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79p4we | How does warm-blooded animals stay warm? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Metabolism! Basically, your cells break down glucose (food) into water and carbon dioxide in order to produce ATP - which is a teeny molecule that acts a bit like a battery, containing chemical energy held in atomic bonds that powers your body (when those bonds are broken, energy is released to do whatever it is you need doing). The chemical reactions that convert food into ATP, and the subsequent use of this ATP, isn't particularly efficient however, with as much as 60% of the energy stored in the chemical bonds being converted to heat energy instead of chemical energy. Essentially, when you break a chemical bond, along with providing energy to the thing you want powering, nearby molecules get a little extra jiggling too, which is heat. This is where most of your body heat is generated - so in a way your body almost *literally* burns calories. You also generate some heat through friction. Every time something moves anywhere, as before, nearby molecules get a little extra jiggling, or heat, from the motion. So along with your body producing heat via chemical means, the actions of, say, your muscles or blood flow also produce heat. This is one reason why you shiver when you're cold; your brain is telling your muscles to dance so they can make a lil' heat and warm you up (as well as to burn more glucose).",
"Short answer : Eating... that's why we need to eat a lot, just to have the energy to stay warm. But let's wait for a more science person,because i don't really know how it work.",
"This has everything to do with metabolism and your body's need to maintain a specific temperature in order for the machinery in your cells to work. When your cells break down \"food\" (sugars, carbs) to generate energy, think of it like adding water to a river flowing downstream. The mitochondria have something akin to little waterwheels, which can only create energy when \"water\" flows through them. You're breaking food down, and creating a type of current (again, like water) to spin the wheel. As the wheel spins, it creates ATP which your cells use for energy, but it also creates heat. Think about how the engine in your car can move the car, but it also gets hot over time. Furthermore, you have a special type of fat cell in your body that we call \"brown fat,\" which behaves a little differently. Rather than use that current to primarily produce energy molecules, all they do is spin the wheel and let everything go as heat. Hope that makes sense."
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79p50f | When does "opposition research" become "treason?" | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Opposition research is just interviews with people and reviews of publicly available documents to learn about someone's past. As an example, lawsuits are part of the \"public record\" - but old lawsuits aren't generally online. So an investigator finding out that there was a lawsuit and finding the microfilm of the old court records and then making copies of it, and then interviewing people involved in the lawsuit or getting copies of the transcripts would be normal research. Treason is when a foreign government offers to spy on your opponent for you and give you things that their spy agencies stole, for example.",
"You are not allowed in US election to money or any other thing of value from foreign nationals or governments. So something that you could get legally from a US citizen would be a crime to get from a non US citizen. It is a bit more complex that that and green card holders are allow to contribute."
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79p563 | If you put a pill under your tongue to get it in your blood stream faster, does it bypass the stomach and liver? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sublingual (under the tongue) administration does bypass the stomach, obviously, but all of your blood will eventually pass through the liver (via the hepatic artery). However, unlike substances absorbed in the stomach and small intestine (oral administration into the hepatic portal vein, which brings everything through the liver first), medication administered sublingually goes to the heart *first*, then on to the liver if it happens to travel inferiorly (downward). This is why nitroglycerin is administered sublingually to treat angina pectoris (cardiac-related chest pain). [Source]( URL_0 )",
"Medical student here. Certainly not a board-certified expert yet, but I can weigh in a bit on this. The benefit of taking medications sublingually (below the tongue) is that the drug enters your blood more quickly, and has a greater opportunity to exert its effects. Consider this -- when you take a pill, it needs time to pass through the stomach and be absorbed primarily through the intestines. After it's absorbed by the gut, the first place that blood goes is straight to the liver. Your body is smart, and it's configured to send the \"collecting\" blood from the gut right to the liver in case you've absorbed something bad. Some drugs are highly susceptible to this process, which is called \"first pass metabolism.\" In fact, some drugs can't be given orally at all, because having all of the dose hit the liver right after absorption ensures that they're not gonna be effective. This is why you can't take birth control with certain antibiotics (Rifampin) -- the antibiotic makes the liver more trained for destroying it and similar drugs, including birth control. Additionally, some drugs simply aren't absorbed at all by the gut, so you can't get them in that way. When you're absorbing the pill elsewhere, be it under your tongue or through an IV, it isn't all going straight to the liver. Yes, it will eventually get there, but it will do so more slowly and not at once. In the meantime, the drug can spread throughout your blood and reach other targets in the body rather than hit the brick wall that is your liver. There is a greater chance for the drug to do its job, as opposed to going \"Stomach - > Liver - > Gone\"",
"Pharmacist input: For most drugs, First Pass Metabolism breaks down the majority of a drug. That is, after it is swallowed and absorbed, it goes first to the liver where a large amount of broken down BEFORE getting into systemic circulation. Going across your oral mucosa (buccal or sublingual) means I gets into systemic circulation (1) quickly, and (2) at a high blood level. Not all orally disintegrating drugs are able to cross the mucosa like this. Some are just better tolerated if they melt away in the mouth. These still get swallowed and get metabolized.",
"I don't think anything can bypass your liver. Read up On the circulatory system. Your body's plumbing works that way for a reason.",
"If it's an Advil gel cap it just literally burns your mouth. Source: popped Advil on my way to getting water and took too long."
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79p672 | What is the logic in nature, where a lot of animals/mammals are giving birth to a lot of babies at once? They can't possible take care of them all. | Dogs/Cats/Frogs, etc. Only reason I can think of, is so that there will be a better chance of as many babies as possible to survive the early days of their lives. But on the other hand, it means that a lot of those babies will die a cruel early death (starvation, getting eaten, etc) Edit: Thank you all for the answers | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is something called [r/K-selection]( URL_0 ). Some species have a K-selection strategy, where they have fewer offspring but take more care of them to ensure that they are successful. The r-selection strategy is the opposite, where the species has more offspring but invests less in taking of them, while many might die some will be successful by chance.",
"Every species has their own reproduction strategy. In modern times humans raise one or two kids, spend a lot of energy in raising it right. In the past they had lots of kids to aid in family labor in hunting, gathering or farming. A lobster might release a few thousand eggs and hope a thousand hatch, and maybe a hundred might live past larvae stage to juvenile, and one might reproduce in adulthood. In good years, a few make it, in bad years none do. A lot of life depends on random events. This year the rains came early and there was a lot of food, next year a wild fire will burn or scare away all the food. Maybe the den gets infested with parasites and most die, coyote eats most the kittens, one manages to live because the coyote was full off the rest of the litter. Can't predict those things.",
"The logic of nature is as follows. As long as there are enough children to give births to the next generation then the species is successful. Species that survives by having thousands of babies in the hope that 10% survive are still successful. Nature doesnt care about the percentage of survivors only that there are in fact survivors.",
"To think of nature in logic and why is the kind of the wrong way to look at nature. Living thing in nature are a result of evolution so the reason that something is the way that is that was a successful way for that animal to develop in the condition it developed in. Thing are the way they are because of how history of the animal and its predecessors and the environment. The result is what is the best way to spread the genes. If most of a litter die or like turtles only 1 in 1000 survive to adulthood it might be the best option giving the alternatives. Evolution does not care if there are many dead offspring as long as it is produce more living ones. Like the frogs in the question. Laying multiple eggs are a cheep for each egg so they can produce many. Most will not survive but som will. You can still look at different spices have differens strategies for litter size for different animals. For animals with litter sizes like cats and dogs it is likely that some of the dont reach adulthood. But if the only had one it would have a better chance of get feed but would still have a high risk of accidents or predators. So the way that result in the higher amount of living decedents is to have a large litter with some death but with more live one. Larger herbivores like horses, antilops etc often have only one offspring at the time. They survive by moving so that need highly developed offspring that soon can move along with heard. They protect the by a large group so the best way is to have one large offspring."
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79p7qa | What part of your Appendix bursting is actually dangerous to humans? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Uh, all of it? You don't want your organs to burst. Pretty much any organ, if it bursts, is going to be life-threatening. Regarding the appendix specifically: for one thing, it means that the blood and lymph vessels that supply the appendix are now severed and spilling blood/lymph into your abdomen. For another thing, appendices burst because they're infected. They're filled with harmful bacteria, and when they burst they spill those bacteria into your abdomen to go infect other parts of the body. For another thing, the appendix is part of the digestive system, which means it's filled with acid and bile and other corrosive fluids. When those spill out into the body, they start digesting it."
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79pcb5 | Anti-tamper software how it works? | Any IT here? Im curious about how an anti-tamper software works. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Software engineer here. Let's change 'anti-tampering' to 'anti-debugging' or 'anti-reverse engineering'. Let's break this down into two different categories - In-memory (while the software is running) - On-disk (while the software is not running) While it is important to understand attack methodologies- I'll skip over that. Understanding attack methodologies is important in this scenario because this can shine a light on the internal mechanisms of software engineering / Operating system internals. I'll try to explain like you're 5 ;) In Memory: While a program is running it is possible to 'attach' yourself to its processes or threads (threads meaning it is multi-tasking). This is used for debugging software for legitimate means. It can also be used maliciously - sort of like a gun, to protect or to harm - so some software products attempt to throw off debuggers. There are a couple of ways to do it and they usually revolve around either anti-virtualization technology (is it running in Virtual Box?) or debugger detection. There can be some strange things regarding this too. In Windows for example you cannot attach a debugger to a process that is already being debugged. The idea then is to make your program _debug_ _itself_. This sounds strange I'm sure, but it is a totally legitimate way to do it. You do not actually have to make a complete debugger, but convince the Operating System you're debugging yourself. Other additional methods and techniques vary, the oldest in the book is (on Windows, once again) debuggers are supposed to set a certain _flag_ on processes when they're debugged. The idea is if the flag is set to TRUE then it is being debugged and the program should halt execution. The problem is though a lot of debuggers do not do this. As a final note, another technique is purposely throwing _exceptions_. Debuggers will stop debugging if an exception is thrown (the debugger interprets this as the software application crashing). The trick here is you create a custom _exception_ rule internally and do 0 divided by 0 (0 / 0). This will throw a zero divided by zero exception and execution will halt on the debugger. However, your application will know what to do on this exception and continue as it normally would while the debugger is in a _frozen_ state. To be fair- all of the techniques described above have ways to avoid this. The solution to resolving things like this go to on-disk modifications e.g. changing the code! This is where on-disk anti-reverse engineering techniques come into play. On Disk: If your program is not running it has no way to defend itself. End of conversation. You can do a few things: digital signature / hashing, string obfuscation, variable/function obfuscation, instruction obfuscation (packing), or 'stubs'. Most products will use the first technique described (signatures) while more sophisticated software products will use a combination of the techniques listed (anti-viruses for example). The idea behind a signature is that your software and all of its instructions in totality create... well... a unique signature! If / when your program is launched and it appears the signature does not match, guess what? It's been modified. Halt execution. It's as simple as that. Now, the other techniques described though go a bit further and go on so that not only can someone not modify it but then _they_ _cannot_ _see_ _how_ _it_ _works_. This is pretty simple in theory. A string is a combination of letters. WCHAR StringExample[ ] = L\"THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF A STRING\"; Okay, on disk someone trying to tamper with the software can see our example of a string as plain as day. The idea is that the string is encrypted and when the string is needed it decrypts itself. Makes sense, right? Function/Variable obfuscation is similar. The names of the functions and variables (a variable being WCHAR StringExample) would be changed so they appear like WCHAR Fgv561[ ] = L\"THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF A STRING\"; Now, the person trying to reverse engineer the software has no idea what the variable is going to be used for. The name gives no context clues. The final two techniques are a bit more sophisticated and I'm at work right now. I'll finish this later."
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79pg2h | How does long chain of atoms (polymer) form a 2D surface ? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The question doesn't make sense because you haven't provided: Which polymer How large of a surface What you qualify as \"2 dimensional\" Under what conditions What context are you trying to ask about?"
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79pmdt | how do fever reducers lower your temperature? | Currently suffering from the flu and Ive been taking these to help me feel cool. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"\"Fever reducers\" are usually NSAIDs, which stands for \"Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug.\" The common NSAIDs you've probably heard of are aspirin and Ibuprofen. These work by inhibiting enzymes that produce chemicals related to inflammation and (somewhat) immune response. Normally they cause your blood vessels to dilate and swell with blood, which is why they're also effective in treating your giant swollen knee or sprained ankle. The same chemicals also help start/maintain the fever response by recruiting immune cells, so blocking their production can help out quite a bit. This specific class of chemicals are called \"prostaglandins,\" and in a sense they're the low-hanging fruit that we can safely shut down without putting you at much risk."
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79pouf | Why are there so many different shapes of water towers? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Not exactly an answer but remember that water towers do not supply water: they supply water pressure to the whole system. The key design feature is that the water has high potential energy to drive it through the whole system. [Like this]( URL_0 )",
"Water towers can vary in size quite a bit. What is most cost effective for a 25,000 gal. tank is probably not the most cost effective for a 3,000,000 gal. tank. Also the tank owners may have specific desires for the tank. Some tanks with larger towers can use that space for storage, etc. By the way, the lollipop shaped towers are probably pedesphere tanks and the ones with lots of supports are generically known as multi leg tanks, I believe.",
"They have varying needs for height (pressure) and volume, must meet local zoning regulations for appearance and strength, and must be engineered to work with local soil strength. Municipal water systems may emphasize beauty over cost as a matter of civic pride. If one is going to paint the town's or the high school football team's name, one might prefer sleek and swoopy lines to the basic tank-on-legs style that looks like a decaying relic from War of the Worlds."
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79pxlh | how does a “slicker” baseball result in more home runs? | Pitchers throughout the MLB post season have been saying that the balls are not the same as the regular season balls and that the leather surface is slicker which is resulting in all the home runs. I get pitchers having a problem with a ball that’s difficult to get a good grip on but what I don’t get is how that would cause more home runs. Wouldn’t it be more difficult to make solid contact with a bat if the ball has a slick surface? Also, I would expect a slicker surface to result in more wild pitches and fouls, not solid fence-clearing contact. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A slicker ball will carry farther due to being slightly more aerodynamic. Pitches will also not have as much movement with the slicker ball because of less resistance or grip in the air. Say last year a pitchers curve ball moved 2 feet, this year maybe a foot and a half or less"
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79q84u | What purpose does a magnet serve in a speaker or headphone? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A magnet creates the force and holds a loudspeaker in a certain position. Vary that force by bringing electricity from the amplifier through a coil of wire stuck to the loudspeaker, and it makes the coil of the loudspeaker move in and out. That pushes the air around and turns the movements into sound that we can hear.",
"Its what produces the sound. Sound is vibrations, so your record sound by putting a magnet in a coil. As the magnet vibrates (from the sound) you measure the minute changes in current through the coil. That is send to another coil, where it amplified (through an amp) and when the current is run through the coil the larger magnet vibrates. The vibrations create the sounds you hear, and since it vibrates in exactly the same way, it creates the same sounds. So the purpose it serves is basically it is the speaker, plus another part or two."
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79qeqx | Why can’t you add 2 110v household wires together to create 220v? | AC confuses me. I can connect to AA batteries together in series and get 3v. How come two 110 volts AC wires can’t be added together to create 220 volts AC? For example, I want to charge an electric car fast but I don’t have a 220v outlet. It seems to me like you should be able to take two separate 110 outlets, plug the into a box that puts them in series and blam-o0: 220v. What prevents this (I’m assuming this violates some law of physics) from being a thing? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"you can.....if they're on different phases. power coming off the grid is 2 phase, 2 sine wave voltages that are 180degrees offset from each other. when electrician wires up the electrical panel, each circuit only gets one of those phases. but if he wires up a circuit with opposites different phases, it'll be 220v. there are products that allow you plug in 2 outlets to make a 220v. URL_0",
"They may be 110v from neutral, but are they 110v from each other? If you have a 9V battery and hook up two leads to the positive and a third to the negative terminal and put them in series, you're not going to get a 18v potential on the circuit, you just get a circuit with varying resistance. All of your 110v outlets in the house are (if wired properly) in parallel with each other at the breaker box and on the same phase, so not much will happen if you attempt to put them in series. You *can* put a 220v breaker into your box off the two hot leads coming from the weatherhead to get a 220v outlet.",
"Voltage (electric potential energy) is a relative quantity. So, whenever you see a voltage you have to ask *\"relative to what reference point?\"* In the case of your house, all your outlets provide a voltage relative to the common ground for your house. So if you daisy chained two outlets together in series, you'd have a wire at 110V above ground connected to the ground connection of another. Which is just a giant short. But let's pretend that wasn't the case. If you connected the hot terminal of a 110V-above-house-ground outlet to the ground terminal of another, you'd just get a hot terminal with 110V-above-house-ground and a ground terminal at 110V-above-house-ground, or no voltage difference at all. Batteries produce a voltage difference between their two terminals. So if the \"negative\" terminal is at 10V and it's a 5V battery, then the \"positive\" terminal will be at 10V + 5V = 15V. Note that this has nothing to do with AC vs. DC.",
"Putting aside the issue of split phase power, the reason it doesn't work like you expect is that a line coming into your house is like having one battery, and each outlet is simply connected to in a chain.",
"It's not that hard to add a 220v outlet yourself. There are a decent number of YouTube tutorials. It costs < $100 for the breaker, some wire, the outlet, etc. It's easiest if you have an unfinished garage / basement where the electrical panel is.",
"You don't get 110 V. In North America you are getting 120/240 mostly in old residential buildings. Single phase. Two poles. That's what you have at home. It's a single phase... both poles are 180° apart. Thus making 240 between the two poles. Read up on it..",
"If you run a wire from a 110v outlet and another wire from another 110v outlet, you have not increased the 110v being supplied to the outlets. The outlets are not the power source, they are a distribution point. 2 Batteries in series are 2 different power suppliers. An outlet is not a power supplier, it's a branch from the distribution panel or load center."
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79qknv | How is Scoville Test performed? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They take a small, exact amount of the dried pepper in question, dissolve it in alcohol, then mix this solution into a cup of sugar water. They have 5 tasters drink that concoction to see if any of them can still detect the heat of the original pepper. If 3/5 tasters can detect the heat, then they'll dilute the solution further until they can't. The more dilution needed before the heat can't be detected, the hotter the pepper, and the higher its score on the Scoville scale.",
"The dillution technique isn't being used anymore, because it is subjective. Every persons tolerance to capsaicin is different and actually rises, the more of it you intake. Today a **high-performance liquid chromatography** is used. The heat producing chemicals in a chili are observed, measured and then transfered into the scoville system, because it is the familiar one. Every chili or sauce has different components with different amounts of capsaicin in different parts of the plant, therefore it is often difficult to measure the exact \"spice-level\". It is still more usefully and accurate than the old procedure. There are a lot of crazy methods for classifying hotness, for example the ***Dremann Hotness Scale*** where the chili are measured in their spiciness in relation to the salsa they are in. Hope this helps and I apologise for any grammatical or orthographical errors, English isn't my first language. Edit: Some formatting",
"Originally, the Scoville Scale was a human-driven test. The dried peppers were powderized and diluted in sugar water, and a panel of 5 humans tasted the dilutions until a majority of them detected spiciness. If that dilution was, say, 1/1000th of the original solution, then the scoville rating was 1000 * 100 = 100,000 Scoville Units. But this scale had flaws: Between labs, you could easily get a 50% difference in ratings. So a new unit was developed: Scientists established a standard curve for spiciness, and then looked at what chemicals were in each level of spiciness using a tool called High Performance Liquid Chromatography. They made a new scale based on **American Spice Trade Association Pungency Units.** But because Scoville was already publicly known, they came up with a conversion between ASTA Pungency Units and Scoville: 1 ASTA Pungency Unit = 16 Scoville Units. **TL DR** Originally, Scoville ratings were done with an elaborate taste test. Today, Scoville ratings are calculated by a lab test based on chemical composition of the peppers.",
"But why is it not on a log scale?",
"And I've always wondered how something can be 100× hotter. What does that even mean ? At what point does your stomach melt",
"Since people are answering HPLC, and HPLC is absolutely not something a layman encounters often, I'll take a stab at simplifying it. High-performance liquid chromatography is a way to 1) separate all the different chemicals in a mixture and 2) learn how much of each chemical there is in that mixture. Since peppers are spicy because of a specific chemical, capsaicin, they can look for that chemical in an HPLC experiment. The way it works is that as each different chemical goes through the machine, it interacts with the makeup of the machine differently. So, some chemicals will go through faster, and some slower. Since they know how fast capsaicin flows through, they can identify it and measure how much there is. So, they mash up a pepper, run the juice through the machine, look for capsaicin, and there's your Scoville test! Hopefully that helps!"
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79reix | Why does water turn white when a wave crashes? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It gets mixed with air, creating tiny bubbles. Those bubbles refract light, causing it to scatter as it bends from bubble to bubble until finally being reflected back outward. Much like why bubbles from dishwashing soap appear white."
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79sbvo | Why do most humans develop a fear of the dark at an early age and why do some grow out of it while others don't | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As for the first question, it is because our ancestors had to fear the dark because if they didn't pay attention to it, something could have killed them. Fear of the unknown."
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79shx1 | Why does the salinity of water change objects' buoyancy? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Water is more dense when there's a lot of salt dissolved into it, so things that are just slightly more dense than water might be less dense than saline water and float in it"
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79sio7 | Why does a glass with water in it get bubbles if it sits over night? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Dissolved oxygen conglomerates on itself and attaches to imperfections in the glass sides. Remember that the act of pouring and / or filling the glass is a process of oxygenation / aeration."
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79sqyz | How does holding something soaked in alcohol under someone's nose when they faint help? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It isn't just alcohol, it is alcohol mixed with an ammonia compound. The result is ammonia gas which irritates the mucus membranes of the nose and lungs to trigger an inhalation reflex. If someone had fainted from parasympathetic slowing of the heart and decreased blood flow to the brain this can counteract the effect."
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79tn03 | Why are children, of all animals, just naturally more energetic and playful? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Humans and rats both have an actual play circuit wired into our (and their) brains. It's because play is essential for learning and for socialization.",
"I always thought it's because life makes adults bitter and jaded. Children and animals aren't constantly being fucked over by their fellow man.",
"I believe this was once answered on here. I'm paraphrasing, but the answer generally stated that kids use all of their energy at one time because they are not accustomed to saving it throughout the day. This is why they get super tired by the end of the day and overly cranky sometimes."
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79tzkj | how does the vibration from heavy bass during a concert or in the nightclub not harm our bodies? (Apart from eardrums) | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"First lets put some numbers up to compare a normal and the loudest concert in the world: Less than 110 is the average maximum a train's horn can be across the world. Silenced .22 lr rifle – 116 db A night club - 118 db Lighting hitting you - 120 db Average Rock Concert - 121 db Silenced .22 pistol - 122 db A loud night club - 125 db Silenced 9mm pistol (glock) – 130 db Silenced .223 (ar-15/m4/m16) rifle – 134 db Silenced .45 acp pistol - 135 db Loudest concert in the world - 137 db Silenced 12 gauge shotgun – 137 db Probably fake readings of a night club - 152 db Non-silenced 9mm pistol (glock) – 157 db Musket - 160+ db Because sound is merely compressed and uncompressed particles/molecules/atoms/stuff moving around. If it had enough energy to hurt you it would just be an explosion. The loudest concert is less than 1/17th to the sound of a pistol (because db measurement is weird). Stun grenades are around 150-170 db making it on par or about 9 times louder than a rifle. In fact a grenade is measured to create 192 db. Or about 8 db away from killing with just sound alone. If there was a crowd this would be the world's most loudest concert: URL_0"
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79u1vx | Why does shampoo not lather up well when you shampoo for the first time in a while? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"My sister told me a long time ago that dirt is the enemy of suds and that stuck with me. But it's basically true. Your hair has oils that are important to its structure. Those oils allow dirt to cling to it. Shampooing strips away those oils and thus the dirt. but remember dirt is the enemy of suds so you won't lather up the first time you do it. That's partially why shampoo instructions say to do it twice, to waste more product and to make sure your hair is actually clean. The second one will probably lather up considerably. Alternatively if you wash your hair too much it will always lather but you are doing considerable damage to your hair.",
"[Surfactants]( URL_0 ) are the active ingredients in cleansers, lowering the surface tension between two liquids or a liquid and a solid (e.g. water and hair oils); allowing it to be rinsed away. The more dirt in your hair, the more the surfactants get bound (\"used up\") and the fewer are available for further cleansing and/or foaming (as free surfactants in the water will cause soap bubbles to form which you experience as lather).",
"The lather foam is unused soap in the shampoo. If enough dirt is available for the shampoo to bond it will not foam.",
"Most soaps are surfactants - molecules that bind to and break up greasy/fatty substances. Water and greasy (or hydrophillic) molecules do not want to mix. In the case of your hair not being washed for a while, it's covered with grease. Water alone is poor at removing it since they repel each other. A surfactant molecule is a hybrid. Part of it is hydrophillic - water loving. The rest of it is hydrophobic like grease. This [diagram]( URL_0 ) shows how it works. The red dots are the charged, hydrophillic parts of the surfactant molecules. The yellow stalks are the uncharged, hydrophobic tails of the surfactant molecules. When these surfactants mix with greasy substances, the surfactant molecules can bind to both the water molecules as well as the grease, allowing the grease to be broken up into tiny bits and dissolved in the water. Surfactants by themselves are really good at making bubbles. Air can generally be considered to be hydrophobic and so when you mix a lot of air into surfactant-containing water, you get thin layers of water, surrounded by a coating of the surfactant molecules, all pointing tail end into the air on both sides of the soap film as shown [here]( URL_1 ). (incidentally, the lipid vesicle shown in the right half of the diagram is basically how cell membranes work) So, when your hair is really greasy, most of the surfactant molecules get used up dissolving all that grease. That leaves little to no surfactant to make sudsy soap bubbles."
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79ub8l | why is gold backed currency dangerous to global financial order? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A gold backed currency isn't dangerous on its own. The US used to have a gold backed system until the great depression. Back then exchange rates were fixed bc almost everybody backed their currency with gold. Some conservatives like this idea because it prevents infinite devaluation of a currency: There is a finite amount of gold in the world, certain countries own certain amounts so they can only make as much money as gold they own. The main problem with gaddafi trying to go back to this system is that oil is traded in US dollars. Besides the US liking this way of business, countries now only use gold as a form of collateral between them as they make deals and their currencies \"float\" ever since the 70's which means they are traded on exchanges in the global financial system. If a country prints a bunch of money, then traders will see this and deem that currency less valuable relative to other currencies. So, besides countries not wanting to pay for oil in gold to Libya only and USD to everyone else it would subvert the global system of floating currencies by allowing an actor, gaddafi, to play by other rules. If he were able to get people to pay him in gold, he could stockpile it which would make it hard for the rest of the world to use gold in the way it does. Also see the England Tea trade with China and the opium wars of the 19th century for how asymmetrical trade balances have caused international conflicts."
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79ucvu | If i drink a considerable amount of water 0.5L+ mid training (aerobic training) I feel like my energy is cut in half for the next 5 minutes. Why is that? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"First of all you are now 0.5kg more heavy but your body also has to divert some extra energy to your digestive track. Even if it is for just a few minutes"
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79ugrp | Why do so few smartphone companies use stock Android? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Custom UI means the users get used to that one experience. Companies hope that users will keep buying their products for that experience (e.g. what Samsung is doing with TouchWiz). Differences are mostly selection of default apps (branded apps by phone manufacturer) and UI when we are talking about traditional phone companies like Samsung, HTC, LG etc. OnePlus for example changes a lot more 'under-the-hood'.",
"In addition to the main answer (driving customer loyalty through familiarity and/or unique features), there is another factor at the bottom end of the market. Some companies will pre-load malware for money. This is more prevalent in the PC market (where pretty much every big manufacturer takes money from McAfee to preload a 'free trial subscription' of that program), but it exists in the mobile market too. I've purchased a bottom-of-the-line tablet that came with preloaded adware that required root access to remove. It was pretty unobtrusive adware, showing up infrequent ads but it was there.",
"Let's be honest, stock android is cool but it doesn't have all the necessary features. It took ages to implement split screen functionality. While Samsung user had it for a long time. Basically, manufacturers try to attract user with unique features that are not available on stock android. Most of the times, these features are mere gimmicks, but every once in a while they tend to be useful. So much so that people might pick a based on that feature. And to be honest, most of these custom ROMs don't remove any stock features. Stock android is generally smoother and performs a little better than custom ROMs but today, even entry level phones have processors good enough to run the phone almost lag free. So having custom features doesn't hinder performance as much and you get extra features to boot. I personally use a Xiaomi Redmi Note 4. Which comes with MIUI as stock. On all my previous phones I've used custom stock baser ROMs like Cyanogenmod and enjoyed them. But ever since I got my Redmi I tried using custom ROMs but the battery and performance of MIUI is so smooth, it really is no issue in terms of usability. I honestly think it's better than stock ROM. This is mostly a case of optimisation by Xiaomi which is better than what some random users can build on XDA, but still, my personal experience tell me the stock ROM is better. Basically It depends on the user rather than any objective differences"
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79uo5i | Why do babies cry and make a drama before they go to sleep. | Title is self explanatory!!! | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Explain the title better! Seriously though, babies are very base or primal in their behaviour and they'll cry about anything really. And since being tired isn't a nice feeling, they'll start crying because they want it to be made better. Eventually they'll tire themselves out enough to fall asleep.",
"This is somewhat of a loaded/false premise question... the thing is, babies **always** cry. That's their sole method of communication. They don't \"make drama\" as they have no *concept* of that nor the facilities to understand, well, much of anything. Babies cry. It's one of their primary functions until they become children.",
"Emotional outbursts are physically draining (just think about the last time you cried until you couldn’t any more). This may be an unintended effect of reacting to uncomfortable stimulus (being tired). Babies haven’t been around long enough to just “deal” with unpleasant sensations, hence the reaction. Plus at that point an infant’s prefrontal cortex is too underdeveloped to even try to be reasonable."
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79upln | The psychology behind chronic self destructive behaviors? | Like, what kind of events can cause them, or like why does their brain say to do the thing knowing the consequences? I apologise if I sound ignorant or rude, I simply don't understand and very much would like to! | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most self-destructive behaviors evolved, as bmingo stated, as ill-adaptive coping mechanisms; i.e, as something meant to help the user deal with stress or other unpleasant feelings and was only minutely harmful, but shows true destructive consequences due to repetitious behavior. These coping mechanisms may have benefits that outweigh the risks to the user at first- for instance, perceived stress reduction. However, due to the side effects of the behavior (hangovers from drinking, scars from self-harm, weight gain from junk food binges), the user may use the behavior more often to compensate for the added stress of these problems, in addition to their original stress which never went away, but was merely pushed into the background. Most behaviors of this sort rely on some brain region (“pleasure center” or “pain relief center”, etc) to exert an effect on the body at large - ex: ecstasy tabs allow serotonin, a happy chemical, to flood the brain and keep it there for longer. These feelings are felt as good by the user, who knows feeling this way is preferable to feeling bad. The user experiences life events that favor continuing this behavior the cycle perpetuates. TL;DR: behavior makes you feel good when feeling bad, brain cares less and less about harm done so it can get its next sweet hit of chemicals.",
"A lot of it comes down to learned behaviour. Either your parents ingrained it into you during your developing years, or you somehow conditioned the response in yourself through the years. Generally self destruction doesn't just come out of the blue, it's almost always got a sometimes unnoticeable trail to it.",
"I honestly feel like this is way beyond an ELI5 situation. As there is a very wide range of disorders and causes. Both from a physiological and psychological standpoint. It can be a genetic problem, developmental problem, brain damage or from abuse.",
"< == actually a psychologist. There are multiple theories out there that seek to explain it as well as suggest ways to change them, so a single unifying explanation isn’t always available. For example, a therapist trained in Dialectical Behavior Therapy would say it’s a combination of environmental factors (chronically emotionally invalidating environment, experiences of trauma) plus biological predispositions (genetics via history of mental disorders in the family and/or higher emotional reactivity). That’s the biopsychosocial model. Then there may be a therapist trained in interpersonal process theory, who focuses on how early attachment affects your relationships now to influence your behavior as well as maintains certain behaviors. And there are also theories based on Buddhist ideals, which is that the mind is built to be anxious and to create suffering by misinterpreting the world, and being too caught up in those misinterpretations leads to more suffering. For some of those theories, developing mindfulness and compassion is the way to freedom from self destructive behavior. And then of course there are cultural factors that lead to more diversity and differences. The key is helping a person figure out what best organizes and explains their experience and fits their worldview, because that leads to the best interventions for that particular individual. It’s also why “fit” is so important in therapy - my style may not always fit everyone so there are some people that I might refer to another therapist who connects better with the client’s experience and worldview. In essence, we’re all different so the answer is different for everyone. Hope that helps!",
"Basically, you learn to do whatever is most adaptive for survival, and that generally means avoiding stress. That’s why a behavior (eg. drinking alcohol) at one time might reduce stress presently but later become the source of stress (eg. missing work because you are too hungover.) Also you go with what you know. If your parents were poor communicators you’ll likely find partners that communicate the same way because it is familiar.",
"my therapist told me a few months back that destructive behaviours are caused due to a person being unable to express their anxiety and/or stress. someone that's undergoing overwhelming amounts of anxiety and stress will find other methods to help them cope with these symptoms, making them act in a self-destructive way. since this practice helped them release their feelings, the person will repeat the behaviour until it causes a strong negative effect in their life.",
"Part of it is the brain is actually not working correctly. For example, ADHD and depression are caused by a lack of the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine. Medications that stimulate the production of those chemicals, or just replace them entirely, effectively treat them. Because most drugs (like pot, or heroin, or meth) stimulate dopamine production in the brain they can temporarily alleviate the symptoms of mental illness caused by a lack of dopamine. If the parts of your brain that regulate risk/reward analysis are not functioning correctly, you may be willing to engage in significantly riskier behavior for a lot less reward, or a very short term reward that is destructive in the long term. Like using dangerous and illegal drugs. ADHD, for example, can be best described as being \"temporally near sighted.\" That is, for a person with ADHD, the future doesn't really exist conceptually. Impulse control is extremely low or nonexistent because the ADHD sufferer is not able to consider the long term consequences of their actions. This can be remedied with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, medications like Adderall or Vyvanase, or a combination of the two. Source: have clinical depression, anxiety, and ADHD. I have done a lot of research to understand why my brain is the way it is.",
"To give a specific hypothetical, say you have a child with a learning disability such that he can't easily communicate, and certainly can't talk. Over the course of childhood the kid might learn \"When other people pay attention to me, good things happen to me.\" This is because attention from caregivers often leads to one's needs being met. Throughout childhood this kid is going to do a lot of stuff. Let's say one thing he does at one point is slump his head so that he taps it with his hand. And let's say this is followed with caregiver attention shortly after. For whatever reason. This may teach an association between touching ones head and attention. But this doesn't always work. So just like how we might press an elevator button multiple times, and harder, of it doesn't light up on the first push, the kid may start to tap his head harder to get attention. And wouldn't you know it, caregivers provide attention when he hits himself in the head. And he eventually learns that he almost always gets attention if he hits himself loud enough to make a noise. In behavior analysis, this is called \"shaping.\" But you can see how self-injurious behavior can develop. Obviously this is just a hypothetical-- every learning process of \"self-destructive\" behavior will be different, but the themes will carry through: individual gets needs met when doing something that may become a self-destructive behavior, needs aren't always met despite the behavior, the behavior intensifies such that needs are now being met, and suddenly the \"self-destructive\" behavior makes sense. And this can happen to any behaviors. If crying doesn't get you a candy bar from the store, a tantrum (more intense crying) might, and often will. So now are you going to do a small cry, or have a big tantrum? I'm coming from a behavioral perspective, but I hope this clears up how certain \"self-destructive\" behaviors can develop and be reinforced by the environment. My example admittedly is very simplified, but I think it gives a general outline of what is basically happening. If anyone has questions, I can try to answer.",
"A personal example. When I was a little kid, my parents divorced quite messily and with that, my parents were gone a lot (also there were other problems but for simplicity's sake I'll leave it there), so being the oldest I had to step it up and sort of act like a parent, which isn't really an appropriate thing to burden a 5-year-old with. But it was something I was praised for \"being so responsible\" and \"such a good older brother\" etc. Later on most of my relationships end up where I give too much, take on too much responsibility for other peoples happiness and generally think that it's my job to save the world or something and there is a lingering sense of guilt about things way outside of my control. A lot of it stems from that. This has caused two major kinds of self-destruction, one where I go and go and take on too much until I burn out and break down, get depressed and pull away from everything like it's a survival tactic (but damages my work, my career, and my relationships). The other kind is coping mechanisms, the easiest way to explain it is as a drug of choice. I have a few drugs of choice, daydreaming, reading fantasy, videogames and overeating. All unhealthy, all self-destructive but they are a coping mechanism for stress that I otherwise am only barely learning how to manage. TLDR: Coping mechanisms and inappropriate upbringing.",
"This is purely anecdotal, so I don't know if it qualifies on a larger level, but here we go. One explanation various self destructive friends have given me is that they feel they don't deserve good things in their life. These (specific) people struggle with intense self hatred and consistently harm themselves in one way or another. Sometimes this is conscious, other times I've been told this is just a pattern they're following on autopilot because it's what they know. An example could be in a romantic relationship: they'd respond to a generally supportive and kind partner with self sabotage. A reason they could articulate for doing this is that they didn't deserve their partner, and the kindness they were given felt painful and misplaced.",
"Speaking from my own experience, I had a meltdown and self destructed because I thought someone would finally notice and care that I was suffering (depression) and needed help. If I just kept coping and carrying on stoically, people would keep dismissing my needs and accusing me of just trying to get attention or trying to get my own way. In the end, the self destruction didn't have the intended result but it did free me up to build my life again without all the stress and drama that had brought me down before.",
"As a person who've jumped from one negative pattern to the next since adolescence, for me it always started as coping mechanisms for feelings I didn't have the words to express and wasn't allowed to show at home. For example, as a teenager being depressed, I would often get scolded for looking sad and being \"moody\", being told that I affected the entire family in a negative way. As I couldn't cry or express my feelings, I started inflicting harm on myself. At the same time, by poor self image (which Ive had since as long as I can remember) was starting to turn into an eating disorder. When, after a while, my self-harming was discovered, I turned all my attention towards starving myself, hoping for death or at least being skinny enough that someone would SEE ME and try to understand. Fast forwards a few years, and hash started replacing my ED as I realised I could eat without feeling bad when I smoked. Long story short, after doing relatively fine some years in my early 20's, I had a relapse, lost everything I held dear, and ended up as a heroin abuser. So anyway... for me personally, all of these negative patterns started as a result of me not being able to communicate how I really felt, as well as not being able to \"let things go\", thereby getting stuck in depressive thoughts. (Also, not getting the help I needed when asking for it, before I started doing hards drugs). I knew what I did was bad for me, and I didn't really want to do it, but I didn't know what else to do instead - and obviously, both eating disorders and drug abuse is a form of addiction - it works in the beginning, but eventually it makes your life hell... but you just can't seem to let it go and also you're ambivalent because you're scared to lose the \"only thing\" you have that works (though in a bad way) and for some people these patterns have become so ingrained with their personality that they don't even know who they are without it, which obviously makes it scary to try and let it go. **TL;DR:** My self destructive behaviours started out as a way of letting out the negative emotions I was feeling, but unable to communicate. They were learned negative behaviours that spiralled out of control until they became pretty much automatic responses to every situation I found stressful or difficult. I knew the behaviours were bad for me, but at the time I didn't care about myself and also didn't know how else to express my feelings except taking them out on myself. As these negative coping mechanisms seem to work well in the beginning, they eventually become so automated that they become your first and \"only\" solution to every hard situation. Also, this behaviour patterns gets registered by the brain, and in time the synapses turn into a \"highway\" which makes breaking the patterns really hard. To change this, you must create alternate \"roads\" in your brain by finding other coping mechanisms and reinforcing these until the \"road\" they built can override the previous \"highway\" in your brain. To do this, you must make conscious choices to behave different than you would previously, again and again until the new behaviour becomes the preferred option in your brain. This takes a lot of practice but is certainly doable, especially with help from professionals. Hope this answer provided some insights and that I managed to explain it in a ELI5 way. BTW, OP: Good on you for trying to understand! These things are difficult to understand even for those doing it, so I respect you for trying. You must be an empathic person :-)"
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79uq7g | How do they put the vitamins in vitamin pills? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You mix the binding agent with the vitamins and ground it to a fine powder. Then you press it into a pill. A bit lik how you mix ingrediens in a cake. You can se a video of how it is done at URL_0",
"Great responses. I will just add that in biochemistry terms, \"vitamin\" just means something that your body requires that it doesn't make itself, meaning you've got to get it from your diet. Edit: I am here referring to the types of dietary vitamins OP was asking about. Also note that vitamins are organic compounds, meaning they have carbon in them.",
"First they identify something high in what they're trying to extract. Let's say they're trying to extract vitamin c so they get a bunch of oranges. Then they grind the oranges up and mix them into something called a solvent. The solvent chemically dissolves everything in the orange and separates it all. The mixture is then spun around super fast, this further separates them. When it settles the vitamin C will be in one of these layers and it'll be extracted separately. Then you'll have (relatively) pure vitamin C. Edit: something something autocorrect",
"I used to work in Pill Encapsulation. There is a machine that makes pills. One barrel holds a batch of liquid vitamins. There is a second barrel that holds heated liquid gelatin. The gelatin flows over two cooled drums, this makes the two side of the pill. The medicine/vitamins flow to heated wedge. The wedge is placed over two dies, that contain the form of the pill. The two ribbons (the cooled gelatin) are fed through the dies, underneath the wedge. The wedge squirts the medicine/vitamins just as the die comes together, and heats the gelatin to seal it. And out pop some pills. URL_0",
"So I work for a vitamin and mineral distribution and premix company. We by raw bulk vitamins direct from china and then distribute or preblend those pure vitamins at ratio for other food and beverage manufacturers. There are three types of vitamin pills. The capsules have been covered pretty well by other posters. What we also have done is premixes for tablets. That requires each raw vitamin to be coated or encapsulated in order for them to stick together when pressed into a tablet. Pure powered vitamins are free flowing powders and would just crumble if compressed. There are also gummy vitamins. Those require pure soluble raw materials that get dissolved in a tiny amount of water and added at the water addition state of the gummy making. As for the pure vitamin powders we use? Those mostly come from China. All your ascorbic acid? China. No one in the US makes it because they extraction process is so bad for the environment. Each vitamin has a different source and process. So do your minerals. Some items like amino acids can be fermented. Your fat soluble vitamins (A,D, E,K) come as liquids or crystals and have to be spray dried onto a carrier to be used in a powdered for tableted form.",
"If you mean [pills like these]( URL_0 ) then they're just little containers made of something that dissolves in your stomach. In a factory, the vitamin is just put inside in a machine, then the two halves are pushed together. That's all there is to it. Maybe you're wondering how vitamins are made. But each vitamin is a completely different chemical, and the answer is different for each. Some are extracted from natural sources, others are made in a factory. In the end they're turned into a powder and put inside a capsule (or pressed into a tablet).",
"Vitamins are usually created in a manufacturing environment, like laboratory that has been scaled up so that the batches are much bigger. Many vitamins can be created by organic synthesis which is, essentially, mixing several components in a specific order under specific conditions (like 100 degrees Celsius for ~4 hours, etc.). They will take commercially available building blocks and combine them in huge reaction vessels and take samples at given time periods. These samples are tested using analytical techniques such as gas and liquid chromatography as well as mass spectrometry. They also test pH to make sure it is in the proper range and once everything is tested they will put the reaction mixture through a purification process. This can be employed using a wide variety of methods such as extraction, fractional distillation, centrifugation, etc. Samples are again tested to ensure that they conform to USP standards (generally 99.8% purity as there will always be some residual water). Once the ultra-pure vitamin is attained in a powdered form it is then mixed with a binding agent and filler such as starch, along with heat, and pressed into pill form (sometimes the doses are very small and that tiny amount of powder is mixed with filler so the pills aren't the size of flea turds). Source: am chemist",
"One I can answer. I develop natural health supplements and supplementary foods for a living and have been doing it for over 10 years. You can buy the vitamins and minerals easily. Companies like BASF or DSM manufacture them. You can buy cheaper vitamins out of China too. We put together a formulation on paper and then calculate the requirements accordingly. For example Calcium pantothenate (vit B5) is 91.6% pantothenic acid, Calcium content of Calcium carbonate is 40%. One I have calculated what the customer wants and what the final input will be I can determine whether it will fit into one tablet or capsule or two (or more). At this point I may go back to the customer for their input. If the brief was for one-a-day but the total actives means I need to consider 2 tablets we may need to revise the formulation. Once the active content has been approved I can either mix it with some excipients - magnesium stearate as a lubricant, silicon dioxide as a flow agent and microcrystalline cellulose as a disintigrant I can generally put it in a hard shell capsule with little more effort. I just need to check the blend flows easily and will fill a capsule to within +/-7.5%. Tablets are harder. The excipients are partly the same as above. But it will depend on whether the tablet needs to by wet granulated or pressed with direct compression. Direct compression is less work but wet granulation gives better uniformity. The choice of excipient often is a choice of the formulator based on experience and what they know works. I tended to use a blend of microcrystalline cellulose and calcium hydrogen phosphate. The tablets are put onto a tablet machine for pressing. The choice of tooling for tablet shape will either be dictated by customer requirements or by our own tooling list. We can do vitamins into softgels too. The active are mixed into oil with some viscosity modifiers mixed in to prevent separation during encapsulation. All dosage forms are tested with destructive testing to ensure they break down and release their contents and to check the uniformity (what's claimed on the label vs what is actually there. There are a few details I've omitted for clarity and simplification. But otherwise feel free to ask me anything you like.",
"Vitamins can be made synthetically. Through a manufacturing process. They are identical to the vitamins you find in natural foods. Also cheap vitamins are identical to the expensive ones so dont over pay for your pills. I wouldn't by the dirt cheap chinnese made ones because who knows what in them but for the most part vitamins are vitamins.",
"There are many decent answers. But I think it should be pointed out: many companies don't. They make total placebos and they (tmk) can't be held very liable. Big CBS (?) expose about 2-3 years ago. Something like 85% had less than advertised, ~ 50% had NONE of advertised product found in their pills/tablets. Buyer beware.",
"\"Pills\" can be: * Two-part capsules * * Get vitamin powder; fill it into capsule and close it off. If the powder is sticky, you might need to add another powder to make it flow nicely into the capsules. There's a machine that does the filling and the closing. * Softgel capsules * * Suspend the vitamins in oil (maybe a vegetable oil, but some \"healthy\" oil like a fish oil is often used for this) * * Make two sheets of gelatine or a vegetable analog and use a complicated machine to inject the oil-vitamin suspension between the sheets and close it off into capsules * * Tumble the capsules and coat them with a thin layer of oil * * Dry them so that the gel hardens * Compressed tablets * * Make a powder mix containing the vitamins and stuff to make it stick together when compressed, but not while it's flowing into the tablet machine. Sometimes this is done by using ready-made powders (direct compression), and sometimes this is done by making a paste with the vitamins and the binders, and grinding this paste up (granulation). * * Stamp the powder into pill shape in a tablet press. This can be a very annoying process to get right: sometimes the tablets fall apart right after being pressed, sometimes a week later, and sometimes they don't even fall apart in the customer's digestive system - a good manufacturer will test this by using a simulated digestive system. Others don't care and will sell you little bricks of vitamins that will pass right through you. * * Maybe coat the tablet to make it taste better or last longer. This is done by spraying a coating on in a tumbling machine, and drying it with air. It can be a thin film coating or it can be a sugar-coating like they use for M & Ms. Source: I used to formulate vitamin supplements about a decade ago on a different continent."
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79uvyh | When we talk, our voices change pitch, volume, etc. Why is this not interpreted by our brains as being musical? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's too random. Take a piano. You can get absolutely beautiful music out of it, but if a small child is just banging away at it, it sounds like garbage. Music has a structure. It has rhythm. The notes aren't random even if some argue that certain songs sound like they are. You actually can make speech musical. For a decently well known example, look at the turrets in the Portal series.",
"There's a funny audio illusion where if you play a short phrase over and over your brain looks past the words and can pick out the musical aspects of the speech. It just needs repetition to be acknowledged",
"Music is, generally speaking, mathematical in structure. Notes are specific, measurable frequencies. The notes in a musical key tend to have mathematically agreeable frequency ratios that musicians adhere to. Speech generally doesn't adhere to this kind of structure. In fact, speaking exclusively within a musical key could be considered a definition of singing."
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79vc19 | what are exogenous ketones and are they helpful when trying to be healthy? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"From a \"exogenous ketones\" supplement's description \"Exogenous ketone body supplements provide users with an instant supply of ketones. Even if you're not in a state of ketosis before ingestion (such as when eating a higher-carb diet). ... And the body efficiently converts BHB to acetoacetic acid, which effectively raises blood ketone levels.\" I would consider this sort of thing with exteme caution... For starters, ketone bodies are an energy source created from fat. If your goal is to remove fat, then simply adding ketones from an external source would appear to do nothing good. Secondly people who are in a ketogenic state need to monitor their ketone levels with pee-on strips to ensure things aren't getting out of hand. \" Prolonged excess of ketone bodies can overwhelm normal compensatory mechanisms, leading to acidosis if blood pH falls below 7.35.\" wikipedia article linked below. Thirdly, even if this worked as described being in ketosis alters your pee chemicals so that what normally naturally prevent stones developing, no longer works properly. URL_0"
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79vc1n | When it comes to classical music, when do copyright laws come into play when a current composer wants to play a classical song at his next concert or his whatever show he is composing for? | Music from Beethoven,Mozart and others are played in many productions of plays, concerts, movies and even advertisements. Can anyone just decided to use this music whenever they please? Can they make money off of this music without paying out anyone? Does anyone own the copyright to there amazing pieces of music? Can any composer make his own version of the song and make a career doing so? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Music in the public domain, out of copyright, can be played without permission or paying. But the performers can copyright their performance and they do. There are organizations, ASCAP, BMI and others which enforce the laws in regard to their members. Any public performance in an area which produces a profit for someone has to obey the laws. Those organizations make sure this happens. It is not a significant burden. They want the music played. The process is well established. There are web sites where public domain music is available for practice. You can get sheet music for practice here. URL_0 and elsewhere.",
"Copyright has a limited duration. Something that was created hundreds of years ago would be in the public domain now. The length of time that someone is allowed to claim copyright is an ongoing legislative tug of war, where Disney in particular is not eager to see Mickey Mouse enter the public domain.",
"I believe how it works is that the sheet music isn't copyrighted anymore due to age so anyone can play it without paying anyone except for the price of the sheet music. Where copyright comes in is when you try and use a version played by someone else. They don't own the song but they own their recording so they hold the copyright to their version of the song. Example would be a symphony plays Beethoven's fifth and you want to put that version in a movie. You can hire them to play it and they can charge for their time playing it but cannot charge for the use of the music. You could take the other route and pay them for their recording they already did. You would be paying for their version of the song they recorded but not for the song itself. This is how my music teacher explained it to me years ago so I might be mistaken, but I think that's how she said it worked."
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79veou | What does Tupper’s Self-Referential Formula prove or realistically achieve? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"What does it prove? That Jeff Tupper is awesome. What does it achieve? Nothing, by itself. Tupper's formula is strongly related to the concept of a [Quine]( URL_1 (a program that produces its own source code as output), which is itself strongly related to the concept of [fixed point]( URL_0 (roughly, a fixed point of function f is a value of x such that f(x) = x. As a consequence, f(f(x)) = f(x) = x, and f(f(f(x))) = f(f(x)) = f(x) = x, and so on and so forth), which are very very important concept in computer science (specifically in the context of lambda calculus, which deals a lot with recursion). Building quines is not particularly useful, but it takes a fair bit of skill, so you tend to learn a lot of potentially useful tricks in the process of building one yourself. You can think of building this formula as an advanced learning exercise."
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79vo6t | why snow builds up on grass before hard surfaces like concrete? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"SInce grass has air flow between the blades is cools down faster than a flat ground surface like concrete so its actualy colder than the concrete by a few degrees allowing the snow to not melt as fast. After a time the concrete will cool down from the snow and eventualy either create a layer of ice or, if its a largely unused road or walkway, snow buildup. This is also why ice is usually found under snow on alot of sidewalks, the snow melts when it hits but imediatly statrs freezing from the air temp."
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79vp8s | How are Papayas resistant to the papaya ring spot virus (PRSV) by simply by incorporating PRSV DNA into the papayas DNA? | For my year 12 project | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The PRSV DNA fragment inserted into the papaya DNA carries the PRSV coat protein gene. The papayas with this viral gene are able express the coat protein, which prevents the papayas from being infected."
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79vu92 | Why is it easier to make a chord shape on an instrument with your non dominant hand, when doing anything else with it is harder? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Practice. Ambidextrous individuals have a tendency towards easier mastery of two handed instruments such as a guitar."
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79vuh7 | How does Luscher color test work? | Why certain colors mean certain emotions? And how Luscher found out about it? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It doesn't, and therefore is no longer used. The assumption is that the traits associated to each colour are generalities, and therefore incorrectly identified by participants as being accurate identification of their personality traits. He found out about the correlation by conducting tests and empirically allocating certain traits to certain colours depending on what each person's traits were, and which colour they considered their favourite."
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79vvgv | How are obscure and complex probabilities determined? For example, what are the chances of running into a friend on a random street in a tiny remote town without knowing the other person was there or planning to travel there? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"By breaking their dependence down into things you can know or guess using techniques like Bayes Theorem. If you move randomly at 5 km/h (which seems unlikely) and there are 25 km of road in the town and you take an hour long walk after dinner then statistics can say which 20% of the town's road network you're most likely to be on based on where you eat dinner.",
"I worked with a guy in China who was doing his PHD in maths (I forget what specifically). We were there when the SARS epidemic kicked off and lots of foreigners were leaving. We caught up for a beer one night and he walked me through the way to get a probability for either of us contracting bird flu. Initially, we just plugged data into the problem. How many people do you get close to in a day, how far does the average person travel each day, how many people do they make contact with, how infectious is bird flu, how many people have contracted it in Hangzhou (where we were), how trustworthy is the official infection rate from the Government. Once we'd plugged all the data in, he started doing napkin notations, some of which I followed, most of which seemed like black magic. Anyway, he came up with a 1 in 8000 chance that we'd come into contact with someone that had come into contact with someone that had bird flu. The point is, for complex probabilities, it seemed like getting all of the different factors into the problem as a number was the essential part. 1 missed factor and the answer goes way off."
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79w7et | What does aspirin do that helps prevent heart attacks, stroke and now cancer? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"For the heart attacks and stroke risks: aspirin thins out your blood, lowering the stress on the veins and arteries.",
"The theory is that it thins the blood, making arterial blockages less likely. But most of the evidence for this is statistical. You have one group use aspirin, one that doesn't, and see who has the most heart attacks. That can show that aspirin is beneficial without us knowing exactly why it is beneficial.",
"Blood clots can cause blockages in the arteries that bring blood and oxygen to the heart and brain leading to either heart attacks or strokes. Aspirin can help in preventing this by thinning the blood and preventing the blood from even clotting. As for how it can prevent cancers i'm not entirely sure, maybe by preventing the clots from forming you can prevent chronic complication from even happening in the first place."
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79wcvd | - How do baggage scanners at the airport work? What do the different colors on the x-ray mean? | The x-ray I get from my doctor is only black and white whereas the x-ray scanners at the airport show different colors. Also, what do the colors mean? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The x-ray devices in luggage scanners are a bit more complicated than the x-ray medical imaging devices. In particular, they're set up to identify and distinguish between different *kinds* of objects, whereas medical x-rays are pretty much only interested in one: bones. The trick is that not all x-rays are created equal. The x-ray source will send out x-rays in a *range* of energy levels. Organic objects block low-energy x-rays some, but not higher-energy x-rays. Plastics block low-energy x-rays better than organic objects, but not as effectively as metal objects, which pretty much block everything. The device is set up so that the x-rays pass through your luggage and then hit the first detector, which sends an image to the computer. But the x-rays then pass through a filter that blocks out all low-energy x-rays before hitting a *second* detector. That sends another image to the computer, this time only showing those objects that block high-energy x-rays. By combining these two images, the software can distinguish between organics, inorganics (e.g., plastics), and metals. It then assigns different colors to each. I think most manufacturers use black for metal and orange for organics, but I'm not sure about that. Could vary from machine to machine.",
"The main idea behind baggage x-rays is that a bag has to be scanned thoroughly in a short period of time, and that different items are to be scanned. To help with that, they use colours since we are more prone to notice colour difference. The colours vary with density- increasing tends to blue so the dense metals and alloys are shades of blue (think laptops, guns, mallets). Decreasing density tends to red, so the redder it is means the item is lighter like a thin fabric or just a linen sheet. Green is always plastic, so they tend to look for laptops and parts with the green colour. A particular example is green rectangle with blue screws, that'd be a laptop. Hope this helps!"
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79wfcd | What does it mean to work in academia, and how does one do it? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Generally, it means to be working in a university setting as a professor, scholar, researcher, etc. Generally you get into by applying for positions, although it seems to be a huge \"who you know\" sort of field.",
"What you do in academia varies but will almost always involve research and writing papers / articles / books, and frequently involve teaching. Very many of these positions require you to have a PhD, and commonly doing a PhD includes doing work that will put you in contact with academia in the field you're specializing on. That is often how you get into academia. Other roles in academia require a Masters and the positions are advertised more broadly."
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79wuoo | How does pain medicine work? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"\"Analgesics,\" the technical term for pain relief medications, actually refers to several different *categories* of medication, each with a *very* different mechanism of action. TL;DR: we're not really sure how the most common over-the-counter pain medications work, but have a pretty decent idea how opioids work. One of the more common categories is non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (\"NSAIDs\"). This includes ibuprofen (Advil), naproxen (Aleve), and good, old-fashioned aspirin, among many others. These all work by interfering with a specific category of enzymes that are involved in the production of certain hormones. . . which in turn has anti-inflammatory and pain relief effects. We're not exactly sure why, but there you go. Then there's acetaminophen, also called paracetamol, the active ingredient in Tylenol. We're even less sure how that one works. It's *not* the same mechanism as NSAIDs, we know that much. Also, whereas NSAIDs have anti-inflammatory properties in addition to analgesic properties, Tylenol and related medications have \"anti-pyretic\" (i.e., fever-reducing) properties, again via a mechanism we don't really understand. *Then* there are opioids. Morphine. Codeine. Hydrocodone. Oxycodone. Opium. *Heroin*. Etc. These directly bind to \"receptor\" sites (i.e., locations on the surface of cells that detect the presence of particular proteins) in the brain and nervous system generally having a variety of effects. One of the most notable is pain relief, as opioids basically block your nervous system from registering pain by occupying all of your pain receptors. But they'll also do a number on your gut and suppress your breathing to the point that you'll *die* if you take too much. Far, *far* more powerful drugs than either of those discussed above. Which is why they're very strictly controlled in most jurisdictions, and some of them are just outright illegal pretty much everywhere.",
"Most medicines work by having a more favorable bond to the specific receptors. The medicine blocks the feeling of pain by not allowing your natural signalling molecule to bond with the pain receptors."
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79x55d | How come sparkling water doesn't spray out of bottles like soda or champagne do? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because it does not form a foam, because it contains no sugars, starches, or proteins that would form the outside of stable bubbles.",
"Surface tension isn't strong enough. Imagine trying to dip a [bubble stick]( URL_1 ) in just water and trying to blow a bubble. [Once you add soap to the water though]( URL_0 ), you can start getting bubbles bubbles. It's similar with sparkling water and soda. Sparkling water doesn't have anything that increases the surface tension of the water, but Soda has sugars or syrups that likes to stick together and create much more surface tension than just water alone."
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79xf0w | What do these main ingredients in a flu shot such as Formaldehyde, Aluminum Salts, Gelatin, Thimerosal, and Chicken Egg Proteins do to prevent the human body from getting sick? What is each ingredients purpose? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"* aluminum salts kick your immune system to make it respond to the vaccine more rapidly * Formaldehyde is used to kill bacteria and any viruses that may be attached to them * Thimerosal is a preservative so that vaccine vials with multiple doses don't grow bacteria. * Egg proteins are found in flu shots which use chicken eggs as part of their creation. * Gelatin is a stabilizer so that vaccines, while in storage or in transport, don't get affected by high or low temperatures and congeal.",
"Those are called adjuvants, they are there to ensure the active ingredients in the flu shot remain stable through time and temperature changes. Sometimes they are there to allow freezing of the active ingredients. The active ingredient of a flu shot is a delicate protein and for the shot to work it must remain stable through shipping and storage.",
"all of those are preservatives/viscocity changing agents. So what they do to prevent the human body from getting sick is to properly deliver the active medical ingredients in a form your human body can use. Medicines degrade (thimerosal, salts, and formaldehyde prevent decay), and they need to be encased in a proper body compatible medium (gelatin is one) to be delivered. Chicken egg protiens is odd, may I ask if there is a more formal name? biological compounds do help with having your body accept it, but I'm surprised its phrased that way. None of these things are bad for you in the quantities they exist in flu shots. They are also not the active ingredients, they are mostly for transport."
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79y4cg | How do scientists decide where to point the Hubble or Kepler telescope? | How do we know where to point it, what to look at? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Typically researchers will submit proposals for telescope time slots to a committee which will review the requests to determine if they are worthwhile, ranking them by priority and feasibility. Included in the proposals is precisely the kinds of observations requested so if the telescope is going to be positioned in such a way as to make such observations convenient then it is more likely to be fulfilled sooner."
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79y4wk | Why does dipping a finger into the fizz of soda make it dissipate so much faster? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most sodas are mostly water and sugar. The oil on your hands is non-polar, whereas water is polar. ELI5: soda bubbles lose their surfactant potential when in contact with an anti-polar colloidal mixture.",
"It causes the bubbles to pop around your finger which causes the further bubble to pop due to surface tension interference. The sudden change in the number of popping bubbles causes a chain reaction similar to the ping pong balls on a bed of set mouse traps. The first delisturbance sets off a chain of disturbances.",
"It only happens when you do it with dirty hands. Wash your hands and do it right after and compare."
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79y6bs | What steak cuts are the leanest? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Filet mignon is just a cut off a beef tenderloin. Which is going to be your leanest \"choice\" cut. Sirloin can be very lean and you can always do some trimming before you cook it. If you want really lean cuts just go to a local butcher and ask them to hook it up. Although, alot of the flavor of a steak comes from a good marble of fat so you may be diminishing your steak experience by trying to go with as little fat a possible."
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79ynd0 | Why do we need thousands of nuclear weapons when one is enough to destroy any target? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A 100 would not be enough to end the world. You could probably destroy all the infrastructure in a large country but definitely not the whole world. The whole purpose of having a ton of nukes is so that you always have more nukes after the first bombs have fallen. If a country only had a handful of nukes then a preemptive attack can destroy them before they launch and the country has no recourse. We currently have more than enough nukes that an enemy country could never destroy them all. There would be nuclear retaliation, and any plan where the enemy can nuke you back is a bad plan."
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79zfg2 | If trees produce oxygen , is there less oxygen in winter? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Not as much as you'd think because it's summer on the other half of the world. Trees are more about storing carbon as wood. Oxygen creation, as far as the biomass on earth goes, is done by algae for the most part because there is more of it photosynthesizing at any given time, compared to trees.",
"I think the trend for oxygen is not as clear, but you can definitely see cycles if you look at a graph of CO2 concentration over a period of time. [Here]( URL_0 ) is one from NOAA where you can clearly see yearly changes in CO2 concentration. And [here’s]( URL_1 ) another that’s more zoomed in. So far as I remember, these variations are mostly due to the activity of trees during the different seasons. If you want more info, I can dig up my notes from the climate history class I took last year and see what we discussed on this topic."
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7a00jp | What is Anti-aliasing, what's the difference between the kinds, and why does it help in gaming? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Here's a close-up of what is generally meant by anti aliasing. URL_2 Basically, it can be thought of as smoothening the edges of an object to make it look more natural from afar. Here's another example that I screen shotted from [this]( URL_0 ) wikipedia article on spacial anti-aliasing (MSAA, or multi spacial anti-aliasing, one of the methods that you've probably seen in the menus if you've played a PC game). URL_1 There are dozens of different methods of doing this in 2D art, and then even more came about when 3D media started being made. There are various algorithms and techniques that anti-alias in different ways. Some are meant to focus on different parts of a scene, like the background, foreground, the edges of an object. A lot of these methods are derived from methods used in graphic design/early web design to make fonts look smoother. Most have jargony and intimidating names, some are based on the person who came up with the method. Some methods of anti-aliasing are proprietary, like nVidia's TXAA which was designed by and for nVidia. All in all, the different names just refer to different methods, techniques, or algorithms to smooth pixels and make things look nice without sacrificing performance.",
"Basically anti-aliasing prevents jagged edges on walls and stuff. Example: URL_0 You can see the towers edges are all blocky vs the smooth surface of the aliased one. It makes an incredible improvement in games at the cost of performance which is why consoles typically don't use aa."
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7a05al | How do we know how hot the core of the Earth is and everything underground if the farthest we have dug a hole is just 8 miles? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One of the main ways we've learned about the earth's interior is by studying Earthquakes. Scientists have learned a lot about how vibrations (which is what Earthquakes are) travel through different types of materials (solids, liquids, semi-solids.) Imagine you take a big rock and put your hands on the side of it, while somebody else taps it with a hammer, you'd sense different things if the person tapped right next to your hands, or if they tapped further away, or if they tapped on the far side of the rock. If your hands were really sensitive, and you kept a detail of what you felt, you'd learn a lot about that. Then imagine doing the same thing with different materials, maybe a big jello mold, or an inflated basketball, or a bucket of water. You'd pretty soon know what kind of vibrations would feel like from different kinds of taps in different places on different materials. Scientists have sensors all around the world that measure earthquakes and other vibrations in the earth very precisely. Let's say a big Earthquake happens in Japan, it will be detected in Japan and the nearby region, but also in America, and Australia and Europe. By comparing the types of vibrations detected in those different parts of the world, and looking at how long they took to travel, scientists can infer quite a lot about the types of material that the vibrations were traveling through. Then they take information from other scientists who have studied the kinds of stuff the earth is made of, and how those materials behave under heat and pressure. When the different groups of scientists put their data together they are able to form a pretty clear understanding of the composition of the interior of the planet without having to observe it directly.",
"MissionFever's response is VERY good. I would just like to add a few comments in ELI5 spirit. Short Answer: Math Long(er) Answer: We don't actually KNOW with 100% certainty. We learn new things all the time. However using mathematical models we are able to accurately determine some things, like where fault lines and natural resources are. We are also able to speculate with reasonable assumptions of accuracy on others (like the composition of the center of the earth). But there are many details that we have to accept as ASSUMPTIONS - reasonable or otherwise. We still can't predict earthquakes or volcanoes with a comfortable level of \"when\" and \"how bad\" accuracy. The exact mechanics happening underground are still mathematical models that SO FAR have done a good job at accurately explaining what happens AFTER it has happened (like earthquakes). So we keep the existing models until a new one comes along. Having taught High School science i can tell you many of our assumptions have been updated over the last few decades as we learn new stuff. Heck, Even continental drift (aka plate tectonics today) is barely more than 100 years old. We're as sure as we can be, until we learn more :-) - go math!",
"to explain it like you're 5, it's the same way that you can tell something is hollow by knocking on it. we detect earthquakes and measure the reverb as it passes through various points on the globe.",
"The answers here are quite good, but I would like to add one detail. There are several slightly complicated mathematical equations (a little much for ELI5 imo), but essentially scientists use them to find the mass of the Earth. Using the vibration of earthquakes (mentioned here already), it can be found that the core is made of iron because the vibrations are different when travelling through iron as opposed to aluminum. Now that we know the mass of the Earth and the size and makeup of the core, we can find how much force the sheer weight of Earth's gravity is pushing onto the core (from all directions). An iron core will change temperature with more pressure. If your mom ever cooked with a pressure cooker, that is a perfect example of how compressing the air around your food will let more heat into it. We know the melting temperature of iron, and we also know how much pressure must be applied to iron to make it a liquid (or in Earth's case, a liquid under so even more pressure so that it seems like a solid again). Another interesting and simple way to tell if a planet's core is hot enough to be a liquid is to observe how much the Sun's gravity pulls the planet into a slightly non-circular (or non-spherical) shape. This is how we know that Mars has at least a partially molten core, because the Sun squishes it like a pancake (very slightly) at certain points in it's orbit. If Mars had a solid core, it wouldn't squish so much. TLDR: Scientists can use the weight of the Earth and it's pressure on the core to determine the temperature of the core, as long as they know the material of the core. Also molten cores make planets more squishy.",
"As a Mud Engineer (drilling fluid specialist) in the oilfield this intrigues me too. Seeing shells come across the shakers from 1500' down 150 miles inland is never boring. I've always wondered how old they are but the come up looking like fresh ones from the beach. Things get interesting downhole with HTHP (high temp / high pressure) but the most I've come across is 315 degrees or so around 11K down in Karnes County. I've only ever worked South TX Eagle Ford wells and West TX Wolfcamp wells so I don't have the geographical knowledge that some old guys have.",
"Also, what else makes a giant magnetic field that keeps us from becoming Mars 2.0? A molten magma core, hurray!",
"Just covered this in geology. There are 4 principles: 1. The composition of meteorites (mostly iron and nickle) and mass balance calculations that show the earth to be similar. 2. Ophiolite: parts of the mantle exposed at the surface. 3. Kimberlite: igneous intrusions (cooled magma) with diamonds. 4. Seismic waves. P and S waves from earthquakes refract (bend) around the core of the earth, demonstrating that it's not solid. A shadow zone helps identify the size of the core.",
"Yarr. ~~Someone~~ Several users already asked this question, like, a couple times. [How do we know what the Earth's core is made of?]( URL_2 ) [How do we know what the earth's core is made up of?]( URL_3 ) [How do we know what the earth's core is made of?]( URL_1 ) [How do we know what the Earth looks like on the inside?]( URL_0 )",
"Digging a hole 'just 8 miles' is actually a key first step to learning the temperature below! Miners hundreds of years ago knew that the deeper you dig into the Earth the hotter it gets. About 25 °C every 1 km in fact. So if miners kept digging all the way to the Earth's core (hypothetically of course) and the temperature increased 25 °C every 1 km it would be 160,000 °C in the centre. But this number is very wrong! This was an early attempt at understanding the temperatures below our feet. It works pretty well for predicting the temperatures of Earth's crust. But it was useless in predicting the temperatures of the mantle and core. To do that we need to use earthquakes, rock samples, lab experiments, and math. Imagine your friend baked you some muffins. The muffins are so tasty that you want to make your own. You ask them for the recipe but they only tell you the ingredients and say you have to figure out the oven temperature for yourself. How do you decide how hot the oven needs to be? First, you need to know where your friend baked the muffins. Did they bake them at their house on the beach? Or did they bake the muffins at their mountain cabin? This matters because baking is affected by how close you are to sea level. This is the effect of pressure. Next, you save 2 of your friend's muffins you break one open to see what it looks like inside and leave another one unbroken. You look at every little detail so that you make yours just like these. How big are the berries inside? How big are the muffins? etc. You want your muffins to look EXACTLY like these ones. These are your samples. Then, you make a graph of temperature vs. muffin quality. You predict that if you have the oven at 0 °F, your muffins will be terrible. If you set your oven at 600 °F you also think they will be terrible because they will burn. Your muffins might be slightly better if the oven is at 25 °F and 575 °F, so you plot those as slightly higher on the quality scale. You keep doing this until your graph shows that 300 °F should be your perfect temperature. This is your model. Then, you start mixing. You follow their recipe perfectly. You set the oven to 0 °F and put in the first batch. When you think they're done you take them out and put them side-by-side with your friend's muffins. They don't look (or taste) the same. You set the oven for 600 °F and try the second batch. Doesn't work. You keep doing this until you find the right temperature. This is your experiment. You make sure you wrote everything down and compare the results with your predictions. Boom! You found the temperature your friend (probably) set their oven to when baking those delicious muffins! This is your conclusion! Now back to the Earth. First, you find rock and mineral samples you think might come from really deep in the Earth, like diamonds and garnets in rocks called kimberlites! This is your sample. Measuring earthquakes tell us that only one part (the outer core) is 'liquid', everything else, like the inner core, is 'solid'. It also tells us what the pressure is at different depths in the Earth. This is your pressure. Then you assume you know the exact mineral content in the sample and the exact elemental content and structure of the minerals. You then make a graph showing the temperature vs. rock/mineral quality. You try to find your predicted optimal temperature. This is your model. Then you try to make the same diamonds and garnets in the lab. You put all the ingredients together and set the pressure to the pressure you measured from earthquakes and then play with the temperature. You record your findings. This is your experiment. You then compare your predictions with your finding to see how they fit. If they fit well, you might be on to something. This process gives you an idea how hot it would need to be deep in the Earth to be able to make diamonds. These are your findings.",
"We don't KNOW. We actually only BELIEVE, based on a lot of research. I'm not a flat earther or anything, but we haven't seen it, or gotten close to it, and the research we have focuses on earthquakes to assume other materials of Earth... But we just can't KNOW 100% what is there.",
"We can use [Newtons law of cooling]( URL_1 ) to work out how fast the earth has cooled. The Earth is 4 billion years old and should be much cooler (There is no hot lava on the moon but there is on Earth.) The only way to explain that is a [nuclear reaction at the core]( URL_2 ). We know the core is iron. How? By density (mass per unit volume). - the density of the Earth 5.5 grams per cubic centimeter. We work this out from the time and distance of the Earth around the sun, and we know the radius of course. - the density of Earths' crust is 2.7 grams cubic centimeter. You can find this out yourself by weight rocks you rind around. - from this we can deduce there is something far heavier at the core. The only thing that makes sense is iron at 7.9 grams per cubic centimeter. Iron is very stable in a nuclear reaction because of [weird science reasons]( URL_0 ).",
"The answer is simple they don't it's a hypothesis as to what it is but in reality we have no idea what the actual temperature of the core is. Just how we have no idea what the actual age of the planet is these are things we can use our technology an intelligence to get as close as we can but it doesn't mean its factual or accurate."
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7a06jv | How do they make the single particle of a particular kind to send around the LHC? And how do they put it in? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The LHC doesn't send single particles around, they move clouds of particles in groups around. They source these particles from pure element samples; if you want cesium nuclei to be accelerated then they would get a very pure sample of cesium and heat it to a plasma, then draw the electrons away to leave bare cesium nuclei suspended in a strong magnetic field. That cloud is then accelerated."
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7a0czd | Why doesn't the Maillard Reaction take place in microwaves? | From what I gather, it's a relatively common question for people to ask "why does food baked in an oven taste better than in a microwave?". And the perennial answer is "because food in the oven undergoes the Maillard reaction", and that an oven heats everything indiscriminately through radiation or sometimes convection of hot air, whereas a microwave heats the water inside food that then heats everything else up - like steaming a food in its own water. What I've never actually seen explained is why the Maillard reaction doesn't happen in a microwave. Heat is heat, so why does it matter whether the heat came from conduction from water or radiation from coils? The Wikipedia page on the Maillard reaction says that the reaction: > ...typically proceeds rapidly from around 140 to 165 °C (280 to 330 °F) Are microwaves simply incapable of producing heat on even the low end of this scale? I know they can at least get up 100°C, but is 140°C out of its reach? Does food not spend enough time in the microwave to undergo the Maillard reaction? What am I missing here? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Microwaves heat water, water boils at 100 degrees celsius. It will only reach over 100 degrees celsius if all the water has been evaporated from the food. So it could, but it would also absolutely ruin the food, and take forever.",
"The issue is microwaves are more even at heating, so stuff usually doesn't get that hot. In an oven you might throw your chicken in there are 350'F. At that temperature the skin of the chicken is in direct contact with air at 350'F, the water in the skin very quickly boils off and the skin becomes dry, and then it rapidly rises to a temperature very near the oven temperature. it doesn't quite get there because the cold uncooked chicken on the other side does a decent job at cooling it, but as the chicken cooks it gets warmer and cools the skin less, allowing it to get hotter. In a microwave the microwaves go right through the air, which stays cool, and then deposit their heat directly into the chicken, but they take a while to do it, so instead of putting all the heat into the skin like an oven does, microwaves put it mostly into the meat directly. It takes roughly takes 1-2cm to deposit it's energy into meat, so the cooking does NOT rely on the skin getting hot first, and in fact the skin may actually stay cooler because it's in contact with cold air and warm meat (which is not hot enough to boil it's water off, so it's under 100'C). It's not that a microwave can't get a steak hot enough to cause maillard reactions, it's that the meat will be way overcooked by the time it gets to that point. By the time you get it to form maillard reactions on the surface, you'll probably have a full centimeter thick crust. Now sometimes this does happen if you try to microwave a frozen piece of chicken and the fatty skin falls off so it's not touching the cold meat. The fat on the skin absorbs more heat than the meat, and it's thinner, so it doesn't cool off from the cold meat, plus ice absorbs even less heat. But when that happens you'll notice the skin is likely burnt, and the chicken is still frozen, but you will get the maillard reactions on the burnt skin."
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7a0nsf | Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses and why were they important? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"ELI5 for something this complex is tough. TL;DR is Luther was opposed to the Vatican acting as a money hoarding business that sold golden tickets to heaven to the highest bidder. Heaven has a gatekeeper and it isn't Rome. God doesn't need a middle management team. It led to the end of the RCC's monopoly on religion in Europe.",
"Luther's Theses were essential for the split of people who were displeased with the Roman Catholic Church. They pointed out issues that he held with the way the church worked, including (but not limited to) Indulgences, basically bribing the priest into forgiving your sins, so you can go to heaven. This allowed Protestantism (literally protesting the Church) to form, which led to massive historical events in Europe and the world."
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7a1ib1 | How do bad big budget movies get made? I'm sure the script has to go through dozens of people before it is approved for the movie and dozens more for production and editing. Is it because the director is a tyrant and demands the movies go his way? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Ahoy, matey! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained: 1. [ELI5: How do bad movies get made (particularly \"big budget\" films)? ]( URL_1 ) 1. [ELI5: Why do so many bad movies get made, considering they have enormous budgets and large teams of experienced world-class experts behind them? ]( URL_2 ) 1. [ELI5:Why are there so many \"bad\" movies? Don't the people making them see the problems the audience does? ]( URL_0 )"
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7a1puc | What exactly is gravity and how does it occur? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Einstein proposed the idea that space is like a fabric that can bend and deform. If an object has lot of mass that deforms this fabric by creating an indentation in the fabric, sort of like having a stretch out sheet and throwinga bowling ball on it. The ball will create a downwards slope towards it that means that any object also on the sheet, like a smaller ball, will fall towards the center. Gravity that keeps the earth orbiting the sun is because the sun creates this indentation in the fabric of space and keeps us \"falling\" towards it beacuse the force of this slope. Inertia carries the earth in a roughly straight line. The result of these two vectors keeps us in a fairly stable orbit around the sun. All objects with mass deform space like this to a varying degree. The local deformity from earth keeps us tied to it because we are \"sloped\" towards the center of the slope that earths mass creates. Youtube videos will probably show this better if its tricky to visualize from my poor explanation."
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7a1ubn | why do flies rub their front legs together? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Flies really really want their feet to stay clean. They're wiping dust and gunk off of their legs.",
"They are cleaning themselves. Flies rely on their compound eyes, antennae and the bristles on their bodies and legs to sense the world around them. They have to keep these sense organs clean so they can fly with precision to find food and mates and avoid predators."
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7a2bzb | Is there any way to 'green' the sahara desert and middle east? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Sahara actually was greener. There are pictographs left on canyon walls showing game animals, giraffes, and other game. These of course were left by humans showing what lived there. It was long ago. The Gibraltar land bridge might not have been breached by rising ocean levels. The Mediterranean may have been a set of salty lakes. There are salt beds under the Mediterranean, the remains of salty lakes which dried up. So during the stone age hominids roamed the Sahara hunting game. The climate was different then. Climate change, the geologic kind which occurs over thousands of years, not what we are doing to the world now which happens in decades, has produced the desert we know now. Yes plans could be devised to change the landscape of regions. It would take cooperation among governments and long range planning. It would take enlightened government by wise rulers. None of this is likely to happen. But we can dream."
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7a2cdw | What is an indictment? How is it different to a criminal charge? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A criminal charge is what the police present to the prosecutor, and what the prosecutor presents to the grand jury. The police investigate a crime. When they have enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, they will bring it to a district attorney. The district attorney will decide whether there is enough evidence to convict the accused, and whether it is worth their time to do so. After deciding to prosecute the crime, the prosecutor will take the evidence the police have gathered and charge the alleged criminal. This is a criminal charge. At this point the judge hearing the case will issue a warrant for the person's arrest, but they have not yet been indicted. The person will be arrested, and a grand jury will be assembled (in the US this is usually 23-26 citizens). The grand jury will hear facts about the case, and decide whether there is enough evidence against the accused to proceed to a full trial. If the grand jury decides there is enough evidence, then they will sign the paper that charges the crimes. The actual paper which lists the crime is called the indictment. When the grand jury signs the indictment, the accused is then 'indicted' for the crime and the case proceeds to trial. The whole process can take several years. **TL;DR**: An indictment is an official document describing a crime that someone is accused of. A criminal charge is what happens before the indictment. The biggest difference is that you can plead guilty or not guilty to an indictment, but not to a criminal charge."
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7a2d7v | Why is it that you can sleep through loud noises/traffic sounds etc, but often wake up shortly before a set alarm goes off? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I am the only person in my social environment that manages to accidental do this every fucking day and it feels good to know that this is known (?). Would love to read why"
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7a2iel | Snapchat can do filters on any smartphone with a front-facing camera, so what's different with the iPhone X's new facial recognition tech? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Snapchat can recognise that there's *a* face in the image and where it is, and apply a filter over that face. The idea of Face ID is to recognise that *your* face is in the image, and use that as a trigger to unlock the phone."
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7a2n9p | Why are auitoimmune diseases so unpredictable and hard to cure? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're \"unpredictable\" because the number of different conditions with an autoimmune component is just *staggering*. To use a metaphor, think of the immune system as a *very* complicated machine with thousands of moving parts. If any one of those parts breaks, you'd still say the machine \"broke down,\" but depending upon *which* part breaks, the consequences could be anywhere from completely unnoticeable to utterly catastrophic. Same with autoimmune diseases. The immune system does a *ton* of different things using a *ton* of different biochemical/metabolic processes, and an error in one function/process could have wildly different symptoms than an error in another function/process. As to why they're hard to cure, well, your immune system isn't a foreign body or infectious organism. It's *you*. And it's not even cancer, either. Cancer is *you* too, but cancerous growths are completely unnecessary to your body's normal function. They can be surgically cut out of your body (under the right circumstances, anyway) with no ill effects (other than direct side effects of the surgery, obviously). They're not actively *doing* anything to keep you alive and healthy. But your immune system *is*. We don't want it to attack *you*, clearly, but it's not as if we can just make it go away and you can go on living your life. There's actually a disease that attacks your immune system. It's called \"HIV,\" and its effects are called \"AIDS\". Not a good look. The ELI5 version of autoimmune diseases is that we really don't have any way of getting your immune system to stop attacking the wrong stuff other than just nuking it *completely*, which is pretty much never a good idea."
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7a2tbq | Why aren't police departments footing the bill instead of the tax payers when it comes to court settlements? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most police departments are taxpayer funded. Where do you think the money is going to come from?",
"They're not private businesses with stockholders and investments you can take. Police departments have no money **other than** taxpayer money. The police **are the government**. There's not a lot of sensible ways to make them pay without it, somehow, coming from taxpayers. If you try making officers personally liable, nobody will do the job unless we raise their salaries enough to cover insurance for potential lawsuits and that *takes taxpayer money too*."
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7a31fw | Why when you look directly at a light source and then close your eyes see the shape of the light? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Looking at something exercises the rod and cone cells in the back of your eyeballs which then send the signal down your optic nerves to allow your brain to process the information. If the subject is very bright, then your rod and cone cells get overworked and start to become less sensitive to whatever type of light they detect - *red*, *blue* or *green* for cones and varying brightness for rods. That means that, when you close your eyes or look away, a shape is retained over the area where your rod cells have become desensitised. The same principle explains negative colour illusions like [this]( URL_0 ) except these rely on cone cells rather than rod cells.",
"Its your eyes extra way of adjusting arpeture like a camera. You need to limit the amount of light entering your eye to avoid over exposure. Lense + squint = correct exposure."
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7a35nt | In airplanes, why is the sound quality of the captain or staff announcements so bad? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Because to have better or more speakers would mean that it would add more weight to the plane, also the acoustics in a plane arnt great it's essentially a tube with people, sound waves are muffled by people noise, also you have all sorts of systems like AC and engine starters and hydraulic pumps which all create noise which also muffles the intercom. But really it's just not that important to have a very loud clear intercom on a plane they get used very rarely for things so the extra cost of more speakers and added weight just outweighs the need for it. For an airliner if they can shed even a couple of kg it ends up saving a lot in costs of the plane over its lifespan."
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7a36jr | How is sound generated from music files? | From my understanding, human hearing is limited to 20-20,000Hz. If this is the case, how are songs different? Are different frequencies played at a very high rate of speed or are they combined somehow? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Many sounds at once is not a problem at all. Sound is a wave and when you have multiple waves you can simply add them together to get the result. [Here is a gif example]( URL_3 ) where green and blue wave together form the red wave. The red wave alone is enough to perfectly describe how green ad blue wave act together. Sound is a simple wave. You can see the wave of a sound file with any sound editing program. [Audacity]( URL_0 ) is popular free one. [Here]( URL_1 ) is an example of the wave of a bass playing some notes alone. The selected area is three seconds long. Now how is this stored on the file? You simply store the value of the wave at certain sample points. With enough zooming in you can see them [here]( URL_2 ), each point is single data point. The data points are usually taken with sample rate of 44100 kHz so one sample every 0.022 ms. This is twice the frequency of human hearing and due to some math reasons you need twice the sample rate of your signal (sound). So you take the recorded wave and store the value of the wave very frequently. This would be a simple .waw file with no compression. Mp3 and others add compression and that complicates things.",
"They’re played over the top of one another. In all your daily life longitudinal sound waves are overlapping each other, and when they do they basically add to each other (if a compression of the wave crosses a rarefaction (low pressure) then they will cancel out, if two compression cross they will create a very strong compression at that point, etc) [like this]( URL_0 ) . With lots of different frequencies doing this all at once the wave forms become pretty weird in shape. You microphone then takes all these weird patterns and turns them into and electrical signal. The opposite then happens when they’re played: your file is played as a mix of all the waves added together. Soz pretty bad explanation but happy to answer further."
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7a3817 | [Gravitation]How did Newton know that the force of two objects is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"He didn't figure it out with the apple. The inverse square law was the result of his work with orbital frequencies. It's the only way that the equations work in order to describe elliptical orbits is if the forces between the planets and the sun decreases as a factor of the square of the distance as they get further from the sun.",
"One of the reasons we recognize Newton as a genius was that he was able to figure this out without making any measurements in the lab. Newton was working from data about the orbits of the planets and moons in the solar system developed by Johannes Kepler. He knew the time it took the planets and moons to complete an orbit, and the relative distances of the planets from the Sun (and moons from their planet). He also knew that the orbits aren't perfect circles, but ellipses. Newton was able to show, mathematically, that an inverse square law for gravity explains all these observations. The inverse square law for gravity wasn't directly measured until over 100 years later, in a lab experiment by Henry Cavendish. (It should be mentioned, however, that there's some dispute over whether Newton came up with the inverse square law idea on his own.) URL_1 URL_2 URL_0"
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7a38y2 | Why do people faint, what happens in the body? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's a fail-safe to restore blood flow to your brain. Where your carotid artery branches into the internal carotid artery (which supplies your brain) & the external carotid artery (which supplies the other stuff in the head region), there's a baroreceptor called the carotid sinus. If it senses a drop in blood pressure (meaning your brain isn't getting enough blood flow, therefore not getting enough oxygen), it causes your body to fall down. When you fall down, your head & your heart will be at the same level, the blood going to your brain doesn't have to overcome gravity, and you'll get more blood flow to your brain.",
"Blood pressure drops, I heard it's evolutionary advantageous since you're essentially \"playing dead\" and therefore whatever made you faint will leave you alone. E.g if you get a minor wound in battle, you faint and wake up after the battle. The enemy assumed you are dead and left you alone."
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7a3ah2 | How does video and image stabilization technology work in our smartphones on such a small scale? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Two kinds of image stabilization systems exist: mechanical and digital. The mechanical systems use small accelerometers built into the chips of the camera to notice movement in the camera during the time the camera is taking the picture and make small opposite movements in the CCD sensor so that the sensor and lens remain focused on the same point. As the picture usually takes less than 120th of a second for mechanically stabilized pictures, it only needs to move the sensor a few tenths of a millimeter in most cases. Digital stabilization works by taking more than one picture in quick succession, finding common points within the successive images, determining how much they have moved and reversing that movement digitally, so in the output file they don't appear to have moved."
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7a3t2n | how does a contact stay directly over your pupil? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It has a similar curvature as the cornea does, which is different from the rest of the eye and that makes it center itself to the cornea.",
"Your eyeball isn't a sphere. It's very round with a bump where your cornea is. The contact lens is formed to sort of that shape. Some brands fit better than others due to variations in each person's eyeball shape.",
"Contact lenses have a set diameter and radius of curvature. The doctor measures your cornea and matches the values as closely to that of the measurements of the contact lens. imagine putting a small plate on top of a basketball. now imagine putting a putting a large bowl on the basketball instead. notice how the diameter and radius of the placed object affects how it will fit and remain on the sphere. this is how a contact lens stays on the cornea. it is of just the right diameter and radius as to work with the contours of your cornea and your eyelids to stay in position. it moves with your eye. too loose, it falls out, to light, you can't blink comfortably. it's not chemistry, it's geometry source : am an optician"
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7a3xru | Why does windchill make you colder? | Why does windchill make you feel colder? If all of the air is the same temperature, shouldn’t the movement of air over you make no difference in perceived temperature? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Not all the air is the same temperature. The air around your body is warmer because your body heats it up, creating an insulating layer of air. Wind causes this warm air to be displaced by new cold air, which makes you feel colder.",
"Here's the thing to understand: our bodies don't perceive heat in *absolute* terms, but in *relative* terms. We can't touch an object and say \"Oh, that's definitely 100F\" or whatever. What we *perceive* is \"Oh, that's hotter than I am!\" or \"Oh, that's colder than I am!\" And what we're actually perceiving is *heat transfer*, i.e., \"Hey, that object is taking heat away from me!\" or \"Hey, that object is warming me up!\" So let's talk about heat transfer. \"Heat\" is basically vibrating atoms/molecules. The more the particles in an object vibrate, the more \"heat\" an object possesses. Why do particles vibrate? This is ELI5. Let's just call it \"energy\" and leave it at that. Well, heat energy has a tendency to transfer from warmer objects to cooler ones. If two objects are the same temperature, no heat will transfer between them. The greater the difference in temperature, the faster heat will transfer. The thing is that air isn't very good at transferring heat, and can't store all that much of it. Again, heat is vibrating particles, right? Air, being a gas, doesn't have nearly as many particles to vibrate as a liquid or solid does. So it takes a lot less energy to raise the temperature of air than of a solid. And, as suggested above, as the temperature of adjacent objects gets closer together, the *rate* at which heat transfers between them goes down. Your body is always transferring heat to the air immediately adjacent to it. When the air is still, the air immediately adjacent to your body actually heats up pretty quickly. And as it does, the rate at which heat transfers from your body to the air goes down. But if you get a wind blowing, that warm air is dispersed throughout the surrounding atmosphere, bringing colder air in to replace it. Colder air will absorb heat from your body faster than warmer air, so if there's a constant stream of cold air blowing on you, the rate at which your body transfers heat into the air will always be at a maximum (given local conditions, of course). Now remember: what we perceive as \"hot\" is not a high amount of heat energy in an object, but an object *transferring* heat to us. Likewise, what we perceive as \"cold\" is not a low amount of heat energy in an object, but our bodies *transferring* heat to the object. So as long as the rate of transfer *from* our bodies stays high, we'll *perceive* \"cold\". Want to prove to yourself that our bodies really only perceive heat transfer in relative terms, not absolute quantities of heat? Run some cool water in a sink. Stick your right hand in it for a few seconds. It'll feel cold to start, but start to feel warmer pretty quickly as your hand cools off and the rate of heat transfer slows down. Then stick your left hand under the water. It'll feel just as cold as it did when you first stick your right hand under. Same temperature water!",
"Imagine putting a small ice cube into a drink. It doesn't cool it very much. Put in a larger ice cube, and even though its the same temperature as the small one, more heat is removed from the beverage making it colder. So it's not just temperature, it's surface area and mass as well. Cold wind blowing is like an ice cube that never melts, because as soon as the air absorbs any body heat, it's replaced with fresh cold air, so your temp decreases but the air around you never gets warmer. Have you ever noticed that when you get out of the shower and dry off with a towel, you don't get that cold, but if you get out of the shower and stand in front of a fan to dry off, that you are soon shivering? This is caused by heat transfer during the phase change from liquid to gas. When sweat or water for instance, evaporate, they remove a fair amount of body heat and take it with them into the air. It's evaporative cooling, and when you dry the skin with a towel instead of evaporating, it removes much less heat. Windchill makes it seem colder for 3 reasons, 1. When there is no wind, and you are not moving too fast, your body heats the air directly around it, which has an insulating action. If you were to sit very still for instance and there was no wind, you would quickly get comfortable as a warm bubble of air formed around your body. Strong wind prevents this bubble from forming. 2. Evaporative cooling. The stronger the wind, the more heat it pulls out of your body as you sweat and breath (moisture in your lungs and nasal cavities also evaporate and take heat with them) 3. Convection and Conduction. With the chill air being constantly replaced, it keeps a uniform chill on your clothing and skin, which constantly saps heat."
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7a46e2 | How were Integrals, Derivatives, Limits, and other calculus concepts originally discovered and applied? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They were discovered thousands of years ago, but the methods for that were super complex. Someone ssked Newton how he knew that earth had an elliptical orbit and not circular. So he went home and invented Calculus to explain his reasoning.",
"Math is like a toolbox. Trying to describe parts of nature without math is like building a house with your bare hands. It can be done, but will take a very long time. For both integrals and differentials it has historically been a matter of making calculations smarter, the same way tools have become smarter over time. **Integrals:** Say you're an ancient egyptian and want to build a house, and that particular house needs a curved gable. Naturally you want to know how much material you'll need for this gable. An initial guess could be that you take the height of the gable, multiply by the width and divide by 2 to get the amount of material (similar to a triangular gable). But you quickly realize that this is not a very good approximation. You then get the idea that you could divide each side of the triangle into very small parts, in the process getting closer to the shape of the gable by essentially \"rounding\" it. If you keep doing this you get to point where each part of your approximation of the gable is infinitely small. This is integration in a nut shell. Say your gable can be described by the formula: f(x) = -x^2 + 2x. Then the initial guess would give Area = (1*2)/2 = 1 Using integrals you get Area = ∫ (0 to 2) -x^2 + 2x = -8/3 + 4 ≈ 1,33 This is a simple example, but this could very well be how integrals first was applied in Ancient Egypt. No one knows for certain who first came up with the idea of trying to use infinitely small parts to calculate an area. **Differentials:** Like integrals, differentials are, simply put, a way of doing things smarter. Differentials come from the idea that you want to measure the slope of something. At first you might consider subtracting end and beginning to get the difference. But if you don't work with something that is a straight line, this will not tell you what the slope is at any point. To do this you have to divide that something into many parts, and now you can subtract two parts next to each other to get the slope there. The more parts you use the more precise it gets. **Limits:** Limits in the context of integrals and differentials are the concept of using smaller and smaller parts until you get to parts that infinitely close to each other. Infinitely here just means as small as is necessary. If you for instance have the triangular shaped gable mentioned in **Integrals** it wouldn't make any sense to make parts smaller than each upper side of the triangle.",
"An extremely brief summary would be like this: If you look at the parabola y=x^2 +1 plotted on a graph, you'll notice that its not a straight line. At first we looked at the average rate of change, e.g. if you look at the average rate of change between (0,1) and (10,101), we average a change of 10 units in y per unit change in x. the formula for this was (f(x+h) - f(x))/((x+h)-x) where above, x = 0, h = 10. If we choose a smaller h, or a negative h, we can still determine this value. However, if we choose h = 0, we get 0/0, which does not equal zero, but we don't know what it is since we divide by zero. So what if we choose something infinitely small for h, which is basically zero, what is that rate of change. What is the rate of change at that instant, or the instantaneous rate of change for x. So if we plug that formula in with y= x^2 + 1, we find that it equals 2x. So the instantaneous rate of change at x is 2x for any point on that parabola. This is the basic premise for all derivatives is calculating the instantaneous rate of change for all points. So there, we had to use limits to get around dividing by zero by dividing by almost zero, and we found derivatives. To come up with integrals, we used process similar to the following. If we traveled with velocity of 5m/s for 10 seconds, how far did we travel. Well if we graph velocity, and look at the area under that constant line of 5, we find 50 m/s*s or 50m which we know is correct. But what if we were not travelling at a constant velocity. well the logic still holds that its the area under the curve of velocity. So if we use rectangles, one unit wide, each at the height of the velocity at the start of the rectange, we can approximate the distance. By using smaller rectangles, we can get a better guess. But what if we use Infinity rectangles, our guess would be perfect. So an integral is shorthand for the limit as we take an inifinite number of rectangles up to the curve from one point to another point, which happens to yield antiderivatives.",
"Interestingly, limits were used by Newton for calculus purposes without knowing for sure that what he was doing was valid. Mathematicians didn't fully understand them for 150ish years when Weierstrass and Bolzano (see URL_0 ) put them on solid footing. Newton got them right, but he was using them on \"easy\" functions so nothing strange came up. Same thing happened when Euler discovered e^{\\pi i} +1=0. Without justification, he used power series expansions of sine and cosine with complex numbers. The formula just popped out. Too good to not be true!"
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7a4fn9 | What's the deal with cellphone store operators? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They’re authorized retailers. They have access to the wireless providers database and can setup new accounts and handle issues. The wireless provider wants a physical presence but doesn’t want to incur the cost of hiring staff, renting a physical location, etc. so they basically outsource this to someone else and then won’t have to deal with the extra expenses. In return the authorized retailer gets some cut, depending on their contract."
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7a4g69 | How do the chances of having twins run genetically throughout a family? | My mother has a twin sister and my father has a twin brother. Is there any chance that my genes (male) can cause twins or does only my sister (female obviously) have to worry. Or is it all just luck of the draw! | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It depends on the kind of twins. Twins can happen due to one of those things: one egg cell is fertilised by one sperm cell but splits early into the growth process and develops into two seperate babies (identical twin) or the female body produces two egg cells during ovulation which are then fertilised by two different sperm cells (fraternal). Fraternal twins have a genetic component. releasing two egg cells at once is a trait that can be passed on genetically. Only in women can this trait actually lead to a higher chance of having twins though (because obviously men aren't ovulating), but men might pass this trait onto future daughters of theirs. As for identical twins, IIRC, the fertilised egg cell splitting is really due to chance and not really genetically influenced so that sort of trait cannot be passed down."
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7a4ndu | How are 'concerts' produced (from concept to show)? | So an artist wants to go on tour......what is the process...designing the show, artist approval, etc. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Like any event, there's lots to plan. The artist has to get a whole lot of people together. A promoter (or two or three, depending on how long and how far the tour will extend) to book venues and negotiate prices for the venue and tickets to be sold, not to mention the cut that the artist gets of those tickets sold. If there's going to be an opening act, the promoters work with local managers to sign up regional artists to open the show, and they also get cuts of the tickets sold. Musicians for the tour (if there isn't already a band) and rehearsal spaces for the artist and band have to be rented. If there's going to be dancers or other people working in the show, they have to be hired and rehearsed, usually by the artist or artist and manager. The stage look has to be worked out, so a designer gets hired and the artist has to approve the look that's planned. Then people have to be hired to create the stage pieces, trucks have to be hired to store them while traveling, and people have to be hired to put the stage up and take it down. Artists have to make sure they have people to care for instruments off-stage (the roadies) and tune and put up the instruments each night, plus pack them away afterwards. Other people get hired to put up and take down sound systems, usually these are local union workers for the venue. For smaller venues, there might be people hired by the artist or the artist's manager. From album release to concert tour, usually there's about a 6 month break, but there's also been about 6 months of planning while the album is being produced, so figure for a full stage concert and show, a year or so of planning."
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7a571p | Explain the relationship between cell size and maintaining an efficient internal environment | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"So as the cell size increases the ratio between volume and surface area changes. The volume increases much more quickly than the surface area does. If you have too much volume creating waste and needing nutrients and not enough surface area to provide those needs then your cell can't survive."
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7a5e6z | What exactly happens in the brain during a coma? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The conscious mind (essentially all that is you) shuts down for some reason, be it physical damage or a bodily response to something. Processes tat run in the background (Breathing, heartbeat, digestion, etc) all run normally (most of the time.) It's basically just sleeping, but for longer."
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7a5o3y | You're suddenly in a vacuum chamber with only 1 plant. How many extra seconds / minutes oxygen do you get? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"None. Negative, actually, you lose time Plants require both sunlight and water to produce oxygen. Neither of those are present in noticable quantities inside a vacuum chamber. Furthermore, when there isn't sunlight plants actually consume oxygen. They produce about 10x as much a day as they consume at night, so it's a net boon in a natural environment, but in your situation, not helpful Edit: bonus fact, plants don't actually turn carbon dioxide directly into oxygen. The oxygen produced is from the water. A plant uses light to pull chemical energy out of water, also producing oxygen from that water, then uses this energy to help turn carbon dioxide into carbohydrates",
"Basically none. Plants need CO2, you need O2, and both are being sucked out by the vacuum. If you mean you're in an air-tight module with only the plant to cycle CO2 into O2, if Google results are to be trusted, your standard house plant makes about 0.1% of the oxygen a human needs to survive. So one plant won't likely make much of a difference at all. Actual values would likely vary depending on how much air was in the module in the first place, what kind of plant it is, and how large the plant is.",
"You don't. Both of you are killed by the lack of pressure long before the lack of anything else even starts to cause a problem. Even if that was not a problem, nothing you breath out would reach the plant and nothing it outputs would reach you. They'd disperse into the air as evenly as possible."
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7a5o7r | What would happen if someone who is obese starves back to normal weight? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Nothing good. Fat cells act as storage for excess glucose, which can be accessed for cellular respiration. However, the body needs a range of amino acids and vitamins to function, which are *not* stored in fat. Before you starve off the weight, your body will be reduced to cannibalizing muscle tissue for proteins, and even bone tissue.",
"I actually did this. I was ~260, and dropped 60 pounds in ~2 months by eating less than 300 calories a day. I was very lethargic and slept a lot. The first time I tried to do anything more than move around the room, I fainted in a grocery store check out line. My blood sugar was ridiculously low, I was malnourished and dehydrated. Other than those mild side effects, and the one major one (fainting), nothing much really happens as your body siphons off fat cells increasingly rapidly until the break point. I lost ~40 pounds in the first 30 days, and the other ~20 in the last 30 days. Some might say there is a decreased cognitive function, but I can't say that I experienced it.",
"On a 1000cal/day medically supervised fast you will lose 3 to 5lb/week. I did that for 6 months and lost 160 lbs at age 50 ten years ago. Biggest surprise was swimming, I used to swim a lot! But when %fat dropped so did buoyancy. I can swim if I exert myself, but can't relax or I sink to the bottom now. Took all the joy out when it got hard.",
"Obese man fasted for 382 days with aid of supplements. Losses 276 lbs. [link to TIL]( URL_0 )"
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7a5pel | How do some people sudden become, or stop, being allergic to something? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Two parts. First I should explain 'allergies'. Allergies are when your immune system recognizes a foreign object that is not harmful as harmful and attacks it - producing symptoms ranging from a stuffy nose to lethal amounts of fluid in the lungs, depending on how big a threat it thinks it is. 1) People can become allergic to something when, completely randomly, one of their immune cells 'suddenly sees it' and becomes activated, eventually resulting in many more immune system cells that all see the foreign object as harmful. This is also how an allergy can get worse over time - constant exposure to some allergans can cause more and more anti-allergan immune cells to be produced, causing a bigger and bigger effect every time you are exposed to the allergan. 2) People can become gradually non-allergic to something (or rather, their immune system response becomes muted) by exposing them to very gradually increasing doses of the allergan. This causes their body to kill off some of the anti-peanut or whatever cells over time as the body does have ways of shutting down a mistaken response. 2.b) People can become suddenly non-allergic to something in two ways - 1) Nuke the immune system from orbit, it's the only way to be sure. You can go through some surgical/cancer procedures that require your immune cells be killed off completely - often they will manage to kill off every single one that produces that allergan's antibody, rendering you no longer allergic to it. Then you die unless you get a bone marrow transplant. Measles has also been know to reset allergies by resetting the immune system. 2) Your body randomly kills off all the anti-allergan antibody producers on it's own. It 'suddenly sees' that they are attacking self and kills them all off. -RIP inbox-",
"Oh, man! Finally my time to shine. Background: I administer skin prick allergy tests and mix/administer immunotherapy under the guidance and supervision of a physician. I AM NOT A DOCTOR. Allergies come from your body encountering something and misidentifying it as a threat. Your body raises the alarm any time this allergen is encountered and sends in the troops to eliminate it. Unfortunately for you, it results in a variety of symptoms. Itchy/red/watery eyes, runny/itchy nose, rashes, migraines, sinus pressure or congestion, etc. are all common. Immunotherapy, in this case allergy shots, helps to reduce allergies by introducing small, precise doses of allergens to your system. Over time the dose is increased to keep building your body's tolerance to the substance. Eventually, your body stops going \"red alert\" when you breathe in some Ragweed pollen because it's used to seeing it in larger amounts via the allergy shots. Typically, people have this reduction in symptoms for years. 3-4 years of allergy shots can lead to a decade or so of significantly reduced symptoms.",
"Another fun thing to think about, with people who seem to develop allergies later in life (but not the ones who have one that they grow out of) There's a series of conditions that fall under mast cell activation disorders that are generally all progressive. Basically your mast cells start to really inappropriately activate immune responses to the point that it seems you're allergic to everything, life itself, and it can get worse/intensified over time. So, you may have low grade symptoms as a child and seemingly be allergic to one or two things but then suddenly as an adult more body systems are more intensively involved so you seem to be allergic to more things that affect many areas of your body. It's not technically an allergy to one specific trigger but an overall overreaction of your body's immune system to the world around you. This is a very newly classified set of disorders with names and diagnostic criteria only really established since around 2010. There's a chance some percentage of the population generally classified with allergies actually have mast cell disorders.",
"Allergies are often when the body mistakes a substance for an attacker and all the defense mechanisms kick in to try and defend you. The immune system is complicated and evolves over time to adapt to the threats it finds, some allergies like hayfever can be both 'grown into' and 'grown out of' depending on what the individual is experiencing and eating. Other allergies are harder to shake or gain, as our body may find that substance vital or lethal depending on circumstances. My hayfever centers around a kind of plant that grows near where my old school was, but nowhere near the town. So I seemed to 'grow into' hayfever and also 'grow out' of it, but really it was location driven. I'm probably still allergic to that plant, but it's pollen doesn't reach me anymore.",
"One thing I haven't spotted a mention of in other answers is that you are not born allergic to things. The first time you eat a peanut or get stung by a bee you won't have a severe allergic reaction - your body doesn't know what the stuff it's just encountered is, so doesn't have an allergic reaction prepared. Your immune system may however look at that peanut and say to itself \"hmm. That peanut was unusual. A bit worrying. We better be ready in case it comes back.\" Then the *second* time you eat a peanut the immune system may have over prepared, start attacking peanuts with everything it has, and give you an anaphylactic reaction.",
"I'm currently working on the the biology of proteins in pollen that cause hay fever. In terms of people who gain new allergies, sometimes over exposure can be a factor. The body ignores the small amounts of the proteins in your body, but the more it sees it and in greater quantities, the immune system gets \"confused\" and recognises it as a threat. Lots of plant scientists become allergic to their plants when they work with them for a long time. Once you have an allergy to a particular protein, you are very likely to become allergic to other plants becquse many plants have proteins that have very similar gene sequences and therefore produce proteins that have the same (or similar) shape. The body seems this shape and attacks it, and you then b come allergic to that plant too (that's not very well researched but it's a common hypothesis). This can happen relatively suddenly if you already have an allergy to another plant. For some people it will just seem to happen over night, where they weren't allergic to the other plant but now suddenly are. I think (again there is no science behind it) it happens more commonly if you are exposed to both plants in a relatively short period of time, because your body is already in search and destroy mode. I don't know much about immunology because I study the genetics in plants, but there is definitely a lot of similarities in genes that can cause allergies to multiple plants",
"Our immune system is very tightly connected with gut health and microbiome diversity. Various strains of bacteria have been proven to reduce or completely eliminate certain food allergies in animal studies. With our modern diet and over use of antibiotics many people suddenly develop allergies after becoming ill and being prescribed treatment through antibiotic use. Essentially what you are doing is eliminating all good and bad bacteria when taking these, which can disrupt the balance of your bodies ecosystem. This is important, because many communities of bacteria play vital roles in vitamin production and assimilation, immune response (allergies), anxiety, weight (metabolism), etc. Food allergies can also be tied to leaky gut which is essentially from poor gut health and diet. Dysbiosis of the gut flora can have significant impact on the structural integrity of your intestines. Your small intestine for the most part is made of tightly packed villi which are tendril-like and absorb your food once bile acids and digestive enzymes break it down. The membrane protecting your gut from “leaking” these food particles is only one-cell thick so when the gut is under attack or inflamed due to bacterial overgrowth or dysbiosis, food can enter the blood stream and cause a large variety of allergic or auto immune responses. This is a large cause of increasing food allergies, and why people tend to get more allergies as they’re older - poor nutrition, excess sugar, antibiotic use and a constant dysbiosis of the microbiome leave their immune system in relative shambles and constantly rebuilding/recovering. Of course not all of our immune system is in our gut, and some allergies come systemically from the immune cells produced in our marrow. These cells are constantly learning and reacting to foreign objects entering our bodies and blood streams, and when they are triggered throughout life you can develop an allergic reaction that isn’t connected with the gut or microbiome. These allergic reactions are much more severe generally and near impossible to “cure”.",
"So I've explained this before so I'll just copy paste my previous comments. The top comment is actually a little wrong and misses out on a lot of important parts. > Being allergic to things that won't kill you is an overreaction of the immune system. This shouldn't happen, but it does. It's an error in the immune system. The immune system isn't perfect and sometimes makes mistakes. Autoimmune diseases are another good example of this. The body is literally allergic to itself and causes harm to it's own cells. Rheumatoid arthritis is an example of an autoimmune disease. The body attacks its own joints thinking it is foreign. When you have an allergic reaction, the body isn't really trying to kill itself. It is trying to kill the allergen with everything it has. It is an overreaction to the allergen. It is using more fire power then it needs. The side effect of doing so is what causes you harm. It's like there is a roach in your house and you decide to kill it with a grenade. You kill the roach, but also the house and you inside it. > Technically you don't develop a \"tolerance\" for it, rather you develop a new type of immunity against it. To defend off foreign invaders, you body produces antibodies after it comes in contact with the antigen. If you were to touch poison ivy for the first time, nothing would happen because you have no antibodies against it. Weeks later, if you touch poison ivy again, you will have an allergic reaction to it because the body created IgE antibodies against it. IgE antibodies are really extreme and is what causes most allergic reactions. From the time you touched poison ivy the first time to the second time, you body was creating cells made just for the creation of antibodies against the poison ivy antigen. This is like a memory bank for your body's immune system. The first time you had no memory of the poison ivy antigen, but the second time you do. Your body is able to create a huge amount of IgE antibodies this time around and that causes a strong allergic reaction. > There are different types of antibodies (IgM, IgA, IgG, IgE, and IgD) and the body reacts differently depending on which antibody is used. IgE is an antibody meant for big foreign invaders such as parasites. This is why there is such a strong reaction, otherwise the parasites wouldn't die. What you would consider \"tolerance\" is really called isotype switching or desensitization. This is when the body switches from one type of antibody to another. This is actually used in the treatment of allergies such as hay fever, an allergic reaction to pollen. Normally your body creates IgE antibodies against pollen which gives you the running nose, sneezing, etc. If you body went from using IgE antibodies to IgG antibodies, then you would have no allergic reaction. This is because IgG reactions are much milder and they are normally found in the blood where those allergens won't go. When your body switches to IgG antibodies to defend against pollen, you no longer have IgE antibodies against it. This causes you to have no reaction to the pollen. Your body normally does not naturally do this against pollen. Immunotherapy is used to force your body to convert from IgE to IgG. You are periodically injected with the allergen into the skin until your body converts from IgE to IgG. The success rate is not that high and it is expensive. It should only be used if your allergic reaction is very severe. It is injected into the skin because of that is a good location for your body to convert from IgE to IgG. This is the example for hay fever, but some allergies will convert from IgE to IgG without help from immunotherapy. You can be allergic one day and not be the next. Your body can randomly decide to switch from IgE to another antibody if it wants to. This will mean that you will no longer be allergic to that certain allergen. > In the poison ivy example, I assumed that your body started creating antibodies against it after the initial contact. This is not always true. You could touch poison ivy or come into contact with allergens many times, but not create antibodies to it. This means that there is always a chance where you won't create antibodies against it. Every time you come in contact with poison ivy, there is a chance that you will create antibodies against it for the next time, or not. You might not become allergic to it until the second, third, or fourth time, or never at all. It just depends on your body. That is why some people are allergic to things while others are not. Shellfish allergy is a good example. Some people don't develop shellfish allergy until later in life. They ate shellfish before many times when they were younger, but they were fine. When an allergic reaction does happen, it is because they developed the allergy from the last time they had the shellfish. You could also lose the allergic reaction later if your body decides to do an isotype switch. TL;DR - Allergies can develop later in life if the immune system decides something is \"bad\" all of a sudden. You can lose allergies if the body decides to create a different type of antibody to the allergen. This can be forced through immunotherapy. You can't really force an allergy. All you can do is expose the person to it all the time and maybe one day they'll develop an allergy to it. Source: bio/pre-med, took immunobiology classes.",
"How you can stop being allergic to something: Allergy shots are recommended for people who have allergies. Usually takes years to administer them because there's a build up phase and a maintenance phase but people who receive them report resolution in allergies for several years (most I've heard of is 20) Usually your allergist will do a skin and blood test checking for the most common allergens whether they be food or environmental. The shots you receive are a tiny amount of what you're allergic to in increasing doses and over time desensitizes you to it. Usually you wait 30 mins to an hr after your shot in the doctors office to make sure you're not having an anaphylactic reaction. People who opt out of the shots usually try to control their allergies by avoidance and by taking antihistamines (H1, H2 blockers, adding a corticosteroid nasal spray or doing saline rinses of the nares). Usually patients with allergies also carry an epipen for acute attacks. In terms of immunology and monoclonal antibodies Omalizumab is also available for patients. It binds the IgE Fc receptor and prevents mast cell degranulation (mast cells release histamine which is one of the culprits behind allergic reactions) Other monoclonal antibodies that bind IL-5 have also been found to be effective. EDIT: the corticosteroid nasal spray and saline rinse is mainly used for allergic rhinitis and not for allergies to foods which would cause an anaphylactic reaction. The only treatment for an anaphylactic reaction (throat closing, GI distress, hypotension etc) is an epinephrine injection."
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7a5u40 | Why do we use the little o and | instead of "on" and "off" on lamps and power strips? Any reason in particular? Will the words just not fit on the button? | Answered! Thank you all! | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're actually a stylized 1 and 0, which correspond to \"on\" and \"off\" in digital computing.",
"I would imagine it also make its universally understood. Regardless of what language you speak you understand these symbols.",
"Using symbols means that one product can serve lots of different customers who speak different languages, rather than having to be printed in all those different languages. There are also some languages where the words for \"on\" and/or \"off\" in that context are much longer than 3 letters, which is awkward for printing on a button."
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7a5uv4 | Is 0^0 indeterminate? | Some say it is 1 including the calculator, but if you use l'hospital's rule, it proves that that 0^0 is indeterminate if you make 0^0 ---- > x^x with a limit of 0. Why? because when you use l'hospital's rule, you get 1, but to even use l'hospital's rule, 0^0 would have to be indeterminate (infinity/infinity). Am i mistaken somewhere? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In analysis, 0^0 is an indeterminate form. This is not the same thing as saying 0^0 is undefined. Remember, indeterminate forms and L'hopital's rule are ways of handling *limits*, which very specifically do not care about the actual value of the function at a given point. You could define 0^0 to be whatever you wanted, and it wouldn't change the limit as x goes to 0 of x^x at all. For the most part, in discrete mathematics (set theory, theoretical computer science, etc.) it's natural to define 0^0 as 1; in continuous mathematics, including calculus, it is often considered unnecessary to give 0^0 a well-defined value because doing so would make x^y discontinuous on its domain and calculus likes continuous functions.",
"Sure, if you use x^x then with the l'hospital rule you get that the limit is 1. But what if you used (2x)^(x)? It's still equivalent to 0^0, but then the limit (using l'hospital rule) is 2. Basically you can get any limit by substituting 2 with any number you want."
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7a5vtu | How does a computer read a CD or DVD and extract the appropriate content? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The disc is spun and below it is a laser mounted on a track that moves back and forth so it can be pointed at any point on the disc as it passes over. When the laser hits the disc the light is reflected back and there is a sensor ready to detect it. However by altering the disc, either by changing the distance between the laser and the disc surface (by making a small pit in the disc) or by using special dye you can make it so that some points on the disc don't reflect the laser into that sensor. So as the disc spins the laser is essentially reading points on the disc as either \"reflects light\" or \"doesn't reflect light\", 1s and 0s to a computer which can be used to represent any computer data including audio or video. The actual patterns of 1s and 0s are slightly different then what a computer uses. This is because a series of all 1s or all 0s would be difficult to read - there needs to be a break to help keep the timing in check. So instead a larger sequence of bits (that have limits on repeats) are used to represent a smaller one - for example 10 bits on the CD might translate into 8 bits for the computer. Discs can have multiple layers (CDs have only 1 layer, the surface of the disc, DVDs can have 2, Blu-ray discs can have more) which is accomplished by making the outer layers transparent in some way - by altering the laser light you can choose which layer you are aiming the light at with the laser passing through any other layers in the way."
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7a5z7t | why do people gain weight as they get older? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A lot of people say that your metabolism slows just because of age, which is the partial answer. Really, as we age we begin to lose muscle mass over time. Muscle mass increases your metabolic rate. Think of how weight lifters eat a fuck ton of calories, even if they're just eating at maintenance. The more muscle mass you have, the higher your metabolic rate. When you lose muscle mass over time, your metabolic rate decreases. Obviously there are other factors that play a role, like genetics but it's very important as you age to keep active. Even bodyweight exercises can make a much difference.",
"I'm not convinced it is entirely or even primarily due to metabolic changes. When you are in your teens you are rapidly growing, most likely walking or riding your bike everywhere, probably are carrying a heavy backpack with you, and may even have 1 hour of mandatory physical fitness class per day. You're burning calories left and right, which offsets even a poor diet. That stops when you get a car, get a job with more disposable income, and start living a more sedentary life. The thing is that despite these changes, weight gain is gradual. Notice how people start complaining about getting older and gaining weight in their late 20s? I believe this is simply them noticing the gradual changes from their lifestyle that began 7 years prior.",
"There will be several factors at play here. First, our metabolism begins to slow down roughly after age 35 or so. As it slows, we need to consume less food, but we tend to eat as usual. Also with age we face physical changes which can lead to a more sedentary life style. In my case arthritis in my feet means I walk a lot less than I did a decade ago. I had to adapt to these changes by watching my food intake.",
"Worse metabolism (minor factor). Less activity (major factor). It's an sneaky drop in activity too. Because for example now if I consider things, I walk a fair amount since I take public transit to work. I also go to the gym every now and then. But I had to cut down on my eating quite a bit to stay in shape. It's super easy for me to gain weight now. When I was younger, I literally ate however much I felt like and didn't gain any weight until I went utterly bonkers. By utterly bonkers I mean eating like 1500+ calories as a snack before bed. When I realized I was gaining more than I wanted to, I cut out the ridiculous aspects of my eating (but ate how I normally did) and I lost a good deal of it. So the fact that I went from doing whatever to eating A LOT less makes it look like my metabolism went wayyyy down. But it's probably not really that. When I was young, I was almost hyperactive and I was picky. Then you talk about high school. I played sports and I still didn't enjoy sitting still. Also had to walk around high school going from class to class and I ate school lunches or packed lunches so they're really not very large. In college, I also walked a shit ton but in little bursts. You gotta go to classes, study sessions. Walk from classes to your room. Walk from your dorm to a friend's dorm. Walk to to the lab. People also would hit you up to play something athletic sometimes. You would go to parties and dance. After college, you start working but you have a lot of young friends and they might be interested in athletic things too. As you get older and older though, you get more and more drained after work. Your friends do too. You're far less likely to come home from work and immediately hit up your friends to go out and do stuff or hang out. You just want to plop on the couch and watch TV or something. Thus without you really noticing your activity level dropped 50-75% and your eating doesn't drop at all. You get fat.",
"Mostly it is that people don't work off the meals they eat. We are coming up on the holidays where just about everyone over eats. But most people never really pay for that over eating. So they gain a pound or two. Same goes for birthdays and vacations. You over eat a bit and don't work it all off. Well gaining a few pounds is nothing, but multiplied by 10+ years and there you are 20 or 30 pounds overweight."
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7a64rg | The Science Behind Writer's Block | What goes on in your brain when you have writer's block? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It can be different for everyone. But usually it's stress and/or a kind of mini-panic-attack. You know you *have* to write for some deadline or about some thing and you're so worried about getting it right that you freeze up, your brain refuses to work, and you sort of go through a mini-panic-attack where the stress of not being able to do something prevents you from relaxing enough to do it. Even if you are a great casual writer and love to write suddenly being under pressure to do it on que can cause issues. Same reason people can choke up on stage when asked to speak, or people who can't get to sleep because they are so worried about getting to sleep on time."
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7a66gv | What method have we used to accurately measure the distance to far away objects, for example, the Andromeda galaxy and how sure are we of our method's margin of error? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"[A standard candle is a class of astrophysical objects, such as supernovae or variable stars, which have known luminosity due to some characteristic quality possessed by the entire class of objects. Thus, if an extremely distant object can be identified as a standard candle then the absolute magnitude M (luminosity) of that object is known. Knowing the absolute magnitude, the distance D (in cm) can be calculated from the apparent magnitude m as shown in the formula below.]( URL_0 )"
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7a68mo | what causes stuttering? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Stutter-er-er here! Stuttering/ or stammering (same thing, I know) is a neurological condition that has genetic and developmental influences, that arise from the malcoordination of brain networks that enable speech production. It is also known that a lack of blood flow to the broca's area in the brain (an area that is highly linked to language processing & speech) may be a key factor in how it’s caused. Side note: Check out r/stutter for more info"
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7a6e3u | What would happen to you if you jump into a deep pool of boiling hot metal like this guy? [NSFW] | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes he felt it. Your skin would burn just from the heat radiation, your muscles and internal organs which contain more water would instantly turn from water to steam and burst ( causing that large flash) . Nothing would be left, the water in his body exploded in to steam and the remainder burnt till it was only carbon. Nothing left. No there would be no statue, the metal would have what ever was left of you as carbon content and anything like your shoes or zipper or teeth fillings would be dipped off as slag.",
"I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't the only fatality in that suicide. Depending on what kind of metal it was he was jumping into. I know horror stories from working in the aluminum factory. Your body is 70% water, and when water boils it expands dramatically. So when the body goes under the surface of the metal and boils there, it creates a huge explosion of molten metal. It happens very fast and it's probably one of the more horrific ways to die. Do not recommend.",
"The temperature difference between the molten metal and your body would be rather large, making it so you don't immediately sink into the molten metal, just float on top of it as your body's temperture gradually changes to become similar to the excessively high temperature of the molten metal. Oh, but while you do 'float' atop the molten metal, you would also experience excruciating pain of the heat burning everything that is your body, as well as allowing on-lookers to to gaze in bewilderment or avert their gaze as your die in horrible pain. In terms of the final output (the input being the molten metal and you), it would be mostly just metal. All your body would have burned up into the air as ashes before coming into direct contact with the molten metal (sorry no statue of you upon your demise). The solidified metal would most likely be the only thing that could be considered your 'remains'*, and wouldn't be used for it's intended purpose due to ethical reasons. Still would be a pretty metal way to go though. *My middle school science teacher told us a story of how his old employer's company had an incident where a guy accidently fell into a vat of molten metal. They buried the solidified metal of which he died in.",
"Why, why would you leak that subreddit onto eli5. My god people have some /r/Eyebleach fast!!",
"The first few thousand picoseconds would be nothing such as you not feeling it, but picoseconds is a short time it's not noticeable. Then there's the literally mind-blowing pain and writhing from everything being so fast and sudden, but your skin and bone are liquifying under molten metal. Then silence.",
"You'd float on top of the metal while being horrifically burnt to death. The heat in the air would scorch the inside of your lungs.",
"Things I never thought I would look up... URL_0 URL_1 I won't talk about this guy, because I think that is disturbing, instead I'll talk generally about what would happen if a person jumped into a crucible of molten steel. The water will boil very fast, it only needs to be raised 60 degrees C to boil. Iron melts at about 1510c, so there's a lot of energy there, but the thermal conductivity of the various tissues will limit how fast they will heat up. Bones are made of hydroxyapatite which boils at 1500c so it will need to be heated up quite a lot. Molten steel can also be a bit cooler like 1370c, so it's possible that it might be cool enough that it wouldn't ever vaporize the bones. Also recognize that people are way less dense than molten steel, so the guy is not going to drop into it, he's going to be essentially floating or standing on it. The air is a poor thermal conductor, so the rapid steam cloud would be made when the water in his body that contacts the metal surfaces becomes superheated steam, and heats up the rest of the water in his body, so it's his own water that is heating him up. The person would essentially boiling himself. The person would essentially burst, and wouldn't have much holding him together after that. It's possible that parts would be ejected due to the pressure, but it's likely that it would stay together and the person would fall limp. Any internal organs would rapidly boil away the water, and the pressure would force its way out of the spine and skull and any other enclosed space. Tendons would see their water boil out as well and the body would fall to the surface. The bones would heat up quite a lot, and being that they are the only really stable structure in a person's body, everything would either be attached to the bones, attached to something fleshy attached to bones, or else would fall and contact the molten steel. This would carbonize and otherwise pyrolize everything, and anything not carbonized would oxidize in the presence of oxygen. You'd likely be left with the bones, parts of them would be charred where there was carbon left on them, parts of them would likely be white where the steam cleaned them. They would be brittle as the cellulose has broken down, but the hydroxyapatite would still be there so they would remain solid. You would likely have to raise the temperature and wait longer to see them fully incinerate. There would be remains, but the person would die nearly instantly as the water would very quickly create superheated steam, and the steam would heat up the rest of the water in the person's body which would also boil and do the same. It would be very dangerous for anyone nearby.",
"Can someone explain what is going on in the image? All I see are blurry stuff and a flash.",
"This is a related answer, although not exactly the same. The Spanish Inquisition would pour molten metals down the throat of their victims to execute them, and according to [this]( URL_0 ) article, the victim would likely die from the following causes: \"the development of steam with increasing pressure might result in both heat induced and mechanical damage to distal organs, possibly leading to over inflation and rupture of these organs. Direct thermal injury to the lungs may lead to instantaneous death, as a result of acute pulmonary dysfunction and shock, as shown by Brinkmann and Puschel.4 Even if this is not the case, the development of a “cast” (once the metal congeals again) would completely block the airways, thus suffocating the victim.\" Apart from the metal forming a cast in the throat, the death would be for similar reasons unless or until the head makes contact and the brain fries.",
"An explosion is what would happen. I watched a show where they threw a pig(dead already) into a volcano lava lake. The water in the body almost instantly turns to steam and explodes violently. This exposes more flesh, which then explodes, until all the water in the body, is turned to steam. It would be very unpleasant."
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7a6f3g | How do rechargeable batteries work if batteries are based on chemical reactions? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They use the energy of the recharger to reverse the chemical process. Some chemical processes are reversible."
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7a6hqu | the Three-Body problem. | ELI5: What is the three body problem, and why is it a problem? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The two body problem would be two objects moving under Newton's Laws of motion, and gravity (think the sun/earth). This problem has been solved, and it's fairly easy. The 3 body problem is the same thing, but with 3 bodies. However, while the 2 body problem is fairly easy to solve in a nice closed analytic form, the 3 body problem isn't. It's what's considered a chaotic system- you'll get vastly different trajectories based on your initial conditions (position, velocity etc). It's actually been proven that there is no nice closed form general solution given by algebra/integrals, not just that it's hard/hasn't been found. In order to solve 3 body problems, we need to use numerical techniques (ie, simulate it with a computer) and/or some approximations. Which is resource intensive, and you need to rerun it for different conditions, even slightly different ones. There are a few exceptions for special cases- certain ratios of masses and certain starting positions. It's kinda weird, because you'd naively think it shouldn't be *that* much harder than a 2 body problem. But it is. You have the same issue with n-body problems (which are extremely important in modeling anything with a bunch of pieces) Here's some previous threads that might have some more info: URL_0",
"For just 2 objects we can take a photo of the situation and note down the time, then do a bit of maths and draw what it will look like in 9388472 years 83 days 2 hours and 23 seconds time, with just a bit of maths. With more than 2 objects, like 3, we can't skip ahead with mathmagic. We have to invent some kind of 'frame rate' and simulate the 3 objects one frame at a time. It works, but we had to invent a frame rate to simulate at, and The Universe doesn't have a framerate, so our simulation will be wrong in tiny ways, and since each frame NEEDS the previous frame, the errors get worse over time."
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7a6nql | New NBA schedule compared to the old schedule | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, its a pretty vague question, but I'll do my best. The main purpose of the changes to the NBA schedule is to provide more days off during the season and reduce the number of times a team would play back to backs (ie, a game Tuesday and then playing again on Wednesday) and 4 games in 5 nights (2 back to back separated by a single day off). The reason for reducing these has a couple of origins: 1. Teams play worse with less rest 2. In recent years, coaches (especially Popovich) have been having players sit out portions of back to back games, to keep them more rested and reduce the risk of injury. The second issue was the real contreversy, as Popovich on several occasions sat out his stars during nationally televised games or highly anticipated match-ups. So starting this season, the NBA changed their schedule to reduce these issues. They started the NBA season about 2 weeks earlier than in previous years, but are still going to end the season at the same time. This gives them many more days of rest to put into the schedule. It also gave them more flexibility in scheduling. They have significantly reduced the number of Back-to-Backs the average teams plays this year. They have also made sure that teams playing in nationally televised games (ie, TNT/ABC/ESPN) didn't have a game the night before hand."
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7a6t3s | Why and how is bottling up your feelings bad for your health | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It'll make you neurotic. If you can't process and come to acceptance of your emotions, it can lead to anxiety, depression, bouts of anger, unhealthy impulses, and self destructive coping mechanisms.",
"Because burying your feelings tends to make them last longer and even get worse. Negative feelings accumulate in our unconscious and cause negative emotional responses to other stimulus that may not have caused negative feelings without that extra baggage. When you are emotionally hurt, angry, etc, you experience a bunch of physical symptoms which are typically lumped together as “stress”. They can include increased heart rate and blood pressure, increased production of various hormones and other biochemical messages within your body, etc. All of these physical responses actually have an evolutionary purpose - your body is trying to get ready for whatever physical exercise you may need to undergo to escape from whatever danger is causing your stress. Ultimately, your body is built to survive, and stress is an indicator to your body that survival may be at risk, better get ready. However, modern stress isn’t really about survival of the “better-run-or-get-eaten” variety. And moreover, it doesn’t go away in a few minutes to an hour the way evolution has taught our bodies stress is likely to behave. Instead, we remain stressed for days, weeks, months, and our bodies undergo that chemical “better be ready” thing far longer than our ancestors ever had to. So we end up with higher blood pressure and heart disease, weakened immune systems, lack of sleep, headaches, even just grinding our teeth. It can all affect our health negatively.",
"Among other things stress can lead to heart disease. Just like lack of sleep caused by stress."
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7a71ld | how do domestic animals choose a favorite person? how do they show that favoritism? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Animals have personalities just like humans. When you hang out with your friends you like your friends because you share similar interests and traits, like you like sports and tag, or you just happen to be around each other a lot and get into trouble. Our furry friends are the same way, often a cat will like a mellow person because they tend to prefer to be really relaxed and a spastic person will put them on edge. A dog on the other hand may greatly prefer to hang out with an active person because they love being active and running. They can show their preferred individual person favoritism simply by being around them more often. If person A is in Room A and Person B in room B the animal who likes person A more will be in Room A more often than not.",
"Food. Are you eating food? Do you drop food? Do you know where the food is? That’s my favorite human.",
"My dog is a rescue and I don’t think he ever really learned how to be a dog... so he doesn’t really ever give kisses. However, if he really wants to show you he loves you he will intently sniff your eyeballs or your ear or he loves to sniff both mine and my boyfriends morning breath and will continue to intently sniff for probably an uncomfortable amount of time. (He’s a weirdo, I know) but, we’ve decided this is his way of showing a really deep affection. He only does it to me, my boyfriend, and one of my best friends who watches him when I’m out of town.",
"Both my cats adore me. They don't fight but they certainly don't like each other and don't like sharing my affection. You'd think they could find common ground with each other."
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7a7na2 | Why are these frog legs twitching when salt is sprinkled on them? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Salt has sodium in it, and sodium is an electrolyte, which lets signals and impulses travel along nerves. When you put salt on fresh muscle it twitches because there's still some potential left to carry into activity."
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7a7op7 | Funko Pops. Why? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Their uniform designs regardless of what show, game, or movie the character is based on lends to its collectible nature. They're affordable and an easy way to decorate a small personal space as a statement of personal taste while being aesthetically appealing due to their similar size and style."
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7a7p15 | Why does eating simple foods like toast help with nausea? | If vomiting is caused by your stomach trying to get anything bad out (like a virus), why does it matter if it's rice or if it's a steak? Wouldn't any food be gotten rid of, not just bland ones? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Your stomach is in distress and lost most of its hydrochloric acid because of the vomiting. Devouring a toast into small, slimy pieces isn’t nearly as hard for your stomach as devouring a steak because the ingredients of toast can be faster processed by your body as the ingredients of a steak."
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7a7q5l | Why is it that when we first wake up after sleeping, our eyes and face are extremely puffy but then returns back to normal after you wake up more? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Many of our bodily functions rely on gravity and blood flow to passively mobilize fluid. Once you get up and move, those motions start to clear away the fluids that are the byproducts of other processes that are happening when you sleep. It's like those watches that can charge their battery simply by the movement of your arm. They use what would be superfluous energy and harness it for another use."
],
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7a7r1j | What is CBD oil and how does it work? | I'm hearing more and more from friends/family about CBD oil and how it basically contains all of the anti-inflammatory and anti-anxiety positives of medical marijuana without THC. How exactly does it provide the benefits and why isn't it a bigger topic of discussion in the medical industry? Is it too good to be true? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dp7xrgw"
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"text": [
"It's not too good to be true. It does have many of the beneficial properties of cannabis, without the THC. CBD is hemp oil, from the non-psycoactive plant cannabis sativa. It comes in three different forms, green (unfiltered, straight help oil), blue (filtered, but not \"cooked down\", and gold (filtered, carboxilated (cooked down)). The benefits claimed by the companies will vary - of course - but from my personal experience, it does work as a mild analgesic, and has a calming effect as well. I did a lot of research on it before I purchased my first bottle ( URL_0 ), and it does help with the grinding pain of arthritis, and the anxiety that comes with just getting old. It doesn't work as well for me as full-on cannibutter, but since I live in Texas, it's the only legal way I can get the relief I need. I suggest you do a bit of research (there are loads of websites. Just put your Googles on), and you can find them. As always, YMMV, and *always* fact check from several sources before committing to anything."
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7a7t4w | How does a signal from the brain know which nerve to go to to get to a muscle? How does it know where to branch off? | Any analogies would be appreciated. I currently think about the nervous system as a highway with many branches and exits. If thats a good analogy, how does a simple car (electrical signal) know where to go? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Your analogy is a little off to begin with. If you were going to correct it, you would say that once a car get's in a lane, it never leaves the lane, if an exit comes up and that lane feeds into that exit, then the car is exiting. It's probably better to think of it closer to what the reality is. From your brain, there are a million or so brain cells that descend down into your spine to control muscle movements. In your spine,there are another set of neurons that receive input from those neurons which then go out and connect to muscles. The exact way that the neurons in your brain connect to and control the neurons in the spine (the ones that target muscles) is a somewhat unknown, and definitely complicated, but for the moment, it's close enough to just think that one brain neuron can become active, and make one neuron in the spine become active, which then travels to a muscle, which causes a muscle to contract. (This is definitely NOT what actually happens, it is a massive simplification, but it's good enough) In this way, you can think about it more simply: if a certain pattern of neurons in the brain become active, then a certain pattern of neurons in the spine become active and then a certain pattern of muscles will become active. So there is no \"deciding\" where the signal go once they start, instead they just flow down like water in a pipe, and the water cannot jump between pipes: once the water goes in, it comes out the end of the pipe. Indeed, the whole brain is like this in some sense: it is just a collection of pipes where signals go in, and follow the patterns of the pipes. Yes, it is more complicated that than: some pipes are able to stop the flow in other pipes, and most pipes will only flow when a certain amount of input is supplied to them. But give or take, this is a useful way to think about how nervous systems work. So then your original question \"how does a signal from the brain know which nerve to go to\" is not really answered. I've said that once a particular nerve gets activated, then it will result in a particular muscle contracting. So your question then comes \"Okay, so how does a the brain know which nerve to activate?\"... and that is basically the fundamental problem of neuroscience: how does the way that neurons are connected create a network that can solve problems and do useful things? I could start giving you ideas about that, but that would be another, really long post, if you're interested, let me know."
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7a8f17 | How exactly does Vitamin C speed up the healing process? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dp7xtph",
"dp812bl"
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"text": [
"From what I've read, it doesn't really. It does a lot of important things in the body, but there's no direct correlation between vitamin C and illness prevention/recovery. Staying hydrated is the #1 thing from my experience.",
"Vitamin C is required to complete the adjustments to an enzyme that re-links collagen, the main structural protein in animal bodies, which gradually decays over time and needs repairing. If you don't have enough C, your supply of that enzyme runs out, and your collagen starts to break down, or doesn't get connected properly in the first place. So wounds don't heal properly, and old cuts and scars can even open back up spontaneously. It's called scurvy."
],
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7a8fka | How do noise reduction headphones work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dp7y543"
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"text": [
"They use a microphone to capture outside noise then generate the opposite waveform to cancel it out when they meet."
],
"score": [
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7a8ksd | A simple Monty Hall explanation | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dp80xdz",
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"text": [
"Always had a pure math, but not intuitive grasp of this problem until I got this explanation: Monty Hall brings you into a room with 10 billion doors, only one of them has the prize. You pick a door. Monty then opens 9,999,999,998 doors, Monty says that none of the doors he opened had the prize in them. There are now two doors left unopened, one of which is the door you picked out of 10 billion. Your odds were 1 in 10 billion when you had 10 billion doors, do you switch? By holding you accept the 1 in 10 billion odds of getting it the first time. By switching you are betting you didn't get it the first time. So of course you switch, you're odds of winning by switching are now 99.99999999% So extrapolate down, works for 10 million doors, works for 1 thousand doors, keep going until there are only 3 doors and Monty is only opening one door.",
"OP, you haven't asked a question at all, and there's a much simpler explanation for the problem. With only 3 doors, we can just brute force the problem to demonstrate the solution. Doors A, B, and C. Doors A and B have nothing while C has money. There are only 3 scenarios and 6 possible ways this ends. You pick A. Host opens B. Switch = Win. Stay = Lose. You pick B. Host opens A. Switch = Win. Stay = Lose. You pick C. Host opens A or B. Switch = Lose. Stay = Win. If you always switch, you win 2/3 scenarios. If you always stay, you win 1/3 scenarios.",
"That's good. One set of cards has a 1 in 3 chance and the other set has a 2 in 3 chance. And you don't learn anything new about either set (you already knew one of the 2 cards was a black card), so the odds don't change. Different people respond to different approaches. Some people that are stuck on the fact there are 2 choices left at the end respond to a higher number of choices to begin with. Choose door between 1 and 1,000,000. You chose door number 4? Ok, it's either that or door number 782,116."
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