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iywyxu
What is the UK Job Support Scheme
What is the JSS and how does it effect Furloughed employees?
Economics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6f8apu" ], "text": [ "If your job wants to keep you but can current only afford reduced hours. The can apply to the job support program. Your company must be a small/medium business or a large business which has reduced income. Your company must pay you for all the hours you do. But to try and mitigate the financial harm from cutting wages the government will now pay a proportion of the rest of your wages. If you earn £100 per day (9 hours) but you company could only pay for 3 hours. Your company would pay £33 for the hours you worked. That means your £67 down The job support scheme will kick in: - The government will you give a further £22 - Your company will have to match that number Hence you get: about £77 per day for working 3 hours." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iyxm0b
Why do knuckles crack?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6fab4w" ], "text": [ "Because while moving them cassually they collect little air bubbles. By cracking them you just release the air, wich is also the cause of the sound. Its a completely different story if something is dislocated and also when your backbones make cracking sounds." ], "score": [ 6 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iyyi90
why does the US have the highest GDP in the world.
Economics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6fjn0j", "g6fjs8u" ], "text": [ "you might want to check that. China is estimated to have the highest GDP in the world now (USA has dropped with the pandemic). But to answer the question, a very large population, an enormous amount of natural resources, a very large country (lots of land), and it was one of the first to start growing automated manufacturing industry (Ford and the assembly line). World war 2 was a major turning point. All of europe was mired in a brutal war for about 2 years before the USA entered. Europe and Russia were largely devastated, while the USA was mostly untouched. After the war, Europe was rebuilding, Germany was under the Marshal Plan, and the USA really advanced the economy as well as its military. In terms of population, USA is about 4 times as big as germany, 5 times as big as france, UK, italy, 30 times bigger than sweden. So of course the GDP of USA is much much larger.", "The major events of the 20th century. The US had some major advantages - lots of land for agriculture, fairly sizable population. The industrial revolution starting in the 19th century started a big change for what it meant for a big economy - in the past it was agriculture and mining but now it was factories and mass production. The two world wars fought in Europe and decolonization basically sealed the deal. European countries were basically the only economies near to par with the US at the start of the century. The massive destruction and rebuilding in Europe after WW2 basically gave the US a 40 year period with which to dominate industry and especially high tech industry. Today, it is likely only China has the potential to grow their GDP beyond the US because of the size of it's population. Although India is projected to have a higher population than China in the near future, it is starting from a long way behind." ], "score": [ 8, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iyyte2
What makes an USB so versatile?
I know that inside a data USB there are 4 wires but I don't understand how those 4 wires allow it to do su much, from file transfer to 7.1 audio and much more
Technology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6fjxvx" ], "text": [ "Electronics is all about using voltage/current and time to generate on/off signals (0s and 1s). How that stream of data is interpreted is completely up to the application that is using it. So you may plug a USB into your computer to transfer a file, it's going to send electrical signals (0s and 1s) to your PC, and Windows is going to say \"Oh hey, I see you're transferring a file to the computer, so I'll interpret these signals in a special way that allows me to copy the data to my hard drive\". When you stream audio over USB, whatever application you use says \"I see we're playing audio, that means the 0s and 1s I'm receiving need to be translated into an audio stream\". The data-in-route over a USB cable looks the same no matter what you're doing, it's the sending/receiving applications that determine *how* to interpret the data." ], "score": [ 12 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iyzf9n
What's the difference between making wine, beer and hard liquor? How are each of these made differently?
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6fn2tr", "g6fn538", "g6fng59" ], "text": [ "Wine and beer differ primarily based on what they are made of, both being simple brews made by adding yeast to water mixed with either grain or grape juice to produce alcohol. Hard liquor is made from some other form of alcohol that has been distilled, which means that it is heated to a temperature where the alcohol boils but the water does not, and then the boiled alcohol is collected in another vessel.", "There’s differences in the process and the ingredients that go in. (Simplifying) Beer is mostly made by filling a vat full of a bunch of water and grains and hops and other thing for flavor. And then letting yeast digest all the sugars in the grain and turn them into alcohol. Wine is made in a very similar way but this time instead of using grains they use grapes (or soemtimes other fruits, but mostly grapes) pit a bunch of mushed fruit in a bag, let the yeast digest all the sugars into alcohol, drink the alcohol. Now hard liquors start similarly, letting yeast digest sugars into alcohol, but after that the alcohol/water mix is run through a distillery, which separates the water from the alcohol, giving you a higher percentage of alcohol in the drink.", "Wine and beer are made through fairly similar fermentation procedures. In both cases, you need to introduce yeast to a sugary liquid, and let the yeast eat the sugar to produce alcohol. In the case of wine, the sugary liquid is grape juice. So you need to press grapes into juice and then add yeast, and let it ferment. In the case of beer, the sugary liquid is called \"wort,\" which is basically a tea made from malted barley. Malted barley is soaked in warm water to extract its sugars, and then you add hops to the wort to flavour it, then you filter all the solids out of the wort, cool it down, add yeast, and leave it to ferment. Hard liquor covers a lot of different beverages, but what they mostly have in common is distillation. You can make a weak alcoholic beverage just by yeast fermentation, but if you want hard liquor you need to distill it. Distillation is basically boiling the liquid so that some of the water evaporates. For instance, whiskey starts out as something very similar to beer - a barley wort that ferments with yeast. But then the wort is put into a still to be distilled, and the resulting spirit is then aged in a wooden barrel for a period of years prior to bottling. Vodka is naturally fermented alcohol made from grains (rice, potatoes, other things...) that has been distilled. Gin is basically vodka that has been infused with juniper berries and other herbs. Rum is made with molasses or sugar cane and then distilled." ], "score": [ 3, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iyzhvj
Why is it easy to type without looking but challenging to recall the specific order of keys on the keyboard?
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6fnwqq", "g6fwm0h", "g6fnbzu", "g6fquby", "g6fo6p5", "g6fnp3j", "g6fqids" ], "text": [ "Muscle memory. The specific brain-to-nerve-to-muscle connection required to press the B key is seared into your system from thousands of repetitions, but it doesn’t also link to the part of your brain that half-assedly remembers that keyboards start with QWERTY. You’ll see this in most physical skills. Try to describe in words how to run or how to swallow. It’s something your muscles just do without invoking other parts of the brain, and those other parts will struggle to articulate how it works.", "Why did like 10 people comment minutes apart with the same answer? Some even referencing that everyone else already said it? What drives people to unnecessarily repeat the answer?", "Muscle memory. Your brain recalls the movement needed by your fingers to achieve the goal.", "Missile mammary. Mammal misery. Memo musclery. Sorry. I keep forgetting where the keys are on the keypad.", "Muscle memory. You don’t have to consciously be aware of something to know. Like being able to sing lyrics to a song with the music playing but can’t when it isn’t.", "In short : muscle memory The long answer, as you type you start learning instinctively what key each letter is on, but at the same time you stop having to look at the keyboard as much, so you forget where each key is from memory, but you can still type them from subconscious memory", "It’s muscle memory. I can play certain songs on a guitar that I haven’t played in years but I couldn’t tell you word for word what the notes are in sheet music. Same goes for hearing songs versus reading the straight sheet music for it too. I just don’t have enough practice looking at sheet music and hearing the song in my heard." ], "score": [ 140, 15, 6, 6, 3, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iyzrnt
why do humans have periods instead of absorbing like many animals?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6fslm9" ], "text": [ "The short answer is we're not entirely sure. I can't quite remember, but menstruation is actually a relatively recent evolutionary phenomenon, it's found in distinct phylogenetic branches (the animals that menstruate are not related to each other), and it's quite rare too. A plausible and commonly floated hypothesis is that shedding the endometrium ensures that an unfertilised egg does not remain in the uterus." ], "score": [ 4 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iyzv35
Why Radiation Causes Such Long Term and Horrifying Damage to Humans
Title says it all. How come exposure exposure to radiation is enough to seriously injury/kill humans? It almost seems magical to me how much damage it can do to a human just through proximity.
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6fpw9n" ], "text": [ "Imagine radiation as tiny bullets. Those bullets travel through your body and damage your cells." ], "score": [ 6 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz03dd
if baby shampoo can be made tear-free, why isn’t all shampoo made tear-free by default?
Chemistry
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6ft1i0", "g6ft253", "g6g1icv", "g6fu6wr" ], "text": [ "Tear free formulation comes at the cost of reducing the efficiency of the shampoo at stripping oils and grease from the hair. It's considered enough of a tradeoff to make it more efficient at the expense of keeping it out of your eyes.", "Tear free shampoo isn't very good shampoo. Tear free shampoo works in part by removing some of the more effective cleaning agents from the shampoo.", "**The reason is the pH (acidity) level** Natural hair is very acidic (pH level between 4.5 and 5) so to match this, shampoos are designed to be acidic as well. This matching is called *pH balancing* so most good shampoos are called *pH balanced*. But this acidity can irritate the eye, and can be especially bad for infants. So baby shampoos are designed to have *neutral pH* instead (pH level around 6 or 7). **TL; DR:** * Shampoos meant for adults should be acidic (pH between 4.5 and 5) * Shampoos meant for infants should have neutral pH (pH between 6 and 7)", "Because adults are able to avoid getting it in their eyes. The drawbacks of tear free shampoo (see other comments) aren't worth it for adults. Just don't get it in your eyes." ], "score": [ 98, 29, 20, 17 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz0f50
When someone is shot why they can die instantly? What the body actually does to shut down so fast?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6ftkkt", "g6ftwr0" ], "text": [ "If a bullet hits the right spot that controls basic life functions like the brain stem that person will die quickly. Is it instantaneous? Probably not. There’s a reserve of oxygen in the cells but that person also won’t be conscious due to the impact of the bullet immediately incapacitating them. Death would follow in mere moments after that.", "Sudden massive loss of blood pressure can cause a person to lose consciousness in seconds, sometimes sooner depending on how severe the damage is. Instantaneous death from a gunshot to the head kills by physically destroying the brain tissue and disrupting the entire central nervous system, shutting down all life-sustaining processes like respiration and heartbeat in milliseconds. Sometimes the damage isn't total, and the person might only be (permanently) unconscious while their body shuts down more gradually as the brain trauma takes effect, causing lethal swelling and hemorrhaging into what remains of the brain. In either case, you could argue that person died \"instantly\" because their brain was destroyed, but their tissues will continue to live for several minutes before lack of oxygen and blood kills them." ], "score": [ 5, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz0fjf
Why did old GPUs not need as big heatsinks?
If you look at pictures of pretty old GPUs you will see that they barely had any cooling onboard. Now the best GPUs all have massive coolers and multiple fans. What made the power consumption go up so much? (Even old CPUs like a Pentium needed a big heatsink, why not the first GPUs as well?)
Technology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6fukn3", "g6fwwgf", "g6fuxfe" ], "text": [ "They didn't need to reject as much heat. Modern microprocessors cram an incredible amount of transistors into a small space, where the path of individual electrons is critical to their function. These structures generate a lot of heat, as they always have. But now more than ever it's critical to reject that heat quickly, as temperature changes will have a disproportionately greater effect on modern ultra-dense microprocessors than they did on much older models.", "Power consumption Modern high end GPUs consume 200-300W of power and turn it mostly into heat. The RTX 3090 uses 350W (hence the massive heatsink) while even a mid tier card like a GTX 1060 uses 150W Rewind to Nvidia's venerable 9800 cards, even the 9800 GTX+ consumed just 140W letting it get by with a much smaller heatsink. The GT 9600 green edition was at just 60W which was low enough for just a heatsink without a fan To deal with more heat you need more surface area or more airflow, but preferably both. The high power consumption of modern high performance cards requires large heatsink and fan assemblies to keep temperatures at safe levels for the components", "Because they were far less powerful. As Uncle Ben said \"With great power comes a metric ass butt fuck ton of heat.\" I'm paraphrasing. The faster the clock, the higher the voltage, and the higher the internal capacitance, the higher the power dissipation. Die are also getting physically much larger and contain billions more transistors. Each of which dissipates a little bit of power. And the old heatsinks on processors were NOTHING compared to the triple fan 300mm liquid cooled setups most people are running now-a-days. For the same reason. An i7 or i9 running at 5gHz could boil a cup of water easily." ], "score": [ 6, 4, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz0qes
How were we able to broadcast video through the air at reasonable quality for years before we were able to stream video at similar quality via internet?
I'm in my 40s so remember dialup and waiting for videos to load. Always baffled me we could receive multiple TV channels through an aerial instantly but a direct wired connection had to buffer?
Technology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6fvnox" ], "text": [ "Broadcast video is a single signal that goes to everyone. The internet involves individual communication from one computer to another. An analogy is that broadcasting is like giving a speech to a room with 100 people in it, while the internet is like having 100 simultaneous different conversations." ], "score": [ 6 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz16i1
What can someone do with your IP address? How does it work?
Technology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6fyhg5", "g6g2div", "g6fybyf" ], "text": [ "The most common and easiest thing they can get is information about your physical location (city, state, ZIP code), which they can use in some cases to get even more information about you, especially if you're not careful about protecting yourself on social media websites. Besides that, they theoretically could access your computer remotely, but there are a lot of roadblocks there, such as your ISP's internet security configuration and firewalls, your own modem and router's security configuration and your computer itself (usually has some sort of basic firewall online by default). A dedicated and capable enough hacker might be able to find a way in but it's not going to be a super simple or easy task.", "ELI5. Your IP address is like your physical home's address.... Except, instead of being an address for a house, connected to a road.... It is the address for your computer, connected on a massive world-wide network. If you gave somebody your home address, they could potentially show up to your house, and perform malicious tasks, or even call a \"swat attack\" on you. ([ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )) Its actually a thing...... Likewise, with your computer's address, they can potentially do malicious tasks. However, generally speaking, your router has a \"10 foot steel security fence\" up to protect against certain types of intrusions. This fence, is referred to as a firewall. Typically, your computer will also have its own \"fence\" up as well. But- using the proper piece of software, you can look at the holes in the fence (port-scanning), and potentially gain access to internal services. Also- lastly- your IP Address can be tied back to your home's physical address.", "They can point a port scanner at your machine, check to see what ports it answers on, and then probe those ports for a service that they can use to either take control of your machine or obtain resources from it." ], "score": [ 26, 9, 7 ], "text_urls": [ [], [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gedVHbgIt7c" ], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz179u
how come women who have around 10% more body fat for men, are more sensitive for cold?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6g1pgs" ], "text": [ "Well for one, a decent amount of the extra fat is located around the organs hey have and we don’t, uterus, ovaries, fat acts as extra cushioning and protection. And second, male metabolisms are slightly different from female ones. On average males have a higher metabolism which means we burn energy and heat up faster, and on top of that, there’s evidence that testosterone (a mainly male hormone) actually Desensitizes nerves to the cold and makes you “feel” warmer, (remember that kid in highschool who would wear shorts even when it was close to freezing outside? there’s a decent chance he wasn’t crazy and that he was actually comfortable wearing that) So it’s really more that men on average just are/feel warmer than women, so we turn the A/C on more, and freeze them out" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz1gxj
Why do you look worse in a picture, but better in the mirror. Does this mean I'm actually more ugly than I thought I was?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6g2a3m", "g6g3t3n" ], "text": [ "Short answer: Everybody in the world has this same issue. Its not just you. Long answer: Its because you're used to a mirror. In a mirror you don't see yourself how you really look - you see yourself flipped around. You are so used to this image of yourself that seeing yourself the correct way looks wrong. With a passing glance it looks like humans have faces and bodies that are identical on the left and right side. But that's actually not the case, there are a lot of small differences in this symmetry. And it just screws with your head when you see these things in the 'wrong' positions. A lot of youtubers and streamers actually flip their face camera horizontally, to make it look like how they see themselves in a mirror. Makes it easier for them to edit and such without being distracted by thingsl ooking off.", "All the other answers might have some bearing, but it's really mostly because of the focal length of the camera being used. Different lenses are good for different uses, smaller lenses like the ones used in phone cameras make the face look differently than what you'd see in the mirror [Look at this picture to see what I'm talking about]( URL_0 )" ], "score": [ 13, 9 ], "text_urls": [ [], [ "http://annawu.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/focal-length-comparison.jpg" ] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz1ikm
Why do things burn up when entering Earth's atmosphere, but not when leaving?
If it's hot enough out there to burn something up, why should it matter which direction you're trying to pass through?
Physics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6g0prz", "g6g1mvl", "g6g1dxo", "g6g61jq", "g6gwp3e" ], "text": [ "It's not that the air is hot. It's not particularly hot. Rather, when you hit air super freaking hard, it suddenly heats up. Objects going to space tend to be moving relatively slowly when leaving the atmosphere, only reaching orbital speeds afterward (for the sake of fuel efficiency). Orbiting requires moving sideways really fast. On the way back down, again to save fuel, they don't slow down all the way, but rather just enough to come back down. The result is that they're still moving super fast on the way in, and they use the drag from the air to slow down the rest of the way.", "The heat is mostly due to compression of the air, meaning the kinetic energy from the object is converted into thermal energy. During descent, for something that was just in orbit it's probably going 17,500 mph, and all of the energy must be dissipated as drag, and so it all goes into compressing the atmosphere, and the atmosphere gets thicker and thicker as the object descends. The only place that's not the case is with re-usable boosters which use propulsion to do some of the slowing. During ascent, some of the acceleration happens high above the atmosphere, like when the second and third rocket stages burn, where the atmosphere is less dense (the average spacing between air molecules is large), and so since it's more gradual and it's partly higher up there's not as much heating. The reason rockets start off pointing vertical is to get away quickly from the thickest part of the atmosphere anyway.", "When you are coming down you are travelling so fast you create a pressure wave in front; high up there isn't enough atmosphere to create much friction. This pressure wave basically turns the atoms into plasma similar to lightning, you generally come down quicker than you go up and are accelerating which is why re entry causes so many issues.", "Things from space are already going very fast and they only slow down once they hit the atmosphere which causes friction. Rockets going up start slow and accelerate. In rocket launches we know the point of maximum pressure and how fast the rocket can be going without breaking. In American rocket launches they'll announce that as \"Max Q\". After Max Q they can accelerate to go faster and faster.", "First you need to understand that space ships or the iss usually don‘t fly high enough to stay there on their own. In fact they are so low and so near to earth that earths gravity is pulling heavy on them. To counteract that, the iss travels sideways, like some object on a rope that you‘re swinging around your head, it wants to fly away from you. The iss is flying just fast enough that it counteracts the force of earths gravity that wants to pull it down. The speed of the iss is 17500 miles per hour sideways. The higher you fly up the easier it is to reach that speed because there are less particles in the air that can bump against your space ship and slow you down. So a rocket flying up to the iss first goes up and then accelerates sideways to match the speed of the iss. Id you want to come back down you need to descent but the more you come back down the more particles are in the air bumping against your ship and you‘re still flying 17500 mph this causes friction and heat." ], "score": [ 30, 6, 3, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz1rry
Why cant we send all our radioactive byproduct into the sun?
Physics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6g2cd3", "g6g2n90", "g6g4l7t", "g6g2i9p" ], "text": [ "Cost: it costs around $5000 to send a single kilo into orbit. Orbit is still very far from the sun. Rockets also [fail spectacularly]( URL_0 ) on occasion, and having a vehicle transporting several tons of radioactive waste explode in flight would be a distater.", "Well. You could. It would just be a complete waste of energy. For one, it’s difficult to send stuff into space, much less send stuff into the sun. Every year you still see rockets failing and exploding on tv, and those rockets are just carrying scientific equipment or food or satellites, imagine the dangers of a rocket full of radioactive waste exploding and spreading that radioactive waste all over the atmosphere. It would be a nuclear disaster. Then, if you even get it into space, it require an insane amount of fuel to get to the sun, you have to cancel out all the velocity you have from being on the earth going around the sun. Kind of like going backwards in a whirlpool, all your energy is working against you. It really just isn’t worth it, it’s way cheaper, and arguably safer, to just bury it under a mountain or keep them in storage ponds forever.", "Sending anything anywhere near the Sun is deceptively expensive and difficult from an engineering perspective. You can't just aim towards it and fire your engines. When you leave the Earth, you inherit its orbital velocity around the Sun, which is around 30 kilometers per second (~19 miles per second). You are now orbiting the Sun with that velocity. To fall into the Sun you have to get rid of that velocity, and that is A LOT of kilometers per second to get rid of. It means a metric shit ton of fuel, and even more fuel to carry that fuel. May sound weird, but it is actually cheaper and easier to first fly out all the way to Uranus or thereabouts and then fall into the Sun, which isn't cheap or easy at all. Granted you don't actually *have to* impact the Sun to get deleted from the universe. You just have to get close enough for the heat and radiation to break you down into your constituent atoms. It's easier than crashing into it, but getting that close to the Sun is still no walk in the park for the above mentioned reasons.", "* It's extremely difficult to launch something and have it hit the sun because you have to change the rocket's velocity by a huge amount. * Launching stuff into space is very expensive * Rockets have a nasty habit of exploding, which would spread high level waste over a huge area." ], "score": [ 26, 7, 6, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_aHEit-SqA" ], [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz1ykx
Why does walking on a rug on top of carpet cause it to ever so slowly crawl its way across the room?
Physics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6g83aw" ], "text": [ "Walking is a much more complicated feat than most people give it credit for. It isn't putting one foot in front of the other. It's transferring your weight against the weight of the earth and providing yourself momentum. You don't just push down, you push backwards while walking. Since you're far less mass than the earth, it resists movement, and newton's law dictates you will have an opposite reaction to your backwards thrust against the earth, effectively moving your mass in the forward direction. A rug has a certain coefficient of friction, and some of your energy gets lost there, effectively 'walking' your rug a tiny amount at a time." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz2rnv
How is that a fruit-flavored beverage that is "Naturally Flavored" also contains no juice?
Chemistry
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6g9mj9", "g6g9gup" ], "text": [ "\"Natural flavors\" covers all kinds of things that aren't juice. Refine your citric acid from a natural source? Boom. Natural flavors. Get your coloring from refining the shells of beetles? Boom. natural coloring.", "Things like \"juice\" and \"natural flavors\" are regulated terms. Natural flavors just mean any flavor compound that comes from a plant, animal, or microbe. This can be something simple like vanilla extract or things that are still heavily processed. It doesn't necessarily mean it came from the fruit it's intended to taste like either. They could mix together dozens of different naturally derived chemicals to arrive at a particular flavor. Juice means that it's actually made by pressing a fruit or vegetable." ], "score": [ 4, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz2skc
Why do vegetables get cold so much quicker than the other parts of my dinner plate?
Like, if I have steak, potatoes and broccoli- why does the broccoli not retain heat as much as the other food?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6gbptj" ], "text": [ "How long food stays hot for depends on how much heat it holds, how much surface area it has to lose heat, and much hot water it is losing as steam. Dense and water rich foods hold more heat than light and dry foods for the same temperature. Toast for example cools off really quick, it's dry and light. Soup is a mass of water, it will hold heat for a long time. Inversely, this also means these foods take longer too cook, as they take more heat to raise their temperature. Foods that are ball have the least surface area, so have the least exposure to lose heat. Foods that are very flat, full of holes, or have a lot of skinny offshoots have a massive amount of surface area. Your broccoli has a masisve amount of surface area. Your steak doesn't. An even then, a ball shaped steak will stay hot longer than a skinny flat one. Inversely, this means these ball shaped foods take longer to cook evenly, as the heat needs to make it way from the limited surface a ways into the centre. Jacking up temperature won't really speed it up, it will just burn the outside. Foods that let their hot water fly off as steam lose all that heat. Foods that trap their steam do not. Your uncut potato or cherry tomato holds heat very well, as the skin traps all the steam. Noodles or broccoli again let the steam all escape. Surface area again comes into play here, but the surfaces ability to trap steam also matter. Tomato skins holds steam really well, as not people have found out when they bite a cherry tomato in a stir fry and scald their mouth." ], "score": [ 8 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz3c14
Why are processed foods worse for your health than natural/organic foods? For example, fresh cheese vs processed cheese slices - it’s the same ingredients with a different form.
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6gczyk", "g6gehnk", "g6gekcl", "g6giro2" ], "text": [ "That’s the thing, it isn’t really the same ingredients. Processed foods on average have higher amounts of saturated fats and trans fats, these are the “bad” fats that eating a lot of has been linked to having major health problems, (heart problems, blood pressures, others). Saturated fats and trans fats are just harder for our bodies to digest. Then there are other ingredients and changes in processed foods that make them different, like the processing process removing vitamins or other nutrients from the food, so you’re not getting the full benefit.", "Fundamentally, they're not. Snake venom is 100% natural and it'll kill you. Cooking your meat is a \"process\" and it's generally a good idea. You're falling for advertising. Marketing. They want your money and fooling you into buying health is a classic strategy. All that said, SOME of the processes that factories use are intended to make the food last longer on the shelf rather taste better or be healthy. Surviving on the shelf is mostly a matter of making the food poisonous to bacteria. If bacteria eat it and grow on it, it's \"gone bad\" and stinks and could make you sick. (Depending on what grew on it). A lot of the things we can to do food to make it poisonous to bacteria isn't exactly the healthiest for us either. Adding trans-saturated fat is a good example. If the ingredients are the same, and the nutritional facts are the same, it's the same. SOME processes aren't healthy. Some natural foods aren't healthy. Some old processes are good, some are bad. Some new processes are good, some are bad. > For example, fresh cheese vs processed cheese slices - it’s the same ingredients with a different form. ok, get out of here with your \"cheese foods\" it's not the same, and tastes NOTHING like the good stuff. ...I dunno about health properties though. I mean, cheese isn't exactly health-food.", "They aren't. There is no standard definition of \"processed food\" Unless you're eating raw potatoes you dug from the ground yourself all food is \"processed\" \"Natural\" and \"Organic\" are purely marketing buzzwords that are absolutely meaningless from a health perspective.", "You realize that the only way you get cheese (of any kind) is to process milk? Anytime you alter a basic foodstuff you are processing it. This can be done physically, chemically, or biologically depending on what your end goal is. And don’t fall for the “natural/organic is healthier” trap. Those are simply marketing terms." ], "score": [ 15, 15, 5, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz3ny6
How does Germany have strong social programs, such as universal health insurance, while maintaining zero debt?
Economics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6gf2ct", "g6ggqoe" ], "text": [ "Germany is not maintaining zero debt. The German national debt is around $2.7 trillion, approximately 62% of the country's GDP.", "They do not have a huge military complex to maintain (or at least not as big as the US) and they have not started any wars since WWII." ], "score": [ 8, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz3ppf
why do we get random bursts of motivation to improve our lives late at night?
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6gmrww", "g6gll7x", "g6guutf", "g6gjsfq", "g6gx888" ], "text": [ "Cause your mind isn't busy doing the stuff it does during the day. Night is a time for reflection. Biologically, we're programmed to spend the day finding shelter and food and such. Translated into modern day, whatever you're doing during the day, your brain is probably focused on work or trying to distract yourself from stress.", "It's easier to do at night because you know you don't have to start right then. You'll obviously need to wait until tomorrow to start. Doing things tomorrow is easy! I mean, I can't start *right now*, it's almost bed time...", "It's mainly because we have less input going on. We don't have to concentrate on walking around, conversations with others, pay attention to anything etc. All these little things add up to take up a significant amount of our \"CPU\" brain power. In today's society we are becoming more and more stimulated with everything. This results in a difficulty in concentrating on important things. (imagine downtown Tokyo vs rural farm land). Because when we go to bed, it's usually dark, quiet and low stimulation, our brains can start focusing on important things like; Hey our health isn't so great, maybe we should eat less and work out more so we can live longer. Or you know what that person was flirting with us, make note for next time you see that as we would like to create offspring. These thoughts usually end up tracing back to a base instinct. Source: I'm quite mad and just follow logic most of the time. Also I'm a nighttime creator that will actually get up and do stuff at 3am if it's important.", "For the same reason we make New Year Resolutions. We look in retrospect at what passed and realised we could have done X or Y better. Sometimes this happens mostly subconsciously and you're just being left with an idea of 'I should try doing Z'.", "For me it's usually because I'm wasted drunk going to sleep wondering why I'm wasting my life being an alcoholic haha." ], "score": [ 214, 166, 23, 15, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz3q5c
Why is there hatred for Comic Sans font?
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6ghk0i", "g6ggm7v" ], "text": [ "1. It was overused. You know that song on the radio that plays three times an hour? This is the font version of that. People got sick of it. 2. It was the font people used if they wanted to be \"cool\" and \"slick\". Want to be the cool boss? Post that memo on the bulletin board in Comic Sans. Eventually people rolled their eyes at it. 3. When you get down to it, it's not an objectively beautiful font. It's the font that most people would make if they randomly decided to design a font. It's sort of lowest common denominator font. 4. At the time it was popular, the internet was still emerging and websites were simpler. Font was a major design choice. So everyone noticed font. And to stand out, you might have chosen a unique font. Guess which one a lot of people chose for their new website? 5. At the time when Comic Sans was not hated, society was less jaded. The internet has spread since then, and with it, people have begun voicing their hatred for things more. People are able to share opinions way more easily today than they were back when Comic Sans was loved. It was a simpler time.", "Mainly because it was overused. It came with Windows by default, so people ended up using it for a bunch of things it wasn't meant to be used for." ], "score": [ 5, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz42ys
Why do most canned foods have water in it?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6gipn6", "g6gjwjs" ], "text": [ "The process of canning food means heating it once it's sealed in the can. Water buffers the heating process so the food doesn't get scorched. So the best canned foods are the ones that already have water in them, as an integral part of the food itself, like soup.", "To kill off anything that could cause harm or spoilage the entirety of everything in the can needs to be brought up to a prescribed temperature, at a prescribed pressure for the prescribed amount of time. This includes the center of the most dense chunk of food in the dead center of the can. Air transfers temperature very poorly, poorly enough that all most insulation does is trap air. If you have air in the can you are insulating the food and making it more difficult and energy intensive to get the center bits up to temp. Water transfers heat very well though so water is added to displace the air making sterilization more achievable." ], "score": [ 5, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz4rmf
Why do we taste?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6gnqs9" ], "text": [ "Unneeded sense? How would you know if something is edible or not? Rotten food tastes bad to us because we evolved to associate that taste with avoiding it; people who didn’t died." ], "score": [ 12 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz4sfe
the volume and surface area of ice
Physics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6gny3l", "g6go0cx" ], "text": [ "No, because icebergs are a tiny fraction of the ice that's melting. Most of the ice that's melting is on land, big ice shelfs and glaciers in Antarctica, Greenland, northern Canada and Russia, places like that.", "A floating iceberg displaces it's liquid volume (you can try it with ice cubes and a glass, or better yet a bowl of water). A rise in sea levels is caused by melt water from glaciers and ice sheets on land." ], "score": [ 10, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz4y0e
Why is vomiting such an awful experience? Why do we vomit?
From the actual throwing up, to the gagging and burning of the back of the throat, why is it such an awful experience? Why do we vomit and how does our body know when to vomit?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6gouhu", "g6gqvuc", "g6guazr", "g6gwsb1" ], "text": [ "I always took it as the process that evolved so that we could forcefully eject things that our body deemed bad for us. The burning is the stomach acid - that’s just a byproduct of the reflex.", "It's such an unpleasant experience because your body is trying to get rid of something that could hurt you. Having the process be uncomfortable forms a memory of discomfort associated with the thing you threw up; if that's a poisonous berry you ate by mistake, then you'll probably be repulsed by such berries in the future and not poison yourself again.", "You throw up when your body thinks it’s ingested something poisonous, so like when you throw up after getting food poisoning, it is doing it’s job properly - removing harmful things from your digestive track. Now when you throw up from, say, car sickness, that’s because your body isn’t hip with the times. Car sickness happens because your inner ear is getting told that you’re moving, but your legs aren’t moving and you aren’t seeing movement with your eyes, so something doesn’t add up. Your body’s response to this is to assume that your body is failing somehow, so it was likely poisoned: let’s get that poison out. As to why it’s terrible, remember, your body is not designed to throw up stuff - it’s doing the exact opposite thing your stomach was designed to do. It’s hard on the system, so while it (hopefully) can handle the poisons, it also wants to make perfectly clear that what you did was bad, and to never do it again (throwing up AND eating the poisonous thing). In addition, the throwing up is likely done with hormone release, etc and those are probably not designed to make you feel good. Lastly, the burning is from your stomach acid coming up with the food/poison, which harms the tissues in your mouth and throat (the stomach has mucus to protect it, but the rest of your upper digestive track does not).", "I was an intern in a hospital working with clients who had eating disorders. It was best explained to me that vomiting is a violent process on the body. We are made to hold our food in so when food is being forcefully pushed out an entrance (like the sphincters involved) that it will be quite painful. There are also contractions in the digestive tract (think the heaving) that work to force the food up through the GI tract essentially going down the wrong side of a one way street. Gastric acids come with that and our gastric acids can actually eat our own flesh. That’s the burning feeling you can get. Just being told that vomiting is a violent process really changed how I looked at eating disorders. Anyway there are many things in the body that cause vomiting and when it’s done naturally it’s a protective mechanism to prevent us from ingesting toxic materials (nausea causes us to not want to ingest anymore) and to expel the toxins we have ingested. Sometimes the body messes up and can make us vomit when there is not protective measure needed. This happens with motion sickness or sometimes certain nerves can be triggered in the body that cause nausea and vomiting. The vagus nerve is a good example of this. Sometimes women who get an IUD inserted through their cervix will get a sudden sense of nausea and vomiting because the vagus nerve can be triggered through the cervix." ], "score": [ 12, 7, 4, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz56p2
why perfume/cologne isn’t also used as underarm deodorant
Like I know that aluminum and whatnot help maximize deodorant, but even aluminum free deodorant keeps BO away longer than spraying your pits with Chanel No. 5
Chemistry
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6gsr83" ], "text": [ "As you noted, perfume/cologne doesn't work. Rather that produce a scent to mask your BO smell, deodorant has chemicals that effect the production of your BO." ], "score": [ 10 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz5aji
What is the purpose of putting Hydrogen Peroxide on scrapes and cuts?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6gsoy9", "g6gsgbp" ], "text": [ "The idea is that hydrogen peroxide kills any bacteria that may have entered the scrape or cut to prevent infection. You’re trying to “clean” the wound. Another idea is that the bubbling effect the hydrogen peroxide has on your skin can remove any small pieces of debris that got into the cut. However, the use of hydrogen peroxide to clean wounds has become something of a controversy in the medical community. A lot of medical professionals say that hydrogen peroxide is *too* good at its job of killing things - it even goes so far as to kill the healthy cells, including ones your body has sent to the wound to repair it.", "Hydrogen peroxide is a strong oxidizer and therefore poisonous to all forms of life. If you have received a wound it is quite likely that bacteria and fungi. This can cause a nasty infection if it overwhelms the immune system. But when you put hydrogen peroxide on the wound you kill everything, including the bacteria, fungi and some of your healthy cells as well. If you then quickly bandage the wound then new bacteria and fungi can no longer enter and the wound is allowed to heal on its own without the same risk of infection." ], "score": [ 13, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz5pul
How can Splenda Sugar Blend claim to have half the calories of sugar when 1 tsp of it is 15 calories and sugar is also 15 calories per tsp?
Chemistry
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6gvuxz" ], "text": [ "I think the claim is it’s twice as sweet so you only need half as much. Gram for gram its nutritional profile is basically the same as sugar." ], "score": [ 8 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz5rsz
why mirrors reverse left and right but not up and down?
Physics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6gwbcu" ], "text": [ "Mirrors reverse front and back. When you hold up your right hand and someone looks at you from behind it's also right for them but if the same person would look at you from the front the hand would be left in their perspective. So if you look at a mirror you basically see what any person that looks at you from the back would see except that your front and back are flipped." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz621h
What happens to the radioactiveness of nuclear waste we bury?
Like, wouldnt the container we place nuclear waste in hold in the radioactivity? making the container not safe to open ever, because opening it would release all the contained radio activity?
Chemistry
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6gzmnb", "g6h4tig", "g6h0aeh" ], "text": [ "\"Radioactivity\" is not like Water or anything you can store. It's more like light. If you put waste into a box and seal it \"radioactivity-tight\" it is like placing a flashlight into a blacked out box. The light is not stored. As soon as the batteries are empty there is no light anymore. Both are forms of energy or \"energy-vectors\". They transfer energy into whatever they encounter on their way. They heat it up and this heat is transferred outside the containmet vessel and not harmful anymore.", "Radioactivity decreases over time so the containers have two goals 1. Be thick enough to absorb any radiation being emitted by the material. Often this will mean thick concrete layers which will significantly reduce the xray and gamma ray intensity once it makes it out of the container. Protecting against Alpha and Beta particles isn't hard, that can be done with foil. 2. Containment. You want something that will stand up to the elements and keep all your radioactive stuff inside until it has enough time to decay into non radioactive stuff. As said above, protecting against Alpha and Beta particles can be done with foil so they're not hazardous if they're in any kind of box, but they are extremely hazardous if you breath in or ingest Alpha/Beta emitters so you need to make sure you keep them in the box. Radiation isn't a thing that builds up in Pandora's box and escapes when you open the lid, the Alpha/Beta particles and the Xray/Gamma rays are emitted and absorbed by the box and turned into heat. There isn't a cloud of radiation that can escape like movies would have you picture. Things that are highly radioactive have relatively short half lives and clear out quickly. In nuclear reactors a major source of the radioactivity of the fuel is Iodine 131 that is being created but it only has a halflife of 8 days so after 48 days its pretty much gone. After about a year the main sources of radiation are from elements with half lives around a year. After a couple decades, most of the aggressively radioactive stuff will have decayed.", "The nuclear waste we bury is typically put into large barrels and buried in concrete to make the waste extremely difficult to get to. While in the barrel, the waste decomposes according to its half-life. A lot of radioactive materials have half-lives in the tens of years. A half-life is how long it takes for half of a given radioactive material to decompose. This effect is exponential, so after one half-life, 1/2 of the material has decomposed. After 2, 3/4. 3, 7/8 and so on. This is what makes nuclear waste material so dangerous. Even hundreds of years after we bury it, it can still be radioactive enough to hurt us. There are efforts to bury the waste so that it's insanely difficult to get to and design signage for people of the future to indicate the danger of the nuclear waste where it's buried. TL;DR: Nuclear waste gets put in barrels and buried in cement. The waste decomposes very slowly over the course of hundreds to thousands of years." ], "score": [ 58, 26, 6 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz6242
If teeth are alive why can't they heal like the rest of the body?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6h9a1r", "g6h262z" ], "text": [ "Hello, your friendly internet dental hygienist here! Teeth are most certainly alive! You can tell if you have ever had a tooth ache or sensitivity to hot, cold, sweet, or pressure. Teeth on the inside have blood and lymph vessels that supply the tooth with nutrients and remove waste. Even though the tooth is alive, not every part of the tooth is living. The enamel (which is a hard substance that covers and protects the sensitive parts of the tooth) is not considered “alive.” The cells that form enamel are only active and present in the tooth during tooth formation when you are a small child. After the enamel is formed, those cells are trapped inside the enamel, die, and become apart of the enamel structure. Because those cells are lost, the enamel portion of the tooth cannot regrow. This is why it is so important to really take care of your teeth! If you do get a cavity or break a tooth, you can have it repaired or filled at the dentist, but nothing is going to compare to the complete structure of your fully intact natural tooth. Here are some helpful tips to keep your teeth healthy! 1. Floss before brushing 2. Floss daily best at bed time 3. Brush 2-3 times daily 4. Angle your toothbrush at 45 degrees to the gumline 5. Use your tongue to check for missed areas 6. Don’t rinse after brushing, toothpaste needs to soak into teeth! 7. Clean your tongue each time you brush (use a toothbrush or tongue scraper) 8. Lower carb/sugar intake 9. Get dental cleanings 2 times a year 10. Love yourself (mind, body, and spirit!)", "The inside of your teeth could heal, but there's not much blood supply getting in there. The outside of your tooth is made by special cells that die off after the enamel hardens." ], "score": [ 21, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz63jm
My friend doesn’t understand being drunk
She doesn’t know why people can’t make rational decisions when your drunk and I need help explaining it. It started cuz I was telling her how I don’t wanna get super drunk in like 8 years in Cancun Mexico and wake up with a tattoo of a catfish and she doesn’t understand why someone would make a decision like that when your drunk. Two hours of explaining didnt sway her so can someone help?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6gzn1s" ], "text": [ "In your head are a thousand little voices. One might say \"You're hungry, go eat something\". Another says \"You're horney, go try to sleep with that girl\" or \"Lets jump in that pond\" or \"tattoos are super cool, lets get one right now\". There's another voice that says \"no those are all terrible ideas, don't do that\". That last voice is called inhibition. Alcohol turns down the volume on inhibition." ], "score": [ 18 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz6b0e
why does music make us want to dance?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6h0vak" ], "text": [ "It's an end product of evolution. It started with animals using sound to move the pack instinctively, and ended with humans developing sound as music and body movements as dance into rituals. These rituals eventually become dancing to the music." ], "score": [ 6 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz744n
Why do meteorites burn up when they reach earth’s atmosphere? Wouldn’t they stay relatively cold from the air blasting them?
Physics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6h4rwd", "g6h5099" ], "text": [ "Friction. At the speeds those rocks are moving, the air is like a sand-blaster. The same way you can warm your hands up by rubbing them together, even if they're both cold.", "There are two reasons I believe: Travelling through the air that fast compressed the air in front of the meteorite causing it to superheat instantaneously. Also the air causes friction on the surface of the meteorite further heating it up to thousands of degrees Celsius." ], "score": [ 5, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz7g0q
How does caffeine give you energy?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6h6qt8" ], "text": [ "It doesn't really give you energy as much as it prevents you from becoming sleepy. Caffeine inhibits the receptors which normally accept the neurotransmitter that makes you feel sleepy. But once the caffeine wears off, all those neurotransmitters are still lingering in your brain, thus the crash that often follows some time afterward." ], "score": [ 5 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz7xhk
Why do sunbeds tan the stomach very easily but hardly the hands/feet?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6hha63" ], "text": [ "Our hands and feet have thicker skin because they make regular contact with surfaces. UV rays take longer to penetrate the thicker skin to activate the melanin." ], "score": [ 7 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz8yrt
why can’t we artificially create and utilize spider silk?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6hgwq2", "g6hhohc" ], "text": [ "Two major problems: it's a really complicated composite of assorted biological molecules that aren't easy to synthesize, and it's formed by a really complicated process inside the spider's spinarette that we don't know how to build artificially. There are some lab-level attempts that are OK but they're not industrial scale or consistency so we can't use it for much except studying yet.", "We actually do by adding spiders DNA to goats and using the proteins in their milk to create the web through a refining and other processes." ], "score": [ 11, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz9mnw
What is the difference between “permafrost” and just regular old ice?
Chemistry
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6hk3w0" ], "text": [ "Permafrost refers to ground that stays frozen... well, more or less permanently. Technically the requirement is at least two years but for the most part, it tends to way longer than that. Ice is frozen water, which is not frozen ground. You might have ice covering permafrost, or ice on ground that is not permafrost, or permafrost without ice on it." ], "score": [ 8 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iz9sup
How does evaporation differ from boiling?
I’m not very good with science, but they both cause the liquid to disappear into the air as a gas, is evaporation just a slow boil essentially?
Chemistry
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6hldlp" ], "text": [ "More like, boiling is forced evaporation. Water, depending on humidity, pressure, and temperature of the air will naturally vaporize to a certain extent, and when it is very hot or very dry or very low pressure, it doesn’t take much to make the water vaporize. Boiling is pumping a bunch of energy into the water to make it vaporize" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iza1z5
Laws of thermodynamics.
Physics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6hofgb", "g6hof8n" ], "text": [ "Zeroth law: Temperature is a thing. Hot things warm up cold things, eventually. If you have three things and the first two are the same temperature and the last two are the same temperature, all three are the same temperature. Nothing terribly profound in this law, but it's important to set some ground rules for a branch of physics that cares so much about temperature. First law: Conservation of energy. You can't create or destroy energy. If you add heat to a system then that increases its energy. If you remove heat it decreases the energy. If a system does work (e.g. a steam engine) then the energy to do that work came from the system, which now has less energy than before it did that work. If you do work on a system (e.g. compressing the air inside a cylinder) then you're adding that energy to the system. Second law: There's this weird concept called \"entropy.\" In a closed system it can only ever go up (on average, over time). Entropy can best be thought of as \"disorder.\" If you have a system that's highly ordered then it can only get more disordered over time. For example, if you have a tank of air that's sorted such that all the fast-moving molecules are on the right and all the slow-moving ones are on the left then that's fairly ordered. If you leave this tank to its own devices then the molecules will move around until they're no longer sorted. This is less ordered. The tank won't go back to the first state on its own, and if you want to put the tank back the way it was then doing so requires you to mess up some other place to do it. Note that stars are extremely concentrated locations where there's a lot of very high energy molecules. It would be more disorder if that energy were spread out across the universe. Very often when something makes the world more ordered (e.g. an air conditioner making it cool inside and warmer outside) it's by taking advantage of the increasing entropy from the sun radiating heat out into the universe. Third law: That \"entropy\" thing from the 2nd law has some minimal value. In normal matter molecules are vibrating or moving around. That's disordered. It would be more ordered if all the molecules were lined up in perfect rows and not moving at all. That state is \"absolute zero\" and is \"zero entropy.\" In addition to establishing the existence of \"absolute zero,\" the 3rd law also says you can't get there.", "1st law: energy can be neither created nor destroyed, only converted from one form to another. In other words, you have a ball on top of a building. It has potential energy, you drop it and that potential energy becomes kinetic energy. It hits the ground with a thud and that kinetic is transfered to the ground and also the air making sound. 2nd law: the total entropy of a system and the universe must increase in a spontanous reaction. In other words, for something to happen without effort or energy put into it, it must create more disorder or possible permutations. A tree will spontaneously fall over, but will never spontaneously upright itself. 3rd law: A system's entropy approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches absolute zero. In other words, as temperature decreases to the point where there is no movement, the disorder or number of possible permutations of the system decrease to a specific value." ], "score": [ 13, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izag6x
A current cellular company's commercial is claiming they have 'the fastest 5G in the world'. Isn't that like saying my car travels 55mph faster than anyone else's car does? How does the cellular network speed measurement system work?
Edit: Wow, thanks for the information everyone! It seems like this question uncovered a lot of industry trickery. So what questions should I be asking the next time I buy a cell phone and they try to sell me on their shiny 5G, and what are acceptable answers? I live in upstate NY, outside of any major cities, if that makes any difference.
Technology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6hpuvp", "g6hz98o" ], "text": [ "5g is a type of connection, not necessarily a speed. So saying \"we have the fastest 5g\" like saying \"I have the fastest *sports car*.\" Not all 5g speeds will be the same. I believe some company was testing its 5g and it was slower than current cellular connections. Others may be faster. It all depends on your device, the tower, traffic on that network, etc. But the network itself is 5g because that's the type of network. The same way different sports cars can go at different speeds, and you can drive a sports car at 20mph or at 120mph. So the \"5g\" part is equivalent to the \"sports car\" part, and doesn't tell you anything about how fast it's going.", "5 G simply means \"Fifth Generation\" of cellular communications standards. A cellphone company has to provide an antenna that uses this technology and your phone has to be within range of it AND have the technology in it to connect to the antenna. Once your 5g phone is hooked up to the 5g antenna, the antenna needs to connect to the internet. (a lot like how your router hooks up to your modem which hooks up to the internet.) So, even though you might have a super fast connection to the antenna, if the antenna's connection to the internet is slow, your connection speeds will also be slow. Other things to consider: 5g has much shorter range, and your speed drops off as a function of distance from the antenna. Each antenna will have a limited bandwidth, so if too many people are using the same one, you'll get slower speeds. 5G is a standard that allows for different hardward to connect, you can still create shitty hardware that connects to 5g, just really slowly. There are also going to be software speed limiters put in so that you don't suck up too much bandwidth, because most cell phone providers suck like that (at least in the US)." ], "score": [ 15, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izazoq
Why is Nvidia buying ARM? Why is ARM so important, and why aren't other companies interested?
Like the title, I've heard a lot about Nvidia's purchase of ARM. Why is ARM so important and what does it do? Why aren't other, larger companies trying to buy ARM?
Technology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6hu2es", "g6hua1h", "g6i5isx", "g6i2uqs" ], "text": [ "ARM licenses the intellectual property for a line of small, low power microprocessor cores. They are used in most cell phones and tablets today. They are also starting to be used in server farms, because heat is a big deal in that application and their processing power/watt is good. A lot of companies wouldn't want ARM because they are incredibly expensive. Some companies wouldn't want it because if they owned ARM then other ARM users would bail and look for other solutions, making it much less valuable. Nvidia has great processors for graphics and artificial intelligence, but no general purpose processor. Until now. They can't really get into the x86 market, but unless you want to play in the PC space that isn't necessary. Having ARM gives them a full IP set for a lot of applications that are going to be big. They will also not only get the licensing revenue from other people using ARM, but they can also fuck over potential competitors.", "ARM is one of the major manufacturers for mobile CPUs (most proper CPUs that dont fit an x86 socket will likely be designed by either them or IBM) Nvidia has a vested interest in their tech because its a potential stepping stone into improving on their own tech, Nvidia has been pursuing ***\"system on a chip\"*** designs for a long time but in order to do that cleanly they need their own CPU architecture as they dont want to have to license to either Intel nor AMD(not like they would anyway due to how the x86/64 license agreement works) ., they want this because if they can produce this system they effectively can market it as a system that can be used for anything that requires processing power no matter how small(this matter when ti involves ai Development and server farms). Hence Nvidia is buying out an alternate way of achieving their goal and prevent their competitors from doing the same, as they would now own the licenses for ARM's Tech IP.", "ARM is primarily known for making processors ideally suited for mobile devices. Most cellphones and tablets use ARM processors. The mobile market is only increasing in size and value, and the recent announcement of Apple switching to ARM processors for their laptops just makes the company that much more valuable. Nvidia makes a number of chips but are most well known for graphics processors, owning ARM aligns their company to make the full stack (CPUs + video). So why isn't a giant company like Intel buying ARM? Well it's complicated. In the US there are anti-trust laws to consider, essentially monopolies are illegal and a major player like Intel buying ARM could be seen as a monopoly requiring the US government to step in and break them up.", "Every computer needs a CPU, which ARM licenses to companies including nvidia. Intel and AMD design and manufacturer the most well known CPU architecture, X86. Because of this any system that nvidia produces ends up paying a significant portion of the margin to CPU licenses. Over 10 years ago nvidia started designing a x86 compatible CPU known as Project Denver. As part of settling litigation between nvidia and Intel Intel agreed to pay nvidia $1.5B and nvidia agreed to not produce x86 CPUs. Nvidia then licensed the ARM architecture and produced the first 64 ARM SOC (CPU and GPU combined). Nvidia has continued to produce SOCs with ARM licensed CPUs but wants to capture all the revenue from their SOCs sales, as well as capture license revenue from their GPU designs, which are much better suited to AI and machine learning workloads than ARM's Mali GPUs." ], "score": [ 26, 7, 5, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izb865
How does the Nielsen system for tv ratings work?
ELI5 How does the Nielsen system for tv ratings work? Is it still applicable nowadays?
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6hviz9" ], "text": [ "Extrapolation. There are over 300 million people in the USA. It is financially impossible to monitor what they all watch on TV. Also, not all TV viewers would agree to the monitoring. So Nielson monitors a percentage of homes and their viewing habits and extrapolates the data. They monitor viewing habits in thousands of homes. If 5% of their sample group watched a show, then they can roughly estimate that 5% of the country watched it too. Now, as you might guess, it's not very accurate, and it's also way more complicated than I'm making it sound in terms of the statistical analysis, demographic groups, ets." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izbdez
Can Google save a significant amount of the world's electrical usage by turning its homepage background to a black color and if so, by how much?
Physics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6hvyev" ], "text": [ "Nope; LCD screens need 0 energy to be transparent, and extra energy to block the backlight for black. White is already the low power solution unless you’re using an OLED screen." ], "score": [ 10 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izbhwq
Why does fast food have to be unhealthy?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6hwutl", "g6hz3i9", "g6iawlc" ], "text": [ "Because people like the taste of salt, sugar, fats, and carbs. So, businesses tend to sell such items. Is it possible for fast food chains to make healthy food? Of course. Healthy fast food exists. But it will be more expensive, generally, and that will end up driving away a certain portion of the consumer base.", "It's primarily economic. Food high in salt, fat and sugar is cheap because those ingredients are abundantly available, store easily and have relatively long shelf lives. They can be prepared quickly and easily with little skill or training required and usually without the person doing the final cooking needing to do any kitchen preparation. They can often be made using automated or mechanical processes, increasing speed and reducing labour costs. They can then be sold to consumers at competitive prices compared to more labour intensive higher skill requirement and riskier because of short shelf life food that is also healthier.", "It's the concept called hyper-palatized foods. A great deal of effort is spent discovering exactly the combination of things people like to eat, and those things happen to be fat, sugar, salt and highly refined carbohydrates. By doing this, fast food restaurants increase their sales versus selling more healthy alternatives and it also fuels the cycle of addiction to food. But the addiction is not to the flavor as you have asked, rather most notably, the carbohydrates and sugar. And heavily oily foods increase the motility of your gut. These factors combine to give you a spike in your blood sugar which creates a strong psychological reward. In the summary, there is no incentive for companies to change the formulas because that would reduce their sales in the long run." ], "score": [ 20, 18, 6 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izbqcg
Why does using a tea towel and an iron help remove burn marks on a wooden table?
Recently I burned my table when I put down a paper plate with hot food on it. After watching some videos I tried "ironing" the wood with a tea towel over top. I used a little bit of steam and sure enough, it worked. However, in none of the videos I watched, did they explain why this works. so what is happening exactly that is causing the fix?
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6i5x8j" ], "text": [ "It doesn't remove burn marks, it releases moisture trapped in the finish. When you put a hot plate down it softens the finish and moisture gets trapped. Heating it up with the iron softens it again, releasing it." ], "score": [ 19 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izbxwf
Why do we pronounce "Paris" in an Anglicized way, but we keep the French pronunciation for other French cities like Marseilles, Versailles, Montpellier, Bordeaux?
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6i2wz3", "g6iewio", "g6ijeg1", "g6idoma", "g6ighxc", "g6iabwp", "g6icgru", "g6ifaxg", "g6ifg4o", "g6ij14w", "g6id8ap", "g6il5up", "g6iisuj" ], "text": [ "Because the name Paris is far older than Paris the city and was pronounced Par - Is-ii and only Francofied in the 16th century. Not to mention thefamous Paris that existed in Greek history that was also pronounced similarly to how we say Paris now.", "A lot of European cities have different names in different languages, ther name for this is “exonym”. While the English spelling of Paris is the same, the different pronunciation could be thought of as an exonym. More obvious examples in English are Cologne (Köln), Munich (München), Rome (Roma) and Naples (Napoli). In French, London is “Londres“. Generally these names exist for cities that are large and important enough that people from outside the region might want to talk about them. English people will talk about Paris a lot, but, say, Nimes a lot less, so not have an established alternate pronunciation for Nimes. In the past there actually were a lot more places in Europe that had English exonyms, but over time many have fallen into disuse and been largely forgotten.", "You know Paris, France? In English, they pronounce it “Paris,” but everyone else pronounces it without the “s” sound, like the French do. But with Venezia, everyone it the English way, “Venice.” Like The Merchant of Venice and Death in Venice . . . Why though?! Why isn’t the title Death in Venezia?! Are you friggin’ mocking me?! It takes place in Italy so use the Italian word, damn it! That shit pisses me off! Bunch of dumbasses!", "If I relate this to my language (French) I think it's because it's easy to pronounce it in English. You can see the same with the brands even if they don't have a historical background as big as countries. In France for example we pronounce CIA in French but FBI in English, because it's mush easier this way", "This doesn't just apply to France, think of the names of places all over the world. The capitals mostly have an anglicized pronounciation but the smaller places (or the ones far away) doesn't. We just do this with places important to us. It's not specific to english, in swedish for example the only state in the US with a \"swedified\" pronounciation is California (Kalifornien) because the film industry was so important there in the 20th century. I haven't studied this that much at all, but it is a common phenomenon in all languages.", "Probably because of trade. Cities in other countries that have English names are usually because there were a lot of trade between them. For example, Gothenburg and Copenhagen have English names, but not Stockholm or Oslo. Years of using the names have resulted in an English version. There is an article about it somewhere if I recall correctly!", "I see questions like this so often and the thing most people keep forgetting is that English isn't whatever other languages these words came from. (I'm speaking all loan words in general, I know these specific words are French.) When the words are being pronounced in English they will usually be converted to English, they become English. They are no longer their original languages words, they are English now and will adopt an English pronunciation. These words in particular are much closer to their French counterparts but they are still not actually pronounced the French way. Imagine speaking perfect accented English then switching to French to pronounce the French words. It's jarring and unnatural. Remember that English has no set rules. However people use it, that becomes the official way, the way that spreads and gets written down. It would be nice if we had a committee that decides on spelling and pronunciations to make them follow a strict and easy to follow standard, but we don't. --- The generic answer to every single question like this is that the words were brought to English at different times by different people, and sometimes through other languages first. As for these specific words we can simply just look at the words for an easy answer. If you asked an English speaker who has never heard the word before to pronounce Paris, they could come up with an easy answer similar to how we say it. The rest? Those are clearly not English. It's easier to just memorize the closest French pronunciation than to try to figure out how to pronounce it in English.", "Many cities around the world have one or more unofficial names that are used in different languages. Those are called exonyms. The english exonym for Paris happens to be written exactly as the official name, even if pronounced differently.", "Because old French didn't have an accent and they were pronouncing the consonants at the end of words. So old french people were speaking French the same way we all did during our first lessons of French lol. Check this out URL_0", "If you want to see French people both wince and get angry at the same time, make them listen to how we pronounce Montpelier here in Vermont.", "Moi je prononce Paris à la française, mais bon je dis aussi San Francisco, Bombay, Londres ou même Dublin à la française", "In English language itself the letters are spoken different than in the foreign laguage. So English speaking people try to pronounce an unknown word like they would do with a common word in their language. So Berlin is also pronounced differently by the native people. They speak it more like \"Bearleen\". If an English speaker speaks it aloud, for us Germans sounds it like \"Bör-línn\".", "In Italian we have Italian names for most of the biggest European cities too, so Paris is Parigi, Lyon is Lione, Marseille is Marsiglia, Nice is Nizza and so on. We keep Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Madrid and Bruxelles as they are, but London is Londra, Berlin is Berlino, Frankfurt is Francoforte, Barcelona is Barcellona, Zurich is Zurigo, Moscow is Mosca, Wien is Vienna, Stockholm is Stoccolma, Beograd is Belgrado, Zagreb is Zagabria and so on. Some of these names might be coming from the Roman Empire names, but I wouldn't be able to say which ones." ], "score": [ 4874, 1868, 65, 63, 50, 41, 20, 11, 9, 7, 3, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [ "https://youtu.be/MvAEMz64O9c" ], [], [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izcaee
how/why did Rice Krispies cereal make that popping sound when milk was added?
Chemistry
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6i1x6s", "g6i81xy" ], "text": [ "air pockets and the thin “walls” between them! when they soak up milk, the walls absorb too much and they “pop” or dissolve.", "What the other guy said but it’s definitely worth mentioning that the original process of making rice crispies is cool. It’s basically like making popcorn with rice. They have fancier processes now that are continuous but originally they were made in batches in a big thing that was basically a cannon. You put dry rice and water in a sealed chamber then heat the chamber until it’s at a high psi then suddenly open it without venting the pressure (which is very loud). Rice absorbs water fairly quickly under pressure and when the pressure is extreme and the sudden decompression evaporates that water almost instantly it puffs the rice up. You need really high pressure (like over 150psi iirc) which is why you can’t do this in something like a pressure cooker (which typically is 15psi max at full pressure) and opening it is kind of dangerous because of the blast of very hot steam Edit: [video]( URL_0 )" ], "score": [ 13, 8 ], "text_urls": [ [], [ "https://youtu.be/E2SMDq5Rmrk" ] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izcbau
Why are pandas so slow and dumb?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6i59ld" ], "text": [ "They’re couch potatoes of the land. There used to be bamboo forests in a huge areas of China before a bunch of it was demolished via human development. They’re slow and dumb because they didn’t need to be fast or smart to feed." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izcg9q
What is Postmodernism?
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6i85bx", "g6i98hl", "g6i8dm9", "g6ic4z8", "g6ifqt0", "g6i87o5", "g6i8vkz" ], "text": [ "Art Graduate here. Traditionalism - the more realistic it looks the better the art is. Modernism - anything with meaning can be art. It doesn't have to be representational. Post-modernism - everything is art. Even meaningless things can be art.", "Modernism = Grand narratives, archetypes of being and doing, reasoning toward an ideological singular truth. Postmodernism = Individial narratives, self expression, subjective truth, skepticism and objection of archetypes of being and doing, interperative, meta meanings. Postmodernism is reactionary and skeptical of the notions of modernist thinking. We live in a post modern world, ie, nihilism, rejection of church (as an example of grand narrative) and power structures; skepticism, irony, meta humour, the abstract, and primacy of self truth over a collective unifying narrative.", "In the simplest form, Postmodernism is a philosophical movement that rejects the concept of objectivity. Defining exactly what the bounds of Postmodernism are is very difficult, as its core essence is in denying universal definitions so this answer focuses on the crux of artistic Postmodernism. To use a simple example, the question \"What is Art?\" shows some obvious differentiation between Postmodernism and older aesthetic philosophies. If you asked a Classicist, they would answer \"Oratory, Sculpture, and Frescoes are art\". A Postmodernist would reject the question entirely since under its philosophy, no definition can apply universally. A banana taped to the wall might not be art to you, but because they created it with artistic intent, it is art to them.", "Postmodernism is the idea that things in the world are not real. Instead, things exist in the minds of the people using them or seeing them. For example, a black person in America might see a police officer and feel scared. A white person in America might see a police officer and feel safer. Is a police officer a threat or safety? Neither. It depends on who is seeing the police officer. The word started in the arts (if I label a toilet as art, sign it, and put it in an art museum is it art?) and philosophy where it has particular definitions. However, the word \"PostModernism\" is used generally to mean a rejection of objectivity (there is a right way to describe something) for subjectivity (who is describing something matters as much as what is being described.)", "Traditional: This is good. Modern: Why is the tradition good? Post-Modern: Goodness is arbitrary and nothing means anything.", "Postmodern philosophy is the rejection of Enlightenment rationalism and many of the ideas that sprang from it, such as a society based on reason, the importance of science, tolerance of differing opinions, and the existence of an objective truth. Postmodernism argues that facts are just individual interpretations and the accepted truth about any topic is just the idealogical interpretation of those with the most power.", "This won’t be #1 answer, but look up how and when dada started. A lot of that stuff comes out of times when the world is chaotic, and I’ve had art teachers speculate the chaos in the world is translated into our art and when the world is upside down people will find meaning in everything. I’m no art history buff, but post-modernism to me represents a culture that has simultaneously been drenched in artificial objects/ideas (consumerism; i.e. the famous Campbell soup painting) and chaos (war, economic distress). I think of it as more of an idea than specifically an art niche, but I’m not taking a traditionalist’s point of view." ], "score": [ 37, 24, 10, 9, 6, 5, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izcjwf
Why do symmetrical drawings of faces look beautiful, but perfectly symmetrical real faces look so disturbing?
I've seen a lot of digital art with people's faces lately and the faces are entirely symmetrical, but the artwork is stunning. However, anytime I have seen someone take a picture with a mirror reflecting half of their face (so it is perfectly symmetrical), it looks bizarre and unsettling. Why does this happen?
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6ioaam" ], "text": [ "When a realistic looking human face looks disturbing for indescribable reason, it can be due to [uncanny valley ]( URL_0 ). In this case, it may be due to the center line of the mirrored face not being in the exact right place, resulting in a face that’s very much like a human face, but just slightly off in an unnatural way. Drawings don’t evoke the uncanny valley, because your brain recognizes it as a drawing of human face, instead of trying to process it as a human face." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley" ] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izckln
Why is it that honey doesn't spoil?
I heard that honey doesn't spoil, and that the expiration date of the product is actually the expiration date of the plastic. Is this true? And if so, why does it happen?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6i41z6", "g6i82c2" ], "text": [ "Honey has high sugar content and a low pH (its acidic), which prevents most bacteria and fungi (mold) from surviving. The main reason for a date is because old honey will crystallise and won't be easy to est", "For the same reason you can’t only drink honey. It has almost no water and will suck out any water from any organism that touches it. That and it has antibiotics in it." ], "score": [ 6, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izctnj
How do puzzle designers create puzzles without making them impossible?
Technology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6i9hjx" ], "text": [ "Very, very carefully. It’s much easier to design a puzzle as someone with experience, than it would be to solve a puzzle you are unfamiliar with, at least depending on how you want to look at it. Sure, there’s a LOT of time that would go into something like that, but it’s often easier to go into something with a general idea of what you want to accomplish, then to look at something completed and try to guess what it does. That being said, I don’t really know much about complex puzzles making. I could be totally wrong, but even simple puzzles have easy ways of making them much more difficult. If you look up Chris Ramsay on YouTube, he’s got tons of examples of difficult puzzles. Even regular jigsaw puzzles are a lot easier than they could be when you consider everything is basically color coded. If everything were all the same color, it gets way harder." ], "score": [ 6 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izcxaw
If you are taking the placebo pills in birth control how do you not get pregnant?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6i7gwd", "g6ibt6w" ], "text": [ "You don't need any meds in the 4th week, but humans are creatures of habit. The pills aren't placebo in the sense of making you think they work and therefore working, they are just about making you stay on the habit of taking a pill every day.", "You can literally take nothing for that week or just keep taking the actual birth control and not get a period. Theoretically the down time in the pills isn’t going to be a time someone is most ovulating and if they were than the surrounding weeks of pills should help prevent conception and implantation." ], "score": [ 13, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izd1bb
how do we know things are millions of years old and how accurate are the estimations?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6i7ff2" ], "text": [ "Radio isotope dating. We know elements like uranium, plutonium and other radio active elements (primarily uranium is used) radioactively decay at a pretty specific rate, this rate is called its half life. We know these rates, and we can use this knowledge combined with the amount of radioactive material we find in rock samples to estimate their age by the amount of material remaining. And well, they’re relatively accurate, but it’s relative, when talking about rocks thatre hundreds of millions of years old, what’s the difference being off one or two million years? We can’t get it down to a super specific date." ], "score": [ 6 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izdtlm
What exactly happens when an appendix "explodes" and why does it kill people?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6ibnae" ], "text": [ "It doesn't ectually explode, it ruptures. And since it's an appendix to the intestinal system, the faeces (the shit) inside that system now has a portal to the outside of the intestinal system, that still lies within the body. Since such a rupturing goes along with bleeding and for that, opened blood vessels aswell, the faeces also has an entry point to that system. What happens next is that stuff, that doesn't belong (mentioned shit) takes a tour inside your body and the body reacts to that with a sepsis (basically an inflammation of the whole body, in this case caused by the bacteria from the intestinal tract) and if you don't help the body fight the whole thing, you're going to die." ], "score": [ 19 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izdvi1
How do we know the calorie content of food when not everything that burns is digestible?
Like cellulose, it produces a lot of energy when burnt, but gives you zero energy if you eat it because humans cant digest it.
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6ig6gt", "g6jdjj7" ], "text": [ "Calories are just a measurement of energy, like joules. Just because the human body can't digest and use some of those calories doesn't mean they don't exist. Calorie counts on food nutrition labels tell you the total number of calories in that food, but they don't tell you how many of those calories you'll actually digest. For example, the more processed a food is, the more calories our bodies are capable of absorbing (the processing did some of the digestion work for us). The health of your digestive system also plays a major role in how many calories your body gets from eating a food. If two people ate the exact same bag of chips, one of those people would probably absorb a few more calories from the chips than the other person, but neither would get as many as are on the label.", "Let's start by defining what a calorie is; a calorie is a unit of energy, more exactly the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. What we know as 'food calories' are actually Kilo Calories, as food is so energy dense that we simplified the numbers. So a what we know as a 100 calorie biscuit actually has 100,000 calories, enough energy to bring a kilogram of water (around 2.2 pounds) from freezing temperature (0 degrees celcius) to boiling point (100 degrees Celsius). One of the ways we measure the calories (kilocalories/ kcals more accurately, as food is so energy rich that we simplified the equation) is really fascinating. We actually burn the food to measure it with a device called a bomb calorimeter. Let's say we wanted to measure the caloric content of a single almond. What a scientist would do is put the almond in a sealed container (the bomb) filled with flammable oxygen, and surround the bomb with five kilograms (11 pounds) of freezing temperature water. The bomb's fuse is then used to give the spark needed to ignite the oxygen, lighting the oxygen, and more importantly the almond, ablaze . Once the almond is reduced to charcoal, that means all the energy it held has been released as heat energy. The temperature of the water is measured. The caloric content is then measured by comparing the starting temperature and the final temperature of the water, and then multiply the difference by the amount of water that was heated up. In our almond example, let's say that the 5 kilograms of water went from 0 degrees Celsius to around 1.4 degrees. So 1.4 (the temperature difference) is multiplied by 5 (the mass of water in kg). This means that a single almond contains 7 calories." ], "score": [ 25, 9 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izdwhf
Our moon is only called moon while all the other ones have their own name. Why?
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6ic4kb", "g6ice17", "g6icq5k" ], "text": [ "Our moon does have a name. In English it’s called Luna and our sun is named Sol. But these names aren’t very common in English because well, it’s not like you’re talking about some other sun or moon, you can pretty easily understand the context of using “the moon” in a sentence.", "Our moon is actually called Luna, though most people don't use it in regular conversation. The closest thing to a common use is the term 'Lunar Eclipse' or similar. I believe the reason it is regularly nicknamed as just 'The Moon' is due to it being the only one visible with the naked eye, so it's almost always the one that you are referring to.", "By the time we knew there were other moons, we were too far into calling the moon, well moon, to change it. Though it -did- have other names that fell out of use over the centuries the ancient greeks called the moon Selene (as well as the Greek goddess of the moon) and we actually originally got the English word from a medieval old English word Mōna that shares origins with the Latin words metri, which means to measure, and mensis, which means month. So essentially, english being english its called the moon because its used to measure the months." ], "score": [ 9, 6, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
ize440
Why do we have to work out to gain muscles?
Why being ripped isn't just the "default" state of humans, like having two eyes?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6ie5rl" ], "text": [ "Our bodies don't like being huge by default. Being really large means you have to eat a lot more to maintain that size, and until relatively recently in human history, getting enough food to survive was difficult for the majority of the human race, let alone getting enough food to have MASSIVE GAINS. So our bodies only build excess muscle if forced to, if pushed into situations where the muscles are exercised to the point of exhaustion and then grow more muscle mass to try and keep up. The other part about being ripped is having a low body fat level, which makes the muscles more visible. Our bodies store fat to use in case of famines, and are really good at that, because we evolved to survive in situations where there isn't enough food to eat. So if there is a lot of extra food, we store it as fat. Which means that our bodies don't like being so lean that our muscles are visible and you can see the abs, they like storing extra food as fat in case of emergencies. Because our bodies are still in \"We are cavemen who might have to hunt a mammoth to survive the cruel harsh ice age winter\" mode, and haven't adapted to the fact that many of us can just go to a store and get way more food than we'll ever need. tl;dr - Our bodies are still in caveman mode, optimized for surviving famine, rather than being bodybuilders." ], "score": [ 11 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
ize7tj
How does Netflix's Night on Earth shoot in lowlight color, and why do some of the scenes seem so computer generated?
Are these just hyper-sensitive cameras, or is there a lot of post-processing. Also, why do some of the scenes (particularly first episode cheetahs) feature such fluid, unnatural motion?
Technology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6ieleo" ], "text": [ "I haven't seen the show but I looked it up because I'm somewhat of a video nerd and now I'm interested. Here's an article I found on it. They don't go into too much details about what cameras or lenses but it's pretty detailed. [ARS link]( URL_0 )" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/the-tools-and-tricks-of-capturing-wildlife-after-dark-for-night-on-earth/" ] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izenn4
How are photons massless?
If photons have no mass, how do they have energy and interact with objects that do have mass? I.e. sunlight and solar sails. Is it possible that photons do have mass, but just such a small amount that we don’t know how to detect it? Explain it like I’m five please.
Physics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6ihlon" ], "text": [ "Things don't need mass to interact with other things. I mean, magnetic fields have no mass, but they push and pull to their little hearts' content. As for light having 'small amounts of mass'... Any value bigger than zero (even 'smaller than we can detect'), when multiplied by infinity, is infinity. When applied to relativity, this means that *any amount of mass, no matter how small* cannot travel at the speed of light without infinite energy. Since light does not carry infinite energy, we can say that it hasn't got ~~infinite~~ any mass. It carries this energy in the form of momentum. The oft-forgotten second half to the famous equation E=mc^2 E^2 = m^2 c^4 + p^2 c^2 This is the energy of an object. Note the p^2 c^2 term. This means that, without any mass (m), a thing can still have energy (e) and momentum (m), allowing it to push on things and do work. edit: typo" ], "score": [ 11 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izeq2k
What happens when you declare bankruptcy
Economics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6ihk94", "g6ihrby" ], "text": [ "You basically say \"sorry guys, I can't pay my debt\". So someone will check all your finances and decide what you need for survival. Everything else will be given to your debtors. After that for a few years you're responsible for giving everything you earn above a survival treshold to your debtors and you can't take new loans. After that period you're declared free of debt. This differs from country to country though, so depending where you are the details can be different. The idea for this is to prevent people from ending in eternal debt slavery, and also to protect investors or loan givers from giving their money to someone who will never be able to repay it (without taking more loans somewhere else)", "There are a few slightly different forms of bankruptcy. But in general all your possesions except for a few essential things will be used to pay as much as possible from your outstanding debt and then the debt will be canceled. However for the next ten years you will have very restricted financial abilities. Basically you will have a hard time getting a loan, no credit cards and no payment plans. If you get into some wealth in that period it is also possible for the previous creditors to claim that you hid the money away and they might be able to take it away from you. There are a few types of debts that are except from bankruptcy. Student loans are expected to pay for education that gives you an advantage the rest of your life and are therefore can not be canceled in a bankruptcy. And if the court have ordered you to pay something then that too is except from bankruptcy." ], "score": [ 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izetxy
- How do we measure the height of waves?
After watching someone surf a 77ft wave, I wonder how do we measure them? How can we accurately measure the top?
Physics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6iilvv", "g6ikgou" ], "text": [ "Can't do it super accurately but that 77ft wave was measured from the video with some AI algorithms. It uses atleast the surfers height when doing the calculating since thats something you know for sure and can compare dimensions to the wave.", "You can use photographs for regular waves on a more or less consistent ocean. Same way spies use satellite photos. Take a picture at a time when there are shadows. Typically from a high place and angled. Take a picture of a known length stick stuck vertically in the ground and it's shadow at the same time of day. Use theory of Pythagoras to calculate the sun's angle from the refence stick. Then measure the length of the shadow on the image and you have the height." ], "score": [ 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izfag0
Temperature
Physics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6ikpct" ], "text": [ "No. Cold is the absence of heat energy, not the presence of cold energy. So, when they said \"absolute zero\", they meant \"absolutely no heat at all\". Heat, however, require the presence of their energy, so, there's no limit of how high it can go because you can just keep adding onto it. For metaphor, imagine laying on the ground, and flying in the sky." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izfcrh
Why is waking up with an alarm such an awful experience?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6il7fu" ], "text": [ "Basically when sleeping your body goes through a sleep cycle and only at one part of the cycle are you supposed to wake up, with an alarm it breaks into the sleep cycle at a random point and is unlikely to be at the right point. URL_0" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://youtu.be/ABKpJ8hQn8o" ] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izfzja
Why is it wrong to call someone 'black' or 'white' when it is perfectly fine to call someone 'tall' or 'short'(they're both physical attributes)?
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6ioayb", "g6iobek", "g6iqdoq" ], "text": [ "it's not wrong to recognize someone's race. People get uncomfortable when it's brought up when it doesn't need to be, because a lot of people bring up race to play into stereotypes", "It's not? If someone is black or white and you describe them as such, that's not an issue. If you bring it up for no reason it will be wierd though lol", "It's perfectly fine as a descriptor. It is a problem really only when you use it in a derogatory manner, like to perpetuate a stereotype. Or if you use it as a noun. The difference between calling someone \"a tall\", which reduces them down to this one particular attribute, versus calling them \"a tall person\", which is just describing them." ], "score": [ 21, 10, 7 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izfztr
The Placebo Effect
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6iu67u", "g6iukp7" ], "text": [ "You can break this down into two definitions. Placebo: This is anything which is made to appear to contain a useful medical substance or be a useful medical procedure, but is actually fake. As an example of a substance, it could be a pill which is made to look like a real anti-depressant medication when it really only contains sugar. As an example of a seemingly useful medical procedure, this can be something as extreme as \"fake surgery\", meaning surgery that appears real but isn't (this has been done before). Placebo Effect: This is when someone is given a placebo (e.g. fake surgery or fake medicine) but is made to believe it's the real thing. Despite being given a placebo, their condition either improves, or they experience side effects, or both. In the case where someone's condition improves or they completely recover, it means they did so with no actual medical treatment. They only \\*thought\\* they received real medical treatment.", "The placebo effect is an effect where if a human (sometimes an animal), believes that a certain effect will occur, then the effect is observed to have occurred, even if nothing capable of eliciting said effect has been administered. For example, if you were placed in a clinical trial that seeks to evaluate the analgesic (pain-relieving) properties of a new drug, you may be given a pill with no active ingredients, then subjected to a painful stimulus. Since you believe that you have taken a drug, you may display a reduced pain response as compared to someone who has not taken anything (placebo or the drug). This is useful as if the new drug is capable of eliciting an analgesic response greater than placebo, the manufacturer has succeeded in creating a functional drug that can now be marketed and sold. If you want to know the physiological basis behind the effect, there are various theories, but the exact mechanism is unknown. What makes it even more interesting is that this effect can produce physiological responses that are not traditionally thought to be controlled by the brain, such as [immunosuppression]( URL_0 )." ], "score": [ 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [ "https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1162023/" ] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izgaao
How do pharmaceutical companies name their new medicines? Is there any set methodology to it?
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6irajh" ], "text": [ "So there's quite a process involved here. So most medications start off as compounds. These are just molecules that scientists think might have some effect on the body, but more research is needed. These compounds need to be named. Apart from the obvious chemical name of the compound (like CO for carbon monoxide) there's a name that is made up of a brand label and then ten numbers, so a compound being researched by Pfizer could be named PF-83738403-01. Then in the next phase the drug gets it's generic name. This name must be approved by the WHO's INN programme and the USAN council. The name itself is made up of a prefix and a suffix. The suffix is based on the formula. So viagra, for example, is called sildenafil. The \"-afil\" explains the way it works, as it refers to the drug's function as a PDE 5 inhibitor. The prefix is a whole different story. The prefix is chosen to be pronounceable yet different from other drugs to prevent confusion. The names have to follow a set of rules in order to be approved: 1. The prefix must have two syllables. This helps create more variation. 2. The name must avoid certain letters. For drug names we use the Roman alphabet, but some countries that use the Roman alphabet don't use some letters (such as Y, H or W) these letters cannot be used. This ensures the drug is pronounceable for all countries. 3. It can't be considered marketing. The drug company cannot use the name of the company in the name of the drug, for obvious reasons. 4. It avoids medical terminology. Drugs can have uses that are only discovered later, so by not naming the disease or type of disease the drug is intended for, any later uses can be easily put into practice without confusion. So if you have a cancer drug that starts with onc-, and it later turns out to help with, say, diabetes, the name would become misleading for some. When the research team has a shortlist of around 6 names, it gets sent to the USAN council, which will either approve one or more of the names or decline. If the name gets approved then the name gets sent to the WHO's INN programme who will also either approve the name or not. If the name gets approved the name gets added to a INN (International nonproprietary Names) list at which point the public has 4 months to object to the name. If no problems arise the name is approved and the pharmaceutical company can start using the name." ], "score": [ 13 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izgdx8
Why is the transmission of certain diseases, such as the common cold, more prevalent during colder months of the year?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6iq696" ], "text": [ "During the colder months of the year a number of things happen that could contribute: 1. We stay indoors more, often closer together in spaces with bad ventilation, meaning diseases can spread easily. 2. Cold and dry air makes the immune system work less effectively. 3. Viruses and other pathogens travel better/live longer in colder air. 4. During the colder months (primarily in the northern hemisphere) we have Christmas and in many countries other festivities, which involve people coming together in groups indoors, which contributes to the spread of diseases." ], "score": [ 7 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izgpmd
Why are sprouted grains/pulses said to be more nutritious than their unsprouted counterparts?
At this point of time in seeds(ie during germination), no photosynthesis occurs which would result in production of extra nutrients. Seeds consume food stored in their cotyledons to grow in this stage. How then is it more nutritious?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6iuphu" ], "text": [ "You’re right in saying that all of the stuff in a seed is still there in a sprouted seed, and nothing new is added. Seeds are supposed to be hard to eat, otherwise humans and animals would eat them all, and then we wouldn’t be able to get more plants. However, when a seed sprouts, lots of changed occur in the building blocks that make up the seed, which let it to be able to grow. These changes also change what makes the seed hard to eat for our bellies. So in short, when the seed sprouts, all of the parts are still there, but they are re-arranged in a way that makes them easier to break down and be used by our bellies." ], "score": [ 9 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izgwy4
Flickering Stars
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6it414" ], "text": [ "You are viewing a distance object through a substantial amount of distorting atmosphere so it only needs a minor disruption of the tiny amount of light for it to flicker." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izgxe3
Why do we yawn?
Why do humans and animals yawn? What does it do for us, does it relieve some kind of pressure? Why is it associated with being tired? Thanks
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6it1t9", "g6j0vbq" ], "text": [ "There's no sure answer. Humans and animals have different reasons. But three suspected reasons in humans are: 1) To express fatigue, similar to how a smile shows comfort and happiness. 2) The yawn helps cool the brain thought different mechanisms. Your brain temp rises when you're exhausted or fatigued. 3) humans yawn when we have less oxygen in the blood and need more. So we take a large Deep breath. Although this one is currently finding data against it.", "Charles Darwin argued, in *The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals*, that if a behaviour was present in many cultures, then it must be inherited (wholly or partly). All traits which appear in a wide range of animals must have some function which is supported (or was supported) by natural selection. In most cases the function is obvious, but with yawning we do not know what that function is. Suggestions have been made, but they do not seem to account for its widespread occurrence in mammals, and possibly in other vertebrates. Yawning is commonly associated with tiredness, stress, overwork, lack of stimulation and boredom. In humans, yawning is often triggered by others yawning (e.g. seeing a person yawning, talking to someone on the phone who is yawning) and is a typical example of positive feedback. This \"infectious\" yawning has also been observed in chimpanzees and dogs. Cats both yawn and stretch, though not necessarily at the same time." ], "score": [ 20, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izh85o
the phrase "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6iurrn", "g6iusgv", "g6iuoay", "g6iu73g" ], "text": [ "The phrase is used to basically say that intentions don't matter - it's your actions and outcomes that count, not the reason you did them. Ie, if the road you took to the afterlife were constructed from what you did in life, a road constructed from good intentions but not good *actions* will lead you to hell.", "\"The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but the road to heaven is paved with good works.\" Sometimes good intentions weren't done well and the results become vain or even harmful; other times the deeds weren't carried out at all, having good intentions alone isn't enough. But most of the time you'd hear people claiming their good intentions when they tried to make an excuse for their mistakes. In this case the good intentions itself is abused, leading them further into the wrong way, hence the road to hell. So we can also say that the road to hell is paved with excuses.", "When you have \"good intentions\", it implies that your actions are less than perfect. For example, if you take $5 out of your cash drawer at work to donate to the Salvation Army. Your intent was good, but you still stole money. When you start doing bad things for good reasons, it becomes easier to do more bad things, until you no longer need the justification to do them. Going back to your cash drawer, if you got away with the $5 donation, you might next time take $5 for a cup of coffee for yourself. The phrase is a warning that just because you mean well when you commit sins and crimes, doesn't change the fact that you committed a sin or a crime.", "People may intend well when they start out on a project, but that doesn’t mean that things won’t go wrong along the way, even disastrously wrong." ], "score": [ 8, 4, 4, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izhl4a
What would happen if the earth didn't rotate or move around the sun and just stood still?
Physics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6ixfv6", "g6ixqm7", "g6iysxz" ], "text": [ "In the real world, if you could stop the Earth from orbiting the Sun, it would simply fall into the Sun. The Earth already *is* falling into the Sun, it's just that it's moving so fast that it falls \"around\" the Sun.", "If falling into the sun isn’t in the equation, and the earth stayed at the same distance away from the sun, I guess it would be like mercury, where the sunny side has extremely high temperatures, and the dark side has extremely cold temperatures.", "Assuming sun is still there, but earth didn't rotate and always had the same side exposed to the sun, this side would be very hot while the other side would freeze. Life would only be possible along the edges where the climate is somewhere in between those two extremes. The constant back and forth between day and night makes the temperature on the whole planet within a livable range." ], "score": [ 12, 5, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izhsuc
Why do we consider the western most region of Asia the “Middle East”
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6iyve2" ], "text": [ "It’s a quirk of English language and time. At first “the East” was called “the Orient” and was as far as the current “Middle East.” Then European explorers went further east than the Orient. That became “the Far East” and what was once “the East” or “the Orient” became “the Middle East” because it wasn’t as far east as you could go anymore. Same thing in the USA with the “Midwest.”" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izimf6
why does pens sometimes just explode when they are in a cup?
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6j4p2j", "g6j59ti" ], "text": [ "The what? I’ve never seen something like that happen, weird.", "I have 2 theories. 1 buy better pens cause cheap ones do tend to explode. And 2 it could be that you throw them in tip first without a cap/not clicked in and that, over time, damages the ballpoint until it starts to leak ink. Now that I think about it throwing them in with the cap on could still cause ink to come out the ballpoint. It’s a mechanical shock that might force a small amount of ink out of the tip. And ink spreads like crazy so it seems like it’s actively leaking." ], "score": [ 4, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
iziw4g
Why does applying pressure to a wound stop bleeding?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6j3s5j" ], "text": [ "You bleed out of the blood vessels that have been severed. By applying pressure on those, you reduce the flow of blood. If you ever watered plants with a garden hose; if you just turn on the water, it flows at a certain rate. If you apply enough pressure on the hose, by say putting a brick halfway between you and the source of water, the flow will eventually stop." ], "score": [ 5 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izj9yp
how do diffusers create mist without heating the water?
Jow do ultrasonic vibration evaporate without adding (noticeable) heat or lowering pressure? I will never forget the formula PV=nRT and don't quit understand how ultraaonic vibrations make this work!
Physics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6jaba1" ], "text": [ "I'm not sure how PV=nRT applies here as we don't have a compressible fluid. The key thing to realise is that mist is not made up of steam, but tiny buoyant liquid water droplets. The ultrasonic vibrations would serve to shake the water enough to form these tiny droplets." ], "score": [ 4 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izjgj1
How do they generate xrays?
Just had an X-ray done of my broken back and now I’m wondering how do they generate the xrays for the imaging?
Physics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6j7tsu" ], "text": [ "X-rays are generated by an x-ray vacuum tube, which generates and directs a beam of high enegy electrons to a plate of metal inside the generator, creating x-rays as the beam strikes it. The x-rays pass through you or get absorbed by your bones, tissues, and organs to varying degrees. A detector behind the body part being imaged captures the x-rays that made it through you and generates an image of the structures based on what x-rays made it through to the detector." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izjx28
why do we have to install a specific Android OS for a specific phone when we can install Windows or Linux on any machine(x86) and expect it to work without too much problems?
Like, If want to install a custom rom(LineageOS) for my Galaxy s9, I have to use a build specifically built for the s9. But when I go to install Windows10 or a Linux distro on my laptop, I can use one version of to install on any x86 machine. Why do we need to make specific versions of android operating systems per android phone?
Technology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6jcmg0", "g6jejp1", "g6kf7wg", "g6jhxw3", "g6kggxj" ], "text": [ "In comparison to phones, computers are very standardized in terms of their software architecture. Computers also enjoy an advantage in that an OS manufacturer (like Microsoft) can include a whole host of drivers to work with any combination of hardware, even if you don't use them all. Phones don't have that advantage. Consumers want their phones to be fast, lightweight, and streamlined- and the hardware on them is fixed. That means trimming all the excess fat off an OS so it fits exactly to a specific phone and its hardware, not to mention adding carrier-specific tweaks and features as selling points. The trade off is that by doing that you lose a lot of compatability as each manufacturer's flavor of Android ventures farther and farther from the original software. It's an interesting example of real world evolution. Phone software too far removed from the original OS isn't compatible with it, while animal species with common ancestors too far removed from each other can't interbreed.", "Windows comes preloaded with a lot of drivers to run the more common hardware configurations. If you have anything in your machine that isn't one of those standard configurations you need to install a specific driver to use it. A phone OS they don't want to add drivers for all the possible hardware into the installer for size reasons plus most people don't install custom oses onto their phones.", "Drivers. The short answer is that every phone has a specific set of hardware and peripherals - digitizer, modem, screen, audio, fingerprint reader, camera, storage, memory etc etc. These drivers need to be included, configured, optimized and tuned. The abstraction between the hardware and Android is a combination of a BSP (board support package) as well as vendor specific drivers. These are all tightly configured and highly optimized to work together so that you get a responsive experience on your handset. Additionally, some of these drivers may be proprietary and require some significant IP licensing fees (I'm looking at your Qualcomm!) Add all of this, and the fact that new flagships and models are being released yearly, and there is no time for the community to reverse and implement their own BSP / drivers for handsets.", "This is due to how ARM works. This is actually the core of why security and support cycles for Android phones are so crappy compared to x86 OSes like Windows and Linux. ARM CPUs are a lot simpler compared to x86 CPUs. This simplicity removes some of the layers between the hardware and software. What this means is that, for ARM OSes, the OS kernel has to be tailor made to work with the hardware in the phone (Specifically the drivers). The kernel of Android is different between different phones. This means that for a new version of Android, the CPU manufacturer (Most likely Qualcomm), Google, and the device manufacturer (Samsung for you) have to work together to update the Android kernel for the device. Note that custom ROMs still depend on these updates from Qualcomm/Google/Samsung in order to work. They all depend on the Android kernel that they create. This is why the custom ROMs are tied to a specific device. This also means that once Qualcomm/Google/Samsung drop support for the device, you will no longer receive Android version updates nor security patches for security issues related to the kernel. The ROM is only a skin on a proprietary Android kernel.", "Each part of any computer needs instructions on how an OS should interact with it. This requires code in the form of \"drivers\". Phones are small, expected to be fast, and consume very little battery power. Workstations are plugged into the wall, have lots of storage, and our expectations of performance varies, along with the variety of swappable parts. Thus, Linux and Windows are \"fatter\" to accommodate the variety of hardware, while phone operating systems are \"thinner\" and attuned to a subset of devices. While some Android support is dropped for older devices, it's not because the new version would no longer work, but because they no longer want to test and accommodate that older hardware with the latest version of the OS. There are some exceptions, but many of the device restrictions are voluntary...not because it can't be done. You'll see a lot of people \"porting\" different operating systems onto \"rooted\" devices...meaning they unlocked the device in such a way that it enables them to install a version of an OS that shouldn't be supported. Sometimes it works great. Other times, they have to obtain/write a particular driver to make the older hardware work." ], "score": [ 100, 21, 13, 7, 6 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izk988
why do people explain why the edited their post?
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6jckha", "g6jcl8l" ], "text": [ "Someone could be replying to your comment or post. But you realize you wanna change something. If you don’t express that you made an edit, their comment or response could not make sense.", "Basic internet etiquette. Many websites show that an edit was made, but not *what* the edit was. The edit might have been making a simple spelling correction, or it could have been completely changing the content of the post (which can completely change the context of any responses). Specifying what changes you made help clarifies the whole thing." ], "score": [ 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izkd4b
This is probably really simple but why is the metal on aerosol cans always so cold?
Chemistry
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6jdo1m" ], "text": [ "In the aerosol can is a product called a propellant. This is a liquid under a modest pressure but is a gas at standard atmospheric pressure. When you spray from the can, you are opening a small nozzle and then the liquid in the can evaporates into a gas and pushes the paint or whatever out the nozzle. Turning a liquid into a gas requires energy (gases have more baseline energy than liquids). Since the only source of energy is the air outside the can, the gas steals heat from the can and the air around it (and your hand). & #x200B; This concept is the basis of refrigeration and air conditioning. In fact, the \"propellant\" is the same type of fluid you would call a refrigerant." ], "score": [ 7 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izklpe
How do tax authorities find out if people reporting their business income less than the actually is?
Let's assume I only accept cash for my business. I got net profit of $3000 this month but I'll just report as $1000. No bank statements mean that no official proof that they can have. I can still manipulate my accounting book to match the tax report. How do they know that if I'm reporting less income?
Economics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6jfaqw" ], "text": [ "That is what the audit is for. The IRS has a good understanding of how the average business in any sector works, so they know what to look for to see if the numbers line up. If you under-declare your revenue by that much, they are going to look at your costs - supplies, wages, etc - and see if that matches. If you are paying people to do jobs that you don't have revenue for, or you used materials to make goods that you never sold and aren't in your warehouse then that is a major red flag." ], "score": [ 8 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izl7a5
How does Memtest survive RAM errors?
My computer has been crashing a lot, and I suspect hardware, so I'm running Memtest86+ right now to see if it's RAM. But since RAM is the swap space that a computer uses for running programs, where does Memtest 'live'? How does it test the memory when it has to use that same memory to store the test results? If there's an error with the memory module that causes a crash, why wouldn't Memtest crash?
Technology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6jj8i7", "g6jvapo", "g6k418g" ], "text": [ "Even when RAM is having issues, there are usually some good sectors that can be used to reliably run a program. The application itself is quite small, so you don't need a lot of good, useable space to run it. From there, it'll be able to test read/write capability of other sectors to determine if they are bad or not.", "Memtest *can* crash. Such a crash happening is implicitly to be considered a (suspected) major memory fault and the test re-ran. Consistently crashing memtest hints to some pretty catastrophic RAM instability.", "RAM issues are localized to certain addresses and physical cells, it generally doesn't impact the whole stick. If data is loaded into the good sectors then it will read/write correctly, and if its loaded into a bad sector you won't get the same value out that you put in originally. Memtest is pretty small so it will run mostly out of the CPU cache, but the small amount that is in RAM has pretty good odds of landing in a functional address. You're usually using memtest to check your RAM when a few kB of a 4 GB stick are giving garbage readings, if a few MB are mucked up then pretty much nothing will run. If such a high percentage of your RAM is mucked up that Memtest can't even run without crashing then that's a pretty definitive set of test results that'll get you a free RAM replacement from most manufacturers" ], "score": [ 6, 5, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }
[ "url" ]
[ "url" ]
izlw5z
What’s the science behind people’s “smells”?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6jyi1o" ], "text": [ "Like the good bacteria that live in your gut and help you break down food, everyone has a unique \"fingerprint\" of good bacteria species living on their skin. The types and amounts of these bacteria can change over time, but they are mostly determined by genetics (e.g. how your specific immune cells react to different bacteria), diet (i.e. which compounds the bacteria are exposed to from your food), and the people/places you spend time around (which all have their own bacteria that might rub off on you). Because genetics, diet, and social life have the strongest effect on this \"fingerprint,\" families or people who share living spaces tend to have more similar smells. This \"fingerprint\" of bacteria can eat pretty much any component of sweat, and when they do, all of the parts that aren't water or salt can be convert into \"smelly\" compounds. Thus, which \"smell\" compounds are produced depends on which types of bacteria are present on that person's skin. To go a bit past five, people have three main types of sweat glands: Eccrine glands produce mostly salty water to regulate temperature, they're always producing it at some level, and they do so all over the body but mostly on the hands, feet and head. Sebaceous glands produce mostly oil to lubricate the skin and hair (think the waxy substance associated with bad dandruff or acne), they're pretty much always active and don't change secretion rates much, and they are mostly found near hair follicles but occur everywhere except the palms and soles. Apocrine glands produce a mix of water, oils and a bunch of other stuff, they are most active when the person is stressed, and they are found mostly in places like skin folds that you probably associate with sweat smell (armpits, between the legs, etc.). The compounds produced by apocrine glands are the ones that have the strongest \"sweaty\" scent, which is why sweat smells are most associated with things like armpits and stress. But since the eccrine and sebaceous glands are more consistently active for most of the day, they have much larger contributions to what you would think of as a person's usual \"smell.\"" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
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izn0i9
whats the golden ratio?
Mathematics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6jtvoz", "g6jwqbs", "g6jufnv" ], "text": [ "The **Golden Ratio** is a number. This number is irrational, so it cannot be written out completely using decimal notation; that would require an infinite string of decimals, which is impossible. The number is usually written as \"**φ**\" or \"phi\" (pronounce \"fai\"). **φ** has a unique characteristic: **1/φ + 1 = φ**, or to put it another way **φ - 1 = φ^-1** **φ** can be defined through an infinite series: **1+1/(1+1/(1+1/(1+1/(1+... ∞ ... ))))** **φ** can approximated by taking the ratio of any arbitrarily large Fibonacci number and its immediate predecessor in the Fibonacci Sequence. (The Fibonacci Sequence is a series of numbers where each term in the sequence the sum of the preceding two terms , starting with 0 and 1: **0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 …** **φ** can also be approximated geometrically by taking any rectangle, and making a square adjacent to the rectangle's longer side to create a new rectangle. If this operation is repeated infinitely, the ratio of the short and long sides of each subsequent rectangle approaches **φ**, and a beautiful \"**[Golden Spiral]( URL_0 )**\" is created. **φ** is about equal to **1.61803398875...** **φ** is found in nature where an organism's or population's growth rate is dependent on the size of the organism or population itself, just as the growth of Fibonacci Sequence is based on the size of the preceding terms of the sequence.", "The number/ratio known as the \"Golden Ratio\" is basically a mathematical phenomenon. It's related to the Fibonacci sequence (You know the one, it goes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. Each number equal the sum of the two before it.) and it shows up randomly in nature, the stars, everywhere really. Objects with dimensions that match the Golden ratio are considered visually pleasing. You even find the same ratio in the measurements of a symmetrical human body. No one really knows why this set of numbers seem to randomly show up everywhere but they do. For example, the number of seeds in each row of seed in a sunflower will follow this sequence. The petals on a rose do, too. The diameter of each spiral of a sea shell follows the same pattern of numbers (or the ratio between each spiral's diameter and the next) We make index cards in 3 inch by 5 inch size because we find those dimensions pleasing. Note the three and five in the Fibonacci sequence I wrote above. The Ancient Greeks first noted this ratio showing up in the study of geometry. You can't make a five pointed star or a pentagram that doesn't utilize the Golden Ratio. It's even found when analysts study the stock market. It literally shows up everywhere and no one really knows why, though anyone will math skills (not me) can calculate it.", "The golden ratio is typically viewed as a ratio between the length and width of a rectangle. This ratio creates both an aesthetically pleasing shape (it looks good and is nice to look at) and a shape that can be cut into a square and another rectangle whose length and width have the same (golden) ratio. The ratio can be applied to more than just rectangles, but rectangles are quite easy to understand and visualize." ], "score": [ 5, 4, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://www.google.com/search?q=golden+spiral&rlz=1C1GCEU_jaUS820US820&sxsrf=ALeKk01sPXxFniC_d_TUFHMECwOc0e1Lkg:1601054617991&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjHuZWe6YTsAhVHkHIEHRugCPkQ_AUoAXoECBUQAw&biw=1517&bih=694" ], [], [] ] }
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izn6hx
How can people create their own burps without eating any food or drinking anything at all, just straight up build up a burp out of nowhere?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6juxuu", "g6jw00r", "g6jv3mf", "g6k4iql" ], "text": [ "It’s a hard thing to explain, but you essentially pull air down into your stomach to build pressure, then figure out how to release", "This is something I leaned to do in my teen years (25 years ago, but can still do today), basically it is a combination of controlling the swallow plus breath intake at the same time that allows a little air to get just past the wind pipe closure, and then a little push to burp. Do it wrong or too often and it is painful.", "Usually it's because they purposely swallow air, but sometimes it can be caused by bloating brought on by a GI condition.", "You can swallow air. Also, some people have some control over their epiglottis (Source: I have this ability). The epiglottis normally blocks the trachea (windpipe) when eating so we don't choke, and blocks the esophagus (food tube) when we are breathing. I can shift mine enough to open the route to my stomach enough that I can inhale air into my stomach. This ability isn't any more useful than /r/eyeshakers or /r/earrumblersassemble though" ], "score": [ 47, 13, 9, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }
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izn9xb
What’s the science behind feeling your 'heart drop’ or getting a sinking feeling?
What does the body go through?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6k31to" ], "text": [ "Typically, that sinking feeling is occurring in the digestive system. That sinking feeling usually occurs because of either something frightening or stressful occurred or you feel a sense of dread. This triggers your fight or flight response and your brain signals the endocrine system to release endorphins and adrenaline. Your muscles and body is now working on overdrive. The sinking feeling comes from your metabolism speeding up due to this release of chemicals. Food is now moving through your body faster then usual. What your feeling is your stomach being quick to hunger and rub together faster then normal and your intestines expanding and contracting faster then normal. This is the sinking feeling and in a way it’s aptly named since it’s caused by food sinking down through your digestive system faster then normal." ], "score": [ 10 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
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iznn1i
Is space an insulator against heat loss? Is this why the heat from the sun is able to reach the planets so far away from it?
Edit: Thank you for all the helpful answers.
Physics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6jy26h", "g6jy6ws" ], "text": [ "If by ‘space’, you mean a vacuum, then Yes, it insulates against convective heat loss, because there’s no fluid to transfer with. A vacuum does not reduce or insulate for radiative losses.", "Space acts as a very good insulator against conduction and convection, there is no material to conduct heat away or form convection currents. This is why we use vacuum flasks to store cold/hot liquid as it is very effective at preventing heat transfer. However it does nothing to stop radiative heat transfer which is why even the outer planets still receive quite a bit of energy from the sun." ], "score": [ 5, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
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izo9xv
how does the bikes not fall over during those high speed motorcycle races when they are going around corners,leaning on the side and almost touching the ground?
Physics
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6k27os", "g6k1z3q" ], "text": [ "Because their momentum is going against the turn. Like, you know how when you take a sharp turn in a car, you get pulled in the opposite direction? That's happening to them, too. So when they tilt really close to the ground, that same force keeps pulling them in the opposite direction and is what keeps them from falling.", "Its a balance between gravity and centrifugal force. The gravity pulls the bike down, but the bike is moving in an arc at high speed. This causes an outward force to act on the bike away from where it is turning. Since the bike has a center of mass higher than the tires the bike wants to tilt in that direction. By leaning into the turn the rider offsets that force and the bike is balanced." ], "score": [ 8, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
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izoatm
How are tiny-brained animals like crows so intelligent?
I read again and again about how brilliant birds are but cow brains are close to the size of human brains and "dumb as a cow" is an instantly understandable term. Is the cow brain just dominated by automated tasks that don't influence what we think of as intelligence? Are cows secretly much smarter than crows? Otherwise, why is the crow able to dedicate such a high percent of its brain energy to so-called "higher-thought" while the cow isn't?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6k4tjn", "g6k4fqa", "g6k1uq6", "g6k6eu5" ], "text": [ "Wrinkly brain means smart brain. Size doesn’t matter, wrinkles do. Increases surface area, increases connectivity between neurons, and so on.", "A huge portion of the brain is devoted to controlling and listening to all the parts of our body. Larger animals have many more nerves that need to be interpreted by the brain. Crows, ravens, parrots, and jays have a very large brain in relation to their body size, so more of that brain can be devoted to intelligent thought. Additionally, more brain activity requires more energy intake for already large animals. That being said, an elephant has a relatively low brain to body size ratio, but because it is so large, there is a bit of extra room for intelligent thought. Basically the brain size needs to correspond with the animal size, but extra brain size on top of that leads to higher intelligence.", "I’m not a genius but I think that brain function is about connections between neurons rather than size. We as humans are EXTREMELY smart, even an average human beats almost every animal(there are exceptions). So if humans are smarter than a 600 pound bear then crows can be decently smart right, again to reiterate smarts is based on neural connectivity among other factors but this is all I know. Hope it helped a tiny bit", "Different animals have different brain architectures and neuronal densities as a result of their evolutions, and size by itself is not such a good comparison tool across species to gauge intelligence. Since we sort of gauge higher intelligence according to general problem solving skills, it makes much more sense for animals like primates and birds who have to navigate complex territories, have social hierarchy, complex communication methods, etc to be equipped to handle different kinds of information and solve different kinds of problems in order to survive. Herbivorous prey animals like cows don’t need the ability to solve complicated problems, since their food is easy to find and sticking together in a herd is usually enough to survive predation. Why would a cow have to worry about figuring out how to open a man-made box to get food inside like a racoon or crow might, when all it needs to care about is finding a patch of green to eat?" ], "score": [ 8, 6, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }
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izoiyh
Where do queen bees come from? Does one of the current queen’s eggs have a new queen in it?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6k42gz", "g6klfnh", "g6krd58", "g6k40uf" ], "text": [ "Every egg can become a queen (in most bee species). When a hive needs a new queen, a larvae is selected (sometimes more than one and they'll slug it out later) and fed nothing but \"royal jelly.\" Royal jelly is made by workers (it's secreted by some gland on their heads), and while all larvae start on a diet of royal jelly, queens get nothing but that, while all other bees are fed \"bee bread\" after a few days of royal jelly (a mixture of nectar and pollen).", "They just pick any of the cells that has an egg in it and then proceed to feed it royal jelly instead of the food the drones and workers get. If they are re-queening the hive they will usually do this to several cells so that they have several queens growing at once. Then, the first queen to emerge goes around and kills the other potential queens to establish her as the heir to the throne. Quite interesting process actually.", "There are three kinds of bees in the hive.There is the Queen bee She is if course a female there is only one Queen in the hive her job is to lay eggs. She is the only female with developed ovaries. Queens are created by feeding the larva from a fertilized egg a diet of Royal Jelly. This will cause it's ovaries to develope. It will emerge as a fully developed queen bee. If the old queen is still healthy and virial she will leave the hive and a swarm of a significant % of the hives will leave with her to develope a new hive. The Virgin queen will depart the hive on her mating flight of which there maybe from 1 to 4 flights. If the old queen has used up all the sperm from her mating flight(s) 3 or 4 years previous she will be laying unfertilized eggs which will all be drones. The workers will raise a new quern when it hatches it will seek out the old queen (which will not swarm) . The new queen will kill the old queen. Then will proceed with her mating flight(s). Worker bees. This is the type of bee that makes up the main population. Worker bees are all females. However worker bees ovaries are not developed. They are fed a diet of Royal Jelly for the first 3 days after hatching from a fetilized egg and then the diet is switched to honey and pollen for the rest of its larval period. Drones. These are the male bees. There only purpose is to find a virgin queen to mate with They do not mate with a queen from thier own hive. Drones are incapable of stinging. They do not have a stinger. Drones do no work in the hive. They do not even have the ability to feed themselves. Drones are the result of an unfertilized egg. When the hive wants to swarm or if it needs a new queen it will feed a fertile egg a diet of Royal Jelly. Mating. Drones depart the hive daily at about noon. They just go out and fly about . When a virgin queen goes on a mating flight it also departs at about high noon. But when it does it flys away staying very close to the ground. This is to avoid mating with any drones (her brothers) from its own hive . When she has gone about a km or more from the hive she will fly up higher and higher. As she does any drone in the area will detect her smell (pheromone) and try to catch her. She will continue to fly higher and higher followed by a number of drones only the strongest will get to the queen and mate. When that occurs his genitailia will be ripped from his body with an audible pop. The queen will return to the hive while the drones gear continues to inseminate her. Workers will remove his kit and toss it away.", "Queen bees are just regular larvae but they are fed a special royal jelly that causes them to mature into queens." ], "score": [ 251, 41, 25, 14 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }
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izony0
If yogurt is made by using other yogurt then how was the first yogurt made?
Chemistry
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6k47xo", "g6knccy", "g6k9fi0" ], "text": [ "You don’t have to use yogurt to make other yogurt, you just need to capture lactobacilli from say surface of fruits, your hands etc. Then you keep cultivating it until all other bacteria die, and you have a starter culture.", "If you leave milk out it will turn to yoghurt from bacteria that inevitably gets into it. Without controlling what bacteria gets into the milk you could get excellent yoghurt or terrible yoghurt. Using yoghurt to make more yoghurt is an easy way to ensure that the bacteria that turns the milk into yoghurt makes good tasting yoghurt as opposed to gross yoghurt.", "Guy from Holland here. We actually make yogurt by adding bacteria to milk. I think that's your answer." ], "score": [ 8, 6, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }
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izqe6o
- why can certain animals (like octopuses) regrow limbs but humans cannot?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6kef64" ], "text": [ "Our limbs are way more complicated than an octopus tentacle. Much of the initial development of our limbs happens in the womb when the embryo and fetus are undergoing development. In the womb, your stem cells are specializing and creating all of the different tissues needed to make your organs. After you are born, your limbs are already intact for the most part. From there they grow. If you lose a limb, it doesn't regrow because the stem cells needed to grow the tissues don't reactivate. As a result, the wound just heals and forms scar tissue. Many believe that the complexity of the limb and the way the wound heals are factors in why the stem cells don't reactivate." ], "score": [ 12 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
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izqolp
What is ranked choice voting that they are using in the election in Maine?
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6kh5jr", "g6kgygd", "g6kkr0j", "g6kfr3y" ], "text": [ "In a contest of 3 or more candidates, you rank all candidates in order. Then we add up all the votes of each person’s first choice. If one candidate has over 50% , he or she just wins. If none of them do, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, but those votes don’t go away. We now give each of those votes to that voter’s second choice candidate, and tally again. If now any one candidate has over 50% they just win. And repeat if none are over 50%. The benefits are that spoiler candidates cannot split the vote with and that candidates will try harder not to offend voters of their opponents in hopes of scooping up second-choice votes. Elections are more fair, always give the win to a true majority holder, are more civil in tone, and encourage third party and independent candidates.", "Most elections in the US is \"first past the post\" where it is simply the candidate with the most votes that win the election. However this means that if you do not vote for the candidate that wins then your vote have been for nothing. You therefore get a system where nobody wants to vote for third party candidates because they want their votes to count and if they vote for the third party candidate their preferred main candidate might lose the election to this. But with a \"ranked choice\" whenever your top choice does not get enough votes to win then instead of just throwing away your ballot it will get counted as a vote for your next choice. This way you can vote for third party candidates and still have main party candidates ranked lower as a backup if none of the third party candidates wins.", "Instead of choosing just one candidate, the voters put their choices down in order. So for example, in a hypothetical election, Trump gets 40% of the votes, Clinton gets 35% of the votes, and Stein gets 25% of the votes. Trump wins, even though 60% of the voters wanted a liberal. With ranked choice voting, 40% put down their choices as e.g. Trump, Stein, Clinton, 35% put down Clinton, Stein, Trump, 25% put down Stein, Clinton Trump. Nobody has 50%, so Stein is eliminated. The voters who had her as their first choice now get their second choice, and now Clinton wins with 60%. Ranked choice voting prevents the \"spoiler effect\". If Jill Stein hadn't run in 2016, Clinton would be president now. Because of the spoiler effect, people who really want to vote 3rd party don't dare to do it for fear of this happening, so the 3rd parties get shafted. Ranked choice voting makes it safe to vote for 3rd parties. Google \"Politics in the Animal Kingdom\" by CGP Grey for a really excellent video on the subject. The first video in the series explains why our current system inevitably devolves into a 2-party system.", "You write in which rank your choices for president are. Its a way to weight each choice so you're not simply voting all-in for one of the two shitty options put forward by the two major parties." ], "score": [ 16, 8, 7, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }
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izqqjq
How much of our brain do we actually use?
Other
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6kfyke" ], "text": [ "We use all of it. That myth about only using 10% of the brain is bull crap. You may not use every part of your brain every second of every day, but all areas of your brain are extremely important and useful." ], "score": [ 10 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }
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izr047
How does our brain create the 'stopped clock' illusion
How does the brain remove the blurry transition and yet we still see during this period?
Biology
explainlikeimfive
{ "a_id": [ "g6ki06o", "g6kic7o" ], "text": [ "You don't actually see during this period, you just think you do because your brain back-fills your memory with whatever you see when you stop your eye movement. Your brain essentially tricks you into thinking that there was one seamless immediate transition from point-to-point, when there really wasn't. So, if you change your glance to look at the second hand on a clock you might feel like it hasn't moved in more than a second, which is impossible. But really your brain just altered your memory of how long you've been looking at it. Kind of creepy, but it stops you from getting disoriented during eye movements.", "The brain actually turns off part of its vision cortex so you actually turns blind as the eyes move. But it is not like the brain is not seeing anything like when you close your eyes, there is just missing information in the brain. So the brain fills the gap of information as best it can from what is available. And the first thing it see is the image of the clock so it must have been what it was seeing all the time. This is where you get the extra long second because the brain completely misses the fact that the second hand just moved and assumes that it have just been still all the time." ], "score": [ 20, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }
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