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lq908r
|
Why does it burn when dry skin finally gets moisturized?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
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"Moisturisers are mixtures, and any one of the ingredients could make your skin *tingle*... the question is why. I personally have eczema, so my skin cells are full of “holes” and not as structural as a normal person. So when I use moisturisers, rather than sitting on the top (stratum corneum) they enter deeper into my skin... but after moisturising for many days, it stops because I use a moisturiser with ingredients like ceramides to make my skin more even. Dry skin, is essentially the top gets dehydrated AND doesn’t fall off like it should - think a dead leaf that’s still on a branch. So when you moisturise, your under layers are exposed. Like a sore. And similar to my eczema, it hurts a little because it’s going deeper than it should. Cosmetics like moisturisers aren’t food grade necessarily, but this tingling is harmless if you’re using the moisturiser to make your skin better *over the long term*.",
"It could mean that your skin is so dry that it has micro-abrasions from it splitting (like chapped hands in the winter) and when it does get moisturized it can sting a little, which happened to me while I was taking Accutane. This happens when you start using moisturizers for the first time every day. Don't stop though, it should go away after a week or 2 of everyday moisturization, but if your skin remains red warm, and inflamed for a prolonged time after your moisturizer has dried or it breaks you out then I would switch products to something more gentle."
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21,
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lq9s5i
|
When we start reading a piece of text, how do our brains know to read it in such a way that accounts for both the upcoming punctuation and sentence structure that we haven't gotten to yet?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
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"The structure of our language syntax accounts for this, usually. There is also a lot of implications involved, sort of 'read between the lines' type stuff that's supposed to be inferred. Are you reading this with an upward inflection as to create the tone of a question? The first word of the sentence set it up to be a question. You know this inherently, but you probably can't site any specific rules off the top of your head for how or why this is.",
"We can't. Instead, we form sentences in a way that makes the structure clear. For example, is I said: The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families. You'd probably think the sentence doesn't make any sense, but if I said: The housing complex houses married and single soldiers and their families. It would not only easily make sense, but it would also clarify the structure of the previous sentence, causing it to now make sense. Sentences that are formed in a way where it's difficult to determine the structure as you hear or read it are called [garden-path sentences]( URL_0 ).",
"Your brain processes your peripheral vision even though you aren’t focused on it. Not a scientist.",
"This actually doesn’t happen for everyone. If we practice reading we get used to the pattern of the writing and sentence structure. Our brains are usually very good at picking up and repeating patterns. It doesn’t always work, even for people with a lot of practice, think about when you have been reading aloud and the last few words of a sentence are on a different page; I’ve had to reread those lines to fix my prosody. Edited punctuation.",
"Your brain looks ahead while your eyes stay on the word you are reading. If a class ever made you ever read aloud you may have noticed some kids occasionally finish the sentence at the edge of the page even though the sentence continues on the next line. Their brain told them it ends there so finish up. This is one reason why reading books is so important as a kid.",
"Your brain is constantly predicting, like Google search complete. Each new word you read narrows down where the sentence is going to go. Also, your eyes scan ahead a little. An analogy: reading is like getting out of bed and going to the washroom in the dark in your own home. You mostly know where and how the task will play out, but you could be tripped up when things are not where you expect. It might be helpful to compare it to another perspective. If you learn another language and you haven't yet developed the fluency to predict the sentence structure, reading moves a lot slower, even if you know all of the words. You're taking in each word as it comes and reading that sentence. To continue the previous analogy, it's like going to the washroom in the dark in someone's house you don't know at all. You go slowly and check constantly so you don't trip."
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lqapgr
|
When in free fall are you actually weightless or do you just FEEL weightless? Is it the same thing if weight is relative?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
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"'Weight' is the sensation of the ground *resisting* your free fall. When you feel weight, what you feel is the ground pushing up against your feet. Remove the ground, and you no longer have a weight. Objects in free fall are truly weightless. They are not *massless*, which still affects things like inertia, but 'feeling weightless' and 'being weightless' are the same thing because weight is something you can only *feel* to begin with."
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lqas25
|
How does unidirectional breathing in birds and reptiles work?
|
I've looked this up and all the sources I can find don't seem to actually explain the structural difference of unidirectional from bi-directional breathing. I can't wrap my head around it, even with diagrams.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
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"Basically it works like this. When a bird breathes in, it fills up its lungs, and also fills up two reserve balloons/sacs. Then, when the bird breathes out, the air that filled up the reserve sacs gets pushed through the lungs. Meaning the lungs are getting “fresh” air on both inhales and exhales."
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lqb198
|
When a person receives a limb donation, how do surgeons "wire up" the nerves so that the recipient can use the limb and feel sensation from it?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
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"Quick answer: Recipient's and new limb's nerve fibers are connected = > Recipient's nerve fibre grows along the new limb's nerve fibre and stimulate the surrounding muscles, making it functional (able to feel & move) = > it takes months until the recipient's nerve fibers have fully grown into the donated limb, making the whole new limb functional. Long answer: Limb transplant is a very complicated process and takes hours to finish the surgery. For a limb transplant to be able to regenerate function and sensation, the recipient must first have the nerves for the limb (literally), meaning the limb to be replaced was broken due to an accident or a disease. People who are born without that limb usually cannot perform this limb transplant, as they do not have the correct nerves. The transplant surgery consists of 3 steps: 1) Fixating bones 2) Reattaching arteries & veins 3) Repairing tendons and nerves. The third step is the answer to your question: The nerves of the new limb will be surgically connected to the body's nerve fiber. That's when nerve regeneration and the healing process begins. Healing process: After connecting the old and new nerve together, the recipient likely isn't able to move right away. The recipient's nerve fibre will take the new nerve as a template, the fibre grows outwards from their body into the donated limb. Until complete regeneration of nerve signals in the new limb, it can take months. That's also one of the reasons recipients have to go to therapy to practice care for their new limb. A bit off topic, but one of the most controversial body transplant-plan has been head transplant. But this is a whole new discussion. . Welcome back for updates on frequently asked questions . Edit: 1) How to surgically connect nerves? \"The surgical nerve repair will be done by stitches. A nerve, in simple terms, is composed of the axon/nerve fiber (which transports nerve signals) and the myelin sheath (which protects the axon). When reconnecting nerves it's only possible to stitch the sheaths together and not the nerve fibers itself. However, stitching the sheaths together creates a pathway for the new nerve bundle/fibers to grow along.\" Answer from u/surprisestupidity in the comments: \"Nerve bundles are composed of many neurons surrounded by myelin sheaths with various layers of connective tissue sheaths. Think of it like how a bundle of individual wires can be wrapped together to form a thick a thick cable. It is actually the connective tissue sheath(the wrapping) around a BUNCH of neurons that are stitched together. The individual neurons are still disconnected within the stitched sheath but ideally, over time, each recipient neuron connects with the ends of donor neurons in the transplanted limb.\" Answer from u/IceEngine21 in the comments: \"Plastic Surgeon here: You can also use nerve tubes when there is a small gap between two nerve ends, as a sort of bridge and guidewire.\" 2) How to stitch nerves together when they are so small? \"The process is called microsurgery. The art is mastered by few top surgeon experts in the world, through the use of microscopes and special techniques.\" 3) Why can't we regrow the spinal cord? \"There are 2 nervous systems: the CNS (central nervous system) and the PNS (peripheral nervous system). A damage to the CNS is irreversible in most cases due to various factors, whereas if to the PNS the regeneration rate is around 30%. A limb transplant affects the PNS, therefore nerves can regenerate. However, a spinal cord injury affects the CNS where nerve fibers almost definitely won't be able to regenerate. However, there have been many ground-breaking studies on this topic, making spinal cord injuries seem less impossible than before.\" 4) How well does the limb work? \"Whether or not the patient can regain complete control is complex. Assuming the new limb isn't rejected by immunity, the patient will need months to retrain their new limb. If the nerves regenerate successfully + adequate physical therapy, it's possible for the new limb to function very well though, complex movements such as tying shoelaces would be possible too!\" 5) How come the body doesn't reject the new limb? \"1. Find a compatible donor: matching blood type, limb size, medical conditions. 2. Immunosuppressants after the transplant.\" 6) Is it possible to regrow the optic nerve? \"The eye's optic nerve is much much more complicated than other limbs' nerves. For once, they are tiny and packed tightly together, each photoreceptors (rods and cones) have their own nerves to detect colours and brightness. And when there are millions of nerve fibers in a few mm space, that can get quite difficult, not to mention the optic nerve is more complex than just a bunch of nerve fibers:)\" 7) How does nerve regeneration feel? \"A good explanation is: When you have been sitting on your leg for a long time and stand up, your leg feels numb, unpleasant, tingling. This is how neuron regeneration can feel like around the time. The tingling feeling in one area means new nerve endings are formed there. Pain would be a sign of irritation.\" 8) Have head/body transplant ever been done? \"Head transplant have been done on cadavers and some animals successfully, even though they had to die shortly after that new transplant due to ethical issues. It's never been done on live human, but the Italian Dr. Canavero has worked on this goal for a very long time. A head transplant directed by him almost happened last year, but the patient decided to not commit to the transplant anymore\"",
"This is from URL_0 Surgical nerve repair involves exploration of the injured nerve and removal of injured tissue or scar from the nerve endings. After that, a nerve can be directly reconnected if there is enough length on the ends to allow for a good quality repair without tension. Another website says after healing begins the nerves regrow and “reach out” to stimulate the surrounding tissue allowing for reattached limbs to work.",
"They don't. Not directly. The correct nerve end on the recipient's remaining limb is attached directly to the nerve fibres of the donor limb, but this doesn't 'rewire' the nerve. Instead, the recipient's nerves then use the donor nerve as a kind of scaffold, and will grow down the same path over many months, gradually connecting with muscles and skin as they go. This is an extension of what nerves do all the time. For example, when you exercise and your muscles get stronger, one of the ways they do this is by increasing how strongly a muscle receives a signal from a nerve. This isn't about sending a stronger signal - its the same signal, but our nerves grow in response to being used, and create more nerve endings, meaning the signal is repeated multiple times along the same muscle fibre. Nerves and muscles will shrink by default, but will grow if the brain keeps asking them to do things. In the case of a severed limb, the brain is still asking for information on that area but not getting it, and it's still trying to send movement signals to that area, so the nerves will still try and grow. In the case of our fully developed nerves, for example the nerves on your hand right now, the brain is getting all the information it asks for, so there's a balance between the brain saying 'stretch out and tell me stuff' and the nerves saying 'relax and stretch less, so we use fewer resources'. The challenge is that it takes time for nerves to regrow. They grow at a rate of around 2mm a day. For a hand transplant, this means it takes roughly 2 years for the nerves to reach all the different muscles and skin surfaces. In a larger transplant, it takes even longer. However, when muscles aren't used, our body breaks them down and absorbs them - this is called atrophy. In the case of a full arm transplant, the muscles would fully atrophy long before the nerves reached them. This is the same issue with spinal cord injuries. The nerves can and do regrow naturally, but so slowly that muscle atrophy outpaces them.",
"It slightly depends on the level (I.e. wrist/forearm etc). Recently I reattached an amputated arm at mid-humerus level (about halfway through where the bicep is). At this level there are a few named nerves that everyone has. The main three are the median, ulnar and radial nerves. So we find these and stitch them together using a microphone to try and line them up as well as we can. Then, as others have said, we hope the nerves grow down the sutured nerves. If we’re lucky enough the nerves will grow across the join and down into the hand to give sensation and motor function",
"A subject I have personal experience with! I broke my humerus playing roller derby a few years back and the fracture severed my radial nerve, meaning I lost the ability to lift my wrist and extend my fingers. As other posters have noted your nerves are protected by a myelin sheath, which is basically a tube around the actual nerve. If you think about your cell phone charging cable the nerve is like the metal wire inside that carries the electrical current and the myelin sheath is like the materials covering and insulating it. When a nerve is damaged the entire portion of the nerve from the point of damage to the termination (or “end”) dies as well. As long as the myelin sheath remains intact or heals properly the nerve will begin to regrow from the point of damage to the termination point. So when performing a transplant or reconstructive surgery all the surgeons can do is connect these tubes and wait for the nerve to regenerate within. Nerves grow very slowly, about 1 inch per month. The radial nerve which I severed in my accident invenerates the hand muscles at the top of your forearm. There was approximately six inches between this point and the damage site so it took about six months to fully regain control of my hand functions. As far as I know this only applies to nerves branching off the spinal column. The spinal nerve itself will not regenerate or heal itself in most circumstances, which is why spinal injuries usually result in permanent disabilities. But long story short, we can’t directly correct the nervous system through surgery or other intervention, we can only manipulate the tubes in which the nerves reside and wait for the nerves to repair themselves.",
"I cut my left thumb nearly clean off, and had it reattached by a plastic surgeon. Took two surgeries. They hook the nerves together with sutures. They are expected to regenerate sensitivity at a rate of 1 mm per month. With my thumb, there are still numb areas 43 years after the operation. It doesn't always work 100% evidently.",
"I've known about this since a young age. My dad when he was 16 worked in a factory. It had a shop saw that would automatically come down and make 3 cuts. One unfortunate day the chop saw caught his shirt and sliced his arm in 3 right at the elbow. The saving grace was that it went right at the elbow and couldn't slice through the elbow as easily as the rest of his arm. He basically had to constrict it and call 911 himself as several of his coworkers fainted when they saw what happened, and that his arm was literally hanging by skin. When this happened to him it was early 70s in Toronto 1972/1973. They had very very very very limited experience with this procedure(he was one of the first 3-5 people they had done it on, but never for pretty much an entire arm) and for the first year of his recovery they honestly didn't know if they had connected all the nerves and tendons back properly and if it was \"wired\" correctly. He was very fortunate and they did manage to do that so he infact got full use and mobility of his arm back after about 2 full years of recovery(it took 1 year for the tendons and everything to heal properly before he could fully start rehab). He has 3 insanely gnarly scars in succession on his arm. One right above his elbow one directly on it and one directly below it. one of the nerves is so exposed on the back of his elbow that if he would normally hit his funny bone as one does it literally buckles him over in pain. (There were a couple times as a young child(4-6) where I thought it was funny and would go for that nerve when we were play wrestling, I would hit that nerve and feel like the David defeating Goliath, but when I was 6 and did it I saw how much pain I caused my dad while he was just trying to have fun and play wrestle and never intentionally did it again). Considering how insanely vulnerable that nerve is I'm both surprised and impressed with how few times I've seen him tap it. But I guess it's like Achilles protecting his week spot, he knows it'll take him down so he's extra cogniscent of it.",
"Here is a short youtube video about a hand transplant procedure [YT-Hand Transplant]( URL_0 ) From what i know after removing dead tissues and recconecting everything people start to feel and sometimes even move the new limb.",
"I didn’t lose a limb but came very close to it. I ripped a slightly larger than an adult male’s fist, sized hole out of my forearm, exposing the bone and severing nerves and tendons to some of my fingers and my hand. From what my dad told me, the surgeons cut my arm open wider and using microsurgery, stitched the nerves and tendons back together and I got a skin graft over the gaping hole in my arm, from my thigh. The hardest part was lots of physio later, but they were so amazing and I was playing guitar and piano a little after a year. All the while realising how easily that it could have been my head (accident was on a mountain bike and impacting a Roughcast wall)",
"I had a sheet of glass fall on me at work last year, they wouldn't intubate me for the repair surgery fearing they would need the machines for covid patients. spent about 3 hrs watching two \"micro plastic surgeons\" (I think that was their titles) they literally cut my wound wider and used a metal clamp to hold the it open. then used a combination of methods to stitch and glue my nerves an tendons back together.... the craziest event out of it all was feeling my nerves \"recalibrating\". I spent an entire night in bed unable to sleep, it felt like my hand was possessed an moving around wildly, yet I was watching it sit there perfectly still, wrapped tight in a fiberglass splint. the sensations came and went for about a week and now about a year later I would say I'm pretty much recovered other then some numb spots on my palm."
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lqbtb3
|
The Xbox Series X has its CPU and GPU on a single chip, but the CPU runs at 3.8 GHz and the GPU runs at only 1.8 GHz. Why can't the GPU run at 3.8 GHz too?
|
This also applies to the PS5, why can't the GPU run as fast as the CPU?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
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"I don't know if you are in the US but in high school in the US we have a thing called the PACER test for physical education. You have to run a small distance to get to a \"check point\" in under a few seconds, and you have to keep running back and forth between two checkpoints for faster and faster times until you just fail and can't run in time for the checkpoint. This is kind of how cycle times work in computer chips. The limiting factor in CPU clock speeds is whether the electricity can make it to the \"checkpoint\" in time. So clock speed is related to cycle time, 3.8 billion cycles per second also means that each cycle takes about 0.2 nanoseconds. Within these 0.2 nanoseconds, everything in the CPU has to \"settle.\" Chips contain devices known as transistors, electricity flows through them to do computations. Chips are designed to do a small amount of computation every cycle they run by the transistors choosing how electricity flows through the CPU. Within these 0.2 nanoseconds, electricity has to travel through a bunch of transistors and make it to a \"checkpoint\" which saves what it just computed. If there are too many transistors, 0.2 nanoseconds isn't enough, and the computation isn't done in time before the next computation step starts and things just go bad from here. So our goal with clock speed is to reduce the cycle time enough such that we can get it as small as possible but that all circuits on the CPU running at this clock can make it in time for their \"checkpoint.\" There are a few conclusions from this. 1. Faster clock speed doesn't necessarily mean faster compute speed when comparing different chips. One chip might have a slower clock speed but does more in a single cycle. For the same chip though, if you can increase the clock speed without bad effects, it will increase performance. 2. You want all of your circuits in your chip to take about the \"same amount of time\" to hit the checkpoint. If one circuit takes too long to checkpoint, it will be dragging down the speed of all the others because this circuit becomes the limiting factor as to how fast you can cycle. This is what CPU engineers painstakingly optimize. The big problem though is that for different inputs into each circuit, it takes different amounts of time, to get things to work properly we have to checkpoint the slowest time. 1 is the bigger reason for why the xbox's graphics chip can run slower, it just does more in one cycle. You can design a faster clocking GPU by decreasing the amount done in one cycle, but graphics tasks don't benefit as much from it so why bother.",
"A GPU runs very specific tasks, and those tasks are \"harder\" than the more \"general\" tasks a CPU performs. Because the GPU runs \"harder\" tasks, it takes longer to complete them, and the GPU has to put more effort in. This in turn results in more heat being generated (modern GPU's run significantly hotter than CPU's)",
"The CPU is like a fast sports car. If you're trying to get a vial of anti-venom from the lab to the hospital as quickly as possible, you want the car to be able to go as quickly as possible. The GPU is like a big truck. If you're trying to get a huge shipment of anti-venom from LA to NY, a truck is going to be far more practical. It has much more cargo space and it can go many more hours without needing a refill, even though it doesn't travel as fast. The CPU and GPU are good for different things. They work together. The CPU needs to be as fast as possible. The GPU needs to have high throughput, not raw speed."
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lqcbei
|
How does ‘phantom pain’ work? Is it due to your nerves or something in your brain? Why/how do amputees still feel the limb after it is gone?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
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"Phantom limb: the neural pathways are still in the brain and spinal column and fire sometimes, causing it to feel like the limb is still there. Phantom pain: when the brain and spinal column are confused about why the limb isn't there anymore, the easiest way for them to cope with it is to trigger the pain response because it's the easiest sensation to make. Here ya go: URL_0",
"Your brain still registers your limb nerves as being as long as your limb, so it has trouble gauging the new distance of your nerves.",
"If we fully understood what was going on then we might be able to prevent it from happening but alas we have very little understanding of the details of our brain. We do know that part of the brain is used for \"sensing\" where all the limbs are at all times. This is why you are able to move your hands very precisely without looking at them. And it kind of looks like this part of your brain does not change when you lose a limb. As for pain the brain have to interpret a lot of thing as pain which is not directly triggering the pain receptables. It is not that uncommon for damage to cut the neurons which sends the pain signal to the brain and the brain will therefore be unable to feel any pain directly. So the brain will make its own pain signals when it realizes. And this might be the case with long time amputations as well as the brain looks as if it is unable to turn off this feature for the missing limb or at least that it will randomly turn itself on at regular intervals."
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5,
3,
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[
"url"
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[
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|
lqceto
|
How does my tablet and phone know to not detect a pen and only skin?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"The most common thing today is a capacitive touch screen. It detects things based on its dielectric capacitance, essentially things that conduct electricity. Your finger does therefore trigger the touch screen, so too will a drop of water. However plastic will generally not trigger the touch screen. So a plastic tipped pen is not able to write on a touch screen. However a more fancier metal pen might be picked up by the touch screen although it is possible for the software to see the difference between a metal pen and a finger. Note however that some plastic pens have a shiny paint on them to look like metal even if it is not. And that a metal pen can easily scratch the screen."
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3
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lqcplo
|
Are blank rounds harmless? What do they do?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"They are not harmless. They still create pressure in the chamber to simulate a live round. But because they create pressure, any debris in the barrel of the gun will be blown out at high velocity. People have died from being shot by guns not properly cleaned and using blanks. But they are mainly for training purposes or movies.",
"They're pretty much just the powder charge, so there's no actual projectile being fired. They're not entirely harmless, though. The gun will still discharge a jet of fire and burning powder at very close range.",
"Generally speaking (because there are so many different kinds of ammunition), a blank cartridge is identical to a cartridge intended for live fire, with one **crucial** difference- live cartridges have a bullet affixed to the front or cap of the case, which- when acted upon by the ignited propellant in the case, will be pushed through and out the firearm barrel towards the target. Since blank cartridges have no such bullet, there is no projectile with which you could endanger a target at ordinary firearm engagement distances. For this purpose (and at these ranges), blanks can be practically considered harmless. However, when firing a blank, you still create a controlled explosion in the gun that must be capable of creating the impact to cycle the cartridge (ejecting the spent cartridge and loading the next one), producing heat, rapidly expanding gas, blisteringly loud noise, and other such theatrical elements leaned on in military exercises. You'll note that any of these things are dangerous if you get too close; I still have a bit of tinnitus from my service days. The *real* danger of a blank, though, is that since there is no bullet pushed through the barrel to remove the primer and propellant left from the firing of a previous blank, the inner barrel gets obscenely dirty over the course of a blank-fire exercise, necessitating hours of rifle disassembly and cleaning between training operations. Boo. Source: trained and instructed as an ammunition specialist in the Armed Forces for several years."
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|
lqcrul
|
Why does cold feel wet?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gofu64e"
],
"text": [
"What cold and wet have in common is that they both usually absorb your body heat energy in normal temperature through conduction, therefore making you feel colder in that area. When you touch metal and water they both absorb your heat for example, and your body might confuse those two similar experiences."
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lqcvsg
|
Why does a bullet instantly kill someone when through the brain? Why isn’t only part of their functioning impaired?
|
I know there are plenty of cases in which someone has survived a shot through the brain, or in which only part of their functioning is impaired, but for the most part, why does a bullet randomly aimed at someone’s head kill them nearly instantaneously? Rather than just losing eyesight or the ability to move an arm or leg. Thanks!
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
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"It depends on what parts of the brain are damaged. Many parts result in death, some slow and others fast. But there have been cases of someone being shot in the head and it only affecting specific functions, and a few cases of them being shot in a manner that results in little to no impairment.",
"Most bullets don't make a perfect bullet size hole through the body, they shatter and along with bone they cause large portions of damage, if the inner part of your brain is damaged its near immediate death, the further the damage is from the main center the higher your chances of survival, but the brain has so many blood vessels even if you survive the initial wound you'd bleed out quickly. Gunshot wounds are still one of the worst wounds you can get and death rates for gunshot wounds to the head are at 90%.",
"Temporary cavitation, you mught survive with effects like you described from a fairly low power round but anything from a rifle or decent pistol calibre will essentially cause a pressure wake as it travels through turning everything in the surrounding area into mush, not just what's in the path of the bullet. Think of the wake left beind by a boat as it goes through water except the boat is travelling at several hundred miles an hour and the water is your brain matter.",
"Because you are mostly incompressible liquid the bullet creates a shock wave that damages tissues well beyond the actual impacted areas.",
"Bullet often splits into fragments + the fragments of skull. They damage multiple parts of the brain. Yes there have been cases when people have survived headshots but those are very rare and lucky ones in which there were little to no fragments and the bullet/fragments miss the blood vessels of the brain and only damage non critical areas. Tv and movies always show an instant death but in reality there's body twitching, similar to beheadings. Your spinal cord can directly control motor functions. Respiration will continue if there is no damage to the part controlling it, the person will eventually die from blood loss and the respiratory center being compromised by the blood loss. The heart keeps beating, as long as there's enough oxygen and blood, it keeps beating, the heart has a system of nerves independent of the brain."
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lqdkw8
|
what colioris force is
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"Think about a ballerina or an ice-skater spinning with her arms stretched out. Her whole body makes a complete turn all at once, but her outstretched arms have a bigger circle to travel in the same amount of time, so they're moving faster. When she pulls her arms in, they don't have as far to go, but they still have the energy (inertia) from when they were stretched out, so her whole body spins faster than before. Now, imagine for a moment that you're at the center of a spinning space station shaped like a wheel with spokes. [Like this one]( URL_0 ). The rim is a bigger circle than the center, but it has to all spin at once, so the rim will be moving faster. If you climbed a ladder in one of the \"spokes\" connecting the hub to the rim, you'll feel a slight pull to the left or right depending on which way the wheel was spinning. Since you're coming from the center, you're not moving as fast as the area \"above\" you, so that's why you feel like you're being \"pulled\" a bit sideways. The station itself is pulling you to bring you up to speed as you climb. And it's the same way on a sphere. The Earth spins all at once, so if you draw an imaginary line through the center of the Earth (its axis), the equator is moving the fastest, since it's furthest from the center of rotation, like the rim of the disc, or the ballerina's outstretched arms. So if you take a cloud at the equator, and shove it North, it has more inertia than its surroundings, so it will tend to drift a bit to the left (or west). Take another cloud that's North of the equator and shove it south, and it will tend to drift a bit to the right/east. If you get enough energy into a storm system that it keeps pushing clouds north and south, it'll tend to spin counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere, and clockwise in the southern hemisphere."
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lqe136
|
How does a digital camera turn light from a lens into a series of 0s and 1s?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
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"The sensor in a camera is made up of millions of tiny capacitors that can hold an electrical charge. Light from the lens is turned into a charge in the capacitor, with more charge building up the more intense the light is. Circuitry in the camera then is responsible for shifting that charge off of the array, where it converts into a voltage. Those voltages are then sampled and stored as a sequence of 0s and 1s for later display.",
"Essentially, using some variant of the [photoelectric effect]( URL_0 ). The incoming light hits specially designed materials, essentially 'knocking' electrons out of the atoms and causing them to be able to move freely. Because of the way the circuit is designed, those freed electrons prefer moving in one direction rather than another, so the light hitting the sensors directly translates to a difference in charge between one end of the sensor and the other. This difference in charge can be detected and amplified into a voltage, which can then be chopped up into a series of fixed levels by comparing it against reference voltages. Those fixed levels can then be expressed mathematically as a series of 1s and 0s and saved/transmitted digitally.",
"Imagine a grid of squares, if light falls on one you colour it black “1”, if no light falls on it you colour it white “0”. If you have a large number of small squares in a grid and zoom out, you’d have a black and white image. If you want more distinction than black or white, you could have a scale from eg 1 to 8 for no light to lots of light, and you’d represent each number in binary (ie 1s and 0s) on the grid. For more detail you could increase the size of the scale from 1 to 8 to 1 to 16, or make the squares smaller so you could fit more in. Colour would work the same expect you’d essentially have three grids, one for each colour.",
"There's a pretty good diagram and explanation here. Basically you put red, green, and blue color filters in front of photosensitive material (the sort of elements that allow electricity to flow when light shines on them, like in a nightlight) and when they're arranged in a grid pattern you can start to assemble a 2D image from them. Fun fact you can also do this with a single photodiode by scanning left, right, up and down. Fax machines and scanning electron microscopes essentially work like this, and old CRT TVs work in oppositely (a single electron beam that scans left to right, row by row, not to sense light but to project it onto a phosphorescent screen.) It just takes more time so if you can pack a bunch of photosensors into a tiny grid it's better. Even still, a grid of digital sensors usually gets turned into a single steam of data, row by row, for simplicity and cost savings. URL_0"
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[
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[
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|
lqebr8
|
why do we feel sleepy, especially after eating, while traveling?
|
e.g. why do we feel sleepy on our way back home in the car after dinner at grandma's?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"Few reasons. First, when you eat, blood in your body focuses near your digestive system, and those organs are currently working digesting the food you just ate. Due to the lack of blood flow to other parts of your body, you get that fatigued feeling. This feeling is accelerated by the fact that us sitting also screws with our blood flow, making us feel more tired. This is also why a lot of students fall asleep during the class after lunch."
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6
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[
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lqedgi
|
How exactly do control rods in a nuclear reactor capture neutrons and slow down the fission occurring?
|
A nuclear reactor is essentially just a metal barrel with a bunch of neutrons whizzing about and causing some metal to fission and release even more neutrons, right? So how does the addition of a non-metal such as boron or a metal like cadmium into steel prevent the atoms within the control rods from destabilized as well? Is it something to do with the molecular structures of the resulting alloys?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"It doesn't really have much to do with Boron or cadmium being non-metal, they work to slow the reaction because they are good neutron absorbers. They happen to be isotopes that will readily grab a free neutron into their nucleus without much complaint. The amount of neutrons you have flying around is directly related to the reaction rate, so absorbing more of them is a good way to slow things down.",
"The reactive materials are in thin rods, so a lot of the neutrons leave one rod and enter the next one. The control rods sit in between them. So control rods can’t do anything about the neutrons inside the solid rods of fuel, but they’re kept below critical mass on purpose. (Smaller than critical). So the rods control how much reactivity you allow to travel in between the solid rods. The maths and the how is a bit complex, but the mechanism is simple in theory. Simple answer really, the maths is hard but the"
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lqf0cz
|
how does the laser thermometer measure how hot/cold something is, by just shining on it with a few rays of laserlight?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"It has nothing to do with the laser, that is just an indicator to see where it is pointed. Instead the temperature is measured by gauging the frequency of infrared light the object emits, as that directly relates to the temperature of the object. If it gets hot enough the frequency actually raises into the visible spectrum which is why very hot things will start to glow."
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11
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[
"url"
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[
"url"
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|
lqf9wx
|
what is the difference between 499 people giving money to one guy who’ll invest it in stocks and 500 people agreeing to buy/sell stocks in a coordinated manner?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"In the first case, it requires that one person (typically) to have a contract with the other 499 that entails them having a fiduciary duty to the others. This is a legal duty to act in the best interest of the people who invested their funds. In order to do so, that one person has to be licensed to do this (ie not anyone can simply become a broker - similar to how not everyone is allowed to practice medicine) 500 people coordinating their investment activities is not illegal on its face. However, intent matters. If that coordination is with the intent to manipulate stock prices (pump and dump for example), then it IS illegal. How does one tell the difference between \"manipulation\" and \"taking advantage of better information\"? Not easy."
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[
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[
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|
lqfrxu
|
What’s the difference between analog and digital?
|
I’m pretty sure that that analog signals is just a continuous stream of input versus digital which provides signals at discrete time steps. Why have we shifted from analog to digital for so many things? Wouldn’t a steady stream of information be of better use?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"Really, the answer is 'computers'. Digital processing of information is much, much, much easier to do in a consistent, reliable, reproducible, controlled, fault-tolerant, noise-resistant manner. If we could build analog computers as good as digital computers, you may have a point.",
"For an ELI5, analog is like writing an essay, digital is like multiple choice. Essays can give a much richer and deeper exploration into a single subject. But it is hard to switch context or explore multiple subjects in one essay. Multiple choice is easy to context switch and is easier to mark. So with multiple short questions, one can switch subjects or areas within a subject easily. Same with electronics - analog has to be fine tuned to that application. It can be done but once tuned, it isn't very flexible. Analog systems are hard to build if they have to accept a wide variety of signals. Digital is usually based on binary logic. Logic is easily chained, \"stacked\" or layered. So very complex structures and functionality can be built that can deal with many sources of input and be fairly easily upgraded and changed.",
"Your summary understanding is pretty good. The big fundamental reason behind the shift is noise/error. If you have an analog signal, and it gets distorted with noise, you don't know what it was beforehand, the noise is carried all the way to the end. If each step, each wire, each filter introduces a tiny bit of error, you are both limited in the number of steps before noise overwhelms the signal, and need perfect, great quality components to process it with as little noise introduced as possible. If you have a digital signal, where 0 is 0 volt, and 1 is +5 volt, if you get 1.1v of noise on the line, you still know upon arrival which one was 0, and which one meant 1, run that through a buffer / schmitt trigger (a special circuit that takes such \"dirty\" digital input, say, +0.8v and +4.4v, and scrubs it, producing clean 0v or +5v on output). This way your only point where you lose quality is when you convert from analog to digital, once - afterwards your data remains unchanged and undamaged, no matter how many processing steps it undergoes, because every time it has a chance to go a little \"dirty\" it can be cleaned up. And if given step risks introducing noise so bad the data can't be \"cleaned\", you just send more data, so that whatever was lost can be reconstructed from redundant extras. That means cheap, tiny components, because you don't care about a bit of noise. That means arbitrary media, because in analog converting between electric current, light intensity, magnetic field, magnetization of recording tape and so on was always tricky, as they never converted completely 1:1. What your tape recorder got through the microphone and wrote to tape was never identical to what it read and replayed; similar, yes, but if silence was still silence and max volume was still max volume, the bass was a little more warbling, the really quiet parts were completely gone, and so on. With digital, a \"1\" is always a \"1\" and \"0\" is always a \"0\"; in particular \"0.98\" is still a \"1\" and \"0.2\" is still a \"0\", you know the inaccuracies are an error, and you can reconstruct the original just as it was digitized, simply by discarding the error."
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lqfu0c
|
Why does a phone's volume need to be increased to ear-hurting levels for a person to be able to hear a podcast over washing dishes when hearing another person speak live over the same sound is fine?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goh0iaq"
],
"text": [
"Sound is a signal via the movement of air. Look at the amount of air that the speaker in you phone can move as opposed to the amount of air a human's lungs would move to the same sound. The larger amount of air would help override the noise from the washing."
],
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3
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[
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[
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|
lqgnks
|
Why do steaks and cuts of meat not have blood inside them?
|
I cooked a chicken breast and while i cut it in half, i noticed that no blood came out of it. Since it is a muscle shouldn't there be blood inside, no matter how clean the outside it?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"A normal practice when slaughtering animals is to drain all their blood from the body while it is still hot. So most of the blood which would have been in the blood vessels in the muscle would have drained out at the slaughter house. Any remaining dropps of blood would become thicker as the meat cooled down from body temperature and therefore does not flow as well. And over time it would coagulate as well which makes it solid. This means that when you cut open a piece of meat there will not be much blood in it at all and the little blood there is will be a solid and not flow out all over the place.",
"Packaged meat is washed and drained of blood before it is packaged. Muscles are not sealed systems. All the parts of your body that require blood are threaded with tiny blood vessels that help carry it there. A standard part of butchering any animal is hanging the animal up to let all of the blood drain. If you were to kill a chicken and extract the chicken breast yourself, it would be plenty bloody.",
"Its all drained and washed beforehand. Fun Fact: the red you see in the bottom of the package of a piece of red meat isn't residual blood. Its myoglobin (oxygen holding protein) released from the muscle on the cut surfaces due to it being damaged by the knife/blade."
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lqhgl8
|
How do fax machines work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
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"gogiveu"
],
"text": [
"Imagine taking a black and white picture. Divide the paper up in to lots of small squares. Then, through the image line by line and write down a 1 if a square is mostly black or a 0 if it is mostly white. Now you have a long list of 1s and 0s. Now you call up your friend. He has a sheet of paper with a similar grid on it. You go through the list of 1s and 0s, and he colours in a square if you say 1 or leaves it blank if you say 0. At the end, he has a picture similar to yours. This is basically what fax machines do. One machine scans a piece of paper, works out where the light and dark bits are, phones up another machine, and that one prints out a copy of the image.",
"It's like an all-in-one scanner-email-printer machine. On the sender side, it scans a piece of paper, then sends the data (as if you send it by email). On the receiver side, it receives the data (like an email), and prints it."
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3
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[
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[
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|
lqi38y
|
How does the concept of a wet nurse work? If continuously given a newborn while nursing a 2YO, does she continue to produce milk until there isn’t another baby?
|
I also know that a nursing woman’s body can adapt the milk to provide for what the baby needs, but how does that work when the newborn needs a ton of stuff and the 2 year old needs something specific? (I’ve been reading a lot of historical fiction lately)
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goggcgt",
"goggwr4"
],
"text": [
"The medical knowledge of 200+ years ago didn’t know that newborns and 2 year olds had specific different nutritional needs beyond the understanding that a newborn could only drink milk and a 2 year old is old enough to eat solid food and be weaned. Milk was milk. And nutritional science is mostly a 20th century science.",
"In general mammals do produce milk as long as it is being used. In fact a pregnancy is not technically needed to start milk production but will make it much easier. This is how you hear of people being a wet nurse even after menopause and even some men being able to nurse babies. The nutrition in the milk will change over time but this is not so significant as to provide with any big issues. But it is usually a good idea to let the baby feed of their mother after birth, especially the first feeding but also for a few days after that as well."
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5
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[
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lqipmu
|
How do astronomers know that the universe is expanding?
|
I understand how they can tell how big a planet is or how hot a star is. The thing I don’t understand is how do they know the universe is expanding? We cant see the edge of the universe also things are moving away and towards us. So how do they know its expanding? Also, what is it expanding to? For example, at the edge of the universe, is there a wall or is there complete nothingness? Like what is it expanding towards? Edit: hopefully I used the right flair. I wanted to use “Astronomy” but there isn’t a flair for that
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"gogkhmf"
],
"text": [
"A guy called Edwin Hubble noticed that the further away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away from us. That means that on average everything we see is moving away from everything else. It follows that everything must have been closer together in the past. As far as we know there is no edge to the universe, the stars and galaxies just keep going forever. There is no edge so the universe isn't expanding into anything, it is just expanding."
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7
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[
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[
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lqj7i3
|
Why do governments care so much about reducing public debt if they are the sovereign issuer of their currency?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"I’m not an economist but basically it has to do with supply and demand. These two factors are always more or less balanced. If you pump currency into the market it’s value will drop. Think of it this way. You have a basket of apples that you want to trade. Each apple is worth one orange. All of the sudden the farm next door starts supplying more apples then they used to. They’re willing to trade two apples for one orange. You used to be able to get an orange for each apple but now, because there’s more supply, you can only get half as many because people can just go trade next door decreasing the demand. Now imagine that the apples are currency (the oranges can still be oranges). This is called inflation. It’s the increase of prices and fall of purchasing power. If the government decided to print money to pay off their debts they would flood the market with currency and crash its value. Different governments have different regulatory bodies monitoring their currency and trying to manage debt, inflation, and purchasing power but it’s not an exact science so everyone is basically just doing the best they can. TLDR: All in all it’s a very complicated system but the short answer is: the more money you print the less it’s worth.",
"It’s about confidence in the system. Too much debt signals a weak economy which can result in a country’s credit rating to drop. This will potentially cause creditors to start calling in debts. Printing excessive money causes inflation and will destroy an economy. Imagine a loaf of bread costing a millions dollars.",
"It costs money to service public debt (pay the interest). The government could print more money to pay off its debt, but this increases the total amount of money in the economy and so leads to inflation. This is called devaluing the currency and is a valid fiscal policy carried out historically in many countries. The problem is that next time you come to borrow money potential lenders will be cautious. They don't want to be paid back in money that has just been devalued because by definition that money is worth less. So lenders will want more interest, making the new debt more expensive for the government. I hope that makes sense."
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|
lqjmn6
|
When you buy a bag of chips or whatever it will stay fresh for a long time but once you open the bag it will only last for a few days. How is this possible?
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gogog8q",
"gogohwj",
"gogopxa"
],
"text": [
"The air in the sealed bag is nitrogen, which makes up some 78% or so of the outside air. When the bag is opened, the chips are exposed to oxygen, which starts the decaying process.",
"Humidity in the sealed bag is very specific and limited to the captured volume of air. This means the chips don’t absorb moisture from the surrounding air and go stale. Once you’ve opened the bag, there’s significantly more moisture available for the chips to absorb (from the whole air supply around them in the house, even if you roll the bag tightly.",
"*\"...there is air in the bag...\"* Your premise is wrong. There's no \"air\" ^oxygen in the bag until you open it. Bags are factory purged/filled with Nitrogen specifically to keep the contents from oxidizing in transit & storage. They're also filled out fully to protect the contents from damage in shipping. Once you open it you've now exposed the contents to both oxygen and moisture, both of which have a negative effect on the freshness of the chips inside."
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4
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lqkayn
|
How is salt a solid state and water freezes at 0 °C but when you put salt on roads at -10 it stays in liquid state?
|
So it’s -10 °C where I am today and there are loads of puddles on the pavements and roads because they have been salted (I’m aware that the ground temperature might be higher than -10). But I can’t wrap my mind around the fact that above 0 °C salt can be solid but when it’s diluted into water it lowers the freezing temperature. But to what temperature? Is there a point where salt is no longer effective on roads and pavements? Does it depend on the amount of salt mixed with water? When the sea freezes is it only the H2O that solidifies? What about the salt? Please, this has kept me up at night!
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
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],
"text": [
"Simple put, the sodium ( Na)-and chloride (Cl) diffuse through the water and prevent the water molecules to organize close together to make ice. It works up until -9 to -15 depending on what type of salt you use... sodium, magnesium ect.",
"Salt is sodium chloride, NaCl. When it hits water, those molecules split in half into Na+ and Cl- ions that float around in the water. When you try to then freeze the water, something interesting happens. The water molecules want to form up into an orderly hexagonal crystal and make a solid, but there’s a problem: wayward chlorine and sodium ions are haphazardly stuck in the middle and don’t want to leave. To force them out, you have to suck even more energy out of the system and cool the water further. The more salt you have, the harder it is to freeze the water. The road salt eventually stops working when you get too cold, even absolute brine water will freeze in intensely cold conditions. And yes, when sea ice forms most of the salt is expelled."
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[
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[
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lql6d8
|
Why do people with amputations experience phantom sensations in their amputated limb?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gogxwcd"
],
"text": [
"For your entire life from birth until whatever accident cost you your limb, your brain was building up and monitoring nerve connections with that limb. There’s tissue in the brain specifically dedicated to interpreting signals from that limb and sending commands to it. It’s ready for pain signals, pressure signals, temperature signals, motion, position, acceleration... But it’s not ready for *no* signal. The brain hardware doesn’t turn off just because you lost the signal, it just sits there like an old TV playing static. This tissue will be repurposed over time, but while that’s happening you’ll occasionally pick up false signals in that static that feel like something is still there."
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[
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[
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|
lqn0vh
|
Are mental illnesses terminal?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goh8vo3",
"goh9dmr"
],
"text": [
"A terminal illness means \"untreatable and expected to kill the patient\". Since the things you listed are 1) treatable, and 2) not inherently fatal, then no, they wouldn't be considered \"terminal\".",
"The term \"terminal\" has a rather precise medical meaning, in that narrow sense the answer is No. In general, people don't die of mental illness as often as they die with mental illness. If you're bipolar and your shoot yourself in the head, you die of a gunshot wound with a mental illness. That said, the statistics for suicide point out that mental illness is a serious contributing factor. If you smoke cigarettes and also die of lung cancer, you don't die of smoking cigarettes - you die of lung failure caused by cancer."
],
"score": [
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lqn44n
|
why if you search up the word schoolgirl it comes up with stuff like ‘sexy schoolgirl’ costume etc but if you search schoolboy it comes up with normal schoolboys?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goh9hcv",
"goh9jhl",
"gohftjr"
],
"text": [
"In women, youth (as long as post-puberty) is strongly correlated with being a preferable sexual partner. Plus there are fetishes related to perceived innocence and to being an authority figure a woman looks up to. In men, youth and innocence aren't nearly as strongly considered positives, compared to strength, confidence, status, etc.; which are things schoolboys tend to lack.",
"Because in many cultures, women are inherently sexualized but men are not. The scary side-effect of that is that female children are sexualized as well, which is...uh...yeah. It's similar to how the idea of a man being topless is treated as \"normal\" while a woman being topless is treated as \"sexual\", for absolutely no rational reason.",
"I've never heard of a schoolboy fetish, although I'm positive it exists. A schoolboy's outfit is essentially a man's golfer's outfit with a vest/jacket. A schoolgirl's outfit on a grown woman can be sexualized because of the skirt I suppose. Grown women don't dress like schoolgirls. Grown men dress like schoolboys their whole lives."
],
"score": [
10,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lqo2s2
|
why is it that we make devices that heat something from fridge temp to scalding hot in 3 minutes but we don't have devices that can rapidly return scalding hot items to fridge temp?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gohfmrb",
"gohg2uf",
"gohm2wu"
],
"text": [
"We do. It's called a blast chiller and they're fuckin' large and fuckin' expensive so reserved pretty much only for commercial kitchens.",
"It’s because of the second law of thermodynamics. Simply put its easier to heat something up (make electrons move faster) than it is to slow those same electrons down. Electrons have a natural proclivity to want to speed up but it requires even more energy to slow them down",
"Let's say you want to turn ice into hot water. You put it in a pot and apply direct heat, that is conductive heat. Conductive heat is very efficient at warming things up quickly. Let's say you want to turn hot water into ice. You put it in a freezer. It has to cool down via convection, which means the surrounding air takes out the heat, which takes a lot longer since air holds very little heat compared to the solid mass of your pot. It's the reverse of boiling water by putting it in the oven, not something people do because it's slow. It's actually worse, because temperature changes faster with a bigger difference. Your freezer may be at zero degrees, about 200 colder than boiling water, but your oven will be at 500, almost 500 degrees hotter than ice. You could pour the water on a cold plate, which is a thick slab that's refrigerated to well below freezing temperatures. The water would quickly freeze due to conduction."
],
"score": [
11,
8,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lqoyu6
|
If you were in a survival situation and were forced to eat another person in order to live, would you be put in prison for it?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gohl3fv",
"gohltv6",
"gohlkpy",
"gohlw11"
],
"text": [
"A dead person? Probably not. A live person? Probably yes.",
"No, there are a few cases of this happening in history. Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 is one example where they had too eat others to survive, very interesting story. In the end I believe the pope had pardoned them even",
"Presuming they were dead and you weren’t the one to kill them, likely not. Depends on how stringent and specific the laws regarding mistreatment of human remains are in the local jurisdiction I’d imagine. But shy of actual murder, probably no court would want to touch that.",
"If they were already dead when you ate them you wouldn't be charged but you'd have a psychological evaluation and probably be required to see a therapist for a while to make sure you're ok. If you killed the person then ate them you'd go to prison for murder and cannibalism"
],
"score": [
12,
8,
6,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lqpbfl
|
We say things like “lizard brain” to describe crocodiles and other dangerous reptiles. As in they can’t be trained or don’t have feelings. Is this actually the case? What about lizard brain in the context of turtles & tortoises?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gohpj2x",
"gohqsqr"
],
"text": [
"\"Lizard brain\" is a term that dates back to phrenology, which was a pseudoscience movement that thought you could determine intelligence and personality by measuring people's heads. It doesn't have any real meaning, at least not in being able to differentiate between lizard brains and mammal brains. If you just search on youtube you'll find plenty of videos from people who have trained pet reptiles. This includes alligators and crocodiles, which make surprisingly good pets if you can afford to properly care for them. Alligators in particular have roughly the same cognitive ability as a cat and behave very similarly to them when raised in captivity. In terms of reptiles having feelings - reptiles typically don't display emotional behaviors that people find familiar. IE, a dog will actively seek out humans to cuddle with them. Since humans also exhibit this behavior we associate dogs as having a humanlike emotional attachment to people. Reptiles will cuddle, but don't usually seek it out. Reptiles do form very close attachments to their owner, but the emotional behaviors they exhibit are sufficiently different from human emotional behavior that its hard to quantify whether they have the same emotional view of their owner as something like a dog would. They might, but that's a matter of internal perception and while their external behaviors show clear signs of attachment they are fairly different from those of a human or dog. But if your question is specifically about turtles - turtles are kind of their own thing. Turtles are *extremely* dumb, their intelligence is more comparable to insects in that they just kind of move towards food and eat it.",
"Only ever heard \"lizard brain\" in the context of humans tbh. However, the question you're asking here can still be answered. Firstly, \"feelings\" are irrelevant. It's impossible to do objective study on animal emotions, so we can only look at their physical sensations, instincts, learning ability and responses. We don't know that much about reptile intelligence, because historically studies on it have usually put them through trials designed for mammals. Reptiles respond to stimuli differently to mammals (for example, they tend to freeze up in response to bad things, instead of running away), so tests designed for mammals don't do a very good job of measuring the abilities of a reptile. It's kind of like measuring a fish's speed by putting it on a dog running track. Recent studies have indicated that reptiles are a lot smarter than we originally gave them credit for. Reptiles can be trained to do tasks they think are in their own interests, like navigating a maze efficiently for the sake of finding a warm environment, but since they've evolved to really care a lot about conserving energy (since they lack internal heating) you can't usually train them to do the silly tricks that you often see dogs trained to do. Reptiles can often seem even lazier than cats, but that's just because they experience life much slower."
],
"score": [
10,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lqpmhl
|
How do car insurance claims work when you're one of the many claimants in the middle of a hundred car pileup?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gohphwx",
"goi0ixi"
],
"text": [
"If there is a known party to blame for the whole incident then the claim can be made against that party but in blameless claims, you will have to claim your damage on your own insurance",
"I've handled claims with 25-27 cars in a pileup on an icy interstate- for the most part, people just use their own coverage- someone without collision coverage did try to claim our insured struck them, but they had no real proof and picture showed the vehicles several feet apart. One thing to consider, once an accident happens, and the vehicles are stopped, it becomes an ACDA issue, i.e. they are not liable for the cars behind them crashing into them even if they \"started the whole thing\"."
],
"score": [
6,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lqpxmk
|
Can farts spread disease like other body aerosols?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goiil2a",
"gohu8j1"
],
"text": [
"Yes and no. Microbes tend to spread based on where they \"live\" in the body. Most respiratory illnesses multiply and divide in the respiratory system, so they cause damage there and spread from there (coughing, sneezing). Other illnesses like cholera tend to live in the intestines, so they spread from there (fecal matter). So it would be very unlikely for a rhinovirus to make its way from your nose through your digestive tract and into your gut to be ejected by your flatulence and spread that way. Likewise, it would be very unlikely for cholera hanging out in your GI tract to make its way up to your nose and be sneezed out to infect someone else.",
"Theoretically, but clothing usually filters anything out and people don’t tend to have their faces in a location that would cause it to commonly be an issue"
],
"score": [
9,
7
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lqquys
|
Why are the top wall street institutions allowed to collude against the public to enrich themselves without going to prison?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gohwi2g"
],
"text": [
"The penalties for most financial crimes are fines. People with lots of money lobbied politicians for the laws to be written that way. Any crime which is punishable by a fine is, effectively, legal if you're rich enough."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lqsjq0
|
For those of us who have "innie" belly-buttons, what is keeping our belly-buttons "pulled in" that causes them to stay indented on our stomachs without eventually flattening out?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goiayj2",
"goj2trk"
],
"text": [
"The umbilical cord extends through the skin, and shrivels up on the inside because it is no longer needed after you are born. This puts a little tension on the button, “pulling” it in. As your belly grows the shriveled part does not grow too, which increases the tension. Often pregnant people do get flat belly buttons when the skin is stretched.",
"As you might know the belly button is what is left of the main blood vessels (and other important tubes) that connected a baby to the placenta of the mother. As that tube stops being useful it basically shrivels and turns into a tendon. This tendon connects the outer skin layer to the inner layer of the abdominal cavity. That is what is \"pulling\" the innie belly button down. I can also try explaining why outies happen (spoiler alert umbilical hernias) but i am trying to keep this as eli5 as possible. Let me know if you have any other questions. Also fun fact. Belly buttons can fail to close and leave a tube connecting the bladder to the belly button and pee comes out (patent urachus)."
],
"score": [
7,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lqsvv8
|
The difference between independent variables vs dependent variables?
|
i'm trying to write a lab report and idk how to figure out which is which in the experiment
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goi9evm",
"goibyle"
],
"text": [
"Independent is the variable or thing you change or swap in an experiment Dependent variable is what is *affected* by the independent variable and subject to changes. Example: Which Hot Wheel car will roll down my slope the fastest? IV: Hot Wheel cars DV: Time they finished",
"The independent variable in a science experiment is the one the scientist changes. The dependent variable is the one the scientist wants to measure. Let's say you were growing potted vegetable plants --- cucumbers, let's say --- and you wanted to know how much water they needed to grow best. You knew how much sun they needed, how often to water, all that, but not how *much* water to give the plant each time you watered. So you get a single package of seeds from the store, split it between three pots, and put them somewhere in your house where they get the sunlight they need. You know the watering schedule too. You want to see the effects of water amounts A, B, and C. To get your answer, you might use a marker to write on the pots how many milliliters of water to give each plant at a time. Then, each time you water your plants, you carefully measure out the three amounts of water you determined earlier. You do this for some set amount of time, say two months¹, and then you observe the growth. Assuming you controlled for as much as you possibly could, the only thing *you* changed was the amount of water you gave each plant. Nature did the rest, and that will have shown as differing growth. Independent variable (you changed): water amount. Dependent variable (changed **depending** on what you did): differing plant growth. Does that make sense? ¹ I have no idea how long cucumbers really need. Just pretend I do"
],
"score": [
12,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lqtb3k
|
What actually happens at a truck weigh station
|
I’ve never understood what the point of a weigh station. Sometimes tucks don’t stop at them and I’m confused?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goid627",
"goj8amo",
"gojdlgk",
"goj4uvt"
],
"text": [
"The weigh station is a place for the DMV and the police to perform routine control of vehicles. Their names comes from the big scales that are required to make sure big trucks are not carrying too much cargo and might be a hazard to drive. But there are usually many different types of vehicle inspections that could be done at the site. Before the weigh station there is usually a sign or a light instructing that might instruct the trucks to report for inspection. But if there are no inspections currently taking place then these signs will instruct them to just pass the weigh station. There are different laws regarding what trucks have to report for inspection and under what conditions in the different states. But a lot of times trucks that does not carry any cargo will be allowed to pass and if the weigh station is full they will also be allowed to pass. Sometimes there is someone controlling a light and will pick out only certain trucks for inspection and let the others pass. In addition to the lights and the signs the weigh station might also be in touch with the truckers using CB radio so the truckers might have been given other instructions then the sign say.",
"They actually do weigh trucks when they are open. For two reasons. 1) Is the truck overweight for the roads they are traveling. 2) Is the truck itself rated for the weight it is carrying. To the casual observer a big truck is a big truck but in reality they are widely different in the weight they are designed to carry. A house moving truck and trailer is really large but has light duty axels, wheels and brakes. It could be easily overloaded if someone uses it to move some heavy product. They also inspect truck driver logs, brakes, frames whatever they really feel like.",
"Trucks that are carrying too much weight are a safety concern. They stop slower, are more prone to breaking down, and are an indication that other safety rules may be getting violated. They also cause excessive wear on roads. But is expensive to check every truck that passes every weigh station. In MA there is ONE team responsible for enforcing it in the entire state. They move from station to station for random checks. Here is an article with some details. URL_0 > Fitzgerald’s unit is 29 strong, and they’re out weighing trucks five days a week. So why is it that weigh stations never seem to be open? > For starters, there’s a dozen of them in the state. On any given day, chances are the team’s not working one near you. Plus, they avoid opening the stations when most of us are actually on the roads. > \"One of the issues with the weigh station is the volume of traffic,\" Fitzgerald explained. \"So right now, they’re almost backed out onto the highway. We can’t have an accident, so now we have to pull everything through. This is why we’re not out during rush hour.\" Jr",
"I've heard they're also to help prevent smuggling of anything by making sure the truck doesn't gain or lose a significant amount of weight during it's journey. But I can't actually remember the last time I saw a weigh station in-use"
],
"score": [
41,
15,
9,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[
"https://www.wgbh.org/news/2017/03/09/local-news/inside-one-highway-systems-great-mysteries-weigh-stations"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lqtdtf
|
Raffle ticket odds, does buying say 10 out of 28,000, give you 1/2800 chance on every ticket or 1/28000?
|
Mathematics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goicntc",
"goid1e6"
],
"text": [
"Each ticket has a 1 in 28000 chance but you as a person have 1 in 2800 chance because you have 10 in 28000. I hope that makes sense.",
"Each ticket will have a 1/28000 chance of winning, but overall you have a 1/2800 chance of winning. You can think about it like this: for each individual ticket, the number of ways that ticket can win is obviously 1 (if that ticket is drawn), and the number of total outcomes is 28000 (there are 28000 tickets, any one of which could be drawn). Probability is really just (number of ways the desired outcome could happen)/(number of total outcomes). The reason you have an overall chance of winning that's 1/2800 is because the (number of ways the desired outcome could happen) is now 10. The desired outcome is winning, and the number of ways you win is if any one of your 10 tickets is drawn."
],
"score": [
18,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lquadx
|
Why babies cry so loud, as the noise can potentially attract predators in the wild?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goihu3y",
"goii8a9",
"goik1bp",
"goiiykv",
"goikla9",
"goinev4",
"goivg0z",
"gokaj68"
],
"text": [
"It can also attract help from a parent if they need food or something. The pros outweigh the cons. Hopefully the parent can protect the baby from predators.",
"It's to alert the caregivers of the baby. When a mother gives birth she is naturally compelled to protect the baby through *any* means possible. This means, although it may alert predators in the wild, the mother will usually arrive first. Furthermore, humans are pack animals by nature, so when I say \"mother\" I likely mean the whole tribe. And trust me, a tribe of humans is a real force to be reckoned with.",
"It worked out to our evolutionary advantage. If more babies died from predators from crying, then that strategy wouldn't have succeeded, but it did succeed over the quiet babies, so the payoff was more beneficial than the risks that were assumed.",
"Plenty of baby animals instinctually stay silent and hidden when they're away from their mothers, like deer. Human babies, evidently, have different priorities. I'd imagine that deer normally forage away from each other and, well, stand/walk on their own, so it's pretty normal for a baby to be temporarily separated. Human babies, though, are utterly helpless alone, and ideally never, ever leave their mothers' sight. For a human baby, if they're alone, the top priority is getting back into mother's arms ASAP.",
"We're pack animals. The pure numbers of individuals in the the pack/herd/tribe would act as a deterrent for predators. A mother with a young and vulnerable baby would rarely leave the group, and a screaming baby would also never be accidentally \"forgotten\" and left behind.",
"A crying baby attracts the most ruthless and effective predator the world has ever seen, to defend it. Adult humans have been known to hunt animals to extinction purely due to a perceived threat to their children.",
"Aside from other things mentioned here, babies actively being held to their mother tend to cry quite a bit less, and just for practical reasons if nothing else hunter gatherers tend to keep their babies bundled onto their body pretty much constantly in some sort of clothing or wrap, with access to nurse whenever they wanted. In a lot of species, mothers normally have to leave their baby to go forage or something like that. A deer has to leave a faun, for example. So the baby is adapted to stay quiet when alone. But humans basically never had to leave their babies so humans don't have that adaptation. As with pretty much everything in child-rearing, your mileage may vary, but we kept our baby on us most of the time and she didn't cry a whole lot and certainly not if she could nurse.",
"From an evolutionary perspective, a baby that doesn't cry at all is unlikely to get fed as frequently as one that cries whenever it's hungry. So the crying baby will grow up stronger and more able to pass on its genes. The other half of your premise doesn't really make much difference. Before the advent of civilisation, humans didn't really rely on being hidden from predators in order to survive. Just like if you look at antelopes, or zebras, or chimpanzees today: their predators know exactly where they are, they have other tactics to avoid being eaten. Most predators rely on smell to locate their prey and then on sight to hone in on a specific individual when hunting; hearing is a very secondary sense for them. So a crying baby \"giving away the location\" of a group of humans wouldn't really put them at significantly more risk. Whatever techniques they used to avoid being eaten (living in caves, starting fires, shouting and waving pointy sticks) those would need to be done anyway. The only real danger to human beings that we can avoid by hiding and being silent is a group of other humans."
],
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56,
40,
14,
8,
6,
5,
4,
3
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lquk9h
|
Why do food manufactures use cylindrical cans so often?
|
Why do they not use other shapes , such as a sphere or cuboid , why is it just restricted to cylinder?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goilask",
"goikxvb"
],
"text": [
"Packaging stuff adds cost. The material costs something, and it's added weight that makes shipping more expensive. It may not be much per can, but for millions of cans it adds up. So, you want to minimize the amount of material needed for packaging. A sphere is the shape with the least surface area per volume. It's also the strongest, since any stresses are evenly distributed across the entire surface. A sphere takes the least amount of material. However, spheres are bad for packing and stacking. Whenever you stack spheres there's a lot of space between them. That's bad for shipping, obviously. You want to maximize the packing space so you can fit the most units per shipping container. A cube (or cuboid) maximizes the packing because there is no space at all between them. But cubes take a lot of material. Those corners become points where stress gathers, which means you need even more extra material to keep them strong. So, you need a compromise. A shape that's almost as strong as a sphere and uses as little material as possible, but also packs and stacks almost as well as cubes. It also needs to be easy to make. Which shape is both sort of round and sort of square? Cylinders. Edit: [Engineer Guy]( URL_0 ) for an explanation from a real engineer, and also additional information about how cans are designed.",
"Cylinders are strong and relatively simple to make. A cylinder can be made with just 3 pieces, the side is just one piece of metal rolled into a tube, and then the top and bottom pieces get sealed on. They also fair better than boxy containers because the corners of boxy containers concentrate stress and break, a corner less circle more evenly spread out load/impact. The main draw back of a cylinder is all the little space that you lose between each cylinder, which is why no one uses spheres, they’re hard to pack and have a lot of empty space between them. Cylinders are easier to pack, stackable and can be pushed up against each other pretty easily. Yes there is some wasted space that you wouldn’t get with cube containers, but the benefits of the cylinder (simplicity and strength) outweigh that negative."
],
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38,
4
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],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lquyqt
|
This quote from Seneca, "Live in such a way that there is nothing which you could not as easily tell your enemy as keep to yourself"
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goilwwm",
"goim175"
],
"text": [
"dont live dirty/scandalously. live how you think people aught to live. be rightous. have no secrets.",
"\"Don't do shady shit.\" Basically, if your enemy knows your entire life, live it in a way where they can't use it against you."
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lquzzi
|
What prevents people from getting dizzy during REM sleep if our eyes are moving so quickly in all directions?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goilz8n"
],
"text": [
"The balancing mechanism of the body is actually in the inner ear, eyes movement does not cause dizziness"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lqvd9o
|
How do reality show interviews work?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goipn4c",
"goj6e0u",
"goj0upn",
"gojgwea",
"goiwa1c",
"gojf0l6",
"gojanzg",
"gojfurt"
],
"text": [
"It's all done after the fact. They've decided how they want to edit things to try to create a scripted narrative, and then they'll ask the person to talk about what was happening at the point in time they're deciding to show.",
"There was a minor \"scandal\" in an early season of RuPaul's Drag Race where one of the contestants' interviews was cut up and the editors used comments from two different interview days. When they cut back and forth from the \"action\" and the interview the contestant was very clearly wearing a completely different outfit despite the comments audio supposedly being about the same moment. From what I've heard, the contestants still do their interviews one episode at a time, but they are now instructed to wear the same outfit each time so the editors can use comments from whenever in any moment.",
"I was on My Strange Addiction about a decade ago so I can give you perspective from there... Basically they did multiple long form interviews on multiple days. We shot for a week, during that week we had a few on location interviews basically just summarizing the situation and how I felt, all very casual, (OTF or OnTheFly). The biggest were the 2 seperate nearly 3 hour interviews where they asked me the number of different questions multiple times as well as reframing some questions. 18+ hours of footage for an 11 minute segment. Got the impression that they just wanted as much footage as they could to edit however they wanted, and were trying to specifically give me lots of room to breathe so they could go wild in the editing room. One interview was at the first of the week and the second was at the end, but I wore the same clothes and was asked many of the same questions. Continuity is important on a shoot like that, but unfortunately they had issues with their audio so I kind of sound like a robot in the final version. But they also didn't have time to do it again so it went to print. So to ELI5 - production cruise will tell you to keep a set of clothes and a lot of reality TV show interviews are focused on repetition and trying to get provocative comments. I really watched my wording and you can tell in the video that they stitched multiple sentences together to get me to say what they wanted me to say, it was kind of embarrassing to me because most people couldn't tell that it was not edited. A lot of the people they hire for stuff like this have experience with acting, or the therapists they hire have done video work before so when it comes to multiple people being interviewed for a reality show they often know what they're doing and have been on set before. They have a Rolodex of people who know how to behave on camera. Unrelated to MSA: I did some production work for a reality show a long time ago about putting gay guys through boot camp (stupid show) and that involved interviews, but it was more the Bachelor/Real World kind of interviews where they setup a booth and do a round of them on shooting days. Alcohol was always served. Now if you're talkin about live reality shows like Wendy Williams or Jerry Springer, the interviews there are much more fast and the hosts are much more aggressive (I was on Bill Cunningham and another that didnt goto air) and oftentimes there's producers either on earphones or with cards on the sides trying to direct the conversation a certain way. Some of the shadier shows will tell you to \"GET ANGRY\" or \"DROP THE BOMB\" etc to try and stimulate drama. That's all the time I have for now but if you have any other questions feel free to AMA. Edit: speech to text corrections",
"It's completely made up. My uncle shot a pilot for a reality show about recovering crashed airplanes (his business). They coached him to say things like \"time is money\" (untrue). They'd tell tell him to say \"if we don't finish this in the next \"X\" hours we lose everything\" (untrue). They told him to berate his employees on camera (not his employees). It was the silliest thing ever. The pilot never made it. His job is really cool and interesting, but he's just to calm and relaxed for a show to work. The fact is that \"safety is money\" and \"they get paid regardless by the insurance company\" and it's very important to \"take their time\". The plane isn't going anywhere. Yes, it's cool to recover a plane that crashed into a mountain at 12,000 feet with no roads. Yes it's hard. The problem is, that it's not exciting without making a big deal about a careful recovery. It's all safety related so the pilot for the show didn't work out. Bottom line, it's all semi-scripted and coached. The scripted stuff is shot after the job is done. The job still needs doing after all and the crew can't get in their way while they're picking up a crashed plane at 14,000 feet and the helicopter barely has lift.",
"Normally they’ll do it throughout the season and afterwards. So if filming takes place over six months, the person will do an interview every 3-4 weeks while they shoot. After they finish, the producers look at the footage and decide which storylines to use. They’ll then go back and interview the people again to get any answers they might need to fill in the gaps.",
"To add onto this - I worked in reality / competition for a decade. There’s some interviews called OTF’s (on the fly) that are actually done in the moment. Usually they’re all done on specific days and times and the talent wears the same clothes so that we can use bites from different days to complete thoughts and sentences via something called frankenbites - so if you see a person start a sentence and it cuts to something in scene with a voice over and then lands back on them, there’s a good chance it was assembled from other interview bites.",
"It feels weird because the interviewees all talk in the present tense (even if they're talking about something that happened weeks ago). The producers tell them to do that.",
"I used to work in transcribing these interviews, it's interesting. It is typically at the end of everything. They sit down and sometimes they're asked questions to prompt responses and sometimes they just talk and monolog. Sometimes they will just give them lines to day. They will then say things over and over sometimes to get the right emotion or expression, or to make sure they use the right verb tense that will then be used in the final cut."
],
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
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|
lqvpzr
|
what makes some things more painful than other things?
|
Why does plucking an eyebrow hair hurt so much less than plucking a nose hair? Or stubbing a toe, getting a paper cut, etc. There's also different kinds of pain, how does the body differentiate between the injuries and how does it calculate how painful it should feel?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goirljn"
],
"text": [
"It all has to do with the nervous system and nerve endings. The nerve endings on your face are far less concentrated than the ones in your nasal cavity and are also constantly exposed to external stimuli (making them more resilient). Pain is your brain interpreting signals received by nerve endings in and on your body so it makes sense that nerves constantly exposed to external stimulus would have a lower pain response as they've become \"numb\" to the stimuli or have died completely. The skin also creates its own protective barriers. A perfect example would be calluses. I play guitar daily and have thick calluses on my fingers. The nerve endings in my fingers are still intact, but the \"armor\" on my fingertips allows me to touch very hot or cold items for a longer period of time than my wife or children could."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lqwkjx
|
Why does urine get foamy when you pee fast?
|
Not a troll post.
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goiu9t5"
],
"text": [
"Unused protein, you can only absorb so much protein in your diet. Protein is a little sticky and thicker so when you pee into the water it has a slightly \"tacky\" consistency allowing for the bubbles to form"
],
"score": [
9
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lqwx0b
|
How does radiation actually kill you?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goix1tj"
],
"text": [
"In simplest terms, ultraviolet (UV) rays from the sun penetrate into your skin a little bit, and deliver their energy to the live cells inside your skin, causing a burn (suntan). If you suntan for too long, you get actual burn damage on your skin. So radiation penetrates through your body and delivers the same kind of \"burn\" to your internal organs. Low doses of radiation can destroy the DNA of some cells, causing those cells to start multipying out of control (that's cancer). High doses can massively burn your internal organs, resulting in [radiation sickness]( URL_0 )."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/radiation-sickness/symptoms-causes/syc-20377058"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lqxjhy
|
How does the body generate electricity?
|
Like when they talk about “electrical impulses” in the brain. Is that real electricity and how do we produce it?”
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goiya2j",
"goiyk14"
],
"text": [
"In the brain as well as the heart. It’s made by opening up potassium sodium pumps. So the body constantly pushes potassium out of the cell in exchange for sodium and when it opens up and all the two equalize the body generates electricity. It’s essentially done with a gradient difference",
"It is real electricity, but not like you think. It is ions producing an electrical potential, but it is very weak. Chemical reactions produce chemicals that have more or fewer electrons than their most stable form, and those can be used to convey signals. Think of it as a kind of weak chemical battery, not electricity in a wire."
],
"score": [
10,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lqxjki
|
In open world games like GTA 5, what happens to NPCs when no one is around? Do they still “move,” drive, etc?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goiyav9",
"goixxcl",
"goixr1j"
],
"text": [
"Videogames typically use a technique called \"Culling\", which basically means, when an object or a part of the map is not in view, or not in the area of the player, it is typically removed from the scene, to save memory/processing power. Once the player/camera is in view of a new area or in view of some NPCs and Cars they quickly get put back into the scene. This is why you can sometimes see Objects and cars loading in if you look at them zoomed-in from far away. So to answer your question, when no one is around, the NPCs are simply removed from the scene.",
"It depends on the games. Cyberpunk makes NPC spawn in when you look but disappear when you turn away. Fallout keeps your area loaded but disappears it when you leave. Not sure about GTA but I’d imagine it’s the same as fallout. You can have all things spawned in at all times but it would take so much ram and be so hard to play since you have to account for all things!",
"Most games As soon as you step out a certain range the npc will simply not exist anymore"
],
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21,
7,
5
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
] |
|
lqy0we
|
Why is diesel no longer "green"?
|
When I was growing up, diesel was always considered the greener option than petrol, and this was reflected in the prices, diesel always cost less because it was taxed at a lower rate. Now they say it's worse than petrol and prices are now higher for diesel. So what changed, or what did we suddenly learn about diesel that we didn't know before? Bonus question, considering they're both made from crude oil, what's the difference in how they're refined?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goj3mtn",
"gojaypc",
"goj1z9b",
"goj3y67",
"goj585r",
"gojiqzl",
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"gokedmi",
"goj2uys",
"gok82mr",
"gok9swa",
"gojk68r",
"gom2ed5"
],
"text": [
"Our definition of \"green\" changed. It used to be purely about fuel consumption...how many gallons do you burn. And Diesel engines are inherently more efficient that gasoline (technically Otto cycle) engines. So they burned less gas, and that was greener. But because of diesel engines' different combustion behavior, you also get differences in the exhaust. Diesel tends to have more particulates, more NOx (contributes to smog), and more unburned hydrocarbons. You can manage that to some extent with better engine designs and emission controls but those are also pollutants and we take a lot more notice of them now than we used to.",
"After a bit of scrolling, I'm surprised not to have seen a mention of diesel exhaust fluid (DEF). Diesel engines made after 2010 are required by law to operate with DEF in accordance with the EPA. I'm not an expert on the science of it all, but I know my entire work fleet needs it. It helps turn exhaust into nitrogen and hydrogen, but again, I'm no expert.",
"Diesel and gasoline are both products of fractional distillation of crude oil. Crude oil is a huge mishmash of different compounds formed when underground when algae and plankton were buried underground and pressurized. All these different compounds behave slightly differently. One of these different behaviors is their boiling points. Fractional distillation takes advantage of this by heating up the oil to different temperatures to capture what boils at each temperature. A distillation column can do this continuously, by having \"stages\" at varying heights that are heated to different temperatures in a gradient. So at each \"stage,\" you may have a different product. At the lowest stages (the ones that don't boil or boil only at very high temperatures), you have tar- and asphalt-type compounds. Higher up, you get bunker fuel, which is fuel oil for ships and heaters. Higher than that, you get diesel and mineral oils. Higher than that is kerosene, jet fuel, and gasoline, and so on. So they come from the same material, but they are different (although pretty similar) parts of that original material.",
"Diesel engines and gasoline engines operate using diffirent principles - you can almost think of it like different operating parameters. The diesel cycle is inherently more thermodynamically efficient than the Otto cycle (how gasoline engines operate). However, they burn less clean, essentially less of the fuel is spent during the process, and I believe the fuel is also less purified - what this translates to is there are more pollutants spit out in the exhaust. The Holy grail has always been to filter the exhaust enough that diesel cars were as clean burning as their gasoline counterparts. Car companies lead us to believe they achieved this. It turns out - they actually just managed trick the emissions tests, and they're inherently as dirty as ever. If you clean them up - they end up being less fuel efficient, essentially the juice isn't worth the squeeze. The result - the diesel boom deflated.",
"Years of study eventually showed that some of the waste products of diesel burning were just as bad as those from petrol (gasoline) - it's \\*never\\* been greener, we just used to think that it was. As we learn, the science changes. And it's an oil derivative, so it's never going to be exactly \"green\" anyway. We also discovered that the NOx emissions were killing people and just basic \"smoke/dust\" (\"particulate matter\") from burning it was far worse. That meant more stringent controls. The EU EN590 standards, etc. really cracked down on what was allowed, which meant that diesels essentially became the same as or more expensive than other ICE vehicles. Diesel now has to give out 200 times less sulphur than in the 90's, for example. Things like AdBlue came on the market to try to reduce emissions from burning diesel in vehicles. And then we found that EVEN THOUGH we'd done all that, things like NOx weren't dropping as much as we'd expect. It was at that point that we discovered that many car companies were literally just cheating the emissions tests and actually pumping out as much as they used to, but hiding it behind software trickery designed to detect if the vehicle was being tested for emissions or driven normally. They claimed that they basically couldn't make a car with the performance they wanted if they didn't give out those emissions. That led to BILLIONS of dollars of lawsuits and recalls for many/most diesel manufacturers. That cost almost certainly is being recouped across the industry, not just diesels, but it also means diesels are under far more scrutiny now and thus costs are rising. Diesel being greener was always a con, basically. We just didn't know it for sure and people still bought them for decades thinking they were cleaner. I can remember calling bullshit on this back in the early 90's - my dad was a fleet mechanic for lorries, etc. and claimed (as he'd been told) that diesels were cleaner. It was always bollocks. By the 2000's we knew it was a lie. Nowadays, people thinking that diesel is cleaner because of what they grew up with is still rife (as your question shows).",
"You'd need a chemist to back me up on this (or correct me if I'm misinformed) but I was told years ago that the refining process for gasoline/petrol is more expensive than the process for diesel, so diesel was cheaper. More recently, though, apparently chemists found some profitable uses for by-products leftover after gasoline/petrol production. You don't get all these useful by-products from producing diesel, so refiners started charging more for diesel, since selling it meant they were missing out on the extra sales they would get for other products when refining gasoline. Supposedly (in the USA, at least) taxes had nothing to do with it.",
"Diesel was 'never green'. The tax regime was different because it was deemed to be used mostly for commercial/industry rather than end-user customers.",
"Because youre only green in the wrestling business for so long. Once Nash picked up some experience he started to a learn a thing or two. Tbh Diesel now is a veteran and I think he would be offended that you still thought he was green.",
"It’s always been a fossil fuel (meaning we are digging up ancient fossils that have turned to carbon, lighting them on fire, and so releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere). Some fossil fuels are better at turning that into fuel but there are no good ones in terms of climate change. If we keep digging up Carboniferous things and lighting them on fire, there will be more carbon.",
"Diesel engines are more efficient than gasoline engines because diesel engines use a higher [compression ratio]( URL_0 ). A lot of people in this thread giving good information about the difference between gasoline and diesel, but not addressing your question about why diesel is \"greener\". It's greener due to the increased efficiency resulting from a higher compression ratio. If you want to know why the compression ratio matters, you will learn a bit of thermodynamics. Suffice it to say that the energy extraction is more orderly and less energy is lost as entropy.",
"It gives off less CO2 and is more efficient so which it why it was considered green. Diesel was later found give off lost of particulates which is not good for the envionment which is why modern diesels have complex particulate filter systems. The push for moving away from diesel actually led to more petrol car purchases, which lead to an increase in CO2 emissions.",
"Man I must be younger than I thought because I never remember diesel being considered green",
"A reason I don't see mentionned here is that a lot of countries originally put lower taxes on diesel as a way to reduce their oil imports. That's the reason a lot of European countries promoted diesel in the 1980s, since diesel motors are more efficient, less oil needed to be imported and so less dependency, negative effects on commercial balance and currency, etc. Since diesel is more efficient, it also produce less CO² than gasoline on the same distance, so in this regard it is slightly greener. But diesel produced a lot of air pollutants than are very dangerous for people's health and cause many death every year. So it's not that great a deal, especially as we've realized the progress made in filtration of diesel motors were much less than believed and were in parts due to cheating at emissions tests."
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|
[
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] |
[
"url"
] |
lr10h1
|
Why do "attractive nuisance" laws exist?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gojiqn8"
],
"text": [
"Beautiful American \"freedom\" at play here. Kid trespasses into my property, drowns in my pool, and I get in trouble because I didn't *also* fence the pool off. I call it darwinism, they call it illegal."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lr1t5v
|
Period is active bleeding?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gojl43l",
"gojhixk"
],
"text": [
"So while the body builds the layers of tissue, it is actively taking blood from your blood stream (all the new cells being made need food and oxygen!). Then you get to the stage where the body is expected to ovulate and the lining is at its peak. Juicy, bloody cushion for the ovum. And then it goes downhill. When no fertilized ovum is received, the uterus fails to send a message to the ovary that you’re pregnant. The ovary then continues with the default mode of making hormones that tell the uterus “get rid of this lining, we’re starting over”. The blood vessels in the lining contract and start cutting off the blood supply to the lining. Remember you have just short of two weeks between expected fertilization and the start of your period. Ample time to make sure there’s a nice demarcation line and avoid bleeding out When people say you are losing blood and should take it easy, you are correct in thinking that blood has mostly already been cut off from your overall blood volume and you shouldn’t feel it much. There is some active blood loss when uterine contractions make a slightly larger blood vessel tear, but most of it is “old blood”. This is also why period blood tends to be darker shades of red/brown/black instead of bright red if it were active arterial bleeding. You do however get tired during your period due to the contractions and hormonal changes, which people falsely interpret as tiredness from blood loss. The common thought of women losing iron during their periods isn’t completely wrong, but the loss is spread out during the month as the blood gets accumulated in the uterus and eventually shed during menstruation",
"It is not like an open wound. It's not something you could cauterize and 'stop'. Your uterus builds up a nice, cosy lining for a potential fertilized egg, and when that egg exits, so does the lining. Its more like the lining is a celebrity entourage, and the egg is the celebrity. They all gather around it, and leave when it does....."
],
"score": [
7,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lr1uq4
|
Why are photographs rectangular, and not circular, like the shape of the lens?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gojh9d7",
"gojjlal"
],
"text": [
"The lens does not relate to the shape of the image. A rectangular lens will still produce a circular image. However, the thing that captures the image is a sensor within the camera, and this is most easily produced as a rectangle (as it is a grid).",
"Because it's easier to manufacture and feed through a camera film that is rectangular than circular"
],
"score": [
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lr21ld
|
How do those LED light therapy face masks work?
|
What are the benefits, and how does it get to the skin?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gojm05o"
],
"text": [
"URL_0 There really isn't any strong evidence that they work at all. If they do work, it's by stimulating specific structures in the skin that have rejuvenating effects. Each color of light has a specific wavelength; red has the longest and violet the shortest. These wavelengths determine exactly what structures they can interact with, kind of like a lock and key. Shorter wavelengths can also penetrate barriers (like your skin) deeper than longer wavelengths."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/led-lights-are-they-a-cure-for-your-skin-woes"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lr226h
|
why does nail polish “dry” (harden?) faster when run under cold water?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gojpqy8"
],
"text": [
"It doesn't dry, it is simply makes the top thicker from the cold but what's under that top surface is still wet nail polish. Polish does not dry per se, the solvent in it the liquid portion evaporates. What's left is the pigment and binders. The one thing that dries regular nail polish is time. Time to allow the solvent to evaporate out. You want to know if your nails are dry? Use your nose. If they smell like what nail polish smell like, they're still wet, when the smell is gone they're dry."
],
"score": [
12
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lr2ffs
|
How does the ISS get more oxygen? Do they have a device that can create more, or do they simply send shipments of O2?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gojlehd",
"gojn9oo",
"gok27bd"
],
"text": [
"They make oxygen gas from water, which is 16/18^ths oxygen by weight. Water is resupplied regularly. It requires a much lighter container than oxygen as gas or a cryogenic liquid.",
"The ISS produces oxygen through the **electrolysis** of water. Each molecule of water contains two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Running a current through water causes these atoms to separate and recombine as gaseous hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (O2). Hydrogen that's leftover from splitting water will be vented into space. The electrolysis is carried out by the oxygen generators: the Russian-made Elektron and the U.S. Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS).",
"Here's a [good article on the ISS oxygen generation]( URL_0 ). You can get oxygen from breaking down water (electrolysis). All you need is electricity, which is convenient in space, because electricity doesn't have to be shipped from Earth; you can get electricity from solar panels. Water's H2O, so breaking down water also gives you hydrogen. You can use the hydrogen to turn CO2 into H2O and CH4 (the Sabatier reaction). This is convenient because the astronauts are all breathing out CO2. So with the Sabatier reaction, you're turning two waste products (hydrogen and CO2) into a valuable resource (water) and one waste product (CH4, also known as methane). About 80% of the oxygen on the ISS is recycled, the remaining amount has to be replenished by supply ships."
],
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14,
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[],
[],
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"https://www.cnet.com/news/breathe-deep-how-the-iss-keeps-astronauts-alive/"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lr2htz
|
The differences between inner monolog and schizophrenia?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gojlrza",
"gojnp4z"
],
"text": [
"You can tell what’s real and what isn’t. Basically. Schizophrenic people are really really unfortunate, when they have an episode, they believe their delusions. Imagine for a second, you are in a strange place, surrounded by people who want to do you harm, and it’s REAL. (But really you’re in a supermarket). Schizophrenia is terrifying, and people who suffer from it almost never hurt anyone else, and are the greatest threat to themselves - and are actually very vulnerable. My inner monologue isn’t..... healthy. I’ve got some mental health problems, and I’m pretty screwy. But I know what’s real and what isn’t. I don’t have to act on my irrational impulses.",
"Everyone has an inner monologue. But when you have schizophrenia you have difficulty distinguishing which thoughts/ideas are coming from inside your own head and which are outside your head. Which leads to confusion about what is happening around you because you start blending your imagination with reality. You believe that things that are originating in your head are actually coming from the real world around you, and not realizing that you are generating them yourself. Some people believe that all humans used to be that way thousands of years ago as we transitioned into reflective self awareness, and possibly explains the origin of religious prophets of old believing that god was speaking to them."
],
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29,
9
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"text_urls": [
[],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lr2qk8
|
Why can't we take the same techniques used to cancel sound waves, and apply it to light waves?
|
I'm certain there's a simple explanation, but if there was a way to cancel light in the same fashion as sound-cancelling headphones, wouldn't you have a practical form of invisibility?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gojnulk"
],
"text": [
"Light waves do cancel just like sound waves, that's what makes the pattern in the double slit experiment, but you have to be spot on with the alignment to cancel Sound moves far slower than electronics process so a microphone on the outside can record a sound, flip it around, and be ready to feed it to the speaker before the sound is all the way through the housing. The headphones also only have to cancel sounds that arrive at the opening of your ear Light moves too fast to detect light hitting a surface, process it, and emit the opposite phase before it bounces away There are some ways to do it like a thin film where some light reflects off the top of the film and some goes in and reflects off the bottom and comes up out of phase and cancels. This only works for a narrow range of frequencies and only straight on, as soon as you're off to the side the paths are different lengths and it doesn't quite work right There are also highly refractive materials that can bend light around an object but they're also angle dependent There's no easy cheat for an invisibility cloak, armies around the world have spent plenty of time and money on research to confirm"
],
"score": [
16
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
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lr4449
|
Why can diesel engines be used in underground mines, but gasoline cannot?
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goju9ss",
"gojuea0"
],
"text": [
"Gasoline vapor is much more combustible. Little gas vapor and a spark will go boom. Diesel is much less dangerous in tight spaces that do not have great ventilation. You will actually see a lot of electric machinery for this same reason.",
"Diesel is safer than gasoline. Gasoline vapour will ignite easily causing explosion or fire whereas diesel does not. In fact you can flick a lit match into diesel and it will not burn."
],
"score": [
12,
9
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
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|
lr46zt
|
() Is it possible to suffocate while still breathing?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gojvdjn",
"gojvijb"
],
"text": [
"Yes, anything that displaces the oxygen in the air without adding carbon dioxide won’t be noticed. Hypoxia can hit pilots at altitude if they are not careful. It interferes with the brain so they don’t notice that they are not thinking clearly and becoming sleepy. Or look up OSHA’s rules and information on confined space entry. There is usually one or two incidents a year in the USA of workers being careless entering tanks, vaults or sewer pipes without checking the oxygen concentration. They pass out suddenly. Worse is when coworkers can see them and go in to try to get them out. Worst I’ve heard of is 5 guys one after the other. All dead within 30 feet of the entrance.",
"Yes, that's a thing. It's a not-unheard-of kind of industrial accident, especially in mines with poor ventilation. It happens when the air pressure is too low, too, like on Everest or in airplanes that lose cabin pressure. But we usually call that *asphyxiation,* not suffocation. There's not a strict rule about the words, but try to use suffocate when the victim uses up the available oxygen (or poisons themselves with their own exhaust), and asphyxiate when there isn't enough in the first place."
],
"score": [
8,
3
],
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
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|
lr4or5
|
Why are our livestock animals the ones they are?
|
Is there any reason why almost universally chickens and cows are the go to farm animal? Like why aren’t there cultures where people are allergic to their produce and meat? Or we just got really lucky and domesticated the species that seems to just work for most if not all societies. Just seems weird that we picked cows and not some other big game like some bison or something. Why chickens? Why not ducks or geese?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gojxp29",
"gojxie2",
"gojz34s",
"golf94m",
"gok7c1v"
],
"text": [
"It's a mix of the animal's temperament and usefulness. Cows grow fast, are useful, and are fairly easy to control near human settlements. Bison are similar, but they're faster and bigger (i think maybe meaner?) and also didn't work well with the semi-nomadic lifestyle of the plains Native Americans (they'd rather just follow than tame them). Elephants are too slow growing and intelligent/independent to easily raise for slaughter. Chickens are small-ish and tend to stay in groups. Several species of duck and goose get hella territorial for most of the year and want large areas of water for nests. Also, chickens not being able to fly well helped us catch and keep them. We could keep songbirds for meat, but it's almost not worth it for so little meat per bird. Chickens also can be left to wander, but they'll always come back to their homes and aren't migratory.",
"I don't have a complete answer to tell you, unfortunately, but I'll give you what I have. I actually *am* allergic to cows. There is a tick called a longhorn tick that once you are bitten, you have a histamine reaction to beef protein. It's also very common for people to be lactose intolerant. Chickens are particularly useful for farming because they lay eggs constantly, if not killed, giving us a sustained source of protein Cows also give milk regularly, which also is a sustained source of protein",
"We domesticated the animals that were easy for us to domesticate. Chickens have a lot of desirable traits that originate in the wildfowl they descend from. * They're a social bird that likes to live in flocks, which makes it easy to keep a bunch of them. * They like to roost in a central spot, which means they like coming home at the end of the day rather than wandering off. * They like to lay their eggs in one place, so much even that chickens and their ancestor species would often prefer to lay their own eggs into a nest that already has eggs. * Chickens are amazing foragers, people don't really realize it these days but chickens will eat just about anything. From potato peels to hunting down small animals like mice and lizards. You can just set chickens free in the morning and they'll find their own meals before coming back in the evening. Those are all traits that the chicken's wild ancestors already had and made them really suitable for domestication. A lot more suitable than say solitary bird that likes to migrate around large territory while needing a diet that is mostly fish for instance. And allergies are a thing. The majority of human adults are lactose intolerant for instance. We really don't digest dairy products all that well. But the human populations that started producing a lot of dairies, evolved dairy tolerance alongside it. Easy access to food is a huge advantage. So any population that gained large-scale access to dairy, usually also evolved increased tolerance. Remember the cliche about the Dutch-loving cheese? It's not a cliche really, the Dutch have better lactose tolerance than any people in the world. Meanwhile, Asian populations where dairy production was rare, have exceptionally low lactose tolerance. The short of if it is that many animals that we did domesticate, were very suitable for domestication one way or another. There's also a genetic component. Cortisol is a stress hormone, animals that naturally have a lot of cortisol tend to be very skittish. Skittish animals tend to be flighty or aggressive and that makes them hard to domesticate. You might be able to breed it out of them over time, but it's just a pain in the ass to get the process started and people simply didn't bother. That's why we managed to domesticate horses but not zebra's for instance. Zebra are much more nervous and ill-tempered than horses and as a result too bothersome to try and domesticate them. And finally, sometimes you don't need to domesticate the animal itself. Chickens, goats, sheep, cows, pigs etc. were all animals that were easy to fit into our lifestyles. Their natural behaviour made it easy for them to live alongside us and for us to benefit from them. Native Americans never domesticated bison, unlike the European bovines that would eventually become cows, bison migrate. They crossed enormous distances across the American planes. That's kind of an inconvenient trait for an animal that you want to keep in a pen next to your home. That didn't mean that Native Americans didn't domesticate bison in a different way though. Rather than manipulate the animal, Native Americans manipulated the environment. They did control burns of forests to create enormous grassy plains exactly where they wanted them. This artificial increasing of plains land also increased the size of bison herds and steered their migration routes. Without domesticating the bison themselves, native Americans did manage their population sizes and routes, thus ensuring good annual hunts.",
"> Is there any reason why almost universally chickens and cows are the go to farm animal? It largely depends where you are. Chickens can be kept pretty much anywhere, and they eat anything, so they are popular everywhere. Cows require a lot of open flat land and specific grazing vegetation, so they are popular in the US where we can give them that. They are not popular in places like Greece, which has a lot of mountainous terrain and sparse vegetation not well-suited for cows. There, goats do very well, so they are the popular livestock. Goats love jumping around on rocks, and they can eat almost any plant (they love poison ivy).",
"Once an animal has been domesticated, it's _much_ easier to adapt it to a new location than to go through the trouble of domesticating an entirely new animal. So domestic animals tend to spread, with people moving existing ones around instead of domesticating new local animals. > Like why aren’t there cultures where people are allergic to their produce and meat? Allergens don't really work like that. There isn't really big variation in what people are allergic to, human immune systems are all pretty similar. You couldn't really _find_ an animal that would only be edible to some societies. Now, there is a tick that can induce red meat allergies, but that isn't super common, and shellfish allergies and the like are more of an individual environmental response, not something a while population could have. Most of the world is lactose intolerant, but that's not technically an allergy. Societies where dairy cattle became important adapted to become lactose tolerant as a result, because of the advantage of being able to drink milk into adulthood. But that came long after domestication. > Just seems weird that we picked cows and not some other big game like some bison or something. Some of this may be about the different temperament of the species but some of it may just be coincidence. In the old world, cattle came first and who would bother to go after bison if they already in the cattle, which are similar. Also in the old world, people were able to \"work up\" to big animals like cattle and horses after starting out with smaller, easier to handle goats and sheep. In North America, they didn't have such starter animals, maybe that's why they never tried domesticating bison. Or maybe not. Human history doesn't follow an automatic similar course in every society, so it could just be chance that some things were never domesticated here. > Why chickens? Why not ducks or geese? Many ducks and geese _are_ domesticated. But chicken are easer to farm in bulk using modern techniques, so they are what's for sale in supermarkets."
],
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10,
8,
7,
3,
3
],
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[],
[],
[],
[],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
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lr4t73
|
Why do herbivores have weaker stomach acid than carnivores?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gok0856"
],
"text": [
"It's generally thought to be related to the need to destroy pathogenic bacteria. Animals carry more animal diseases than plants do. Beavers, which are herbivores, have highly acidic stomachs and I have seen it speculated that this is to protect them from waterborn diseases which they are more likely to contract than most herbivores due to their habitat."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lr51m6
|
Why is it that washing bloodstained fabric with cold water helps to remove the blood, but washing with warm or hot water causes the stain to set?
|
It seems like most fabric stains come out more easily with hot water. Is blood just weird?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gok4n9f",
"gok0o3n"
],
"text": [
"Cleaning protein stains can be thought of like cleaning a raw egg white off of a rag. If you use hot water the raw egg white will cook enough to set into the cloth. You can't just rinse out the egg white if it's been turned into cooked egg white all imbedded around the cloth fibers. It's *much* harder to get out after the proteins are heated. Same with blood. That's also why you always want to check on a stain *after* it comes out of the wash. Because once you put it in the dryer it's probably never coming out. But for some things, like blood and grass stains, if you soak it with an enzymatic stain remover (like Shout™) for long enough the enzymes will eat the protein and it'll still wash out. - *If you want to see what's happening on a more molecular level, take a handful of thin rubber bands. Gently mix them all together into a cohesive pile. Each rubber band represents a protein strand. You could untangle this pile. But not after you blast it with a hot hair dryer. That pile is not untangling ever again.",
"Think of taking a cold shower vs a hot shower. A cold shower makes you want to get out as soon as possible, while a hot shower makes you want to relax and stay in as long as possible. This is how the proteins in our blood react to water. When the blood first contacts our clothes it dries up and attempts to hold on to the fabric of our clothing. The cold water penetrates and rehydrates the blood encouraging it to wash away. Hot water accelerates the binding process and allows the blood to cling onto the fabric faster, making it harder to wash away later."
],
"score": [
43,
37
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
] |
lr5nr9
|
How is nearly every book that is written nowadays listed as a “#1 New York Times Bestseller”? Something isn’t adding up to me.
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gok1yza",
"gok2cxj",
"gokv7h9",
"gokides",
"goklqwj",
"golngz3",
"gokbss4",
"gol2c0o"
],
"text": [
"The New York Times is just a popularity list. So things are ranked by week, month, year like any other list. So if you are the only major book released in the week you might be an instant number one. In reality though there are so many books released every week it’s a half a decent metric to go by as any. An astronomical number of books are released that don’t end up on the list, just the ones popular enough to afford advertising are the ones you hear of.",
"There used to be only one list, but they've now created dozens of lists for divergent genres and such (think top 10 YA sci-fi dramas). If you update these lists every month, you end up with literally hundreds of #1s each year. Since most mainline bookstores only have limited space, they're more likely to fill up with popular/advertised books which get on these lists more often, making it seem like an even higher percent of all books get this award (when really it's a fraction of a percent).",
"In addition to other people’s answers, what also sometimes happens is books get artificially placed on the list by buying up preorders and reselling or gifting them. This happens with a lot of political books. The Republican National Convention helped Trump Jr.’s book Triggered make the list by buying up $100,000 worth of copies to give away.",
"Also, keep in mind that a lot of the blurbs you see on books list the *author* as a NY Times best seller, meaning that the book is written by someone who got a previous book on one of the lists, but doesn’t actually mean this current book you are holding is worth a damn.",
"Kind of quasi-topical but an interview with Michael Malice alleged that the NYT best seller list is in cahoots with major publishers. They make it extremely hard to publish independently and still get the support needed to successfully release a book.",
"Books are published in hardcover first, it is this copy that is judged. The paperback edition is 2nd ,3rd or later printing. It is on the cover of these editions that the awards or 'Bestseller' rating comes from.",
"They have dozens of top lists with different genres. Also people often preorder books now and all those sales get counted to the first weeks sales.",
"There are a very large number of genres and the lists are published weekly (so there are 52 weeks a year, with several genre lists so every year there's potentially hundreds of new #1 best sellers, and thousands of bestsellers that make the list). Finally, it's all based on survey data, and there are consultants that know which bookstores are surveyed, so some targeted buying can put a low selling book on/on top of the list for a week, and then it can market itself as a best seller forever."
],
"score": [
57,
52,
24,
15,
7,
5,
4,
3
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lr5w4f
|
How do people survive from a "gut shot" bullet/knife wound?
|
Like, for example in the Netflix anthology *The Ballad of Buster Scruggs* an old prospector gets shot but survives and says over and over again "you didn't hit nothing important." Is this real? I mean, surely a bullet or even knife wound would have punctured some internal organ. How is that survivable?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gok3gbe",
"gok35xw",
"gok38vq"
],
"text": [
"It is completely possible. It isn't likely, but it is possible for a bullet to pass through you without hitting an organ. There is a lot of connective tissue/muscle/fat in the body, and if you're lucky the path of the bullet only strikes that. Again, it is a very lucky thing, but possible. Trevor Noah (the comedian) has a real life story of when his mother was shot in the back of the head and survived. The bullet entered the back of her head, stayed under her skull, missed all major arteries/veins, and came out the front of her face by her nose. It was a serious injury still, but she survived.",
"Brain, heart, and lungs are the most important. Getting hit in the kidneys, pancreas, liver, stomach, etc. would absolutely hurt like hell. Unless it’s an organ that is immediately responsible for pumping oxygenated blood through your system it’s not going to kill you immediately. *I’m also not a sciency person, could be way off base.",
"Got plenty of organs. Heck even got a couple doubles. There's alot of places you can be shot where you think youd die, but you won't if you recieve timely medical care. There are also places you can be shot where you wouldnt expect to die, but totally could. like the femoral artery in your leg."
],
"score": [
6,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lr6tq8
|
According to the laws of electricity, positive charges repel positive, and negative repels negative. We also know that inside an atom are protons and neutrons packed tightly together in the nucleus. What keeps these protons from repelling each other and scattering into space?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gok7eru",
"gok70zs"
],
"text": [
"Because there's an even stronger force than electromagnetism holding them together. In fact, it's literally called \"the strong force\". If you've ever picked up a piece of metal with a magnet, you've seen that a force (gravity) can be weaker than another force (magnetism) in certain circumstances. In this case, there's an even stronger force (actually called 'the strong force') that's stronger than electromagnetism in certain circumstances - specifically, when the correct number of neutrons and protons are bundled up together. In actuality, protons and neutrons themselves are made up of smaller particles, called 'quarks', which are \"glued together\" by the strong force. When these protons and neutrons get close enough together, that \"glue\" sort of \"spills out\" a little (fnord - there's weird quantum stuff I don't wanna explain in an ELI5 response), and this \"glue\" gets the protons and neutrons to stick to each other - but it only happens in the right configurations. That's actually why some atoms are more \"radioactive\" than others - radioactive stability is basically a measure of how much the neutrons and protons in a particular atom are able to \"stick together\" due to the residual strong force.",
"Well, they do. That's what nuclear fission is, roughly. The neutrons attract very strongly to the protons. In small atoms, this attraction is strong enough to firmly bind the nucleus together. In larger atoms, the force is less capable, since the neutrons' attractive force drops off faster than the electrostatic repulsion."
],
"score": [
29,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lr74z1
|
Why food get "fridge taste" when they are in the fridge for too long?
|
I was eating some coconut that was in the fridge for some time and for some reason it had this strange "fridge taste" that some food get when they are in the fridge for too long, so I wanted to understand how this works
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gokazjd"
],
"text": [
"A refrigerator is a closed up box which traps odor, food in the fridge absorbs oder making it tastes bad. So what you need to do is take everything out of the fridge and toss all leftovers. Then wipe down the fridge with a disinfectant cleaner make sure you clean under the vegetable drawers. Now get 2boxes of baking soda, (they make a special one for the fridge)and put 1in the fridge and 1in the freezer. Make sure you wipe down all your bottles of condiments. This should solve your problem. One more thing date your food and thow it away when it's a week old."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lr7l6r
|
What is happening when you twitch/kick when you are falling asleep?
|
To add, is there a difference between why you do it as u are falling asleep or doing it throughout the entire night?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"golfz9l"
],
"text": [
"It’s called a hypnic jerk. Basically it is thought to be an evolutionary gripping response from back when humans’ ancestors slept in trees. Those who jerked awake and gripped the tree limb instead of falling to the ground (and potentially then being killed by predators) had a higher rate of survival and that gripping/jerking reflex during sleep prevailed as it was important to survival. There’s a good RadioLab podcast that explains it. The podcast episode is called Falling."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lr8ej9
|
Why are antennas half a wavelength long?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goo20ee"
],
"text": [
"Not all antennas are a half wavelength. A simple antenna is just a piece of wire or metal that is cut to resonate with the frequency. The frequency is inversely proportional to the wave length. Lower the frequency the longer the antenna, higher the frequency the shorter the antenna. An antenna cut to one wavelength for wifi would be 12.5 cm long. You could put that on your router and it wouldn’t be a big deal. An antenna cut for AM radio at 770kHz would be 390 meters tall. That would be impractical to install anywhere especially if you just want to listen to talk radio."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lr8kcu
|
From an actual 5 year old (my daughter) Why green mold is green?
|
We are doing home experiments and she asked this about the mold we grew in a bread. I honestly don't know what to say.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gokffu1",
"gokh0u1"
],
"text": [
"Any organic substance in this world has a particular color because of something called as a 'pigment'. A pigment absorbs all the colors apart from that particular color (white light is a mixture of all the colors) and reflects only that particular color, which you see. Blood is red because of hemoglobin pigment. Skin is brown because of melanin pigment. Most plants/leaves are green because of chlorophyll pigment. I dont know which pigment is present in green mold that gives it green color, but my best guess would be chlorophyll.",
"Not a scientist but I did some research. We don't exactly know why SPECIFICALLY a given mold chose green as the color, from what I can tell. Fungi produce pigments for a reason - they're protective. Sometimes they protect from UV light, or extreme temperatures, or free radicals, or to create barriers against other rival molds. Different species are different colors. Even the colors vary based on what they're feeding on, how humid it is, and how much light they get. Different places have different colors of fungi. It's about how they evolve to produce what pigment. Scientists tried to make fungi without pigment to see what happened and they just... Did really badly. If your bread mold is green it's probably penicillium."
],
"score": [
17,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lr97ne
|
Why do rockets go straight up rather than take off similar to an aeroplanes?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gokh10x",
"gokguky"
],
"text": [
"The actual savings to be made from this are tiny. A rocket doesn't use most of its fuel getting off the ground and gaining altitude--most of its fuel is burned in getting up to 17,000mph (orbital velocity) so it doesn't just fall back down as soon as it gets into space. The sheer amount of fuel required to do that is way beyond what even the biggest aircraft can carry--even a relatively small rocket like a Falcon 9 weighs more than 300 tons fully fueled, whereas the largest aircraft currently flying is the Tupolev Tu-160 at 121 tons. There's also the problem that once you've actually got out of the atmosphere, the wings and other control surfaces are pure dead weight that don't offer any benefits and reduce the available payload. The total payload a Shuttle could lift to LEO was less than 30 tons, a tiny fraction what a Saturn 5 rocket could manage, because of all that extra weight in structure and wings required to allow the thing to fly in atmosphere.",
"Rockets need to go a lot higher than aeroplanes do, and they need to get a lot faster. Only a small part of the fuel they burn is used to lift them out of the lower atmosphere. Once you're outside the lower atmosphere, air-breathing jet engines no longer work because the incoming air isn't dense enough to combust the fuel - and that's the place where they need to pick up the most speed. You could theoretically try and stay inside the atmosphere long enough to gain more speed using a jet engine rather than a rocket engine, but you face issues such as the incoming air being supersonically heated to the point where the engine isn't really that efficient anyways. It also represents a huge extra design hurdle. If you design a first stage merely to get the rocket up to the edge of the atmosphere, well, that first stage also represents extra weight, diminishing some of the efficiency you hope to gain. All in all it's a massive design hurdle that doesn't promise much gain, unless you also manage to make the first stage reusable in the process. That hasn't stopped [some projects]( URL_0 ) from trying, but attempts to solve the engineering hurdles involved have never quite panned out."
],
"score": [
11,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lr9fym
|
What's the reason you never see prices and you always have to request a quote for products as a business customer?
|
It seems like such a waste of time.
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gokhf8m"
],
"text": [
"The change in the price of materials or another variable in the supply change often limits the ability to give an outright price and has to be a formulated."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lrcluh
|
Why is there so much more land in the northern hemisphere than the southern hemisphere?
|
By looking at a map, it seems like a majority of land on Earth is in the northern hemisphere. Is there a reason for that, or is it just coincidence?
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gokusp6",
"goky19s",
"gokuxe7",
"golrk83",
"gokyj3b"
],
"text": [
"There is no other reason for it than that's where it happens to be right now. In plate tectonics theory, the continental crust - which makes up the land - wanders around on the denser oceanic crust. Only *extremely* slowly. 600 million years ago most of the land was in the southern hemisphere, and it's just at this particular geological \"moment\" all drifted up north.",
"Mind you, most maps are not accurate. Many maps make North America (and therefore, the Northern Hemisphere) significantly bigger than they should be.",
"Plate tectonics. The earth's surface is constantly moving. URL_0",
"Follow-up question: is there actually more mass (currently) in the northern hemisphere? If so, does that imbalance affect Earth's rotation or orbit around the Sun in any way?",
"Plate Tectonics is the easy answer for this, however [The Supercontinental Cycle]( URL_0 ) plays a huge role as well, it basically says that over a large period of time the various land masses break apart then converge again to form one or more super masses that kinda float around on the crust. Pangaea and Rodinia are good examples of this and both had large portions in the northern hemisphere."
],
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148,
17,
5,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[
"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/06/science/tectonic-plates-continental-drift.html?smid=url-share"
],
[],
[
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercontinent_cycle"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lrd4rh
|
why does brain transplant not exist?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gokxlkw"
],
"text": [
"Is it a brain transplant or a body transplant? There were some proof-of-concept animal tests done in the USSR in the middle of the 20th century showing that medical science could keep a severed head alive for a while and even successfully attach it to another body, but the end result is complete paralysis. Right now we have no way to connect the central nervous system to the spinal cord after it has been completely severed. Since the new body is completely useless and must be kept alive mechanically, there’s no situation where this is preferable to trying to save the original body and just keep that one alive mechanically instead."
],
"score": [
11
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lrd5e1
|
Why do some links declare that they are redirecting you to a webpage, but others don't?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gokz091",
"gokyxgp"
],
"text": [
"It's set up as a courtesy within the website hosting the link as a warning in case you accidentally clicked it. This gives you time to cancel if you didn't intend to go there, or you identify that link as something you don't want to see or potentially unsafe.",
"There are some websites that people put a lot of trust into. If there was a link on one of those sites, especially if it's a link in user-provided content like a forum post, they want to make sure that the user is aware that they are going to leave the site. This ensures that people don't link to another site that makes itself look like the original site to try and use that trust the user has. This is something that the website does on a technological level. The code they used to build the website automatically changes links to some external site into a link to a redirector page that will then take you to the external site. It is not something that is free to do, so many websites won't take the time or effort to do it."
],
"score": [
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lrd745
|
An entity publicly pressuring/forcing someone to resign vs. A company firing someone
|
Why go through the charade if it is public knowledge that the company is initiating the "resignation"?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gokxtk3",
"gokympt"
],
"text": [
"I assume you mean for important positions (like a CEO of an organization or someone high up in government bureaucracy). In these cases it's usually because firing someone in these roles is very hard. The organization basically says to the person, \"Look, we *will* go through the song and dance and jump through all the hoops to fire you over this, but it will be a painful slog for everyone involved. Just resign instead.\"",
"Firing of high-level employees often invites lawsuits, especially because they are likely to have a long employment contract with many terms. Lawsuits can be lost and they can result in bad publicity for the company. It's easier on everyone if the officer agrees to resign, as the officer also tends to keep some fat benefits in that case too."
],
"score": [
9,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lrfce5
|
Why do keep having high school/college nightmares even if school ended a decade ago?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"golbi5d",
"gol9prc",
"gol9oqa"
],
"text": [
"I'm fifty-six years old and I have some bad news for you if your worried about it after a decade.",
"This dream is a fairly common response to stress. For me it's either a history final and I never attended the class or the first day of a new school year and I don't know my class schedule.",
"I'm not sure why you might be having nightmares (bad high school experience?) but, in my experience, dreams will frequently take on the setting of major portions of your life for years on end. For example, I worked at a resort as a teenager until I was 24 years old. For at least five or seven years after I left that job, the resort (or a strange mutation of it) was the backdrop for my dreams. The hallways, pool area, the individual condos, were the set for many dreams even when it didnt make sense. Later I worked at a high-rise building on a campus and for years afterward, THAT became the backdrop of many of my dreams."
],
"score": [
9,
6,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lrg492
|
How do wormholes work?
|
So me and my mom yesterday were talking about space and all that stuff so I made a post about black holes and it really made sense but she brought up something that even I don’t understand a bit about. How do wormholes work/exist/function
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"golenz2",
"golficr"
],
"text": [
"Wormholes are purely theoretical, so they don't \"work\" any particular way because, as far as we know, they don't actually *exist*. If they did exist, they'd theoretically work something like this: * Hold up a sheet of paper. That's space. * Going from one end of the paper to the other end takes as long as it takes to travel across all that space. * Now fold the paper over, and pinch it with your fingers so that the two edges are touching at the spot where you're pinching. * Your pinch is a wormhole. You can go from one spot where you're pinching to the other spot where you're pinching just by stepping from one to the other, because they're touching. There's still the same amount of paper between them, but you've created a \"bridge\" shortcut connecting those two points.",
"Wormholes are still just theoretical and we have not been able to prove their existance. The concept is that since spacetime can bend it could be possible for spacetime to bend in such a way that it touches itself it an area and connects. That would mean that things could pass through such a wormhole to arrive at a completely different part of the universe. It would be like taking a shortcut. When trying to figure out how such a wormhole would look like we have applied our knowledge of the laws of physics and we can find out that a wormhole would look exactly like a black hole. We do not know if this means that all black holes are wormholes or if wormholes even exist. As for now it is more like a thought experiment but we could discover some nice uses for this theory some day."
],
"score": [
9,
7
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lrgkpp
|
Why do substances with similar chemical composition have so different physical properties?
|
For instance, graphite and diamonds are made both made of carbon atoms, the difference is in the crystal structure, but they look absolutely different and have different hardness. Take another example, iron is a gray and shiny solid, while oxygen is a colourless gas, yet oxides of iron are of red-ish colour. Why is it so?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goljs21",
"goliqk4"
],
"text": [
"You can fill a jug with legos, and then pour it out. You can build a lego castle, but then you can't pour it. If you don't have enough lego and you make a castle out of half sand and half lego. This castle won't be as strong as an all lego one. With lego you can also build a robot that has no resemblance to the castle. It all depends on how it's arranged and also connected together. With elemental iron, the atoms bond together. With rust, the atoms bond to sand. Think lego stuck to lego vs lego stuck to sand. A diamond is a very tight carbon structure, legos stuck tightly together. Graphite is legos poured onto the floor.",
"Chemistry is all about how atoms attach to each other, in oxygen atoms get together in pairs and the pairs don’t really interact with each other, so you have a gas. In iron, atoms get all together and share their electrons, so you have a pretty strong metal that conducts electricity really well, however when some oxygen comes around, now iron likes to get together with the oxygen, creating a new compound, rust (iron oxide) that has come potent different proprieties and flakes off On the other hand carbon has many different ways in which is can connect to other carbon or other molecules, which is one of the reasons all life we know of is carbon based, there are so many options. So it can atttach to other atoms in sheets, which are extremely strong, but once that’s done, the sheets don’t really connect to each other very strongly, so you actually get a really week material, graphite. If on the other hand they all connect to each other in a nice crystal, the bonds are all really strong and you have diamond. Again you can also connect that to oxygen, but the molecules you get don’t really interact with each other anymore, and you get a gas we call co2"
],
"score": [
13,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lrgruz
|
why do progressive lenses become more difficult to learn to wear as you become older?
|
I just received my first pair of progressive lenses yesterday. I gave in because I was tired of constantly switching back and forth. I was nervous because the eye doctor told me the closer you are to age 53 (I’m 51) the more likely of failure. So far it’s ok, just a little weird.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"golmxu1"
],
"text": [
"Currently am wearing a progressive lens with +1.75 for near and 0.25 for far. Am 44y and yes it took me a couple of weeks to train my brain to the view of my eyes adjusting with. But now it's easy once I wear and can use for both without having blur viewing for far away objects. The only important thing I got to is the placing it on the nose so that you don't have to keep adjusting it for reading or viewing. Hope this helps."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lripli
|
why is the US midwest called the midwest if it isn't in the midwestern part of the US?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goltrvz",
"goluwa9"
],
"text": [
"Because it was in the midwestern part of the US when the term was coined. Having been coined, the term stuck.",
"You have to remember that for most of the USA’s development, the East coast was the main population center of the country. So for a time everything west of the Appalachian mountains was “the west” or the frontier. In the late 1800s there were about the same number of people on the eastern side of the Appalachia’s as there were in the rest of the country. So as everything from Colorado to California was called “the west” or “out west”. People game up with a term for that chunk in the upper middle that wasn’t part of the south or the west or the east coast. But since it was on the way to the west people came up with “Midwest”"
],
"score": [
13,
8
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lrirco
|
What is usenet?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"golulr7",
"golvxia"
],
"text": [
"It is an old protocol leftover from the early internet, like http or ftp. It is essentally a bulliten board format and it pretty much was the internet before web pages caught on. You could access it through almost anything, usually your email program. There were/are thousands of newsgroups covering every subject you can think of, like alt.lemurs, or news.austrailia or alt.lemurs.i.hate.them or alt.share.corvette.pictures. it is completely decentralized and I think you can set up your own nodes. And noone really pays attention to it anymore. Or at least that's what it was the last time I used it like a decade ago. And the first rule of usenet is you don't talk about usenet. Now get off my lawn ya whippersnappers. :)",
"In a way it was a bit like Reddit. There were different subs or newsgroups you could subscribe to (there was no concept of \"default\" subs or anything, you had to opt-in to every single one), but once subscribed to a particular newsgroup (alt.binaries.babylon5.episodes) then your newsreader (like an email client) would start to receive posts from that newsgroup from its nearest newsgroup server. There were newsgroups for everything: tv shows, bands... sharing of software, porn, you name it. But essentially under the hood it was very similar to email - all text based. There was a practical message/post size so larger posts could be broken up into chunks or parts of a message. And, like email, there were ways of encoding binary data as ascii text... although back in the early days of binary file sharing via newsgroups, a picture would get chunked up across maybe 5/6 posts. Pretty soon newsreader apps could automatically collect all the parts of such a msg and rebuild the binary attachment automatically. There was a practical limit to how far \"back\" in a newsgroup archives you could go - it depended on how much drive storage your ISP's newsgroup server was allocated. Once we started sharing big pictures, game cracks in zip/rar form and digitized videos (tripping_the_riftS01E01 Part 1/567), most news group servers only had a few days posts in their cache, so if you wanted a particular post you'd have to post yourself asking for someone to repost what you're looking for. But just like Reddit, anyone could sub to a newsgroup and post whatever, and there weren't admins (that I recall) or anyway to moderate content. So some groups were really great because everyone contributed and behaved and others really went to shit. edit: why did they go away? web/CGI script based bulletin boards like Digg, 4chan, Slashdot sprouted up once the \"web\" really got started in the late 90s and THOSE platforms had the missing features like content filtering and moderation etc. Plus, there was no single/master newsgroup server, the server had to be put up (and paid for) by someone, usually your ISP... and as newsgroup traffic (or rather data usage) skyrocketed with binary posts, alot of ISPs would either cut out the binary groups (boring!) or lost the newsgroup server entirely. I mean why download a big binary file from 8852 chunks (what if you missed piece 487? you were screwed) when you could download it a lot faster direct from the content maker's website? It would have been like each ISP hosting their own Reddit but having to prune unpopular or too active subs because they couldn't handle the traffic/storage."
],
"score": [
13,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lrjquv
|
What causes "bobbles" ("fuzzballs") on woollen clothing, please?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gom4z5a",
"gonstwy"
],
"text": [
"Friction against the surface from things like your arms swinging, carry things that rub against the surface, leaning and brushing against things",
"LPT you can shave those bobbles off using a cheap razor. Makes your clothes look brand new again, just don't press to hard because obviously you can slice a hole right through instead!"
],
"score": [
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lrjxdg
|
What exactly is happening with our eyes/brain when the room is spinning?
|
Not due to alcohol, but if you have a head cold or vertigo & you turn too fast & you get the spinnies. Why do you see things spinning like that?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gom2sq0"
],
"text": [
"Your brain uses information from your balance system (in your ears) to figure out how you're moving your head, then uses that to \"back out\" the motion that causes in your vision so that you correctly perceive motion of outside objects. When you move your eyeballs everything on your retina moves, so your brain needs a way to figure out if that was motion due to \\*you\\* moving (not that interesting) or the object moving (very interesting). If you have a head cold or vertigo or spin, you temporarily screw up the motion sensors in your ears; they tell your brain that your head is moving when it's not (or vice versa). Your brain tries to reconcile this with your eyeballs and gets totally confused...your eyes say you're staying still, your ears say you're moving, your brain says, \"F it, I'm out of here and going to split the difference.\""
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lrk6vp
|
What is a Lie Group in Mathematics?
|
Doing a physics project on forces and need to be able to sum up what a lie group is in a few sentences. Can anybody help me out?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gom3y5f"
],
"text": [
"A Lie Group is a special type of differentiable manifold. That makes a multidimensional space, like the 3 dimensional space inside a room or the 4 dimensional spacetime of our universe. There is no requirement for 3 or 4 dimensions, so if you're a string theorist with a favorite 11 dimensional manifold, it could be a Lie Group. In addition to differentiability, a Lie Group requires smooth results from multiplication an division. That excludes some manifolds with tightly wound dimensions, as some ST folks also use."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lrksud
|
What’s the deal about Roko’s basilisk?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gom8xaj",
"gomjeid",
"gom90f8"
],
"text": [
"It's a thought experiment: * Let's say that, at some point in the future, a super-powerful AI will be created. * Once it comes into existence, it will punish everyone who *didn't* help bring it into existence. * One way it could punish them is by creating a perfect simulation of those people and then torturing those simulations forever. Those simulations wouldn't know that they were simulations - they'd believe that they're real people, living in a real world, and they'd feel the torture as if it were real. * Therefore, you must start working right now to help bring that AI into existence, to prevent the future eternal torture of those simulations. If you think that that's a dumb idea for numerous reasons, then...yeah, I'm with you.",
"So, an argument happened once on a message board for particularly smart, obsessive, and neurotic nerds. People were arguing about different ways to think about making decisions, and different ways of thinking about what \"you\" even are. A few of them came up with some ideas, one of which was that if a computer could perfectly simulate all the parts that make up \"you\", it would literally *be* you, and you would \"wake up\" inside that computer. If the original you wasn't dead, it would also still be \"out here\" - which implies that the moment the computer simulation of you was \"turned on\", you'd have like a 50/50 chance of experiencing your next moment \"outside\" or \"inside\". This led to a bunch of crazy conversations about Pascal's wager - the idea that you should pay attention to really horrible ideas that are unlikely to be true, but would be absolutely awful if they WERE true, because \"there's always a chance\". So someone named Roko came up with \"the basilisk\", which is an idea of a God that only exists if enough people create him (as an AI, obviously), and that immediately begins torturing everyone who DIDNT create him, by spawning so many different simulations of each person being tortured, that the chance that you wind up being the experience of \"out here\" is almost zero. Its basically a really stupid probability trick, and was meant to show how taking certain ideas about probability seriously would make you act crazy. So of course people started taking it seriously. Because *of course they did*.",
"Roko's Basilisk is part meme, part thought experiment. It asks the reader to assume that in the future there will be a super-intelligent, vengeful AI capable of travelling backwards in time. This AI decides to punish everyone both in the present and the past who did not directly or indirectly help make it. It's a rather ridiculous proposition so it's rarely taken seriously as that, but there is a modified version of Roko's Basilisk that's much more interesting - the idea of a basilisk that only punishes those who *knew* they could be doing more to help the basilisk. In this modified situation, anyone who never knew about the problem of Roko's Basilisk is never punished. The only people punished are those who learn about Roko's Basilisk and subsequently don't choose to help the basilisk be made. This would then make simply knowing about Roko's Basilisk a dangerous thing, and brings into question the morality of telling someone about Roko's Basilisk."
],
"score": [
11,
6,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lrl9ff
|
“Natural flavours” in food products
|
Came across a box of jelly beans today that had a white “coconut” bean on the front. On the back the ingredients state “Natural coconut flavour**” With the ** note at the bottom; **Coconut free. Can someone in the food industry ELI5 this to me? Is it really just because flavor is misspelled that the label can claim it’s natural coconut, as well as **coconut free at the same time?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gomb2ed",
"gomalw5",
"gomc3ko",
"gombhft",
"gomaumk"
],
"text": [
"Natural flavour, like natural colour, describes the origin of the substance. Natural flavours and colours are extracted, as is, from a natural source, as opposed to artificial flavours and colours that are synthesized - cooked, or undergo some other reaction. For example, a red dye that is extracted from beets is a natural colour. There is a substance that gets expressed from beaver glands that is used as a natural raspberry flavour.",
"While I can't tell you how those flavours are derived, I can confirm that flavour was not misspelled, as that seems to be colouring your assumptions. That is how it's spelled in Canada and the UK, the USA removed a u from it. Same with Colour.",
"\"Natural flavor\" has a very specific legal definition in the USA: *\"The term natural flavor or natural flavoring means the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional.\"* So if there's no actual coconut at all, then it's \"coconut free\". And if there's, say, gamma nonalactone which has been extracted from some \"fruit, herb, bark, or similar plant material\", then it's got \"natural coconut flavor\".",
"Natural flavour means it was distilled / extracted from a plant or animal or mineral. Artificial means it was created from scratch in a laboratory from more base molecular ingredients.",
"I might be wrong on this, so maybe take it with a grain of salt; but the way I've always seen it was, they probably extract the chemical components of the actual coconut that give it that specific flavor. None of the coconut itself is used in the packaged product, just the chemicals that were extracted from it."
],
"score": [
11,
8,
7,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lrm6ba
|
Why in the Scooby-Doo Cartoons they couldn't / didn't color obvious plot objects closer to the backgrounds to not be obvious?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gomgkav",
"gon6v3k"
],
"text": [
"As I understand it, the backgrounds were larger, painted images that were then animated over. This meant that anything meant to move or change couldn’t be a part of the original background image, and would have to be re-drawn for each frame it was on screen. Matching the detailed work and style of the backgrounds while drawing frames would probably have been prohibitively time consuming for a format that had strict release deadlines.",
"They were filmed on a [multiplane camera]( URL_0 ). The way these worked is that everything existed on their own little slide and the camera took a picture for each frame. You could paint the background all at once and create really impressive panning & parallax effects. Imagine a scene where a character walks on from stage left, picks up a baseball, and throws it out the window; the camera tracks the ball flying over an empty street and then smashing a window across the way. You'd have: - one layer be the background, a nicely painted picture that includes the first room, the window, the street below, and the facade of the other building - one layer for the character, which might consist of: - five frames of 'walking animation' looped together - five frames of 'grab the ball' animation - five frames of 'throw the ball' animation - one layer for the ball, which would be a single image that you reposition carefully to show the arc This approach above is about economizing artist time & making for cool camera effects. Using the multiplane camera your artist would need to draw 15 character shots, one object shot, and one detailed background shot, which are all relatively easy to do - you wouldn't need to redraw the background over & over. And, if you're doing something serial (like, say, Scooby Doo), you can build a library of reusable animation cels - one for the walking animation loop, the grab an object loop, the throw an object loop, etc. So long as you kept things like their outfits the same and kept the objects on seperate layers. This saved a _lot_ of money on animation costs. This also scales up with quality too: many of Disney's animated works were done on a multiplane camera, like the Little Mermaid. It meant they could achieve impressive tracking shots that were impossible to do otherwise by using careful gearing mechanisms create smooth motion of the background moving - something that would be challenging to get right if your artist had to redraw it repeatedly."
],
"score": [
12,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplane_camera"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lrmcfm
|
What is the vegan argument against unfertilized eggs?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gomgvx1"
],
"text": [
"I've heard two things: 1 - The bad treatment of the chickens 2 - That we've bred chickens to lay eggs daily to the detriment of their health, and that chickens naturally didn't do this."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lrmz18
|
What exactly happens when we lose our stamina after not running for a while?
|
I used to be a daily runner, then the gyms closed in March last year and I stopped completely. I recently got back into running and I get out of breath so quickly, but my quads don’t feel any kind of soreness. What exactly happened that made me lose my breath so quickly?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gomodvs",
"gonmakd",
"gooyzo2",
"gows69z"
],
"text": [
"The way I understand it is that the heart and diaphragm are muscles like any other. If you don’t use them, they will get weaker. Imagine that the amount your diaphragm can bench press is the amount of air you can successfully move in and out of your lungs. Your heart bench presses blood. When you’re diaphragm is weak, you have to take smaller, shallower breaths to compensate and your heart has to beat faster as well (which consequently also causes you to need to breathe more). I’d imagine your chest being relaxed also plays a part as it has to expand to make room for your lungs. If you don’t stretch (in this case the stretching is caused by breathing), you don’t have the flexibility, and your breaths must be shallower for this reason too. Finally, when the rest of your muscles are weaker, they have to work harder to accomplish the same task which causes them to need more resources. Imagine switching from a modern sedan with great gas mileage to a huge gas-guzzling truck that gets 5 mpg.",
"When do any form of cardiovascular exercise it puts your body into homeostatic imbalance and it is the rate at which your body can restore that balance which is effectively your level of fitness. Lots of factors affect how well your body does this such as your red blood cells affinity for carrying oxygen, how efficiently your cells convert fuel to atp etc etc. Running more will force your body to adapt to be able to restore this balance more efficiently. Long period of inactivity will do the opposite.",
"I think it has to do with number of mitochondria and myoglobin the muscle. Like white muscle vs red muscle. As you exercise more, you build more tolerance by increasing the numbers of the above two things.",
"There are several things that you need in order to run at all. First is physical mobility and coordination. This by itself is not an easy feat, which is why it required several months to learn just to stand, then years for us to master balance while moving across various terrain. Second is resource use and delivery, this is two parts: one is fuel, the other is physiological logistics. A contingent dependent to these two is EFFICIENCY. Just like physical development of movement and coordination, we only have a finite amount of energy to perform a task (before we even know that energy is needed) and the more efficient we are with our energy, the more we can perform. Efficiency can be seen through repetition of a physical task. Using a keyboard, lifting weights, running. It takes more biological energy to create movement when you are less efficient. This becomes more obvious in fine motor use between a master at something and an amateur. A way to increase efficiency is to practice by repetition methods of a particular physical task. To get better at running, you would run more. To tune that running, you could try other things, such as controlled fuel consumption and distribution during training/physical activity (i.e. restricting your breathing during training, blood doping, resistance, etc.). Delivery is tied to resource use in the basic example of breathing in air and processing oxygen extraction within the alveoli of the bronchioles. The amount of oxygen you breathe in is important, but the rate at which you can convert useable oxygen is also important. This applies to the rest of the delivery system. The basics are, air to oxygenate the blood (airway/breathing), blood stream to carry the oxygen to the organs and tissue (red blood cells), chemicals to manage organs and tissues energy use (i.e. potassium) and energy mechanisms for physiological processes (ATP - adenosine triphosphates). Increasing delivery increases oxygen, but not necessarily the distribution of other needed chemicals. When you are out of shape, your body is less efficient at managing the lactic acids produced by the work after consuming the energy provided. Through repetition of physical activities, the physiological processes become more efficient at not only delivery of resources TO the parts of the body in need, but also delivery of the chemicals produced as a byproduct of work. Excessive lactic acid and inorganic phosphate production are commonly seen as the cause of muscle fatigue. In addition to this process, there's also the process of managing organic/native energy stores within the body (i.e. fat). For the sake of simplicity, I'm only talking about the fat the body maintains to use as energy - not all fat can be used as energy. This is why you can be super fit and have pockets of fat that just don't seem to disappear. Although we can become more efficient through training and repetition, there are mutations and natural physiological changes that can occur that we just cannot adapt to our energy processing workflow. How efficient you are with the energy you have to consume will define the duration you're able to perform work (stamina). Increasing efficiency happens naturally over repeating a process... even if the process itself isn't the most efficient, performing a task with a specific process will increase efficiency using that specific process (i.e. running backwards will increase your ability to run backwards for longer distances over time, but it won't necessarily increase your ability to run forward at the same rate - task specific stamina is a real thing). Another thing to consider is the physical changes that happen over time as you repeat a physical task. Sometimes this might be \"muscle memory\", other times it can be a change to which muscles grow at what-rates. There are likely several other mechanisms and contributing processes that add to this explanation, but this is my non-professional human-enthusiasts' point of view. So not having the stamina at your peak performance is directly related to your condition and efficiency. Even things we think are simple require stamina for that simple thing and a lack of stamina will become quite apparent when you attempt to perform that task (like watching kids may seem easy, but trust me - it's tiring as heck; however, you will find seasoned mothers who seem to balance an inordinate amount of child care and household tasks with relative ease!). I may have explained this like you were 13 and not 5 - apologies. I need help editing this down to a 5 year old explanation."
],
"score": [
28,
5,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lroidc
|
How do the effects of ketamine treatments for mental illness work?
|
I, 42F Canada, start twice-weekly ketamine treatments for bipolar disorder and I just don’t quite understand what getting high, tripping for two hours and then going home is going to accomplish in the long run? What makes this different than what could be achieved through recreational drug use?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gon5vbf"
],
"text": [
"Your brain uses chemicals called neurotransmitters to increase or decrease activity in different parts of your brain. Different chemicals activate different nerves. Recreational drugs can affect your brain in ways that are similar to neurotransmitters. Different recreational drugs affect different nerves. Ketamine affects nerves that respond to a neurotransmitter called glutamate. Magic mushrooms affect nerves that respond to serotonin. Cocaine affects nerves that respond to dopamine. Getting high and tripping on one drug doesn’t affect the brain the same exact way that another drug behaves. You may have heard that recreational drugs can have long-term effects on your brain. Many of these effects are unhealthy and undesirable. But there is recent evidence that ketamine may have a beneficial effect on the brains of people with depression if the person is given the drug at the correct dose for the correct amount of time. Too much or too little will not help a depressed person, the levels of ketamine have to be just the right amount for just the right length of time. The antidepressant effect that ketamine may have when administered correctly by a medical professional is not caused by the experience of tripping or having hallucinations. It just so happens that the amount of ketamine necessary to be just the right amount for treating depression is usually large enough that some tripping (also known as “dissociation”) may happen as a pleasant side effect. If a recreational drug does not work on the nerves that respond to glutamine, then it will absolutely not have the same beneficial antidepressant effect that properly administered ketamine has been discovered to have. Mushrooms or LSD are not interchangeable with ketamine because they do not work on the nerves that respond to glutamate. Recreational use of ketamine is not the same or as safe as therapeutic ketamine treatment. Go to r/therapeuticketamine for more general information on this. Also, the antidepressant effect that can be achieved by a medical professional with therapeutic ketamine therapy is not permanent. You have to have maintenance treatments from time to time."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lroqh8
|
Tax write offs
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gon092h",
"gon42gf"
],
"text": [
"Yes, you are correct for personal deductions. Write-offs are more in play for people who own small businesses or are independent contractors/consultants, since their taxes are based on revenue - expenses = profits. Take an iPhone as an example... pretty much anybody with a business needs a phone. Rather than needing to earn $1,500 in income to have enough post-tax income to buy a $1000 iPhone that's almost $1100 with sales tax, you instead buy it as a business expense and reduce your taxable income by $1100, actually saving yourself taxes by buying the phone. Same with a car lease, if you use it for business purposes. Or say you're a doctor going to a medical conference in Hawaii, and tack on a vacation with your wife and can deduct many of the expenses for the trip.",
"This surely is not be the place, but dammit I can’t help myself... Kramer explains write-offs to Jerry URL_0"
],
"score": [
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://youtu.be/XEL65gywwHQ"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
lrp6yu
|
why are infants/children playful? (Humans and animals alike)
|
Just saw a video of a baby elephant playing with its family and it makes me wonder why we do it. Also sorry if biology isn’t the best flair for this question ^
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gomyw8v",
"gonxq0w"
],
"text": [
"Playing helps build social bonds, physical coordination, muscle functions needed for life skills and survival.",
"Problem solving, fine motor development, language development, boundaries, and a host of other things are all tied* back to (human) play. I read once where it takes the average kid less time to learn new skills if it’s taught through play than through memorization. I could go on and on about this. Preschool teacher of a play-based center. It’s all about play!!"
],
"score": [
8,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lrpd8q
|
How does calculators actually solve the math problem?
|
How do they know the solution? I can’t really wrap my head around it, there are tons of different math problems, so how do they know every single answer?
|
Mathematics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gon0hdw",
"gomzuaw",
"gomzk1o",
"gon0hiw",
"gon0lww"
],
"text": [
"They don't know the solution. The have rules built into them that allows them to calculate the solution. To start with the simplest example, suppose we want to add numbers. Inside a calculator you represent the numbers by having voltage on a wire or not having voltage. This is the 1 and 0. We could then hook together transistors so they could take the two wires coming in, and make it so the wires coming out represent addition. 0+0=00 1+0=01 0+1=01 1+1=10 (2 in binary) This circuit is called a \"binary adder\". You can daisy chain these together to get as many digits are required. Every other operation that a calculator can do uses this same sort of process of hooking together transistors in a logical way so that you get the correct outcome. For a fairly intuitive example using dominoes instead of electrical components, [check out this Numberphile video]( URL_0 ).",
"It's not about knowing every single answer. It's about knowing the process of obtaining the answer. As an example. It knows what happens when you add two numbers together, it doesn't have to remember the answer to every addition problem.",
"Every mathematical expression is made up of a series of basic operations that can be done one after another to arrive at the result. Exactly how you'd do it.",
"URL_0 This is a physical representation of logic gates utilized to add numbers, using marbles and gravity. Calculators do the same thing, roughly, with transistors and electricity but incredibly far more complex, with elegant tricks for recreating calculations.",
"They don't have a list of all possible answers, they work through the math more or less the same way you would work it out on paper. You can build hardware that does addition(take a look at URL_0 ), and a multiplication problem can be reduced to a few addition problems (long multiplication). There are a few things that might just be stored, constants like pi or e, maybe a lookup table for sine cosine, etc. What you store vs what you calculate from scratch depends on how cheap storage is and how difficult it is to calculate every time you need it."
],
"score": [
11,
10,
9,
6,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNuPy-r1GuQ"
],
[],
[],
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcDshWmhF4A"
],
[
"nandgame.com"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lrpog6
|
Why does it seem like every year is the year of cicadas emerging after 20 years of dormancy?
|
I’m only 27 and I feel like I’ve heard about cicadas emerging en mass, like a dozen times.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gon1ynz",
"gon82gy",
"gon29fe",
"gon1e9f",
"goncbtm"
],
"text": [
"See this site URL_0 There is more than one brood and they are located in different parts of the US. So one area may be talking about them and 100 miles to the west they are not emerging",
"Colonies of cicadas survive by the age old \"safety in numbers.\" If an entire colony emerges en mass, then some will be eaten but most will survive. So, they hibernate for some number of years, and then appear altogether. However, neighbouring colonies will run on different cycles. So, colony A might emerge after, say 5 years, and then colony B the following year after 7. We humans have a regular sleep cycle, called out circadian rhythm. It's the same word origin :) Now, here's the trick. If two colonies appeared together, they might cross-breed. This might lead to offspring emerging after a weird number of years in smaller numbers. This would be bad, as they'd be easier to hunt and eat. So, to avoid this, they've evolved to have prime number cycles. If A and B have 5 and 7 year cycles, they'll cross paths every 5x7=35 years, as this is the lowest common multiple (the smallest number in the 5 and 7 times tables). But if they had 6 and 8, well you might expect it to be better because they are bigger numbers. But no, the lowest common multiple of 6 and 8 is 24, so they'd cross paths after 24 years!",
"There are numerous cicada subspecies with varying life cycle lengths. Some are 2 years, some 5, some 7, some 13, and some 17.",
"They probably don’t always start the cycle at the same time in different geographical areas",
"Besides what others have said, there also are annual cicadas that come out each year. So just because you see/hear cicadas, does not mean they are a part of one of the long dormant species."
],
"score": [
30,
25,
13,
9,
8
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.fs.fed.us/foresthealth/docs/CicadaBroodStaticMap.pdf"
],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lrqrpw
|
Where is the line in skill learning between Conscious Incompetent vs. Conscious Competent?
|
I'm learning about the [Four Stages of Competence]( URL_0 ), but one thing alludes me. If I'm learning a physical skill like dancing or boxing, where's the line between Conscious Incompetent and Conscious Competent? - Is it when I can do the move 100%, but it takes focus? - Is it after I follow the trainer, learn the move, and can do it super slowly?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gonb7za"
],
"text": [
"It's not a line, it's a gradient. As you practice, you should get better, but it doesn't happen all at once, and each time you attempt the task, you might fail at different parts. As well, being as good as possible is not necessarily competence, you might be competent well before that point. You can't think of learning as a straight line graph of competence vs. time put in. It's much more chaotic, sometimes you just have a fluke where you do it perfectly, sometimes you get in your own head and can't complete the task that you normally are able to do."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lrrdbm
|
How does a Paraglider fly upwards
|
I know about how hawks use the heat from field to fly upwards, but do Paraglider work on the same principle? I was snowboarding and when we got to the tip of the mountain there were a couple of people who where flying down and suddenly up again. Now I am asking myself where they just using the updraft or is there engineering at work. I hope for a explanation how they work, for example compared to a glider plane or to kites used for ... Kiting Thx.
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gondjtj"
],
"text": [
"There could be a draft, but gliders are like big giant wings. If I’m not mistaken they have some kind of way to either control the glider itself, or some kind of flap or something that lets them tip upwards. They’ll natural just drift up, but lose some speed. Kites would probably be a simple comparison."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lrs82c
|
why do we get random "good stares"?
|
What i mean is, its not like like when you're staring through something because you're thinking...maybe it's just because you're tired? But sometimes, I'll find myself (and I know others go through this too) will just have this good stare at nothing in particular and you don't even want to blink or move your gaze away. Its almost like you're having a staring contest with nothing. What causes our eyes and/or brain to do this?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"goof77g",
"gop8iuj",
"goniium",
"goou3t8"
],
"text": [
"Lmao I get what you mean, like it feels good to zone out for a minute. I don’t know any exact science on it if there is but what I’m assuming is that it feels good because you’re literally not thinking about anything at all and it feels like your brain basically turns off for a quick sec. Meditation is all about that pretty much and that’s why meditating is good for you.",
"Basically you're relaxing the muscles in your eyes properly and it just feels nice - like the eyeball equivalent of lying down after a long day. Some people can do this on command \\[[link]( URL_0 )\\]. When you stare at something for a long period of time (like a computer screen for example), you will generally blink less. You might notice that if you've been staring at a screen for a long time you have to force yourself to blink, or after long periods of screen time your eyes have trouble focusing.",
"Fatigue? As a Diabetic, I get this when my blood sugars are dropping too low.",
"Cause our day to day reality could be a whole lot better if we weren't all repeating the same routine everyday working all the time to stay afloat, I honestly think its a coping mechanism.. Our ancestors would probably stop to admire a beautiful landscape or something interesting they saw every now and then but we just get to admire a wall.."
],
"score": [
6,
4,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://www.healthline.com/health/eye-health/can-everyone-unfocus-their-eyes"
],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lrsyg1
|
How do bones grow?
|
Tonight my son (3 1/2) was playing with his 9m old sister and noticed that his arms were longer. He asked why and I said he was older and had grown more. Then, because I apparently didn't feel dumb and caught off-gaurd enough in his eyes he said, "How do my bones grow?" I told him I didn't know, would ask some very nice internet people, and get back to him. And before the 8 million "bone" jokes roll in, I'll be enjoying those myself. Thanks in advance!
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gono136",
"gonh8vg"
],
"text": [
"Your bones start off soft when you're a baby and grow stronger and longer as you get older. There are parts of your bones that stay soft a little longer (growth plates), and thats where the new bone comes in, and when it closes all the soft parts, you stop growing!",
"There are places on bones called growth plates, which lengthen the bones by just growing more cells and continuing the bone structure."
],
"score": [
12,
8
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
lrtkdo
|
Why does painkillers numb headaches or muscular pain, but not the pain from something like stubbing your toe while they're active?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gonom5v"
],
"text": [
"Painkillers reduce pain by blocking inflammation. Inflammation involves the release of signals by damaged cells that tell the body hey this area is damaged and we need to direct resources here until things get better. Some of these signal molecules travel to nearby pain nerves to send a pain signal to the brain (others dilate blood vessels, call in white blood cells, call in repair cells etc) This effect is not instant, it takes a while for the medicine to find its way to the area is needs to go. Thus stabbing your toe happens so fast that the painkiller wont have enough time to act. It will however reduce the lasting pain from that stubbed toe minutes to hours after it happens."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
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