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m2rskn | Why are human males designed like video game monsters by having a weak point on the outside of the body, testicles. Why is such a painful and sensitive organ just dangling outside of our bodies instead of protected inside a shell like a brain? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Temperature control. Sperm actually develop best at a temperature lower than average body temperature. The scrotum not only allows testicles to be cooler than the body, but also to move closer or further away",
"Testicles are super sensitive to temperature changes, hence why there's so much expansion and contraction capabilities down there. If they were internal your body wouldn't be able to regulate temperature nearly as well, so instead it made them super sensitive so you are better incentived to actively work towards protecting them.",
"Humans are in no way \"designed\", we've evolved through trial and error via evolution. It has a function, making sperm, and that function requires sperm to be kept at a lower temperature than the body's core temperature. This is important because sperm have to operate in parts of a woman which can be below her core temperature. Her eggs, on the other hand are always safe and warm inside her core. It's sensitive to impacts in order to teach the owner to protect it from damage which could prevent his contribution to future generations.",
"It’s kind of an evolutionary glitch with all mammals (not just humans). Testicles can only function properly at a temperature slightly lower than normal body temperature. Hence they have to hang out for some air cooling. Some persons have a condition with testicles staying fully or partially inside their scrotum - it’s a prime factor for testicle cancer due to heat damage. The organ is painful and sensitive exactly because it’s so exposed and important at the same time - so that males will take care to keep it out of harm’s way.",
"If living things can survive long enough to have babies, they will pass on their genes. Having the genitals outside the body in the current arrangement does not affect the ability to have babies, so the trait is passed onto the next generation. If a male were to have a mutation to cause a protective genital arrangement that did not affect his health or ability to reproduce, the genes for this would be passed onto the next generation. If this arrangement gave males a competitive advantage to have babies over males with non protected genitals, this mutated gene would be passed on more. Eventually the protected genital gene would be passed on enough for it to become a common trait. But because the current genital arrangement does not affect reproduction, the genes and physical trait of non protected genitals are still present in the population",
"There is also a hypothesis I was taught that basically says sometimes really disadvantageous features become the norm in an organism as a sign of showing off just how successful the organism is as a whole. Basically having testicles in such a vulnerable location forces the male to go above and beyond to care for them, to protect them and keep them free from harm. This demonstrates to potential mates that the male is such a successful creature that it can cope with obvious disadvantages and still survive.",
"Sperm production and storage requires slightly below normal body temperature. Keeping them inside is really hard, because your body would have to spend a lot of energy trying to keep them cool. On the other hand, they can just be air cooled. Muscles can pull them closer to the body as needed to keep them warm. Your morphology is also dependent on the changes already present from your ancestors. Making an entirely separate body part to share sperm is hard. Instead, animals evolved to use their already present urethra and connect the testicles to that. That means your testicles have to be near your urethra, which is between your legs for a couple reasons, not least of which is its distance away from your mouth and nose. Your testicles are about as protected as they can be, given all that. They're protected by your legs and thighs. Adrenaline will encourage your testicles to retract up closer to the body for even more protection."
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m2s9kw | How do shopping bots exactly work and what’s the best way to get rid of them? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's usually just a form of automation. They watch the store page for an item to be in stock, possibly with some limits like max price or something, and complete the order form with pre-configured information (like address, payment info, etc). Because it's an automated system, they can do this 24/7 without taking any breaks, which greatly increases the chances they're able to make a purchase before regular customers are. As for getting rid of them - you ultimately can't. You can add measures that make it more difficult to automate (like CAPTCHAs - those annoying images you sometimes have to decypher, or find all the images with a mountain in them or whatever)....but as with most software systems it's a constant cat and mouse game. Unless you involve real people being face-to-face to make a purchase, a vast majority of anti-bot measures can be defeated with more complex bots if the author is determined enough."
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m2sv9x | Why do they make power adapters so large that it’s difficult/impossible to plug something into the adjacent plug? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Laziness and to save money. Adaptors are ubiquitous and very inexpensive and a well designed small adaptor need not cost a lot more. Most of these adaptors are sourced-in. Few companies bother to design them from the ground up. At most, they will send out an external drawing/industrial design and some reference material or finish required. There are good companies that spend the time to spec out adaptors that work well, fit their aesthetic and are small. They will spend a few dollars more to get it right. You have to spend more to get efficient, small form factor adaptors. Others just cheap out. You can get an off-the-shelf adaptor sourced with some custom labels/screen print and pay just a few dollars. (I've sourced OEM adaptors for less than 3 bucks in volume) Often times a smaller company just won't spend the resources and assign some junior buyer/sourcing person to bring in a couple of catalogs to pick from.",
"They don't design them to intentionally block adjacent plugs. They are that size because that's what's necessary to cheaply convert the incoming AC into the required DC for the device you're plugging in. They can do this either directly at the plug and keep the wire uniform all the way to the device, or they can make the types of cables often seen in laptops, with those large blocks along the cable. On smaller devices (that don't require as much power), those blocks are small enough you can put it right at the plug and only cause *some* issues such as blocking a nearby plug or two. The alternative is to move it down the cable so you have a smaller plug, but this adds more room for failure (you have two connection points - one for each side of the block, instead of just one coming out of the block). For some devices, like laptops, the block is virtually always too large to put on the plug, which is why they have the blocks halfway down the cable.",
"They make quite slim ones, but they cost more. Most manufacturers don't see sales dropping because people love their phone and hate its wall wart. As a result they go with the fat+cheap ones.",
"It’s like $5 to offset the cost to the consumer with a [mini extension cable]( URL_0 ). I’m sure there are better prices out there but I would agree that manufacturers should be required to have the power block down wire. I wonder what the exceptions would need to be.",
"Something else to consider is a lot of countries (especially countries that use 240v supplies) have bigger plug sockets that are spaced further apart, so large power adapters actually fit just fine. Companies always looking to save money aren't going to make a special, more expensive adapter with a cable for countries with small us-style outlets.",
"To have safety approvals (UL or similar) if you have another line-voltage cord that also has to be tested and approved separately and as a part of the assembly. Eliminate the extra cord by putting the male plug directly on the power supply box, solved, faster time to market. Also saves a couple feet of thicker copper wire which is also expensive. And one less detachable cord to lose somewhere / incorrectly package / etc. Otherwise if the supplier or construction of the line-voltage cord changes they have to re-apply and re-test the safety of the combined unit again."
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m2tmmf | When you block one end of a straw why does the liquid stay in place/in the straw? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are three main forces at work here. The first is a force called capillary action. In short, this is the tendency for a cohesive fluid (cohesive meaning it's sticky to itself and holds together, like water) to cling to the walls of the inside of a tube and generate an upwards force. This upward force combined with the waters surface tension, another product of waters cohesive properties, allow the fluid to stay intact inside of the straw instead of just running off and separating like oil would. The second is gravity, which obviously pulls the fluid towards the ground the third is suction, which causes the air pressure in the straw to drop as the water is pulled away by gravity. after a short drop, the pressure is low enough to provide a suction force powerful enough to suspend the fluid. so basically, capillary action and cohesion keep the fluid together, and gravity combined with suction keep the fluid in place by pulling in opposite directions.",
"The liquid can not go out unless something else goes in to replace it. Normally, that would be air - but if you block the other end, then you're blocking the air from getting in at that end, and the water itself is blocking the air from getting in at the other end.",
"If the liquid fell out of the straw, that could create vacuum unless the vacuum could be filled by something else. But air can't get in from the bottom, because the liquid is in the way, and it can't get in from the top, since your finger is in the way. So instead, the liquid of the straw is held up by air pressure at the bottom pushing upwards and a combination of weight and the normal force from your finger pushing downwards."
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m2uf63 | How do holograms work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Light has wave-like properties. One of those properties is wavefront interference. That means two beams of light can combine to make either more light than the individual beams or less light. (Sound also does this, that's how noise-cancelling headphones work.) The most basic idea of a hologram is to arrange light so that when the intersection of two beams is viewed from different angles the resulting interference pattern looks like what you see when you look at a 3D object. This looks like a 3D \"image\" but it's not an object, you can wave your hand through it."
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m2uni5 | Why are Humans afraid of Cockroaches? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, we associate them with filthiness. Also, they make weird noises and they're very difficult to get rid of.",
"cockroaches specifically possibly because they can spread disease. but the reason we're afraid of insects/spiders in general is for a couple reasons. one is that some of them can actually pose a threat; anything venomous or disease carrying like mosquitos could kill you, and before medical care anything that bites/stings could result in an infection. the second is just that they're really weird. they look like incredibly alien, move really fast, and sometimes live in swarms. Any of these traits would be pretty scary in any animal, not just insects, so having all of them sets off a lot of red flags in our brains.",
"They can nibbing on your leftovers and spread diseases. They prefer hiding in dark places and can crawl out when you dont expect to",
"I can't recall exactly which studies showed this (covered in my freshman psychology course), but viewing sharp, spiky, bug-like shapes provoked a fear response in the part of the brain responsible for fight or flight (the amygdala). Basically, the brain has evolved in a way where it sees an insect or arachnoid shape and has an instinctual burst of fear. Whether this happened due to the venomous qualities of some insects or for another reason, we're not really sure.",
"Reason 1) Small, scuttley, crawly. Monkey brain recognizes bug, and monkey brain doesn't like bugs because might be poisonous. Hides in walls and under things, so hard to watch out for. Can sneak up on you and you won't even know until you feel the tickle in your body hair. Makes paranoid. Reason 2) Lives in gross places. Is gross. If you see one, there is probably a rotting mess somewhere nearby, and those spread diseases. Therefore, gross bug - > disease - > not safe."
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m2w3ig | What is diffusion? | Hello, so far the only thing I understand about diffusion is that it’s the net movement of particles from a higher concentration to a lower concentration. I would love an explanation with an example with real life situations and also could you explain to me what it’s mean by higher concentration and lower conc. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine that you have a pool with a net in the middle. You fill one side of the pool with plastic balls. That side has a much higher concentration of balls than the other side which has none at all. Then you remove the net, what's going to happen? The balls will spread throughout the pool. That is, they will diffuse. This diffusion will happen until the balls are approximately evenly spread out through the pool. At that point the concentration of balls is equal in all parts of the pool.",
"Diffusion just means “spreading out” into something else. When you put a cube of sugar in some tea, the sugar diffuses into the tea. The cube slowly disappears as the sugar breaks off and spreads throughout the tea. Alternatively, you could say that the tea diffuses into the sugar cube. It’s just a matter of perspective. In terms of high/low concentrations, the cube has a high concentration of sugar (I mean, it’s a *sugar* cube. What did you expect?) and a low concentration of tea. The tea starts with a much lower concentration of sugar, but a much higher concentration of tea (incredible as it may seem, the concentration of tea in tea is 100%. There is 1 mL of tea in every mL of tea). Over time, sugar and the tea reach an equilibrium. The cube (or rather, the space that the cube used to be in) becomes diffused with tea, while the rest of the tea becomes diffused with sugar."
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m2woc7 | If sodiums explosive when it reacts with water why does adding salt to water for cooking do nothing? | At what point does all this happen? the ocean IS salt water. what am i missing here? throwing salt on ice cubes doesnt do anything either. lol. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's pure sodium that violently reacts with water. The sodium in the ocean and that we eat is sodium sodium chloride which is a more stable molecule so it doesn't explode our faces.",
"Pure sodium is explosive because it really doesn't want to be alone. It wants to be bonded to something else. Inside of a salt molecule the sodium atom is bonded to a chlorine atom and it's very stable so there's no explosion when you put salt into water. But pure sodium will bond to other atoms so aggressively that a lot of energy is produced in the reaction. The resulting compound will be stable but the creation of that compound will cause an explosion.",
"Elemental sodium reacts with water. Normal table salt (there are lots of other different types of slats) is sodium that has already reacted with chlorine. So it won't react with the water. Just like how water is made up of oxygen and hydrogen both are highly reactive chemicals that tend to cause fires. But you use water to put out fires.",
"Pure sodium metal is different from sodium chloride(salt). Just like pure hydrogen and oxygen gas is different from dihydrogen monoxide(water) when you compound elements it creates a different molecule that acts completely differently than the pure elements it made of.",
"Because \"sodium\" and \"sodium chloride\" are completely different substances with completely different properties. The properties of a compound are not just the properties of all of its individual molecules added together - the process of forming the compound to begin with means something changed, so the compound's properties also change.",
"\"Salt\" covers a lot of territory. Technically speaking a salt is anything formed by an acid and a base reacting where the hydrogen has been replaced by a cation (usually a metal). Now what that means is that sodium is not, technically, a salt on its own. It's a common component of salt molecules, including sodium chloride, NaCl, which is what we call table salt. Now an atom or molecule has what you can think of as connectors hanging off of it. Those connectors interact with certain other atoms and molecules in ways that are determined largely by how many connectors it has and how they're arranged. Sodium has a very...energetic reaction with water because the way the connectors interact tears apart the bonds in a chunk of pure sodium and those bonds release a bunch of energy as they break. BUT when you add another atom, like chlorine in table salt, it completely changes the connector setup the new molecule has. Specifically it has an arrangement that doesn't get torn apart and release energy in the same way. When the connectors change, the reaction changes as well, often drastically."
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m2wrh7 | What part of a photon is a wave? What part of a lightwave is a particle? | Do photons just "bounce" their way around the cosmos? Is each photon on a direct trajectory but the series of them move in a wave pattern? Does each photon have an electromagnetic field that resonates or something? Just realized I've never learned precisely how light is both a particle and wave, meaning which part of it exhibits which. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Neither, there is no distinction between particle and wave. There is just the photon, and it can be described with particle motion in some contexts, and described with wave motion in others. As an example, if you have a [Double Slit Experiment]( URL_0 ) and can let one photon through at a time, you'll find that each photon hits the wall at one place (like a particle), but when you repeat it enough times, the distribution of them gives you an interference pattern (like a wave), even though there's only ever one photon present at one time.",
"The problem is that photons aren't a thing we can relate to directly...they aren't waves or particles, they're...photons. They have some properties that look like waves and some properties that look like particles but they \\*aren't\\* waves or particles, those are just the best analogies we have to relate to what they actually are. It's kind of like saying, \"What part of an airplane is a boat and what part is a car?\". It has boat-like parts (fins, a hull, a pilot, etc.) and car-like parts (wheels, doors, steering) but it's neither, it's an airplane."
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m2yrmw | What are the benefits of reading? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One of the big ones is that it gives you access to the knowledge that the entire human race has collected over its history.",
"One benefit of reading is being able to read the responses when you ask ELI5 what the benefits of reading are.",
"Increased vocabulary, visualization skills and the ability to see things from a different perspective ....to name a few."
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m2ys8z | Why is there so many languages existing, spawning, and dying in Papua New Guinea? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are an estimated 8 million people in Papa New Guinea who live in small jungle villages of no more than a few hundred people. Those villages exist in a minimally contacted state - they've never been formally surveyed, there are no roads leading to them, and there is no official communication with anyone living in them. Each of those villages has its own culture and language. That doesn't mean that the languages are completely unintelligible to one another. Its more of a language gradient - someone from the Northwest of the country won't be able to understand someone from the Southeast. But that same person wouldn't have a problem with someone from an adjacent village and would be able to communicate, albeit with difficulty, with someone living 50 miles away. Under these conditions defining a distinct language is pretty difficult, but there are probably hundreds to thousands of them. The country is currently urbanizing. This means that people are abandoning those villages and moving to the cities. When they move into the cities they learn to speak a pigdin language that is a sort of mix of the major indigenous languages in the country. If a village empties out into an urban area and the village's residents start speaking pigdin and you defined the language that the village previously spoke as being a distinct language then at that point the language dies off."
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m2zel9 | Why when doing something mundane, like walking or pumping up a tire, in public do we feel so conscious/weird/embarrassed? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Human seek to identify patterns. Because we are social creatures and want to fit in. So doing something different might feel off."
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m2zjf0 | What makes certain poisons/toxins lethal at small doses? | I'm not sure if it has been exaggerated but I remember watching certain stuff that certain toxins/poisons are deadly that the dose could kill thousands, if not hundreds, of people. I know what they could doto your body like paralyze your brain or damage your nervous system and such yet I cannot comprehend why it takes a small dose for them to do it. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Usually these poisons can be so deadly at such a low dose because they’re very similar to an enzyme. A typical poisonous chemical like carbon monoxide can only react once. The CO molecule binds to an oxygen carrier protein and disables it. To disable all the oxygen carriers, you need a lot of CO molecules to block them up. Chemicals that are extremely poisonous at very low doses can disable an important molecule *without* disabling itself too. A single toxin molecule can knock out hundreds or thousands of critical body chemistry molecules in rapid succession and keep doing this for hours because it resets after every reaction."
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m2zuos | Why do we sometimes only breathe out of one nostril at a time? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is called the [nasal cycle]( URL_0 ). It's a constant cycle where one half of our nasal cavity expands while the other contracts, so the majority of air is only ever inhaled through one at a time. This cycle has two main functions: 1. It helps our sense of smell. Some odor chemicals need longer to properly react with our smell receptors, while some react right away. One nostril being fully open allows for air to be inhaled quickly, but the other one being restricted lets air in slower. Having low and high airflow at once lets us detect a greater range of smells. 2. It helps improve the air quality that we breathe. Periodically switching between both nostrils ensures that the fully open one is always moist. One of the main functions of the nose is to humidify the air we breathe, which is why the nose produces mucus in the first place. Mucus adds moisture to the air, which is good for the lungs."
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m30cfo | Where do dimensions come from? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They don't \"come from\" anywhere in the sense that they're not *objects* - they're *measurements*. Draw a square. It has two dimensions: height and width. The dimensions didn't \"come from\" anywhere because they're just properties of the square. The *square* came from somewhere because it's a thing that exists - it came from you drawing it.",
"Each dimension can define one physical description of an object on a number line. We live in 3 dimensions.",
"Dimensions come from *math*. The concept of a 'dimension' is based on a way of trying to represent the world we live in using numbers, specifically for capturing the concept of *independent* directions of motion. We say that we live in a 3 dimensional space because when you try moving you can move in 3, but not 4, independent directions of motion. How much more of an explanation do you need?"
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m30jyu | The great attractor. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Let's zoom out, the Earth and our Planets orbit the Sun. The Sun and the other stars in our Galaxy orbit what is likely a black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The Milky Way Galaxy then fits into a cluster of other Galaxies called the Virgo Cluster. The Virgo Cluster of galaxies fits in with other clusters called the Virgo Supercluster. The Virgo Supercluster fits with other Superclusters into what we call the Local Group. The Local Group is a part of the Laniakea supercluster. So you can at least imagine that Laniakea is large beyond any comprehension. Just like Earth orbits the sun, it's believed that Laniakea has some sort of super-massive gravitational center that it's constituent superclusters are attracted to. Astromers can't actually *see* what this attractor is but they can infer it's presence by how it tugs and pulls around Laniakea. The reason why astronomer's can't see the Great Attractor directly is because it's located directly through the center on the far side of the Milky Way.",
"TL/DR: Its just a normal cluster of galaxies, there's nothing *actually* mysterious about it but we couldn't see it until 1999 so it became a sort of astronomy pop culture mystery. Until 1999 it was only possible for humanity to observe the universe by looking at visible light and certain very long wave length radio waves. Visible light can't penetrate dust, Since the center of the Milky Way is filled with dust we can't see anything on the other side of the galaxy. Very long wave length radio waves have a very, very low resolution. Think of the difference between visible light and VLWL radio waves as being like the difference between taking a picture on a 100 megapixel phone and a 1 pixel phone. With the 100 megapixel phone you can see a lot of detail. With the 1 pixel phone all you can see is a single dot of white or black. So we could technically image the Great Attractor with VLWL radio waves, but all that told us was that, yes, there was matter in the direction of the Great Attractor. While we couldn't see the Great Attractor in any meaningful detail, we could see all of the Galaxies that are above and below ours, and from viewing those it became apparent that everything nearby was moving in the direction of the mysterious object that we couldn't see. In 1999 NASA launched the Chandra X-ray Telescope into outer space. X-rays can penetrate the dust at the center of the galaxy *and* produce a much higher quality picture than visible light. With the Chandra Telescope we were able to take pictures of the Great Attractor, which is actually just a galaxy cluster called the Norma Cluster. There is nothing particularly special about the Norma Cluster. Similar galaxy clusters exist all over the universe. Also, as it turns out, the Norma Cluster is just sitting in front of the Shapely Supercluster, which is an even larger galaxy cluster, and its actually the Shapely Supercluster that we're moving towards."
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m30s15 | Why do some foods taste better hot as opposed to eating it cold? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Warm things give off more scent and vapors, and scent is a major part of your sense of taste. It varies for different foods because some of them rely on aroma more than others. This is why marketing your Coors as tasting the best when it’s ice cold is really admitting that the flavor is so bad than you have to suppress it to make it drinkable."
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m30xbe | how does vga, dvi,hdmi, displayport,usb control each pixel of a monitor if the cable doesn't seem to have a wire for each and every pixel? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The cable is carrying a mostly serial signal...it's not sending data for every pixel at once, it's sending one or several pixels at a time (but so fast that the monitor can draw the whole display 60+ times per second). It's like how we can read a novel despite only looking at one page at a time...we read the pages in sequence and then we have the whole novel.",
"They sent every pixel information one after another. That is why if you film an very old tv you can see the screen building. [here is a slow mo video with a good explanation]( URL_0 )"
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m31c9v | Why does the body bring tears to your eyes when choking? What is the practical purpose? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The choking reflex helps us survive, and as such it overdoes it from time-to-time, like our Flight/Fight/Freeze instinct does. First, it triggers coughing and mouth/throat secretions for lubrication. The secretory motor system, as a byproduct, brings tears to your eyes. It's flushing everything it can as fast as it can to get whatever is blocking your airway to dislodge. The coughing thing isn't even a regular cough, it's a super-violent kind of cough that actually sends air up into your tear ducts, which A) hurts like a mother and B) causes more tears. Normally this wouldn't be a big problem, happens all the time. We've got a neat little system in our tear ducts has these plugs (punctum) that stop the air from coming up and lets the tears we normally produce to wet our eyes drain down into our noses. But the sheer violence of the choking reflex shoots up so much pressure that it reverses the whole system, making the tears coming down our noses shoot back up. More tears."
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m31sbf | Can you replace sweating by getting yourself sprayed with water? | I saw a short of a marathon in extreme heat. The runners got spray with water to cool them down. Does this replace the effect of sweating? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In a way. As long as there is a liquid evaporating on your skin you're shedding significant amounts of heat. It doesn't matter if that liquid is pure water or sweat. Mind you, your body isn't suddenly going to stop *producing* sweat, but getting splashed with water will definitely augment your body's own cooling abilities in the short term.",
"Spraying yourself with water have the exact same effect as sweating. It helps the body cool down in exactly the same way. However your body may not stop producing sweat even if you are submerged in water as the sweating is often determined by internal body temperature which may still be high. And you also use a lot of water when you are active for more then just sweating. So while being sprayed with water is a good thing when you are doing physical exercise you still need to drink water as well."
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m32jg2 | What's the difference between a central line and an IV? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A central line (CVC) is much longer and ends up all the way near the heart, or even just inside the heart. It's used when you need to give medicine/fluids that would harm smaller veins, especially when you need a large volume. It can also be used to take blood tests or run nutrition."
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m32nq2 | Piers Morgan debacle? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"He bad mouthed Meghan for years after she ghosted him. She said in her recent Oprah interview that her mental health suffered to the point of suicidal thoughts. Piers said he didn’t believe her. Lots of people called him out for those remarks. A colleague on his show called him out live in air and after a couple of minutes he left the set, later quit the show entirely.",
"Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan have for some years now been distancing themselves from the rest of the royal family and the British people. They are currently living in the US and have expressed that they do not want to become King and Queen as would normally be the case. They recently did an interview with Oprah Winfrey where they were open about their issues with the press, mental illness and even racism from other members of the royal family. And this interview which featured three of the wealthiest privileged celebrities in the world complaining about how hard life is have gotten some strong reactions. You can either interpret it as people who are so out of touch with the real world that they think their small problems can compare or you can interpret it as humans needing other values then fame and money to thrive. And it is hard to interpret it as anything in between so there are very strong reaction in either direction. One example is Piers Morgan who is a British talk show host which was hosting a morning talk show. He is a bit of a character not afraid of voicing his opinion which have caused him to be disliked by a majority of people but still provides good entertainment value. It was no surprise that he was one of the most vocal people against the royal couple but he handled the situation so badly that either he quit, got fired or both. The irony is that not only is Piers Morgan rich and famous like the royal couple but also represent the type of journalism which murdered Harry's mother, provoked racism against Meghan and forced the couple to flee to America in the first place."
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m32sim | How does TensorFlow work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Tensorflow allows python and JavaScript developers to use optimized machine learning algorithms without having to write them themselves. I’m currently building my own neural network for a college class so if you have a more specific question I can try to explain, but there’s too much to try and explain everything now."
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m337ez | why is it good to wash your hands in hot water but bad to take a hot shower? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Is it bad to take a hot shower? I've never heard this one before.",
"Hot water is a more effective solvent. So it washes things off of your hands better (like dirt, oil, grease, etc) that can collect bacteria and germs. That's all. Your hands are a bit tougher than most of your skin and less prone to drying and irritation, so it's not a big deal to use hot water got 30 seconds.",
"I don't know if it's *bad* to take hot showers, but there are certainly drawbacks. > * Hot showers can dry out and irritate your skin. Schaffer says the hot water causes damage to the keratin cells that are located on the most outer layer of our skin — the epidermis. By disrupting these cells, it creates dry skin and prevents the cells from locking in moisture. > * They can also make certain skin conditions worse. Higher temperatures make it easier for the skin to dry out and worsen conditions like eczema. > * Hot showers can cause you to itch. Friedman says the heat can cause mast cells (which contain histamine) to release their contents in the skin and cause itching. > * They can increase your blood pressure, too. If you have problems with high blood pressure or cardiovascular disease, taking a shower that’s too hot can make these conditions worse. URL_0 ? The skin on your hands is tougher and not as prone to these drawbacks, plus better hygiene trumps other factors. Not to mention handwashing is usually much briefer than a shower."
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m337pd | What's the difference between osmosis and diffusion? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Let's say we have a tank filled with water. If you put a filter in the middle, then fill half with sugar, one half has a high concentration of sugar, while the other half has a low or null concentration of sugar. Diffusion is when sugar molecules pass through the filter, from the high concentration half to the low concentration half. Osmosis is when water molecules pass through the filter, from the low concentration half to the high concentration half. In both cases, the goal is making both halves be an equal concentration. Diffusion increases the amount of particles on one side, osmosis dilutes the other; diffusion affects the solute, osmosis affects the solvent."
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m33mp8 | Why can’t we just surgically remove/lipo all the unwanted or excess fat at once? | I’m just curious. I’m sure if it was possible, it would be the most popular cosmetic surgery in the world. No more “my 600 pound life” shows, just go in and come out at your goal weight. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The easiest way to explain this is this: there's actually multiple types of fat, and they differ in how they're stored, as well as what it would take to remove them. Subcutaneous fat is, more or less, what people think of when they think of fat. It can be worked off through exercise, or it can be surgically removed relatively safely through medical procedures. What is NOT easily removed is fat that builds up surrounded the organs (visceral fat), which can not simply be suctioned off easily. A crucial thing to note, though, is that fluids are stored in fat. If you where to just suction off literally 400 pounds of fat, that would cause MASSIVE issues in the individual and their fluid levels, which would critically effect many major organs, namely the kidneys and heart. That's not to say that doctors can't suction off large amounts of fat; but there certainly is a percentage that they can. I personally do not know what that is (that gets medically complicated and needs numerous variables to be taken into consideration), but there is a limit. Hope that helped.",
"Not sure if this is one reason but at that size your skin is like 3 times the size of you. So if they did it all I imagine the wind would not be your friend.",
"Fat is filled with blood vessels. Blood vessels are filled with blood. Sucking out fat can pop blood vessels. Blood vessels can fill the empty space where fat used to be. Skin can stretch and hold a lot more blood than there was fat. Blood outside of blood vessels is not going back to your heart. Blood not going back to your heart is not going to organs that need blood. Blood outside of blood vessels also starts clotting. Clotted blood makes unclotted blood start to clot too. Clotted blood can leak back into blood vessels. Blood clots can break off and block organs from receiving blood. Organs start dying without blood. Organs that get enough damage can't be repaired. Humans that have enough damaged organs can't live.",
"It's not just existence of the fat that matters. Changing the person's habits also matters, and there's no shortcuts for that. If you don't change the habits, the weight will come right back. It's the same reason why alcoholics can't get liver transplants, it's a pointless surgery and waste of an organ when the likelihood of success is miniscule and risk of failure is still basically guaranteed.",
"Most fat removal is done for fat under the skin. You need to make a hole in the skin to insert your fat vacuum. Repeated surgeries mean more incisions that may not heal properly (scar) and increase the risk of infection. Fat cells also do not divide very quickly as you age. If you surgically remove fat, you end up with fewer fat cells which can cause a \"lumpy\" appearance if you continue to gain fat. Much of the \"bad\" accumulated fat lies in the spaces between organs. This kind of fat is not removed through plastic surgery.",
"Because all the fat, as I understand it, isn’t bound up in easily accessible layers of lard, meaning it’s abit more complicated to reach it all. That makes the procedure you propose far more risky, meaning good doctors will be more reluctant to clean you out completely. Better to just clear out the largest excess pockets of fat, and put the patient on a diet and exercise regimen, to increase the chances of keeping the fat off.",
"In addition to all the answers here, I think it should be noted that we still don’t know everything about adipose tissue. Research is showing that fat cells actually send and receive messages to and from the brain, in a similar way to our organs. Also a healthy individual’s total body weight should be comprised of approx 20-25% of fat. Simply removing fat doesn’t address the root causes for a person being overweight. Particularly psychological reasons such as binge/comfort eating etc."
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m340ny | why can cloth absorb/soak up water but plastic can’t? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"No holes in the plastic. Water likes to squeeze into the little gaps between the fibers of a cloth rag or piece of paper or the holes of a sponge. This is called “capillary action”. The surface tension of water causes the water to pull itself into narrow spaces between solid materials. There are no little gaps or holes in plastic for the water to squeeze into. Plastic is smooth and solid, and there’s nowhere for the water to get into it."
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m34gmn | Why we don't see starlight approaching us from every possible direction. | Considering that the universe is either infinite or at least Douglas Adams style big, surely the likelyhood of there being a star in every possible direction is high. Light in a vacuum for millions or billions of years is still light. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Trying to solve this very conundrum actually led to lots of the scientific advances of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries! Basically the answer is that the speed of light is finite, so it takes light a certain amount of time to reach us from distant parts of the universe. On top of that, the universe is not infinitely old, so there has only been a certain amount of time for the light to travel. The result of those two things is that only a finite (but very big) area of the universe is visible to us, and that area contains a finite number of stars.",
"This is [Olbers' Paradox]( URL_0 ). Another part of the answer is the expansion of the universe, and the consequent red shift of light from distant sources."
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m3588y | When art is being sold with an NFT, how is the image and ownership transferred? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The NFT blockchain only records a chain of transactions and, in theory, ownership. It does not transfer the actual work of art at all, it is more of a way to create an irreversible receipt independent even of governments. In fact not only does an NFT not transfer the original art as you thought, it doesn’t do many of the things people imagine it might. As I alluded to earlier it doesn’t actually transfer ownership of the art; creation of an NFT doesn’t establish that the creator actually owns the work represented, and the independent nature of the blockchain doesn’t apply to questions of ownership. Many people have created NFTs from works they do not fully own meaning that rather than trading ownership, they instead created a token to commit copyright infringement with each trade. And while an NFT could be used as evidence of a sale in a lawsuit, it isn’t obvious that it would be superior to a paper receipt. An NFT doesn’t even prevent the resale of an original work; someone might paint a picture, create an NFT from the scan which they sell to one person, then sell the original physical painting to a second person. In what sense does the NFT holder “own” the painting? It isn’t clear."
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m35xir | Why can we "taste" spicy foods with other parts of our body like our eyes or throat or when we use the bathroom, but we can't do the same with other tastes? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because \"spice\" is actually a targeted response of pain receptors, and you have pain receptors in more places than just your tongue.",
"Capsaicin, the chemical that makes peppers spicy, is just a painful irritant that gives off a warm feeling. This can happen anywhere on the body you have pain nerves. It's not a flavor given off by a group of chemical compounds like sweet, savory, or salty, just your tongue reacting to being organically maced.",
"Spicy food is not actually a taste. It’s a feeling. Spicy food has a chemical called capsaicin that latched onto your heat detection cells, and makes colder things seem hotter. So something that in actually is ~100 degrees (inside your mouth) feels much hotter. That works with other parts of your body too. Your hand (~95 degrees) feels much hotter, and what you are feeling is literally a fake burning sensation caused by the capsaicin.",
"You can! With mint! (Keep away from your privates unless you’re into that stuff.) menthol (cold), capsaicin (hot), skin go “wtf is happening to me?” Also, some cursed knowledge I have. If you eat a spicy pepper, and then brush your teeth to try and get the spicy off your tongue, hot and cold sensation chemicals DO NOT cancel each other out. So if you ever want to know what hellfire tastes like, while also being electrocuted, eat a ghost pepper and brush your teeth with minty toothpaste."
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m36132 | Why does TestOut tell me 4G internet is capable of speeds up to 1Gbps? | I'm doing online courses, and a TestOut LabSim video I just watched was going over mobile internet connections. They claim 4G can reach speeds of 1Gbps, though I find that incredibly hard to believe as that would make my cell phone internet speed 20 times faster than my home computer's. Is this some kind of laboratory conditions theoretical max or are they just wrong? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"From the LTE Advanced Wikipedia page \"Three technologies from the LTE-Advanced tool-kit – carrier aggregation, 4x4 MIMO and 256QAM modulation in the downlink – if used together and with sufficient aggregated bandwidth, can deliver maximum peak downlink speeds approaching, or even exceeding, 1 Gbit/s. Such networks are often described as ‘Gigabit LTE networks’ mirroring a term that is also used in the fixed broadband industry\" To my more layperson understanding, that is something along the lines of combining multiple LTE connections into one effectively faster one."
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m363f0 | Could human-synthesized chemicals like LSD or Methamphetamine theoretically also occur in nature or are there structures/properties/materials irreplaceable? | Full disclosure I'm on a journey back from Meth addiction. I've just always found it interesting how people will smoke Marijuana or eat Mushrooms but will refuse to do a line of coke or a tab of Acid. The logic is always that some substances occur naturally and are therefore fine for human consumption. But wouldn't human-made compounds and chemicals also eventually occur in nature given enough time and the right environment? Or are these chemicals 100% unnatural? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are naturally occurring substances that will totally kill you, hemlock comes to mind but I'm sure someone will reply with a list of 10 more poisonous plants. Evolution selects for chemicals that provide benefit in excess of the cost to chemically form them. Nicotine is produced by the tobacco plant to kill caterpillars that are eating its big, soft, delicious leaves. Similarly, coniine, the poison in hemlock, is produced by the plant to keep mammals like bears from eating the tasty berries. Bears have tougher digestive systems than people, so enough to make them sick can kill a person. If there was a \"meth weed\", it would have to get some benefit that offsets the work to produce it. Addicting animals to eating it seems like, well, the opposite from what a plant would want. Barrenwort, sometimes called horny goat weed, produces a chemical that stimulates blood flow to sex organs to distract the animal that eats it from continuing to eat more. That sounds like a better sort of strategy."
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m363pl | What is holding the water? | So when you have a big flood from something, you see pictures or reports saying X feet of water. Think like hurricane Katrina where it was up to peoples roofs. What is “holding” that water, so to speak? Why can’t it just spread out across the land or something? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Essentially it does spread until it hits land higher than the height of water and or the water isn’t being held back as much as it is still in the process of spreading out it just takes time for that volume of water to move any distance",
"It does spread out across the land. When there is an over abundance of water, the bodies of water and waterways rise significantly. Many areas in the Gulf and East Coast are below or at sea level; therefore, when the sea levels or water levels in general rise, these areas are underwater."
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m372ky | How large can an explosive volcanic eruption get? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We don’t know. But we know of a super volcano under the Yellowstone. And we know that the Deccan Traps have are big enough to be a possible explanation for K-T extinction that more or less removed 3/4 of life on Earth. And of the Siberian traps that were even larger and could have been the cause of the even greater dying in the P-T extinction.",
"I think one of the largest on record, is Mt. Tambora that erupted with a total force of 800 megatons. That's 16 Tsar Bomba's. It spewed so much ash in the atmosphere, that we went a year without a summer since the sunlight was obscured. Also, Mt.Krakatoa exploded with a force of 400 megatons at once which caused a sound so loud, that if it had happened in Tehran, you'd have heard it in Paris. So, that."
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m3737g | In software, what exactly is a framework? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A lot of people here are merely defining what a library is, which is just a chunk of code that someone else wrote that provides useful utilities. A framework goes further and creates an entire way of doing things. Often, it feels like a whole new language built on top of the base language. It imposes some sort of \"opinion\" about how things should be done. Consider trying to make a complex website in HTML/CSS/JS. It's entirely possible to do so with no libraries/frameworks, but it's painful. When the user clicks something and you want some new content to appear, you have to write the code that programmatically generates the new elements, then go find where those elements should be inserted in the HTML, and call a bunch of clunky `appendChild` functions. jQuery is a *library* that makes a lot of this easier. It provides a bunch of useful functions that make it much easier to create new elements and stick them in the HTML. But you're still fundamentally doing things the same way. React is a *framework* that not only provides useful functions, it defines a whole new way of writing interactive websites. It has very strong opinions about the \"right\" way to write a web app. Instead of thinking about how user actions should cause visual changes, you think about the app having a \"state\" at any time. User actions modify state. And then you write code that defines what the app should display in terms of the current state. You never write the HTML-modifying code yourself, some magic under the covers does all of that for you.",
"Say you needed a wheel. You could, a) build it yourself, or b) go get one already built. Frameworks are kinda like that. Its code that makes it easier to build apps without reinventing the wheel every-time.",
"Comparing software engineering to building a house, you can build anything from scratch, buy different parts from a retailer to build and put it together to build your house. So let's say you're building from scratch, you can customize everything. But you have to craft every window from those woods you cut, or maybe your language would have precut woods which you can immediately use to build. Framework is like using a ready made stuffs from certain retailer. You go to home depot to buy certain countertop, windows, doors, etc to use. There are some products that look and work like other retailers, but there are some stuff that you can only get from certain retailers. So if you need certain size windows, you may have to buy from certain retailers or you have to build one yourself. So you could technically buy 10 windows and make 1 custom one just for a specific use. Which is similar to using framework, but building specific interface for a specific use if you need to. Even when you buy from retailers, you still need to nail them together, etc. This is like using your own code to use the framework to build the house. Edit: I stand corrected. What I'm explaining is indeed a library, not framework.",
"Think of it as a tool kit. Rather than building your own hammer/ screwdriver, you buy/borrow the tools from someone else and then make your own project with it."
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m388zk | What is the space time continuum? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because space consists of 3 dimensions, and time is 1-dimensional, space-time must, therefore, be a 4-dimensional object. It is believed to be a 'continuum', or constantly continuous and unbroken, because so far as we know, there are no missing points in space or instants in time, and both can be subdivided without any apparent limit in size or duration. So, physicists now routinely consider our world to be embedded in this 4-dimensional Space-Time continuum, and all events, places, moments in history, actions and so on are described in terms of their location in Space-Time.",
"Space and time are related to one another. Humans like to think of space existing, and time passing, but that might not be so simple in all circumstances. A photon for example experiences no time. None at all. Time does not pass for it. If you got in a spaceship and went very fast, close to the speed of light, and returned to earth, more time would have passed on earth than in your ship. You would have “traveled through time” upon arriving home. Why? Because space and time are knit together. The speed of light is a point where time ceases to exist, and it can almost be thought of as a speed limit. A way of saying “*our universe relates this much space to this much time*” Continuum just means there aren’t any gaps in it.",
"Imagine the universe as a coordinate system. Let's suppose we want to determine YOUR position on this coordinate system. We would then have to use the 3 coordinates of 'space' and 1 coordinate of 'time' to represent your position. According to Einstein you are moving in space but also moving through time at a total velocity equal to that of light. If you move faster through space, you'll move slower through time because that velocity is always constant. Hence space and time are sort of integrated into a 'continuum'. I am sorry if this didn't make sense 😅",
"I think it is worth pointing out that the physical entity is usually just called \"spacetime\", whereas \"space time continuum\" is usually used in Star Trek and only vaguely relates to the physical entity.",
"Thank you for this question, but i've come to a realisation that this question cannot and will not ever be explained like i am 5 ever, this is ome of these questions that the simplest of explanation will put a strain your brain lol",
"Well, Billy, you go to school at the same time Daddy goes to work and I jump onto my work computer at home right? What time is it? 830am...now one hour later, where are we and what are we doing? Daddy may have a sale at work, I may be typing an email and you....I'll be having a snack with Freddy in class! Billy giggles....Now TEN hours pass. What is going on now? Billy thinks...we are all together having dinner and it could be pizza.... Mom smiles....yes, Billy. We were apart and then together and time kept marching on. And during dinner, what do we talk about? Billy says, All the things that happened in our day!!!! Yep....we all have different things going on every day in different places with different people. Each day is different. Grandma, Aunt Megs, Cousin Cindy.....they all have different days and even the whole world of people and animals!!!! Babies and love and sadness and death. All over every second somewhere in our great big world....We all live on Earth in this big Universe like cube bubble thing....Billy laughs....like a star and planet fish bowl! Billy says....Mom is struck...yes....indeed Billy, and time is just the way we count our memories and adventures. They call it Space Time Continum BUT it just means we should cherish every second and know all people go through all sorts of things all the time. Just be loving and kind...kisses....Now, go to bed. I love you.",
"Man, a bunch of ELI25s got posted to the wrong sub. Here's the skinny mate. There's two parts to this. The continuum portion refers to smoothness. Basically, it's like a slide (continuous) versus stairs (has gaps). Our experience of time and space is like a slide. We don't hop from one step to the next. We smoothly move between places and into the future, like going down a slide instead of walking down stairs. The space-time part: Think about space for a second, just in the room around you. You can go forward and back or side to side by walking. But if you turn to your right, now what was forward and back is side to side, and what was side to side is forward and back. In math, this is a rotation between two dimensions and there are special math rules that go with that. Now of course there are three of these space directions (up/down, front/back, side/side) and then we have time. The space and time seem different. But it turns out, that the math used to describe rotating to your right, also allows you to \"rotate\" between spatial dimensions and times (this is special relativity). So in a way, it's like \"turning\" into time instead of right. Things that are described by the same math are essentially considered the same. So even though our experience of space vs time seems very different, since the math of rotating between different space dimensions allows rotating into time, they are considered the same.",
"All things have the potential to exist, which would make the universe infinite. However, not all things do exist, which makes the universe less than infinite, but more than finite (this is the simplest case of language being insufficient for the task at hand). We'll say the universe is “transfinite” and leave it at that. All things that do exist do so simultaneously, though the implication of time with the concept of simultaneity isn’t entirely accurate either. Of the things that do exist, all are connected by bonds of “probability” with the lowest aggregate state of energy. These bonds of probability are the sub- quantum nuclear force. This is the foundation of what we call “time”. The state of being called “you” at any given instant is linked by bonds of probability to the states of being called “you” that are almost identical. The stronger the field, the slower the energy transfer and flow of “time”. Each thread of “past”, “present” and “future” is its own microuniverse, extending from the beginning of the universe to its eventual end. This happens all the way down to a subatomic level, until the random fluctuations of energy become great enough to make cause and effect break down. We see this phenomenon as electron tunneling or quantum teleportation. You might also note that quantum entanglement operates instantly over any distance, because it is not subject to time. At a still smaller scale, energy and probability are a chaotic sea where everything is connected to everything else, a reservoir of infinite energy and infinite possibility that is, however, infinitely difficult to tap or control."
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m38jwo | . What’s with the instinctual head rub we do when we bump our head? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not just the head. Rubbing *any* part of your body right after you injure that body part helps you feel better. [Scientific American had a good, short article on it.]( URL_0 )",
"Where nerves fire, they suppress the nerves around them, meaning if you have nerves firing in pain, causing the nerves around there to fire by rubbing the area will act to lessen the sense of pain. The nerves registering the rubbing will suppress the nerves registering pain"
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m3a88k | How do plants generate force and push/grow through things? | I recently watched the myth busters segment on bamboo torture where the bamboo grows up and pushes through the victim. How does the bamboo, and other plants, generate the force to push like that? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"1 person cant pick up a semi. But 300 people can. When a plant grows it does so by billions/trillions of cells dividing and pushing against their neighbors. Each cell doesn't exert much force at all its almost to small to measure. But multiply that force by a trillion and suddenly its enough to interact with stuff. The energy and mass comes from water in the ground and sunlight reacting to cause photosynthesis."
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m3aeix | Why is media not formatted to 16:9? | Mainstream (all?) TVs these days are 16:9 displays. Why is media not? Movies aren't, lots of YouTube content isn't. If 16:9 isn't the ideal ratio for content, why are our TVs? Do the black bars at the top and bottom "add immersion" of some kind? School me. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Like most things in life, 16:9 is a compromise. Movies started off as 4:3 back in the beginning. As a result, TVs ended up being 4:3 to be able to show movies and shows shot on 35mm film. As technology advanced directors started to use wider formats to be able to give movies a more epic scope and they kept getting wider all the way out to Panavision's 2.35:1 ratio. When you overlap 4:3 and 2.35:1 rectangles, a 16:9 rectangle covers both the height of the 4:3 frame and the width of the 2.35:1 frame. This means the tallest film and the widest film both fit in the box and have as little black bar as possible. When the standards orgs were drawing up the plans for HDTV they decided to go with this aspect ratio so that both old 4:3 content and old wide content would look acceptable and new 16:9 content would fill the screen. Since the conversion to HDTV was only back in the 2000s, we have all this content that wasn't recorded in a 16:9 format and we get black bars."
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m3aym7 | Why did people in Texas get really high electricity bills? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine that you wanted to buy a hamburger, and go to the local hamburger restaurant. Now this hamburger restaurant is special, it takes all of the hamburgers that are cooked everwhere in the city and sells them to anyone who wants a hamburger. We will call this the Hamburger exchange. Now the exchange has two interesting features. First, if more people want to eat hamburgers than there are cooked hamburgers, the price of a hamburger goes up (and vice versa). The second is that you don't get to know the price of the hamburger until AFTER you buy it. On a normal day, you can go to the Hamburger restaurant and buy a hamburger for $10. Some days it $11, other days it is $9. Now you normally only buy one Hamburger a day, and the price moves very slowly, so maybe on Monday it was $11, $12 on Tuesday, $13 on Wednesday, and you decide not to eat a burger on Thursday because you dont want to pay any more than $13. Then, one day, there is a beef shortage and there are almost no hamburgers being cooked (You dont know this right away), however, on the SAME DAY you also find out that the ONLY restaurant open is the Hamburger Exchange. There is no other food available. So you buy three hamburgers because you cant eat anywhere else. At the end of the day, like always, you find out the price you have to pay for these hamburgers, and to your utter surprise, your bill is $300! This was because everyone else was also trying to buy hamburgera at the same time as there were almost none being cooked. This basically explains the TX Energy system. Prices for electricity are based on supply (number of cooked hamburgers) and demand (number of people wanting to buy hamburgers). However, you dont actually know your current price of electricity until you get your next monthly bill. This created a situation in which a whole bunch of people wanted electricity (because of the cold weather), while no one was supplying it (because of shortages and shutdowns). This cause the price of electricity to skyrocket. The issue is that there is no real time feedback on the price of electricity. You dont know whether your fridge is going to cost $10 to run, or $10,000 to run. Normally, this isnt a big deal as prices are very stable, and dont really move around much from month to month. During the bad weather this created a really bad situation where people should have reduced their electricity usage to save on their bills, but didnt actually know they needed too.",
"Some people had signed up for variable rate plans, which adjust the rate based upon the current wholesale raid (which varied based upon supply and demand). These plans can be beneficial if you can shift your energy usage away from peak consumption periods. When the freezing cold tempatures hit, the reduced supply and virtually infinite demand caused the wholesale electricity rate to soar, causing those customers on variable rate plans to see their rates jump to the maximum $9/kWh. However, because of the situation, not taking advantage of what opportunities you have to avoid freezing to death would be unrealistic, and many of those users ran their heaters when they had electricity despite the potential for surged rates."
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m3c0qs | - how do scientists know that a particular species' (panda, turtle, sharks, tigers) population is getting extinct? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They do studies to see how many of that animal there are in certain areas, and try to extrapolate outward from there. For example, if you know pandas can only live in bamboo forest, and you survey some random bamboo forest and find 1 panda per square mile, and you know there's only 100 square miles of bamboo forest left, you can make a guess that there probably aren't much more than 100 pandas.",
"Along with other commenters on statistical means of counting populations (pop. to area extrapolation) another method has to do with habitat loss or degradation. I mean - it's the same kind of calculation, just different. For example, let's say there is a species of small mammal (like the pika) that can only thrive at a certain altitude and with a certain species of tree at that same altitude. Let's further say that due to climate change, that altitude's temperature is changing and the specific trees are no longer propagating or growing at the rate necessary to sustain a healthy population of pikas. Therefore, you can deduce that the pikas are in danger because their very limited critical habitat is growing smaller (without having to count pikas). Same can be said for many marine habitats, such as coral reefs. Polar bears have similar issues, as do many bird species (especially those in rainforests). Predator cats (like mountain lions) need HUGE areas when it comes to range. If a significant portion of that range is lost, it's a massive problem for the cats."
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m3c85o | What is camera obscura? How and When it happens? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine you have a large TV screen facing a wall 2m away. The light from the TV is hitting the wall, but you can see a picture on the wall. It's just all fuzzy. This is because the light from the TV shines out in all directions. The top of the wall is getting hit by light from the whole TV. Now suppose you put some kind of screen up in the middle, 1m from each side. You poke a tiny hole in the centre, which lets a little light through. Now, the top of the wall can see through the hole to the bottom of the TV. Similarly, the bottom of the wall can see the top of the TV. This means light from the TV shines through the pinhole onto the wall, and projects an image of the TV which is upsidedown and back to front. The smaller the pinhole, the dimmer the image is because less light can get through. But *also* the sharper the image is, because the light is more directional. This is how a camera obscura works. But instead of a TV, it can just be the outside world. If you put a film inside, you have a pinhole camera that you can take pictures with.",
"Basically a enclosed box with a tiny hole, light travels through the hole and the world outside projected on the wall parallel to the hole. It was used to make painting back in the day."
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m3cazq | How can blackholes warp time? What is time? | Im kinda piggybacking from an older post, where the OP asked what exactly time is. How can the blackholes warp time, if time (as i know) only a measurement on how old everything is? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"*Age* is a measurement of how old something is. Time is a measurement of the rate of change. An object's \"time\" is also described relative to another thing's \"time\". Time and space are (as far as we know) bound together and inseparable. If an object is massive enough to distort space it will also distort time. A black hole is a really massive object compared to the earth, so space (and this time) become stretched, and elongated. Time around it moves slower *relative* to the time on earth."
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m3cenl | we already know how photosynthesis is done ; so why cant we creat “artificial plants” that take CO2 and gives O2 and energy in exchange? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Artificial photosynthesis actually is a deeply studied field of research, where you use sunlight to drive a reaction that releases oxygen from various solutions. The problem is, the components needed in the reaction are inefficient, degrade/deplete quickly, or are expensive to make/maintain.",
"> we already know how photosynthesis is done ; so why cant we creat “artificial plants” that take CO2 and gives O2 and energy in exchange? Understanding how something works and having the ability to replicate it are not the same thing. Furthermore there isn't really an incentive - for all purposes that require plants on a large scale (really only one: biomass creation) you just use, well, *plants*.",
"You have energy on the wrong side there. It takes CO2 and energy and gives O2 in exchange. Also organic photosynthesis is incredibly complicated and uses a ton of membranes, enzymes and proteins that would be very hard to synthesize on even a tiny scale never mind a useful one. Your question is like asking \"we know how cellular respiration works so why can't we create \"artificial animals\"?\" Like, just grow entire frogs and monkeys in a test tube, or 3D print them? If that seems obviously absurd for our current tech, be aware that plants are just as complicated as animals in terms of cell machinery. If your question is just about using sunlight to convert CO2 to O2 (not actually artificial entire plants), then [yes that absolutely is a thing that exists and is currently a huge area of upcoming research.]( URL_0 )",
"Expense. Constructing an 'artificial plant' as you described would be very expensive, since all the necessary enzymes will have to be artificially synthesized and assembled. However, even is an 'artificial plant' is made, it would need be maintained, which adds to the running costs. At this point, it would be much more cost effective to just plant an actual plant, which does all that is needed, in addition to providing for wildlife, maintaining biodiversity and reducing the (potentially global) temperature.",
"We can create \"artificial\" photosynthesis using tanks of genetically engineered algae. But as a way to produce oxygen it's pretty slow and energy inefficient. Much quicker and more energy efficient to use electrolysis of sea water. This is how submarines produce oxygen, for example. An often overlooked fact is that trees don't actually produce the vast majority of the oxygen we need to breathe. In fact we could chop down every tree on the planet, but oceanic algae would continue to produce enough oxygen to sustain us. But if we want to reduce atomospheric CO2, we need the carbon to be taken up and *stored,* not just recycled. The best way to do that is, simply, more trees. If we were to plant 1 - 1.2 trillion trees on the planet, that would capture enough carbon to return atmospheric CO2 to pre-industrial levels.",
"The only real purpose this could have is to take CO2 out of the air and keep it out of the carbon cycle for an undefined time. Other purposes, like turning solar energy into biomass for food or fuel are already covered by plants, GMO or not. So to store the CO2 with the artificial plants could be possible if there is a pretty much useless molecule to turn it into. There isnt really such a thing, certainly not made with photosynthesis, so it would be used for something, which may harm the environment in different ways. Even if such a molecule could be made with artificial plants, the best way to store CO2 would still be to plant way more trees.",
"Well, we know how our stomachs work but we don't give ourselves artificial stomachs, turns out there's no need.",
"Why do we need artificial plants when we have regular plants?",
"It's about theoretical versus actual versus production. Take for instance batteries. Yes we have batteries with layers as thin as one micron. Yes we can make them actually. Can you mass produce it, and make it cheaper than the alternatives? Probably not. Tesla had same philosophy.. it's easy to make a model car, not easy to mass produce them.",
"I'm interested in why the OP thinks we need artificial plants to this rather than just regular plants. What would artificial plants provide that regular plants would not? Are there any instances where our technological mimicry of biological systems ends up being superior? Can you imagine the tech it would take to create a seed that you could just toss out your front door into the dirt and a week later there would be a plant there sucking in C02, capturing that sunlight, and spitting out 02?",
"First, we actually still don't know exactly how every step of photosynthesis works. Second, the reactions in photosynthesis are catalyzed (made possible) by enzymes, which are highly specialized since they've been evolving for billions of years. Humans may be good at technology, but we cannot compete with billions of years of evolution to produce catalysts that perform as well as those that do photosynthesis. Photosynthetic organisms just do it better than we can. And third, we actually *are* working to improve photosynthesis and apply it in novel ways. There is new biotech which has made photosynthesis more efficient in some plants, and has allowed for part of the process to be ported over to industrial microbes so that they can use CO2 as a direct feedstock for chemical production.",
"Hijacking a high comment: Actual plants are by far the most efficient way to do this lol, and the only way we can mitigate the ecological disasters of climate change making vast swathes unlivable. Actual plants, ecosystems, and land use practices, coupled with stopping emissions, which will be easier when we grow/produce most of what we actually need to survive close to home. And because one chestnut tree can birth thousands more and feed thousands of people over the course of its life, the sooner we start planting food bearing trees the better. This is literally the most elegant and only tool at our disposal. Technologies like the one you're talking about, going to Mars, all of that is digging our carbon hole deeper when we don't have time to sink carbon energy into those things anymore."
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m3co8n | How does a phone know when another phone is calling them? How do they not get interrupted by other phone signals? | Sorry if the question doesn’t make any sense, I’ll try my best to restate it if it’s unclear. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The cell phone tower will issue each phone with a time slot and frequency when it is allowed to transmitt and when to receive. When the phone is in standby the time slots will be very small and far between. But when the phone starts using data or a phone call is made the time slots become longer and more frequent to allow for higher bandwidth. The cell tower will make sure that no two phones are given the same time slot on the same frequency if they are close enough to interfere with each other. This often requires cooperation with other nearby cell towers."
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m3d3zg | All the ancient civilizations remains are deeply buried under ground. Where does this earth come from? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not so much that everything that's old eventually gets buried, it's that stuff that happens to get buried is there for us to find, whereas stuff that doesn't gets reused or recycled eventually and then can't be found by us. But cities in particular do tend to have stuff get buried. For one thing, in pre-modern cities, when buildings got old and collapsed the rubble was often just flattened over and new construction built on top. This has the cumulative effect that the street level of a lot of cities has gradually risen so that you can often find the foundations of ancient buildings in the basement level of the more recent construction. Also, a lot of human settlement is in river valleys, which do often have a new layer of dirt deposited on them periodically when they flood. Also it bears mentioning that a lot of the very best archaeological finds are things that were intentionally buried, like tombs and other burials.",
"If you build a modern structure and want to replace an old one that's in the same location, first thing you do is demolish the old. We tend to build very exacting foundations for our buildings these days, so we excavate and destroy the foundations of the old to give a clean slate for the new. That's not always the case, but it's how we often do it, and we have many powerful tools to allow us to do so with relative ease, like jackhammers and bulldozers and trucks and digging machines. Even so, we leave behind various traces that are not worth our effort to pull up, like old piping and the like. Very large structures like skyscrapers and bridges sometimes leave huge anchors dug into the bedrock itself, and when we eventually replace them, chances are we're unlikely to go to the effort to remove these if we have no pressing need to. So you can imagine how, many years from now, you'd find all kinds of buried evidence of our buildings around. Ancient cities had this phenomenon, but far moreso, because digging up foundations was significantly more difficult and time consuming without big powerful modern tools, and many ancient structures didn't need the sort of precise design that many modern ones do, so without a compelling reason to go to the effort of removing these foundations, you'd just re-use what was already there, or you'd bury them and just build on top. Often when things are abandoned, nature tends to take over. Plants spread over the top of things and eventually die, decompose and become soil. Over a very long span of time, the level rises, and the ruins are buried beneath. Other times, floods come and deposit silt over the top of things, or in dry places winds can bring dirt and sand over a long period of time, very slowly burying things. What hasn't been buried tended to succumb to erosion, and of course we don't know about things we don't have evidence for anymore. Put simply, we find things buried, because 99% of the time things being buried is the only reason they survived long enough for us to find them in the first place.",
"The Colosseum wasn't buried. Neither were the Carnac Stones, or Machu Picchu. Some old things were buried gradually by dirt and sand being blown over them, like the Sphinx. Actually the head stayed visible, which must have been confusing during excavation. You've digging up a big statue of a dude and then there's paws. Some things were buried on purpose, like Newgrange. It was always a partially underground structure. Other things were buried very suddenly, like Pompeii. We know exactly where the stone came from because Vesuvius is right there. Remains that weren't buried were usually either maintained, so we can't find them because they're not lost, or they were worn away and carried off so we can't find them because they're not there.",
"Some parts of the earth are being eroded away and deposited in other parts. The bits of ancient civilisations we've dug up are in areas where earth is being deposited. Other bits of ancient civilisations have been eroded away but we mostly don't know about those ... just because they're not there any more.",
"Every year, the trees shed their leaves. The leaves compost and turn into soil. Not that much soil to begin with, but soil nonetheless. Every year, more leaves. More soil. More leaves. More soil. Eventually, it'll hide anything. If you just give it time.",
"It comes from other areas. Rivers flood and carry mud with them. When the flood recedes, the mud is left behind and builds up. But that material is missing from another place now. Wind can do the same and blow sand and dust over your place. If the conditions are right in a spot, the sand and dust builds up there. On the long scale of geology, new mountains get built up by tectonics and start to erode, providing more dust, sand, gravel and so on, which then gets transported and covers other places. On the very long scale, all that stuff sooner or later gets pulled back into the mantle in subduction zones, melts up and basically gets recycled.",
"Well, there's nothing depositing earth *under* old ruins, and a few processes adding small amounts on top of them. Over extremely long times this adds up to net accumulation on top and they get buried. The biggest one is probably organic material. You might think that the mass of plants comes from the ground, but no, nearly all the material in plants comes from the air. All the cellulose in wood and leaves comes from carbon dioxide in the air. So plants are turning air into solid plant material and then constantly dropping it on the ground. It builds up. (BTW this is why deforestation is linked to climate change - all plants turn greenhouse gases into dirt). Another big one is deposition of dust by wind. Sweep off an outdoor basketball or tennis court. Then come back a few days later and it has some dust and dirt on it. What if you came back a year later, maybe an inch of debris? How about 1,000 years later? There's also sediment deposition by moving water. Rivers change course, and floods happen - these may wash mud and rocks over and onto civilization remains. Over very long timescales, other natural disasters like mudslides and earthquakes may come into play.",
"*There's no such thing as \"unlimited earth glitch\"* Actually, there is! Earth is constantly being dusted with cosmic dust, which lands on the Earth and increases the planet's mass. There's also a constant rain of meteors from space which burn up in the atmosphere, their ashy remains floating down to the surface all the time. This space dust accumulates on the Earth's surface, making the planet a tiny bit larger every day. Meteorites add mass to the Earth as well -- that's how the Earth formed in the first place. Over time, tiny bits of dust add up to more, nearly unlimited earth!",
"Rivers flooded periodically and added a layer of silt. Wind was constantly blowing in sand and dust causing it to move. [source]( URL_0 )"
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m3d4um | Why can you objectively know someone is attractive but only certain people give you that "zing" feeling of desire/crush/etc? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Attraction itself isnt just caused by how beautiful someone is. Things like personality and behaviour play a role too. And your own attitude towards the person, something that can change depending on how often you see the other and how physically close you are . Besides that people also tend to be more attracted to people similar to themselves. So knowing someone is objectively attractive is just something you know. You may start feeling as soon as some sort of relation begins"
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m3d8g4 | Why is breathing good? You take in O2 but breathe out CO2. Seems like a net loss of a C. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The O2 actually becomes water (H2O). And the CO2 comes from breaking down simple sugars (C6H12O6). These processes take place in the cell (cytoplasm and mitochondria). The semi-permeable membrane of cells and respiration makes it seem like it’s just O2 - > CO2 but the process is better summarized as O2 + C6H12O6 = > CO2 + H2O (Cellular Respiration). [a lil more info: Glucose acts as a energy source for generating ATP as it breaks down, while oxygen serves to drive the final parts of the electron transport chain, which forces generates a polarity causing a mechanical action of a group of molecules that generate the ATP. There’s a lot more to it but this is simplified lol] Source: Premedical Degree",
"It is a loss of carbon. You replace that carbon by eating. What you need from breathing is the energy that is released what carbon and oxygen react. Because the energy difference between oxygen as O2 and CO2 is what your whole body uses to live.",
"> Seems like a net loss of a C Correct! But that C is \"spent\" C that you ate as food, and is now a waste product that needs removing. You have to get rid of it somehow, it's got nothing left to give. Some background on that: The available energy in stuff comes from the chemical bonds holding it together. You get energy by breaking high-energy bonds, reassembling the same parts with low-energy bonds and capturing the difference. That's how explosions and fire and digesting toast all work. Here's the key: Food has lots of C-C bonds, that's anything with carbons connected together, like anything organic, and these C-C bonds are high energy. C-O bonds are very low energy. So by breaking all the C-C bonds and reassembling all those atoms using only C-O bonds (like those in CO2), there's a bunch of excess energy left over that can be used to do stuff, like type this comment :)",
"The chemical processes that provide you with the energy to... well basically live, requires oxygen. You breathe that in. The same process produces carbon dioxide, which is essentially poison. So you breathe that out. That painful burning feeling you get when you hold your breath too long isn't due to oxygen deprivation. It's your body telling you you're risking carbon dioxide poisoning. Your body isn't concerned with a loss of C. Carbon is one of the most plentiful elements in the universe and it's easily replaced by eating. All life on Earth is carbon-based. Anything you eat has plenty of C in it."
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m3dyu7 | How do different types of alcohol give you a different kind of buzz? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are lots of factors at play. Firstly, there's alcohol per volume. Hard liquor is less filling and high alcohol, therefore it is easier to get drunker quicker than beer and is more dehydrating. Next is chemical composition. Wine for instance has antioxidants that can change your mood/feeling. There is also mood/culture surrounding the alcohol. For example, tequila is usually drunk socially as shots when everyone is in a festive and fun mood. Whiskey isn't used as much as a party drink. Wine is typically drunk to unwind. Lastly, it can also be all in your head or your reaction to the drink. If you don't like the taste/burn of whiskey, or the dryness of wine, it can sour your mood. There is also suggestive cultural influences, which relates to the above paragraph. Your expectation is that wine hits differently and so you \"feel\" it. For the most part, though, it appears to be psychological and the alcohol content. Yes, the chemical composition could play a role, but it is debated whether or not they contribute significantly enough. Alcohol is alcohol at the end of the day and the overall effect will be the same. But your mood or expectations as a result of the context of the drinking and how the drinking makes you feel seem to matter the most."
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m3el4z | If chimpanzees and humans are so genetically similar, why do we look so different? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"But we do look similar, really similar. I think your mistake is in how you're judging similarity. Think of any random organism on the planet: A mushroom, carrot, pidgeon, slug, ameoba, anything... How similar do they look to us compared to how similar a chimpanzee looks to us? I worked with Orangutans for a while and then similarities stunned me. I expected similarities because you hear about it all the time right. But not that much, it's not possible to explain how similar they are without experiencing it, it completely changed how I view the world. One of the babies I worked with, Kate, acted exactly how my niece did as a baby. She would squeeze my finger, explore my face by touching it, grabbing onto my hair. The slightly older juveniles would be naughty and playful, but they'd also sometimes just want have affection or hold hands, just like a toddler. There are actually a relatively small number of key mutations that _really_ differentiate humans and primates in a functional sense, e.g. FOX-P2",
"How similar living beings look from the outside does not always reflect how similar they are genetically. Just look at different breads of dogs, they can look really different and they are not just all the same species but the same sub-species and extremely similar genetically. Meanwhile African and Asian Elephants are not even the same species and far more distantly related than you might think by looking at them. There is also the the issue that objectively speaking chimps do look quite a bit like us. They appear more different because our brains are fine tuned to tell different humans apart and thus notice far more details in anything that look close to ourselves than in anything that does not look as much ourselves."
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m3f5ip | where does burnt fat really go and how does are weight come down | ELI5: We all talk about burning fat...but I’m a physics person ik matter can’t just be destroyed so where does the burnt fat really go and what I mean is how is stuff from my body removed to make the weight come down ...also some tips pls to loose weight 😬😬 | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"IIRC 90% of fat will be expelled with respiration. 10% with other \"methods\". Tips? Just one: eat less and better. More green, less meat. Weight loss starts here, training is just the tips of the iceberg. Always remember, you cannot outrun a hamburger.",
"Most ends up as CO2 and H2O that you exhale. The rest ends up as metabolites you excrete in urine or feces. You lose weight by burning more calories than you eat. So get enough exercise to keep you fit and watch the \"stealth\" calories in things like processed foods, soda, and alcohol (a shot liquor is about 100 calories!)",
"Fat is burned by converting oxygen and carbohydrates into carbon dioxide and water, so basically the products are exhaled. Using the major muscles groups in exercise like walking is really good for a low stress way of burning calories.",
"You get energy by oxidizing organic carbohydrate compounds within your body - literally burning them. You exhale that burnt carbon and hydrogen as CO2 and H2O. This is how you lose mass. This is why it takes so much exercise."
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m3fhyt | The difference to your health between vaping with nicotine and smoking cigarettes. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Its not really the nicotine thats bad for you. Its the tar and other bad chemicals that cause damage to your lungs and give you cancer. So by removing those and just keeping the nicotine, it will be better for you"
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m3fixq | Why is it natural to swing our arms when we run? What does it do? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Its a balance mechanism. Youre far more likely to fall on your face if youre “naruto running” than if you run like a normal person.",
"They swing when we walk as well. The swing helps to engage the core and counter balance the opposing leg swing phase of our gait. The amount of arm swing is determined by the pace of the gait.",
"To create balance between your left side and right side. Your arms are thrown forward during the opposite leg step forward. The momentum forward and back for your legs on opposing sides twists your torso side to side. Your arms, although smaller than your legs, are closer to the center or gravity for your torso. So moving them in opposition counter-balances your torso. Try putting your hands in your pockets while you run. Watch your shoulders naturally try to compensate the imbalance. Your torso is trying to remain front-facing of your direction."
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m3fp0q | () what exactly is a transition metal? | How do they have incomplete subshells? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A transition metal is a metal that is basically in between the Alkali and Alkali earth metals on one side and metalloids / non-metals on the other side. The properties are 'transitioning' from metallic to non-metallic. They have incomplete shells because of the shape of orbitals. You do remember there are 4 'lettered' orbitals, right? - S, P, D and F. Each of the orbitals has a higher energy level than the previous one. But wait, each 'orbit' or 'shell' also has a higher energy level than the previous one. So whose energy level is higher? That's where the whole game of incomplete subshells come in. Now I am going to oversimplify this, but basically if the (N+1)th S or P have lower energy levels than the Nth D or F, the electron will jump an orbit and fill the bigger orbit's S and P orbitals rather than staying in the same orbit and fill it's D or F. The underlying reason is, electrons dont know maths and can't count. N, N+1 or N+2 doesn't matter to it. All that matter to them is stability and they'll look for the lowest energy place they can find and go jump in it."
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m3fpdv | How is it that some mobile games manage to make adverts that are extremely high in graphics and looks fun, but when we try to download and play them, they are extremely horrible. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They’re fake, animated to make the game look cool. Not actual gameplay footage. My comment is going to get deleted for being so short but that’s the gist of it so I’m writing this to make it long blah blah blah blah blah lololololol hahaha",
"u/the_shitty_therapist is technically correct. They are fake. Also the very main important point is, costs of making a high-definition trailer video or demo + low graphic video game is waaaaay cheaper than making an entire mediocre graphic video game. Also the target demographic is young kids / people from impoverished areas who cannot afford even a console (let alone a gaming PC). They don't complain."
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m3fu33 | . What does inertia mean? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you're being lazy, you stay lazy. If you're motivated, you stay motivated. Unless something comes along and changes what's happening, you're going to keep feeling the same thing.",
"A thing that is moving keeps moving. If you want to change that, you need a force proportional to its mass and the change in movement. The tendency of the thing to go on doing the same thing it did before is inertia."
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m3g8p3 | It’s known that when you recall a memory your brain is actually rewriting the entire memory all over again and not fetching it from some kind of memory “storage”, but how do scientists actually discover that or come to such a conclusion? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You can perform studies with people where you ask them to recall events of which you have video recordings. When you press them to remember details or elaborate on something, they'll often fill in the blanks, and not always with correct information. Once \"recalled\" they'll remember the fake memory more vividly."
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m3gf93 | Technically,Body has stockpiling capabilities (etc fat). Why can't we eat food worth of week and last week without eating? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"People can do a week without eating - the human body can go for long times without food because of the reserves it stores. Going without water is a bigger problem",
"> Technically,Body has stockpiling capabilities (etc fat). Why can't we eat food worth of week and last week without eating? You can absolutely do that! It's not going to be pleasant though. Hunger doesn't go away simply because your body has enough reserves to survive. How much you can eat in advance depends on what your digestive system can handle though.",
"You COULD, but you’d need to eat something with a LOT of calories to get a weeks worth into you. And by day 4ish you’d be really weak and living off your reserves. We aren’t built for that kind of diet. We struggle to absorb a weeks worth in a day. And we use a lot of energy from our food kind of straight away. Especially sugars and stuff."
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m3gtlu | How did Greece come to have such a large influence on the world during antiquity? | Reading about Hellenistic dynasties in Egypt and Greek rulers in Judea doesn’t make sense to me given the size of Greece and that they afaik were divided into multiple small city states. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"After Philip II of Macedon united Greece under his rule, his son, Alexander the Great, conquered the entire Near East region, including Egypt and Judea, in the second half of 4th century BC. Those Greek dynasties were established by his Greek generals after he died without a successor. It’s like one of the most exciting parts of ancient history, look it up.",
"the two short answers are their prime location for trade across the Mediterranean sea with any other early civilizations and Alexander the Great/the Macedonians conquering most of the med sea before other empires stepped in",
"The Greeks didn't do much influencing, but the power houses who loved Greek culture did Classical Greece was conquered by Persia, then freed, then conquered by Macedon, and then Alexander the Great conquered territories all the way out to India and spread the Greek culture that he liked to all of them. When he died he put generals in charge of various portions of his empire. Ptolemy I Soter got Egypt and a bit of the Levant forming Ptolemaic Egypt, Seleucus I Nicator got Asia Minor and formed the Seleucid Empire, there were 5 in all. These are the Hellenistic Dynasties and would reign until Rome popped by to try to take them over. Later on Rome really liked Greek culture and appropriated and spread it a lot, and the Eastern Roman Empire would maintain their love of Greek culture and ideas until its fall in 1453 AD. The individual city states of the Greeks really didn't do much to spread their culture and rules by force, but their enticing culture intrigued others who were good with force but bad at culture(Rome) and they spread it for the Greeks.",
"Greece had a big population at the time. 10-13 million in late Antiquity compared to 5 million in Egypt, 3-4 million for the Carthagian Empire. I couldn't find any number for Italy at the time, but a couple of hundred year later in the 1st century we estime at 6 million the population on the whole peninsula. This leave use with Persia, who had 50 million at their peak, but this include Persia, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Levant, Egypt, etc. So as you can see Greek was pretty powerful in term of demography. Yes they were fractured into city states, but most of the world was fractured too. It's not because you have an empire that everybody follow you. Most of the time local power kept their own power and only a fraction of the local ressources made it to the leader to project power. A bunch of Greek nation banding together was a force to be reckon with. The reason why Greece had such a population at the time was mostly because of Geography. A bit reason why a population wouldn't grow was because of war. Invasion, migration, pillaging, etc. Population had to rebuild their region from time to time. Greece was mostly protected by their mountains, more mountain in the North in the Balkan, Sea all around in the south. Allowing the polation to prosper for longer period of time. Something similar happened in the heartland of Persia with the mountain protecting them. Greece was also a naval power. Persia was far inland so their naval tradition was a lot more recent, Egypt had no wood making it hard for them to make ships, in Anatolia most of the biggest valley where people lived where more into the interior of the land, leaving Greece and the Levant as the main two naval region of the time. Greece was protected by mountain and keep their supremacy, the Levant were conquered by the land, leaving their colony of Carthage as their sucessor in naval power. Eventually Persia having access to the Levant would become a Naval power too, but then Alexander happened. Greece also had limited Arable land so by that point in history they just had too many people for the land. This is one of the reason why some cities declined in the late Antiquity like Sparta but also why the Greek started to colonize the hell out of the Mediterranean Coast. So if most ships on the sea is Greek and they create Greek colonies along the coast, you can see where their influence come from. Finally, Macedon and then Rome did a lot of conquering and kept the Greek influence, keeping it alive and kicking."
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m3h5my | Why does time feel so different when you're an adult vs a kid? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"All the answers here talk about % of time lifed so far, but that is generally not how our memory works. We don't have a solid block of time we compare the current passage of time too. It might appear to make sense, but human memory isn't a hard drive in which we notice that 1 year at 50 now only increases the volume of data by 2%, not doubling it, as it did in our second year. What is more important is the things that are happening to you and the difference between your \"now\" perception of time and you retrospective memory of it. In your \"now\" perception, time can fly by if you're having fun or are working on something that requires your attention, while it can seem to crawl if there is nothing to do. Ask yourself how time is going on a thursday afternoon in the office, with nothing left to do for the day but the clock still demanding 3 hours of your time be spent in a boring cubicle compared to how a party at which you're having a blast can seem to last only two hours, when 8 have already elapsed. But these same memories get handled differently in long term memory. Once that thursday has passed and nothing happened there, your brain (which is not a hard drive just recording every second 1:1) will not keep memories on things that were uneventful, if it was a week like any other you had for the past 10 years, there is no reason to have 500 copies of that week in your head, all perfectly memorized. That is while a day can feel like a drag when living through it, it can feel like weeks passed in an instant. Thats why time as a kid felt so much longer. Things are constantly changing, you're learning new concepts in school all the time, you're aging into new things and aging out of others things, the media and products made for kids are evolving extremely fast and you're generally not yet acustomed to many things that will become routine once you're an adult. I mean, just think about your own life, if the \"% of your life\" idea were true, why do especially eventful periods of you life seem so long in retrospective, even if there are shorter than longer stretches of calm periods, which seemed like they were over in the blink of an eye?",
"Oh this has been studied lots and they have scientific theories on how this works. Science says it's all about perception. For example you are 10, one year represents 10% of your entire life and your brain only has 10 years of life and memories stored so your perception of time is based on this. Compare this to say a 50 year old where a year represents only 2% of your life and you have 50 years of life experience and memories stored in your brain so your perception of an hour at 50 is much quicker than when you are younger.",
"There's a fantastic [video]( URL_0 ) about this by Veritasium. Basically our internal clocks (essentially the speed at which neurons fire in the brain) run slower the older we get, and we perceive time differently. In the beginning of the video he starts a timer and asks people of varying ages to yell stop after a minute. The older people stopped it way later, because their perception of time was different. One guy stopped it at 1m40s."
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m3hr3i | What exactly is an enzyme? | Yes, I did google it but my pea sized brain can't seem to understand it | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"an enzyme is a protein with a catalitic effect. A catalitic is a molecule that is implied in a chemical reaction but that will not be consumed. It is used to either allow a certain reaction to happen or to make a reaction faster.",
"Enzymes are proteins that make chemical reactions happen. Most chemical reactions would happen so slowly as to be useless to life, so enzymes grab the various chemicals and create a little factory to do the job.",
"Enzymes are like molecular tools - they make a job easier and are then available to be used again. As an analogy, think about how much easier it is to do something like opening a can with a can opener (the enzyme in this scenario) vs. just bashing the can on a table. The sort of jobs enzymes are doing are usually sticking two molecules together (e.g. to build something) or breaking a larger molecule into two smaller pieces (e.g. digesting food molecules). The enzyme makes these processes faster or possible when they'd be slow / impossible otherwise. Unlike the molecules the enzyme is acting on, the enzyme isn't permanently changed by the process (so it's ready to be used again and again).",
"An enzyme is form of protein that triggers chemical reactions and scientists typically name enzymes with the -ase suffix. For example, the human body likes the sugar glucose but milk doesn't contain glucose, it contains a different sugar called Lactose. (-ose is the suffix for sugars) So the small intestine produces an enzyme named Lact*ase* which chops Lact*ose* into two smaller sugars, glucose and galactose, which the body can use. Like all proteins, enzymes are very sensitive to temperature and will be destroyed if heated up.",
"If you think of trying to open nuts with your fists, compared to with a nutcracker. The Enzyme is the nutcracker, it's something that doesn't itself spend any energy, but it helps with the transformation. For a technical definition, they are proteins which help lower the transition state of a reaction. Chemical reactions normally go between two stable states, and require a certain amount of energy to get over the barrier between them. Sugar doesn't catch fire at room temperature, but if you heat it up, it can burn. An enzyme will let sugar burn at room temperature, by lowering the activation energy. They do this by weakly binding to the right parts of the sugar molecule, so it can fall apart more easily."
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m3jdks | Why does a shadow become more fuzzy when the object that casts the shadow is further removed from the surface it casts the shadow on? | Why isn't a shadow as sharp as one can see the object? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine you have two point source lights that are near each other. A surface that's exposed to both lights will be illuminated twice as brightly as a surface that's only exposed to one. Now, put an object between the light and the surface. Because there are two lights, the object actually casts two shadows. But, if the object is very close to the surface, the two shadows will be close to each other, even overlapping. As you move the object away from the surface, the two shadows get farther apart. Where the two shadows overlap, you get a dark shadow. Where there's only one shadow, you get a light shadow. Now, the thing to realize is that no real light source is a single point. It takes up space, which looks the same as multiple light sources very close to each other. So, in summary, the fuzzy border of the shadow is the region where only part of the light source is visible."
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m3k8cg | How does light carry data and information, i.e in fiber optic cables? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So everyone has already more or less summed it up as On vs Off, zeroes and ones, all that good stuff. but if you want to get really interesting: we can actually do multiple \"streams\" of data on the same piece of fiber. How? *Different colors of light.* We do the same on/off thing described by other commenters, but with light of different wavelenths (colors) on the same piece of fiber optic cable, at the same time. It's called Wavelength Division Multiplexing, multiplexing means sending more than one stream of information, so Wavelenth Division Multiplexing is sending multiple streams of information, divided by using different wavelengths/colors. I know it's not directly answering your question, but it's a pretty cool thing we can do!",
"Light is either on or off. Light or dark. So let’s say that in normal computer(binary) code you have 1 representing the light being on and 0 being the light off. Light is shot through the fiber optic in a series of on/off 1/0 and picked up on the other end and converted into binary code."
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m3kykz | Why do things in space group in discs rather than spheres (solar system, galaxies, etc.)? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's a number of forces here at work. First, when a lot of celestial objects form, they often have spin. This spin flings matter in the plane perpendicular to the axis of rotation, thus you have a larger amount of mass orbiting within the same plane to start with. Furthermore, as orbiting things pass near each other, they both pull on each other, causing the orbital axis of both to align ever so slightly. Repeat this for a significant amount of time, and they will eventually move towards the same orbital plane."
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m3m3i1 | How do you differentiate ADHD from Bipolar | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's really just about which symptom seems like the main one. For bipolar it's emotional, having switching episodes of extreme happiness to extreme sadness. Whereas adhd is attentional, memory, and planning. Both tend to have impulse issues but with bipolar this is mostly only seen during manic episodes whereas with adhd it's constant. Both will have depression but with adhd this tends to situational to do with the fact that they try very hard to focus and remember but end up failing. This makes them feel useless. Whereas with bipolar, the depression isn't necessarily linked to one thing or could be a range of things. But with all mental health / psychology there is a real problem of overlapping symptoms and diagnosis agreement."
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m3nd0e | Why do mirrors flip the image Left-Right and not Up-Down? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They don't flip left-right or up-down. This is quite hard to get your head around, but it's true. The stuff that's on the left on your side is also on the left in the mirror image. What they actually do is flip back to front. The in-out direction is reversed. This makes things look reversed left-right but they're actually not. It's easy enough to see with symmetrical objects, but can be quite confusing when it comes to text. Why would flipping back to front reverse the text that you see? Well, it doesn't do that either, it turns out. The reason words look reversed is because to see them in a mirror you have to flip them around. If you have a word written on transparent material and you look at it in a mirror, you'll see that it isn't actually flipped. This is quite difficult to get your head around with just words, so [here]( URL_0 ) is a video to demonstrate it."
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m3nrca | How are countries that have languages that depend on tone able to have a music industry? | This really may be an absolutely stupid question, but it’s been bugging me for a long time. Mandarin for instance is highly dependent on tone changes to say different words, but (pop)music takes away that ability because it takes away from the tune and melody. How does anybody make music that makes sense? Or can my western ears not pick up the small tonal changes they sing? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It varies based on the specific language or culture, but since you brought up Mandarin I'll just speak to that. In Mandarin, tonality is ignored in music. Native speakers can still understand it just fine based on the pronunciation and context, and it very rarely causes any kind of confusion. But Mandarin is pretty simple. Hmong, for example, has up to 8 tones, and when people write lyrics for the Hmong language they actually do still include tonality. That means the lyrics are usually written out before the melody is worked out, so you can compliment the melody to the tone. When you translate a song from a non-tonal language into a tonal-language, and you can't change the melody, you have to **severely** limit your vocabulary. The melody dictates the final syllable of every word, so you really have to do a lot of work to match the meaning and the melody.",
"Tonal languages do not rely on absolute pitch, but relative pitch. So you can still slide around and \"sing\" tones. Of course a lot follows from context, but the tones are still sort of preserved. But yes this absolutely partially forces the melody of the song. --- I can only really speak for Thai though. I can give you an example: Listen to the very first line of this song (timestamp = 14 s) URL_1 Might be hard to pick out, but he's singing, with word tones beneath: jaak khon, khon tee koey mee jai gan yoo low mid, mid fall mid mid mid mid low Now listen to the melody. It goes: E ↑ C♯ C♯ ↑ D ↓ C♯ ↓ B B B ↓ A Maybe that doesn't make sense, but whatever, you can still hear the melody start low, then go up, so the first word becomes low tonally relative to the mid word. Then it stays on mid until \"tee\" which is falling, and should start higher in pitch, so the melody does that too. Then we go back down to mid, linger there until we go down again. Here is a \"problem\" because the tone doesn't change, but it's actually ok because the words that follow are also mid so it's still the same relative to *those* words, and even so context here makes it pretty clear what he's singing about. Then finally we end on a low note, just as we'd like to. So you see the melody is not a coincidence. Sometimes you have no choice and you want the melody to be exactly one way.. it can also work, because at least in Thai, all the tones have a pitch pattern which the follow: URL_0 so as you see, as long as you follow the curve well, what the absolute pitch is doesn't really matter, because all tones are unique anyway. Maybe it's my imagination or bias, but I think it sounds like the singer is doing these tonal slides in the example above. With all these tools, implementing tones into singing is easy!",
"TL;DR 1) Melody doesn't necessarily take away from the tone, so singing can still have proper tone and be easily understood. 2) Proper tone isn't necessary for understanding the language. There are many regional accents in Cantonese/Mandarin just like in English (eg. London vs. Jersey Shore accents) which sounds totally different from each other and yet is still the same language. Fluent speakers can potentially understand multiple regional accents, depending on whether they have past exposure to them. -----Long Version----- Unsure if I'm understanding the question correctly but here's my experience with Mandarin, Cantonese, and my hometown dialect (unsure what the dialect is called). You don't lose the tone when putting melody on it. You can still sing in a tune/melody while maintaining the tone of the words, understanding it is not an issue at all. Certain music, such as rap, does cause some changes to the tone of the words. I've heard rap songs where the singer \"mispronounce\" words on purpose such as using a \"wrong\" tone in order to rhyme or make the rhythm sound better. In this case, the listener usually can understand the intended meaning based on context. However I have also heard songs that changed the tones so much in order to make it sound a certain way, that I have trouble understanding the meaning. This is most common in rap and hiphop style music, which is similar to English rap and hiphop also, there's slangs and accents used to make the words sound certain ways instead of pronouncing it normally. However this mispronounciation is planned and intended for a certain style or sound, and is not because the singer is unable to use proper tone. Its just cause the singer or songwriter decided that the song sounds better with a mispronounced tone, or it could be a slang. I'm sure there's other nuances that I'm not familiar with. Just in my experience listening to songs, the pronunciation can be correct while still following the melody, so I do not think tune and melody \"takes away\" from the tone of the language at all. Perhaps its harder for non-native speakers to understand the words in a song because it affects the way tone is perceived by the non-native speaker when melody is superimposed, but I've always felt the tone is preserved in the songs. However, I also understand accented Mandarin so maybe I'm not the best judge of proper tone. There's so many dialects in Chinese and everyone's Mandarin is \"improper\" cause of their dialect causing an accent on their Mandarin but usually people still all understand each other, so maybe native speakers are just really good at understanding the language regardless of tone? To be honest, when I speak to other Mandarin speakers, everyone's pronunciation with tone is actually quite incorrect, and I find that the tone is more correct in songs than in everyday speech. Usually the singers don't have super strong accents in their songs. Hope this answers the question. ETA: I revisited some songs that completely butcher the tone. My final verdict is that, it is not true that tone is necessary to understand the language. I can still understand most of the language in the absence of tone. So I think its just experience with the language. It is more difficult to understand for non-native speakers because you don't have the same familiarity and also experience of talking and understanding people with strong accents who don't use the correct tone anyway. It's like British English vs Jersey Shore English, both are English but also totally different in pronunciation. Some people understand both and some people understand neither, even when fluent in English. It is the same for Cantonese or Mandarin, I can understand some people with strong regional accents from certain areas but not from other areas.",
"Cantonese has 6 main tones (9 overall). Songs indeed are “restricted” on what words can go where so that it doesn’t sound weird. It’s kind of part of the craft. That being said, you can still cram words in that sound off and people won’t mind too much, if it’s not too often and doesn’t sound too far off."
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m3o3ve | Why is sleeping during the day considered unhealthy? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your entire sleep system in your body is geared towards being tired and sleeping during the dark hours and being alert and awake during light hours. Sunlight and dark trigger the production of different hormones. If you're sleeping during light hours you are likely getting less restful sleep than if you slept during the dark hours. Permanently altering your sleep schedule in the way you're describing can lead to serious health problems long-term. You can read up on [Shift Work Sleep Disorder]( URL_0 )."
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m3on4o | Why do we need to free up some space for software updates? | It’s just frustrating sometimes especially my watch requires 3gb of space for it to update. Now I have to delete apps and data. Doesn’t it feel like a rip off? Shouldn’t be the update space separate? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You need space in the kitchen to bring all the groceries in, before you're able to unpack them and put them away. You need space on your device to get the updates, before it's able to unpack them and install them.",
"You need to have space to download the files, oftentimes those files are compressed and need to be decompressed (expanded) so they can be put in the right spot. It would be a terrible day if the update just tried to replace files needing update as it downloaded them, because if *anything* happened - internet disconnected, your device restarts, etc. - then it could royally screw up how the device works. So it *has* to download everything and make sure it's all there before it starts replacing/updating files."
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m3oy3y | Why are soft drinks not sold in gallon jugs? | To start I couldn't sleep last night thinking about this topic- but at least in the United States why are soft drinks sold in 2 liter bottles instead of a more ergonomic gallon jug with a handle? Is this an economic decision? Do people actually prefer the hard to grip bottle over the jug? Am I crazy? Are there soft drinks sold in gallon jugs in other parts of the world? Thank you. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Gallon milk jugs are made out of a different kind of plastic that is easier to mold into complex shapes that have a handle in them. But, this type of plastic and the shape with a handle is not particularly good at containing pressure. Since soft drinks are pressurized with CO2 the containers need to be made differently and they don't work well with a handle."
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m3q93f | Why do people still choose cigarettes over vapes if they both have nicotine and vapes are “technically” healthier? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cigarettes are a lot less hassle, cheaper upfront, it's easier to gauge how much you're consuming, and the full health effects of vaping aren't still well known. You also tend to get a different sensation from smoking a tobacco product than from vaping.",
"They're both nasty, but as a (former) cigarette smoker, I tried vapes and had heart palpitations because there is WAY more nicotine in the vapes then there are in the cigs. We also get used to the specific feel of our cigs, its the whole ritual of it, and it's not easy to break on it's own, let alone with the addictive chemicals.",
"As someone that has both smoked and vaped. Cigarettes are cheaper upfront, less of a hassle (you don't have to refuel your vape and change coils and all that bs), nicotine fluid for the a long time and I think technically still is banned in my state, you get a different sensation from smoking a cigarette compared to a vape, it's easier monitor how much you're smoking. There's to many reasons to list but the biggest one in my opinion is its not just nicotine in cigarettes that is addictive so they don't help with the whole crave of wanting to smoke."
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m3q9ba | How does Putin get away with killing people? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"National sovereignty, combined with virtually absolute control of the nation which he leads, makes him effectively immune from prosecution. Dictators do that all the time.",
"How does Putin get away with killing people? Because he kills anyone that disagrees with him. When you are a functional dictator, and have absolute control over the police and military, then you can literally get away with murder. Russia is a sovereign nation so he isn't answerable to any international authority."
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m3t2u0 | why do people get sentenced to 212 years instead of just calling it life? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"People can shave off years from their sentences through good behavior and plea deals. Also, there are crimes with upper limits on how long someone can be sentenced with. Life is a more extreme sentence than a set number of years so you can't charge someone with life even though the number of years may result in the person spending the rest of their life in prison.",
"In most legal systems life doesn't actually mean life, it has a defined term of years and different parole rules from other sentences. If you get sentenced to 212 years however, and the parole rules say you aren't eligible for parole till you've served half your sentence, then you need to serve 106 years before you can get parole. Whereas with a life sentence you might well be out in 15 or 20, depending where you live."
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m3t3b5 | Why is there no lightning or thunder in a snowstorm, but there is in a rainstorm? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Living in the midwest USA I have seen and witnessed lightning and thunder during a snowstorm. Albiet, they are very rare but with enough instability and warm air trapped close to the ground, it can happen."
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m3uahe | What determines what light is reflected back creating colors? I know color is reflected light, but what determines that? Does it have to doing with | The frequency of the electrons? Idk | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Close! Frequency of the photons of light. Sources of light often emit a wide range of frequencies. The sun, for example, emits a full spectrum of frequencies extending beyond the visible spectrum. Things that light hits will reflect or absorb some of those photons depending on the properties of the molecules they hit and what it does to the molecules' electrons when hit.",
"There is two pretty separate things. One is purely physical, if the surface of something has many small features it just physically interacts with the light waves. If the surface has lots of small holes the light waves bigger than the holes and the ones smaller than the holes will reflect different ways and amounts. Butterfly wings are often shiney and colorful because they have tiny scales that reflect some colors to the sides and colors like blue outward. The other effect is that the way things reflect is an atom absorbs it and then releases it back in the other direction. The wavelength of the light depends on what the electrons are doing and different configurations will put out higher or lower frequencies when you push energy into them"
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m3v3i6 | What is happening physiologically when we sink into a hot bath and we get that incredible "Ahhhhhhhh.....!!" tingly feeling? What is happening to our brains and bodies behind the scenes in those moments? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you sink into a warm bath the heat allows your blood to flow easier and become more oxygenated which in turn relaxes your muscles and relieves tension. That's why it feels so good."
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m3v58y | How Does LIGHT Carry Data? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The light used in fiber optics is of very specific frequencies. Like your local radio station. It is sent just like an electrical signal in that it is digital, meaning there are high points and low points. The high points could represent a one and the low points a zero. Many, many of these specific frequencies are packed very closely together, hence the large amount of data. They work almost exactly like wires but are very low loss, meaning most of the signal gets through. This is very simplified."
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m3v70y | why do some antibiotics say to avoid direct sunlight? Does it make skin burn easier? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes. There is some interesting research on this topic; that the skin's microbiome (the bacteria that live on our skin, and feed on our secretions, etc) actually has a protective role to play against uv light. I would assume that taking antibiotics has a deleterious affect on these bacteria this causing the photosensitivity. It's a fascinating, and growing line of research. Edit:. For anyone interested, here is a great paper: URL_0",
"Yes, they can make you photosensitive. That can cause you to burn more easily in sunlight. I've seen this on malaria medications which is especially important because malaria is often found at latitudes where the sun is stronger anyways.",
"Holy crap. I thought this was a troll question and was thinking \"yeah don't leave pills out in sunlight\" TIL some drugs make you a uber nerfed vampire.",
"Yes. I had Lyme disease meds that had this warning. I coached spring football and used sunscreen but still got scorched. Being bald didn’t help either.",
"I am actually shocked that this isn't talked about more often. If you are on a diuretic then this can happen. Like furosemide or hydrochlorothiazide. Sulfonamides like Bactrim. Even if you have darker skin you can still get a sun rash/burn. & #x200B; Also a somehow lesser known thing to think about is Metronidazole can cause some pretty severe reactions with alcohol. Don't even risk using a mouthwash that has alcohol in it. It always shocked me how few people knew this considering a very large percentage of the adult female population has taken Metronidazole at some point in their life.",
"This is the case with anti rejection/immunosuppressant drugs. With a lower immune system the chances of getting skin cancer is higher for anyone with a transplanted organ.",
"It isn't necessarily burning as in a sunburn. They can be chemical burns, too, or trigger an allergic reaction when your immune system sees what's up. Some drugs are be sensitive to UV light, and after being exposed to UV light (such as from the sun) can start to damage your skin. The damage can come from the medication itself or from your immune system trying to attack it."
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m3v7tu | Why do chemicals like shampoo and soap ingredients have such crazy long names? How are the names developed? | For example, my kids J & J baby wash has ingredients like cocamidopropyl, pentaerythrityl tetrastearate, and ethylhexylglycerine. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Those are chemical names. They are standardized by IUPAC (international Union of pure and applied chemistry) to uniquely identify a chemical and be reasonably descriptive. They describe class of chemicals, their structure, distinguishing characteristics etc.",
"These are actually alternative shortened names of chemical compounds. Cocomidolproyl is a surfactant. pentaerythrityl tetrastearate is a viscosity increasing agent in water. Ethylhexylglyerine is an ether alcohol used as a preservative.",
"There are specific standards for naming organic compounds in chemistry. The crazy names relate to characteristicsof the molecular structure.",
"It’s a bit of the dihydrogen monoxide effect going on. They are less names and more descriptions of what exactly it is for anyone who knows the naming formula. It has the unfortunate side-effect of seeming strange, inscrutable and slightly scary to people who *don’t* know the naming formula, even though technically speaking a common name like “water” is significantly more ambiguous to someone who is encountering it for the first time.",
"As others have mentioned, IUPAC gives us chemists a long list of rules about how to name chemicals. This way, we can accurately translate a chemical structure into a name, and any other chemist can know exactly what molecule we are talking about even if they’ve never heard of or seen that chemical before. Sometimes we shorten common chemical names, or portions of those names. So not all of the chemical names you’ll see are truly IUPAC, but rather “common names” citric acid is a good example since the real name of citric acid would be confusing and unrecognizable to the average consumer."
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m3viq4 | Why does oil and grease make phones have that weird glitchy look when on a screen? It doesn’t happen with water | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"bends the light, oil has the ability for a smear to split the whole light spectrum into colour parts With light hitting it you see one effect, with phone screen light hitting it you see another from the other side, the two together make it look trippy and glitchy"
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m3w76o | what happens to our body when we're in too much pain? and how opioids (morphine, tramadol) help ? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Morphine is an opioid receptor agonist Our body is full of all kinds of receptors, for simplicity, it’s full of little locks which require specific keys to unlock them to activate their effect. I.e. when someone gets an adrenaline shot from an epipen (adrenaline is the key in this instance) it goes and unlocks a whole bunch of locks to which it fits into to cause a number of effects. e.g. alpha 1 receptors (or alpha 1 locks) when bound (unlocked) by adrenaline cause your blood vessels to contract and increase your blood pressure. But adrenaline will also go bind to a whole bunch of other receptors (locks) like beta 2, to which there is a high amount in the lungs and it causes the vessels in the lungs to dilate - i.e. bronchodilation. That’s why adrenaline is given to treat anaphylactic shock (where your BP drops rapidly and your airways close). In the case of morphine, it’s a similar mechanism, instead it binds to opioid receptors (there are a whole bunch of these that do different things, but in terms of pain, they bind to 2 specific points to stop the pain, a pre-synaptic vesicle and post synaptic vesicle. In the pre-synaptic inhibition, essentially what the morphine is doing is stopping your brain sending down messages that the pain is actually happening/causing you pain. In the post synaptic inhibition morphine is essentially stopping the messages from the brain being received. If the brain can’t send signals to your body to say it’s in pain or your body can’t receive it (pre and post synaptic inhibition) you don’t get pain. On my phone but I hope that makes sense. Edit: [My anki card literally came up for this today so if you're seeking some more detailed info.]( URL_0 )"
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m3w9h1 | When you lay down why is it that sometimes it feels like the whole world is shaking and spinning violently? am i feeling the earth spin or is it a mental thing? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That is not a normal sensation. Your sense of balance is determined by your inner ear. If you are experiencing sensations of movement when you are lying still it means that your inner ear function is impaired. It could be an infection or caused by something much worse. You should see a doctor as soon as possible. Edit: impaired*",
"Sounds like vertigo bro. Vertigo is a symptom and actually has many causes. If this continues I'd go to your doctor. It could be something as simple as an infection in your ear",
"Have you been drinking? Your body senses motion using fluid filled tubes in your ears. Alcohol changes the viscosity of the fluid and makes it feel like you're spinning. If the sensation bothers you, slide your leg to a position where you can put a foot on the floor. You'll still feel \"swirly\" but giving yourself a fixed reference point will stop the spinning.",
"That's generally a sign of an inner ear problem. It's most likely benign labarynthitis-- simple vertigo. Totally common and very very curable with one of several at-home maneuvers. Look the maneuvers up online and try them. If they don't help then make a doctor's appt because it's probably an inner ear infection.",
"I've literally never felt like this and have absolutely no idea what you're talking about with this. As others recommend, I highly recommend getting a doctor",
"You will never feel the earth spinning. The effect of the earth spinning, on you, is a very slight decrease in your effective weight.",
"You have BPPV. (Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo) Don't worry! It's nothing serious and easily treated. I'm a vestibular physical therapist and see this on an almost daily basis. Your doctor can order PT. I highly recommend trying to find a vestibular PT in your area. URL_0 will have a listing of local providers. Meclizine is a very common medication to take but pass if you can. It only masks the symptoms but does not fix the problem. You can also youtube the Modified Epley maneuver and self treat. 90% of cases are the posterior canal (which this clears). If you don't know which side is affected, you can safely do both. Good luck!",
"It’s likely not feeling the Earth spinning. Because the Earth’s rotation isn’t really changing at all, we don’t really feel it. Just how you’ll feel the acceleration if you go from 0 to 50 mph in 3 seconds, but you will barely feel the movement if you’re going 60 mph constantly. More likely it’s in your own head, or your inner ear",
"You’ve got these hollow hoops in your ear filled with liquid and lined with little hairs. Little bits of material in those tubes and tickle those hairs, and where they tickle give you your sense of balance. If any part of that gets messed up, your brain thinks you’re spinning around. It’s called vertigo, and it can happen because of ear infection, or a variety of other things. A doctor ought to be able to help narrow it down and give you a way to stop it, or at least make it better."
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m3wdvp | why do game console developer kits look ugly? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because designing nice looking cases costs money. Developers don’t care about the aesthetics of the computer/console they’re developing for; they care about the internal hardware and the software development tools. Studios don’t want to pay more for dev kits just so they look cool in developers’ offices. And console makers don’t want to waste time/money on designs for something only developers will ever see.",
"Hardware specs still in flux Not for retail sale so no need for them to look pretty Sometimes additional components like more than one NIC, so loses some of the possible sleek factor"
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m3wg2i | If someone is exercising and breathing heavily, and they are exerting themselves to the point they pass out, will they continue to breathe heavy or will their breathing return to normal? | I apologise if this is not the correct place to post this. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If they’re breathing heavily from exercise they’ll keep doing so because they have a physiological need for oxygen and the autonomic nervous system controls that. If they are breathing heavily for another reason, like they’re scared or panicking, then their breathing will quickly return to normal after they pass out because the reason for the heavy breathing has ended"
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m3wp66 | why do games have so many dll files? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're called library files because they contain resources for programs to work. They are accessible by multiple programs to share the data, but only when needed so it saves on memory. Each library would have a specific functionality though, so that's why there are a lot of them, but since they're only used when absolutely required they don't waste a lot of system resources.",
"Games do not \"have\" .dll files, they \"are\" the .dll files. DLL files are libraries of purpose-related programs. A game is a very complicated assembly of those programs, therefore it requires many libraries to serve different purposes. You will have a separate dll for network, graphics, sound, input, disk interface, etc. Everything that happens in the game is coded in one of those."
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m3xrb0 | Why couldn't Princess Margaret marry a divorced man? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The public opinion of something can very over time. While culture generally gets more progressive over time, it's not always a straight line. And we can't forget that opinions above the behavior of men have generally been different from opinions about the behavior over women. All that said, they Monarch had barely survived a recent scandal involving their monarch marrying a divorcee, and he was forced to abdicate and leave the country. Which they mention many times during this season.",
"Seeing that something clearly was the purpose of a drastic action is very different from officially admitting the purpose of that action. Henry hired biblical scholars to carefully draft his request to the pope for his annulment (based off the fact that the bible says you can't marry your dead brothers wife or some shit and that is definitely what happened to him). He waited for the gout riddled elderly church official the pope dispatched to hear his case to limp his ill ass on the much delayed journey to England. Henry very much wanted the legitimacy of a Papal annulment. He jumped thorough a lot of hoops to try and get it. When he felt like (with some justification) that the Vatican was dicking him around to flex their power over his own, he took the very drastic step of establishing his own state religion, but legitimacy remained an important aspect of that transition. You give the game away if you just go \"the church of England will divorce anything from anyone!\". Since you have papist rebellions within your own walls now it makes a great deal of sense not to lend any more credence to their arguments that the royal family are all blasphemers."
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m3y6rc | How did current olympic champions surpass the ones from decades ago so much? | Are they training harder? or are athletes today just physically better? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Along with the other comments about better training/nutrition, a huge part is actually technology. Shoes that return more energy per footstep, swimsuits that have less hydrodynamic drag, etc. There have been lots of controversies with leaps in technology for certain sports and world records being broken (i.e. the examples I just mentioned). Incremental improvements in technology for a certain sport are less likely to be in the spotlight or get banned, but they have just as much an impact on olympic or world records over the years.",
"Sports medicine and training have advanced a lot since the first olympics. In a hundred years time training methods of what works and what doesn't have changed, even diet has changed. Athletes now have more stamina and strength than ever. It took a lot of time to get to Roger Bannister who broke the 4 minute mile record running in 1954, now it's a pretty normal thing for a good athlete to be able to do.",
"There's a great book called The Sports Gene by David Epstein for anyone interested in this question. It addresses a lot of the reasons mentioned so far for continued advancement in sports records over the past century: improved nutrition, larger pool of athletes, the explosion of lucrative careers in professional athletics, better sports medicine, and better technology. It also shows how, in the past few decades, many of these sources of new generations of record-breaking performances are becoming exhausted. Pools of genetically gifted athletes have stopped growing at an exponential pace, and young athletes are combed over and shunted into their best sport with increasing efficiency. Sports medicine, training, and nutrition are all likewise generating decreasing marginal returns. Advances in technology have hit similar inflection points, and in many cases are being regulated or banned from competitive sports. The end result is that breaking records in sports has become increasingly impossible over the last couple of decades, and breaking a world record now means being born at the far edge of the distribution of human ability, together with consistently pushing one's body to the edge of what is physically possible for years. The 20th and early 21st century in sports will soon be viewed as a brief, never to be repeated window in human history in which a population explosion, leaps forward in nutrition, medicine, and technology, and the professionalization of sports all led to records being broken by percentage points instead of hundredths of percentage points.",
"If you accumulate tiny incremental advantages over your opponents, they add up to big gains. Athletes have support teams of nutritionists, physiotherapists, exercise physiologists, sports psychiatrists. All those fields get better every year. They have technological improvements: bikes, swimsuits, running shoes. Olympic athletes are supported financially by their governments. There’s a wider pool of athletes to choose from and talent scouting is better. People are growing bigger and stronger than ever before because of all the food we have access to now. The baseline level of technical skill in a sport increases over time, too.",
"Athletes are much more professional now. We never used to have teams dedicated to training for the Olympics or other competitions. Often participants were gifted or those with enough time and money to do some training. People are also generally getting bigger, which doesn't just mean we're all getting fat, it includes taller and stronger. All thanks to better nutrition and health. When you think about it, we wouldn't eat such a variety of foods all year around without things like cold chain storage. And with better research we know how to tweak performance. Somethings like getting less colds over the year may only make a 1-2% improvement, but cumulatively with all the other small improvements, it gives athletes a winning edge.",
"Here’s a great [Ted Talk]( URL_0 ) that explains your question actually. Technological advancements and sports medicine have made athletes into who are they are today versus a century ago.",
"USA certified track coach here. The science of exercise didn’t really take off until the 60s and 70s. We began to learn so much about training and recovery that we could start fine tuning training plans to fit individual athletes. Drugs really helped advance it because what workouts work well for drugged athletes will also benefit non-drug athletes. We also had money injected into sports that allowed athletes to train exclusively and not try to qualify for the Olympic a while holding down a part time job and eating table scraps. Nutrition also took off and our knowledge on that has been monumental in training. There’s still a lot we don’t know, particularly in area of the nervous system and gene doping that could further unlock performance in ways we haven’t imagined.p",
"Wider pool of athletes. There was a time most athletes were only upper class whites, because they were only ones with free time and money to pursue sports. Better training... they understand the physiology of strength and other skills better, have better techniques, are much more likely to have started younger and trained more throughout their life; better nutrition and understanding of how it helps optimize performance; better sports medicine to treat injuries; better equipment",
"Drugs, mostly. Name an Olympic track and field record you are confident is clean. No? Exactly. Cycling hasn’t had a clean winner in thirty years (Wiggins and Froome went down yesterday, as their team doctor was adjudged a Dr Feelgood liar by a medical tribunal), athletics we know what happened at Nike Oregon, etc, etc. Drugs. Prove me wrong.",
"Better drugs and hormone treatments that are harder to detect. This is not just cynicism either. The modern anabolics used in professional sport are very hard to detect and leave the system very quickly. The money for engineering these hormones comes from the world of pro and Olympic athletics.",
"Steroids. People who aren't in the know are going to say \"but they're all drug tested!\" until you understand how drug testing and steroids work-- you'll believe that the majority of athletes aren't doping. They are.",
"MY COUNTRY DID AN EXPERIMENT ON THIS. They compared the performance of current and “from the 60s” athletes wearing the same clothes that were in fashion 50 years ago. The current one CRUSHED the athletes from the 70s. Mostly because the later ones had bad hips or were already in wheelchairs",
"All these comments about training and equipment? Let's be real. It wasn't too long ago that smoking and beers in the dressing room was common.",
"To make it real short, science has figured out how to better train an athlete. Genetics teamed with science.",
"A lot of people seems to be missing the biggest component in their answer. That component is time/money. 80 years ago you couldn't afford to be just an \"athelete\". The more prosperous society became the more specialized everybody could become. Back then a soccer player was also maybe a farmer or a baker or whatever. Now they can spend more time playing soccer and training to become faster, stronger, more skilled and they can earn a living doing so as well. This is 100% the main contributor. The people who talk about technological advancements are giving too much credit to the \"shape of the shoe\" now vs then. It is 100% time/money.",
"Actually, most of those gains are due to technology in some manner. For example, many of the biggest gains in running speed are actually due to better construction of tracks, which are now more grippy, more consistent of a running surface, more level, better swept for debris, etc. Advances in sports like bobsled are similar. The US bobsled team did extremely well for a while, and it was more due to the fact that the bobsled program was given technical assistance and technology developed for NASCAR than because the athletes were superior.",
"Olympics used to be a strictly amateur thing. Getting more money involved may be an additional impetus to compete more seriously.",
"As well as what everyone else has said, there are also just more people now, which also helps. Compare when only 2 billion people had been born to now, when it's what, 12 billion? Statistically that first 2 billion will only contain 1/6 of the best in any field. So even without any technological advances, we'd still be seeing records broken just because more people are available to try to break them",
"It has absolutely nothing to do with Soviet Russia or the USA's secret steroid programs during the cold war.",
"PED. Not necessarily steroids but performance enhancing drugs. Hmb creatine carnitine, and even some illegal stuff, but shhh we don't talk about that",
"As other people have said Sports Medicine and Training have massively improved, but equipment and technique development have also developed to a similar degree.",
"Another thing to factor in is that, when the modern olympics was initially founded in 1896, the goal was to have the athletes be talented amateurs from all walks of life; not necessarily have them be professional athletes. In fact, it wasn't until 1989 that the rule that prevented NBA players from competing in the olympics was struck down, thus paving the way for the 1992 US men's basketball \"dream team\", which included basketball legends Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, and Magic Johnson.",
"Has anyone brought up the murky world of roids and the evolutionary game to be 1-step ahead of the enforcement? Bill Barr’s line comes to mind: the competition is with regards to to our roided guy versus the other country’s roided guy. This was in reference to Lance Armstrong and the many years of avoidance on getting caught - where covertly it was known that the cyclist were all roided up - and the competition was who could keep it on the down low, and have the best roids.",
"A mix between better nutrition, training, and recovery methods, as well massive improvements in equipment and clothing. Having more aerodynamic clothing, helmets, shoes with better traction, goggles that provide clearer vision. A lot of it is just better recovery techniques, as well. Athletes can train harder and more extensively because they have medical professionals that can gauge the exact limit they can push their bodies to. Nutritionists measuring their exact calories in and out to ensure peak performance. At a guess, I would say genetics and general improved health plays some part in it. We are able to eat a lot more and a lot healthier (generally) these days, and more people are born healthier to healthier parents. But this last part is more my own conjecture than based on any hard evidence.",
"Well that's the thing. If you are taking PED (performance enhancing drugs) it doesn't always mean steroids and growth hormones.. It can be other supplements like pre workout to improve the intensity of a workout, then creatine and other pills assisting in muscle recovery. Some aren't even illegal since they are commonly available to cure joint pain.. add high altitude training and monitored nutrition with bcaa, whey protein and all the other supplements that you can't test for. All of those are legal And then steroids, well the thing is you can only test for them whilst the athlete is cruising, and even then it's not 100% accurate.. so let's say I juice all tear, then stop a month before the competition. They test me then; no Biggie I'm clean. That's why they do spot tests all year but you know, someone has to be in charge of those, and they might be \"motivated\" to forget an appointment, or do someone else instead.. The problem isn't the drugs, because everyone takes them, so the playing field is still even. The problem is pretending like they don't exist"
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m3yb8w | Supernova Nucleosynthesis | I get that it creates heavier atoms by fusing lighter ones, and it happens during a supernova. But, what I don't get is the process of it. And the teacher didn't help either as they literally just read the module verbatim. Thanks! | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In a supernova the star has lost equilibrium so the pressure balance of fusion versus gravity is thrown out of balance. The star begins to expand, then as it exhausts its fuel it collapses down on itself hard. This sudden violent collapse forces the matter in the star's core to be suddenly compressed so hard it forces the atoms together into a tiny space. Depending on how big the star was initially this either forms a black hole, or if it's not as massive an explosion of the material as it rebounds releasing the pressure. If the atoms are compressed by enough pressure they can overcome the charge differences and be forced together or fused into heavier atoms which after the nova explodes are spread out into the universe. There is also the S-process in stars, I think half of all elements heavier than iron are created by it. Basically this is there are a lot of particles flying around in a star. In the process of neutron capture which is where an atomic nucleus and one or more neutrons collide and form a new heavier element. This is a very slow process, which gives it its name the S process.",
"During a supernova, a whole lot of neutrons are created. Imagine an iron atom inside the exploding star. All these neutrons are flying by, and some have a chance of sticking to the iron atom. By the time the supernova is over, the iron atom has been covered in a whole lot of extra neutrons. That iron atom is now a very unstable isotope, and in the aftermath of the supernova it will radioactively decay. That means the extra neutrons turn into protons, and that's exactly how you make heavier elements. For every neutron that turns into a proton, you go one element heavier.",
"As other comments already explained, nuclei heavier than iron are created by neutron absorption/conversion. Those between silicon and nickel are indeed [created by fusing helium into silicon]( URL_0 ) (and its daughter elements). This smashing of nuclei requires a lot of energy to overcome their repulsion, that is why a super energetic environment like that of supernova is required.",
"Stars fuse lower mass elements into higher mass. H > He, 3 x HE to Carbon and higher elements. There is a slow process by which elements are created by slow capture of neutrons. This means that the nucleus captures a free neutron and then undergoes decay which increases the atom number. Slow neutron capture might be once in 100 years. As the lower mass fuel runs out, stars start to collapse and the heat of the core goes up which allows for burning of heavier elements. The limit is iron. All fusion releases energy to prop up the star until iron is formed. Fusion past iron requires energy input so once iron forms, the star explodes within seconds. During a supernova, a lot of heat is generated and a lot of fusion can happen at once. And there are a lot of free neutrons which can be captured by heavy nuclei. It is thought that heavier elements can be created through the r-process which is rapid neutron capture. It is rapid in that a neutron is captured by an atom and then it captures more neutrons before a decay can occur. The rate is perhaps 100 neutron captures per second. This will pump up the number of neutrons in the nucleus of the atom. This only happens in very neutron rich environments. The heavy, neutron rich atoms will undergo decay to something stable but still remain heavier elements. The r-process will also occur during neutron star collisions. These collisions might seed the interstellar gas with most of the heavier elements."
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m3ynv9 | Why do we have to rise for the Judge when they enter a courtroom? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To show respect for the judge, not just the individual, but also his office and our system of justice. It's a tradition going back many centuries.",
"In old times, the judge was royalty or clergy. The peasants were expected to show their respect to their Lord by standing. As American law is based upon English Common Law, we've carried many of their customs as well."
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m3z78o | How does the internet work? | Pretty sure I’m still going on Ted Stevens’ “series of tubes” metaphor. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A good analogy to understand the internet is by comparing it to mailing letters. You send a letter to a place requesting content. Maybe you send a letter to Sears asking for a catalog of all they have on sale. Your letter is delivered by your internet service provider (ISP) instead of the postal service. It gets sent to Sear's IP address instead of their street address. Instead of someone opening your letter, reading your request, and responding by sending a catalog back to you, Sear's servers do all of that. They send your requested information to your IP address instead of your street address, in the form of a web page your browser knows how to read rather than a letter.",
"A bunch of big companies interconnect all their computers. Then they let you connect to them and tell your computer how to get to fred's computer over on Amsterdam Street so you can buy that special brownie"
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m3za6a | as a parent how can some children noises cause pain | As parent when my kids cry, sream, or wine in certain ways I feel like it physically hurts and some time feel sick. It has to be phycological right? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well humans are conditioned to immediately recognize sounds of pain, struggle, crying and suffering. It's just in our nature. But some are more predisposed to being more mentally reactant towards these sounds that it can cause physical pain. When I hear a kid crying at a grocery store my entire day is fucking ruined because that kid's screeches pierce through my soul"
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m3zvz0 | What is dark comedy / humour? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A type of humor which centers around morbid or taboo topics, like mental illness, death, rape, and things of that nature."
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m3zz0o | What does it mean for ETH to be more like "gas" than an actual currency? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In short, it allows it to do, rather than to have. In analogy: gasoline can get you to the other side of the continent, money can't get you anywhere, unless you spend it to let someone else get you to the other side of the continent. The Ethereum network allows addresses to contain code, scripts and values, to be executed in transactions. These scripts are called contracts. This means that a script execution is open and transparent, and the execution cannot be tempered with. But you'd need gas to execute it. So again, instead of paying a third party, like a bank or accounting agency, to do important, official business, you would be able to see and trust the actions of the network. Let's take the purchase of a house as an example. I do not have the funds to directly purchase a house, but the contract on address XYZ is written by a mortgage supplier, and allows you to register for a mortgage. An address making a transaction to this contract is registered in the contract. Now, why is this different to a website offing a mortgage? We have to trust whatever code we can't see on the website, but any transaction and it's content, including the publishing of the contract, is public. Whatever the contract is doing, you can see it. It's quite a complex matter, but I hope I did answer the question at least a little bit. I'm happy to answer any further questions"
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m401jh | How do surgeons remove a brain tumor without damaging the brain? | I’ve been watching Grey’s Anatomy (I know) and I’m curious- I know that you have to move around the ‘important parts’ to access a tumor if you’re able to even operate at all. But, how is any part of the brain ‘not important’? Meaning, how are surgeons able to touch and manipulate parts of the brain without it 1) turning into mush 2) being damaged and affected permanently ? Thank you and sorry if this is a dumb question, Grey’s has me real into this. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Not a surgeon. But my husband had brain surgery 3 weeks ago. Brain Surgeons have had enough experience and research over the years to know what they can remove and how best to remove it. The lump my husband had was right smack bang in the middle of his brain. (behind his eyes, under the cortex and in front of the cerebelllum) Surgeon went in from the back and slightly to the left. Surgery is also robot assisted. Brain surgery means all the liquid your brain floats in has to be drained away and it has the regenerate after the operation. This give you a headache. Your brain doesn't like being dry. Going in from the back of the brain makes you very nauseated. Going in from the front has risks of seizures and epilepsy. Brain surgery isn't without risks. Hubby has had a few complications, but he couldn't keep the lump either.",
"They don't. The idea is that the damage they cause during surgery is insignificant compared to the immediate risks associated with not removing the tumor.",
"The literal answer to your question is: they can't. Any surgery causes damage, this is especially true of a wad of soft tissues that are covered in layers of blood vessles/goo and squeezed into an elaborate series of fused bone plates. The number of ACTUAL brain surgeries (where you're getting into and screwing around in the soft tissues) is very low for this reason. Most 'neurosurgery' is related to the bones and connective tissues attached to the CNS.",
"Not a dumb question. The probability is that there will be some damage depending on tumor location. They will have the person be awake during the surgery when poking the brain (there are no pain receptors in the brain itself) and test an area with a small electric current (I think) and ask what the patient is experiencing. The calculation is what damage is worth getting the tumor out. Functions arent strictly localized like you see in cartoons or the movies. Some adaptation is possible. If it is a small area at the surface you may never notice anything missing (might have been signals anbout 1 cm on your rump) something deep and the surgeon may be roughly choosing between loss of some vision, some mobility, some sensory integration or some judgement. The brain is a bit more flexible than we used to think and the consequences interact with our life situation. The same damage size and location in a person who is a seamstress/tailor who thinks spatially about how pieces fit and what relates to what vs a lawyer who has to speak correctly according to a set of verbal rules and think quickly about various options could have very different life effects. One may be devastated and the other barely notice."
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m402zr | why is that when our legs are at rest we can sometimes feel our kneecaps “grumble” or “vibrate” slightly when we touch them? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Two reasons: 1. Your body is constantly moving inside. Muscles relax, blood gets pumped, gas escapes from between your various cartilages, etc. These can cause sensations that are very slight, but can definitely feel like that. When you pop your fingers, it's a similar cause. 2. \"VLS, Vibrating Leg Syndrome\". Practically everyone has a vibrating smartphone in their pocket for 16 hours a day. Our brains get happy when we get a message, so we've associated the phone's vibration with that joy. Every now and then, we feel something in our leg, and our brains REALLY wants it to be a message, so it feels like a vibration. Some people even claim to hear their notification tone often, despite not receiving a message."
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m40863 | what do the news mean when they say the goverment froze the bank accounts of a person? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They’re frozen like a river. Can’t do anything, can’t go anywhere. In short, the government called up the bank and told them to halt all future transactions on that specific account/s. From there they’ll usually spend time combing through recent transactions to figure out if anything illegal was being done with that money. This is where they’d try to trace back where all the money came from and where it’s been going.",
"It means that there is a law in that country that allows the government, probably in the firm of the police, to contact any banking institutions holding a person's money, and inform them that nobody is allowed to access that money until the government or courts say otherwise. These institutions will be subject to large fines if they do allow anybody to access the money. Not to mention huge pain in the ass investigations into what other banking laws are they breaking. One of the reasons why rich naughty people spread their money internationally. You can't freeze what you don't know about. Or what's outside your jurisdiction."
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m408ir | Where do the letters in Vitamins derive from? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Most of the skipped letters used to have vitamins named that but were later discovered to actually be minerals like niacin, fatty acids like omega 3’s, or reclassified as another B vitamin. The letters were just order of discovery. First one discovered, we’ll call that Vitamin A, etc.",
"By order of discovery. Vitamin F is fatty acid, which is not a vitamin, and ofc is fixed when they reclassified the vitamins."
],
"score": [
31,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
|
m40gz7 | Why is the Badminton shuttlecock the fastest object in sports? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gqsnu9w"
],
"text": [
"Because it’s so light. Force = Mass * Acceleration. So when you Have something with very little mass, it takes way less energy/force to make that thing go really fast. So the swing of a badminton racket is enough to get it going real fast. Then, because it’s so light, it slows down really quickly due to the friction with the air, which is why even going so fast they don’t go super far."
],
"score": [
10
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
|
m41haf | Does the age of meat (relative to the expiration date) before being cooking affect how long is it safe to eat after it is cooked? | E.G. I have 2 packs of chicken. one is 5 days before expiration (5A) , one is 1 day before expiration (1B). If i cook them both today, would 5A be safe to eat for 4 days longer than 1B? Would they both be unsafe at the same time? Or something in between? Something I thought about and realized that I didnt know the answer to. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gqs2oxz"
],
"text": [
"Nope. Once it is cooked everything evil is done for. The time it remains safe after cooking is identical."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
m41l18 | Why do smaller rechargeable batteries (smartphones, power banks) use mAh to measure capacity, while larger batteries (laptops, EVs) use kWh? | How come some use Watt-Hours and some use Ampere-Hours? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gqsbatm"
],
"text": [
"When you are comparing batteries of equal voltage, using Ah or Wh are basically the same because you can just multiply by voltage. For example standard car batteries are 12V and their capacity is quoted in Ah. Why not Wh, which would work equally well? The things that a car battery powers (starter motor for example) pull a known current so it makes sense to quote capacity in current x time. This applies to phone batteries that all work at the same voltage. In contrast electric cars have batteries of a range of voltages. Roughly speaking higher voltage is more efficient and more compact but requires more expensive components. Hence designers pick different values depending on their needs. Given you care about the total energy stored in the battery, and you don’t necessarily know the voltage, it makes sense to quote the capacity in Wh."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
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