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Just how did the Habsburg family managed to get so many inheritances? Was it just luck or fruit of some masterplan?
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The Habsburg family focused heavily on marriage alliances as a method of expanding its power. The motto of the Habsburg family in fact was "Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria, nube!" *"Wars may be led by others, you, happy Austria, marry!"* The remarkable realm of Emperor Charles V was the product of this strategy. While the French monarchs sought expansion through military conflict, the Habsburgs did not. The result was a France surrounded on three sides by Habsburg territores: Spain, Germany, and Flanders.
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Well, the House of Habsburg went extinct in the 1740s, with Maria Theresa as the last 'true' Habsburg. Her husband, Emperor Francis I, was of the House of Lorraine. The house resulting from their marriage was styled as the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, rather than simply remaining the House of Lorraine, and was often simply called the House of Habsburg. I'm not sure if this is what you were looking for, but it's the closest thing I could think of off the top of my head.
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Why can't the human eye see clearly underwater, but with swimming goggles we can?
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Wait, people can't see clearly under water? This is a serious question, because under water I see as well as I do normally with my glasses.
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For the same reason you can tell [these guys] (_URL_0_) are surrounded by a glass dome even though you've (probably) never been in that sub before: because glass is not invisible. It reflects light, reflects images, casts shadows, and looks VERY different than the water they are swimming in. It's not hard to pick out that glass is a solid surface underwater. Plus, keep in mind that fish can see underwater much better than we can. When we open our eyes underwater without goggles, we see a blurry haze. When they look through water, they are seeing as clearly as we would in air. Their lenses are designed to correct the distortion.
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Do mirrors have any sort of delay?
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Yes. When you see your reflection, the light that enters your eyes has traveled from you to the mirror and then back again. In air, light travels at approximately 300 millimeters per nanosecond, so the delay won't be perceptible.
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The photon is absorbed by an atom in the mirror and its energy is briefly stored in that atom by exciting an electron. When the excited electron comes back down to its resting state, that energy is released in the form of a photon. This is why light appears to travel slower in certain mediums, the delay has to do with how long the electron takes to store and retransmit the energy carried by the photon. Source: physics class.
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What's the difference between the alcohol we drink vs. the alcohol we use as mouthwash?
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They are similar (but different) molecules. Drinking alcohol is ethyl alcohol, which is a molecule made up of 2 carbon atoms, 6 hydrogen, and 1 oxygen. Rubbing alcohol is isopropyl alcohol, which is another type of alcohol with three carbon atoms, 8 hydrogen, and one oxygen. These molecules may be similar, but the body digests them very differently. Ethanol is fairly safe to drink because it gets converted into acetaldehyde which is mostly safe, while isopropyl alcohol gets converted into acetone, which is toxic. Mouthwash contains 20-40% ethanol (the same stuff we drink) However, it also contains other stuff that is toxic if swallowed in large amounts, so don't drink it.
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You're talking about the Pro-Health stuff, right? The gunk you see is because that mouthwash is alcohol-free. Alcohol in traditional mouthwashes like Listerine is used to dissolve flavor oils and keep them mixed together. Without alcohol, this stuff separates. Source: _URL_0_
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Is cold water more effective at exstinguishing fires than hot water?
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Water mainly puts out fire by absorbing energy. The heat of vaporization of water is about 2,260 kJ/kg. The specific heat is 4.2kJ/kg. So the heat energy absorbed by evaporation is the same as a temperature rise of 535 Celcius. So the difference between cold and hot water will always be much less than the evaporation effect.
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Water is cheap, easily available, and not toxic to humans. It also absorbs a lot of energy before vaporising which probably helps. However bear in mind water isn't suitable for all types of fire. Using it on oil/electrical fires, for example, is a pretty poor idea, unless you dump a colossal amount onto it from a fire hose.
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Can global warming and the next ice age cancel out?
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We are currently in an [ice age](_URL_11_)\*, in an interglacial period. Since creatures first walked on land, about [500 million years ago](_URL_8_), it has rarely been [as cold as it is now](_URL_9_) *(horizontal axis is not uniform*). (\* It seems popular usage of the term "ice age", and scientific usage, are different.) Given the climate system is, mathematically, a complex system, I suspect the greenhouse gas driven warming might drive the planet into a warmer equilibrium. Global warming is not, in the long term, a problem for life on earth. (Unless we drive it many degrees warmer, not just a few. The [Eocene](_URL_10_) was not a fun time, and that was slower.) It is a problem for life on earth as we know it - the animals and plants we're familiar with (and have co-evolved with).
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If you are talking about rising sea levels from global warming then the issue isn't sea ice its the ice thats on top of the antarctic archipelago, green land, northern Europe, Russia and Northern Canada. There is lots of glacier that is sitting on the ground not floating on the Ocean.
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Why do you cry/shed a tear when you yawn?
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When you yawn your facial muscles contract. If the muscles around your eyes pull tight, they can squeeze the lacrimal gland (which produces tears) and/or lacrimal sac (which stores "overflow" tears) and push out tears.
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When you yawn the muscles in your face are literally squeezing the moisture (tears) in your tear ducts out yo face. For real. Like squeezing a sponge. If the 'sponge' has a lot of moisture there (maybe you don't blink a lot, or you naturally produce a lot of tears) then you're more likely to tear up when yawning. Yawning is contagious because the same part of our brain that picks up on shit from watching others do it--like figuring out what certain slang or mannerisms mean without really being told--are activated when watching someone else yawn. It's an empathetic thing; peeps with autism spectrum disorders--like Asperger's, for instance--don't yawn when witnessing others yawn. It's also 'good' for the brain, because of the momentary increase in oxygen. Yahoo answers has a buttload of wisdom of these topics, btw.
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Why when you get a misquito bite that it gives you a bump?
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The mosquito injects its saliva to stop clotting and allow it to drink your blood. But your body also reacts to this like a foreign invader or infection so it provokes an immune response, swelling the area and sensing irritation.
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There are very tiny nerve receptors in your skin if two or more of them are stimulated at the same time you get this sensation, sometimes the bug moved before you saw it, sometimes it can be dust or other debris, sometimes it can be a phantom response. For more on the nerves in your skin - _URL_0_
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Why do whirlpools cast shadows?
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Stagnant water can still cast a shadow. A whirlpool casts a different shadow due to the turbulence in the water which causes different directions in which the light scatters.
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It reflects off of different things. Think of the light beam hitting multiple angles instead of just the one point. As light isn't just the beam we see, but Muriel's waves, they all hit at different angles. As such, there are different shadows cast. It's pretty boss. Optics are cool.
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Is it theoretically possible to deconstruct a nucleus into its substituents and reconstruct a nucleus from the subatomic particles?
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We can't pick apart nuclei like LEGO blocks, but we can manipulate them using nuclear reactions. And we do so all the time, for experimental purposes, and also for commercial reasons where certain radioactive isotopes need to be harvested.
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yes, the process is called [transdifferentiation](_URL_1_) and it is achieved in a very similar fashion in the production of iPSCs where the governing transcription factors of a particular cell type are introduced exogenously into a different cell type. For instance, some scientists believe that bypassing the iPSC stage from a skin cell -- > neuron could be more easily done and just as useful. Here's an [example] _URL_0_. The idea is old but we the overall success of transdifferentiation experiments is relatively new.
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Why was the Tog Gear crew attacked in Argentina?
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Because Clarkson's Porsche had 'H982 FKL' written on the license plate, and Argentinians though it was a provocation because Argentina lost the Falklands War that went down in 1982. _URL_2_ _URL_2_
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/u/Georgy_K_Zhukov debunked one of the documents cited as "proof" of this theory [here](_URL_0_) and by /u/Bernadito in a [similar thread](_URL_2_). /u/commiespaceinvader answered [why Argentina is the go to country for these conspiracies](_URL_1_).
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If someone with a highly infectious disease (like Measles) walks into a doctor's office, what does the office have to do to keep others safe?
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If measles is suspected, the patient would be isolated and tested. They would probably have to be moved to a hospital. Airborne precautions are required for measles so the patient would wear a mask when not in isolation and would be kept in a negative-pressure room, healthcare workers would wear a respirator while in their room. The CDC would be alerted when the results are positive for measles. Anyone who was in the same room would have to show evidence of immunity to measles. If they weren't immune, they could be given the vaccine up to 3 days post exposure, or an immunoglobulin up to a week. The local health department would find out where the patient had been since they were contagious and make that information public so that anyone without immunity who might have been I'm the same place as the patient could go to a doctor. This would go similarly for most highly contagious and dangerous diseases, the CDC publishes protocols for just about everything on their website.
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Experts interview patients and track their past movements to find out everyone they may have had contact with (example: everyone who was on the same flight, everyone who ate lunch at the same restaurant, etc.) until they find someone else who also has the disease. If that second person got sick before the patient then they gave it to the patient; if they got sick after, the patient gave it to them. Assuming the second person gave it to the patient, the investigators now interview the second person and track their movements until they figure out who that patient got it from. This continues until they find patient zero, who in the cases you mention picked it up by travelling to a country where measles still circulates commonly.
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How many strands of RSV are there and does RSV mutate like the flu?
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There are a large number of strains of RSV (i'm not sure of the exact number), but they are grouped into 2 subtypes, A and B, by antigen. RSV, like any nucleic acid, has the potential to mutate, but is considered more antigenically stable than influenza (which has a higher potential for antigenic drift).
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It's called ["antigenic shift"](_URL_0_), and influenza is notorious for this. In the case of influenza, the virus has 8 strings of RNA, each of which codes one or more proteins. When the virus reproduces, multiple copies of all of these RNA strings are packaged into fresh virions and extruded from the host cell. If more than one strain of influenza simultaneously infects the same host cell, the virions that bud off are likely to include a mix of some RNA strands from each of the parent strains of influenza. This allows a random reassortment of genes in a manner very similar to sexual reproduction, and gives the virus a tremendous ability to change and adapt. This is a big part of the reason that influenza is such a difficult disease for the medical system to control.
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Foreign Aid. Why does the US give millions to stable countries such as Mexico and China?
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Much of that aid is in the form of food and education and other humanitarian aid in parts of the world that don't have enough of it. Yes, the government might be stable, but that doesn't mean that we can't help the people who live there.
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The aid is military aid, and it doesn't come in the form of cash, but rather credit to buy American weapons. It's purpose is to maintain political stability in the region in order to maintain oil supply and protect the canal. It's secondary purpose is to maintain the military industrial complex; in order for the weapons manufacturers to stay a float(and be ready for war) they need a constant supply of contracts. The money comes from American tax payers... Obviously.
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Does using my gas oven in winter "waste" energy?
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You are right, a gas oven is pretty much 100% efficient in terms of converting chemical energy to heat. Likewise, something as simple as a light bulb, or as complicated as a computer is also 100% effective in converting electrical energy to heat. That's the beauty of thermodynamics, eventually any external energy you add in to the system will be dissipated as heat. Usually this is a source of inefficiency, but not when your goal is to warm your house. So as long as your house is heated by conventional heating^1 (e.g. using a broiler or space heaters), then pretty much any device will be as efficient in turning external energy into heat as the central heating system. 1. I felt obligated to add this caveat since [heat pumps](_URL_0_) can have an efficiency, or a coefficient of performance greater than 1.
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Yes, that waste is converted to heat. But, where does that electricity come from? If it comes from a coal power plant, it may be better for the environment if that 40W came from the gas burner in your basement rather than the coal power plant (through inefficient power lines). If your electricity comes from solar/hydro/nuclear/geothermal, then the best environmental choice would be for you to use electric heat in your house, and the electricity used by your computer/fridge/lights/etc. is no different from the electricity going to your electric heater. Also, if you heat your house with gas, then 40W of electricity is much more expensive than 40W of natural gas.
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Why Nielsen Ratings are still used as an actual way to measure ratings, and why we can't figure out a better way to assess how many people are watching a show?
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ok, Why still used? because its an established method that has been around for a while. He has a monopoly on the industry, and he has revised his methodology over time to include other media types. Figure out a better way? Sure why not, just become a statistician and go for it? But odds are, hes hired some already with his bigger budget, and hes got them all working on a way to present accurate results. Basically, the data relies on real feedback; set top boxes, or through cable systems. Either way the larger the sample size, the better it is overall. Its pretty accurate, its not like he spins a big wheel in his office to guess ratings.
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UK TV Production student here! In the UK we use an organisation called the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (BARB). They select a broad range of different people from the general public and install technology in their home that records what they're watching. They even have systems which detect how many people are in the room at the same time watching a given TV programme. They then estimate how many people may have watched a programme in the country using the data collected from the people participating in the BARB panel. The BARB website states their "reporting panel is 5,100 homes. The panel homes are located across the UK and represent the viewing of all individuals aged 4 and over within the household (plus their guests) and return data on a daily basis from around 11,500 people. All digital terrestrial, satellite and cable platforms are represented". _URL_0_
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When electronics, such as smartphones, preform multiple tasks at once, or for an extended period of time, what makes the device hot?
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Any time an electric current passes through a conductor, a little bit of heat is generated. If an electronic device is hard at work, you have lots and lots and lots of tiny currents passing through lots and lots and lots of tiny conductors. Together those tiny amounts of heat add up to a substantial amount I really. This isn't limited to handheld electronics. For one or two decades computer hobbyists have had fun trying to push their computer hardware to work faster than what it was designed to do. This practice is called "overclocking" and one of the key challenges is controlling the heat that gets generated to prevent the circuits from getting damaged. This means overclocked computers will have very intricate cooling systems. Some even use liquid (contained in pipes and tubes) to cool the circuits!
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A fan in phone would make it too fat. So it uses a heat sink instead. When it reaches maximum temp it then bottlenecks itself til working temps ate resumed..
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Why does the sound of rain relax me and help me sleep?
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You relax and go to sleep easier when there is a constant noise. The rain will cover all other noises and make it's own raining monotone noise.
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I think as an addition to /u/DanceAmbulance 's text, it's worth mentioning that the human eye recognizes how much natural light there is around it, and if the sun isn't shining, it may think that night is coming and you need to go to sleep. Also the air is fresh during/after raining so that might help. + the rain's sounds are so calming.
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How early did mankind first have an accurate map of the entire globe?
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In order to answer the question you must first say what was the last discover that really changed how a map looks. To me there is two discovers that change how a map looks to the human eye. The first was the discovery of Bass Strait in 1800 and the full mapping of Alaska around the same time. Here is a map from 1808 that has no major omissions unless you count Antartica and the North Pole. _URL_0_
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You may be interested in my previous [posts](_URL_0_) about [Roman maps](_URL_1_). The short version is that we have no complete surviving maps of the world until the *Tabula Peutingeriana*, a medieval copy of what was essentially a late antique road map, not a chart intended to accurately show distances and angles. That the Romans were capable of extremely accurate world maps is quite obvious from the tables of distances the geographers give us. We also have a large number of local and private maps, as well as fragments of the *Forma Urbis*, but barring the *Tabula Peutingeriana* we have no surviving world maps (we know that they existed though), and no provincial maps (for which I believe we have no evidence in any case)
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The Franco-Prussian War and Impressionism
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Hmm, a lot of work has been done on the relationship between Impressionism and Hausmann's transformation of Paris so there's room perhaps to tie that to the Franco-Prussian war. Maybe you could also look at Manet's paintings of modern naval warfare?
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I seem to remember seeing old Newspapers and especially Karrikatures (sic) with Jokes about the lacking military Prowess of the French stemming back to the time of Otto von Bismarck here in german Museums. The Franco-Prussian war was quite an embaressment, since it was France who declared the war (Emser Depesche) and got squarely beaten, lost a region long fought over to their enemy, who humilitated them by proclaiming their empire in one of the most iconic rooms in France. This was followed by a lot of anger on the French side and the wish of the German Empire to "finish the Job" (see the Krieg-in-Sicht/war-in-sight crisis)
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How does rust harbor tetanus?
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And it's not the rust *per se* that necessarily harbors the tetanus. Tetanus is in the dirt. When you impale or puncture yourself on something dirty, you are sticking the dirt particles into your flesh into a place where air can't get to it. Tetanus is caused by *Clostridium tetani*, a spore-forming bacterium that likes to grow in wet, nutrient-rich, unoxygenated enviroments, like in closed-off flesh-wounds. The spores get shoved all up in there -- > they germinate -- > they multiply -- > then they make tetanus toxin -- > then lockjaw.
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Rusted metal doesn't actually cause tetanus. Tetanus is caused by the bacterium Clostridium tetani, which often resides in soil, dust, feces etc. Tetanus can be caused by any puncture wound infected with this bacterium. The reason why rusted metal poses a higher risk of infection has to do with the depth of the potential wound (tetanus thrives in low oxygen environments such as deep below the skin) and the fact that old, rusted metal has a higher probability of being exposed to the bacterium. So tl:dr any wound can cause Tetanus, but rusty metal is risky because old, dirty and pokey.
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Were foreign diplomats from non-white nations restricted by US segregation laws?
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/u/The_Alaskan gave an absolutely stunning answer to a similar question a few months ago: * [What happened when black diplomats when to Rhodesia, apartheid South Africa or Jim Crow United States?](_URL_0_)
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The strictest meaning is that the children of foreign diplomats born on US soil don't get automatic citizenship, because the parents, having diplomatic immunity, aren't subject to US jurisdiction. There's some argument that it should also apply to children born of illegal immigrants, but that argument hasn't made any progress in courts.
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The difference between single-payer healthcare and Medicare for all
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Single Payer Healthcare means all health care costs are paid by one entity, like the provincial (state) government in Canada. That entity may get its money from other sources (in Canada the Federal government and a health care tax all working Canadians pay). It doesn't have to be the provincial government, it could be the Federal, it could be one for profit health insurance provider, it could be Bill Gates. Medicare for all is just one implementation of a single payer system. You would take the existing Medicare system and just extend it to everyone not just people over 65 (I think that's the age)
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The "single payer" emphasizes that the entire health care system is financed through the government only, as opposed to many different insurance companies or directly through patients. It is a bit misleading because the government obviously levies taxes to pay for health care, and there are many tax payers, not one. Canada, the UK and Italy, for example, have this in place. The advantages are that administrative overhead costs are low since there is only one organization doing the administration, also it does not seek a profit. Further, the government as single representative of an entire health care providers can haggle for much greater discounts than a single doctor or hospital ever could. A disadvantage is that the people employed in these health care systems, most notably the doctors, are not paid as well as those in countries with profit-oriented health care, so they will always have to live with a certain amount of personnel leaving for places like the US.
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What was the Strategic importance of Stalingrad during WWII?
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> What were the advantages of the Germans taking it, Little to none, Stalingrad was never an intricate part of Operation Blau. Original orders were to encircle the city, even though a full encirclement would probably be avoided, and bring the traffic on the river under artillery fire to deny needed supplies to the Red Army. > rather than just besieging it and letting the Red Army starve to death. Besieging it was impossible, there were some 5 armies on both flanks of the city preventing any German crossing of the Volga. > Also, why focus on Stalingrad when the political capital is Moscow? Because the war was no longer being waged as a "Blitzkrieg" campaign, it was now a war of attrition for which Germany needed resources, like oil, located in the south of the Soviet Union rather than Moscow.
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hi! you may find something of interest in these related posts * [Was winter the most important factor in the Soviet victory at Stalingrad?](_URL_2_) * [Why did Germany lose the battle of Stalingrad?](_URL_1_) - mostly book recommendations, but there are a couple of links to other posts * [What made Stalingrad such a focus of the Germans and what made it so particularly hard to take?](_URL_3_) * [How did the Soviet defenders in Stalingrad hold on against the Wehrmacht until reinforcements could arrive?](_URL_0_)
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What is the difference between a budget car tyre and a premium brand. What happens during the manufacture of them to make such a noticable difference in grip?
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First you have the rubber; what ingredients are used? The natural rubber can have several qualities, everything from pure condom rubber to rubber with sticks and insects in it. Then you have the additives, what proportions are used? Sulfur and stuff. Porpotions between natural and synthetic rubber. The best premium recipes are guarded secrets. Some rubbers are soft and some durable, a consideration has to be done. Then you have the cord, how well did they manufacture them? What materials? Oh, and we must not forget the "baking" of the rubber, times and temperatures, expensive brands care, cheap brands don't care. Then the pattern design.
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Well, a couple of things. Snow tires have/use a much softer rubber compound than your average all weather tire. Because of the softer compound the tire still maintains flex and deflection while cold. Rubber in standard tires are notorious for becoming hard when cold. As rubber becomes harder is is more prone to losing grip because of lost friction. Softer rubber compound combats this. In addition, most (not all) snow/winter tires DO NOT carry a mileage guarantee. Simply they do not last very long under normal (not cold/ice/snow) conditions. Snow tires are only designed to be used in cold/ice/snow. Snow tires are usually a "high void" tire. Similar to mud tires they are designed so the force of the tire spinning "voids" or throws the snow/ice out of the tread. You can usually see this happening if you are behind/beside a car with high void tires. Souce: I was a tire salesman for several years on the mid-atlantic seaboard.
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If MRIs can detect Cancer and early detection is so important then why don't we all go for full body MRI scans every year or so?
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Another thing to keep in mind is that while early detection is good, yes, MRIs don't just detect cancer early. They detect a whole host of things that are 99% of the time completely benign, however each of those things would still need to be looked into. That means extra cost of running tests, extra stress for the people undergoing these tests, extra man hours for doctors, all to detect something that... wasn't worth detecting.
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1. Those machines are very expensive. Cost is a significant issue. 2. It is non-trivial to find cancer even with such scans (unless it has progressed a long way). Maybe soon we'll have AIs that can do it well. 3. Radiation exposure is best avoided unless there's a good reason. But with all that said, there *are* times when doctors do scans even when they don't really suspect cancer. Such as when someone has a strong genetic predisposition for a certain type of cancer.
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Why do my leftovers stick if I don't wash my plate soon after eating?
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The moisture in the leftovers kept them from adhering to the plate. When you leave it out, they dry up and stick to the surface. Basically, on a very small scale your plate is not a smooth surface, it has peaks and valleys and such. With moist things like sauce, the food particles flow all over these peaks and valleys. As the water evaporates, such particles are no longer suspended and can't flow as easily, so they are sort of interlocked with the rough surface of your plate. This is why dry food like uncooked pasta doesn't just stick to dishes like tape. Special materials like Teflon are engineered to minimize the surface contact between food and dish, thus making them much easier to clean.
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Friction, is the short answer. Plates are porous, if microscopically so; food remains become increasingly rigid as they dehydrate, and, absent lubrication, end up sharing a large surface area relative to their volume and mass, hugely increasing friction. This is exacerbated by heat, which expands the plate; when it cools it also slightly contracts (on a microscopic scale), tightening it's porous parts around lodged particles.
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Why is Jill Stein the one requesting the recount? What is she expecting to get out out of it?
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The Green Party is not widely known and its presidential aspirations were not taken very seriously by the left of the Democratic party, which is the demographic they might appeal to. This gets her and the Green Party in the news (much like her arrest warrant in the Dakota pipeline protests). The difference now is that the major parties are done campaigning, so there is more focus on her/her party. Yea, she can't win, but from her perspective only good can come from the recount. Added publicity leads people to learn about the Green Party and in the off chance that it changes some electoral college votes, the party more closely aligned with the Green Party (Democrats) stands to benefit.
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There's a misunderstanding about what your vote is actually for. You're not saying, "Hey everyone, I want Jill Stein to be president," you're saying, "Hey, state I live in, I think Jill Stein would be the best president for our state." The fact that states even use a vote tally to choose electors isn't mandated anywhere but in their own rules. A state's legislature could vote to choose electors based on which direction the wind was blowing if the state passed a law to that effect.
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Why is being skeptical about certain things (like the existence of God) make you a freethinker, but being skeptical about other things get you labeled as a "conspiracy theorist" or a "denier?"
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Skepticism doesn't mean *"doubt everything"*. It means *"question everything"*. Some questions have answers.
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Atheist: "I have no reason to believe in a god, so I don't" Agnostic: "One cannot know whether or not a god exists." Secular: "Decisions should be made without reference to religious beliefs" Edit: Thanks for the gold! Great discussion, I'm enjoying reading people's different takes on this.
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when someone has a higher alcohol tolerance than someone else, what’s the difference on a molecular level?
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There's these tiny little molecules in your body that break alcohol down into not-alcohol (alcohol dehydrogenase). some people have more of these little worker buddies than others. A lot of it is genetic. Old people have less.
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I can speak of alcohol. You have to build up tolerance to get a BAC above .10%. If you don't have tolerance, you will get sick and lose a lot of the alcohol you are trying to take in. 0.25% is getting to the point where you could overdose on alcohol. Granted, the chance of overdosing at this percentage is kind of low, IIRC it is less than an LD of 25, but you could die. If you can get your BAC up to 0.40%, the LD goes up to 50. That means that you are flipping a coin as to if you live or die at this BAC. I imagine that if you can get to 0.60% you are not going to like the experience even if you live. The thing is that you can't accidentally overdose on alcohol unless you have tolerance. You also can't change how much alcohol you can put in your body without there being a significant risk of death.
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How do people that go to jail pay their fines?
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It's paid after they serve their sentence. If they have to pay a fine, it is added as a condition of their probation/parole. They usually won't be able to complete their probation/parole if they don't pay the fine.
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If it's the result of a lawsuit. It goes to the plaintiffs (and their lawyers). If it's the result of a government bureaucracy fine, it goes into the government's coffers.
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What is the sensation that we experience when we sleep that feels like falling and causes us to wake up suddenly?
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It’s called a hypnic jerk and it’s a muscle spasm that we can’t control. Think of it like sleep hiccups. Some people think it’s caused when your brain is trying to take over at the same time youre about to go to sleep. Other people feel like it’s evolutionary. Our monkey minds are telling us we’re falling from a tree
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When you're in between deep sleep and the lighter sleep where it's easy to wake up, the sleep paralysis that stops you from acting out your dreams can do strange shit. Sometimes you'll be surfacing to wakefulness again when your brain accidently throws the sleep paralysis switch again. The sudden tension in the body can feel like falling to a sleep-frazzled mind, and it galvanizes you strongly it can even create the sensation you'd dropped onto the bed and bounced. You didn't. Your body just got switched into safe mode by accident.
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If you load a boat with twice its maximum weight in cargo but the cargo is birds and at any point half of them are flying will the boat sink?
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A boat that can carry 100 tonnes of cargo can carry at most 100 tonnes of birds (whether they are flying or not is irrelevant). If you are confused about this answer look into the difference between force and mass as well as Newton's 3rd law of motion.
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As long as the water displaced by the hull weighs more than the boat does, the boat will float. Just look up Archimedes' Principle (of bouyancy).
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Why do computers break after 3-5 years of use?
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I assemble my own desktops and they last far longer than that. Even the one I have with an SSD drive has had 0 failures. My retail laptops have generally failed for Newtonian reasons before the 5 year mark but I don't think you're referring to computers literally breaking into pieces. What *do* you mean by "break"? Every few years I'll reformat and reinstall the OS on my computers. This cleans out all the drivers, background applications that start automatically, and registry (configuration) entries which helps to prevents slowdowns and conflicts. Edit: typos
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There is an exchange of electric potential, which involves current flow through the delicate components of the computer. If this is beyond what those components are designed to handle then they fail, permanently. Some incredibly tiny component is physically damaged.
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Why do most car commercials advertise the leasing price of a car if most consumers buy, instead of lease, their cars?
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People that buy their car tend to keep their car for a long time. Let's say 4-6 years on average. People that lease switch cars every 2 to 3 years. Say 2/3 of people buy their car and 1/3 lease. Since the lease terms are half of typical car ownership periods, that means over 4-6 years, there are just as many leasers looking for cars as there are buyers, even though quantitatively there are "more" buyers.
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Look at a lease as paying for depreciation on a car. If a car costs $40,000 and will be worth $30,000 in 3 years, then your lease payments should be approximately $10,000 spread out over those 3 years. The advantage of leasing is it saves you the hassle of having to sell or trade in the car after 3 years. It is rarely significantly better or worse (financially) than simply buying and trading in every 3 years... just more convenient if that's what you want to do.
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Why is orange such a holy color in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism?
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As I understand it it's not orange per se, but *saffron* which is extremely expensive to cultivate and shows the dedication to the faith through that cost
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It's because purple's not a fruit. The currently cultivated orange is the product of several citrus varieties that originate in Eastern Asia and India. The earliest cognate we have for "orange" is the Snaskrit नारङ्ग (nāraṅga). It appears as far back as 500 BC in the *Sushruta Samhita*, a text which among other medical topics, describes medicinal uses for plants. As the fruit moved westward, so did this name for it. We see the word in Persian, then Arabic, and eventually Turkic, Germanic, and Romance languages. And with most of these cognates, the word is shared between the color and the fruit: Spanish *naranja* and *anaranjado*, Arabic برت قال and برتقالي .
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How can we have heart-lung bypass and kidney dialysis but not liver dialysis? What makes creating liver dialysis so difficult?
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ELI5 version: The kidney is a filter. The liver is a factory. We can build pretty good filters, and add stuff back in if we need to. Replicating every single synthetic and metabolic function of the liver would take a machine that can perform thousands of different reactions at controlled rates.
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Short answer: the liver is an insanely complex organ, responsible for something around 500 separate processes in the human body. To create a machine that could take over all of those functions would be nearly impossible and very impractical. At least at this point in science. I'm sure a larger answer is coming, but that's the gist.
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Why are we so naturally drawn to turning left?
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The short answer is that we're not. American sporting events do seem to be but it's hardly universal. To answer the American sporting case: NASCAR goes counter-clockwise because US horse racing goes counter-clockwise because certain European horse racing goes counter clockwise (or because the English went clockwise and the US colonies hated the English – it's not totally clear). But lots of European and Australian horse racing events are run clockwise, not counter-clockwise. _URL_0_ i.e. for US sporting events, it's tradition. Cultural traditions become deeply ingrained – to the point where they may seem instinctive. Some people feel driving on the right is "instinctive" but there are numerous countries which feel the opposite way. However, many of these traditions tend to align over time for reasons of compatibility.
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Our brains are cross wired, and it generally depends on what side of the brain is dominant. The right brain controls the left side of your body, and vice versa. It's rare, but it does happen where someone is truly Ambidextrous, where they are equally capable with with hands. However, that is rare, and how our society has developed, if you start showing prominence to one hand or another, people will continue to stimulate to use that hand, as opposed to the other. Interesting "fun fact" in Latin, the word for left side is "sinister" so for the longest time in Catholic schools (this happened to my grandmother and has since fallen out of practice) they tied her naturally dominant left hand behind her desk and made her write with her right hand. Because being left handed was considered being evil.
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What’s happening when you see a flickering star?
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The atmosphere is made of gaseous fluid. That fluid varies in density. That variation causes light to bend in different ways. Stars flicker because the atmosphere causes the light to bend. Our minds interpret it as that flicker.
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Well, to be fair, stars do look sort of like that. The distortion in the light as it passes through Earth's atmosphere makes the stars appear to twinkle, giving them shifting points that can only be depicted as static when drawn.
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Why is vaping nicotine supposedly better for your health than smoking cigarettes?
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Forget the nicotine, that is not what is bad about smoking. smoking is bad for you because of the chemistry that happens when you burn stuff. It's why people die from smoke inhalation during house fires. Smoking causes you to ingest all sorts of toxic chemicals. Not because they are put into cigarettes, but because they are created when you burn them.
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In the short term, yes. Nicotine stimulates nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in the brain, which can lead to a brief improvement in some cognitive functions. There was actually a recent study looking at using nicotine patches as a treatment for Alzheimer's type dementia (nicotine has a *somewhat* similar effect to the drugs we use now to slow the decline in that disease). However, the long-term negatives of tobacco use **clearly** outweigh that positive, and there are other mechanisms to achieving the cognitive "boost" associated with nicotine. **EDIT:** For the hoards of people who asked if there are negative effects of nicotine itself, yes, there are several discussions elsewhere on this thread regarding the research indicating [nicotine itself being carcinogenic](_URL_0_) (as well as being linked to several other negative health concerns). However, our understanding of isolated nicotine use is somewhat less advanced, and further research is needed.
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Why is a perpetual motion machine impossible to build?
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The rules of thermodynamics can be loosely put as: Zero: The universe wants to play a game where it changes your internal energy. One: You can't beat the universe. You can only hope to tie it. Two: You can only tie the universe at absolute zero. Three: You can't get to absolute zero. Building a machine that never loses energy in some form to the universe is impossible under these constraints. *Side note: Did you know that starting a numbered list in this format autocorrects to begin with "1." if you try to start it with another number, like "0." or "3."? Just finding this out.*
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> For example if you put a spring in between two magnets, and had some device that could generate electricity from the tension in the spring You can't generate electricity from tension, because tension means that everything is in equilibrium. There has to be actual *motion* to get work out of a system and generate electricity.
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Why does your computer also upload small amounts of data when you are downloading something and what is it uploading ?
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Data is downloaded in small pieces. Your computer is basically just acknowledging that it received certain pieces without any errors and would like the next couple of pieces to be sent. And if there were errors or some pieces weren't received, your computer will ask for these pieces to be resent.
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It depends on a lot. What is your name, address, and link to the file you were downloading?
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why do dry erase markers erase themselves if you color over a line you already drew?
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The pigment in the marker is dissolved in alcohol. The alcohol evaporates after you write with the marker and expose it to air, leaving the pigment as a dry, solid layer (though easily wiped away). This is why you can't write with dried-out markers. But if you write over the pigment with the marker, it dissolves again in the alcohol you're adding.
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A pencil mark is just graphite on top of a piece of paper. Think of it like something sticking to a frying pan. The eraser is like the spatula that scrapes it off with friction. Pen in actually is absorbed by the paper. Like water on a paper towel. You can't really remove it once it is there.
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Why does the body release, instead of retain, liquid in the form of diarrhea when that means we are dehydrated?
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Pretty sure it’s the other way around...You get dehydrated from having diarrhea. That’s why people die from cholera.
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You have it the wrong way round. Diarrhea is a common cause of dehydration. The diarrhea is itself a response of the body to certain type of infection, aiming to physically remove the germs from the bowels. EDIT: Some infections also directly cause diarrhea themselves, which they have evolved to do in order to spread to new people.
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If the human body completely regenerates it's cells after five years, how are tattoos so permanent?
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Tattoo ink isn't injected into cells, it sits between cells and can't be destroyed by the body.
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It is only the top [level of skin](_URL_0_), the epidermis, that has cells that quickly divide and are replaced. Tattoo ink is deposited in the dermis, the next layer down, in which the cells divide much more slowly. Even then, the ink will [eventually fade as the cells divide](_URL_1_), it just takes a much longer time.
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Why do most guys wiggle their legs up and down rapidly while sitting?
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This isn't just a guy thing, I've seen many girls do it too. I don't know why we do it but I've heard some do it because of anxiety
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Odd numbered legs: good for sitting level on many surfaces, bad for locomotion.
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Could the earthquake in Mexico have affected a sensitive digital scale in Northern Ohio?
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It's not impossible. Here is a [visualization of the seismic waves from the M8 Mexico earthquake impacting the US array](_URL_1_). Peak shaking (as recorded by a seismometer, not felt by humans) occurs across the US between 4:56 and 5:09 UTC (-4 to get to EST) so around 1 am would have been when the P and S waves were arriving. [User info for a similarly sensitive balance](_URL_0_) lists 'Distant earthquakes, etc. Vibrations such as those above are often indiscernible to humans but strong enough to make a microbalance unstable' as a potential interference on accurate measurements. Would need to know precise timing of when the disturbance occurred compared to arrival times of seismic waves to know for sure (or at least make sure that it's possible) and eliminate more local effects like strong wind gusts outside (also listed as potential source of interference).
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Earthquakes have collapsed steel structures, notably in 1985 in Mexico City. Damage also occurred to the connections in many steel buildings during the 1994 Northridge Earthquake (but there were no collapses). Lessons from these and other quakes have been incorporated into modern codes - especially in California, which has the most advanced seismic building code in the world.
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How do big box stores like Wal-Mart and Target make money off of iPhone sales if they sell them at the same price (or lower) than what the carriers' subsidized price is?
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the stores are not buying at retail price. they're buying at wholesale price.
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They do that to avoid running afoul of manufacturer set minimum prices. Manufacturers of premium goods, generally sell them in expensive retail outlets (with skilled sales staff). If customers go to the store and take lots of staff time to make a decision but buy on a cheaper Amazon the retailers will go broke, and manufacturer will lose the valuable high touch sales staff. Legally manufacturers in the US aren't allowed to set minimum prices, but they can contractually require retailers not to advertise prices below a minimum amount. Only showing prices in a shopping cart doesn't advertise prices and is a way for stores like Amazon to not violate these agreements.
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How does a lightrail work?
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You mean [Lightrail](_URL_0_)? Exactly the same way as heavy rail, but with lower speeds and less coaches. They usually only service outer-city areas. Inner-city is serviced by metro/tramways and big distances between cities are serviced by heavy rail, which is faster and has bigger capacity.
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_URL_0_ Here is a old educational video about how it works. Still relevant and accurate today.
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How and When did we "discover" the nutritional value of food?
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Just to provide a little encouragement, this is definitely answerable! The Greeks, Romans, Middle Ages Christians, and Hindus all definitely wrote down or alluded to their understandings of food's necessity and the operation of the body. I would even be willing to bet we can glean some understanding of earlier views on the subject, by analyzing sacrificial customs and myths.
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They didn't. They just knew the effects of eating certain plants and what certain plants would do based on taste and smell. It's the main reason we have a sense of taste, to be able to tell if something has lots of sugar, acid, salt, etc.
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How does snake venom coagulate blood?
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Snakes have lots of different types of venom, so I'll go with cobras as an example. Cobra venom has, among other things, the enzyme phospholipase A2. This enzyme is a hydrolase, which means it breaks things down using water molecules. In this case, it breaks down phosphatidylcholine. Phosphatidylcholine is a really important part of our cell membranes, especially red blood cell membranes. Without it, the cells break open and dump out all of their contents into the bloodstream. All the various organelles and other parts of the cell in the blood can sort of clump together and clump with the components of other broken cells. This is what causes the blood to coagulate. This all happens very quickly too which is why cobras are dangerous! [Here is an article talking more about the mechanisms](_URL_0_) Not safe for snake-a-phobes.
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Some snake venoms have the ability to cause massive clots in your blood which is why it turns into a gel. The reason it can do this is because it activates your coagulation pathway in your blood somehow. There are a few mechanisms that can cause this. The snake venom could be an activator of prothrombin, fibrinogen, protein C, factor X, factor V, factor VII, etc. What mechanism is used to activate the coagulation pathway depends on what the prothrombic molecule is in the venom. Here is a list of some that I just found by googling: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) EDIT: you can google the coagulation cascade if you'd like. You'll find it to be extremely convoluted which is why snakes can evolve many mechanisms to activate the cascade.
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Why are bolt action rifles more accurate than semi-automatic rifles?
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Semi-automatic and automatic weapons use springs and shock absorbers powered by the propellent in conjunction with levers, cams, and other mechanical works to advance the weapon to the condition needed to fire the next round. Those mechanisms are inducing torque and shifts of weight and balance throughout the firing cycle, which can impact the aim of the shooter.
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Because of the need to use the rearward inertia (recoil) to cycle the bolt, semi-auto shotguns need to have a certain amount of recoil to work properly. For 2-inch shells, bird shot, and other non-00 buck, this may be an issue and could result in a failure to cycle properly. Pump-action does away with these concerns and is generally, more reliable.
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Do bigger cars have an advantage over smaller cars when the driver hits a deer?
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I couldn't find the height of the CR-V grill so based on the picture and height of the tire (215/70R16 is 27" tall) it looks to be around 40". White-tail deer shoulder height is 21" to 47". The CR-V would hit the body of the tallest deer, and the altima would hit the legs and probably end with the deer through the windshield.
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Deer have a few advantages that humans do not, we have clothing. First a deer a layer of fat around their organs and under their skin, that acts as insulation layer. Their winter fur, is actually two layers, an outer layer that's made of hollow hairs, and forms a dense weather resistant layer, and an inner layer that's like goose down, and traps a layer of warm air close to the body. Effectively their fur is like a outer weather resistant jacket, and a wool sweater on the inside. _URL_0_
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Why is mint considered the ideal smell for fresh breath?
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Because mint grew easily and abundantly in the average garden. It was also one of the more pleasantly pungent smells and helped people digest meals. So after a large meal, people would chew on a bunch of leaves. It was passed down through generations as a herbal remedy for both bad breath and tummy troubles. So now we associate mint with good breath.
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It´s not that mint breath is considered to be the most pleasant. Rather menthol is uniquely able to mask other types of breath smells and has other beneficial attributes for oral hygiene.
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During WWII, did the Soviet Union ever have any battles directly against the Allied forces? (US, Britain, Australia, etc.)
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You may be interested in this question that was asked about a month ago [Has the United States ever gotten into a direct military conflict with Russia where casualties were involved?](_URL_0_)
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Without its allies, Germany would not have been able to fight the USSR the way it did. Up to one third of all personal on the Eastern Front were non Germans. Now most of the front line troops were Germans, with Finland and Romania being the next regular armies. There were also hundreds of thousands of Russians/Ukrainians/Baltic/Caucasians fighting for the German side, mostly used to fight partisans and for security and occupation purposes. (freeing the Germans to fight the Red Army) Spain and Italy also contributed to the Eastern Front, as well as small numbers of international SS volunteers. Hungary and Slovakia only contributed relatively small numbers. Bulgaria did not send troops against the USSR. A good book is Rolf-Dieter Müller An der Seite der Wehrmacht Hitlers ausländische Helfer beim "Kreuzzug gegen den Bolschewismus" 1941-1945
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Quantum mechanical states are modelled as rays in a Hilbert space, but how do I know _which_ Hilbert space?
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When dealing with quantum mechancis your hilbert space will be made using the eigenvectors of a hermitian operator (all operators corresponding to observables are hermitian). Because the basis set obtained in this way is always complete, you can describe any state using it. This means your hilbert space can be made from the eigenvectors of any operator corresponding to an observable and you will be able to describe the state of your system using it. As for finding the initial state of an actual physical system, you would need to do some sort of experiment to measure it. I can't really be more specific than that with such a vague question.
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An object like this: |a > is called a "ket vector". It form part of what is called Dirac bra-ket notation. The "bra vector" is denoted by: < a|. These are how the states of quantum mechanical systems are represented mathematically. To make a familiar analogy, you can think of flipping a coin. But instead of a classical coin, you flip a quantum coin. There are two possible "basis states": heads or tails. You can write them as: |H > and |T > . These just tell you the state of the quantum coin flip. A ket vector for a quantum system encodes everything you can possibly know about it. If you know the ket which describes your system, you know everything you can possibly know about your system. If you lack full knowledge, you can't describe your system with a single ket. Instead you have to use a [density operator](_URL_0_).
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Why don't you see rain in sports tv broadcasts?
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My guess is that it's the focal length. When they show the field they have to use a rather large focal length since the players are rather far away. When they show the bench they would use a smaller focal length which would include the rain. Depth of field is probably also in play (no pun intended) here. Wider aperture for they players, since they move so much, but it can be narrower for the bench.
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Most likely because of the camera movement. & #x200B; on TV the camera focuses on the player and the rest moves around them. in person, you are already far and you point of view is the whole stadium.
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Can you die from the influenza virus itself? How?
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The influenza virus has the potential to be fatal. The cases you're referring to with bacterial infections work like this: When your immune system is already going balls to the wall against a preexisting foreign pathogen, it's weakened. Adding the influenza virus hammers down your immune system to the point where the virus can spread almost entirely without any resistance. Another common case is that of cancer patients. The reason why it's important to keep environments of cancer patients as clean as possible is because of their lowered immune system's which will result in almost guaranteed death if they're infected with another disease.
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They can die from a variety of things. It is a common misconception that the flu alone cannot kill you if you are young and healthy but this is not true. The 5 year old answer is that the flu can make you stop breathing and you can die. The more detailed response is that even in healthy people the bodies own response to the virus can lead to a condition called ARDS (adult respiratory distress syndrome). The lungs are damaged by the immune response to the virus and are flooded with immune cells and cells that make scar tissue. Many young healthy people die from this way from the flu and even sometimes other cold viruses such as coronavirus and RSV. It is also true that the flu also kills in other people by triggering heart attacks, asthma attacks, heart failure, and other problems in those already suffering from pre-existing conditions.
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What type of Government does Russia really have in practice? Socialist? Dictatorship? Democracy?
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Socialism is perhaps more an economic outlook than a form of government. Officially Russia is a democracy, however Putin's control over the press and a lack of general rights make it difficult to practice true democracy. As a result most would consider Russia to lean more towards a dictatorship.
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Autocratic empire until 1917, then communist for nearly 75 years. The USSR collapsed in 1991, and Russia has been an increasingly autocratic semi-democracy since then. Russia is absolutely **not** a communist state any more, and hasn't been for more than twenty years. Putin is the current president, who had a lot more personal power and influence than many would like. He served his terms as president, then had his handpicked successor elected, so then immediately appointed Putin as Prime Minister. After Medvedev had served a term as president, and Putin was eligible to run again, he did, and is now back in office. He managed to get the presidential term increased too :)
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How does drinking water after you eat not dilute the acid in your stomach which causes it to be ineffective at digesting food?
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Your stomach acid technically doesn't digest your food, it sterilises it. And provides an optimal environment for protein digesting enzymes to break down your food. Fat and carbohydrate breakdown occurs in the intestines (some in the mouth). Acid is continuously produced by your stomach lining and neutralised by secretions from your pancreas in your small intestines. So water won't dilute the acid too much as it's continuously added and removed from your stomach. The secretion of acid is also very tightly regulated by various hormones and receptors throughout your digestive tract.
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In short, yes drinking water dilutes stomach acid. However, the stomach is capable of detecting and correcting this change (as it tries to keep itself balanced at a certain pH). Even if you drink a liter of water directly before eating, the change in pH of your stomach acid will be correct quickly enough to make little difference in digestion. Alternatively, drinking water before or with a meal is known to promote other positive health effects that are more beneficial than the detrimental affects of the minor, temporary increase in the pH of your stomach acid. So yes, water dilutes gastric acid, not significantly enough or for long enough to affect digestion. Drinking water with food (and just generally staying hydrated) is significantly better than not doing so.
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What happens when you crack your knuckles? Is it bad for you?
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Related question: why does it feel so GOOD to crack a joint? There's like a palpable relief sensation, what causes that?
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We had a discussion about this in a fluid mechanics class a few years ago. Supposedly the bones move so quickly that cavitation bubbles are created. (Vapour pressure drops far enough in a small local area that some water molecules spontaneously become gas 24000 time the volume. They then extremely rapidly collapse with crazy high pressure and temperature). This can cause some pretty crazy pitting in things like boat propellers. I can only imagine that it would be worse in less hardness material like bone. Although the length of time involved is much less when cracking knuckles. Source: -Mechanical Engineer
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If I have a dataset with 85% of datapoints the same lowest number, can I still make a bell curve with standard deviations?
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A bell curve is the result of a "fair test", and so if you have a test where the results are all bunched up as you describe, then it's probably not a "fair test" in the first place, and you should investigate that. I do understand what you're getting at - imagining that everyone magically became genuinely smarter - but those results would not form a bell curve histogram at all, making the rest of your question moot. So if an IQ test started giving everyone the *equivalent* of today's 110 score, we more likely conclude that the test is somehow broken, and stop trusting it to mean anything.
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So you've got a set of numbers. It could be test scores, football stats, poll results, whatever. They (generally) form a bell curve. The average tells you where the bell is centered. Such-and-such football team averages 14 sacks per season, for example. But the average doesn't tell you how widely ranging the data is. Does that team almost always get 13 or 14 or 15 sacks per year, averaging out to 14? Or does it sometimes get 4 sacks, sometimes 6, sometimes 19, sometimes 26, etc, averaging to 14? The standard deviation is a mathematical trick, like the average, that tells you how widely varying the data is. Essentially, two-thirds of the data points will be within 1 standard deviation in either direction of the average. 95% of the data will be within 2 standard deviations. 99% will be within 3 standard deviations. So if you have a very small StDev, it means that the data is very tightly clustered together. If you have a very large StDev, it means that the data is spread out.
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Why were dowries necessary in medieval and early modern Europe?
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While you wait for more targeted answers, there are some resources in previous threads that may be of interest: * [How and why did dowries develop?](_URL_1_) - 3 comments, over 3 months old. * The commenters speak only for Classical Athens with some mention of China and India, but they also go into the reasoning behind dowries across various cultures. * [When and why did the practice of dowries end in Western Europe?](_URL_0_) - 4 comments, less than 1 month old. * No answer is given in the thread itself, but a commenter points to a book published on the matter.
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> Dowries exists in societies where capital is more valuable than manual labor. For instance, in Middle-Age Europe, the family of a bride-to-be was compelled to offer a dowry —- land, cattle and money —- to the family of the husband-to-be. Bridewealth exists in societies where manual labor is more important than capital. In Sub-Saharan Africa where land was abundant and there were few or no domesticated animals, manual labor was more valuable than capital, and therefore bridewealth dominated. [Source](_URL_0_) ELI5: Capital > Labor: “I have access to lots of people to work for me, so if you want me to take in your daughter you better make it worth my while.” Labor > Capital: “I need more workers! How much for your daughter?”
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"The proton has never been observed to decay and hydrogen-1 is therefore considered a stable isotope." Is there no more stringent way of defining H1 as a stable isotope?
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The stability of the proton is an open problem (it's stable in the Standard Model, but decays with an extremely long half-life in some Grand Unified Theories). At any rate though, if the decay exists, it is so exceedingly rare as to be negligible even on time scales on the order of the age of the universe.
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The answer is maybe. It depends on if the proton can decay. Current theoretical estimates put that half life around 10^35 years. It has not been seen, but people are looking. There are many "stable" isotopes that have a half life. We call them stable since their half lives are far longer than the age of the universe.
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Does the number of brain cells correlate to intelligence in humans?
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No. If this were the case, babies would be geniuses. During developmental stages, humans have more brain cells than at any other point in their lives. However, it's basically like neuron pudding. Babies go through a dramatic neural pruning.
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The volume of the brain doesn't matter. The number of folding is what matters. Imagine having a 100 meter square sheet, versus a 10 meters square sheet. Now take the large one and cram it into a human skull. Do the same with the 10 m2 sheet and push it down into the elephant skull. The 100 m2 sheet has obviously more neurons, and a much bigger number of foldings when the fabric is crammed into such a relatively small volume. This allows neurons from any part of the sheet to be in close contact with other neurons that are normally far away when the sheet is flat, this creates obviously far more contact between all the neurons and thus more intelligence. Brain to body ratio is another factor to intelligence. But folding is what matters more when a bird like a crow, with a much smaller skull shows to be able to solve problem like an ape. I advise you to check pictures of an elephant brain, a dolphin brain and a human brain, and you'll understand what I'm talking about.
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Throughout the Medieval and Early Modern periods, scholars who did not share a common language would often write letters to each other in Latin. When scholars visited each other, would they also speak in Latin, or was Latin a purely literary language by this stage?
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For the record: Latin was spoken in Catholic Mass until the 1960s. Most Latin instruction, where it's available, requires speaking the language, even today. So the answer is a bit simple: if two such scholars met, they would essentially be forced to speak in Latin due to the lack of shared language. There would likely be some regional differences in pronouncing the Latin, but the two scholars would be able to speak easily on just about any topic. Although this system began to decay due to the rise of vernacular (particularly in Protestant areas) throughout the early modern period, scholarly works were still typically printed in Latin—Newton's *Principia*, published in 1687, is entirely in Latin and was reprinted in Latin under Newton's direction for two eighteenth century editions. Even when scholarly works were printed in vernacular, they still often (and still do, to a lesser extent) drew heavily on Latin words and phrases because the entire history of Western discourse was written in that language.
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~~I'm not sure which "other people" you are referring to.~~ The Romans thought that Latin was a dialect of Greek. Modern linguists believe that they are both part of the Indo-European language family and therefore have a common linguistic ancestor. [This article](_URL_0_) will probably interest you
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How does Anti-virus software differentiate between "good" programs and "bad" programs?
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Every virus scanner has a different approach. But one thing a lot of them look for is HOW a program gets access to certain data/information on your computer.. Think of it like this. If you see a person you've never met walk into the front door of a house, you'd probably just assume they lived there. They went in the front door after all. However, if you saw that same person climb and jump a fence to get into the backyard and try to enter through the back door, or maybe a window, you'd be much more likely to assume this person was up to no good. Most malicious programs use weird tricks to get to things they aren't supposed to have access to. If some virus scanners sense something is working in an unconventional way to get access, they will likely just assume that program SHOULDN'T be accessing that info, and is therefore malicious.
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The companies that offer virus removal programs maintain lists of known viruses which they publish to machines running their anti-virus software. The software uses that list to search for files that are known to be installed by malware. Be aware that this explanation is simplified.
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Is there more variation in the nucleotide sequence of a highly conserved gene than its protein sequence?
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Codon degeneracy is certainly part of the answer. But you didn't specify what DNA sequence you were looking at. Comparing the cDNA sequence to a full gene might match quite well (not counting the gaps, of course) but comparing a full gene to a known full gene will have tons of variation from introns.
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There's probably a whole bunch, and I don't know if anyone has an accurate answer (and it would probably be a computational nightmare to resolve). The problem is that the genome is very large and most of it isn't subject to a lot of study. That said there are some segments of DNA that are termed super conserved. These segments typically have very important sequences that directly interact with other biomolecules or are very important to the structure of whatever they produce. Some of these are almost always identical in all individuals in a species (I'd image because mutations in these regions would likely be lethal), but can even be identical going back millions of years up the evolutionary tree depending on what site exactly you're looking at.
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Does a vacuum have energy?
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The vaccum can have an energy density. This is ultimately only meaningful in the context of gravity (since for other forces, you can add a constant to the energy density of the vacuum, and it changes none of the physics). In general relativity, vacuum energy density produces a [cosmological constant](_URL_1_), which affects the rate of expansion of the universe. The other context in which you see vacuum energy density references is non-gravitational, with the Casimir effect. For example, if I have two metal plates in empty, there are ways of analyzing this where you see that the presence of the plates makes for a difference between the vacuum energy density between the plates and that outside; this does not contradict the previous paragraph, as *differences* in energy are always meaningful. But, furthermore, one interpret and explain the Casimir effect that [without using vacuum energy](_URL_0_).
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Is "gravity" a sufficient answer? To elaborate, Einstein equation, which governs gravity, has a term called the cosmological constant, and the overall structure of the universe depends on its value. You can do some algebra and see that the cosmological constant is directly related to the density of the vacuum in the universe. We know from quantum field theory that even the vacuum, classically empty, has some energy, so it's not unexpected that the vacuum has energy. The problem is that the amount of energy we predict the vacuum to have from quantum field theory is way way too big compared to the actual observed cosmological constant. This is perhaps one of this biggest unsolved problems in physics.
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How is "baby fat" different from regular adipose tissue?
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Babies have a type of fat cell generally not found in adults with a much higher mitochondria content (which makes them appear slightly brownish, hence the name "[Brown fat](_URL_0_)"). This fat can be used to produce heat directly and so can be used by newborns to maintain body temperature without shivering. However baby fat is lost more due to the programmed growth whereby these reserves are used to grow the body. The brown fat exists in all mammals.
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I was told by my anatomy and physiology teacher way back in high school that kids don’t develop the core muscles needed to hold their GI tract in place until puberty, so that extra baby fat is actually the abdominal cavity being pushed out by their low-hanging guts. Distended stomach is the term. Normal when young, serious medical condition when older.
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How do massive sites like Google and Amazon keep close to 100% uptime? Aren't they a big target for things like DDoS attacks?
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Amazon's servers are built to withstand Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which are self-imposed DDoS attacks.
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A DDOS attack works by bombarding a website with so many commands that it has to shut itself down. It's effective if you have enough computers to do it, but the bigger the site, the more computers it takes to shut it down. It's also illegal to do a DDOS. It would be difficult for a government to do that without getting caught(especially when fighting a website who's entire shtick is revealing government secrets), and if the people found out that they were attacking a site like that, it would be seen as a sign of tyranny, which is bad for any government that calls itself a free country. TL;DR, DDOS attacks are hard for governments to organize, and a more efficient solution would be to just find the guy leaking information and fire him.
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How fast does the edge of a large magnetic field change?
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[EM waves](_URL_0_) propagate at the speed of light (by definition), so it'd take a time equal to the distance between the magnet and the point of observation divided by the speed of light. Of course, the speed of light varies depending on the material in question -- so for example the effect would be "faster" for the case described happening in vacuum as opposed to in (for example) water. Something else to keep in mind here is that because the effect is propagating at the speed of light, we'd never notice the discrepancy, due to relativity.
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[This](_URL_0_) is of course a good start. Most importantly, such transition will take thousands of years to complete. The magnetic field may or may not disappear during the time.
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Can rainbows originate from ice particles?
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It sounds like you are describing a sun dog, [google image search](_URL_0_) provides a wide range of examples. In the southeastern US, I often see two small sections of the circular sun dog in the winter sky, and occasionally during the summer. Similar to [these](_URL_1_), but much less vivid, most people don't see them until I point them out. (which is sad). They are a different shape than rainbows because they are formed by hexagonal ice crystals in the high atmosphere instead of spherical raindrops.
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Budding Environmental Scientist here: There are ice clouds, typically over the polar region. These clouds are basically floating ice particles. Funny thing is they are related to yearly ozone spikes. In the winter the crystals bind to CFCS then when summer time rolls around the ice crystals melt releasing a flood of CFCs into the atmosphere, causing peaks in yearly ozone depletion. Perhaps more than you wanted to know, but I did my best. For Reference: _URL_0_
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Do widespread large forest fires cool the earth similarly to a volcanic eruption?
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The reason volcanoes cause temporary (sometimes global) cooling is pyroclastic ash being shot vertically all of the way into the stratosphere blocks some of the sun's incoming solar radiation. Volcanoes that blow their sides out upon eruption, effusive eruptions, or forest fires would likely not reach the stratosphere enough to have much of an effect on temperature especially in a global sense.
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Alan Taylor suggests in American Colonies that the Natives American communities indulged in regular bush burning activities which meant the forest floor remained cleared of dead and dying debris. The additional side effect of which is that its difficult for massive fires to proliferate because in fact the forests were being "managed" by the native Americans. He's basically suggesting that it was less likely that these massive fires would occur.
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Why do I feel the urge to walk around when I'm talking on the phone?
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Snagged this from a previous ELI5 on this matter: You do your best thinking when you walk. It's well known that your mind is stimulated when you are active and upright. Many scientists and composers adopt this method for idea generation and some of the greatest artists and thinkers from Darwin to Britten were at work whilst walking: _URL_0_ When you are on the phone and focused on the conversation your mind switches to focus on the 'place' where the phone call is happening. If you watch people who are deep in conversation they will also be facing downwards and very slightly huddled. As a result you become far less aware of your surroundings and subconsciously your body is telling you to go for a wonder so you can do some thinking - as a sort of coping mechanism. It's the same as people rubbing their chin or wringing their hands in a meeting (although this is a stress relief). Stress balls also perform this task.
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It may also be an attempt to focus on walking a little better. Your brain can only focus on so many tasks at once. If you're really paying attention to someone listening, it would be harder for you to passively pay attention to walking. I imagine people are just looking at their feet and where they're walking so they don't trip up.
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If the law of physics are the same regardless of what frame, does a stationary charge experience a Lorentz force when a magnet moves near it?
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In an frame where the charge is stationary, there is no **v**x**B** force.
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Einstein set out to answer questions about Electromagnetism when he came up with the theory of relativity. That's something often overlooked in the discussion. His real useful bit out of the theory at first was the notion that Electric fields and Magnetic fields are just two aspects of the same thing. And when you shift from one observational frame to another, as you change how you measure lengths and times, the bits we're usually familiar with about relativity, you're *also* transforming electric fields into magnetic and vice versa. So when a charge is in motion relative to you, you're seeing that charge's electric field transformed into a magnetic field from your perspective. (or at least some of the electric becomes magnetic).
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Why was Eisenhower chosen as Supreme Allied Commander?
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He was very well respected and liked. He was the best candidate to be in an alliance with Britain, as he was a humble man without and ego. The other American choices, like Patton and MacArthur, had egos and would have fought with Montgomery, the British general.
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Eisenhower feared that too much influence from a military-supporting industry would make things worse, eg pushing for a war so their products are bought. [Simple Wikipedia](_URL_0_)
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Why and how did humanity conceive of such seemingly impractical food that is the noodle?
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If you'll have a look at [this](_URL_0_) video, which shows a traditional Chinese method of making noodles, you'll see that although it's a fairly labor intensive process (And likely takes many years to perfect), the process in itself doesn't require much in the way of technology, and simply requires a good knowledge of technique. I'm unable to answer both your questions without speculating, so let's both wait for someone to enlighten us.
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Alton Brown did an amazing ELI5 explanation on "Good Eats" here: _URL_0_
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What does an animal's tail do?
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A horse disperses its fart odor with its tail.
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Tail feathers counterbalance real well like a tightrope walker. If you watch a bird on a wire you'll see them moving their tail feathers for balance.
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Why is there a brief sharp pain in our eyes when going from artificial light to sunlight (indoor to outdoor)
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Because it's brighter. It's the same reason when you turn on the lights in a dark room. Light enters your eye through your pupil (the black part). When it's dark, your pupil is bigger so it can let it more light and you can see things better. When you turn on the light, there's a brief period of time where more light enters your eye than it can handle. This is what causes the sharp pain, but eventually your pupils adjust and become smaller, so the pain is no longer there.
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It's likely caused by pressure on your retna. The same reason you see light when you close your eyes and press on them. The pressure activates the photoreceptors in your retna.
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When genes change expression is this change simultaneous over the whole body or could genes in only certain cells change expression?
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No, genes can be expressed in some cells but not others. This is how you get differentiation of cells, to create organs etc. It's not just in something large like the body that this happens, genes can be turned on in certain portions of a embryo, but not in others.
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Evolutionary Biology student here! The answer is epigenetics. Gene expression can be silenced or enhanced by a few different mechanisms including methylation and histone modifications. C and G rich regions of the genome (called CpG islands) upstream of genes can have methyl groups added to them which prevent transcription (expression) of those genes. For example, a blood cell will have completely different methylation patterns (called the methylome) than a skin cell, even though both have the same genome. This is how cells differentiate
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Of all the people Stalin had purged and executed, who were the people that were closest to him personally?
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[Nikolai Bukharin](_URL_0_) is a good start. He helped Stalin take power, and "Socialism In One Country" was his idea. When he was set to be killed he famously left a note for Stalin reading "Koba, why do you need me to die?" Koba was an old nickname of Stalin's. I've heard Stalin kept the note for the rest of his life, although I can't find a good source for that.
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Do you really see a change in Stalin's persona after Lenin's death? Even before Lenin's death he was butting heads with the 'established' Bolsheviks. I would pin his more ruthless qualities more on the side of the party he came from than any other political or social stresses. People tend to forget just how involved Stalin was in the conspiratorial wings of the party. Whether it was robbing banks/trains to fund the party, or having covert dealings with multi-national communist organizations, Stalin always had his hands in something shady. When you spend the majority of your life climbing a power structure built on deceit and treachery... paranoia and ruthlessness seem like the only possible outcome. Would you consider the struggle after the death of Lenin to be more 'bitter' then the revolution itself or the red/white power struggles that followed?
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What would happen if i plug my ( USB ) headphones into my phones usb adapter that goes in the wallsocket and put the headphones on.
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Nothing. You might hear a little bit of noise in the headphones but if they're not $6.99 knockoff specials, should be fine. Your phone's USB wall charger will have been tested to only put out the 5V at 1-2000 mA rated for your device. All they'll do is power or charge your headphones. There won't be anything in the charger that would generate the data signals that the USB audio decoding chip in your headphones could use to generate sounds with. If indeed the data lines of that USB charger are connected to anything. Might only have live USB power rails.
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Damaged electrical plugs? Because this happens with the usb adapter for my phone charger. Not a loud sound but if my head is close ish to it I hear it. I would also like to know.
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Why do our arms and fingers in a relaxed state have a bend to them?
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You have muscles that, when flexed, curl your fingers/arms. And you have muscles that, when flexed, extend your fingers/arms. It therefore takes effort to go to either of the extremes because you need the muscles to pull hard enough to stretch the opposing muscles. When both sets of muscles are relaxed, the equilibrium position of the joint will be partially bent.
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The muscles which are used to pull your fingers straight relax and let the muscles which are used to curl the finger settle into their respective neutral state. One set of muscles is fully stretched when the finger is straight, and the other set is fully stretched when the finger is curved, so when you don't consciously contract either set they will settle roughly halfway between their extreme states where they even each other out.
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Why the last sips of beer taste worse?
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I believe it's because it's majority saliva and the fact that by the time you are drinking the last few sips the beer is warmer than at any other point of drinking. Source: I am more often drunk than sober.
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They don't. That's not how alcohol works. What you might experience is the satisfaction level of the first few sips being greater than the ones that follow. The simple fact is that the more alcohol you ingest, the more inebriated you come.
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If we had 8 digits instead of 10, would we use Base 8 math?
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There is no reason for using base ten over any other base, though being divisible by several different primes is a nice quality. This would not change math at all, except for a few little arithmetic tricks (checking for divisibility by three would no longer be as simple, etc.).
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It's just a combination of the way you learned to add and the way we write numbers. For most people, the "hard" part of adding is when you have to carry because it forces you to remember two things (sum and carry) instead of just one (sum). 6, 7, and 8, being closer to 10, are more likely to cause a carry. I'm guessing 9 is an exception for you because you probably have some trick for it... maybe you think of it as "add 10 subtract 1". Of course, this is all an artifact of our base-10 number system. If we used base-2, adding 8 would be as easy as adding 1000 is in base-10.
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I'm serious about this question. Is there a universal “speed of smell " or are rates of diffusion different depending upon the substance and the medium it is in?
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It depends on the substance, the medium it's in, the temperature, pressure, etc.
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In theory, yes. In practice, no. Diffusion is slow, so if you want a cup of even tea by diffusion alone, you will probably have cold tea.
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How would a medieval elevator or gate actually work? How were men able to raise something so heavy without modern technology?
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There were many great inventions, pre-medieval times, that allowed man to lift more than he physically could on his own. For instance the [pulley](_URL_0_)
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[According to this article](_URL_0_), they bring up a derrick (simple, non-motorized cranes) that can lower the big crane. Then the derrick can be disassembled and brought back down through the regular elevators.
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Why do so many medicines (pain pills, muscle relaxers, antihistamines,etc.) have a side effect of sleepiness?
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All of the types of medicines you described work by basically stopping your body from doing something it would normally be doing, often by interfering with the ability of your nervous system to communicate the messages necessary to do it. A side effect of that can be to generally slow down your nervous system overall, which manifests (among other ways) in you feeling sleepy.
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Melatonin mostly seems to act on the body's clock, signalling "night." That's an important part of sleep, especially if the body's clock is thrown off (jet lag, shift work) but there's a lot of other stuff involved. Benadryl blocks histamine from acting in the brain. Histamine has a couple roles, but one is to stimulate wakefulness. Block that, and you get sleepy.
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Why does xenon an inert gas interact with flourine?
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"Xenon reacts directly with fluorine because fluorine is a very powerful oxidizing agent (hence it gets reduced and it gains an electron from Xenon). Xenon has larger radii; therefore the electron attraction to the nucleus is weaker in comparison to the smaller noble gases. Fluorine on the other hand is very tiny and highly electronegative, so it would steal an electron from fluorine, forming a compound." [ Source](_URL_0_)
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Because Xenon is the heaviest of the noble gasses (excluding radioactive radon), its valence electrons will be the least tightly bound. Basically, because they sit further away from the nucleus, you have a lower energy penalty for losing the full electron shell configuration. This makes it susceptible to highly electronegative elements, like F [Compounds of Xe](_URL_0_)
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what exactly is ISIS?
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They are a Sunni supremacist group that emerged after the 2004 US attack on Fallujah. The Fallujah attack was bloody - extremely so - and among those Iraqis that lost friends and family there, some blamed the Iraqi insurgents, some blamed the Americans, and some blamed the Shi'ite population. Those in the latter category were some of the founders of ISIS. As for what they stand for today - they stand for using armed struggle to create a theocratic nation state in which Sunnis are hegemonic and non-Sunnis are either expelled or extorted.
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ISIS is a different sect than the shiite mosque they bombed. they all basically hate each other and have nothing to do. ISIS enemy list is like this 1.) Jews 2.) West 3.) Hindus 4.) Other muslim sects 5.) themselves
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If the Ice/Glaciers are melting so fast, why aren't global water levels rising very noticeably?
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There's a lot of fuckin' water in the world, to put it bluntly. If my sink represented the size of the earth proportionally, and I filled it up with water and stuck an ice cube in it, the water level wouldn't rise at all, hardly. Proportionally, that ice cube would be massive! That'd be like an Australia made of ice completely melting and releasing ungodly amounts of water into the oceans! It doesn't matter, though. My sink and the Earth are too damned big to be affected by a RELATIVELY small iceberg.
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TLDR: bad news. You've got to keep in mind that the Antarctic ice sheet is mostly continental glacier (unlike the north polar Icecap, which is mostly sea ice). Also that fresh water freezes more easily than salt water. What this says is that the melting of the Antarctic Ices shet is accelerating, and that this can be seen by the increase in sea ice, which shows influx of fresh melt water. For reference, the Arctic sea ice has been reaching record lows, as the polar temps rise.
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I would like to learn about Vikings. Where should I start?
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It's not a broad overview, but a very well-written and engaging book is *Bloodtaking and Feudmaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland* by W.I. Miller. I'd strongly recommend that. For an overview, I would strongly recommend *The Viking World* by James Campbell. It is direct, approachable, and full of pictures that really help give context to the text. Otherwise, there is an organisation called the Viking Congress, which meets every few years to discuss different themes and ideas in Viking history. Their proceedings are published, and each congress publishing will have about 30-40 short articles discussing the themes of that meeting. If you can get your hands on some of these, the articles are mostly digestible, and wide-ranging in subject matter.
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Thanks to a hot tip from /u/Miles_Sine_Castrum, I got to [sail and row a replica Viking ship](_URL_2_)! History is the *best*, and genuine public support for historical education and experience is so phenomenal to see in action. Maybe it's time I actually learned something about the Norse...
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During WWII and relative to today, how long was the communication lag between the High Command of the various powers?
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UK to US: Originally there was a secured scrambled telephone line underneath Selfridges in Oxford Street, London that went directly to the White House. This was later relocated to the cabinet war rooms. Just across from Parliament, underneath a government building are the cabinet war rooms. Constructed in 1938 it was primarily a communications hub. You can read about them here: _URL_0_ There was a special room called the transatlantic telephone room where Churchill would talk to Roosevelt. It was basically the size of a big closet and was kept secret from all but a few who needed to know. So communication across the Atlantic would be quite quick and presumably ad-hoc?
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I can't quite give you all the answer, but basically the longer a signal can travel, the lower it's birate or quality is. For example there's a "channel" that is very low quality but can be hears all over the world. All you can send is morse code. It's utilised by militarys.
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Why do many Arab countries have similar flags?
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Other colors are the other Arab empires. Black is for the Abbasids (not Muhammad), White for the Ummayaads, Green for the Fatimids, and Red for the Hashemites, which were the rulers of Mecca who organized an Arab nationalist movement against the Turks. _URL_0_
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There is a [small area](_URL_1_) between Egypt and Sudan which remains unclaimed, and [another area](_URL_0_) between Burkina Faso and Niger which was unclaimed until last year. Does anyone know a good flag maker?
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What would happen if you just unplugged the RAM or Hard Drive (MAIN HD) while the computer is running?
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The computer will crash as soon as the disk is accessed for anything critical, which in most circumstances will be more or less immediately. The computer motherboard will likely try to restart, fail to find a bootable device, and then power off. The disk itself will likely have problems dealing with the abrupt loss of power. If you are lucky the heads may not crash and physically damage the disk, but there will likely be data corruption to some extent.
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The concern is when a computer is writing to the hard drive. If its in the middle of writing and there is a sudden loss of power it can cause data corruption and potentially cause complete loss of everything on the hard drive, including the operating system
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Is there a specific medical reason why 4 hours is the cutoff time to see a doctor after ED drug's effects won't go away?
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> Current scientific evidence demonstrates that when an erection lasts longer than 4 hours, it merits evaluation and possible treatment because of the potential detrimental effects of the erection on the viability and future function of the corporal tissue. There is some "arbitrariness" to it, although starting at 4 hours you begin to see microscopic changes of severe and possibly irreversible injury. [More than you probably want to know...](_URL_0_)
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It honestly depends on the drug. There are drugs that can do this but must be administered through a vein, administering through an artery will have little to no affect as the drug would just go to where the artery is going. If you inject in a vein you will get mixture in the right atrium and the distribute through the whole body. Drugs like Etomidate and Propofol can render someone unconscious in a matter of seconds when administered through a vein. I've personally given someone Etomidate while yelling at me. They stop mid sentence ~ 4 seconds later, eyes roll back in their heads and they are down. As far as intramuscular injections, which is what you are describing, it can have similar effects but slower. IM sedatives can take as little as 5 minutes to produce an effect, but nowhere close to IV injection. Source: I'm in anesthesia school and have worked in healthcare giving these drugs for the last 8 years.
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What level of upkeep was required for lighthouses in antiquity?
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We simply don't know. The nature of classical literature, and arguably even moreso the Medieval period transmission, means that what little survived is confined to a fairly limited set of interests, and unfortunately lighthouse operation was interesting neither to the classical literary set nor to Irish monks. On the other hand, many of these matters, such as oil quantities needed, should stay fairly constant, so i am eager to hear about other periods.
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The oldest lighthouse I know of is the Tower of Hercules in Spain. It was built by the Romans in the 2nd century and it's still used to today. The design is somewhat complex so I'd surmise that the concept of a lighthouse predates it by quite a bit.
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Salt water oceans, but fresh water ice caps?
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When water forms ice crystals it forces out other solutes like salt. There's no room in the well ordered ice crystals for other stuff. This is part of the reason salt and other solutes lower the freezing point of water. Any water that begins to freeze leaves the rest of the liquid water even saltier (which, after a point, becomes energetically very unfavorable). Basically, when you boil or freeze water, the stuff that's in it doesn't come along for the ride. The oceans are salty because salt is very water soluble. Over billions of years rain has fallen and rivers have flowed over the ground, picked up some salt along the way, and carried it to the oceans. That water then evaporates to start the cycle over again but the salt stays behind in the ocean.
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The biggest reason is that salt water doesn't keep its salt when it evaporates. Only the fresh water part turns to vapour and it leaves the salt behind. So you have only fresh water in clouds. Those clouds produce the snow that falls on mountains and the poles where it's colder, and forms glaciers and ice caps respectively. Second, salt water freezes at a lower temperature than fresh water. In order to freeze salt water you have to get the temperature further down, which is why a lot of places scatter salt on roads and sidewalks in the winter. Spray, like on a fishing boat, will freeze because it can get cold enough in the frigid blowing air. But icebergs and stuff won't generally freeze as well as fresh water does, and the ocean's freezing process drives out the salt into the water that's left underneath, so the majority of "pack ice" around the poles in winter is fresh.
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In feces, do we excrete any bodily waste that isn't undigested food or intestinal bacteria? That is to say, does our body dump any waste into the intestines to get rid of it like our body does with urine?
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I am a scientist who studies various marine biotoxins, generally produced by algae. Many of these compounds including [domoic acid](_URL_0_) are excreted partially or entirely in the feces. Also, many other metabolic wastes wind up in fecal matter as well, but that's not my field so I'll let those folks handle that part.
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Digestion requires that the food be fairly liquid and easy to pipe through the intestines which absorb most of the nutrients, but just dumping it out in that form would waste a bunch of water which your body needs. In order to be more efficient the colon removes much of the water before it is expelled from the body. If you have something wrong with you that the body interprets as coming from bad food it can speed up the digestion process to get rid of it quickly. This means the colon gets the wet food and has no time to suck the water out before it is expelled, meaning it comes out as the "Hershey squirts".
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