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Did any young or inexperienced king/queen ever make a decision that doomed their kingdom?
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Well the young King Sebastian I of Portugal (age 24) discounted the advice of his commanders and got himself killed at the Battle of Alcácer Quibir, which lead to the annexation of Portugal by Spain while simultaneously heralding the decline of the Portuguese empire. I guess that would count.
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Most royal families date back well over 500 years. Many spring from medieval times, when they controlled a great deal of land, had many serfs living under them, and were lord to many knights and soldiers. They then had the power to expand, taking more land, and getting more money, men, and soldiers at their disposal. Once they have a firm grip on the country, they pass down the crown to their heir, usually the eldest male son. This begins a dynasty. Dynasties continue until either A. Another rival monarch conquers them. Or B. A popular revolution(e.g. the French Revolution) overthrows them.
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Which does consume more energy, opening and closing the fridge twice, or leaving it open for a while but only once?
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Well, setting the times that the fridge is open in each situation equal to each other will mean the energy consumed would be just about the same. However, since situation 1 involves opening and closing (and thereby disturbing the surrounding air) twice instead of once, it seems to reason that more warm air would get mixed into the fridge in situation 1 so more energy would be consumed in that case. The main advantage to opening the door, closing it, and opening it again to put stuff back is that the door isn't open as long as it would be if you just left it open the entire time. So by setting the time the doors are open equal to each other, you're already starting situation 1 off at a disadvantage.
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It's easier for the customer to take what they need. But yes, it's a waste of energy. Which is why having doors on the refrigerators is becoming more common. (at least here in Sweden, I hardly ever see open front refrigerators anymore)
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How is it that moms keep on finding evidence that vaccines are bad for their kids? Is ANY of their evidence valid, or are they just looking for ways to connect illnesses with vaccinations?
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Very rarely, a child will have an adverse reaction to a vaccine. It's rare, though. The supposed evidence that vaccines are bad is 99.9999% anecdotal. Meaning that they have no real studies to back it up, just a bunch of people saying it was so. In most cases, issues [autism, allergies, etc..] are not diagnosed prior to the vaccines, so people blame the vaccines when it comes out because so many people are saying vaccines are bad. It's just more anecdotal evidence.
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A doctor said it once, so celebs jumped on board and made a bunch of noise. It's been pretty much established that the doctor had no legitimate evidence -- he was even stripped of his license. Vaccinate your kids.
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What are some recommended books on German history, in particular 19th century and the lead up to unification?
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It depends on what specifically you're interested in - there are plenty of fine works out there, but I would recommend James J. Sheehan's *German History, 1770-1866* (Oxford, 1989), Frank B. Tipton's *A History of Modern Germany Since 1815* (University of California, 2003), and Gordon Craig's *Germany, 1866-1945* (Oxford, 1980). I am reading Craig at the moment, it is very old school history - politics and wars - but beautifully written and a good overview if you don't know much beforehand. You might find Matthew Jeffries' *Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871-1918* (Palgrave, 2003) a useful cultural history complement, as well as Ute Frevert's *Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Revolution* (Berg, 1990). Finally, there is a good duology of critical essays on the German 19th century historiography, Eley and Blackbourn's *The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Societies and Politics in 19th Century Germany* (Oxford, 1984).
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I'll assume that you're open to anything, so one book that you might enjoy was David Blackbourn's *The Conquest of Nature*, and environmental history of Germany since the 18th century. He deals with a range of topics from an environmental perspective, including draining marshlands in northern Germany, management of the Rhine, and the complex relationships between Nazi ideology and ideas of nature. He's very good at demonstrating the intimate connections between ideas of nature and its management and broader trends in German (and European) history, so it's not like this is some cottage-industry, irrelevant, fringe bit of scholarship. I'm sure that specialists in German history could offer works that make different interpretations, but Blackbourn's work is well-written, he's a respected scholar, and this is not a bad place to start.
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Why is it that when we voluntarily keep our eyes open they hurt after a couple of seconds, but when we space out we can keep them open for minutes.
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Probably because you're consciously forcing the muscles when you try and keep them open, whereas when you're spaced out they're able to stay open longer without the effort. Eyeball gnomes seems more plausible though. I'm going with that.
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Physically, the muscles around your eyes (similar to the ones that help you squint), are contracting and releasing rapidly, without your conscious effort. There are many causes for this, such as tiredness, stress, dry eyes, caffeine/other drugs. Usually this resolves itself quickly!
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Do particles actually spin, or is it just a mathematical theory?
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Actually, we know they aren't spinning. They really do have angular momentum- as trickyben2 put so well, but it has been calculated that there is no way the angular momentum they have could come from spinning- because a point on the particle would have to be moving faster than the speed of light.
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This theory was put forward in 2003 by Peter Lynds. This has been dismissed by mainstream physicists for the lack of a mathematical model behind its philosophical considerations. There's more info [here](_URL_0_)
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Why is the background really dark in extreme high fps slowmo videos? And how does zooming in help make the video slower?
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If using a high-speed camera to create slow motion, since the frames are taking much faster than standard cameras, each frame receives less light due to the short shutter speed. The nicer high-speed cameras have large sensor arrays to compensate, but the fundamental problem is still there. To my knowledge, zooming in does not affect the video speed.
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Older footage was often shot at a lower frame rate, so when it's played at 24 frames per second it looks like things are moving faster than normal.
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A lot of dinosaurs seemed to be armored. Why is armor rare on large animals today, when it was de regueur for hundreds of millions of years?
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It's not ideal on mammals, because in order to carry it you need to be big. But if you're big, you'll already have trouble losing heat, which armour would make worse. Large reptiles often still are armoured.
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This is more about the decline of armor in general, but you might be interested in [this post](_URL_0_) which also links some previous posts by myself and u/WARitter which go into more detail.
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Fossils: The hard, inorganic parts are preserved essentially by petrification. Could man made objects - cars, ships etc become fossilized and if so how would the process differ, if at all. And how would such fossils appear to paliontologists of the far future?
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Well, people finding ships aren't paleontologists, they are archaeologists. And we find "fossils" like that all the time already from our ancestors. Ships, swords, coins, statues, shoes -- all kinds of things can become preserved for future people to find.
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There need to be special conditions so fossils get formed. The fossilization process has to happen before the body gets eaten by bacteria and such which usually take care of dead bodies.
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does the vitamin c from my lemon tea breaks down when i'm boiling it?
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Vitamin C doesn't decompose until around 370°F/190°C so boiling water alone won't destroy it. It does, however, react with oxygen in the air. The oxygen in the water combined with the high temperature will probably lead to some of the ascorbic acid being oxidized but unless you're leaving it out boiling for a very long time I think it's safe to say any loss of vitamin C would be rather minuscule. One thing worth noting is that because vitamin C is soluble in water, after boiling most of the vitamin C will stay in the water instead of in the lemon. If you're drinking the tea this ends up being a benefit, but if you were cooking vegetables and throwing out the water afterward you would be losing it with the water.
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If the food is boiled, then some of the Vitamins contained may leach out into the water; this is especially noticeable with Vitamin C. Effectively, certain nutrients are "water soluble"; they dissolve in water, and are washed away by the water that is boiling the food. Additionally, the heat can break the nutrients down into stuff that isn't particularly useful to us.
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Can somebody explain to me how modern day Darwinism and evolution are currently thought of by the scientific community of today?
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[Project Steve](_URL_0_) is a light hearted attempt to refute claims that evolution is not accepted by scientists by compiling a list of scientists who do support evolution. To get on the list you have to be a scientist that supports the theory of evolution, and be named Steve. To date there are over 1200 Steves on the list
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Evolution is a clearly observable force of the natural world, It is observable in every generation of every species. Being able to look at the genetic makeup of a population of individuals over time will show the chages in that genetic makeup. By analyzing the changes in genetic makeup, it becomes very evident what is random change in the genome and what change is being pressured by some form of selection.
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Why does it take so much longer to use a phone/laptop's charge than it does to actually charge it?
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The laptop let's say uses about 200mAh of power. Your charger can give to laptops battery 2000mAh of power. Your laptop is power efficient and does not consume more than what charger charges. As battery wears out over time, it will charge quicker and depleet quicker, because capacity is being lost over time and lets you use smaller amount of capacity. Edit: In short, the charger gives way more mass power to phone/laptop than what laptop/phone itself consumes.
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Most phones use USB, but USB was never designed to use much power, just enough for a few flashing LEDs. So a phone has to make sure it can charge off what is guaranteed by the standard to be available (500mA at 5V, so 2.5W). Fast charging is where the phone can communicate with the charger and ask if it can give more power, if it can then the power gets ramped up and your phone charges faster.
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Does language affect the way a person's vocal chords develop?
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That's a quite interesting question which led me to making a research but my findings says that spoken language only has a psychological effect. The most solid piece of information I found is in this article: _URL_0_ In this article the researchers have inspected 3000+ languages and they found out climate/humidity has a significant effect on vocal cords' development: shorter and less stretching in humid environments and this causes a larger tonality in that region's languages and so on. So the issue is climate affects vocal cords and that affects languages which later causes habits that make pronunciation of other languages harder for the learner in my understanding. Edit: Thanks iwaka for pointing out my mistake on the outcomes: there is a larger tonality in humid regions, not smaller.
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The sound of one's voice is controlled by all sorts of factors. Size and shape of the mouth, lips, tongue; size and shape of the larynx, chest volume, etc. etc. etc. Some are modulated by hormones, others dictated by anatomy. **ALL** of these things are spelled out by genetics. Then there's things like history of smoking, infection with a cold, etc. all of which are under less genetic control. So the answer to your question: yes and no.
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What would happen if the world stock market crashed?
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The two-word answer is: Recession, probably. Depends on what caused the crash, and how the world's central banks react. Three examples: * World stock markets collapsed in 1929, and the world plunged into the Great Depression. (Not claiming causality either way.) * The US stock market collapsed in 1987, to the same magnitude as in 1929, but there wasn't even a single quarter of recession. * The US stock market crashed in 2008, and the US plunged into the Great Recession. It really depends. During the 1987 crash, the Federal Reserve flooded markets with enough liquidity and cash to prevent spillovers into the rest of the economy. Arguably they did not do so, or to enough extent, in 1929 or 2008. If stock markets crashed *today*, it would probably reflect falling expectations of future profitability of business as a whole. Given the current state of policy, I don't think the Federal Reserve could react fast enough to stop a renewed recession.
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The banks that got bailed out were at the center of the global financial services industry, and everyone was constantly acting under the assumption that they would not suddenly collapse. We don't *know* what would happen had they just been left to die, but the world's economy is much too important to leave to chance.
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How do blackheads/zits form?
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All over your body you have these small holes from which your hair grows. In these holes, you also have a gland that produces oil, which keeps your skin soft and tends to your hair. When dead skin cells or dirt collects in these holes, they make a bumb in your skin. When the top layer of skin is gone, the air makes the clogged hole with dead skin cells look black, which are blackheads. They most frequently appear around your nose, as the skin is a bit thinner there, as well as a more frequent victim of not getting cleaned from dead skin cells and dirt
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Pimples are a result of an infected hair follicle, which grow from deep in your skin _URL_0_. Dead skin cells and sebum will clog a hair follicle sometimes. When they do, the hair follicle keeps pumping out sebum, but there's nowhere for it to go. That's what creates the initial problem. If there's no other problems itll result in a blackhead. But the environment inside the hole amade by the follicle creates a great environment for bacteria to breed. Thats when your immune system attacks it, resulting in a build up of pus along with the sebum, and the emergence of a pimple.
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Postpartum Depression
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From what I read the problem can arise from the dump of hormones after the birth that have built up over the 9 months of pregnancy. At least that's what my doctor told me when I got PPD/PPA. My depression was more along the lines of doing everything right and something happening to myself, my husband or my child. I am still sensitive to news stories about young children and shows and movies where a child comes to harm. Most of the time it's just a general depression that can mainfest in many different ways but they don't worry to much unless it does not go away or if the mother/father (dad's can get it to) thinks about harming themselves, the baby or both.
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This is really not my scientific field, but part of it is the HUGE amount of hormones you have in your body while pregnant. When they start to leave your body, they leave a body in hormonal imbalance. Other things can of course be "oh, shit, now I'm stuck with this responsibility forever" etc, psychological issues and stress. Oh, and don't underestimate months of not sleeping as a trigger for depression.
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Postpartum Depression
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What /u/Miliean1 says is *partially* correct. However, it is worth noting that one can get postpartum depression after *adoption*. This means that mere hormones and pregnancy are *not* the only factor! Keep in mind that we don't know the *causes* of *most* mental disorders. However, hormones and other neurotransmitters, though, are *likely* the culprit. When you have or adopt a baby, your brain will release oxytocin. Lots of it. This helps you bond with your baby, and yes, women get more of this than men (in general). So you're getting a lot of Feel Good hormone when you're with your new baby, which helps you bond and love and care for them. Then at some point that drops down and stops. And then you're getting some withdrawal symptoms. For most people this is more of a smooth transition. For others, not so much. --- In no way is this comparable to a miscarriage.
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This is really not my scientific field, but part of it is the HUGE amount of hormones you have in your body while pregnant. When they start to leave your body, they leave a body in hormonal imbalance. Other things can of course be "oh, shit, now I'm stuck with this responsibility forever" etc, psychological issues and stress. Oh, and don't underestimate months of not sleeping as a trigger for depression.
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Why are people occupying larger cities across the US.. opposed to occupying Washington D.C.?
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They are planning a huge Occupy event scheduled for January 17. It's called Occupy Congress, and they're shooting for a million people to show up. You can read about it [here](_URL_0_).
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Each state has a slightly different reason for choosing its capital, but there are a few common reasons why cities other than the biggest city are chosen. One is that some state capitals were chosen very early on and never moved even though other cities outgrew the capital. Another is that some states preferred to locate their capitals more centrally to be closer to all areas of the state. That's the main reason Washington D.C.'s location was chosen to be the capital of the new nation (it was central at the time it was chosen). A third reason is that placing the capital in the biggest city might make it look like a state is biased towards its biggest city. For example, if NYC were the capital of New York, then a lot of people who lived in New York but not NYC might suspect that their state government cares more about NYC citizens than citizens in other parts of the state. You often see this criticism in the UK where people complain that the country places too much emphasis on London.
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Why, in an age of advanced technology and the internet, is the American voting system so archaic?
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Bottom line is paper trail is harder to defeat than a digital one.. if a hacker finds a 0day exploit they can change the entire election in a couple of keystrokes.. with a paper system changing more then a handful of votes would be a massive undertaking, even if it all gets scanned in digitally, there is still a paper copy that someone can go back and check.
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Because the United States federal government is a Republic, not a Democracy. In particular, it is not a direct democracy where citizens vote on everything.
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How did Anarchist Catalonia and the Free Territory in Ukraine function exactly? Were they truly anarchist societies?
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Just as some general reading on the topic, I'd recommend a couple books: Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (_URL_4_) by Leval. This bloke basically went around to a bunch of places during the revolution and wrote about what was going on. Really interesting stuff. Contrary to what some state-socialists would have preached, I think it shows the peasants actually had a broader, more developed revolution than the industrial workers in the big cities (who were more constrained in what they could do, admittedly). This one quite clearly outlines the specific ways in which many of these collectives ran themselves. Also, another one to read is Anarchism and the City (_URL_5_). It's an incredibly interesting history of Barcelona as a city, though not something entirely relevant to your question.
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When the USSR fell, Ukraine (along with many of the Soviet states) decided that they wanted independence from this government that they blamed for so many issues (and that had just collapsed, not exactly reassuring people that they could provide good governance). 300,000 Ukranians formed a human chain demanding independence, and when they held a referendum on it, every region voted in favour (with Crimea being the lowest at 56% in favour of independence). Ukraine had been one of the founding members of the USSR (it was it's own country/region before that, it didn't always consider itself to be Russia), so when the USSR collapsed, Ukraine decided that it was better to be independent again, and not try and stay in a failed union. Before the USSR, Ukraine had a long history of having its own national identity, even when occupied by other countries, so whilst it has strong ties to Russia, it was it's own state first and foremost, with the Russian part always being secondary.
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How do radar (or ultrasound / lidar) beams get back to their source instead of bouncing in all kinds of different directions, never to return?
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The signals are indeed bounced in all kinds of different directions never to return. But _some_ is reflected back to the receiver. This returned signal is very weak in comparison to emitted though and often has to be amplified at the receiving end. Stealth craft work by trying to absorb as much as possible and reflect (scatter) as much as possible to drastically decrease the amount of signal reflected directly back to the receiver. LIDAR is very similar but since you're usually scanning a local area much more of the signal is returned.
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A radar not omni-directional. Just like a satellite TV dish it must be pointed in the direction of the signal in order to receive it. So in order for the ship to know what's going on around it it has to point in all directions. It spins 360° and scans all the signals around it.
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Can a moon sustain life like on Endor?
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Yes, as long as the moon has sufficient mass and a magnetic field to support an atmosphere, it is theoretically possible for a moon to sustain life. Note that in the case of our moon, it can not, since it does not have sufficient mass, or a liquid iron core capable of sustaining a dynamo for creating a magnetic field. Sustaining life on our moon is thus only possible through domes and other structures.
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In a word, no. Assuming the the planet already had a defined orbital path, and enough mass to have an atmosphere- and water, if we're talking conventional habitation- it should be able to support life. Asteroids generally arent a problem as they burn up when they enter the atmosphere. Tides are a significant part of life on earth, but thats because plants and animals along our coasts have adapted to them, not because shifting water levels benefit them directly(if anything, it would be better not to deal with tides). I'm unsure of the moon's effect on climate, but keeping in mind the versatility of life(and think of the ice ages ours has survived!) its not a deal breaker. The most important thing astronomers look at is the size and location of the planet. It must be small enough to have survivable pressures, but large enough to hold air. It must be close enough to the star to stay warm, but far enough to stay cool.
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Why are electrolytic and Tantalum capacitors polarized but ceramic and film capacitors are not?
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Electrolytic capacitors have a thin layer of aluminum oxide which serves as the capacitor's dielectric: it separates the metal anode from the metal + electrolyte cathode. Applying voltage of the wrong polarity causes the oxide to dissolve into the electrolyte, thereby short-circuiting the anode and cathode.
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Probably the biggest one is tantalum, which is used mostly for making capacitors. Tantalum capacitors have more capacitance per volume than most (all?) other types, so they're very useful for things like cellphones which engineers are trying to make as small as possible.
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What happens to EU countries if the European Union breaks up?
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Most probably Eurozone countries would return to their national currencies, free movement would be removed but it's likely the single market would remain. So it would be reduced to a economic trade union of sovereign countries, kind of like Norway is part of the European single market, but isn't part of the EU.
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Well for one we would be dicks. The EU started out as a union of countries who promised to cooperate en help eachother in time of need. If we don't support them in their time of need, the union wouldn't really mean anything, would it?
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Why are deserts located where they are?
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There are actually several kinds of deserts. There are small ones that's outside the normal geographic range of 30 degrees above and below the equator. These are formed due to the rainshadow effect, which is a phenomenon in where clouds containing moisture are blocked by topographic highs such as mountain ranges. An example of this is the desert behind the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The usual kind of desert that many may know is located around 30 degrees above and below the equator, such as the Sahara. These are formed due to the air currents going around the Earth. At the equator, these air currents converge and rise up, since this point is closest to the sun and is thus the warmest region. After rising they will undergo convection and cool, and this cool air will settle more than 30 degrees north and south of the equator. As a result, only warm air currents actually pass through the 30 degree boundary, and leach out moisture, forming the deserts that we observe today.
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There are plenty of ways a desert can form, but those in particular are formed simply because of their distance from the equator. Due to the rotation of the Earth, global winds circulate in a way that brings warm and moist air to equator. The air then rises higher, cools, and loses moisture. Next, it moves north, and at about 30 degree latitude, the dry air sinks and begins absorbing away what little water there still is.
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Would a sponge 'dry out' in space?
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In the vacuum of space the water would immediately evaporate. Gas molecules are constantly impacting the container they are in or other gas molecules, but in space there would be nothing for them to impact, so they would just float away in whatever direction their initial momentum was in.
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Even a nebula is incredibly close to vacuum; the jar would just contain a vacuum with, if you're lucky, a small dust grain lying on the bottom of the jar.
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I work in a bar, sometimes I grab a glass and it just explodes. Why?
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Glass often has internal stresses - caused by parts of the glass shrinking faster than other parts, from cooling off quicker than other parts. This is supposed to be removed during tempering in the kiln, but it's not always perfect. So, small scratches can drop into these stresses, allowing the glass that is under stress to break — especially if part is cold and another part is suddenly warmed, or vice versa.
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The glass was tempered (manipulated thermally to brake into less threatening shards) and put in compression. Removing it from its frame has taken it out of compression, inducing to crack up as it freely expands.
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How can Neutron Stars have immense magnetic fields?
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A neutron star is [more complex](_URL_2_) than just a blob of neutrons. Charged particles like electrons are still present and can form self-sustaining, heat driven currents ([dynamos](_URL_1_)) that produce the magnetic field. As a side note, neutrons have spin and with it a [magnetic moment](_URL_0_), even though they are electrical neutral from the outside. But this is *not* source of magnetars magnetic fields.
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I think that the most common explanation is that magnetars are neutron stars born with a particularly high rotation velocity, and strong differences between the rotation velocity at the center and on the surface. There can then be a "dynamo" process in which rotational energy is converted into magnetic energy, as the young neutron star evolves towards more uniform (and slower) rotation. This method to form magnetars was proposed by [Thompson and Duncan](_URL_2_). Another method is to create the magnetic field in the merger of two low-mass neutron stars. In that case, the growth of the magnetic field comes from instabilities in the contact region between the two colliding neutron stars and/or from the differential rotation of the neutron star resulting from the merger. This is discussed for example [here](_URL_0_) and [here](_URL_1_).
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How can a decrease in the global price per barrel of oil create a negative affect on local, national or global economies?
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Plenty of industrialized/first-world nations produce oil, so lowered oil prices means less profits for those industries.
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Part of it is also tied to the price of oil extraction. Alberta for instance has been experiencing an economic boom because of the oil sands, however when the market value of petrol drops below whatever it costs to extract and process oil from those oil sands(IIRC $75 a barrel around 2000), it becomes a better strategy for the owners of the oil sands to stop extracting oil until the price comes back up.
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Does climate change nullify almancs weather prediction?
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The farmer's almanac's "predictions" are 100% bunk. They have nothing to do with science, and have never even come close to being consistently accurate.
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It's easy to forecast the weather however far in advance you want, that's how weather almanacs work. It's hard to be precise or accurate because the atmosphere has a complex interaction with the land and the current state of the atmosphere is largely unknown.
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How do gravity assists (like the one used for the juno spacecraft) work in orbital mechanics?
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What you are talking about is the slingshot effect, basically it uses the gravitational pull of the planet and falls towards the planet but misses the planet completes a fraction of an orbit and the result is an increase in velocity - _URL_0_
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Essentially, the problem with gravity and the other forces is that the equations which describe gravity require space to be smooth and seamless, but the equations that describe the other forces require space to be quantized, or made up of a series of miniscule points. It's more complicated than that, but that's the general idea.
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Why do potato chips' such as: Ketchup, All Dressed, and Dill Pickle sales tests perform so poorly in the US, but are among the top flavours in other countries?
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The flavours you mention all have one thing in common: sourness. Ketchup, all dressed and dill pickle are all vinegary flavours and sour/vinegar is not a flavour element that's very popular in American cuisine with a few notable exceptions (certain bbq sauces for example). Salt & vinegar or malt vinegar is extreeeeeeeeeeemely popular in the UK/Ireland, as are all things pickled. The American taste tends to run more towards sweet and salty.
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I actually found ketchup tastes very different in different parts of the world at McDonald's.
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Why do we use OR gates in computer chips? Why don't we just merge two traces instead?
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Emitter coupled logic (ECL) is a logic family that does allow implementing OR by simply wiring the outputs of two gates together. This is because an ECL gate can only source output current, not sink it. A pull-down resistor is needed at the output of each gate (or "wired-OR" combination) to produce a low logic level. However, ECL is not used for computer chips for a few reasons. Unlike CMOS, ECL gates consume power even when not switching, making ECL typically more power hungry in complex circuits (although it can be more efficient in high-speed circuits that are never idle). And it uses differential signals, resulting in more transistors, and thus more die area, needed for each gate.
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[You should watch this lecture from Richard Buckland at UNSW](_URL_0_). I linked to the relevant part where he starts talking about the history of the computer. It's a long watch but it explains how transistors are put together to make gates and how 1s and 0s control them to perform logic.
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Why do animals (specifically cats and dogs) like being pet so much?
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Cats and dogs have been selectively bred to be good companions. Most animals find being petted extremely stressful and many would lash out if you tried. But those are poor traits for pets so we try to breed them out. There's an old Russian experiment with a fox farm that demonstrates this very nicely. At the farm they bred foxes in two separate carefully selected breeding pools. In one group they only bred foxes that showed aggression towards humans, in the other group they selected on very meek foxes. Eventually they had one group of foxes that was practically lunging at their cage to get out and attack humans while the other group of foxes acted like affectionate puppies. Exact same thing with dogs and cats. We bred out the behavior we didn't like. They enjoy human interaction because we selected for specifically those traits.
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Basically it boils down to: a.) Fur is soft, and touching soft things is a pleasant sensation b.) Animals are usually fairly receptive to being pet, so we feel good about creating a positive reaction that also provides enjoyment for us as well
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Why are scanning tunneling microscope images always blurry? What are the limitations in improving the resolution?
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Without looking into it, I suspect the size of the tip is the limiting factor. Its hard to probe smaller if you've got a fat finger. And by that I mean the atom on the tip of the probe. If it is (for example) a tungsten atom, then that would be the limit in the resolution of what it can scan. Edit - wikipedia even says as much... The resolution of an image is limited by the radius of curvature of the scanning tip of the STM. _URL_0_
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I'll have to read the full source article when I get to work (it's part of my job!), but generally the resolution problems that telescopes face are different than the ones that microscopes face. Telescopes can get better resolution by being bigger, using adaptive optics, and with interferometry. Microscopes looking at things smaller than about half a wavelength of light can't resolve them no matter how big the lens is, so people have developed clever techniques to get beyond this. [Awesome techniques](_URL_0_)
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Why does playing music in the background of a social gathering put people at ease, allowing them to talk more comfortably whilst removing that awkward feeling?
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Maybe simple because when there's only silence, whenever you start talking, you feel like everyone is listening to what you're saying and so you feel some pressure. When there's music, you feel like what you're about to say isn't going to be the instant focus of everybody in the room.
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Probably because it has been around a lot longer and is seen as different. Listening to music can also be a very passive activity and can be done while doing other things and doesn't require engagement unless you are watching it performed live.
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the subreddits fifth-,sixth-, and seventh- world problems
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Satire, all satire. They make fun of "first world problems" and take it way further.
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Yo man, I respect this subreddit, but string theory might be a little too ambitious for ELI5.
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Why is it so hot (58 °C/136 °F) in Mexico's Cueva de los Cristales (Cave of Crystals)?
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Well, you have a geothermal gradient of ~25 degrees / km normally. However, this cave is sitting over a pool of magma, which raises the temperatures a lot more than the expected 25 °C/km. _URL_0_
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Because it is Texas and closer to the equator than much (but not all) of the US. This is normal Fall temperatures for Texas and it is actually fairly cool as it is in the 70s and 80s. It is not considered hot unless it is over 100 here.
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Question regarding Jovian radiation and the potential of life on Europa
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Europa's ice crust is thought to be of order 10 kilometers thick. That will stop any radiation.
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The problem is: what is the energy source? If there is a liquid water ocean under Europa, sunlight is not going to be the energy source. This leaves open the option of [hydrothermal vents](_URL_1_) which can sustain energetically an ecosystem by releasing chemicals which are consumed by [chemoautotroph](_URL_0_) bacteria. If such hydrothermal vents exist, I guess deep sea organisms living near our oceans hydrothermal vents could adapt rather easily.
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Lorentz Transformation into a superluminal frame
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You are asking how to transform into a superluminal frame. This is not something covered by special relativity. Any Lorentz transform is clearly not defined if v > c because complex distances is nonsense. It might be possible to create a framework for this but why? There is no experimental evidence for the existence of inertial frames with superluminal speed. Even the superluminal neutrinos, which turned out to be an experimental error, were never suggested to exist in an inertial frame.
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The Lorentz transformations are an integral part of SR. They are how you transform between different inertial reference frames.
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Why isn't the most recent common human ancestor Mitochondrial Eve or Y-chromosomal Adam?
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Start with the MRCA and pretend it's a male. If this male had daughters, these daughters would not have carried their father's Y Chromosome - any sons they had would inherit it from someone else and could have a different Y-chromosome then their grandfather. Y-Adam would be the most recent ancestor from whom all Y-chromosomes descended - so the MRCA must be after Y-Adam. Likewise, if MRCA is female and has sons, her sons don't pass on her mitochondrial DNA - her grandchildren will get it from their mothers. The common ancestor of those females would be Mito-Eve, so the MRCA must be after Mito-Eve. In other words, if you follow genetic lines back through any ancestors to find the most recent ancestor of everyone you find a result much more recent then if you trace only the male line (father -father's father etc.) or only the female line (mother - mother's mother etc).
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[A single common ancestor is at least 10^2,860 times more probable than multiple ancestors.](_URL_0_)
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Who decides what to name tropical storms and how do they arrive at that name?
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The World Meteorological Organization names the storms. They have a rotating six year schedule, so the names used this year will also be used six years from now. The exception is when a storm becomes particularly deadly and damaging, at which point the WMO "retires" the name so that no future storm gets that name, and it's replaced on the rotation with a name that starts with the same letter.
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A hurricane is a tropical cyclone and specifically one that develops in the Atlantic or the north east Pacific. Once it leaves the tropics it becomes a post-tropical cyclone. Cyclones that generate outside the tropics are extratropical cyclones and do not count as hurricanes. They form over cooler regions and won't pick up nearly as much power as a tropical cyclone that travels hundreds of miles over 80 degree water. Cyclones are common, there are a bunch around earth all the time, most of them are weak and outside the tropics so they don't get any fancy names. Only ones inside the tropics can become hurricanes or typhoons because thats how we defined hurricanes and typhoons
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Why were capes first used? What were their primary functions?
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hi! there's still room for the fashion historians here, but meanwhile, you can get started on these earlier posts * [What was the practical purpose of a cape/cloak?](_URL_1_) * [Did people in cold-climate parts of pre-modern Europe really wear cloaks whenever they went outdoors?](_URL_3_) * [When did average people in stop wearing capes?](_URL_2_) * [When and why did the cloak seemingly fall out of fashion?](_URL_0_)
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It's a matter of practicality more than anything else. Technically, wearing a cape is still fashionable with black and white tie attire - as well as its military equivalent, mess dress. This is because a cape won't crease the fabrics in the same way that a coat could. Nonetheless, even then you'd be hard pressed to find someone who actually wear one. More generally speaking, capes have declined alongside the decline of horses. Riding a horse wearing a coat - despite it being warmer, tends to restrict movement in a way wearing a cape does not - which can keep you warm & dry by draping over the horses back. As horses have become largely obsolete, coats - which aren't so easily trodden on when walking on foot, have replaced their role.
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When the equator goes through a country, does that country then have two different seasons at any one time?
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Countries near the equator don't really have seasons. At most they'll have a rainy season and a dry season, which isn't dependent on what side of the equator they're on.
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_URL_0_ > Near the Equator there is little distinction between summer, winter, autumn, or spring. The temperatures are usually high year-round—with the exception of high mountains in South America and in Africa. (See Andes and Mount Kilimanjaro.) The temperature at the Equator can plummet during rainstorms. In many tropical regions people identify two seasons: the wet season and the dry season, but many places close to the Equator are on the oceans or rainy throughout the year. The seasons can vary depending on elevation and proximity to an ocean.
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Why do you gain an accent when you move to a different area or even a different country? Why dont you just retain your original accent?
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You normally do not adopt the accent of the country you move to unless you move while you're still a child (when the language centers in the brain are still developing). Children who move before the age of 8 are likely to adopt the local accent of the new country/culture almost perfectly (if not just like a native speaker of the accent). Those who move between the ages of 8-12 will likely retain some evidence of their original accent, but it may not be particularly obvious where they're from. Those who move after 12 may adopt some features of the new accent, but they're unlikely to sound like a local speaker and it'll probably be obvious they originally came from somewhere else. Those who move after the age of 15 will almost never adopt a new accent unless they consciously make an effort to train themselves to start talking like the people around them. In any case, the accent won't come naturally and will probably never sound like a true local speaker, even with training.
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You'd have to give an example, because this would be answered on a case by case basis and is probably way less common then you're assuming. However, the crux of the answer is that accents reflect *many* things -- not just geographical area. Accents can be influenced by your sense of identity, and therefore can be influenced by things like social class, ethnicity, personality, and sexual orientation.
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Could one perform a gravitational slingshot around a black hole? How effective would it be (if yes)?
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Yes. As long as you stay far enough away from it, the gravity of a black hole works no different than that of a planet or star. Anything your spacecraft can do around a planet or a star, it can also do around a black hole. Since black holes are more massive than most stars (sometimes by a large amount), the distances and speeds involved will likely be larger, but the fundamental principles remain the same.
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hi! you may be interested in a few earlier discussions on slings v other weapons * [Why did the sling fall out of favor as a weapon of war?](_URL_2_) * [Did military use of the sling die out in the middle ages? If so why?](_URL_0_) * [When were slings no longer used on European and Middle Eastern battlefields?](_URL_4_) * [Just how effective and were slings as weapons in ancient warfare and how were they used?](_URL_3_) * [Were slings viable weapons in large military engagements? How dangerous were they in general?](_URL_1_)
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If you placed a non-flexible metal ring five feet above the Earth and it wrapped all the way around the Earth what would happen?
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Ignoring that there probably isn't a round ring configuration that can be 5 feet from the ground everywhere, it would be intrinsically unstable so one part would fall to Earth forcing the other part into the sky. That point of contact would likely shift, causing the point to swing around the planet like a hula hoop smashing everything underneath it. This line of destruction wouldn't remain perfectly straight, so it would walk across the terrain unless constrained by mountains. Some large chunk of the planet would be a Spirograph of death until the ring was destroyed.
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[It would spread out in a sphere](_URL_0_) The lack of gravity allows it to spread out rather than fight its force.
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What are the technological differences between the video game cartridges of the 80s-90s and modern cartridges such as SD and flash drives? Why is going back to cartridges for video game distribution a good idea?
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Is video game distribution going back to cartridges? Given the ubiquity of the Internet and cloud storage, this seems counterintuitive.
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Video game cartridges are like the solid state drives (SSDs) of the past. They had much faster data transfer rates but data capacity is much more expensive since the data is stored on computer chips. Disks are the opposite and are similar to hard drive disks (HDDs). They have slow transfer rates because they require reading of a physically spinning disk but can hold a large amount of data. This is why there are loading times for games on disk because the console has to read the disk and load it. In the N64 vs Sony Playstation days, N64 had very responsive games with little to no loading screens. However, the Playstation could have games with movie cinematics because the CDs could store a large amount of data
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Why the world economy hinges on the success or failure of Greece.
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Most of the countries in Europe joined what's called the European Union. In a sense mostly uniting their economies. Kind of like an extreme version of NAFTA. They mostly use the same currency (the euro) and their economies have become connected. The EU derped in letting greece join because Greece seems to be a pretty big economic deep itself. If Greece fails economically (and this looks pretty likely) then the rest of the EU countries that are good (like germany) will have to bail them out. This will cause economic problems in the rest of Europe for obvious reasons. The EU is now a very large economic player and just as the rest of the world was affected when the US economy crashed, so will it be when the EU economy crashes.
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Nobody knows for sure without speculating. There are multiple parties involved in the Greek debt crisis - the Eurozone (which technically means 'the other EU countries' though I've seen some argue basically means 'Germany'), the IMF (which *currently* is [not approving](_URL_0_) of what the Eurozone is doing), private banking both international and domestic to Greece, and the Greek government, and the Greek people. And a lot of what each might do in both near future and long-term is dependent on what things another involved party might do. I think that's the best answer I can give that question.
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Why doesn't my stove fill my kitchen with CO and kill me?
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Carbon monoxide results from the incomplete combustion of hydrocarbons. The fuel mixture in your oven and gas stovetop are sufficiently close to the stoichiometric point (even mixture) or lean (oxygen-rich) enough that this isn't a significant issue. If you notice that the flames are orange-red, that's an indication that your fuel mixture has become cooler and richer, and that can lead to more CO production. There is also the fact that your oven doesn't use a very large amount of fuel compared to other appliances like a hot water heater or home heating system. Those have the potential to cause harm if they aren't ventilated properly.
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CO is nearly always a problem, combustion produces by-products, complete combustion produces CO2 incomplete combustion produces CO. Incomplete combustion is produced when there isn't enough oxygen to burn the fuel properly CO is deadly even in relatively small amounts - _URL_0_
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How exactly does an explosion kill you?
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There is a whole list of ways. Shrapnel- basically really sharp bits of things flying through your body and tearing you apart. Heat- explosions generate a lot of heat. If you are close to the explosion and survive everything else the heat will most likely kill you. Shockwave- this is the big one. When there is an explosion it generates a massive shockwave in the air. Usually when you hear of people missing limbs it's because of this shockwave. Imagine a giant the air as a fluid a shockwave would be like a tsunami.
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Explosives essentially are a very violent chemical reaction. The explosive burns at a very rapid rate, and that creates an area of high pressure, on the detonation point, which expands into the area of low pressure around it (the air). This expanding pressure differential is known as a shockwave, which imparts kinetic energy on objects in it’s path. The speed of that reaction, and thus the resulting power of the shockwave, is the difference between low explosives (like dynamite) and high explosives (like C4). So, the damage explosives do is split into kinetic damage, which inflicts a ‘pushing’ force on the objects near the explosive, as well as a thermal componanant depending on the explosive. Which is why people who are caught in explosions tend to have mild to moderate burns, but die from the massive blunt force trauma of the shockwave.
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What is the real reason that are there no snakes in Ireland?
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They were wiped out during the ice ages, and never managed to recolonize across the ocean to Ireland. The rest of Britain was connected to the mainland for a little while after the retreat of the glaciers.
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One theory is a lack of domesticatable animals. CGP Grey has an excellent pair of videos about it if you'd like to learn more. I'll link them in just a second EDIT: _URL_0_ _URL_1_
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Why is pork often in prohibited for religious or spiritual reasons?
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I apologize for not having the link, but there was an AskHistorians podcast that discussed this subject. The gist of it, as I recall, was that among the Semetic cultures of the near East, pigs were associated with refuse. People who ate pork were likely to be the poorest of the poor who didn't have the means to raise other livestock such as cattle. As such, refraining from eating pork was a means of placing one's self above an undesirable social status.
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Chicken and pork are more likely to be contaminated with the sort of bacteria and parasites that are harmful to humans. This is partially due to the conditions they are raised and slaughtered in, partially due to the biological similarity between certain animals and humans, partially due to how long the meat is left to 'hang' and age to let the blood run out/flavour develop. If you raised a pig in sterile conditions and spent the money to know that it was completely disease and infection free, you could eat the resulting pork raw safely if you wanted. It's just a lot cheaper, easier and tastier to cook it.
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Why does microwaved food shrivel up, get hard and rubbery if you don't eat it right away?
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microwave ovens are basically enclosed chambers which emit microwaves on whatever you put in them. When you put food with water in it's liquid state, the microwaves basically cause the water molecules to excite and heat up. if you warm it up in the microwave and leave the water to just evaporate, the result is dehydrated food. but also because of the resulting heat from the hot water it also overcooks the food causing it to caramelize/burn and go rubbery. Fun fact: because microwaves only excite water molecules in liquid state, it's possible to make a bowl from ice, fill it with water, put it in the microwave and the water will heat and boil before the ice melts...as long as the water doesn't melt the ice first.
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Microwaves don't really heat food itself, they mostly heat the water *inside* food. But microwaves don't heat the water evenly. It gets heated in little sections, and those hot parts spread heat to all the cold ones. That takes time though. When food snaps but doesn't get hot its because the water in those hot parts started boiling (that's the sound) but it hasn't been long enough for the heat to spread out (that's why its cold). This is why packages say to let the food sit for a few minutes after cooking. Or you can run the microwave a few seconds on and a few seconds off to spread the cooking time out, which is the same exact thing the "power" setting will do.
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What methods could we use to prevent muscle atrophy on manned space missions?
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The current way of preventing muscle atrophy on manned space flights is have gym equipment on board such as biking machine and the elastic rope for upper body. So far the most effective way to simulate gravity in space is by using rotation. The methods that could be used to simulate gravity is rotation, linear acceleration, mass, magnetism, or building some kind of gravity generator. Sites I used: _URL_0_ _URL_1_ _URL_2_
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I'm no scientist, but I do believe that for atrophy to actually occur, you need to stop all muscle use ( i.e paralysis) for an extended period of time. As long as even rudimentary physical activity is given to the muscles, atrophy will never occur. In the case of Sarcopenia ( age related decrease in muscle function) then it is involuntary and not due to a stop in muscle action. Hope this clarified some things.
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Why did everyone protest the changes made by Ellen with boycotts and petitions, but aren't doing jack squat about the continued changes that are being implemented by the new CEO?
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Seems to me that she made changes and we thought that she was dictating them on the community. When she left and the changes remained and the doctrine remained, I think there was a fatigue that she was not the problem and the fight remained. People are living in the moment of victory and not seeing the lose all around them.
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"The main opposition grievances are high inflation, crime and the shortage of some staples." Thousands have gathered and marched to ask for the resignation of President Nicolas Maduro. [This link](_URL_1_) from BBC explains a bit more but its still too summarised. [Here](_URL_0_) are fresh pictures from the protest posted on Reddit a while ago. I guess both anti government and supporters are marching and protesting each believing in their own agenda and purpose. Its not very well covered in Media due to various reasons but primarily due to the government policy there.
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A bird traveling 60mph enters a train car traveling 60mph parrallel to it. What happens to the bird?
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If the bird glides in through the window, it is liable to fall down to the floor of the car. It has been using 60 mph relative wind for lift, and that suddenly drops to zero. Also, it has been using its wings (or descent, if that is how it keeps its speed outside) to power it into a 60 mph relative headwind. The headwind suddenly drops to zero when the bird enters the car. It if keeps flapping its wings (or descending) when it is inside the car, it will hit the front of the car. If it just glides horizontally into the car, it will only have to contend with the change in lift and deceleration as it enters the air in the car.
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If its just gliding, all other things equal, it will fall into the seat with little speed relative to the car. The wings won't lift it anymore without airflow around them, but there is no particular force to accelerate or decelerate the bird any more than already existed outside, it's just the reference point changed, if you will.
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How does a spider not get stuck in its own Web?
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Not a scientist or a science major. But spiders produce 2 (or more) kinds of webs. Usually they have one that is sticky. That they get stuck in. And another one. That is stronger. It holds up the web. But isn't sticky. Spiders walk on those parts of the web
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They'll start to squeeze out a strand a silk, which is sticky at the end, and the wind will catch it and carry it downwind. Eventually, hopefully, it'll stick to something on the other side of the river, and the spider can start building her web from there. The webs are usually built with two anchor points on one side and one anchor on the other.
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How is an octopus able to match its background's color so well?
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I think what you're talking about here is the octopuses skin, and in that case the ink sacs have nothing to do with it, it's actually skin cells called chromatophores. These contain pigments that reflect back light to appear coloured, in the case of cephalopods and other organisms that can change colour these pigments can be switched out within the cell to change colours. In octopus a system of muscles control colour change. Different species have different "resolutions" - that is, some species are far better at mimicking their environment (see Mimic Octopus or most cuttlefish vs. Giant Pacific Octopus). Some species also alter their texture to better blend in. It's not really my area of expertise, so i hope that was clear enough, if theres something you don't understand feel free to ask more and i'll try be more clear! Here's some great extra viewing: [video 1](_URL_2_) [video 2](_URL_1_) [extra bonus video](_URL_0_)
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There is a theory that their weirdly shaped pupils result in something called "chromatic aberration", the result of different wavelengths of light refracting at different angles. In humans this causes colored "fringes" around objects which can be observed at the edges of eyeglasses or if your eyes are dilated at an optician. Octopus and squid may be able to use this to determine the color of their surroundings in order to create a match.
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Why do school districts have multiple smaller elementary and middle schools that feed into one larger high school?
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For younger kids it's generally considered important that they live close to school so they have a short and save way home. For older kids it's beneficial to have larger schools because that means you can offer a more diverse course selection.
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Usually a case of financing, and the income inequality in the US. Schools are often financed by property taxes, and the areas with high tax revenues often have high schools better than most worldwide. However, in middle class and lower areas there often aren't the revenues to hire the best administrations and best teachers, so the schools are pretty poor. There are a lot of very bad school systems int he US dragging down the averages. Also, there have also been racial and religious factors making sure that not all schools are financed very well. Which is why, in the US, the quality of the local school system is a major factor in where wealthier parents move.
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What's the difference between Google having my browsing history/private information versus my ISP having that same info?
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Google only has the data which you send them (which can be a lot, to be sure), ISPs have *everything* unless you pass everything through a VPN.
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If google turns evil, or some law happens that would require it to divulge private information, that would be not so great. There is some kinky stuff in everyone's search history and some stuff that could be interpreted as kinky if you tried hard enough. There is also issue of commercials getting more and more in-your-face with personalised e-mails and pop-ups and whatnot.
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Why is the memory that our immune systems gain from experience not hereditary?
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Because the "memory" we get about microorganisms is not strictly written in our normal DNA... The memory is merely the persistence of memory B and T cells that can recognize the antigens we have encountered.. Since we only pass on our germline DNA to our offspring, this memory is kinda lost with each individual. Whether this mechanism is by design or by not having the opportunity to evolve otherwise is an open question, but suffice to say it doesn't look like a great idea on paper: if we have to pass on to our child memory of every antigen we and our forefathers have encountered, thats one big burden of inheritance indeed!
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The Immune System is incredibly complex, so there really is no ELI5 answer, but in essence you have special immune cells that are designed to recognize foreign/non-native molecules called "antigens". When these antigens are found, the immune cells latch on to the foreign cells and destroy them while simultaneously "remembering" the distinct characteristics of the antigen that it was exposed to so that when/if it sees it again, or another very similar antigen, the immune cells can kill it that much more easily. This ability for the immune system to "learn" is its greatest strength and is now being used to harness the same power to fight endemic genetic diseases like cancer. In fact, the most recent Noble Prize for medicine/physiology was given for this discovery. Former US President Jimmy Carter is probably the most famous patient to have used this immunoglobulin therapy to treat the melanoma which had spread to his brain.
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Why can airlines have the movie rights to recently released movies so quickly, but it takes a lot longer for Netflix and other streaming services to add new movies to their catalogs?
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Streaming services are the last to acquire rights to the video because they represent the customer segment with the lowest profit margins. Why should a customer pay more to see the movie in a cinema/airplane when they can watch it at home anytime they want? The airlines are willing to pay a higher price per customer to capture passengers, and movie theatres are willing to pay even more, which is why they get the rights in that order.
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They probably own the rights to it outside of Netflix as well, so they could see a big profit from DVD and Blu-Ray sales on top of having exclusive content that entices people to sign up for their subscription service. I assume it's not that different from how HBO and Showtime can afford to produce their own original material when they are just subscriber-based movie channels on the surface.
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What happens at the molecular level when you cook meat?
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The textural change of the meat as a whole is a combination of water loss and protein denaturation. Consider the textural change of a cooked egg--that's a pretty major change, and has the same source. As for color, red meat contains a lot of iron, tied up in myoglobin proteins. That's what gives it its bright red color. When cooked, two things happen--the myoglobin changes and eventually denatures, and the iron changes oxidation state, leading to a change in color. This is why cooked meat is less red. As for browning and crust formation on the surface of cooked meat that's exposed to direct, dry heat, that comes from a set of complex chemical reactions. Some of it is the caramelization of sugars, and some is the Maillard reaction (really a set of many reactions that make a ton of flavor compounds) between sugars and amino acids at high temperatures. The crust that results is also because of proteins being denatured and water being driven off.
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I'm pretty sure listing all the reasons why (cooked) meat tastes different would require a knowledge of molecular gastronomy, since some flavors result from chemical interactions that happen during food preparation. But on the simplest level, the proteins of different species are made up of the same amino acids, but the proportions of the amino acids are different. Since various amino acids have different tastes (sweet, bitter, umami, flavorless, etc.), the levels they're present at will affect the overall flavor profile of a piece of meat. (the amino acid anion glutamate, for example, has a particularly meaty or hearty "umami" taste, which is why it's been used so widely as a food additive) Then you also have differences in fat content, the amount of sugars present that may or may not have been nicely browned, and probably quite a few other factors.
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What has happened in Syria the past ten years?
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This may get buried, but I really hope it gets noticed. This is an answer to your question posted on Reddit a month ago by a person living in Syria _URL_0_
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Let me link you to a [comment] (_URL_0_) I made in another thread. Its in Rusian national intrests for Syria to stay the way it is.
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[Engineering] Is it physically and structurally possible to build a large warship like those of Star Wars?
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In space, there's no gravity to put strain on structures that would collapse on earth. Assuming you had enough raw materials to build the ship, and the fuel to take the pieces into orbit, the only limiting factor for the size of a vehicle constructed in orbit is when it starts being affected by its own gravity. And, of course, you'd need enough thrust to push the ship around at a reasonable speed, efficiently enough that the whole thing doesn't have to be a giant fuel tank. And there wouldn't be much point without some sort of FTL mobility, unless you're planning on sending a generation ship somewhere.
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Nuclear cargo ships have been [built and demonstrated](_URL_0_), but the bottom line is that they just aren't economically viable. This is due to a combination of factors, such as the need for highly trained staff, safety, security and regulatory requirements, and the fact that marine reactor technology is highly controlled due to its dual-use capability (i.e. military).
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Explain like I'm five: how lasers work
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It's not voodoo magic. It's kind of like brushing your hair. When you get up in the morning, your hair (assuming you have more hair on your head than I do) is all tangled from tossing and turning and all that other jazz. This is what regular light coming from, say, a light bulb looks like. It's all tangled and scattered. What do you do to fix your hair? You comb it, of course. You brush it again and again, until it's all straight and perfect and just the way you want it. The laser unit does the same thing to the laser light, only instead of a comb, it's got a set of mirrors that comb the light back and forth until it's just right--at which point the light is allowed to shoot out from the tip of the laser and entertain you while you use it to drive the cat crazy.
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There a few relevant phenomena: The photoacoustic effect, where firing a laser at something causes it to expand rapidly as it heats up, emitting sound waves. The acousto-optic effect, where changes in the density of a material over a sound wave cause differences in the index of refraction, which affects how light goes through it. Sonoluminescence, where sound waves are used to rapidly collapse a bubble, which releases a flash of bright light as it collapses.
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What does "100% juice with other ingredients" mean?
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That they use 100% juice IN it. So a bottle that is specifically labelled 'Cranberry juice' could be Cranberry juice (which is 100% juice), apple juice,(which is also 100 juice%) water (if the juice is 'from concentrate'), preservatives and even additional sweeteners. Juice is one of the MOST misleading label products of all time. OF ALL TIME. Read the labels-- and always read the labels-- of juice products. For example, this popular 'juice' brand has less than 10% content that is actually from oranges and pineapples. The rest of the 'juice' in it is water/corn syrup. Ingredients: Contains Pure Filtered Water, Sweeteners (High Fructose Corn Syrup, Sugar), Orange and Pineapple Juices from Concentrate, Less than 0.5% of: Vitamin C (Ascorbic Acid), Citric Acid (Provides Tartness), Natural and Artificial Flavors.
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100% equals the minimum daily amount recommended by the FDA. You can easily surpass this by eating vitamin rich foods or by taking a pill. It doesn't mean that is all your body can process
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How are electrical signals traveling on neurons directed to its target?
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What /u/unia_7 said. Each nerve carries a large number of individual axons. Each axon either goes to one group of muscle fibers, or from one sensory receptor. That said, an axon CAN split in two and make synapses onto multiple separate target neurons. But it can't 'route' electrical signals down one branch vs. another. A branched axon duplicates the information it transmits; it can't selectively route information.
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This is the most simplistic way I can think of to explain this; your brain has connections between neurons called synapses. Synapses carry electrical signals across neurons and parts of the body move based on the intensity and frequency of these signals. When you "want" to move something, the synapses fire in the part of the brain that controls that something and signals are sent from the brain, through the nerves in your body to the muscles in order to move that something. So basically, you actively select which part to move (unless you have a muscular disorder such as chorea) and your brain will fire neurons in that area of your brain. The same thing happens when you are touched but in reverse. A stimulus activates nerves where you are touched and those nerves communicate to the part of your brain "in charge" of that body part. I hope that helped! It's a complicated process! Edit: Spelling because I didn't pass 5th grade English.
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The Glass-Steagall Act
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"American banking system" is a pretty general question, which has gone through tons of changes since the country was founded. As for Glass-Steagall, before it was passed banks could do just about anything with the money you deposited, without having to back it up, so much of it was used in loans and investments. When the Great Depression hit, people flooded to their banks to withdraw their savings, but the banks didn't have enough money to distribute, so thousands of people lost their savings and thousands of banks closed. Glass-Steagall basically said to banks "If you take deposits from citizens, you're called a commercial bank, and you can't make investments with their money", and also banks had to insure their depositors' accounts for a certain amount. The act hoped to prevent both the practices which led to banks' low amounts of money, and the loss of money by investors in a future bank failure.
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Glass-Steagall was put into place to prevent this. Sadly it was repealed in the late 90s. Unsurprisingly that's when the seeds of the latest major recession began, because Glass-Steagall was directly designed to stop that sort of recession.
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Why are oceans salty?
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They didn't used to be salty. Billions of years ago they were more or less fresh. Remember all\* rivers lead to the ocean (\*except for the ones that don't). As rivers [erode their way through the rock and earth](_URL_0_), they picks up those minerals and carry them along the way. Included in that is various salts. Depending on the area, the water might have a higher or lower general hardness, but since all\* rivers lead to the ocean, all those minerals and salts all wash into the ocean. When the water evaporates, the salts and minerals are left behind. The more or less pure water cycles back and picks up more minerals, which get carried into the oceans. After a few billions years of this, the oceans have become much saltier. You can see the same thing happening in [Lake Tanganyika](_URL_1_). It's at the end of a major African river system, and it's mildly brackish with a very high pH because of all the minerals washing into the lake, with no outlet.
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You are ~~completely~~ mostly right. Salt exists in large deposits all across the globe. As water travels across the land, it picks up salt and other minerals and deposits them in the ocean. When the water evaporates from the ocean, it leaves the salt and minerals behind. Over billions of years, the oceans became salty. Good deduction on your part! Edit: See posts by others below.
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What is the best book for someone to read about A) the Sunni Shiite rivalry and B) the Kurdish struggle?
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For a book on the Kurdish struggle I suggest [Blood and Belief](_URL_0_) it talks about the history and development of the PKK, which is possibly the most popular Kurdish nationalist group right now and have a sister organization that runs Rojava. It also briefly dives into the issues between the PKK and the KRG in Iraq. It's really interesting.
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You can read the book [After the Prophet by Lezley Hazleton]( _URL_0_). It presents a lucid and readable historical account of how the Shia-Sunni discord happened, from a historical point of view. However, I have two caveats about this book. While written by a Westerner who is apparently not a party to the dispute, the book has appeared to me to be subtly biased in favor of the Shias. Secondly, the doctrinal and cultural differences between Shia and Sunni are perhaps more important in shaping the conflict than any political or historical conflicts. This factor too is inadequately dealt with in the book.
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Why does censoring someone's eyes make them unrecognizable?
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It doesn’t really... look at a picture of a loved one with sunglasses on and you can still tell who it is. Obscuring any part of the face, however, makes it significantly harder to identify an unknown/vaguely known person.
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Things that happen inside the eye as seen by the owner of the eye, such as [floaters](_URL_0_), for example. Of course, these could be captured by a camera by viewing the inside of the eye, but they aren't captured as seen by the person.
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Why does the quality of GIFs, pics deteriorate with each repost?
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If you simply copied the link to the original gif it would be fine. If you downloaded the original file and uploaded it to a service that doesn't apply any postprocessing it will be fine. But what typically happens is, when you upload the image to a hosting service, that service decides to process the image to make it smaller or faster or a different file type. Then someone downloads that processed image, reuploads it again to a new host that also applies processing to the image, reducing the quality of the file **again**. Image hosts don't want huge lossless super high res gifs because it costs bandwidth and that costs money. So they mostly try to cut corners by resizing or shrinking the file.
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Three things that videos do that GIFs dont 1. Video encodes relate the differences between one frame and the other, IE change pixle 257 from this shade of red to this shade. GIFs are the entire picture, every frame 2. Also, depending on the quality of the encode, colors that are close to each other are rendered as the same color, especially blacks. This is why black backgrounds can seem blocky on low quality settings 3. Video codecs enjoy some hardware exceleration
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What is actually happen when the news tells me an obese person's skin has "grafted" to their couch?
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I would say this is an example of a poorly worded story. If she had been sitting in the same place for a long time, she would have developed bed sores. The fluid from the bed sores could have dried and stuck with the fabric like how the fluid from a wound sticks to a bandage. In that way, she could be called "grafted" whereas a better word could be stuck.
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It depends on how fast the weight loss is, how long the person was overweight, the method of weight loss, and then genetics. If someone was seriously overweight for 30 years before finally getting lipo, they'll have excess skin. If someone was seriously overweight for a short period of time but lost weight through dieting and exercise (a more long term solution versus lipo) then that person will probably not have excess skin. Also as height mentioned, age is a factor (edit)
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If a war veteran suffers from PTSD and kills a person/people, what happens?
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They would go to trial where they would likely plead insanity/mentally incompetent and be placed under the ward of the state (see: asylum) until they are deemed fit for the general population. That is provided the arresting officer didn't shoot them.
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More can be written, but you might like to go through ["Can it be statistically proved that the 'inexperienced reinforcement' units for example in WW2 or other large long conflicts suffered casualties at a quicker / bigger rate than the veterans?"](_URL_0_) by /u/the_howling_cow . This is not to discourage discussion. More questions, data, and debate are welcome.
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What significance does your signature really have?
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When entering into an contract, you need some way to prove both party understand and agree to it. In the event of a dispute, you want to be about to provide evidence to a court that an contract was agreed to. A signature is a convenient way to do this, but it is not the only way...witnesses or audio recordings will do also. To that end, *anything* you write down that is *consistent* and *unique* will do as a signature. Most signatures are illegible, so putting a number at the end is irrelevant, so long as it is the same number all the time. As long as a court can look at it as say "yup, your the guy who puts a 23 at the end of his name", its valid.
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They have 2 signature, one for signing for fans and another for professional setting, also they have enhanced security around them because they are public figures / have more money generally
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Why does every human/household have a specific scent and why is everyone's different?
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Every person has different bacteria in their skin that creates their own scent. Combine yours with your SO and it will a create a seemingly unique scent.
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This isn't a universal trait. Lots of people prefer a natural smell to an artificial one. You shouldn't assume that because you feel a certain way, that is how everyone feels.
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why is it sometimes hard to get drunk guys hard? (NSFW)
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One of the primary effects of alcohol is to [depress the central nervous system](_URL_0_). The central nervous system allows a man to get hard. Inhibit it, and he can't perform.
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TIL: seeing these is much, much easier when you're drunk. THanks reddit! Edit: Oops, this is ELI5. "this is much, much easier when daddy's tired and emotional, dear."
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Since Mars atmosphere is 100 times thinner than earth's why can't we simply land a spaceship like plane or glider? Why all the elaborate yo-yo and "flying saucer" methods?
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because its 100 times thinner. Thatd require some serious wings to provide the necessary lift. Its simply more efficient to come in hard and use rockets to slow decent at the end.
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It is all about efficiency, there is less air to plow through meaning you can fly faster with less fuel and the added benefit of avoiding most weather. Also the differences in distances traveled around the globe by being a few kilometers up are negligible. The Radius of Earth is 6,378 km A jet airplane flys 11 km above the surface. * Circumference is 2pi * r * Circumference of Earth = 2pi*6,378.1 = 40,074 km * Circumference of Airplane flight = 2pi*6,389.1 = 40143 km Even flying around the world it's only ~69 km (0.17%) longer a distance than the ideal surface distance.
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As someone who has never skateboarded in my life, I don't understand how jumping off the deck pulls the whole board up with you. Every time I see this it's black magic to my brain. How does this work?
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Think of it as though the surface of the board is covered in sandpaper. It's all scratchy, right? Now, pop a wheelie. The front of the board rises. The front of the board is now higher than the back of the board. What the skater does next is, he jumps with the foot at the back, and at the same time, slides his other foot forwards. The friction of his foot on the 'sandpaper' surface of the board catches on it. And because of the angle and direction that the friction is being applied in (forwards!), this forces the back of the board to lift to try and be level and move forwards as well. Get a piece of paper, and have it sit on the ground so that one edge is touching, and the other edge in the air. Now push your hand against the top of the paper in a sliding motion. If you get it just right, you can force the back edge of the paper to lift up so that the paper is flat, before it falls back to the earth. This is what a skateboarder is doing with their feet.
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It's not really a jump. You move the front of the board up really high by slamming down on the back and taking your weight off the front. It's a lot like slamming your fist on a fork and it flying up off the table. You then shift your weight back forward to level it out unlike the fork that spins through the air as it flies.
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What is Graphene, and why is everything trying to implement it?
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Graphene is a a one atom thick layer of graphite. It's useful because it's incredibly light, yet strong. It's also an excellent conductor and relatively easy to make. So you can use it to make very strong carbon nanotubes, or you can use it to replace expensive metals in electronics. Graphene is essentially a miracle substance with a lot of potential applications.
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you do realize that you're asking for an enormous amount of information... right? Have you even tried searching on... say _URL_0_ ? _URL_0_scholar?hl=en & q=graphene & btnG= & as_sdt=1%2C44 & as_sdtp= There are plenty of reviews over the current status and prospects of graphene as well as potential applications. Is there anything specific you would like to know?
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If salt is so bad for cars, why do we use it on the roads?
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salt is good for not dying in car crashes and car crashes are worse for cars then salt. Some places use other things, but salt is really cheap compared to most alternatives, although sand is pretty good.
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You're on the right track of thinking. The reason areas near roads don't become too salty right away is because when it rains most of that water enters a drainage system and makes its way towards rivers and lakes. That's where the biggest issues occur as you often see fish, algae, pretty much any aquatic organism get affected. Another factor to note is the frequency at which salt is being deposited. Salting the roads one time for a single snow storm won't have as much of an effect as areas further north (or south, depending) which require salting roads once a week or more. Some municipalities have started switching to beet juice for just this reason.
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What is a medium? Why is air and water mediums?
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Mediums are anything that stuff can travel through/communicate through. Air is well.. air and sounds travel through it (which are really vibrations traveling through air molecules). Water is a medium because lots of complex chemical reactions can occur in an watery (aqueous) environment. This has to do with water’s polarity. Water and air don’t always have to be the mediums, solids are mediums, they can actually carry sound waves better than air
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Water *in liquid form* is denser than air. Water *vapor* is not. The molecules are spread out enough to have similar or less density than air.
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How were whales hunted in medieval times?
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In the Basque region, where whaling occurred as early as the 11th century, they used a system of coastal watchtowers. The people who manned the towers were provided a salary, while all other whalers worked regular jobs and would only receive income based on the catch. These watchers would raise an alarm at the sight of a whale and the local men would push off in small row boats. They would approach the whale and use the regular harpoon and lancing method that was used well into the 19th century. They would then pull the carcass to shore and strip it of blubber before boiling that into oil. The industry was important, but whales were infrequent enough that it was not always a reliable source of income for Basque towns, thus why only the men in the watchtowers were salaried. Later on, with larger, more rugged ships, the Basque began whaling in Labrador and Newfoundland, but that is well outside the period you're asking about.
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I don't think we've nailed this one down yet - some possibilities I've read about include dislodging pests or scratching and itch. They also slap their fins and tails on the surface water, perhaps to let other whales know who's boss (bigger whales make bigger splashes). One site suggested that since breaching is often done in rough seas, the whale may be attempting to rise above the mist over the water to catch less moisture when taking a breath. That one seems a stretch, but we'd have to ask a whale to be sure!
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Is it true that most Indians who move to America were members of the highest caste back in India? (Or what is left of the caste system)
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I wonder if we could verify this claim with some real data. A lot of Brahmin families traditionally dominated in education but my personal experience growing up in big Indian cities was one where thankfully caste was never an issue. I apologize if this is too anecdotal but I have personally met Indians in the US from numerous backgrounds but I have no idea what caste they belong to Regionalism is a bigger problem Indians have to tackle and that is because of the zillion languages spoken in India.
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India still has the Caste System: _URL_1_ _URL_0_ Also, most marriages are arranged. THis leads to people who are poor, always being poor. They are born into a specific social status and it's very hard to get out of it. They can't marry up, or move up much past where their parents are. THey get arranged to marry someone of the same social status and then their children are born into the same circumstances.
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Did Midwest Native Americans produce salt?
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The Oneota Complex in Wisconsin during the late Woodland / Mississippian period used salt to temper their pottery ([Boszhardt 2008](_URL_0_)). Probably for other uses too, but it's in pottery where we see it salt usage most clearly. There aren't any readily available sources of salt in the Wisconsin though, so the Oneota peoples probably got it through trade from places further south. In [this post](_URL_2_), I discuss the salt trade in the Eastern Woodlands and how salt was produced in different areas historically. There's also the coincidentally well-timed [Certain Trends in Eastern Woodlands Salt Production Technology](_URL_1_), which was published in the September issue of *Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology,* which I happened to read just *after* writing the salt trade post. It's mainly about the development of salt pans and related artifacts, but it does have some additional information on some of the sites I mentioned in the linked post, such as the Great Salt Spring.
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The [Haber-Bosch process](_URL_0_). Before that, Chile and Peru were he main exporters of mined saltpetre.
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What were some of the downsides to Swiss neutrality during the two World Wars?
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I don't if this comment is allowed, but in Sweden, neutrality led to a large amount of buildings predating even World War 1 in pretty much every city. This has become a recent problem with Sweden trying to expand responsibly. Now, cities must expand horizontally rather than vertically because there are too many historic buildings getting in the way of new development. This might not be the case in Switzerland, but it might help your question.
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This is a question I've wondered about. It turns out the answer is the system of "protecting powers" _URL_0_, in which the interests of one state are protected in a second state by the diplomats of a third state, when state 1 and state 2 don't have diplomatic relations. In WWII, this meant that most communication went through Switzerland: > At one point Switzerland represented the interests of 35 states in their enemies' capitals, including the Allies in Axis capitals and the Axis in Allied capitals simultaneously, totaling around 200 mandates. The Swiss were able to cover various issues between the warring states, including the repatriation of prisoners of war, the welfare of Rudolf Hess after his arrival in Scotland and notification of Japan's acceptance of unconditional surrender. Basically, there weren't direct communications, but there were formal means by which they could discuss the issues that had to be discussed while they were trying to kill each other.
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double-entry bookkeeping
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I'm not an accountant, but basically double-entry bookkeeping keeps track of where money came from (one entry) and where it went (the other entry). Since you can't invent money unless you're a counterfieter, the two sides have to add up to the same amount. A business would have income and expenditure. Income would be from sales, or from capital investment which you used to get the business going. Expenditure will be everything you spent as part of the business (gas, electric, supplies, phones, advertising, raw materials, salaries etc), and what's left over should still be in the business's bank account.
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Just wingin' it, but I would say it's a question of error rate. Error rate drops dramatically when there's two independent running sources. Say you mess up 1 out of 100 entries. With single entry bookkeeping, you get 1 error every 100 lines. With double entry, you get 2 errors every 100 lines, let's say (twice as many entries, so double the errors). But if you get an error, you can go back and check it out and see where it was. Unless you happened to make an error on the incoming side for a credit (payment, say) and the same debit (deposit to your bank), you'll catch it. The chances of you making the **same** error in both lines in (1/100)x2, or 1 in 10,000. Basically, tallying all the accounts payable and accounts receivable separately gives you 2 different streams of data to compare.
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How do you come to a full stop in a stick shift vehicle?
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Brake as normal. Leave the gearstick alone. When the engine is about to stall, depress the clutch. If you don't want to keep your foot on the clutch, you can choose to put the car in neutral and then release it. An alternative technique is to shift down through each gear as you're braking. That was used more with older cars that didn't have such good brakes, shifting down meant the engine could help slow the car. With modern cars most drivers don't bother. EDIT: And in fact organisations that teach driving, for both new learners and 'advanced' driver training, favour the 'block shifting' method where you brake down to your new speed then change into the gear for that speed. For example doing 70 mph in 6th gear, brake to 30 mph, then select 4th gear.
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They're two different mechanisms. The parking brake is connected directly to the wheels, holding them in place. The gear shift locks the transmission, which is a part of the engine. There are electronic parking brakes which engage automatically when you move the gear shift to park.
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Why does being in the sun drain your energy?
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The body needs to hold his temperature at round about 36°C. So if you heat up due to beeing in the sun, the body needs energy to get the heat out. (Just like a fridge which need energy in form of electricity to transfer heat to the outside)
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There are a number of animals that use sunlight as a major energy source. [Aphids use sunlight to produce ATP, which is essentially energy.](_URL_1_) Oriental hornets are also capable of photosynthesis, through a yellow strip on their body surface. [The green sea slug absorbs chloroplasts from algae, that continue to function in its body as a subcellular level.](_URL_0_) Thus, these slugs are solar powered too.
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What kind of people were normally appointed executioner? What qualifications would one need?
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hi! there's lots of room for more info here, but you may be interested in these posts * [How were executioners viewed by society in late medieval and early modern Europe?](_URL_1_) * [What was the application process like to be an executioner in Medieval Europe?](_URL_2_) * [How did you become an executioner in the medieval age ?](_URL_3_) * [Could a woman become an executioner in Middle Ages?](_URL_0_) if you have followup questions on locked posts, ask them here & include the user's username so they'll be autonotified
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Hi, there have been several interesting threads on executioners that are worth checking out Prestige and pay * [Was the position of executioner considered prestigious in European history? Did it pay well? Or was it a pariah's job?](_URL_1_) featuring /u/brumblepug. < -- Note also links to a few more threads near the bottom * [Why were executioners so despised historically?](_URL_0_) Life as an executioner * [Did executioners in medieval Europe develop mental illnesses as a result of their job? Are there any records of this happening?](_URL_3_) featuring /u/sunagainstgold * [How did executioners in medieval europe (or really any time period) emotionally cope with their jobs?](_URL_2_) featuring /u/TheFairyGuineaPig
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Why and how do to predatory fish (tuna, shark) survive carrying around up to 100 million times the mercury concentration compared to their environment?
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It has to do with how the toxins are stored. If it is stored in fat cells then it is essentially just held there until the fish uses the fat up and releases the toxin into the body. Or if something eats it then it releases the toxins from fat. But some times these levels are shown to be drastic as 100 times their environment. But that doesn't mean they are at toxic levels. You'd be surprised the amount of certain toxins that are needed to kill something. But long term health effects can be noted from relatively low doses. So that fish could be exposed to low doses over a long period of time that wouldn't directly kill it. Some will cause neurological disorders that may take years to become severe enough to kill the fish. This may be longer than the fishes normal life span.
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It's important to keep fish in the correct size tank, and with the correct number of fish (the rule of thumb is 1" of fish for each gallon of tank). It's also important to give them something to be active *with* - plants and decorations are good for that (plants are also vital for filtration - which is *another* thing that *all* fish need). If you don't do that, the fish *will* be stressed. They won't so much be *bored*, or appear bored - but they'll *not* be happy or have a good life! So all those goldfish in bowls? Terrible. All those betas living in a cup? That's just horrific. They might not look it but they *are* suffering. Fish - even betas or goldfish need at *least* 5 gallons, *and* filtration, *and* entertainment, *and* their water replaced regularly, *and* their tank cleaned, *and* temperature control.
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Why do couples often look alike?
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Elderly couples tend to look more similar to each other because over time they mirror each other's facial expressions and mannerisms, leading to similarities in wrinkle patterns. Mirroring muscle use patterns can, over time, lead to changes in bone structure. Think of someone who has a stroke, paralyzing the muscles in one side of their face. Even though the bones are unaffected, the muscle wasting changes the bone structure, which gives the "classic droopy stroke face".
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With electromagnetism, it's the laws of physics. With everything else, you're just more likely to notice when two people get together that have something different about them. You're not going to notice that they have 90% of the same likes and dislikes, just the places where things don't line up.
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Is poop sculpture formed inside the colon or when squeezed out the poopchute?
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Poop sculpture or fecal formation occurs in [the large intestine](_URL_0_) where water from digested food is reabsorbed in the body. This is where food takes a solid form; notice that your poop usually follows the shape of your colon. There might be changes in the texture or sculpture of your poop; it might get watery or become too hard depending on various factors. By the way, I shall now call my anus as the poopchute. It has a nice ring to it.
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In the case of fiber, its sticky and slippery at the same time. That makes it bring the rest of your poop along for a very fun, regular ride down the fart slide and into the Porcelain Kingdom. Doing that also keeps super sticky fat (cholesterol) from clogging up your blood vessels. If you want a slightly less ELI5 more in depth explanation, start this video a minute and a half in. _URL_0_ Edit: I have been honored beyond compare for rudimentary poop knowledge. And my mother said I'd never amount to anything.
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How can we have pictures of our galaxy even though we're in it.
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We don't, except as seen from Earth's perspective of course. Pictures you see of the whole galaxy are either an artist's impression, or actually photographs of a different spiral galaxy which ours would resemble.
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Not sure what you mean. The pictures we have are taken from the inside. We don't have pictures from the outside, those are artist depictions based on scientific indications about the nature of our galaxy.
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Apart from humans, has any other animal caused the extinction of a species?
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My favorite example of mass extinction is the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) because things were so simple back then. It's all cyanobacteria's fault, as they were the first life on earth to get energy from photosynthesis. The biological introduction of free O2 into the atmosphere changed earth radically, more than half of the minerals on the planet don't show up until after cyanobacteria do, and the change in atmospheric conditions turned the earth into a snowball for about 300 million years. Oxygen was also poisonous to the anerobic bacteria at the time, so most of those species went extinct during the GEO. TL:DR Yes.
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Most people are commenting on examples of lost breeds, not extinct species. There are few examples, since it would be more common to adjust the breed, instead of letting them go extinct. Domesticated animals are such useful tools that it would be uncommon for an animal to become extinct without the people using them to also be eradicated, which would also eradicate records of such animals. The only true example of an extinct domesticated mammal I can find is the Fuegian dog. A type of domesticated canid which is a dissident of the Andean Fox. The Fuegian dog was a domesticated animal of indigenous South Americans. Their culture was impacted dramatically by contact with Europeans, which may have contributed to the loss of their canine companion. Edit: /u/skytomorrownow also commented on a native dog species. This is probably pretty common, since the domestication of canids was fairly universal, and the loss of these animals after colonization, and eradication of the culture, would also be common.
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What impact will Aetna leaving most of its Affordable Care Act states mean for the act?
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Hopefully that and other insurance companies abandoning it will provide the push needed to get a public option through Congress. The ACA is not a solution to the problems the US has with health-care, it was a temporary measure that was ultimately intended to stop the runaway inflation of health care costs, which it succeeded at doing. The US still needs massive health care reform.
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Trump has promised to repeal it and replace it with something else, with what no one knows yet so it is hard to tell what is going to happen. I see two options, either he waits to repeal it until an alternative is work out which mean that nothing will change in the short term. Alternatively he repeals it immediately after he takes office, maybe as a 100-day promise. If this where to occur insurance company would no longer have to give insurance to people on the basic of the affordable care act. They will be free to set any criteria on their customer as they see fit which before meant that people with preexisting condition (chronic sickness, cancer etc) would be rejected or be forced to pay very high premiums. For a young and healthy person the premiums would probably go down if the act was repealed.
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How practical is harvesting geothermal energy as a significant renewable energy source?
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It really depends on where you are. [Iceland](_URL_0_) generates about a quarter of its electricity from geothermal - but it's also a really volcanically active region.
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You can harness it for power. It fluctuates a little so you could draw some energy from it. But you have to remember that the earth's magnetic force isn't that strong in general and the fluctuations are tiny. It wouldn't be cost effective compared to any other renewable method of power generation to extract power from it. I remember with one spaceship they tried extracting power from it, somewhat successfully, by dangling a long wire behind their or shuttle. The shuttle was moving fast already through the magnetic field. _URL_0_ But it broke, so that failed.
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why is President Obamas amnesty executive order being brought before the Supreme Court?
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Reagan amnesty was a lawful compromise with Congress, tax cuts for so many immigrants. I am not familiar with any Bush amnesty so I decline to remark. Obama's executive amnesty otoh is a complete go around of Congress. Executive orders bear no legal weight, they are not law. They are directives to agencies of the executive branch. Once he leaves office, unless resigned by the next POTUS they become null and void. This is seen as an overstep by the executive branch into the legislative branch.
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I assume you are talking about Obama's executive order. It allows for immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally when they were children to secure protection from deportation if they are between the ages of 16 and 30 at the moment, in the military or school, and free of criminal offenses. They will also be allowed to apply for work permits.
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