I get this issue fixed. Sucks.
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When looking through a scope or binoculars, why does it "see through" objects that are in front of it? Such as an iron sight or finger.
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It has to do with how optics (scopes, binoculars, ect.) bring in light. The lenses bend light different amounts based on the angle that the light hits the glass. Lenses are specifically designed so that, at a certain distance, any light from a particular point will end up in the same place, even if it contacts different parts of the front of the lense. This means that even though your iron-sight is between your eye and an object, the light that reflects off that object and passes left, right, and above the irons to hit the front of the lense will get bent by the lenses in the scope back into the proper place for your eye. Explaining would be easier if I had an illustration, but that's the gist of it. Oh, and this is the same reason that chain link fence seems to disappear when a movie camera changes focus. The lense is changing the distance at which all the source light ends up in the same place.
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Because your eyes aren't in exactly the same place as one another. They're a few inches apart..You are literally seeing the object from two different angles. Your brain combines the images into one when you have both eyes open so you don't really notice.
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When ignited what temperature does gunpowder reach?
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It depends on the conditions. Gunpowder works by turning a solid into gas and releasing energy in the process. Since the temperature is high, these gasses may be modeled by the familiar Ideal Gas Law, which is given by PV = nRT Where P is pressure, V is the volume the gas takes up, n is the number of moles of gas (essentially an amount of gas), R is the Ideal Gas Constant, and T is temperature. If we solve for temperature, we get T = PV/nR This means that the temperature is completely dependent on the pressure and volume inside the container.
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The ignition temperature of most materials is above the boiling point of water. Since water doesn't change temperature while boiling, you have to drive off most of the water before you can reach a temperature where fire will start.
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Why Do Beef, Pork and Chicken Taste Different?
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Here is an article explaining exactly why - _URL_0_ Essentially, each meat has a different amount and different type of protein, fat and sugar in it. When it is cooked, the protein, fats and sugars react with eachother through the Maillard Reaction to produce different chemicals such as furfurals, furans, pyrroles, etc.. These chemicals are mostly responsible for the taste and smell. Pork is very high in sulfur and nitrogen content- this reacts with some sugars to produce the characteristic bacon smell and taste. Chicken is low in sulfur content and has a type of sugar that makes it taste like chicken - frog legs also have these sugars, hence the similarity. This is a simplified explanation - there are very in depth studies of the exact chemical differences in scholar. There is also a huge food science industry which studies this - it is called headspace chemistry.
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There are a few of different reasons. One is the fat content, the second is how the meat is prepared, another is the location on the animal that the meat comes from. You can even taste that last factor with other meats, like chicken. Compare the taste of a chicken breast (white meat) to a chicken thigh (dark meat). Even if they are prepared the same way, they will taste different because of the basic differences in the meat.
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How can we differentiate sounds that are quiet but close, and loud but far away.
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All sounds are detected by both ears no matter what direction they come from. Your brain can tell by the order different frequencies arrive and by their strength whether the sound made it to your inner ear by entering the ear canal or if some of it passed through your head to get to the ear canal on the other side. Your brain has a pretty complex map of how your skull changes thing so it can fairly accurately determine the location of a sound relative to both ears. Determining if it was quite and close or loud and far is just a trigonometry problem at that point. If your left ear heard it from straight ahead but your right ear head it from slightly to the left then its pretty close and slightly left of your center line. If both ears hear it as being slightly to the left then you've got almost parallel lines tracing the route so it must have been far away but loud.
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We do get a bit of 'parallax ranging' through having two separate ears. Also, sound tends to attenuate at a frequency dependent rate, with low frequencies carrying further, so experience with a particular sound can suggest it's distance.
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If everyone uses Wikipedia, but everyone says it is unreliable, why doesn't Wikipedia stop third party edits and edit themselves?
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The entire idea of Wikipedia is that it's a world wide, public collaboration. You might as well ask why Reddit doesn't stop letting people post links and just hire a team of professionals to post stuff instead.
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1. They have bots which automatically clean out spam and vandalsim. 2. New users can't add external links 3. The people who want to improve wikipedia are far more dedicated and have much better tools than spammers who want to screw it up.
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Historically, were allergic reactions to food understood, or was it considered to be poisoned food? Were any famous "assassinations" now thought to be death from anaphylaxis?
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I want to add a related question to this very interesting topic; did anyone ever perform an assassination, successful or not, by way of exploiting allergies?
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The wording of your question makes it almost impossible to answer in any meaningful way, at least from my reading of it, for one pretty big reason: if you're stipulating the time period as being pre-discovery/understanding of allergies and allergic reactions, the historical sources would, by definition, have been just as ignorant in the matter as the king and his attendants. The best we can hope to do is speculate based on the accounting of the manner of death, but that's hardly going to provide any concrete answers.
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Why is Saudi Arabia an ally of the USA?
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Saudi Arabia has oil and wants money. USA has money and wants oil. It's pretty much as simple as that.
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1 - Oil; 2 - "The enemy of my enemy is my friend", and Iran and Saudi Arabia hate each other; 3 - Saudi Arabia has long coastlines on both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, which are very important shipping routes; 4 - Keeping them as allies somewhat prevents them from acting like enemies. They must listen to what the US says and, in broad terms, do it (although they still have a lot of independence to do stuff that's sometimes opposed to US interests.
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How did the world's first spoken language came into existence?
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Language was likely developed when people used certain sounds to alert one another of specific things. Overtime these were taught as essential for fast communication. I doubt language started out with complex sounds like in today's modern languages, however they likely started as small and quick sounds. Of course, as they developed, they got more and more complex.
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People weren't "brainless." They were basically as smart as average humans now - they just weren't at all educated. Communication, including vocal communication, also existed before people made up language. Animals growl at each other, howl at the moon, whimper when in trouble, and have various mating calls. We just made a much, much sophisticated version of that. We'll never know exactly how language developed because we can't time travel and for obvious reasons history wasn't being written down and recorded at the time. However, it was likely a slow process where people pointed at objects and made the same sound repeatedly until a sound stuck. Repeat a few million times over several generations and you have yourself a language.
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Why do plants etiolate with lack of sunlight?
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most plants also have some extra energy stored up somewhere so they can do that, even if they don’t have sunlight at the moment.
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Plants that bend towards the light do so because of a hormone called auxin. Auxin goes to the shaded parts of the plant and causes the cells there to elongate, making the plant face the sun. This is called positive phototropism. There are lot's of other things that go into it, but that's the basics. GCSE Biology is useful after all. :)
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How do probiotics work and why can taking them sometimes cause extreme abdominal discomfort?
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Probiotics are colonies of good bacteria. Taking them is suppose to repopulate the gut with said bacteria, but if you get too much, if they have to fight with the existing bacteria and either die, or you are eating a diet that causes them to produce a lot of waste you will sometimes have discomfort.
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Probiotics and Antibiotics are different things. Probiotics are actual bacteria that are helpful and beneficial. Essentially they are symbiotic parasites in your stomach that assist in your daily operation and help you do things like break down foods and digest materials for your body to use. Antibiotics are drugs used to fight off bacterial infections. While this is happening in a good fashion if you're sick, the antibiotics do have a noticable affect on the probiotics in your system and do at times wipe out entire colonies of good stomach bacteria that keeps you functioning properly. This is why doctors will recommend taking probiotic yogurts or supplimenting your bacterial insides while on strong antibiotics, to avert a secondary infection elsewhere in your body.
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A good chunk of people are "vegetarian", but what would happen to the human body if we became carnivore?
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We'd have to start eating a wider variety of meat parts. Some vitamins are most easily found in plant matter. Like you can get a ton of vitamin C from an orange, so if you cut that out, you have to find an animal source. Liver is high in vitamin c, and also iron. Nowadays people mostly eat the muscles and fat of animals, but most of the vitamins and minerals are held in the organs and bones, which most people don't find very palatable. Also, some carnivores will eat the plant matter inside the prey's stomach, because it's already partially digested and therefore easier for them to process. So as we are now, we would eventually become low in certain vitamins and minerals, but we could mitigate that by expanding what parts of the animals we eat. Also I imagine we'd have very high cholesterol
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Lots of humans survive as vegetarians. Some such as the Maasai, traditionally lived as almost total carnivores. We don't have to have such a diet at all. We have options.
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- What is actually happening when you get water stuck in your ear?
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Water is pretty "sticky" on our skin. Have you been to a restroom only to find one of those air hand driers? Even if it tries to blow away the water, you end up wiping your hands on your pants anyways because the water is still stuck to your hands. The same thing happens in your ears. The water is stuck in your ear canal. Depending on where it's stuck it can get out easier or harder. If it's just in your canal, it's like a drop of water on the inside of a large straw. It can slide out with enough effort. If it's stuck directly on your eardrum, it'll muffle your hearing and it's harder to get out because the drop is attached to the sides and end of your ear canal.
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Water traps an air bubble in your ear. Air is less dense so it wants to rise in water. It can't at that angle. Then turn your head and the bubble escapes so water fills the void.
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How deep into the ocean will the impacts of a hurricane be felt?
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Three times the effective wave height. The magnitude of water movement underneath a wave tails of quite rapidly with depth. Once you are about three times the wave height (trough to crest) below the surface, the movement is barely noticeable. "Effective wave height" is the average height of the biggest third of all waves. Once you're three times deeper than that, the effects are negligible. Typical maximum wave heights in a hurricane are rarely exceed 15m, so once you're 50m deep, you're not going to get much effect. This also means that hurricanes cause remarkably little damage in the ocean. It's only when they get into waters less than about 15m deep that the devastation happens. As another puzzle, we have no idea how air-breathing marine life weathers a hurricane. How to dolphins survive? We simply din't know.
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Waves have a decaying effect and are essentially noise level at tens of meters depth. The rain changes the composition of the water and that diffuses through the area but even a meter of rain over a kilometer-deep ocean is going to be a negligible change for a short time. The change in bulk current and the flow of storm surge on littoral areas would be the biggest effects. When an entire bay gets sucked out to sea, that's 100%. Or when it gets pushed a km inland, or cuts through a barrier island, or creates one...
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How did Russian Oligarchs acquire their wealth?
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Privatization - during USSR most of the property belonged to the government. To transfer into market economy Russia needed to sell those factories, mines, power plants etc. to private companies. Since corruption was crazy it was easy for some of to-be-oligarchs either to bribe or to force people to sell their shares for cheap. Most of the respected billionaires you can see now were just crooks, bandits and fraudsters in the 90's. Even Khodorkovsky who is very loved by the West had to spill a lot of blood to accumulate the wealth. The period of 90's was very difficult for many Russians, some compare it to the 30's in US when mafia was omnipresent and invinsilble. Many of Russians were happy to see Putin take reign since he brough back "stability" - there was much less chance to get a soldering-iron showed down your arse. The crime didn't ended there, but at least some "rules" emerged. By the end of 00's most of the organized crime was crushed and went back underground.
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Because they are oligarchs. An oligarchy is a form of government where the power rests with a small number of people, generally wealthy people with strong political influence. Russia may put on a show of elections and such but they are really ruled by powerful businessmen which makes it an oligarchy.
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How well did Western Europe royalty know one another? (e.g. is it possible many royal children attended the same boarding schools?)
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There is a documentary that looks at the children of Christian IX of Denmark who is called the Father-In-Law of Europe. His children (and their spouses) are as follows: Frederick VIII of Denmark married Princess Louise of Sweden Alexandra married King Edward VII (great grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II) George married Olga Constantinovna of Russia and was King of Greece (and grandfather to Prince Phillip) Dagmar married Alexander Alexandrovich Romanov (Alexander III of Russia) Thyra married Ernest Augustus who was the exiled heir to the Kingdom of Hanover. Prince Valdemar married Princess Marie of Orléans. The families of many of the royal houses were intertwined and have been for centuries as royalty really only married royalty.
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Related question: would the rulers go to greater lengths to make sure at least the nobles knew their face precisely because otherwise there wouldn't be anything else identifying them?
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How does the photon of specific phase that causes stimulated emission in a laser device arise?
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The first photon doesn't have to have a specific phase. Whatever it has determines the phase of the laser. In terms of direction and polarization: If it is not aligned with the laser cavity (or has the wrong polarization, if that is relevant), this chain of photons dies down quickly and another "first photon" will start the laser. Note that actual lasers do not emit *perfect* laser light. You can still get all sorts of weird effects in between.
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First, the acronym that we commonly refer to as a laser, was originally L.A.S.E.R., which stands for Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation. There is a gain medium (could be a gas/solid etc) that is somehow excited (flash lamps, electric current, chemical reaction). This excitation puts the material into a state where it is more likely to undergo stimulated emission than absorption. This gain medium is in an optical cavity, so each "pass" that the photons go through the gain medium there are more and more photons, which are then eventually released through the laser. The reason the light in a laser is coherent, is that when a material undergoes stimulated emission, the photon that is released is identical to the incident photon in terms of phase, frequency, polarization, and direction of travel.
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Why did Hitler use the title führer instead of kaiser?
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Because he wasn't a monarch and his political system wasn't monarchical. That's like asking why Stalin didn't call himself Tsar. Politically, in his early days he also needed to rely on the support of conservative monarchists who saw him either as a pliable pawn or a lesser evil compared to the socialists, communists, and liberals. Their hope was to use the Nazis to maybe someday put a Hohenzollern back on the throne. If his ambition was to make himself the emperor, then he'd never get their support.
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This is a [popular question](_URL_0_). See: [What was 'the worst thing ever' before Hitler and the Holocaust? What example would Godwin have used, if he lived at different times in history?](_URL_2_) [Who was considered the most evil person in history before Hitler took the title?](_URL_3_) [Today, Hitler and the Nazis are widely considered and offered as the ultimate in evil. Who or what was the popular analog before Hitler arrived?](_URL_1_)
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[REQUEST] I'm a student working with motivating children about science and mathematics, do you have any fascinating videos about science that I can show my students? Hopefully a concept I can read myself up on and explain it in laymen terms.
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I'd recommend Periodic Videos on Youtube (chemistry) _URL_1_ Veritasium, also on Youtube (general science/physics) _URL_0_ Vsause on Youtube (science/philosophy/general coolness) _URL_4_ Smarter Every Day on Youtube (general science and great for younger students) _URL_2_ Seeing as you recently did a project on gyroscopic motion, you should really check this video out. It's pretty awesome. _URL_3_
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Keep in mind that young children are natural scientist, they are curious about the world around them and want to know how it works. Find out what the kids are interested and engage them, please don't teach at them. The worst thing that could happen is to crush this curiosity with memorization. If it is nature take them to a park and have them discover what animals and plant live by them. If it is space get them a telescope or do one of the scale models of the solar system. If it is chemistry start off with different physical (melting, freezing, magnets) and chemical (baking soda volcano) reactions. and remember that cooking is just chemistry with a yummy result at the end. Show them the basics of the scientific method (hypothesizing, experimenting, recording, and analyzing the results) and let them discover the hidden beauty of the world. Best of luck. edit: spelling
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why does coffee seem cold and pop (soda) seem warm when drank at room temperatures?
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Because how we usually think of them is hotter and colder respectively. You associate coffee with heat and soda with being cold.
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I can't speak to the soda part, but people drink almost as much iced coffee as they do hot coffee.
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Why exactly did they British choose to wear red and not like, blue or something?
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I don't understand this question. Are you asking about soldiers' uniforms, as in "the redcoats" in the American Revolution? Or about something else?
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The British started wearing the short jackets in the 1750s, as a response to fighting in North America in the 7 years war, as the longer jackets were more prone to snagging in the forests they often found themselves in. Light infantry fighting in loose order was heavily evolved during this period as well. The shako replaced the tricorne in the 1790s in the British Army largely because of changing styles but also the shako made a soldier look bigger and thus more intimidating to the foe and the visor protected the eyes from the sun. The bicorne was famously worn by Napoleon, who started something of a fashion for them, and military officers gradually took it on, starting from about 1800. They also had the advantage of the wearer being able to fold it under his arm when on not on his head. Source: Redcoat by Richard Holmes
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Why can we not find a "cure" for male pattern baldness?
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Mostly for some of the same reasons that we can't stop aging. We can slow it down, we can try to mask it but ultimately we can not stop it. It is a genetic condition rather than a disease so there isn't anything to 'kill' that would fix the problem. Its possible that with gene therapies in the near future we will be able to do something about this, but adding segments of dna to people is something that has to be studied a LOT before anyone would be comfortable about doing something like that over a little hair loss.
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Testosterone gets converted to a chemical called DHT (Dihydrotestosterone). DHT is what causes hair loss, specifically in people who suffer from male pattern baldness. DHT is an Androgen (masculine hormone), so it's responsible for facial hair amongst other things. While it's present in women, it doesn't have a role to play. It has higher levels in men, and is responsible for a lot of the puberty stuff for us guys.
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Why is the weight unit "pounds" abbreviated "lbs" instead of something else that makes sense?
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It comes from Latin. Pounds were originally "libra," which is actually short for "libra pondo," which means "weight pound." Bonus: this is also why the symbol for the British currency, the Pound, is an L, as in £.
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Well that's wrong anyway. In physics weight is measured in Newtons. They're both used to measure "weight" in the everyday sense but science uses the metric system. Forget about feet, inches, pounds, and gallons and get used to metres, kilos, and litres. I don't know exactly how the US curriculum handles it but the entire scientific community uses metric, so you need to know it.
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Given the stresses on our oceans and forests, does our biosphere currently produce a surplus of oxygen or are we running at a deficit? Could we run out of oxygen in the future?
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CO2 toxicity would be a huge issue long before oxygen depletion. Current concentrations of CO2 are around 400 ppm. Oxygen is 22%. Photosynthesis won this one a long time ago. If we somehow consume enough oxygen to get to 20% we would barely notice the deoxygenation, but the hypercarbia from 20,000 ppm CO2 would have killed us all.
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There are indeed some animals that don't breed oxygen (f.e. see _URL_0_). However, they all live in extreme environments. The best-known anaerobic (non-oxygen breathing) organisms are those clustered around hydrothermal vents (also called black smokers). Around these vents on the bottom of the ocean, there are organisms that use sulphur instead of oxygen. Probably that's also how non-plant organisms worked before Earth's atmosphere became oxygen-rich.
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Why did Nordic people evolve to have thin bodyhair and blonde hair while people in hotter regions have thick bodyhair which would be better suited to colder climates?
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The differences in hair has a negligible effect on your ability to survive northern climates: humans won't survive the winters anyway without clothing, so your hair matters little. What **does** matter is sunlight. Near the equator the intense sunlight is a problem, causing sunburns and skin cancer, so darker skin and hair that absorbs the sunlight before it can cause damage is beneficial. Near the poles the lack of sunlight during winter months is a much bigger problem, as [vitamin D is synthesized in the skin](_URL_0_) when it is exposed to sunlight. When *too little* sunlight is the bigger problem, having lighter skin is beneficial.
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Straight hair that lies flat tends to hold in heat. That's an advantage in cold climates. Curly hair allows heat to escape while still providing protection from the sun to the skin underneath. That's an advantage in hot climates. Melanin in skin (the part that makes it dark) tends to block what's needed to make vitamin D while offering some protection from sunburn - this is why people who live closer to the polar regions have far lighter skin: less danger of sunburn, and since they get so much less sunlight, they need to produce vitamin D much easier. People who live closer to the equator get a lot more sunlight, so they have all the vitamin D from sunlight they need, but the protection from sunburn is far more important.
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All about Modern Deserts- How did they form? Why are they so prevalent? Should we fear their expansion?
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Deserts are a result of weather patterns. When there is no moisture in the air, it seldom rains. Where there are large chunks of land where the prevailing winds are not over oceans, deserts form.
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Usually the problem with deserts is they don't get much rain at all. They usually get less than 10 inches of rain annually; "integration with the water cycle" isn't going to solve that if there isn't water to go around.
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Were flaming arrows as prolific and effective as they seem to be in fiction? And general questions on flaming arrows
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You might be interested in past posts on this topic: * [_How effective were flaming arrows, and was their use as prevalent as modern pop culture (Gladiator, Game of Thrones, Total War videogames etc...) would have us think?_](_URL_0_) ^(19 Jan 2014 | 4 comments) ^(/u/Borund details the main uses of flaming arrows.) * [_Just how common were flaming arrows in medieval warfare? How were they used?_](_URL_1_) ^(30 May 2014 | 119 comments) ^(/u/Freevoulous describes other known uses and other incendiary ranged weapons.) You can ask followup questions by posting your questions in the comments with experts tagged to direct questions to them.
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Well, according to my Medieval Warfare professor, never. There is no account of fire arrows ever being used in combat. This was for two reasons: - The arrows fly fast enough it wouldn't stay lit anyway. - The arrow itself would just burn and lose its effectiveness. There are accounts of fire being used as a weapon (and in some cases even as a defense), but I can't recall off the top of my head any mentions of flaming arrows specifically.
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How easy was it to get away with murder in the Roman Empire?
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It depends on who you killed. If you killed a male citizen, you were in big trouble. If you killed the wife of a male citizen, you were in slightly less trouble, but it was still pretty bad. If you killed a slave, as long as it was yours, you weren't really in trouble; if you killed somebody else's slave you had to reimburse them for the loss of property. If you killed a prisoner of war, you were in no trouble. As for the actual punishments, I'm extremely curious. Roman experts? Chime in!
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Well, crucifixion was a real thing that was done. Also, servile witnesses could (must?) be tortured if they are to testify in court, collective punishment could be practiced, the court system was set up to favor citizens over noncitizens, etc. However, I don't think that simply listing brutal things the Romans did will lead you to really learn anything. The dichotomy between civilized and uncivilized is false, and is ultimately a value judgement based on adherence to our cultural norms. "Uncivilized" is a term used just as frequently for wholesale slaughter of civilians as it is for the use of a salad fork when a dinner fork is called for.
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In the time of Cleopatra were the Pyramids still being worshipped and kept in repair?
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More of a clarifying question, but were the pyramids themselves worshipped? Were old pharaohs buried in them still worshipped ?
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Cleopatra was not Egyptian, she was Macedonian Greek, her ancestor was one of Alexander the Great's generals who took over Egypt during the years following Alexander's death. The Greeks did not take control of Egypt from the Egyptians however, the Persian Empire had actually been in control since the (8th century BCE?). The great pyramids were constructed by the Bronze Age Egyptians, who were the ones who also built the sphinx and the other famous artifacts in the British Museum. Pyramids of Giza: 2500BCE Cleopatra Dies in 31BCE (Remember that Cleo hung around with Julius Caesar and Marc Antony when Rome was the power in the Mediterranean.)
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Why does putting bread into hard brown sugar soften it?
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It adds moisture without making the sugar wet keeping the molasses from crystalizing
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Yeast is a fungus, and it likes to eat sugar (as many things do). When it eats the sugar it produces ethanol and carbon dioxide as waste products, and the carbon dioxide is what makes dough rise.
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If two people of different sizes fall off a motorcycle at the same speed, and land exactly the same way, is the heavier going to experience more physical trauma?
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Edit: I read the study wrong! My bad... This is a side impact study from the NHTSA website that shows fat or obese people are less likely to sustain a pelvic fracture in a side impact crash. Which completely surprised me. The study goes on (and this is where I mislead myself earlier) to note, unsurprisingly, that fat and obese people were more likely to sustain a pelvic fracture from door intrusion (door breaks pelvis) than normal and thin people. Which totally makes sense - there's more mass to stop, and door panel intrusion has less dependence on a crash system. (The study shows a lack of side impact airbags. So it's structure only, and there is not much room in the occupant envelope in that direction compared to head on or rear end.) ([Study - PDF Download Warning](_URL_0_)) This paper studies how fat people do in side impact tests. I would also look to the NTSB / FAA for more data.
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Yes, this is how collisions work. To be more specific it is the vector sum of the velocities. So it you're flying at 200 and someone crashes into you from behind at 500 it's only a 300 collision. If they hit you head on it's 700.
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How do animals avoid inbreeding in the wild?
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Exact way varies by species. For example lions, elephants, and others often drive away the males from the family group. Then during breeding time, generally only the dominant male in the area has the opportunity to breed with the group. This reduces the odds of inbreeding. More importantly, it reduces the odds of inbreeding over multiple generations. In breeding for 1 generation has a fairly low risk of genetic problems, it's inbreeding over multiple generations that causes problems.
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Inbreeding does not always impact fertility. While it is bad for the genetics of a species careful husbandry of the breeding process can keep the genetics diverse enough to return to a functional population. Remember that genetically speaking all of the members of a species are related *a little bit*, including humans. Inbreeding creates increased risks, but it takes generations of dedicated inbreeding to really badly affect a species. With humans guiding the process and keeping family lineage records we can mitigate some of that and save the species.
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Are cravings actually reflective of nutritional deficiencies?
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I know ice is a craving for iron deficiency (anemia).
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Most of the feeling of satiety is based on your digestive tract literally just being "full." Certain hormones are released when you're "empty," then as food begins to pass through, different nutrients that are released as it is broken down (sugars, fatty acids, proteins) hormones are released that trigger the feeling of being "full." So it is more about actually having food present that makes you feel full. If you're lacking something that you need you will begin having cravings. Now if you became "malnourished" from missing a lot of meals, then you'd feel physically sick, be weak, dizzy, probably have tunnel vision, etc. These symptoms might not go away with one meal if you don't get what you need, but you might still feel "full" at a certain point during eating because the presence of the food reaching your small intestine.
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How are the abdominal muscles dealt with during surgery?
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It depends somewhat on the type of surgery being performed and how much of the abdominal cavity you need to access. For surgeries over a very small area, a localized incision can be made and the muscles simply pushed aside during the surgery. For larger surgeries, a common strategy is to cut through the linea alba, a strip of connective tissue running down the middle of the six-pack. [The linea alba is the pale middle area in this picture.](_URL_0_) In other cases, muscle must regrettably be cut (preferably lengthwise instead of across, as that heals much more easily). Again, it all depends on what specific surgery is being performed. [Quick summaries of common surgical incisions.](_URL_1_)
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Connective tissues. They hold / hang everything in place. In the abdomen, specifically the peritoneum it is called the mensentery. Unlike other answers, they do not "just fit". _URL_0_
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What's the point of raising minimum wage if, to compensate, there is an inflation.
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The % increase in wage is significantly higher than the % increase of inflation. A 10% increase in pay that causes a 4% increase in inflation... is still a 6% pay bump.
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Wages have not really kept up with inflation. So while wages are higher today than they have been historically, the "buying power" of those wages has not risen proportionally to costs of living. We're making more but it's not making us any richer. _URL_0_
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how did we prove that all atoms have a gravity well if it's too tiny to measure?
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We can certainly measure the gravity of small bodies. The historical [Cavendish Experiment](_URL_0_) used torsion balance to measure the gravitational effect of a 158 kg lead ball. That is certainly not the same as measuring the gravitational effect of single atoms, but it disproves your hypothesis of Gravitonium at the center of celestial bodies. Experiments show, that there is correlation between mass and gravitational attraction. Thus it would make sense to create a theory that builds on the hypothesis that mass is a source of gravity. However, our as of yet best theory of gravity (General Relativity) finds, that mass is not, in fact, the only source of gravity. GR proposes, that the [stress-energy tensor](_URL_1_) is the actual source of the gravitational field. This would explain, why photons can be the source of gravity, despite the fact that they posses no mass. Since they posses energy, their stress-energy tensor can act as a source for gravity.
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Im assuming you're talking about the large hadron collider. If you smash atoms against eachother fast enough, you can hope to get some readings for certain things. For example, thats how scientists think they can find the higgs boson particle, which might answer a few big questions we still have about how gravity functions on an atomic level
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People say that if life wasn't based on carbon it might be based on silicon. Why do they say this, and how would it be different than carbon based life?
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One of the aspects of carbon that make it so suited to life is the fact that it has 4 valence electrons that allow it to readily combine with lots of other different kinds of atoms in a vareity of ways. It is so versatile it has its own branch of chemistry known as *organic chemistry.* Based on how the periodic table is organized, all atoms in a given column have the same number of valence electrons. Silicon, being in the same column as carbon, but one row down, has 4 valence electrons. So a superficial comparison suggest that silicon would be a candidate. But there are other things to consider. Carbon is lighter and relatively abundmant, and silicon does make all of the kinds of molecular combinations carbon does. Also, even if they have the same number of valence electrons, bonds formed with carbon atoms are stronger than those formed with silicon atoms. There is no telling what silicon based life would be like, and it is purely (at this point) an element of science fiction.
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All of the answers so far only talk about how many bonds carbon can make and that it can make them with multiple different elements. This is all true, but it is more or less equally true for silicon. What makes carbon special is that it wants to form 4 bonds, but it can form single, double, and triple bonds with other atoms. Not only does this explode the structural diversity possible with carbonaceous molecules, but greatly increases the number of potential types of reactivity. This is important because a C–O single bond (methanol) is different from a C=O double bond (formaldehyde) and is also different from a C O triple bond (carbon monoxide, sort of). These differences allow for the crazy amounts of diversity needed for life as we know it, and also calls into question any ideas that a silicon-based life form could exist.
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How and why do June bugs only come out in June, and then magically disappear?
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It has to do with the short life cycle these bugs have. Most of that time is spent as a grub. They live in leaf litter or even underground during this time. You might even see one but not recognize it as a June Bug. Eventually they pupate (sort of like how a caterpillar changes into a butterfly, only not as pretty at the end), and become the ugly bug you see flying around. They mate, lay eggs and then die. So the June Bug is there all year round, just not in beetle form.
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I suspect it is more likely they were named June bugs because they came out in June rather than coming out in June because they were named June bugs. "For every thing there is a season." The increases in both temperature and hours of daylight in the spring signal a lot of changes in nature just as the decreases in temperature and decreases in the hours of daylight in fall do (Northern Hemisphere). These reasons likely apply along with other aspects of their reproduction cycles.
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How do television networks know how many people tuned in to watch a specific show at a certain time?
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They often have a number of people who fill in viewing diaries in return for a small payment. Extrapolation to the whole population, similar to opinion polls, gives the total audience. Other methods use recording boxes to work out what channel the tv is timed to over time.
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Some families are chosen to have a special box in their house that tracks which family members are watching which shows. They multiply those numbers to extrapolate it for the country as a whole. See also: _URL_0_
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What kind of engine or power source would be needed to make a wormhole suitable for space travel?
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There is no known mechanism, whether practical or theoretical, for creating or maintaining a traversable wormhole.
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Um, we don't know. All current theories about wormholes rely on "negative energy" which has not been proven to be possible. Moving on from the practical to how they would work in theory. Imagine travelling between 2 points on a piece of paper. You would think the fastest way would be a straight line but if you could fold the paper up, connecting the 2 points and punch a hole through the paper you could travel instantaneously. If we could do this we could travel vast distances while never locally exceeding the speed of light. It should also be possible to do this in time allowing time travel.
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Someone told me that after German Reunification it was discovered that 1 in 5 East Germans were Stasi informants or employees. Is this true?
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One of the biggest bombshells in Germany over the past 20 years is the [Stasi Files](_URL_0_). Millions of pages have been recovered or reconstructed from the Stasi archives and Germans can actually request their files. One of the people mentioned in that article was denounced by his teacher; another was effectively blacklisted when he refused to provide identification on request. The end of the movie [The Lives of Others](_URL_1_) also deals with the political and social fallout of the public release of the Stasi's archives on German society. Basically if you look through the files many of the informants were not paid but rather volunteered the information for a wide variety of reasons. Some may have been paid, others may have used an anonymous denunciation to eliminate a political or social rival while some informants could have done so to enact some kind of revenge.
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It might be helpful if you (or he) would specify what population. The German one? Or maybe the European population or global population as a whole?
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Why, when I fall asleep with my socks on, does my foot hair hurt to move in the morning?
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This probably won't be like you're 5 but I'll try... Your body hairs have their own little [muscles](_URL_0_). It is possible that keeping your socks on all night leaves these muscles "strained"--different than their normal resting length--which causes discomfort by morning. disclaimer: this is speculation based on 1 year of medical school
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Lack of circulation leads to lack of oxygen in the tissues. The peripheral nerves are the first ones to be affected by lack of oxygen, especially the sensory nerve endings. They basically stop sensing things (heat, touch, pressure). The feeling of your foot being "asleep" is actually the feeling of having very little to no feeling... if that makes any sense. The tingling or pain you might feel when your foot "wakes up" is caused by re-oxygenation and re-activation of the nerves. Your nerves are being over-stimulated.
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Is it true that major European powers wanted to execute Napoleon Bonaparte?
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While Andrew Roberts is a bit of a Bonapartist, he is correct. Prussia wanted Napoleon dead. There was a bit of fear involved, fearing that he would end up rising again but there was more interest in revenge. While Austria had been soundly defeated several times and Russia was one of Napoleons longest term enemies, but Prussia had the worst defeats and greatest humiliation (Jena is a textbook Napoleonic battle due to Prussian inflexibility). Wellington had no interest in more blood, but knew of an island almost in e middle of nowhere that he stopped at during his time in the wars against India. It was out of the way and could easily ensure that Napoleon would never leave.
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As a follow-up, what about Napoleon IV, who was also killed at an only moderately young age (23) in the Zulu War?
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Universe Simulation Theory-How do we know that the cutoff point in crystal lattices is indicative of the universe behaving like a computer rather than a computer behaving like the universe?
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We don't. These arguments are not sensible. First, as you say, our universe might just be dsicrete. Furthermore, if our universe is a simulation, we have no ideas what the laws of physics would be like in the "real" universe. Thus, the fact that computer simulations are discrete in our universe tells us nothing about what simulations would look like in some hypothetical "real" universe in which we are a simulation, because it is only within the simulation that discretization is a feature of computers.
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From what I can gather, they are using fermions in lattice (in place of space-time) and using super computers to work simulations, and see if these simulations can create atoms, molecules, et. al. all the way up to live. If we can do it with just supercomputers than a far more advance life form, with much quicker processing and much more computing power, can create our universe as a chaotic simulation. The rest (the math, and the more complex talk of they are creating a lattice QCD system) is way beyond my knowledge level.
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Both sides of the Dorner scenario.
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"Damn, gonna miss shark week." - Actual excerpt from Dorner's manifesto. He's not a totally unreasonable man.
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* Racial tension -- white-ish guy in white neighborhood grabs a gun and follows black kid around * Intrigue -- the facts of the case are unusual, and make us question the nature of self defense * Uncertain outcome -- it is possible to see both sides of the case, to outsiders, it appeared it could go either way, so it gives everyone something to talk about * Process of elimination -- there currently no young, photogenic white women involved in any sort of big trial, and Nancy Grace has to talk about something
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What is happening in your body (chemically) to cause a headache from caffeine withdrawals?
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Caffiene is a pretty potent vasoconstrictor, meaning it squeezes the blood vessels in your brain. When you use caffiene regularly, your brain gets used to this. When you quit after a while of being used to this, the vessels dilate more, meaning they relax. This causes a sudden change in bloodflow to the brain, causing pressure around the brain and against the skull, activating the pain receptors similar to a regular headache.
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Most headaches occur in an area of your head that have nerve rich muscle or vascualr tissue. These pain-sensitive areas can be activated by stress, muscle tension, enlarged blood vessels and other triggers. Particularly in blood vessels, if they dialate, the expansion can be quite painful. This is why caffeine helps so much with a headache as it is a vasoconstrictor.
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What makes some engines signifcantly more powerful than others although they run with the same type of fuel
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Efficiency. If you burn more fuel per cycle, that can up power output. But, if you make each ‘burn’ more efficient - extracting more useful energy - you increase power that way too. Typically, increasing engine compression ratio will do this; although it comes with problems which must be controlled. The more heat energy you can direct towards driving pistons, instead of being lost to the cooling system or out of the exhaust, the more efficient your engine will be for a given amount of fuel. Petrol engines are typically 25% thermally efficient, diesels are 40%. This isn’t just down to differing fuels, the compression ratios are very different too.
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Diesel engines have a lot going for them that gasoline engines don't. They are more efficient and produce far more torque than a gas engine. That makes them perfect for the very large and heavy vehicles they power. They also are *far* more durable, and can last for over a million miles with proper maintenance. Gas engines are smaller, lighter, cheaper to produce, and produce more horsepower than diesel engines. That's why they are found in almost every non-commercial vehicle in production today.
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Besides being cut or menstruating, how does the body dispose of old, used blood cells?
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cuts and menstruating aren't ways of dispose blood cells.
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Blood is made in the bone marrow, and this is happening all the time. It then travels through pores in the bone and enters the veins through attachments. When blood cells get too old and start to fail, they are broken down by special cells called phagocytes (fay-go-sites) that turn them back into base nutrients and waste products. The nutrients are reabsorbed and used by other cells, while the waste products travel to the kidneys and are filtered out.
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Why do electronics stop working after they are submerged by water?
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The immediate answer is conductivity. Water is extremely conductive to electricity. If water is connecting two electrical components, electricity will flow between them. If it's connecting two components that aren't designed to connect, that causes errors or possibly even permenant damage. Water can also permenantly damage some electronic parts on a physical level, like screens, batteries, buttons, etc. If something isn't designed to be completely submerged in water, it probably won't work again until it's dried. Even then, residual moisuture can cause malfunctions. Speakers are a good example: water in between the diaphram and the casing can cause it to lose the ability to transmit sound clearly. If you've dunked your phone in water, you might be able to see moisuture droplets beneath the lens of the camera, ruining photos more or less permenantly. Water also causes quick corrosion to ferrous metals, causing those components to wear out or lose their conductivity.
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To protect the hot metal from the oxygen in the air most wielding techniques use a cover gas. This cover gas will also work under water to keep water away from the area. Even if the electrode comes in contact with the water the electricity will take the easiest path to ground which should be through your working piece. Of course underwater wielders need to be a bit more aware of the dangers then normally.
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If I disconnect my desktop from the internet and power source for a couple of weeks, reconnect the power and start it up, how does it keep the correct time and date?
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The motherboard has an onboard battery (usually something like a CR2032 button battery) that it uses to keep a small bit of storage running. That storage contains your BIOS settings (boot order preference, BIOS password, etc) and a system clock. The system clock has a tiny circuit attached that allows it to store the system time, and have it progress normally, even if the system loses power. It won't actually be the correct time and date, though. The onboard oscillator will be imperfect and will deviate from the actual time. The deviation will be too small for you to notice, but it'll be enough that the computer wants to update it ASAP. So once you reconnect to the internet, it'll connect to a time server and download the correct time, and set that system clock to that time.
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There's basically a miniature Quartz clock in the computer that still runs while the computer is powered down via a battery, and then when you connect to the internet it'll use the internet to sync its clock unless you've turned that off.
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when will the switch to 128-bit computing occur?
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When we need about two thousand petabytes of RAM.
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Let's say we have a program fully optimized to produce 0's at 3GHz ... this is the "realm" of current technology though any real implementation would be slower. That would produce 10^9 0's per second. Then it would take 10^10^100 / 10^9 seconds to run, in other words: 10^999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999991 seconds. Which is still much much much longer than the life of the universe.
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Why Are certain areas said to be not habitable for "centuries" due to a nuclear accident, but places like Hiroshima are habitable?
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Different kinds of radiation. Bombs like Hiroshima generated a lot of quickly dissipating radiation, and very little long-lasting radiation. The Chernobyl reactor, on the other hand, put out lots of long-lasting radiation and very little short-lived radiation. I don't know enough about the topic to be more specific, but that's my understanding of it.
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The natural radioactivity of uranium is a different phenomenon from the nuclear *fission* that's used in nuclear reactors, and vastly different than what happened at Chernobyl. Uranium is only very weakly radioactive; the most abundant form of uranium, uranium-238, has a half-life of 4.468×10^9 years (roughly four and a half billion years). For context, that's about the age of the planet. Also, when it decays, the particles it emits aren't very threatening. In fact, uranium used to be a popular additive to various glazes and pieces of china back before the Cold War. All of this to say the environment surrounding uranium mines isn't affected much at all; the level of radiation it emits is more or less background noise.
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Why does "pressing charges" seem optional for some crimes, but not others? Can you sign a contract before being murdered to not "press charges" on the murderer?
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This is a misconception that comes up on /r/legaladvice on a daily basis. The victim does not choose whether or not to press charges; the district attorney does. The victim can choose whether or not to cooperate with the police investigation. Often times, especially for minor crimes, if the victim chooses not to "press charges" (e.g, to cooperate with the investigation) then it'll be dropped by the prosecutor for lack of evidence.
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Laws vary based on locality, but in my state there is one charge, criminal homicide, which encompasses first degree murder, second degree murder, voluntary manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter. I'd imagine this is done to streamline the trial process, so that anyone accused of murder doesn't have to be charged with all four, and a person can't get off the hook entirely by putting a hole in the argument that it was premeditated.
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Why does it seem as if infrastructure is holistically bad throughout the United States?
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Infrastructure isn't sexy. Presidents and/or governors don't get as much political gain from filling in potholes or shoring up bridges, as they do from addressing Big Things like wars or social policies. Most of the highways in the US are from the gigantic manpower glut right after WWII, and nothing has come close to matching it since.
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Money has been given to work toward replacing the infrastructure, it simply takes time. But given that, the Federal Government does not have much authority to do anything. The State government does have authority but does not have the money to do much.
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What are long exposure shots? Can I click them using a smartphone camera?
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long exposure means your arperture stays open for a long time instead of fractions of a second. smartphones generally don't have that option because it wouldn't make sense - long exposure is useless without tripod, as even slightest shaking will make a picture all blurry
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A camera works by capturing light, exposing it for a shorter time means less motion (sharper pic) but it's darker, a long exposure is the opposite. Besides using it for pictures of the sky at night, you can take a pic [of a freeway](_URL_5_), use a [flashlight to draw](_URL_6_), etc.
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How many ants would it take to hold up a horizontal human?
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Assuming... mass of ant: 3mg strength of ant: 50 times its body weight -- > 150mg length of ant: 10mm width of ant's body: 2mm area of ant: 10x2 -- > 20mm^2 density of human: 1.4mg/mm^3 depth of lying human: 100mm mass per unit area: 140mg/mm^2 ----- According to my rough calculations it would be very close. They would definitely be able to get the arms and legs off the ground but the torso not quite. For a child as you mentioned they might not be able to deal with the head but the rest of the body should be okay as they aren't as thick. Also because it is so close if I am off by a factor of 2 with some of my assumptions it could completely change the answer.
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Well let’s do some calculations. An ant is about 2mm Long by 0.4mm Wide and ~0.4mm tall. It’s surface area is 0.8mm^2. However it’s not a perfect square so let’s reduce that to 0.5mm^2. The mass of an ant is anywhere between 1mg to 5mg. Let’s take the heavier estimate of 5mg. The volume of the ant is ~0.15mm^3, after making some estimations for it not being a cuboid. This gives it a density of 33.333 mg / mm^3. Using this calculator: _URL_0_ we can calculate the terminal velocity of the ant. I’m using a drag coefficient of 1.15 since it’s not very aerodynamic. The terminal velocity of the ant is 2.26 m/s. This is a very very small number. Ants are capable of moving horizontally at 1.34 m/s, so falling at 2.26 m/s should have zero impact on the ant. You can throw them from space and they wouldn’t die on “impact” because they are falling too slowly for there to be any impact. EDIT: 1.34 m/s not 13.4 m/s. Ants can’t outrun Usain bolt.
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Do all protons have the same weight?
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Yes, all protons are identical in mass and charge, and what's more the lower limit of their lifetime is 2.1x10^99 years. All electrons are identical in every way, and they have no known size. Curiously, the lower bound on their lifetime is only 2.6x10^26 years. Neutrons are a bit different. They are all identical in mass, but they can decay in about 15 minutes outside of a stable nucleus.
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the mass of a proton comes from the 3 valence quarks and the binding energy between them, or the energy in the "strong field" . but it seems no explanation these days can go without having "particles pop in and out of existence"
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To what extent did the Japanese leadership have knowledge of the atrocities the Imperial Army were committing on their occupation of Asia?
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I talk a bit about this [here](_URL_1_), more specifically wrt the actions of Unit 731. I also go into more general detail [here](_URL_0_) about the exact level of complicity that the Japanese leadership had.
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I kind of hate to post this in /r/AskHistorians because I used mediocre sources and almost *certainly* have some inaccuracies there. But [I made a post on the subject of historical Japanese soldiers](_URL_0_) for /r/TotalWar a while ago. Some of the information there might be of use to you.
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is potato bread better for you than white bread?
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Potato bread has more calories than white bread, but is also higher in protein which can help you feel fuller longer. Potato bread is higher is sugar, but also has more complex nutrients like niacin which can help you convert food into energy. Depending on the brand, both of them are pretty sugar rich and nutrient empty compared to wheat bread.
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White bread is basically empty calories. If you're getting all the nutrients and fiber you need from other food, and aren't eating too many calories, then white bread is fine. Most people don't eat enough fiber or may be missing some other nutrients you might find in whole grains, so it's an improvement to switch. It's al just about balancing the different inputs with your output.
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Why does my GPS consistently disagree with my car’s speedometer?
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Speedometers work by measuring how fast your car's tires are rotating, but they can't know how big your tires are. The bigger your tire diameter, the more your car will travel per rotation, meaning the faster your real speed will be compared to your reported speed. Speedometers are designed to high-ball because if you, say, were ticketed for doing 105kph when the speedometer said you were doing 100kph, the car manufacturer could be liable. GPS-reported speed should be fairly accurate as long as you have a consistent fix.
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There are really stringent penalties for cars having speedometers reading too low, as this would lead to speeding. This means manufacturers set then so they read faster than you're doing, to account for manufacturing variation, and things like changes in tyre size due to wear and expansion from rotational forces. Your sat-nav uses (unsurprisingly) sattelites, and the timing of signals from them. These are incredibly accurate, and will be the true figure. Do, however, check your tyres for under-inflation, as this can cause speedometer errors.
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Tuesday Trivia | Idealists and Realists
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Here's a question - was Machiavelli an idealist or a realist? Did monarchs of his time take up his advice? If so, did it work, or did his advice come off as foolish rhetoric?
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Realist: "Whatever IS, is. Whether that be good or bad, we accept it." Pragmatist: "Whatever works is good. Focus on what gives a good, reasonable and realistic outcome and ignore the rest."
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Where do all the eyelashes go that you can't get out and disappear into your eye?
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They don't really stay in your eye any length of time. Your eye is enclosed so nothing can get behind it from the front. The eyelashes are pushed out of the eye by the body's own mechanisms, like tearing, eye goop, or causing you to rub your eyes, and blinking. You just don't see them when they come out. They don't stay there, and they don't get dissolved or something, they all come out.
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They eventually come out on their own, potentially during REM sleep, but more likely when you're awake. You often won't feel them if they stay away from your cornea, and you'll just rub it away when it reaches the edge of your eyelid.
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If we send garbage into the sun to be incinerated and the cargo contains some iron would the sun destabilize?
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No. Iron does not directly cause stars to cease fusing elements, nor does it directly cause destabilisation or anything like that. What actually happens with iron during fusion is that stars lose energy from fusing iron and heavier elements. Elements lighter than iron produce more energy than they consume through fusion, whereas iron and heavier elements consume more than they produce; thus there is an overall loss and eventually there will not be enough energy to sustain fusion.
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Not while the system continues to be driven by heat from the Sun. If the Sun suddenly stopped shining then I imagine the system would actually reach equilibrium rather quickly.
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During the Third Crusade, did the Crusaders and the Muslims start using each others equipment upon discovering their respective previously unknown equipment/technique?
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I know you've asked this question (or questions similar to it) several times now, and I've been waiting to answer in hopes that I might be proven wrong. But there's no evidence that I'm aware of for European or Muslim troops adopting each other's equipment during the Third Crusade; one expects that, if they were going to, they would have done so some time in the previous one hundred years, rather than during an active campaign. The only source I'm aware of that even describes individual equipment to any great extent is Baha al-Din, who emphasized the protective qualities of the Europeans' armor, consisting of both mail and some variety of felt vest that excelled at stopping arrows. I can't emphasize enough that most medieval sources are *terrible* for understanding the small details of military life. They are, in the main, concerned with narrative (and glorification of aristocratic sponsors). Tables of equipment, casualty reports, payrolls: we have none of these things for the Third Crusade.
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Previous answer that deals with the crusades that you'll find useful: _URL_16_
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S.A.D (Seasonal Affective Disorder)
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Basically, not getting enough sun makes you depressed. That's why one of the ways to alleviate it is to use a light box.
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We view it as a medical disorder, they view it at a personality trait.
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Why you always pee when you poop but you don't always poop when you pee?
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It's because our bladder is constantly being refilled. We just learned to not leak all the time. Your poop doesn't come in a steady stream and chances are that while you are sitting there that there is also some urine to get rid of by the way.
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It takes more effort to poop than to pee. One requires relaxing muscles, the other requires pushing with them.
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Philosophy of History
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These books come to mind, just pick those that seem interesting to you: * *That Noble Dream* by Peter Novick * *The Historian's Craft* by Marc Bloch * *In Defence of History* (Evans) * *Historian's Fallacie: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought* (Fischer) * *What is History?* (Carr)
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To uncover the mystery of how we ended up in our present situation. History is about prologue, the introduction and setup required of every story (because if you jumped right in, you'd be confused as shit). And I stress "the mystery" because much of history is about asking whether the things we think we know about this prologue to our world, actually were the case, on the basis of evidence and logical presumptions. Also fortune telling. *“The purpose of history is to cite the past in order to explain the future. When a phenomenon occurs in the world, look to see what comparable events are recorded."* — Dong Zhongshu (ca. 179–104 b.c.)
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what happens when homeless people are picked up by an ambulance in the states?
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The details depend on the particular ambulance agency and the state's laws. However, the people working on the ambulance and in the emergency room are expected to stabilize any patient regardless of their ability to pay. They cannot just let someone die. If the patient cannot afford the services provided to them, the medical personnel may try to bill the patient, but it's understood that many patients simply cannot pay. The result of this situation is that other people (i.e. those paying "out of pocket" and people with insurance) are charged larger bills to make up for the expenses associated with treating the poor.
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It depends on the severity of the accident compared to the severity of the call they're en route to. If they see a horrible car wreck, and they're on a call for a broken bone, they'll stop for the wreck and radio in to let the dispatcher know to send out a new ambulance for the initial call. However, if they were on their way to a heart attack victim, they'll likely radio in and request a new ambulance for the wreck.
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Why does this bulb project itself through the tiny holes in its shade?
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I'd assume the tiny openings are working as a [camera obscura](_URL_0_), or pinhole camera. The hole is small enough that only relatively direct rays of light from the bulb pass through each one, allowing them to form an image when they strike an outside surface, instead of the image being obliterated by light freely escaping in all directions. The image of the bulb itself is inverted, the same way an image is when it goes into your eye (before your brain rights it).
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The filament of a light bulb is just a thin piece of metal, usually tungsten. When it's heated, little bits of tungsten can evaporate away and make slightly thinner spots. The thin spots tend to get hotter since the same amount of electricity is passing through a thinner wire, which increases the evaporation rate. Eventually the spot gets thin enough that it breaks under the sudden thermal stress when the filament heats up. This is one of the reasons to use halogen bulbs. The halogen gas helps deposit the evaporated tungsten back on the filament, and so the filament can last longer and run hotter.
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Why do we capitalise all words except conjunctions and some prepositions in titles?
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Convention, at heart. It used to be that writers capitalized all letters. Then, some time passed, and they capitalized only nouns and beginnings of sentences. Then, more time passed, and they started capitalizing only proper nouns. It's gotten to the point that we only capitalize more meaningful words in general and in titles. For instance, "the" isn't as meaningful as nouns and verbs are. EDIT: Teotwaki69 correctly says in the below post that the convention is based on parts of speech.
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until at one point of the history of english language every noun used to be capitalized. I believe it was one of the quirky things of unregulated languages that only I remained capitalized when things changed.
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What is i and how does i^2 = -1?
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Why is i^2 = -1? Because that is exactly how we define i! Your second question is more interesting. When your start working with squares, it isn't long before you realize that the square of any number is always a positive number. The question that follows is, then what happens when you take the square root of a negative number? Well nothing happens, the square root of a negative number just doesn't exist. Then some old random greek dude said, imagine, there is some number i whose square is -1.. Now suddenly we have a way to express the square root of every negative number! square root of -25 is 5i . It turns out that the ability to express the square roots of negative numbers has very useful applications in engineering so we adopted i and kept it. But it still remains that i has no clear significance when counting. for instance if I had i apples, what does it even mean?! For a long time, it was considered quite pointless and hence the name imaginary numbers as opposed to the other *real* numbers.
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By starting with i^2 = -1 you are basically extending the algebra of reals with an object i that has that properity that is defined in terms of the operations of that algebra but if you start from the sqrt you have to deal with the fact it's multi valued.
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Why do most dogs move and make noise in their sleep, but most humans don't?
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According to my other half all I do when I'm asleep is move and make noise. It would explain why I wake up tired sometimes. Just how many people have you observed sleeping to come to your conclusion?
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Absolutely not an expert, but I believe that the brain reacts to specific noises rather than sheer volume when it instructs the body to wake on hearing a noise. For example, a baby's cry is specifically designed to wake a mother from sleep, which is why it generally works. You can also make your own associations, such as your alarm clock or phone ringtone. Obviously, like all traits we evolved in this manner, it will vary from person to person. But it's about type of noise, not volume. I had a friend who could quite easily sleep through the sound of two loud angry nerds playing WoW in his room and absolutely NOT keeping the volume down. We go out for a smoke and come back in and he wakes up like Rip Van Winkle and asks "Did you smoke in here?" just from the fact he could smell it on us. Again, not an expert, but I seem to recall hearing this explantion from someone trustworthy. Don't take my word on it.
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Does Anti-Matter have the same properties as it's Matter counterpart?
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Aside from the obvious reversal of charge, parity and other quantum numbers, matter and antimatter are treated slightly differently by the weak force. This is called CP violation and arises from complex phases in the CKM and PMNS mixing matrices. We have measured CP violation in the quark sector for over half a century now, but we haven't yet measured it in leptons because neutrinos are really hard to detect. Hopefully new neutrino experiments like HyperK and LBNE will be able to measure it. [Further reading](_URL_0_)
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Anti-matter doesn't have negative energy or anything like that, it has opposite charge. When a particle-antiparticle pair annihilate, the energy that is released is the total sum of energies of both particles, which consists of kinetic energy and mass energy (E=mc²).
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Why does a nearby lightning strike make the power flicker?
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Electromagnetism is one of the forces of nature that acts at a distance. Gravity is another example. Just like two magnetic north poles will repel each other, electrons repel one another, push against each other from a distance, because they have the same electrical charge. The sudden and enormous blast of current that flows through a lightning bolt creates an electromagnetic field that can briefly interfere with the electrical currents flowing through nearby power lines, jiggling the electrons in the power lines, even if the lightning doesn't strike the power lines directly.
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If you watch a [slow-motion video](_URL_1_) of a lightning strike, you'll see that before it hits the ground it sends out small "feelers" that go out somewhat randomly, but mostly downwards. Once one touches the ground, the path it took gets very bright (this is the most visible part of a lightning strike) as it carries a massive current between the clouds and the ground. Lightning happens when there's a big enough potential difference between the clouds and the ground so the air breaks down. The plasma created by the initial electrical breakdown follows the local path of least resistance, which is why it moves randomly, but then once there's a line that touches the ground and lets the potential difference equilibrate all the current travels through that path.
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How many different electromagnetic waves are currently traveling around me in my room?
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An enormous number. If you treat your room like a [photon gas](_URL_0_) at equilibrium, you can calculate the average number density of photons in the room at room temperature. I haven't worked out the number, but it will be huge. If you believe the above assumption, the spectral distribution is a [Planck distribution](_URL_1_) for room temperature. So it's mostly infrared light, but it extends over the entire spectrum.
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You are bathing in electromagnetic radiation all day. Just avoid x-rays and gamma rays. Your phone/wi-fi don't make those.
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Why do small animals such as squirrels have such 'jerky' movements?
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They’re small and agile meaning there is less weight hindering fast movements. Also from the size perspective, I imagine it would look somewhat similar to our movements in terms of speed and range of motion (if that’s the right way to phrase it, could be wrong). In some it is quite likely aided by the threat of predators too. Wouldn’t you move quicker if at any point you could be supper?
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Instinct. Same as why a baby sea turtle crawls to the ocean, or a baby duck follows it's Mom around or any mammal that knows to suck on it's mother's teet for milk.
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How could hadrons containing top quark be produced?
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Conditions where the top might live longer make hadrons completely impossible. You would have to change the laws of the universe, e.g. by making the weak interaction weaker or reducing the mass of the top quark to extend its lifetime.
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They can't exist on their own because of [color confinement](_URL_1_). The interaction potential between two quarks increases approximately linearly with the distance between them at large distances. If you try to pull them apart, you reach a point where they would rather produce new quarks and become separate hadrons than split into individual quarks.
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