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m5qed0 | What is the Charles Bonnet Syndrome? | What is the Charles Bonnet Syndrome? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Vision deterioration that can then involve hallucinations anything from simple patterns to complex images.",
"Humans are very sight oriented when it comes to our senses, so the brain puts a lot of effort into processing visuals. In order to make that job easier, there are tricks our brains perform. For example, we don't actually see colors In our peripherals, and we have blind spots, but you probably don't notice that when you're looking around. Your mind \"fills in the blanks\". If you lose your eyesight CBS is a name for the visual hallucinations that are likely a byproduct of your brain practicing it's usual image processing tricks even though the input is reduced or not there. I'm no expert, had to Google CBS and am extrapolating with what I know about sight from there. Looking forward to seeing other answers",
"You may want to read the book *The Mind’s Eye* by Dr. Oliver Sacks, all about different kinds of hallucinations, including CBS."
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m5rr4g | Why do cigarette butts smell stronger than actual burning cigarettes? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The entire time you’re smoking a cigarette, you’re bringing the smoke from the burning tip through the cigarette to the filter. By the time a cigarette becomes a butt, a lot of smoke and tar is concentrated at that end and in the filter. That, combined with the remaining tobacco going stale, makes them smell worse",
"They don't, but you are used to burning cigarettes smelling excessively. Butts however, probably don't release as much aromatic hydrocarbons as burning cigarettes too. That's the part that smells nice and appealing of cigarettes. When i stopped smoking last week, still had a can of butts in my window, where i used to smoke, and that can smelled absolutely gruesome after my second day smoke free while I couldn't smell it at all when I was smoking.",
"cause the filter, i'm a smoker, and the filter is disgusting, i mean, it retains some of the actual bad stuff, but at the same time it gets gradually filled with it and it goes from white to brown in 10 puffs, sometimes when i'm smoking and i see the brown filter i just throw away the cigarette 'cause you realize it fucks stuff up lol",
"The posts on quitting smoking... hey buds, I quit a two-pack-a-day habit almost 40 years ago, am seldom around smokers but there are times I'll be sitting around happy and suddenly get twitchy. \"What do I want?\" \"Cigarette. You don't just quit and Done. You have to keep quitting. The addiction isn't like anything else available to the body and brain. But here, like elsewhere in Life, \"No\" is a complete sentence. 'S worth it though. I laugh w/o coughing and don't have to negotiate with people, where I sit and where I'll go, \"so I can smoke.\"",
"It's the chemical build up being drawn through the filter with each drag. It was a pain for me to hide them as a teenager just because it was exponentially stronger than the cigarette itself."
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m5swv4 | - Why are dinosaur fossils buried so deep under ground? | My understanding is that water on Earth has pretty much been constant for hundreds of millions of years. Is that the same with soil/rock, basically land? I always see cliff faces that show all the layers of millions of years but where does that come from? If its from volcanos or internal forces pushing up does that mean Earth's core it getting less dense? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sedimentary rocks (where we find fossils) are built up in layers. This needs two things: (1) a supply of sediment, which comes from rocks being weathered and the resulting sediments accumulating in some low lying area. (2) the subsidence of this area so that it becomes an actual sedimentary basin — the sediment is supplied, the whole region is sinking (ultimately due to tectonic forces pulling the land apart on a larger scale) and the buried sediments eventually get deep enough to compress and lithify into actual rock. The sediment supplied is being weathered from elsewhere: upthrust bits of crust, (especially mountain belts, but anywhere with higher relief than its surroundings), so it’s all a big cycle and no new mass is being generated — it’s just moving from highlands to lowlands in this particular link in the rock cycle. Any organisms dying in the sedimentary basin (or even dying elsewhere and being transported to the basin) have the potential to get fossilised, though the vast majority do not because they are not buried quick enough and get scavenged or broken down. On of the key factors being that the more hard parts the organism has, the more likely it is to fossilise. This means that there is a bias in the fossil record towards excluding soft bodied creatures and is why finds like the [Burgess Shale Fauna]( URL_0 ) are rare and can reveal a whole other host of organisms living alongside the usual suspects from whatever period it was at the time. Now, the deal with finding fossils from some sedimentary basin is not quite finished. The last piece of the puzzle is this: we need that basin to be **uplifted** (again, this is by tectonic forces) at some point after the fossilisation in order for us to be able to find it. It’s not like people are digging deep holes in the ground to find dinos or whatever else there was; we are just looking in places which have since been uplifted so that the overlying layers have been eroded away and we’re back to dinos (or whatever) being at or near the surface again. Fossil finds are often after some storm event where slightly more rock and sediment has been eroded and we see a little piece of something poking out, then an excavation begins (which could be as simple as hammering the host chunk of rock a couple of times and getting a little fossil, or it could be a whole operation lasting weeks to gradually uncover a larger specimen). Cliffs are special places in that they show many layers exposed like a slice through a cake, and they are places of very active erosion. Bits are always getting weathered away by the elements or just simply collapsing, so new fossil finds will often follow if the cliffs are sedimentary and known to host fossils. This is how famous early palaeontologist [Mary Anning]( URL_1 ) made several early discoveries of previously unknown species, the most spectacular being large marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. The Geological Society of London still didn’t grant her a membership or let her disseminate knowledge with the “real” scientists because you know — early Victorian Britain was no place for a woman to be having intellectual ideas. Not even an upper class woman at that! Thankfully Mary Anning is beginning to be a bit more celebrated for her achievements these days, just a shame she didn’t live to see it. Anyway I hope that answers most of your question. For this bit: > If its from volcanos or internal forces pushing up does that mean Earth's core it getting less dense? Yes, some layers *are* due to volcanic ash being deposited on land. This doesn’t normally form fossils, but there are some quite amazing exceptions, watch [this 9 minute video to see the most notable one]( URL_3 ), from a volcanic system that I guarantee you will have heard of. Due to the recycling of material back into the Earth at [subduction zones]( URL_2 ) the Earth is not running out of new material to be erupted. Due to there being a fair bit of residual heat from formation *and* the continued production of new heat from radioactive material in the mantle, the Earth is not running out of heat for volcanic eruptions any time soon either. The core is actually getting denser over time — as the Earth very slowly cools, the solid inner core expands at the expense of the molten outer core. That is, more of the molten core gradually crystallises so that the inner core grows, the solid iron-nickel of the inner core is more dense than its molten counterpart in the outer core. We don’t need to worry about the dynamics between the core and the surface volcanic eruptions, they are not entirely separate (it’s all the Earth after all), but they are way more complicated and subtle to matter here.",
"Soil is mostly made up of decomposed dead things and surface rocks that have been eroded by wind or water. It’s more or less continuously forming. As the soil gets buried deeper, the pressure slowly hardens it back into rock. Rocks have a whole life cycle of sorts, while they form and erode very slowly from a human perspective they definitely aren’t permanent fixtures.",
"The rocks you see on the surface return to the earth's mantle, albeit very slowly. The rocks you see above ground will eventually weather into sand, silt, and clay and travel to the lowest point gravity can take it. This is usually the ocean. Over time, pressure from more and more sediment accumulating will cause the sediment to become a sedimentary rock. This is known as diagenesis. At convergent plate boundaries like the Rockies and Andes, the oceanic sedimentary rock will travel with the tectonic plate and the rock will be forced underneath the continental plate. This is how rocks \"return\" to the Earth's mantle.",
"Dirt and stuff like that is constantly being eroded and therefore moves and settles in areas periodically. It builds on top of the preexisting layer of Earth and thats what forms those layers in those cliffs. The more layers that are built on top due to erosion pushes the bottom layers farther down and so does anything on those bottom layers, like fossils.",
"So over time in some areas dust and landslides and volcanos and earthquakes and such cause a build up of layers of earth. In other places, erosion causes layers to be worn down. When they’re worn down then they’re gone, dust in the wind. So any potential fossils can’t form there because it all eroded and blew away. Or the areas changed over time and the organic matter was turned into petrochemicals. So we only find fossils in the places where the right conditions prevailed to cover over the dead animals and then gradually fossilize them. This happens extremely rarely but over the course of hundreds of millions of years, it has happened enough times that we do find a lot of fossils. Do the core isn’t becoming less dense, it’s that matter from one part of the earth blew away and covered other areas of the earth. Great mountains eroded over time and the material that eroded ended up in a different location."
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m5tlp8 | how does the eco setting on a washing machine save energy and water by washing the laundry for *longer*? | Edit: Thank you to everyone that replied! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The motor of the washing machine uses very little power when it's just moving the clothes around. It's a bit more during the spin cycle, but that doesn't last very long. The vast majority of the power is used to heat the water, so if you can use a lower temperature and/or less water and instead just have the motor do its thing for a longer time, you use less energy (and water) overall.",
"Whenever you clean something, there are 5 basic elements involved: Water, Agitation, Time, Chemical, Heat (WATCH for short!). Think of them arranged as the wedges of a pie chart. For something to get properly clean, there is a balance of these 5 things. You can reduce one or more of these elements, but in compensation, one or more have to be increased. In modern washers, the amount of water, chemical, and heat is reduced, at the expense of time and agitation. The washer is relying more on the mechanical action of agitation to shoulder the load of soil removal, but obviously, this takes longer. In terms of our pie chart, W, C, and H wedges are smaller, and the A and T wedges are made larger to compensate. As someone mentioned, it takes less energy to agitate the clothes in the wash wheel than it does to heat the water to higher temps, hence the energy savings.",
"The energy required to heat the water is significantly greater than the energy to pump the water or spin the tub. A typical electric water tank is 4500 W. A washing machine's boost heater (for better machines, if incoming water is too cold) would be 1500 W. A pump might be 100 W. The main drum motor might be 300-500 W. Kinetic energy to heat 20 L of water from 20 to 40 C: 1,600,000 J Kinetic energy to spin a stopped drum full of 40 kg clothes+water up to 300 rpm: .5 × (.5 × mass × radius^2) × (angular velocity)^2 = 1.2 × (37 rad/s)^2 = 1600 J (assuming solid cylinder for moment of inertia)",
"It uses the water, longer. therefore it can get away with using less water, since it uses that same water more efficiently. think of how long it takes for water to seep into a thick cloth",
"The eco setting on my washer uses colder water than the warm setting. Heating water takes a lot of energy. A big chunk of household energy use is just heating water and heating|cooling air."
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m5uxsh | Why do abandoned buildings break down so fast while buildings in use (without renovation) can last much longer? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The elements get to it when its not maintained in a variety of ways. One big one is temperature; humans like our buildings in a comfy temperature range and the materials buildings are made of do well in those temperatures. But if you live somewhere with temperature variations the severe cold or heat causes materials to degrade, pipes to burst, etc. Or perhaps the outside gets inside. Windows break, wind and critters get in, moisture seeps into the walls and causes wood to rot. Maybe its just a colony of some insect that eats all the wood and causes structural collapse. All in all its an accumulation of any number of those factors or other natural occurrences that pile up unattended when a building is abandoned. Normally people would fix these issues, but with no one there the damage never gets repaired.",
"In addition to all the things already said, I think one of the more important points is also, that already damaged buildings are more likely to be abandoned and that might skew the statistics quite a bit.",
"Each case is probably different. But one reason is that abandoned buildings often don't have temperature regulation, no furnaces or air conditioners running. Extreme changes in temperature can damage paint, drywall, pipes, flooring, etc. So they start to fall apart. Also, no one is there to notice a leaking roof, damaged windows, pests, or whatever."
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m5vutj | How do we know that most of the population has HPV? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They can actually be tested for, it's just expensive and useless to test for, so no insurance companies will pay for it. Its easier to say we can't test for it.",
"Excellent question, so the answer is through complex math and study, but primarily through analyzing the receiving end in this case. Lets say person B contracts HPV, with symptoms. You, as a researcher, found out they have a history with person A. If you repeat this process enough times, through analytics you can paint a pretty broad picture of how many people it's transmitted to regardless of if they are symptomatic or not, as even if person A's results do not show up, you can still get the broad data from person B. Quick addition: get the HPV vaccine. I'm a dude and I got it, literally easy to do and don't have to worry about it now. Do it for piece of mind and to minimize the chance of potential cancer."
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m5wjrw | How do allergies work? | I get that your body is trying to defend itself against something it thinks is harmful. But how come people due from an allergic reaction? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine that you’re in a space ship. Fire would be incredibly dangerous and could easily destroy the whole ship. The fire suppression system is thus very strong: If a fire is detected, the affected room is sealed and has all of the oxygen removed. Dangerous if you’re trapped in the room with the fire, but much less dangerous for the ship than letting the fire run rampant. An allergy is an unintentional triggering of this system. That’s obviously bad, because a room on the ship being sealed and having its oxygen vented could easily kill someone for no reason. Since this is a case of the system being broken and acting in an unintended way, it’s possible that a particularly bad trigger could cause every room on the ship to be sealed and all of the air to be vented, killing everyone on board. This is something that would never happen if the system was operating correctly, but since its already clearly not operating correctly, it opens the door to doing much more damage than would typically be possible under normal circumstances. That’s basically what is happening with severe immune responses to allergens. The immune system is overreacting to something that isn’t actually dangerous, and that means that it can potentially overreact *so* much that the reaction itself does serious damage to your body because it’s triggering effects that are much more extreme than would ever normally occur."
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m5xn7f | How do rockets and space shuttles accelerate in outer space? | On Earth, helicopters propel themselves by pushing air downward using their propellers. That's using air. How about rockets or space shuttles in outer space when there's nothing to push or displace? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They push gas out, the gas pushes them forward. It is never about the air that they are in, it is about newton's 3rd law.",
"Imagine you are shooting a gun. The gun pushes back into you when it fires a bullet. This recoil is a reaction to the bullet being accelerated forward. Now imagine you are floating in space and you shoot the gun. The recoil from the gun will send you drifting backwards. Replace the gun with a rocket engine and the bullet with rocket exhaust and you have propulsion with no need for atmosphere.",
"Ejecting mass out the back of the rocket and for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.",
"Newton's third law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Which means when a rocket propels fuel from its thrusters the force of that pushes the rocket in the opposite direction.",
"Fundamentally if you push something then it has to push you back. It has to. If you throw a ball, the ball was pushing back on you when it was in your hand. You can literally feel your hand compress against it. Conventional rockets let out gas and the gas pushes the rocket on its way out. You are also a fart rocket",
"As other posters have said, spacecraft bring the \"air\" with them and chuck it out the back. Normal rocket engines are basically throwing the smoke from the fire out the nozzle. Maneuvering engines often are just cans of compressed gas that they let leak out when they want a kick. Then there are more exotic things like ion engines that use electric fields to accelerate small amounts of gas to very high speeds. Don't feel bad about your confusion. The New York Times made the same mistake, and accused Goddard in 1920 of missing information taught in high school! ''That Professor Goddard, with his 'chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react -- to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.'' In 1969, after the Apollo program, the Times issued a retraction: Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error."
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m5y298 | "Why do people say you're screwed if you win the lottery? ^() | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Many people who have been poor their entire lives don't really have the training or skill to handle getting a ton of money all at once. They don't know how to invest money, or how to handle paying taxes on a large amount of income, or how to deal with relatives who ask for help now that you're rich. A lot of people who were poor then won the lottery end up losing all of the money very quickly, spending it too fast, or making bad financial decisions due to a lack of experience.",
"This is called the curse of the lottery. People aren't prepared for the enormous changes having that kind of wealth makes to your personal life, and many people can't cope with it. Upwards of 70% of lottery winners end up broke, in dept, or in worse shape than they were prior to winning the lottery within only a few years of winning it. It's astonishing how quickly people can burn through even enormous wealth when sufficiently motivated. There's a number of reasons for this, but I'll explain the most common. 1. Financial management is a skill like any other. People who get an enormous amount of wealth all of a sudden often have no idea how to manage it, invest etc. So they tend to squander it, buy too many things, spend it on gifts, and make bad investments thinking the gravy train will never stop... which eventually it does. There's an argument to be made that the Lottery attracts these types of people because being bad with finances is what makes you play the lottery in the first place. Hence the phrase \"The lottery is a tax for stupid people\" 2. Dept builds up because of loans. When you win the lottery you have the option of a lump sump up front or monthly payments. People often take the payments because you get more money in the long run than up front. But what happens is they buy a bunch of stuff like houses since \"I have the money\". But because the money is held in trust and sent to you as monthly cheques you have to take out loans and mortgages to buy bigger things. The winners then find themselves unable to make the monthly payments because they over extended themselves. Since they have no other collateral they go bankrupt and spend years if not decades using their monthly lotto winnings to undo the financial damage they caused. 3. Everyone wants to be your friend. Your name and face are published and everyone bothers you to get money. (Some States make it mandatory to publish lotto winners identities which doesn't help) From family, friends, and random people looking for investment or a quick buck. Lottery winners are harassed relentlessly and often the target for extortion. 4. It breaks apart families, everything becomes about money. Long time loyal family members break contact out of jealously or try to sue you to get what they see as their share of winnings. Everyone feels entitled to get their piece of your pie. This doesn't include divorce cases, and problems with your kids inheriting the wealth. 5. The party lifestyle - Some lotto winners end up going on a non-stop bender partying to the extreme consuming copious amounts of drugs and alcohol, while throwing around piles of literal cash and buying cars, jewelry, and toys. Living the gangster or playboy lifestyle is outrageously expensive and is really nothing more than trying to buy attention for yourself. These types of people end up with entourages, a group of \"friends\" that really only follow you around to indulge in your lifestyle, have no concept of moderation, and constantly encourage you to increasing levels of depravity... until you either die or go broke.",
"Some states require that the person or other entity receiving a lottery jackpot have their name publicly disclosed. If this happens, anyone who knows you will know that you will have suddenly become very rich, which can throw a really nasty element to existing friendships."
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m5zb2x | How can historians know the medical causes of death of people who lived before the existence of modern medicine? | For example I was watching a documentary about Japanese warlords and it said that one of them died from liver cancer. How could they know that? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Paleopathology, which is the study of disease in ancient populations, is a huge multi-discipline field. It takes aspects of, human osteology, social anthropology, epidemiology, etc, and more. The short of it is that diseases leave plenty of traces before it kills someone. Social traces in the way they may have acted (lead poisoning in ancient Greek populations being a good example), changes to bones and internal organs (which could then effect bone growth), any signs of traumatic injury, and on and on. Paleopathologists use many methods to figure out likely cause of death. I don't know the specific warlord youre talking about, and am unsure if liver cancer leaves a mark on bones, but I would think that in the above case there was some writing/patient history that would have went along with the diagnosis",
"Ancient medicine may not be perfect, but it was not completely off either. They were certainly able to recognize signs and symptoms of patients, and make certain diagnoses. They may not have been able to cure cancer, or know exactly how cancer affected the body, but could identify it. Through observation, they could tell how a bad liver made a person sick. When dissecting a body, some older doctor might have made a note about how the liver looked weird or diseased. An historian might look at old medical records, and might notice that many people died of something called bile fever (I am making this word up just for this example). They look at medical books and the symptoms for bile fever are very similar to liver cancer. They track this word bile fever over many year of medical books, and eventually they might find a modern source saying something like, \"we diagnosed this person with liver cancer, or as the locals call it, bile fever.\" The similarities between the description of the disease to liver cancer, and the connect to liver cancer with an older term often found in the records allows historians to come up with a modern diagnosis of ancient diseases."
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m605ec | What is it about Florida that breeds such utter batsh*t craziness? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We have this perception because Florida's laws protecting privacy are much much more lax than in other states. In other words, all people are crazy, Florida just reports on it easier",
"It's Florida law that government [records have to be publicly accessible.]( URL_0 ) So whenever anything crazy happens, it's easy for reporters to find the mugshots, arrest records, etc. and file a story without much effort. That, and the meme has taken on a life of its own.",
"I think it’s a combination of factors. 1. Sunshine laws, so wide open public records. 2. People looking for Florida stories because it’s Florida. 3. Almost no one is native. The state attracts people from all over who are trying to start over, live the dream, or get away from their problems elsewhere. Tourism and real estate are our biggest industries. Buy the dream & sell it to some one else. Also, warm weather and plenty of beach bars and strip clubs mean there are more opportunities to be drinking and getting fucked up. So, there’s that.",
"Living both in Florida and Pennsylvania, I've seen worst shit happening in Pennsylvania than Florida. Also, Florida has basically year round good weather with plenty to do and get into trouble. That’s said I’m happy living in Florida.",
"Native Floridian here, and I have no idea. Florida is a backward melting pot. The more North you go, the more southern you get. The further south you go, the more northern it is. East and west might be backward too, still not clear on that. We have big bustling cities with backwoods hick towns between them. I think the absolutely mashup of people and cultures probably doesn't help, you get a little bit of everything and put them in one place, then you're going to have more appearing in that common ground. Florida feels lawless - I've yet to live anywhere in FL where law enforcement really seemed to give a shit and, well, you know our governor. I think it's just a bad mix of things to make it a breeding ground."
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m60a07 | Why is it that if you cook beef for a long time it softens up, but if you cook chicken for a long time it doesn't? | I'm about slow cooker recipes where you add beef chuck, and at first it firms up and seems like it'll never shred. But eventually it'll just fall apart. Versus chicken which seems too easy to overcook. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Both chicken and beef firm up when you first cook them because the muscle proteins undergo a chemical change and tighten up (squeezing out water in the process...this is why overcooked meat is dry). Touch cuts of beef, like chuck, also contain a lot of connective tissue, mostly collagen. This is an insoluble and very tough protein...it's why cheap steaks are tough and chewy. Collagen doesn't break down quickly but if it's stays hot for a looong time (hours) in the presence of moisture, it eventually converts to gelatin. Gelatin has basically no structure so the meat falls apart and it \"lubricates\" the fibers so they taste \"moist\" even though it's massively overcooked in a traditional sense. Chicken is incredibly lean. Chicken breast, in particular, contains very little fat or connective tissue. There's nothing to break down and turn to gelatin if you cook it long, you just get tough chicken fibers. Chicken \\*thighs\\* do contain collagen, they can be cooked to a \"fall apart\" consistently like beef chuck, although it doesn't take as long."
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m60qib | why does 15°c feels cold in summer but 15°c is a fairly hot in winter? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As a Californian I have to say 15 degrees C (60F) is horrifically cold any time of year. That's two coat weather, that is. Gross.",
"When exposed to hot weather your body acclimatizes to the heat after a few weeks. Your blood vessels move toward the surface, your pores become larger so you can sweat more. The blood concentrations of water and salt change to cool you better. Conversely these changes make you less adapted to the cold. So if there is a cold day during summer, it feels colder."
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m613i9 | Why are graphics cards in such low supply? | Title mostly says it all. I know about crypto mining and such, but why is demand suddenly so high and supply suddenly so low? Also, why are they trying to stop people from crypto mining if they get to sell the cards anyway? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The pandemic has affected supply of a lot of electronic items, graphics cards included. As for why graphics cards manufacturers wouldn't want miners to scoop up their entire stock, well, it looks bad for them if no \"normal\" user can get one of their cards--not to mention, users looking to upgrade might go for a lower end device that the manufacturer doesn't make as much money on.",
"So, the main chips are made from these wafers (big flat circles) of silicon. Those wafers are fed into machines that know how to write on them to print circuits (not exactly, but it's an analogy) and the size of the writing is predetermined, like the thickness of the lead on a pencil. The thinner the writing, the closer things can be together, making more chips from a wafer, because if you change that thickness (node size / process) you have to take many other things into account. The main thicknesses being used are 7nm from a company called TSMC and 8nm from Samsung. You can't just spin up more capacity, because it's super expensive, like billions of dollars in investment, and years to produce, but if you are in the fab business (making chips for customers) you want to sell all your capacity, and have as little waste as possible. But... demand is through the roof. The pandemic has made people reverse a trend where they didn't need a computer at home, or maybe only one. What happens when you suddenly have a couple of kids doing homework, and one or more parents work from home now? You need more computers, right? Well, remember when I said you can't just spin up more capacity? All that time, those wafers, they were sold. They get used to make memory chips, graphics chips, chips for motherboards, CPUs, etc. There's no more to go around, but people still need computers. With the pandemic, factories slowed down, shipping companies were seeing a surge, and raised prices, Taiwan, a major location for manufacturing computer and electronic parts is in a drought, which means they are shipping in water for their factories, and that slows them down, too. Texas had a major snow, plus blackout, and they do a lot of fabrication, too. Shutting down a factory like that makes starting it up a lot harder, and it kills supply. So you have weather, illness, demand, supply, and competition for resources all coming together to create a very big problem. Now, the crypto miners are adding to the frenzy. See, when those factories took their orders for capacity... the manufacturers of those parts had to take a guess. Guess too high and you wind up with too much stock, and you have to sell for less. Nobody wants to do that. It can erase all your profits and put you out of business. Guess too low, and your virtual shelves are empty. They needed to guess over 18 months ago, and they guessed wrong. You can correct that, to a degree, but nobody could have foreseen all these things coming together. If they guessed they would need 15% more than last generation of products, that would have been fine in most normal years, but we are looking at probably 400% higher demand, here. Others have answered why these manufacturers tend to avoid looking too cozy with miners. It makes gamers resentful, and they don't like that people with deep pockets who don't care if a card is $700 or $1300 if it's profitable, while they may have saved up for a year, waited, and can't find any cards."
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m62167 | Why do people get all warm and fuzzy inside when they are around someone they like? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Nervousness could be a reaction to arousal. In response, the body unconsciously performs functions that would elicit the effect of blushing. IE body uses vasodilators that control where blood will enter, in this case towards the head. So the face will appear more redder in color because of increased blood flow."
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m624pz | Do vitamins drinks/pills really work | Does it actually work or is the whole thing a placebo | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Short answer is yes, although it’s particularly agreed upon by nutritionists that absorbing the nutrients through food itself is a far better method of uptake. Think John’s Hopkins did a study on it a while back. Quick addendum, that goes for *general* vitamins; there’s plenty of vitamins that make egregious claims (“will boost brain function!”) that aren’t supported by hard science. But for the most part, if you need vitamin C, a vitamin c pill will help.",
"The other comments are true that *if* you are deficient a vitamin pill will help. I'm going to give the counter argument, that if you are *not* deficient, because you have a balanced diet, all a vitamin pill will give you is expensive yellow pee.",
"Depends on what you mean by \"work\". If you have a specific vitamin **deficiency**, then yes, taking the appropriate supplement will remedy that. Consult your physician if you experience any symptoms."
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m6286r | When deeply shocked why do we take deep breaths? | Yesterday I took a cold shower and my body was shocked, I started breathing super deep and could not control it. Same goes if your world is shattered by the bad news of death. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your body is very good at recognizing when it's in danger, and responds by going into overdrive, pumping more blood, creating more adrenaline, and generally getting itself ready for fight or flight. When it's doing all this, your body requires a lot more oxygen than normal, and so you start breathing deeply. That response works really well for most crises. Unfortunately, that response is basically the default response to *all* crises, including temperature shock from the shower and even mental and emotional crises like losing a loved one.",
"Cold shock response is a series of cardio-respiratory responses caused by sudden immersion in cold water. In cold water immersions, cold shock response is perhaps the most common cause of death,[1] such as by falling through thin ice. The immediate shock of the cold causes involuntary inhalation, which, if underwater, can result in drowning. The cold water can also cause heart attack due to vasoconstriction;[2] the heart has to work harder to pump the same volume of blood throughout the body. For people with existing cardiovascular disease, the additional workload can result in cardiac arrest. Inhalation of water (and thus drowning) may result from hyperventilation. URL_0"
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m62p83 | How can an extended period with no sleep kill you? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We don't know if it can. we don't even know if there is permanent damage from it. The cases where someone did stay up very long, damage reversed after they slept and their routine went back to normal. We have done experiment on rats where they were kept up and they ended up dying. But we don't know if that was because they were not allowed to sleep or because they were constantly woken up from their sleep and the stress of that killed them.",
"[A 2020 study]( URL_0 ) found the following: > In a study on sleep-deprived fruit flies, published in Cell on June 4, researchers found that death is always preceded by the accumulation of molecules known as reactive oxidative species (ROS) in the gut. > When fruit flies were given antioxidant compounds that neutralize and clear ROS from the gut, sleep-deprived flies remained active and had normal lifespans. Additional experiments in mice confirmed that ROS accumulate in the gut when sleep is insufficient. This was studied in much simpler organisms compared to humans; however, fruit flies are noted to \"share many sleep-regulating genes with humans\". > The guts of sleep-deprived flies had a dramatic buildup of ROS — highly reactive, oxygen-containing molecules that in large amounts can damage DNA and other components within cells, leading to cell death. The accumulation of ROS peaked around day 10 of sleep deprivation, and when deprivation was stopped, ROS levels decreased. > Additional experiments confirmed that ROS builds up in the gut of only those animals that experienced sustained sleep loss, and that the gut is indeed the main source of this apparently lethal ROS. TL;DR sleep deprivation results in buildup of ROS in the gut that can become immensely harmful. Sleep deprivation is more survivable with the aid of antioxidants. Disclaimer: These results were found in creatures with a simpler physiology but with the same sleep-related genes as humans, so please *do not* assume you can stay up forever if you eat fruits and vegetables and XXX-flavored Vitamin Water. The human gut is larger and seems vastly more complex between its microbiome and direct link with the brain, meaning that we probably have more unique variables at play when dealing with sleep-related health"
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m64h0b | Temperature in vacuum | If heat is caused due to movement of particles of matter, and vacuum is a place devoid of matter, and temperature is the degree of heat. Then what's the temperature in vacuum? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A true vacuum is impossible. The closest we can get to an actual vacuum would still have photons radiating and reflecting from the container walls, and so it would still have a defined, albeit low, temperature.",
"A true vacuum has no mass, as you said, and this is why it doesn't really make sense to discuss the temperature of a vacuum. This is why it's misleading to say that space is cold--since there's no matter, you're only going to lose heat via radiation, which is much slower than by convection or conduction. So you will cool down to absolute zero eventually, but it's not like you'll flash freeze like you sometimes see in movies"
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m654jo | How do computers remember to turn back on during the restart option? Isn’t it temporarily shutting the computer down? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Inside of your computer is a \"smaller computer\" (usually called an \"embedded controller\") that is always on, even when the rest of the computer is completely off. It does things like keeping track of time (note that the clock on your computer doesn't reset even when you unplug it), handles the power button, often also power/hard drive/battery LEDs, fans, etc. It also manages power delivery to various components and can talk to the rest of your computer. When you tell the computer to reboot, the EC switches everything off, but knows to switch everything on again later.",
"EDIT: when I posted this there were only a few not so accurate comments in the thread, lots of good info here now :D ~~So much bad information in this thread... It does restart all the way (not halfway like some people seem to suggest).~~ This is why you see the bios etc on reboot. Anyways a TLDR copied from [here:]( URL_0 ) `power states in your computer are controlled by an implementation of ACPI (advanced configuration and power interface). At the end of a shutdown process, your operating system sets an ACPI command indicating that the computer should reboot. In response, the motherboard resets all components using their respective reset commands or lines, and then follows the bootstrap process. The motherboard never actually turns off, it only resets various components and then behaves as if the power button has just been pressed.` The only difference between shutdown and reboot is at the end of the OS's shutdown process, which ACPI command is called. (turn off power vs reset) Note sleep/hibernating are a different beast altogether. If you're interested in further reading, \"ACPI\" is what to google.",
"The top answer right now seems a bit over technical and not ELI5 to me. Essentially your computer never turns 100% off. There is a constant flow of a tiny amount of power from your bios battery. When your motherboard gets the command to shut off it shuts down all the main components but still keeps the tiny bit of power needed to start the bios. Restart just does that but then immediately turns all the main components back on.",
"A good analogy of how the restart button works goes like this: When you shut down your computer it is like a chef cleaning up and going home for the night. When you abruptly shut down your computer it’s like the chef going home without doing any cleanup and when they arrive back in the kitchen they have a lot of cleaning up to do before they can begin their work. This is why when you abruptly shut down your computer it takes longer to start up again than usual. When you restart your computer, it is as if there is a break in the dinner rush which gives the chef an opportunity to clean up their workspace and get ready on a fresh slate again without going home. So essentially your computer will continue running its bare minimum to clean up and restart again as if it has been shut down and started up again",
"Your computer has more processors than just your CPU. The motherboard is covered in little processors that each do different jobs. The motherboard also draws power from the Power Supply Unit even when the main CPU is powered down. When you press your 'ON' button, an electric shock hits an ACPI module on your motherboard that initiates the bootup process. ACPI is a sort of design agreement for how to manipulate the power in the motherboard. When you tell your computer to reboot, your Operating System shuts down as usual, and then instead of sending a 'turn me off' signal to the ACPI module, it sends a 'reboot' signal. ACPI cuts power to the CPU, RAM, and rest of the computer as usual, and then it begins a new bootup process. You can also set up most computer to Wake-On-LAN, which is when a computer is connected by an Ethernet cable to a network, and a specific set of signals sent across that wire will be relayed from the Ethernet port to the ACPI module, which then starts booting up the PC. There are also settings for ACPI on how to handle power failures. Let's say there is a power outage and you've got a battery backup that is connected to your computer, so when the battery gets low it sends a shutdown signal to the OS. The OS closes all of the processes, and then asks the ACPI module on the motherboard to shut down power. When power is restored, the UPS doesn't send any information to the computer, because the computer has been shut down. But the motherboard is receiving power again. If the ACPI module has the setting toggled, it can send an 'ON' signal to the rest of the computer just as if the 'ON' button had been pushed.",
"I've answered this in another thread. The OS uses a generic command and ACPI BIOS to send power commands through the system bus to the Power Supply and Peripherals. Each peripheral will enter a power mode and shutdown or move to an idle state in a safe manner. The onboard logic of each peripheral knows how to do this. So the hard drive will park safely and flush caches as needed. The CPU will enter a different CPU power state. The Power Supply will then enter an idle power state and will switch state to full power after x amount of time. As long as the power supply is plugged in and the ATX switch is on the power supply will be receiving power and will be active or idle. The computer may seem off but it is not. A full shutdown wil place the power supply into idle and will not power certain devices of a certain power range so your hard drive and fans will be powered off. Your CPU, Motherboard and some peripherals such as your network card will receive a small amount of power in this state. A restart will bring all power lines back up to full power causing your hard drive to activate which will start the boot process.",
"You know how when you go to sleep, you can’t move or see or smell things? But then you wake up and can do all those things again. Your brain turns off all the things you do when you’re awake, but your brain also remembers to wake you up. When you press the restart button on a computer, everything turns off, but there’s a small piece of the computer always powered by a little battery that remembers to turn everything back on again.",
"I think this post breaks Rule 7 [ELI5: How do computers know to power back on when you restart them?]( URL_1 ) [ELI5 how can a computer turn itself on]( URL_8 ) [[ELI5] How does a computer know to boot up again when you select to \"restart\" it?]( URL_9 ) [[ELI5] How does a computer restart if it turns everything off?]( URL_0 ) [ELI5: How does a computer restart automatically, just because I clicked \"restart\" versus \"shutdown\"?]( URL_2 ) [ELI5: How does computers know that they have to restart after shutting down?]( URL_11 ) [ELI5: How can a computer, durning restart, shut it self down and turn on again]( URL_14 ) [ELI5: How do computers restart?]( URL_6 ) [ELI5: How does a computer know to turn back on after you tell it to restart?]( URL_3 ) [ELI5: How does a computer know to turn itself back on again during a restart?]( URL_15 ) [ELI5:How does a restart button work?]( URL_17 ) [ELI5: How do computers remember to turn back on when you click the restart button in your OS and it shuts off?]( URL_16 ) [ELI5: How does a computer turn itself on when it's off during a restart cycle?]( URL_4 ) [ELI5: How exactly does a computer restart?]( URL_10 ) [ELI5: How when a computer is ordered to restart, it doesn't 'forget' to turn back on when it shuts off.]( URL_5 ) [ELI5: When restarting a computer, how does the computer know to turn back on after shutting itself down?]( URL_12 ) [ELI5: How does a computer restart itself?]( URL_7 ) [When you restart a computer, after it shuts down, how does it know to start up again?]( URL_13 )",
"The very last command the computer gives during the shutdown is a special command named \"reset\". In some machine languages just called RST. It's a direct command to the processor to give an electric signal on a wire that is normally unused, but leads to every device into your computer. This is the reset line. For the processor itself the reset command means to put the adress counter to zero and just continue working. So the processor reads and processes the adresses 0 and 1 and so on. At this adresses is the ROM (a hard coded memory) with commands to jump to the boot routine and so the computer didn't stop at all, but just jumped back to zero. And all the other devices does the same or similar things. This is not the whole story. But for an old ZX81 it works this way. In former times the reset line was often cut within an ethernet card with wake on lan. So the card could wake the computer up after a shutdown without loosing its own preferences. That made a lot of trouble. With any change on those cards you had to switch the computer completely off, so they can't override your adjustments.",
"Computers, when they first boot, generally start by executing instructions from memory address 00000000. When a computer is first turned on, it gets that address naturally anyway (because there's no voltages on the pins at first, which corresponds to 00000000), and it requests whatever is at that memory location and starts executing whatever is there. On old PCs this would have been the BIOS, nowadays it's UEFI, on other machines (e.g. Raspberry Pi) whatever you want to boot (the bootloader) is set up at that location by the firmware or other hardware. In the old DOS days, a \"warm boot\" (what we'd call a reboot) was literally just an instruction to start executing code from memory location 00000000 again (literally the instruction JMP 0000 in some cases). That code then clears memory, initialises hardware, finds the storage and OS, etc. as if it had just turned on. That hasn't much changed, except just jumping to that location is probably impossible nowadays - it would likely damage the computer filesystems, allow people to interfere with programs, etc. But a restart nowadays is basically saying to the OS \"clean up after yourself, Windows/Linux/MacOS, and then when you're done jump to address 0 and start executing that code again\". Hence a \"restart\" is really just a shutdown procedure (without the actual hardware shutdown) followed by a re-initialisation as if you've just turned the computer on. An actual hardware shutdown is the exact same kind of \"clean up\" process, followed by an instruction to the motherboard to cut the power supply (but even then, modern computers rarely go entirely off, there's always something listening to see if they should turn back on, whether it's a software-controlled button, a network interface or a timer-chip). They don't \"remember\" to turn back on, because in this case they never really get turned off. The CPU just turned to the front of the instruction manual and starts doing all those \"if this is the first time you've turned on, then you need to clear memory, initialise hardware, etc. etc.\" instructions that it would normally only do when it's just been turned on. Back in the day, \"cold-boot\" meant actual power-off and was a physical action to turn it back on. \"Warm-boot\" meant this kind of restart/reboot/re-initialisation process (often initiated by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete but that key combination does something very different nowadays). We don't really use those terms any more.",
"I think the booting process is handled by the motherboard not the system, it's clearly visible while fans don't turn off (also managed by the mobo)",
"The Operating System is actually separate from the computer itself, the part that translates between the software and hardware (the BiOS) doesn't turn off when you do a restart, because it just unloads and reloads the operating system rather than unpowering the entire computer.",
"Inside the computer motherboard is a component that contains Non-Volatile Memory. The data written to that controller is kept alive by CMOS, which is a [button battery]( URL_0 ). However, even if that lithium battery died, the BIOS would revert to a default state (Factory Default Settings), which tell your computer how to boot, reboot, and everything else."
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d6cvq7/eli5_how_does_a_computer_know_to_boot_up_again/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bb8t2/eli5_how_exactly_does_a_computer_restart/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ged6x/eli5_how_does_computers_know_that_they_have_to/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/288ebp/eli5_when_restarting_a_computer_how_does_the/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m12rt/when_you_restart_a_computer_after_it_shuts_down/",
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m65a7y | Why is vaseline/gel applied on MMA fighters' face before they go to fight? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Before they start to sweat their skin is dry. Those first hits without sweat would rip the skin to heck from the friction of a dry face and dry glove. Vaseline is used to allow for some smoothness to avoid major cuts early on",
"Vaseline removes the friction from the punches that would otherwise rip their faces open. Imagine punching anything dry and then punching it if it’s coated in vaseline."
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m65b27 | What is "shorting" a stock? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Borrowing a stock, selling it, and hoping that by the time you have to return it, you can buy it cheaper. Analogy: Your friend has a new, shiny PS5, but has to go on a trip and can't use it for a while. You borrow it from him, and immediately proceed to sell it for 3X its market price, because everyone wants them and there's no supply. You're betting that by the time your friend returns, the supply issues will be resolved, and you'll be able to just buy a new one in a shop for its normal price, and make a good amount of money. But of course there's a risk. If there's still no supply by the time you have to return it, you might end up paying 5X to a scalper.",
"Well someone just learned about wallstreet bets... anyway, let's get to explaining. Shares of a company are sold. These share basically mean that a certain percentage of the company belong to you. Usually, you hold these share because you expect the price to go up. So that you can sell them for more than you bought them. Shorting is kind of the opposite. You basically ask someone that has share \"Hey, I have a deal for you. You give me these shares right now and in a month time I pay their new price to you.\" In that case you're betting the share's value drop. So you take them from the guy, sell them at full price and X time later you check the price and tell the guy from earlier \"Hey, remember that I owed you for these shares? Well their price dropped so I only owe you half their price\".",
"You borrow a stock from Bob and sell it to steve. You pay bob interest because you borrowed a stock. Eventually, you have to buy the same type of stock and give it back to Bob. If the stock price falls more than the interest amount, you end up with a bit of profit."
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m65cns | How does it come we notice when we get direct eye contact with another person? | There is something that makes you know when you have that direct eye contact with a person, even though they might stand meters away from you and you are surrounded by other people too. What makes you know when you have that eye contact? Because even if there is someone that is standing almost right behind me I know when someone that is standing let’s say 6 meters away is looking at the other person or when they are looking at me. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Eye contact was very important for our ancestors, to find potential mates or threats. Because of this our brains developed a \"super power\" when it comes to eye contact, reading the miniscule changes in the eyes that indicate we've made contact. Note that this system is hyper sensitive so it can trigger a lot of false positives (thinking there's eye contact when there's not).",
"It's a natural behavior. Before we developed such complicated mating ritual (such as buying coffee, offering flowers, going to a restaurant etc) and before we could talk, prolonged eye contact was a sign of interest. As such, prolonged eye contact is ingrained in our instinct as something important. Second thing to understand, our eyes see everything in front of them. Not just the bit we're looking at. It's just that our brain chose to ignore things beside the center because it can't keep up with giving high definition to everything we see. Nonetheless, it still check everything for any sign that are important to it (movement for predators, shiny stuff, etc) which include eye contact. When the brain discern that eye contact, it attract or attention to it.",
"I’m not sure i understand the question? You know because you’re looking at their eyes and can see they’re looking at you?",
"I am naturally shy and do not make prolonged eye contact. I grew a beard during lockdown. A magnificent mane if I do say so myself. My wife hated it and asked everyone for their opinion (\" Tell him it looks awful\") Most folk think i suited it. Anyway one day one of her friends turns up for a socially distanced walk. I think her friend is quite attractive but I've never really flirted or anything because ... what's the point? I go to meet her while my wife is getting ready. I look her in the eyes thinking \"Go on - comment on the beard, everyone else does\". I don't break eye contact. Suddenly everything goes out of focus except her eyes. I can tell from them that she's smiling. It seems to last for minutes but in reality probably only a few seconds. My wife approaches and breaks the spell. Her friend looks down at the ground, still smiling, and stretches her arms overhead. That is my eye contact story.",
"Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?",
"Your brain is an insanely complex network of cells called neurons that can receive information, process it in various ways, and then pass on their work to other neurons. What we call consciousness is the result of the neurons working together to transform the various physical senses into a rational understanding of the world. There are specific neural network subgroups in your brain that are dedicated to detecting certain kinds of visual patterns, such as motion or alignment, or detecting shapes or faces. We know these neuron clusters exist because it is possible to overstimulate and \"exhaust\" them, which can cause a false sense of motion in the opposite direction. This is what is \"setting off\" the eye contact feeling, a cluster of neurons in your brain that have the job of detecting such patterns and sending out a priority alert to the consciousness when these patterns are found. It is similar to having a bunch of concentric rings all shifting around randomly, but then suddenly coming into alignment for a moment, which makes them jump to the top of your attention priority."
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m65rba | How do "smart" dishwashers know that the dishes are clean? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They do a pre-wash cycle that rinses the dishes with plain water to see how dirty the water gets (basically shine a light through it) during this cycle. It then works out how dirty they are likely to be. That is also why you put the detergent in a closed receptacle in the door - it doesn't drop into the water until after the pre-wash.",
"They have a sensor that measures the opacity of the water. As more food gets washed off the dishes into the water, it becomes darker and lets less light through which is what the sensor measures. Its a pretty crude method that allows the machine to roughly estimate how heavy the load is and therefore how long the washer needs to give for the enzymes/chemicals in the tablet to break everything down. Pre-rinsing is generally a waste of time. This removes the food particles from the water which are actually part of the scrubbing action - so no food particles = worse cleaning. Certain things like oatmeal/porridge might benefit from a quick blast under the tap to loosen any stuck on thick bits."
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m66ol5 | Why blood doesn't get through the pores? | An actual question from my 6 year old! | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Why blood doesn't get through the pores? Because your pores aren't connected to any blood vessels. In fact your whole circulatory system is *closed*. There is no opening. Everything entering and leaving it needs to pass through different cellular membranes that only allow (or actively *pump*) certain things through.",
"Pores are simple the surface openings of glands under the skin that produce sweat when we are too hot. The liquid is extracted from the blood vessels going the glands but there is no direct connection.",
"There are many complex systems in the body that function interdependently. The system that carries your blood has only a few entry points and exit points. There are filters on all these points. Your pores are holes in the skin. The skin is a totally different organ that is fed by the system that carries your blood. They are interdependent but not “connected”. Something had to break or cut or disrupt in order for you to bleed, this is the break in the system."
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m66ut2 | Derivatives of Curves. How do they work? How is the second derivative of a quadratic equation a constant? Is the second derivative the slope of the slope? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Is the second derivative the slope of the slope? That's exactly right. > How is the second derivative of a quadratic equation a constant? It just is. That's more or less how a quadratic is defined, its a shape whose second derivative is constant, a shape whose slope increases proportionally to the x or whatever input you are using. The derivative definition of the limit as h approaches x of (f(x) - f(h))/(x - h) is pretty self explanatory imo. This is just the slope formula, rise over run, but taken to an infinitesimally small rise over an infinitesimally small run.",
"A derivative of a curve, y, evaluated at a point along the x-axis, x, is the slope of the line tangent to y at x. When you calculate the derivative as a function it is just a quick way to find the slope of a tangent line at any point. The second derivative is, indeed, the slope of lines tangent to points along the first derivative. Since the derivative of x^2 is just the line 2x passing through the origin, a tangent line at any point will just be the same line with a slope of 2. Since this second derivative is just a constant, a horizontal line on the x-y plane, its tangent is just 0. It has no slope at any point. A fourth derivative of a quadratic and beyond would all just be taking the slope of the horizontal line following the x axis and are mutually 0."
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m67737 | Why are we more productive,focused easily on things we enjoy? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because if you think it is useful, or fun, it give an incentive to pursue it, rather than something where there is little to no reward."
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m67eu8 | why does scratching around a wound feel so good? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To ELI5 u/htranie below: Rub/scratch isn't enough to be painful , it is enough to temporarily switch off bad sensations. This feels good.",
"I don't believe at present there is a concrete explanation for scratching itches, but there is a controversial one for why we rub painful areas. I think the system may be similar, but I can't offer anything definite. I'll briefly describe a much argued idea called the Gate Control Theory. URL_0 Here is a 2014 paper discussing recent findings and future directions for the theory. There is a suggestion in the paper that pain and itch may be gated by some mechanism. C fibres are small diameter fibres which transmit slowly and is involved in the generalised, area feeling of pain, as well as histamine-caused itching. A fibres are large diameter, quick-transmitting fibres involved in non-pain sensations (touch, pressure, etc.) the quick, sharp first pain, and itching. The Gate Control Theory supposes that A fibres can activate an interneuron that in turn inactivates the afferent neuron that transmits the pain signal to the brain. Thus, we are \"overriding\" pain with another stimulus. We do this by rubbing and thus stimulating A fibres. C fibres which signal continuous pain from the site of injury instead inactivates the interneuron which allows the afferent fibre to the brain to convey the pain signal. By elucidating more about the mechanisms of itching, as well as confirming the validity of the Gate Control Theory, we can offer a better explanation as to the phenomenon of scratching itches, or rubbing a sore area of the body."
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m67rdh | What goes in the making of a chess prodigy? | The current world champion, an 18year old Magnus Carlsen beat a former world champion Anatoly Karpov who was 57 at the time. I'm sure there must be a lot of instances like this, just pointing out one. I've seen kids aged 5-6 beat adults, far-more experienced players. How does this happen? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Experience can only get you so far in chess. Sooner or later the game will branch out from known situations to something unique and from there the only thing that matters is analytical thinking and work memory. For these abilities the age of 20 seems to be the peak, so young players are at an advantage with their fresher brain (once they managed to learn all the opening situations and how to respond to them) And I'm pretty sure those 5-6 year olds were savants. Autists with a very specific skill they can do inhumanely good but lack a lot of other skills"
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m684g2 | How did people get by before dentistry was a thing - did we simply lose all our teeth or suffer from the pain constantly? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We mostly had far fewer dental problems because our diets weren't loaded with sugar. And we ate a lot more fiber which kind of help with 'brushing' your teeth as you eat. The majority of our health issues are caused by modern diets and lifestyles. People didn't have those luxuries in the past and didn't suffer the associated ailments as a result.",
"People in Pompeii had really nice teeth do to a low sugar diet and naturally occurring fluoride in their water.",
"[Tooth abscess was a leading cause of death up until quite recently]( URL_0 )",
"Barbers were dentists and minor surgeons - that's the origin of the barber's pole, a bloodstriped bandage.",
"It was not uncommon to pull out all your teeth and replace them with dentures. Even before you had any issues with the teeth you already got. This is a practice so old we do not know when it started and it just recently stopped. People would do this until the 60s when dentistry had become common enough that people prefered keeping their teeth. So a lot of the old people walking around with dentures today got them in their 20s even before they had issues with tooth ache.",
"Shorter lifespan and different diet meant it wasn't a major issue, but if it did occur you just lived with it or died from it.",
"Point of reference: I'm 38 years old, and I haven't been to a dentist since somewhere in my early twenties. I eat a low-sugar diet, I drink lots of water (washing down whatever acid does build up in my mouth) and I don't smoke/drink/etc. But, yes, if you had trouble with your teeth before dentistry it was going to suck big-time for you. As in you might just be eating soft foods for the rest of your life. But that was the same for most medical problems, which is why the average lifespan was a lot less (fun note: The majority in the gain in average lifespan didn't come from people who used to live to 60 now living to 70, it came from far fewer people dying at young ages and living to 60 instead).",
"We died young. A lot of times from abcessed teeth, or a random sickness. We generally didn't live very long pre modern medicine.",
"Yes. But there's evidence that we didn't have as many problems with teeth as you might think. Though modern hygiene does indeed help you live longer and maintain your health longer, modern life is also harsher on our bodies (sugar and acids on your teeth, etc.). Think of the skeletons that you see on archaeological digs. How many have no teeth, or crooked teeth or sometimes have no missing teeth at all? This is why Bear Grylls can spend months in the wilderness with only basic facilities, etc. If you're using your teeth to do what evolution has designed them to do, they last far longer, and if your lifespan is already less than ours, they'll survive your whole lifetime without much of an issue for the majority of people. Living longer, and having luxuries have actually made things worse - you're less likely to die outright, but far more likely to outlive your natural immunity, the lifetime wear-resistance of your tooth, etc."
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m6ajp8 | What changes will happen to brain cells when you learn something new? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The neurons inside your brain are reworking their action potentials so that the desired response comes from the desired stimulus. They might be adding more neurotransmitter receptors or subtracting them which can alter the action potential of a neuron which can affect its ability to turn on or off depending on the stimulus. Like say you're learning to catch a baseball. You start by having to think about it. You have to think about where the baseball is coming from, the path that it's on, where you anticipate the ball will be, putting your hand in the right position, then closing the mitt at the right time. First time you might get it completely wrong. When you get it wrong, you think about what you did wrong, connections between your visual cortex and motor neurons start to nudge each other to correct themselves. Then you get closer so they're on the right track. In response to the stimulus and a bit of effort they nudge a little more. Then you finally get it! So now your brain knows the path! So you do it again. Your brain starts to reinforce that path by making the action potentials along that path lower in response to the stimulus. You feel it getting easier and easier and you have to think less and less about it. Pretty soon you can accomplish the action without even thinking about it. This is because your brain has basically streamlined the entire action and all the relevant neurons are firing in response to the stimulus as previously learned."
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m6bi2b | The brain controls and regulates all the necessary body functions. Why can't we consiously perform these functions or use our brain to affect our body. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Generally because there is no need for you to micromanage those things, or they'd sometimes even lose their purpose. If you could release dopamine at will you'd never leave your bedroom because you get all your motivating happiness fixes at home. We only have direct access to the bodyfunctions that need to be able to control (like breathing for when we dive). And every good programmer will tell you that he works similar. Giving the user the option to turn off essential functions WILL cause trouble by someone accidentally breaking everything.",
"Some people can. It just takes practice. People have demonstrated the ability to raise their core temperatures, slow their heart rate, etc.",
"For the same reason we find it hard to spin lots of plates on poles - we're bad at multitasking. When we're out in the wild, we want all of our attention on the gazelle in front of us, not trying to stabilise our digestive system and balance thermal regulation manually. The more automated systems, the better."
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m6eqd9 | Why when you evaporate coffee and store the steam until it becomes liquid again, the liquid no longer has the color of coffee? | I did this experiment one day because I was curious, sorry if it's a stupid question | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Evaporating water, collecting the steam, and condensing it back into water is known as distillation. By doing this with coffee, you are essentially just separating the coffee from the water - the coffee stays in the cup and the water turns into steam (that you collect and condense back into water). Because the water no longer has the coffee in it, it goes back to being clear.",
"Coffee is basically just bits of coffee bean suspended in water. When you evaporate the liquid, only the water is boiled off, and the bean bits get left behind as a sediment. The color of the coffee comes from the beans, ergo if the beans are left behind, so is the coloration.",
"What you did is called distillation. Basically, you can separate the different parts of a liquid solution by taking advantage of the differing boiling points of its parts. Water boils at a lower temperature than caffeine and, likely, most of the other stuff in coffee. By heating the coffee up enough to boil the water but not enough to boil that other stuff, the vapor that condenses will be almost entirely water while the rest of the stuff like caffeine will be left behind.",
"Your experiment just accidentally invented distillation. If you have water with stuff in it, when you heat it up, the steam is just pure water. The stuff is left behind when the water evaporates - so when it becomes liquid again, that liquid is just water. You could do this with coffee, tea, juice - or even milk, spaghetti sauce, jam, or yogurt. Anything with water in it. The steam coming off is pure water only. This effect is why the ocean is so salty. Salt dissolves into rivers and lakes from the ground, and gets carried into the ocean. When the sun evaporates ocean water, the salt is left behind and just accumulates in the ocean. This can be useful for making drinkable water out of sea water too, just boil or evaporate it and collect the condensation. You use this effect when cooking every time you \"boil down\" a sauce or soup to make it thicker. That only happens because it's not the whole sauce boiling away, it's only the water *from* the sauce leaving, so the sauce left in the pan gets thicker and more flavourful as you remove water from it.",
"The reason that coffee looks brown is because tiny bits of the coffee bean are dissolved in the water. When you evaporate the coffee, only the water evaporates. The boiling point of the coffee bean pieces are WAY higher than the boiling point of the water. That means that you're left with mostly pure water in the steam with no dissolved coffee."
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m6eurd | Why do store bought tortillas keep A LOT longer at room temperature than store bought sliced bread? | When it comes to taste, texture, and mold, tortillas last a whole lot longer than your standard sliced bread. I have noticed that this is true for both corn or flour tortillas. Why is that? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Water content and surface. Tortillas are very dry and flat, so there's no water and very little space to grow for mould. Sliced bread has more water and because of all the yeast air bubbles and being sliced has a lot of surface for the mould to latch onto.",
"Food spoils due to many factors, mainly the amount of preservatives, moisture and air levels and temperature. If the preservatives are the same in both, then I would say that the higher amount of moisture and air in bread is the cause. In any case, keeping it in the fridge will extend both products lifespan, although it is recommended to keep bread in an airtight bag at room temperature for best quality. Tortillas seem to be fine in the fridge, and can stay good for weeks!",
"Bread was made with yeast, tortillas aren't. In addition, the typical slice of bread is more aerated and may even have a higher moisture content than the typical tortilla.",
"That's also one of the reasons I always buy unsliced loaves, less handling and surface area of the moist inside bread to get mouldy. Just the relatively dry outer crust."
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m6f06e | Why do spray paint cans get cold when we shake them? | Don’t know if it happens to other cans as well but why do spray paint cans feel cold when we touch after shaking them? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are actually many factors that contribute this. The main one however is that the paint within the can is pressurized to a point such that both gas and liquid of the paint exist. This is called saturation. When you shake the can, you are not only mixing these two, but you are increasing the pressure inside the can. This however does not explain why the can still gets colder when you use the can which intuition would tell you should lower pressure inside the can. The answer to that, is that the pressure does not actually change within the can. As you use the saturated material that is a gas, the material that used to be liquid begins to boil and becomes gaseous. This is why the can always releases the gas in a steady stream until it is near empty. The pressure stays the same. However it takes a lot of energy to change the material from liquid to vapor. This is what causes the drop in temperature Edit: fixed- Minute Physics has an excellent video on this which I will link to below: URL_0",
"They don't. They get cold when you *spray the paint*, because you're releasing pressure from the can. Releasing pressure is an endothermic reaction, meaning that the remaining contents of the container (and thus the container itself) get colder.",
"PV=nRT Basically, in physics the pressure and volume have to balance out against the temperature. If you lower the (P)ressure (in this case without changing (V)olume), then you have a lower (T)emperature on the other side to balance out. (N and R are constants if I remember right.) It's how refrigeration works too. You pump the coolant around and change the pressure to make things hotter or colder. It's the same reason canned air gets colder too"
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m6f2ru | What does a PC monitor do that a television does not? | It seems to me that over the last decade or so computer monitors and television technology has converged and, on the surface offer the same thing. But people are willing to pay a premium for a PC monitor. For example, I’m looking at this 32 inch monitor \[4k, 60h\] and they want $6k?! Meanwhile even if I wanted to spend more, the absolute most expensive 32inch tv I can find is less than $700. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"At its core, nothing. But the specs tend to be different, as different things are more useful for TVs versus PCs. Apples to apples between resolution, size, refresh rate, response time, color space, brightness, and pixel density - they should be about the same price. PC monitors often have higher refresh rates (not in your case), and much lower response times. A TV might have a response time (the time to shift a pixel from one color to another) around 50-60ms, whereas a monitor above 5ms generally isn't particularly good. Pixel densities may be larger as people are generally sitting closer to monitors vs TVs, they're not making money off of selling your TV app usage and personal data, which also contribute to prices."
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m6fwls | - Why do we experience depression | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Depression is what happens when you repeatedly subject your brain to trauma. Due to repeated prolonged exposure to trauma-related chemicals in the brain, your brain chemistry will adapt to the constant presence of those chemicals. It will release less of the chemicals that come from positive interactions and experiences and it takes more to provoke those chemicals and it'll take less to prove negative-emotion chemicals. Put simply: The more trauma you endure, especially in formative growing years, the more likely it is that your brain will treat that traumatized state of brain chemistry as the normal. Source: Major Depressive Disorder and Childhood PTSD."
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m6fxu5 | If we are trying to get rid of carbon, why is it worse to put plastic in landfill than recycle it? | Wouldn't it be better to bury as much of it deep underground as possible and seal it off? edit - I should add that I do reuse and recycle, and I use as little plastic as I can afford to in the first place. I am just curious about this aspect | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are two different concepts going on. One is carbon sequestration, where we're trying to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it away to it doesn't contribute to global warming/climate change. This is important to protect our current population/civilization from the side effects of climate change. The other concept is sustainability/reuse; if we're constantly draining our oil reserves to make new products and then burning/burying our old products, we will run out of oil to make new products. Reducing the amount of products used or finding ways to recycle/reuse them is important in trying to make sure that the resources we have can last for longer. This is a more long-term goal, so that we can continue living on the planet for longer, at least until we can colonize another planet. If we use most of the resources we have, there might be wars fought over the remaining resources, or we might run out and die off.",
"[It's not, and your misgivings are correct.]( URL_0 ) Plastic is more expensive to recycle than to manufacture new, so our \"recyclable\" plastic waste is overwhelmingly sent to developing countries without the infrastructure to produce it themselves. Unfortunately, only a fraction of what goes in the recycling is recoverable, so the rest becomes garbage anyway - and these countries have much poorer waste management systems than the United States. Instead of a landfill, much of this plastic will get burned in rubbish heaps or dumped into the ocean. Aluminum should absolutely be recycled. Other scrap metal is probably better off recycled as well. [**But if you live in a first-world country, it is usually more eco-friendly to send plastic to the landfill.**]( URL_1 )",
"I believe that in areas where plastic is not currently viable to recycle, we should bury it, creating what in future could be considered an ore body of plastics. Imagine that in 50 years, we can easily and economically recycle plastics. Wouldn’t it be great to have a location with tons of this resource?"
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m6g91l | who creates the names for phobias and why are some of them so counter intuitive, like long words or palindroms | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"What do you mean? Most are just descriptive names of the disorder - agoraphobia (‘agoras’ open space ‘phobia’ fear); -arachnophobia (‘arakhne’ spider); and so on. Greek is used because phobia is a Greek word to start with.",
"They're not \"counterintuitive\" at all, they're very specific and their names represent exactly what they are. They're just named from Greek roots, so they look a little unusual if you don't understand the root words."
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m6hm8m | Why people cannot get high from catnip? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We are not cats. Whatever chemical it is in catnip that affects cats fits into some kind olfactory or pheromone receptor that cats have and that humans don’t have. If catnip was a key, cats have a lock that that key fits into. Humans don’t have that lock, and so the key is useless to us."
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m6hrgn | if building muscle is caused by microtears then how come we don’t get bruises from doing it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Bruises are from tears/ruptures in blood vessels. Muscle growth is from tears in muscle tissue. You can tear muscles without tearing the blood vessels around them. Its like if a part breaks but it's still hanging by the wiring, because the wires inside are still intact - except in this case the wires are your blood vessels.",
"Because muscle growth isn’t caused by muscle damage. It’s a myth that’s spread everywhere because it’s so compelling; it’s one of those explanations that just clicks and makes sense. But it’s not supported by the science. The real drivers of muscle growth are mechanical tension and metabolic stress. Mechanical tension is basically your muscles freaking out over how heavy a weight feels, and deciding to get stronger so that it feels less heavy. Metabolic stress is your body trying to feed energy into your muscles and not being able to keep up with the demand, and deciding to level up the muscles so they need less metabolic support. Edit: in response to people taking issue with “myth” - the popular meme “why does muscle grow from weight lifting? Cause they get damaged and grow back stronger/bigger” is ABSOLUTELY a myth. The best opposing case that could be made is that muscle damage is one of the three primary drivers of muscle growth, but every expert I’ve read has implied that research over the past decade or so has been building a case that muscle damage is merely correlated with muscle growth under many circumstances. It’s difficult to establish concretely that muscle damage has absolutely nothing to do with growth when pretty much all weight training causes some damage. Here’s a review of some research that includes a study that showed similar hypertrophy rates between two training modalities that caused different amounts of muscle damage - [study ]( URL_0 )",
"As many hypertrophy-related studies, the conclusions about muscle microdamage and its relation to growth are fairly ambiguous, but suggest [little to no correlation between damage and hypertrophy]( URL_1 ). Perhaps microtears do somewhat contribute to protein synthesis signalling, but it seems as though hypertrophy occurs regardless of muscle damage. That said, bruising doesn't occur since no blood vessels rupture, these truly are microscopic damages. With actual muscle tears, [major blood vessel damage and bruising can occur]( URL_0 ). **Actual ELI5: when muscles break during exercise, most of the time it's tiny cracks. Bruises are caused by blood leaking, but this kind of damage doesn't affect blood vessels unless it's an actual injury.**",
"Muscle damage does not cause muscle growth. There was never evidence to suggest that, it was a hypothesis that stuck. Mechanical tension and signaling from metabolic byproducts appear to be the actual drivers.",
"Bruises caused by damage to blood tubes. Blood tubes bring nice fresh blood to muscles to feed them and to clean their nappies (take away waste). Muscle damage does not damage blood tubes. Muscles made of many many fibres, fibres take some damage, like an old rope. Nice fresh blood comes and repairs the muscle fibres, making them even better than before, upgraded! :)",
"I've never heard a satisfactory answer regarding why people get sore. Microtears is one hypothesis I've heard, but I don't think it's proven to be the case. Anyone have any proof of what's going on and not only a guess?",
"Actually, if you work out with enough intensity you can get bruises. But it's almost always a sigh of overtraining and I wouldn't recommend it (from experience)",
"Cause I'm a karate man! Karate man bruises on the inside, so they don't show their weaknesses.",
"an extra-hard workout can totally cause bruises. That's because you're pushing your muscles with so much effort that it leads to tiny tears in your blood vessels (not just your muscle fiber)"
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m6irwq | how do vitamin tablets work? | For example you can get vitamin D from the sun, so how can it be put in a small tablet? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You don't get vitamin D from sunlight. Sunlight hitting your skin causes a chemical reaction that creates Vitamin D out of other things your body already has. But our bodies are not our only sources of Vitamin D, or any vitamin. Our food gives us a vast majority of the vitamins and minerals we need, including Vitamin D. Vitamin D is high in some fatty fish, Eggs, Cheese, and Beef Livers. So any of these could be used as sources of the Vitamin D to make it into pill form. However, I think normally it's artificially created nowadays. I'm not 100% sure though on that part."
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m6jkbg | How are bacteria created? | Just read a news article about how 3 completely new types of bacteria have been found on the international space station due to it's isolation, if that's the case then how did they get there if we have never observed them before? what created them? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Some similar bacteria likely travelled up there on the astronauts or some item. What makes every organism unique is it’s DNA. bacteria change their DNA a lot, it’s why they adapt so fast. If they make a change that makes them unable to survive, those DNA changes will not be passed on. What determines if the DNA changes are good or bad is the environment. For instance, if some change makes you better at surviving in the cold, but you live in a hot climate, it likely won’t get passed on. In a cold climate, it could be very useful. The ISS is a very unique environment. Everything is precisely controlled and does not exchange anything with the outside. This would lead to unique DNA changes being passed on. A similar situation is observed on islands. Before people started moving around so much, taking animals and diseases with them, islands bred unique organisms because they were isolated from each other.",
"Bacteria are alive and evolve just like any other organism, we haven't closely studied all the millions of different types of bacteria out there to identify them all yet.",
"Bacteria come from other bacteria. As for where “new” bacteria come from, there are two answers to that: One, we don’t have a catalog of every type of bacteria that exists. The number of different bacteria that we don’t have a record of probably outnumbers the ones that we do know about explicitly. So sometimes a new type of bacteria is discovered not because it came from anywhere, but because no one noticed it before. Two, every time a bacterium reproduces, just like anything else, there is a chance the reproduction process will include errors. These errors are mutations, which can change the nature of the bacteria that result. Accumulate enough mutations, and you wind up with, effectively, a new bacteria. Bacteria reproduce extremely quickly in comparison to most macroscopic life, so changes that would take millennia or longer to happen in most species can take place in a matter of a few years with bacteria.",
"To add to the other responses, also note that such simple organisms can evolve very fast due to short generations. I.e. while a generation for humans is in the ballpark of about 20 years, for bacteria it's a matter of hours. And while asexual reproduction does hinder the evolution, if you start with one bacteria and end up with a couple trillion in a matter of months, there ought to be completely new species evolved to survive in the new environment. The same would happen to any other species, it would just take a lot longer, especially if it's not artificially tweaked (like when humans bred new dogs for example)."
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m6jobl | When filling up the car with petrol, how come you can see shadows of the fuel gases, it not actually see the gases with the naked eye? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Pretty sure the vapors are colorless but it they have a different density than air, which causes light to warp as it passes through them. I’m guessing if you got your head down there and really tried to look directly through the vapors, you’d see distortion similar to a heat shimmer.",
"Light travels through some materials at different speeds. When light passes from one material to a faster/slower material, it bends. This is called [refraction]( URL_1 ). It is the same phenomenon at work when it seems like an [object bends when partly submerged in water]( URL_0 ). You're not able to see the gas with your naked eye, but you are able to see how the transition from regular air to fuel vapors bend the light. If refraction bends light away from an area, you'll see shadows on the ground because that spot momentarily gets less light. You can see the same sort of shadows forming at the bottom of a pool when you make waves on the surface."
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m6jq98 | what does stage fright do to the body, is it good for us to experience it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"First, what is stage fright? Stage fright is a form of stress response. Animals (humans included) experience stress when confronted with a (perceived) life-threatening situation. A series of chemical changes in the blood and brain prepare the body to either fight for survival, or run for dear life. (This is why this mechanism is called the \"fight or flight\" response.) The changes include tensing of the muscles (to get them ready to activate more quickly), increased heart and breathing rates (to make sure there's enough oxygen available), decreased digestion, etc. But going up on stage isn't life-threatening, why does it stress us out? We humans are very social creatures; back in our hunter-gatherer days, we formed tribes and relied on each other's support for survival. This meant that being ostracized/exiled from the group meant certain death, either by starvation, freezing, or being picked off by a predator. As a consequence, we've adapted to avoid situations where that may happen (so we are, by nature, careful to respect each other's boundaries - although exceptions exist). It's for this reason that we find embarrassment/humiliation so painful, since it's an early indication that our actions could get us exiled from the group, and that we need to change our behavior. People who experience stage fright are focusing on the potential for public embarrassment and mass rejection, two things that we instinctively strive to avoid, and having a life-or-death stress response as a result. (I'm sure we also don't like having the exclusive attention of a whole crowd of people at once, since back in our tribal days, suddenly having the full attention of the tribe usually wasn't a good sign.) As for whether it's good to experience, well, yes and no. Yes in that putting ourselves out of our comfort zones helps us expand those comfort zones. If we're not used to, say, public speaking, then doing some public speaking will help us learn that the danger for embarrassment really isn't that high. This will help with stage fright in the future. No in that the stress itself is never good for you. There are a lot of studies about what the stress hormones do to the body (particularly when the stress is chronic - something one experiences day-by-day) and it's not pretty. Stress is the body revving up into the red zone, burning itself out because the alternative is likely death."
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m6kr1e | How did Ecuador and Zimbabwe physically switch their currency to the dollar? | How does a nation's hyperinflated currency get switched over officially to USD? Who would want to sell US dollars for zimbabwean dollars to allow that to happen for an entire currency? I can understand it very gradually happening via richer people or emigrants bringing dollars from outside, or tourists, but as a whole how does it logistically happen to completion? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well I know in Ecuador what happened was that people just started buying dollars with their sucres. That's literally it, the people largely replaced their own currency themselves by buying a safer form of money before theirs devalued completely. The govt just said ah well OK since you're all doing we'll make it official and so the bank of Ecuador started allowing people to exchange their sucres for dollars. And you're right, it really was thousands of the local currency for 1 dollar. How they did this is that the govt makes an agreement with the US, something like \"hey were à tropical country with boatloads of chocolate and bananas and other stuff, we'll give you a bunch of this at really really great prices in exchange for you shipping us a bunch of US dollars for us to put in banks and ATMs so people can exchange them\" So they do this for a while, and simultaneously stop printing their own local currency. And then after a year or so they say \"alright that's its no more exchanges. From now the local currency is worth nothing\". By then the economy should be running on dollars if the central bank of the country is in any way competent"
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m6m25s | Euclidean and Non Euclidean spaces and geometry | What is the differences and what are the uses of non Euclidean geometry in the real world if there are any? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Euclidean geometry is the geometry that you learn in grade school: the rules are the same regardless of where you move/rotate yourself in a Euclidean space. Distances between points are simply the length of the line segment connecting those points, and so on. Non-Euclidean geometry is anything that breaks those rules. (Portal is a good example, if you've ever played it: the distance between two points depends on whether you go through a portal or walk, and it's possible to get back to where you started even if you never turned around by creating infinite loops with portals, etc.) In the real world, the surface of Earth is actually non-Euclidean: if you start at the south pole, go 100 feet north, 100 feet east, and 100 feet south, you'll end up back where you started (Euclidean geometry demands that you end up 100 feet east of where you started). I live in Colorado, and even though it's a \"rectangle,\" the northern border is about 26 miles shorter than the southern, due to the curvature of Earth. Higher physics also involves non-Euclidean geometry, in the form of wormholes and such.",
"Think of a globe. Put a pen on the North Pole of that globe and draw a line along the Prime Meridian down to the equator.From that point, drag the pen east along the equator 1/4 of the way around the globe. Now you've got a big \"L\" on the globe, a 90-degree angle back where the meridian and equator intersect in the Atlantic Ocean. You've come 90 degrees east into the Indian Ocean. Now drag the pen back up to the North Pole. Now you have a triangle. But you have a triangle with three right angles. & #x200B; This doesn't work in Euclidean geometry because Euclidean geometry begins with the premise that we're restricted to the surface of a flat plane, and builds up rules from there. Spherical geometry begins with the premise that we're restricted to the surface of a sphere, and builds up rules from there. If you're restricted to moving across the surface of a sphere, then the shortest path between two points is an arc on the surface of that sphere, not a straight line. A ray on a *plane* has a starting point and stretches off to eternity. The spherical equivalent of a ray would start at a point and come back around to where it started. I suppose there's no meaningful difference between a line and a ray on a sphere since stretching infinitely far across the surface of a sphere in one *or both* directions will wrap around the sphere and make a circle. But we can use either set of rules, planar or spherical, to build up a set of internally consistent rules that let us describe the universe.",
"All math is based on a few rules, that are combined to make new rules. If you don’t use all of those rules, you’re doing a different kind of math. Euclid set 5 rules. 1. You can draw a line from any point to any point. 2. You can make a line longer as far as you like 3. You can draw a circle. 4. All right angles are the same. 5. That, if a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which the angles are less than two right angles. IE parallel lines never meet and they never get further apart either. Number 5 was much more complicated than the other 4, and this really bugged Euclid and math guys for thousands of years. They kept thinking it could be derived from rules 1-4 if put in the right order. Turns out they couldn’t. Most of non-Euclidean geometry decides to mess with rule 5. So say instead of parallel lines never meeting either they meet eventually, or they split apart. So how is this useful? We’ll say you’re at a spot on Earth, and head straight north and just keep going, you’ll eventually cross the north pole. Say another person at a different spot also heads north and just keeps going, he’ll eventually cross the north pole as well. So the two of you had parallel paths, and yet your paths met, because the Earth is a globe, and not flat. And that’s where non-euclidean geometry works. Euclidean geometry describes what geometry is on a flat surface. Non-euclidean geometry describes what geometry is on a not flat surface, for example: the globe we live on."
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m6mmc7 | If the concept of time as we understand it didn’t exist before the Big Bang, can the most popular theories be explained to me as to how “all of it” started? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Space/time are linked in the universe, the farther back you go in time the more closely all of the different forces (gravity, electromagnetic, etc.) get until they are all combined into one unified force. The theory I'm most familiar with is the big bang wasn't so much an explosion as a phase change. Think of something like water turning into steam. There was something before the universe as we know it, but right now all anyone can do is speculate about what it was like. This is why the hunt for how to fit the different forces back together comes in. If we can understand the conditions which allow that, we could maybe understand what the universe was like before the big bang.",
"A common misconception is that the Big Bang Theory explains the origin of the universe. It doesn't, it only explains its early development. Why \\*waves hands around\\* \"stuff\" \\*keeps waving hands\\* \"exists\" is really more of a philosophical question, and while every physicist hopes to one day have the answer to that question, it's possible that no \"final\" conclusion will ever be reached. Since your question is about philosophy (specifically ontology/metaphysics), not science, there aren't any theories, per se. The pursuit of those kinds of answers is moreso an exercise in speculation than anything else. (Although I find that kind of existential speculation tons of fun.)"
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m6p2fc | How does RGB work at the wave level? | I understand that light is simply electromagnetic waves that our eyes interpret as light. And that RGB is a combination of red, green, and blue light. But how does combining three separate lights actually result in a different color? Superimposing waves shouldn't change the frequency/wavelength of the light at all, right? Is it just our eyes doing some black magic? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The short answer is it doesn't. True yellow light has a wavelength of \\~550nm. The \"yellow\" that your computer screen sends at you is just a combination of red (\\~700nm) and green (\\~520nm). You're correct that our eyes are doing black magic. We have three types of ~~light-sensing~~ (EDIT: color-sensing \\*) cells (called \"cones\"): L, M, and S, named based on what wavelength they're sensitive to. (L is mostly sensitive to red, M mostly to green, S mostly to blue). Colors like (true) yellow stimulate both the L and M cones, but our nervous systems can't tell the difference between yellow and a mixture of red+green. That's the fact that RGB displays leverage to their advantage. Bonus fun fact: Magenta (red + blue) doesn't correspond to any (pure) color, it's just an invention of our brains to represent the L+S cones being stimulated at the same time."
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m6pdze | Why can't we 'nuke' a volcano? | So I was watching a video the other day about a massive volcano that erupted in the 1800s. It released so much sulphur into atmosphere that the planet cooled by 2 degrees. Which led me to the absurd thought that maybe we could induce a volcano into erupting to cool the planet and negate some of the climate change we're seeing? EDIT: forget the word NUKE and just think about if we could trigger a volcano successfully to our benefit? I understand that we wouldn't want nuclear fallout. | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Oh man I just listened to a podcast that discussed this exact idea, even referencing the 1860ish explosion. Basically. 1) fallout could be radioactive 2) would cool the planet unevenly 3) could severely damage local ecosystems 4) if it worked too well, the ash could cause a global food shortage"
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m6pot7 | Why are dubbed movies/shows and their subtitles so off from each other? | I love anime and a lot of foreign films/shows that are on Netflix. I mostly watch in the original audio, but sometimes watch with dubbed audio because the subtitles are not great. I've always noticed though, that the subtitles are way off from the dubbed audio. I'm assuming that they're done separately, but why wouldn't the studio try to sync them up as best as possible? Looking for any linguists out there to shed some light. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This bothers me too. I always find myself wishing that they'd do the subs based on the dubs, or if the subs are already done first, just read the subs as the dub \"script.\" You're correct that they're done separately, and they're also done with slightly different objectives: The subs are trying to explain what the actors are trying to express. Suppose emphasis is given at the end of a sentence, but the foreign language follows subject-object-verb order (instead of subject-verb-object, like what English uses). This means the emphasis is actually on the \\*verb\\* and the translator has to move the sentence around in some way to get the verb to the end, or otherwise rephrase it to make it clear it's the verb that's being emphasized. The dubs are replacing the voices altogether, trying both to match **both** the natural mannerisms of an English speaker and the lip movements and body language of the character as best as possible. This means the translation often has to move words within sentences (and even entire sentences) around to match that as best as they can. In practice this difference doesn't turn out too badly. Most audiences prefer either subs or dubs, but not both. I'm somewhat hard-of-hearing with spoken conversations so I have subs turned on, even when I'm watching a dub, and I really wish the subs would just be redone to the dub. But I also realize I'm in the minority. :)",
"There are a few reasons for this. As you said, subtitles and dubs are generally translated separately, by separate groups. Translation is a bit of an art. You can emphasize exactness of vocabulary, or the feeling that a native speaker would have hearing a particular word or phrase, or a multitude of other aspects, because it is very difficult or impossible to consistently get a translation of a sentence that is exactly 1:1 in both the literal meaning of the words, the layered meanings of the sentence, the way the sentence sounds, the tone, the register, etc. This alone will result in slightly different translations of the same thing when different people are translating. Then you have to factor in that the dubs tend to have an extra constraint, where the translators will do their best to sync the timing, and sometimes even the specific mouth movements, as well as they can. This means that they often have to get creative in not just conveying the meaning, but conveying it in a way that fits the form of the conversation you are seeing. Subtitles don’t have this restriction, and frequently you will get much more literal translations for subtitles that are giving you an exact translation of what was said, as close to word-for-word as possible. Meanwhile dub translations tend to be much looser, aiming for something that fits both the visually depicted flow of the conversation as well as something that will sound good when spoken aloud by whoever is dubbing. The differences in these constraints, combined with how inexact translating is in general, means that the translations can often be very different in both word choice and general sentence structure."
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m6q7rw | Why do videos from 10+ years ago have such potato quality these days when they looked fine back then? | Unless I'm misremembering, but I feel like I didn't struggle to make out details in some videos back then the way I do these days, because the quality seems so degraded. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"the best reason i can think of is that video looks best when it is the same or higher resolution than the screen you are watching it on. Lower res video looks better on a low res screen than it does on a higher resolution screen most of the time. (this depends on how the video is up-scaled) Also you were used to that video quality at that time, and now you are used to something higher resolution and the transition has been slow. As the years pass nothing changes much, and then you look back and see how far tech has come.",
"It’s a combination of having your expectations elevated by modern resolutions and the fact that screen sizes are generally just much bigger now. You used to watch low resolution content on tiny screens and that was all you knew. Now you watch super high resolution content on very large, high resolution screens. The older content is no longer standing on its own, but being contrasted with these better images, especially when displayed on screens that play to the better quality content’s strength while highlighting the poor quality of the older content.",
"In addition to other comments, I think another reason could be re-uploads of poor quality. I know when I try to find a video that's 10+ years old, I usually find some crappy upload that was a screen-capture of a copy of the original."
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m6q9mi | Why isn't all income taxed the same? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Like if you make $50,000 in wages and your neighbor makes $50,000 in capital gains, then shouldn't both pay exactly the same amount in taxes? Why discriminate on the basis of income? Short-term capital gains *are* taxed at the same rate. Long-term capital gains are taxed at a lower rate because they represent something you've owned, something you've invested in for more than one year, thereby incentivizing people to make longer-horizon purchases."
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m6qf8r | Why are oranges called oranges, but peaches aren’t called pinks, and plums aren’t called purples? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"English didn’t have a word for the color “orange” until the fruit made it’s way to the region. That’s why a lot of orange things (like hair) are called “red” in English. The color we now call orange used to be lumped in under the umbrella of “red.” The color is named after the fruit. The fruit isn’t named after the color.",
"According to a bit of quick research, the colour orange came from the fruit. We didn't call the fruit orange because of it's colour, we called the colour 'orange' because of the fruit's name. 'We \\[English speakers\\] lifted the word from French, which got it (with modifications) from Italian “arancia”, which came from Arabic “naranj”, which derived from Sanskrit “naranga”.' -[Sharon Wolfgang, in response to a similar question on Quora]( URL_0 ) Before this, English (or rather, Old English) didn't have a name for the colour orange, we called it 'geoluhread', or 'yellow-red'. Eventually, as English-speakers became familiar with oranges, they decided to name the yellow-red colour 'orange'.",
"The color orange is named after the fruit, just like the color peach, the color pink (it's a flower), and the color plum. Really it's only purple that's the odd one out here; it comes from ancient Greek and was the name of the shellfish purple dye used to be made from."
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m6qhaq | Why is meat from a cow called beef, meat from a pig called pork, but meat from a chicken is still called chicken? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The corresponding word for the meat is poultry. Most of these meat/animal dichotomous names are a result of the Norman invasion of England. The wealthy aristocracy then spoke a dialect of French, while the commoners still spoke English. Thus the animals that the poor people raised retained their English names while the food that the wealthy are were referred to using the French names.",
"Bird meat is collectively referred to as poultry. However, there are several edible birds so we use their individual names.",
"Poultry. Also, I swear I’m having deja vu. Didn’t this exact phrasing of the question pop up like a week ago? Granted, COVID brain could be playing tricks."
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m6qk8e | what exactly are magnetic fields, and how exactly do they do what magnets do? | While I know basic info about magnetic fields(opposites attract, and so on) but how exactly do magnets do what they do? And what are “teslas”? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine that everywhere in space is filled with little arrows that can be of different sizes and point in different directions. [This page has cool pictures demonstrating this.]( URL_0 ) All those little arrows are a field. Throughout all of space are different types of these fields. The magnetic field is one of these. When you have something that's magnetic, it means that it has the property of affecting the field. It's affecting the size and direction of all those little arrows. [Example image.]( URL_1 ) Any other object inside of a magnetic field will then feel a force on it because of its interaction with that field. For physical magnets, like the kind you stick to your fridge, they get their magnetism by essentially being made up of a bunch of tiny magnets. The particles that make up atoms have a natural magnetic field due to a fundamental property they have, called \"spin\". This makes them like tiny magnets. If all these tiny magnets are pointing in random directions, they cancel each other out overall. On the other hand, if they arrange themselves to point in the same direction, the magnetic fields don't cancel out. Instead they add together and the whole object becomes a magnet."
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m6qr0l | Why are lentils so cheap? | Here in Wisconsin 80¢ at Woodman's gets me over a thousand calories worth of high protein, high fiber goodness, and I just do not understand. How are they so cheap? Are they just that easy to grow? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"If you look at the bulk cost of [lentils on ycharts]( URL_1 ) the in 2020 was $14.60 to $22,20 for Hundredweight = 100 pounds At the same time [wheat on ycharts]( URL_0 ) in 2020 you get $4.54 to $5.43 for 1 Bushel that is 60 pounds for wheat so $7.57- $9.05 for 100 pounds. So the cost of lentils is between 1.9x and 2.6x the cost of wheat. Soybeans is around 1.1x lentils. Plants you can grow on fields on large scale and harvest with machines are very cheap. Plant protein is the cheapest form of protein, it is not surprising because crops like that are grown to be feed to cattle and other animals to produce food for use. It is a log more efficient for humans to eat the plants directly. The \"problem\" is that most think that the meat is tastier and prefer it. There is no secret behind them and other similar food. You might not be used to them because they are not popular where you live but they are a staple food on the Indian subcontinent.",
"I don't know why either. Lentils are delicious, Americans just don't know how to cook them."
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m6qvie | why do we believe the universe must have a standard i.e space and time to govern it? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Black holes were originally predicted by the math of General Relativity that describes how gravity works. We didn’t actually detect them in reality until much later. We’re still working on robust mathematical descriptions of *exactly* how they work, seeing as they are fairly difficult to study, as far away as they all are, but they’re not a good example of how the universe fails to adhere to the laws we’ve worked out. They’re actually a pretty good example of how good the rules we’ve figured out actually do at describing the universe."
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m6r16g | why does dental care cost so much, even in countries with universal health care? | Dental and oral health has been proven to be closely related to general wellbeing, and I would assume that dental care would be easier to provide (less intensive surgeries and overall simpler procedures) if it was cheaper and more easily available. So why does it cost so much, even in countries such as Canada and Sweden which have universal health care? Asking because I'm shocked every time I get a bill from my dentist for a basic cleaning and check up, not to mention the costs of fillings or intense oral surgery. | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In Canada Dental care is not covered by the national healthcare plan, so it's one of the few things that still requires insurance to help cover. Others include physio therapy, chiropractors, and prescription drugs. So the question is why? Given that dental care is so important to our health why isn't it covered? Well the answer is political. When the Canadian government was pushing in Healthcare legislation in the 50's it was an uphill battle. As beneficial as the system was going to be there was a lot of resistance and fighting between Doctors and the Government regarding how the system would work and some compromises had to be made. Similar to the resistance to moving towards single payer in the US right now. A lot of the same arguments were being made. Dentistry wasn't nearly as advanced or common place as it is now, back then fillings were possible but the majority of the time Dentists would merely pull out teeth. So while it was discussed as an addition it was eventually dropped. The idea being that the government would look into it later... Moving to single payer healthcare was such a step up from what we had before that people at the time just accepted it. Dentistry really was an after thought compared to being able to get emergency surgery without paying for it. Well decades later it still hasn't happened. No government has yet championed the addition of Dentistry to the healthcare system, so Dentistry remains in a pre-50's state where costs aren't government controlled and insurance companies still reign. This is a case of the field has advanced a lot in 50+ years but the healthcare system hasn't caught up. Dentistry, drugs, eye wear, prosthetics, physio, massage, chiropractic care are all examples of things that could and arguably should be added to our national healthcare system. It's merely a matter of having a government that will get this done.",
"In my country (Costa Rica), it is covered under universal healthcare. It works pretty damn well in some parts of the country in others it doesn't; but it is understandable taking in consideration our social healthcare system has been under attacked for 30 years by strong healthcare company lobbyists, yet it is still standing strong. I used to work for a US healthcare company, and honestly, for around a year and a half all I heard from people were horror stories, you guys really need a better system. Universal healthcare has made dental relatively cheap here; when I was living in a hostel I would often meet newcomers from the US coming to get their dental treatment here. Some guy told me it was cheaper to fly over here, than to get it done in his state, I don't know about that though, I think he also wanted to travel around"
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m6r38k | How do narcissists and people of the dark triad get so good at manipulation and trickery? | I mean I was wondering how they manage to get so good at forming ideas on how to manipulate someone or trick someone into doing what they want. I don't get how they managed to learn this. I mean I personally cannot figure out how to manipulate or trick someone buy myself, somebody has to teach me. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It starts out as feeling like the victim of something. Then every action taken is a step to achieve reparations for every hypothetical wrong done against you. Basically it becomes an easy way to justify any actions you take because you feel entitled to whatever you seek. -Who was it? -What do you think this is equal to? -What is the best way for them to notice? -What is the most defensible position? Now don't get me wrong, some people don't actually even think like this, it's almost a way of life and there's zero awareness in it whatsoever, just getting swept away in the madness. Once you start thinking like this it becomes natural to just fall through the breeze trying to get what you want, and basically eventually everyone notices you're a piece of shit Source: me, but I'm doing better now and I just choose to stay away from people after seeing myself for what I am",
"There are two main advantages that a dark personality has over someone with a healthy system of empathy: 1. They have a ton of experience at this. Fundamentally, getting good at ***anything*** is just a matter of doing it enough and getting practice, finding out what works and what doesn't, and adapting the strategy accordingly. Some dark personalities don't even value their relationships, so they can simply cut ties and move on if they're exposed. 2. Sociopaths/psychopaths (i.e. those with antisocial personality disorder) can \"shut off\" their empathy at will, and instead use it as a way of rapidly learning what a person's pressure points are and predicting how they'll react when pressed on a specific topic. Individuals with proper empathy have this ability, too, but we use it to gain an intuitive understanding of what's off-limits so that we can avoid those areas.",
"I think they also know that some people have a hard time saying no or putting up boundaries, so they keep pushing and pushing and then acting like it’s your idea or your “fault”",
"Basically you are playing a game the whole life. There aren't any other people, just buttons to press on and, since you are doing it your whole life -- you figure out what buttons do what. That's pretty much it and there isn't much else to be busy with anyway, so your processing and learning capacity is *a lot*. Think of interacting with NPCs in a game. You have options of what to do or to say and there isn't that many of then really, so you just try it all out, until you get what you want. You don't have to understand how it works or to emphatize with anything that happens in the other's mind, just observe reactions and adjust your behavior. Then if something doesn't fit the narrow set of pre-existing buttons or buttons don't do what you want, you either move along (cause you don't care that much) or get straight into rage and violence smashing the controller against the wall if you don't have enough self-control.",
"They aren't always good at it. But narcissists and psychopaths both try to play on people's emotions.",
"Manipulation is sort of easy. Try to get the person to sympathize with you, and get to know them. (No, I am not a psychopath)"
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m6retb | What happens in your body when you fall asleep? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"We often think of sleep as turning off the body. This isn't entirely true. Sure, some parts are inactivated or slowed down, but other important functions happen. It can be related to a pit stop in car racing. Using your body (especially your brain) can cause wear and tear. Bi- products of daily activity in your cells that might get in the way or even be harmful to your body build up. Sleep is the time your body fixes things like that. Your body goes through different cycles that repeat during sleep. Completing the cycle is important to getting a good night's rest. Waking up in the middle can leave you feeling drowsy. It's like it the race car ran off before all the bolts got put on the tires. You'd feel the car shake.",
"Below the ears, not a whole lot changes. Without all the moving we do during the day, we can devote more energy to things like digestion, repair, etc, but the body just keeps on working. As far as what goes on in the brain? We’re not entirely sure. We know we have cycles of different kinds of brain waves, but we’re not really sure what those cycles do"
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m6rrbo | Bullet Proof Glass | How does bullet proof glass work? how is some glass bullet proof and some isn’t? is there different types of glass on a molecular level? (not sure if physics is the accurate flair) | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Thinner sheets of glass are laminated together to make a stronger material. The two things to keep in mind is it’s quite thick, and it would be better called “bullet resistant” glass. Because a big enough bullet will punch through it. It works by transferring the energy of the shot into the layers. Once it’s been hit, it quickly loses strength."
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m6srun | ! What is the difference between genetics, and epigenetics? My experience thus far has been in nature vs. nurture, and epigenetics sounds like it is a grey area in the middle. | I am studying the effect of trauma on the ability to learn, and I can't get my head around this concept. I get genetics. I get experience-determined elements, but I do not get epigenetics. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"In many ways, you're closer to right than you think. Genetics is your DNA, which I like to describe as a football playbook, here's how you can do a lot of things, and heres what you should do in response to certain things,. Always. Epigenetics is the handwritten notes on the margins, and the tabs you use to get to a specific section. When you hand off your 'genetic playbook' to your kids, some of the notes go with it, and some of the notes get lost. We don't understand epigenetics yet, and there's a lot about genetic regulation we haven't the foggiest idea about. Histones, the scrolls that help organize your DNA can be modified to make the section of DNA they contain more accessible, or less accessible. This is handy for turning off/on age related genes, or genes that promote energy use when you're starving. If it helped you, odds are it might help your kids, so it gets inherited, or gets recreated in them through similar experiences. It's complicated, and it's still poorly understood.",
"Epi means above. It's a higher level of genetics which affects gene expression without affecting the genetic code itself. Environmental factors during the individual's lifetime cause chemical modifications to the genetic material. These modifications are basically markers, chemical groups that are stuck onto the chromosome, which have the effect of promoting, demoting, and disabling the reading of that section of the chromosome. This has wide ranging effects on the displayed characteristics of the individual, and epigenetic information carried in the gametes can also be passed on to offspring (i.e. trauma experienced in your lifetime can have an effect on your children). In the case you're studying, experienced stress causes cells in the body (brain, perhaps) to add markers to their DNA. These markers mean that some genes are promoted or demoted, and the proteins that are over- or under-produced have critical implications for cognitive function. Epigenetic information from the parents is 'nature' and acquired epigenetic alterations are 'nurture'."
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m6szto | how my stomach is hard when I'm obese? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"I’m pretty sure it’s because the majority of your fat is sitting under your abdominal muscles instead of distributed around, on top but under the skin, the rest of your body. And from what ive read, your kind of fat is more dangerous than general wide spread fat.",
"Simply put, your fat is on your internal organs. Your stomach muscles are getting pressurized outward from it and feel hard as a result. I'll guess you have a hard time breathing deeply too? It's called visceral fat, and it's worse for you then subcutaneous or skin fat.. the usual flabby fat. If you start losing weight, it will be the first fat that starts disappearing."
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m6t5na | What happens to someone's debt if they go to prison? | I was listening to a podcast where a serial killer was in debt half a million dollars. He was then put in prison for life. What happens to that debt? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"That much debt is typically charged off by the bank. Believe it or not, it also falls off the credit score after seven years in the US.",
"If he was worth anything, the same process creditors would have to follow for a non incarcerated person. They’d have to go through all the usual methods to collect, file to garnish wages, sue in civil court to attempt to seize assets to repay, etc. It all has to be done through the courts. Just because your guilty of one crime, doesn’t make your finances any more open game. Unless it’s a financial crime in which case repayment and seizures will usually be part of you criminal indictment and case. You don’t have to go to jail though to have a bank write their loss off on you and call you not worth their time because you don’t have any money or assets for them to seize."
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m6v1w0 | Why are old movies and videos are in a square frame and nowadays they are in a rectangle frame? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"It's all relatively arbitrary. The old 4:3 square-ish look was chosen because 4:3 was the most common type of film on the market when movies started being a thing. TV came along later and the key players in early TV had the chance to choose a different format since they weren't reliant on film. They settled on a wider aspect ratio because they thought having more horizontal space would be useful for capturing a bunch of people on screen at once. That change was later emulated by movies and frames have generally continued to trend wider over time, but it has always been in the interest of aesthetics more than anything else.",
"The oldest and earliest movies were done with at the time new equipment and often shot square or 4:3 (thats 4 wide by 3 high). This was due to the film they used and the screens they were shown on. Those classic silent films were generally 4:3, like almost all of them are 4:3. It was the nature of the equipment they used primarily. Gradually more aspect ratios were introduced, and movies, for both practical (the film and screen they used) and artistic reason, started to move to much more wide than tall. Some common aspect ratios in movies became 2.39:1 and 2.35:1, 2:1, 1.85:1 (1.85:1 and 2.39:1 are most common) and others as techniques and film and screens evolved to be able to support more diverse ways to make and show a movie. Artistically, a wider screen is viewed as being more \"cinematic\" while a less wide screen is more \"trapped\". Depending on the movie, you may want one or the other feeling. Many \"epics\" movies are shot very wide screen to feel more cinematic! Some crazy ones ae even stuff like 4:1 TV has a similar story, but the TV standard went from 4:3 to 16:9, which is significantly less than the movie ratios used which are now usually 2:39:1 or 1.85:1"
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m6vakr | If you get big strong muscles from microtears, then how come we can't just put something in the body to rip it artificially | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"1) Its horrifically complicated: muscle growth is often simplified as muscle tearing, but there are hormonal, metabolic and mechanical steps mixed in. It's not as simple as chop the muscles and wait for gainz. Otherwise you could just slap your biceps with a hammer and wait :) 2) There isn't technology that can target specific muscle fibers on that level. Not only would you somehow have to reach the muscles themselves, you would have to find a way to tear them in such a way as to encourage regrowth (see 1) rather than simply cutting around. 3) Lifting weights is already a simple and effective way to grow muscle, seeing as that is how all of these processes evolved. There are ways to \"cheat\" (PED etc) but even those still require you to perform the exercise"
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m6vc39 | How does Binaural beats change brain chemistry? Like deeper sleep, better focus, brain hemisphere synchronisation? Does it actually work? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Apparently yes. We had some studies that proved they had an effect on your mood. It works better when the target frequency is close to the current brain frequency, so combining them with an EEG that measures your brain frequency and adjusts the Binaural beats to slowly guide your brain improves the effect. This is called \"Mindmachine\" It works because different frequencies in our brain relate to different states (sleeping, high activity and so on). A binaural beat sends such a frequency from the outside, and our brain has a tendency to follow it. Since those frequencies are outside of the acoustic spectrum we have to \"cheat\" the frequency in as the difference between both ears."
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m6vg97 | What is the biological basis for us producing tears when we get emotional? Is it the same if we produce tears when we aren't emotional, for example, when yawning quite hard? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Tears trigger social bonding and human connection. Even though we get physically and emotionally more capable as we mature, grownups never quite age out of the occasional bout of helplessness. “Crying signals to yourself and other people that there’s some important problem that is at least temporarily beyond your ability to cope,” Scientists have also found some evidence that emotional tears are chemically different from the ones people shed while chopping onions—which may help explain why crying sends such a strong emotional signal to others. In addition to the enzymes, lipids, metabolites and electrolytes that make up any tears, emotional tears contain more protein. One hypothesis is that this higher protein content makes emotional tears more viscous, so they stick to the skin more strongly and run down the face more slowly, making them more likely to be seen by others. Tears also show others that we’re vulnerable, and vulnerability is critical to human connection. A less heartwarming theory focuses on crying’s usefulness in manipulating others. “We learn early on that crying has this really powerful effect on other people,” Rottenberg says. “It can neutralize anger very powerfully,” which is part of the reason he thinks tears are so integral to fights between lovers—particularly when someone feels guilty and wants the other person’s forgiveness. “Adults like to think they’re beyond that, but I think a lot of the same functions carry forth,” he says. URL_0"
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m6vznf | What is the purpose of the holes in windmill blades? | They are intentionally built into the blade. I am fanning a hard time remembering if they are leading our trailing edge without finding the picture I took at the time. I am sure there is someone who had worked with these and knows as in sure they serve a purpose. I put positive flair because I am guessing it has some physics reason. Thanks in advance! | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Is it all windmills with [blades like this]( URL_0 ) you are talking about? The answer can be seen in the image. The wooden structure with hols is there as a support for fabric that catches the air. It is a way so you can change the catchment area of the blades so you can regulate the speed the rotate it. When not in operation you can roll op the fabric and there is a lot less braking force needed to keep it still. Modern wind turbines have a blade that can be rotated to change the angle of attack for the same reason, some even has tips that can rotate independently so they provide a force in the other direction as a way to keep the blades stationary if needec."
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m6w342 | How are security cameras around the world so easily accessible? | So today I saw the link of a website which apparently connects you to security cameras around the world. I want to know how is it possible? And since I did go to the website and did a few clicks (it was http), should I be concerned? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"It only links up to cameras that people put on the web, the vast majority of cameras store their information locally and not on the web.",
"Most security cameras come default with the username as admin and the password as password. Many people don't change these passwords. They broadcast to the web over http. Google and other web crawlers find these cameras. That website databases those cameras."
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m6wbv2 | Why do balloons deflate over time? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Gas molecules are small and rubber, particularly thin rubber like that used for balloons, is very slightly porous. Because the pressure inside is greater than the outside air, molecules will diffuse through.The rate of diffusion is governed by 1) the size of the molecule so something like helium which is just single atoms and therefore tiny will escape quicker than molecules like nitrogen consisting of two atoms per molecule. 2) the porosity of the skin so a Mylar balloon, and particularly one with a metal coating, will deflate more slowly.",
"Rubber is slightly leaky. Air/helium molecules slowly squeeze through the rubber over time, exiting the higher pressure balloon interior and deflating it.",
"Though the Reason part has already be answered, I wanna address the prevention part. There are these Creams being sold in the market, which when applied on the surface of the balloons, helps prevent the leakage to a large extent. It is mostly used on the Helium filled balloons to keep them airborne for longer period of time. One call also apply grease or some type of oil with some specific properties, so that the weight of the Balloon does not exceed a certain ratio."
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m6z26r | Water powered engine. Why is not considered a viable option inspite of so so much research? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Water doesn't contain (easily accessible) energy. Water fuelcells *output* water as exhaust gas and use hydrogen as a fuel. Hydrogen is a gas. Putting it into a regular diesel engine would just have it escape through the smallest cracks. It's also more efficient to turn hydrogen to electricity in a fuel cell and then run an electrical engine with that power (wich is also true for diesel, but only for bigger engines like ships or goldmine dumbtrucks)",
"> Can water work as an energy source in an unmodified diesel engines? No, water is a rather chemically inert substance. Maybe there is a misunderstanding here as to what a fuel cell does? A fuel cell is a kind of combustion engine for hydrogen. Water is its *waste product*.",
"Water itself is inert and non-combustible. Toshiharu seems to be talking about \"Atomic Hydrogen water\". So, instead of H^(2)O, he's talking about HO. (A water molecule with a single hydrogen atom, instead of two. This is *not* regular water. Setting aside if this is actually true, the question with Hydrogen remains: From where do you get the energy to produce it? Often that is the problem. You have to already have the energy to convert into this fuel. Then the bigger issue is usually that a lot of energy is lost in this conversion too. Making it more expensive and less environmentally friendly."
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m6z9hu | Why is genetic material incentivized to propagate itself? | I was in another thread and someone made the comment “literally the only motivating force for any life is actually genetic material's incentive to propagate itself.” And that got me thinking, “yeah, I obviously know that the ultimate end goal for an organism is passing on its genes... but why?” Why does that matter, or rather why is it a goal for genetic material to propagate and perpetuate itself? What is the “incentive” here and WHY is that an incentive? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not a goal, there is no incentive, it's just that viruses, bacteria, and life that doesn't multiply doesn't stick around on the planet. Evolution is not progressive.",
"It’s not a goal, it just happens. If some specific genetic material tends to propagate itself more than other variants then, well, there becomes more of that genetic material compared to others, which tend to propagate less. So eventually the more propagating genes will win over all the others. Until even better propagating genes show up through mutations. It’s that simple, completely basic common sense really. Self-replication is the defining characteristic of life, it’s what makes it so prevailing. Basically everything on the planet that can be converted into a living tissue gets converted eventually. Life would not be life if it did not do this. Thinking of this as “incentives” and “goals” is just a way for us, humans, to visualize and better understand it, to sort of get a more intuitive understanding. Because that’s how our brains and consciousness operate.",
"Those who pass on their genes (genes not life) survive, thus the genes that want to propagate themselves, propagate themselves.",
"It's not a goal or incentive. It's just that the material that propagates spawns more material that continues to propagate. If something doesn't propagate, it dies off. The better something propagates, the more it spreads."
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m6zp61 | Why do babies going through a severe stranger anxiety don't seem to be bothered by stranger kids? At what age/height/weight/other factors do they internally differentiate between kids and adults? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Simple, it’s the human instinct to be alerted in front of threat. Babies constantly learn about the world around them, and to realize which are potential threats. In the baby’s mind, adults only mean larger animals; thus this alert system kicks in. Some babies still afraid of other kids, however most of the time the kids’ mind see those as mangable threats, so the system signals the babies to chill out.",
"It's mostly a size thing, and certainly varies from baby to baby. Bigger is scarier. We don't lose it either, if you saw an animal that you'd never seen before that was the size of an elephant come quite close to you you'd very likely have a pit-of-your-stomach physiological scare feeling as well. Babies also tend to not be afraid of small dogs and cats, but can often be frightened by really big dogs. My neighbour has a Cane Corso that still sometimes freaks out my 11-month-old."
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m6zsyy | why do hot showers and baths feel so good? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Id imagine it would have to do with heat causing your muscles to loosen and your arteries to dilate allowing better circulation. Not to mention the buoyancy (in a bath) relieving the joints and allowing you to self-deprive you of your senses for a bit and take a break. Unwinding from relative overstimulation."
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m70lq0 | If tuna is hatched and raised in non-mercury containing water, does that make it mercury-free? | Will heavy metals travel from parent to offspring? If not, why aren’t fish that contain heavy metals hatched in places where water can be monitored? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Mercury accumulates through the food chain, so if it’s fed non-Mercury containing fish, it won’t accumulate it. Tuna can’t be farmed, they are wild caught.",
"It's only in the grand sense that tuna collect mercury from the water. Tuna get the mercury from their food. The mercury absorption happens at the bottom of the food chain. Mercury is normally very rare in the environment so pretty much no living things have evolved ways to get rid of it. This means it builds up over the animals lifetime, and is what the term 'bioaccumulation' means. Tuna are top predators and both live a long time and eat things that have accumulated mercury themselves. To get mercury free tuna you would need to give them food from an entire food chain raised in special low mercury water which would be outrageously expensive. To avoid mercury, move down the food chain. A pound of sardines that only ate plankton and lived for nine months will have less mercury than a pound of a tuna that spent 10 years eating those sardines.",
"Tuna cannot presently be farm raised. They are huge fish that live in the open ocean, where they roam very long distances. The closest thing to captive raised tuna are open ocean \"farms\" that are large netted areas that keep the tuna in one area. The nets are open enough for other fish to swim through, which feed the tuna. Tuna are very high on the food chain. They are apex predators that rely on a pretty large food web to survive. Because they are such active swimmers, they don't thrive in enclosed spaces. So, that's why we can't raise mercury-free tuna. The mercury comes from their food. Mercury is hard for living tissue to get rid of. Once it gets into your fatty tissues, it tends to stay there. The organisms lowest in the food web that are filter feeders accumulate some low levels of mercury from the environment. The predators that eat them take in all that mercury and can't get rid of it. Since they eat a lot of those small organisms, they accumulate much more mercury than their food does individually. Larger predators eat those predators and accumulate even *more* mercury, and so on. Each step up in the food web means more mercury accumulates. Since tuna are pretty much at the top of the food web, they end up consuming a lot of mercury, which ends up in their own tissues. They also have a lot of oil and fat, which is where the mercury ends up, so they can hold a lot of it. If it were possible to raise tuna without any of these natural food sources, yes, we could raise tuna to be much lower in mercury. However, since they are so high in the food web we would first have to raise their food source without much mercury, which itself would have its own food that would have to be raised without mercury. Since we're already overfishing the oceans just to feed ourselves, it wouldn't be feasible to grow that much food just to feed the food that feeds our food.",
"Tuna are an ocean predator, not some calm aquarium fish. You have to feed them fish, and those fish are how the tuna picks up mercury, not from the water they swim in."
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m70xp8 | Why does motion sickness result in vomiting? | Doesn't specifically have to be motion sickness any explanation of nausea really. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As far as I know, your brain links the sensation of Motion Sickness with being poisoned, so you get nauseated and/or vomiting to clear out any (potential) poison in your system. It’s essentially a very basic survival mechanism that has evolved over thousands of years, but in modern times it is triggered by other things.",
"Vomiting is the body's primary defense against eating poisonous things. Poisonous things cause signals to get mixed up in the brain, and the body barfs to get the stuff out of the system. Motion sickness is when the body detects that the motion signals from the eyes don't match the ones from the ear's gyro sensors. Signal mismatch might be poisoning, so it's time to barf."
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m71c92 | What does Internal Rate of Return (IRR) & Extended IRR actually represent in finance? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So imagine you want to buy a garden hose. There are many varieties of hoses, some with a half inch wide hole and 10 ft length. Some with quarter of an inch he and 20 ft length. Given the standardized average pressure of water in your garden tap, if I give you a formula which calculates the farthest a garden hose can water your lawn while starting out from your doorstep - That would give you a good idea of which hose to buy. That's what IRR translates to in Real life. XIRR works like this -- Imagine you finalized which hose to buy. Now your local municipality tells you that after one year, we're gonna halve the pressure of water to your home. To compensate, you will make some adjustments, maybe cut the length of your pipes to ensure the pressure stays constant. Or maybe 2 years after that, they say hey, we're gonna quadruple the pressure of water. You may then want to invest in a stop cock or an extension hose to ensure you stay ahead of the curve in your annual lawn watering competition. Thats what the IRR and XIRR would calculate - it being the average square area of lawn you would be able to water while standing on your doorstep in different scenarios and comparing products on that."
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m72eqc | What's the difference in sound quality or comprehension between an MP3 at 320kbps and a 24 bit audio wav file. - Also, what effect will playing these over bluetooth have on the sound and sound quality. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"ok, there are 2 concepts you have to understand, Bitrate and sampling frequency a digital audio recording makes images/samples of a audio recording at a specific interval being the sampling frequency, and with a specific size which is the bit rate. a CD does 44.1Khz at 16bit, which means it takes 16bit samples at 44.1Khz, and uses a codec called PCM, which uses around 10-12mb per minute and is considered lossless since all the information is stored but that's debatable. Now the issue is lossless vs non lossless. Mp3 is a compression format, its actually Mpeg 1 Layer 3, it first filters the audio for frequencies most people don't hear, and then uses mathematical algorithms to reduce the size of the samples, this can result in audio sounding more metallic, bass and treble sounding weaker, clipping... so a lot of people prefer using 192Kbps or even 320kbps, some people prefer 256VBR (variable bit rate) but others claim that variable bit rate causes distortions in the sound. but we have to differentiate between a digital recording and a compression format, PCM, DSD and such are more storage oriented and use as much space as they can to store the music while you have Flac, ALAC, Mp3, AAC, MQA and such which are compression formats. Now you have 2 categories in which they separate to, you have formats like Flac, Alac, Ape which are lossless, meaning that they do not discard any information and just compress the information to keep the sound identical. Others like MP3, AAC, MQA \"shave off\" information they considered not necessary for the listener, and then compensate during the decoding, so the audio is incomplete but the part which was removed is indistinguishable for 99% of the population, and considering 80% of the population listen to music from their iphone by airpods which are at best mediocre quality... now the bluetooth thing is something different. The idea is that between your phone and your bluetooth audio device there's a data link. that data link has 2 important factors, available bandwidth and latency. Now depending on the protocol you use, the bandwidth and the latency will improve. So you have basic SBC which allows \"acceptable\" audio quality, AAC which improves sound quality and then you have 3 Major proprietary protocols which come from 3 different companies - APTX from Qualcomm. which includes a HQ mode, Low latency mode and Adaptive mode, - LDAC from sony which has normal LDAC which is pretty good and LDHC which is a higher bandwidth version for higher quality. - the H1 and W2 which are proprietary for apple devices only. The problem with these is that for APTX and LDAC you have to pay for a license from the manufacturer, Sony for LDAC and Qualcomm for APTX, Also Qualcomm has its own Bluetooth chips in the QC series, but if you build a cheap speaker or headphone and use a mediatek or realtek chipset, you get the basic open codecs which are AAC and SBC. You can Expect LDAC or APTX from a set in the 100-200 dollars from Bose, Sony, AKG... but a pair of Soundpeats that cost 35 bucks on amazon, i don't think they splurged for the APTX license."
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m72nuf | How do slime mold grow? | After reading about slime mold and seeing this [video]( URL_0 ) I was wondering, how do slime mold grow? Do they simply **expand** outwards or is it that they **multiply**? e.g. if I put 100 grams of slime mold in 1 location, will it **expand** to say, 2 locations, and have the 1st location with 80 grams left, and 2nd location with 20 grams (i.e total 100 grams), or is it that they **multiply;** 1st location still 100 grams, and 2nd location with 20 grams? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They multiply, and die off where no food is left for them. They are a colony of single-cell organisms that cooperate to a degree"
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m72vve | Why do liquids feel like 'less' food? | Since I started drinking more soups and smoothies and less solid foods, I have dropped a bit of weight. Not a lot, just a few pounds. In addition, I feel less 'full' after having liquid meals. Why is this? Shouldn't calories be the same, regardless of whether something is in solid or liquid form? For example, I had a smoothie with two bananas, a cup of blueberries, and two cups of oat milk today. I could never bring myself to actually eat two bananas, a cup of blueberries, and two cups of oat milk *separately,* but blended together I can consume all of that, no problem. Why? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you crumble pieces of paper and throw them in the waste bin, you'll find the bin can only hold some 10s of sheets. Now, use a shredder on the paper before emptying into the bin and you'll find the bin can hold 100s of shredded sheets. The blender is the shredder for your food, cutting it up to smaller bits than your mouth can. Thus, blended smoothies fills less volume in your stomach than chewed food. As for your weight loss, your example with the fruit smoothie should be the same calories if you ate the food or drank it blended. You'll have to consider other parts of your diet. You said you're drinking more soups. Our body can mistake dehydration for hunger, making us eat or snack more than intended. Soup would help relieve your thirst as well as hunger. Solid food is also more calorie dense and harder to judge portions unless you have a scale. Meanwhile, you can easily measure out portions of soup and smoothie in a cup or bowl. You may be doing a better job tracking what you're eating.",
"Your body has to digest the solid foods more than the smoothie. The process of blending the smoothie does most of the work of chewing, the first phase of digestion."
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m733ua | Mixing numbers | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"gr8wrea",
"gr8y2sc"
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"text": [
"It sounds like something called \"dyscalculia\", which is kinda-sorta like the math version of dyslexia. You should speak to your doctor.",
"Maybe your brain has trouble translating the symbols into concepts. It's more common than most people think. For example: if I told you to write down \"The cat is cute\", that's no problem because you know what the sentence means. You think of a cute cat. But if I told you to write down \"Oghmatinokusitela\", you'd probably be like \"Oghma- okay, what was the rest again\", because your brain can't turn it into a concept. You end up mixing the letters or forgetting part of the word. Some people struggle to turn symbols that represent numbers into concepts. What to you think of when you see \"3\", \"three\" and \"III\"? Do you know intuitively that all three mean the same, the way you can connect the letters A and a?"
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m736kk | On foggy days why are we able to see a short distance in front of us but decreasingly so the farther ahead you look? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine a screen window. You can see through it, because the screen only blocks a little bit of light. Most of the light still gets through. Now, imagine a hundred screens all on top of each other. Now, you probably can't see through that, because each screen blocks a little bit more and all of the screens put together block most of the light. It's the same with fog. The water particles are small and spread apart, so light can still pass through, but a little bit gets blocked. The more space there is between you and what you're looking at, the more fog there is and the more light gets blocked.",
"Fog is *mostly* transparent. In front of you, you're looking through a little bit of fog. It's still mostly transparent. Far away from you, you're looking through a *lot* of fog. It might still be mostly transparent, but all the bits that aren't begin to add up. It's the same as how a *sheet* of plastic wrap is clear, but a *roll* of plastic wrap isn't.",
"Fog makes it harder to see things because it gets in the way, blocks out part of the image so it's a little fuzzy. The further away you look the more fog there is between you and what you're looking at. Because there's more fog there's more stuff in the way that makes it hard to see. So the further out you look, the more fog you're looking through, and the harder it is to see."
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m73ze1 | How do rewritable CDs and DVDs work? | To my understanding, hard drives are magnetic, and an electromagnet can be used to alter data. A CD or DVD is more visual; it uses a laser to read and write physical pits/troughs in the disc. If the disc uses physical pits, how does the laser carve them out in the case of a domestic rewritable disc? And how does it fill them in when it rewrites over them? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To make a recordable disc, you start with a plastic substrate that has blank grooves rather than a predefined pattern of pits. The blank grooves can keep the drive on track before the data is written. In addition to a layer of metal, the media includes a thin layer of dye. Pulsing at high power, the laser in the drive can ablate or \"burn\" marks in the dye. Read back with the laser at the normal, lower read power, those marks look like pits to the detectors in the drive. Because the high laser power permanently changes the dye, this format can be written only once. For additional rewriteable capability (CD-RW), a thin layer of so-called phase-change metal replaces the dye layer. That material requires two extra \"dielectric,\" or glassy, layers for protection. The drive employs a high-power laser to write amorphous marks in the metal layer, an intermediate-power level to write crystalline marks and a low-power level to read the recorded data. To the drive, the crystalline areas appear bright and the amorphous areas appear dark. As a result, the disc can be read in the same manner as a CD-ROM. The crystalline-to-amorphous transition is reversible. URL_0"
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m74ty0 | Why is Aurora Borealis (Northern lights) more popular than Aurora Australis (Southern lights)? Or is it just me? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"There are less people and less land in the southern hemisphere. Something like 2/3 of the landmass i above the equator. The areas where you can see the southern lights are also pretty unpopulated so there's just far more opportunity to see them in the north.",
"Grab a globe and look at the far Northern Hemisphere. Now look at the far Southern Hemisphere. You may notice that the Antarctic circle neatly contains a single inhospitable continent, and is otherwise in the middle of absolute nowhere. The Arctic circle is surrounded by inhabited landmass."
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m756pe | What does it mean when my phone says that my WiFi is not secure? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It means that the wifi doesn't have protections in place that prevent mean people doing bad things to you by watching what you send to the internet through your wifi. It's kind of like if the postal service had an open door policy where anyone could open any letter they wanted, so it's best not to send things you don't want other people knowing through that postal service (like bank login details). Wifi that anyone can connect to, like the free wifi in hotels or cafes, are open to this. Ideally what you want to be doing is using a postal service where only you have the key, so no one can open your letters - only do important things on the internet when you're connected to your home, password-protected wifi.",
"Most WiFi networks are encrypted: the information between you and the WiFi router is encrypted by the radios at each end so that someone else on the network can't read any of the data you send or receive. However, public access WiFi networks (coffee shops, airports, libraries, etc.) often aren't encrypted. Whatever you send or receive over the WiFi network is readable by anyone else on that network. You need a separate layer of encryption, like a VPN or https:, to render that data secure. Your phone is warning you that you're on an unencrypted WiFi network, so unless you've got another layer of security, anything you send/receive might be visible."
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m76iap | Why do atomic nuclei with odd number of protons behave as magnets when introduced to a magnetic field? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The magnetism of an atom comes from its electrons. Each electron shell can hold a pair of electrons - one with \"up\" spin and one with \"down\" spin. Electron spin isn't the same as normal spinning, but it's also not *not* like normal spinning. The spin of the electron creates a tiny magnetic field. When the shell has both electrons, their spins cancel each other out so there is no overall magnetic field. When there isn't a pair, there is one electron more with that direction of spin than the other direction, so its magnetic field isn't opposed by another electron. This gives the atom an overall net magnetic field. Atoms *generally* have the same number of electrons as they have protons. An imbalance between the two creates a charged ion, which is very likely to either capture an electron or eject an electron so that the charge becomes neutral again. So an odd number of protons means an odd number of electrons, which means the outer shell doesn't have a balanced spin, so it has a tiny magnetic field associated with that spin."
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m76ycl | How are diamonds formed in a lab(I am having trouble understanding the diamond seed)? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As best I understand it, they take a tiny bit of a natural diamond (the \"seed\") and then use chemical processes to slowly drop a stream of individual carbon atoms onto that \"seed,\" like someone drizzling syrup over pancakes. Since the diamond is just made of carbon itself the atoms being drizzled over it bond to it, causing it to grow by latching onto its chemical structure. So they can use this to shape the diamond to whatever shape and size they want while it stays a pure diamond in terms of actual chemical structure.",
"Picture atoms like lego blocks. Normal matter is just a bucket of loose lego. There is no structure to it. But in crystals, like diamond, they are stacked together in an infinitely repeating pattern. Your seed diamond is like an already completed lego project. All they are doing in a lab to grow it is putting more lego blocks on the outside. Its easier when there is a foundation to start building on. To do it from scratch it would be like shaking up a lego bucket and hoping they all stick together. With a seed they have a framework to stick to and a pattern to follow. To put it in other other terms. Have you ever seen that super cooled water trick? You can freeze really pure water, and it won't turn to ice unless you give it a smack. Ice is a crystal. The water in the bottle has no point for it to start building crystals from. When you smack it you create a nucleation point. A point for crystals to form around. Lab diamonds are like that. You are telling this hot mess of carbon to start building themselves *here*."
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m76ywt | Why do most grocery stores start their sales on Wednesdays? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"gr9lfgw"
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"text": [
"Tuesday is usually the quietest day for supermarkets, allowing them to stock and prep for the sale that starts Wednesday. If sales started Sunday, they would need to stock on Saturday, the most busy day. Starting Weds gives people time to buy things for the weekend. It also gives people time to plan what to buy over the weekend."
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m77x1l | If we breathe out carbon dioxide why does CPR work? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Our lungs exchange O2 with CO2, but not all of it. Going in, the air is: 78% Nitrogen, 21% oxygen and .04% CO2. Coming out its: still 78% Nitrogen, but now ~15% oxygen and 5% CO2. So there's still oxygen in it. If you're performing assisted breathing on someone its because they can't breath on their own. So the 15% O2 you're _forcing_ into their lungs is better than whatever little they're getting on their own account.",
"It's very rare for rescuers to perform mouth to mouth these days. Most models of arrest management in developed countries with robust emergency services systems have moved towards hands only CPR. We'll still deliver oxygen, but it's from a bottle through a face mask or a breathing tube. The initial bystander rescuers should be focusing on quality compressions and clearing the airway rather than performing mouth to mouth. Yes, we breathe out enough oxygen for the patient to use as others have stated. In this day and age, it's generally not required as compressions are far more important. Source: Am a paramedic.",
"Normal air is about 21% oxygen, 0.1% carbon dioxide, and a bunch of other stuff. The air we breathe out has about 4% carbon dioxide and 16% oxygen. We do not consume all the oxygen or breathe out pure carbon dioxide. That does cut down on the amount of oxygen a CPR recipient receives a bit, but forcing someone to breathe 16% oxygen is better than them not breathing in any oxygen.",
"Because your body doesn't consume all of the oxygen in the air. So when you exhale into someone else's lungs there is still oxygen present.",
"CPR is when you go into cardiac arrest. At this point, the circulatory system is already failing because the heart isn't pumping blood. CPR has two stages - 30 chest compressions and two breaths. If you're at the stage where your heart has stopped, the chances are slim of CPR restarting the heartbeat without additional support from an AED.",
"One thing everyone is missing is that in cases of asphyxiation your lungs rely on the presence of CO2 to help trigger a breath. If your lungs are full of N2 or He for example you simply stop breathing and die. CPR helps with circulation of blood and will help revive. In a lot of cases chest compressions alone will help save the life of heart attack victims.",
"A real ELI5 explanation: You push on the chest fast, about 100 times every minute, to keep the blood moving through the body because the heart isn’t working. Even if you can’t give any extra oxygen, CPR still helps because any oxygen is better than none. If the brain doesn’t get oxygen it dies piece by piece. “Source”: respiratory therapist who has participated in a lot of in-hospital CPR efforts",
"Just don't sing 'Another one bites the dust' while performing it on anyone. People don't like that one. 'Stayin' Alive' is a better song to do it to.",
"AEMT here: Your oxygen is saturated with up to 100% oxygen at most points. (Edit: unless you have underlying health issues) When your heart stops, it stops pumping. The oxygenated blood is still in your arteries, so by pumping the heart, it moves that blood to the tissues. The tissues then exchange CO2 with your blood, and the cycle continues. You only have a small percentage of CO2 in your body, relatively speaking. This builds up over time, along with lactic acid(which is a byproduct of anaerobic metabolism, AKA: cells not having O2) and causes acidosis in your blood. You then need more advanced medications such as Sodium Bicarbonate, which helps buffer that acidosis.",
"When your heart stops (why we preform CPR), the MOST important part of CPR is chest compressions. As another poster mentioned, there's still plenty of oxygen in our blood during a cycle. The goal of CPR is to compress the heart and keep blood circulating. What you're probably more referring to is how does rescue breathing work? Well, the better question is \"Why do we breathe?\" To get oxygen! Eh, not really. We don't really use that much oxygen if we're just chilling and there's more oxygen in the air than there is in our body, so oxygen will naturally flow into us anyway. We breathe to get rid of CO2. CO2 builds up in our body REALLY quickly and it's super toxic. On top of that, CO2 actually binds better to our hemoglobin than O2 does. Literally, everything binds better to hemoglobin than O2. So we need to not only have more O2 going in to make it stick (high concentration) we also increase the pressure by inflating our lungs. Well, When we do rescue breathing, the pressure is enough to get some oxygen in there and moving. But at the end of the day, tons of research has indicated the real value of CPR is keeping the mostly oxygenated blood that's already in the body moving. This prevents organ death, brain damage and a host of other bad stuff. Not really ELI5 but it's the best answer I can give without breaking down the individual sciences of the many, many mechanics in play here.",
"Air you breath in: about 21% oxygen. Air you breath out: about 15% oxygen. Your exhale is not 0% oxygen nor is it mostly CO2. It's mostly nitrogen.",
"They have done studies in which hands on cpr only was given, no assisted breathing. Studies have shown that the passive movement of air into the lungs from compression is as effective as a forced breath given mouth to mouth and incurs less risk of transmitable disease to the rescuer.",
"Because we don't breathe out pure carbon dioxide. We breathe out sir with just a little bit less oxygen than it had before. Don't ask why we're so inefficient like that, we just are. Even if you don't breathe for them though, pumping their heart is still useful because there is still a fair bit of oxygen in their blood.",
"Aside from the comments below, I would add that a fair percent of the air that you breath in, never makes it to the alveoli in the lungs to be exchanged for CO2. All the air that just makes it into your upper airway, trachea and bronchi is still 21% oxygen. So the first several seconds of exhaled air is still oxygen saturated. (But as already noted...mouth to mouth is never done anymore...occasionally mouth to one way mask)"
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m794jt | How come wind cools you down, since it’s literally moving atoms, hitting your skin, creating kinetic energy? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your perception of temperature is largely governed by how quickly your body can shed heat. And how quickly your body can shed heat is related to the temperature difference between your body and the air immediately surrounding your body. The smaller the difference, the less quickly you shed heat and the warmer you feel. Wind (or any other form of air circulation) moves the air that you've warmed away from your body and replaces it with air that has yet to be warmed by your body. This is why wind only makes you feel cooler if the air temperature is, in fact, cooler than your body."
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m79drr | What is inflationary pressure? | Greetings. I have recently saw a title for the article named “RBC CEO sees inflationary pressure building as economy bounces back”. What does inflationary pressure means? Thanks in advance. | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"An inflationary pressure is anything causes the buying power of money to drop, in other words prices are going up. If gas cost $1/gallon last night and costs $2/gallon tomorrow, that's an example of inflation. The various reasons why gas costs more are the inflationary pressures."
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m79ulk | What causes those lucky clover? Are they actually pretty lucky? (In a science sort of way) | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The fourth leaf is the result of a mutation in the plant. I guess the luck myth simply comes from the fact that it is a rare occurrence, something that you must be \"lucky\" to find.",
"They are caused by either a mutation or a recessive gene. Its estimated to be around 10,000 3-leaf clovers for every 4-leaf. Its also possible that the surrounding environment could play some part in the development of 4-leafs (soil quality, ph, etc.). However, if you find a 4-leaf clover, your chances of finding more in the surrounding area is higher since they may be coming from the same plant or closely related ones that share the gene/mutation."
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m7a2tr | What is reimbursement? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To \"reimburse\" is to pay someone back for something that they paid for that you were supposed to. Like, if my job needs someone to buy more paper for the printer ASAP, I can go to the store, pay for it with my credit card, and then give the receipt to the company. Then the company will reimburse me, by paying me the money for what I spent on the printer, so it's like the company paid for it all along. What this means if that you would have to pay for the therapist, then your insurance would give you the money to either fully cover the cost, or partially, depending on their policies. Health insurance companies often have lists of doctors that they have deals with and are prepared to paid for, but some allow you to use doctors who aren't on their lists, but you will have to send them the bill and they'd pay you back.",
"The easiest way to find a therapist covered by your insurance is to contact your insurance agency or log on to the insurance website and find a provider. That way you are not aimlessly calling therapists. If you don’t have anyone right where you live, there might be teletherapy services that your insurance covers. Out of network coverage rarely covers the full cost of appointments (minus copay). You could submit paperwork to get reimbursed a portion, but that is likely going to be a pain.",
"It means the therapist doesn’t take the insurance, but if you pay upfront, you may be able to Get the money back from your insurance.",
"You may be able to pay for the services up front, and after submitting documentation regarding the visit to your insurance, they can pay you the appropriate amount for an out of network provider visit."
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m7blja | how the ball review thingy works in Tennis. | I mean it seems so random and everyone seemingly just accepts it. Is it lasers? GPS? And then they make a graphic real quick? Thanks. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Video cameras. 6 of them I think.. for tennis the system is called Hawkeye Tennis Line-Calling System. All you need are two cameras that can triangulate the ball's position; the algorithms to detect \"tennis ball\" or \"base line\" within their field of view are fairly (nowadays) simple and once you have calibrated (with a calibration rig or ball) what each camera can see, how a single ball is seen by multiple cameras converts relatively easily into an exact position. Now do this a few hundred times/second and you've got motion tracking and detection if the ball ever strays out of bounds."
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m7c4sm | How an oversupply of solar energy could lead to a blackout | I live in South Australia where 35% of households have solar panels. Some of these panels were temporarily switched off recently in order to avoid a "state wide blackout". How does an excess in energy to the grid cause a blackout? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Traditional power plants (except hydro) can't switch on/off instantly, it can take hours or days and costs $$. And obviously solar can't generate during the night, so those power plants have to be on and generating at night. But they can't stay on and generating _as well as_ all these solar panels unless there is demand to match the generating capacity (too much energy - > things start tripping to prevent overloads etc., harder to balance) so since the solar panels can be turned off pretty easily, they get shut off first. This is why Tesla and their giant batteries is such a big deal: if you can take the excess capacity from wind and solar and store it for use overnight or when its cloudy you _can_ turn off the generating plants and save a whole buncha money.",
"In electrical grids, the grid operators have to very closely match supply and demand. Because grids operate on AC (or alternating) power, which means the electricity in your grid \"flows\" by alternating directions at 50 hz, or 50 times a second. So, all the equipment in the grid is very finely tuned to work super well and efficiently at 50hz. The problem is, when there is a mismatch between supply and demand, it alters how the current alternates. Too much demand and not enough supply, and the alternating starts to slow down below 50hz, too much supply and not enough demand, and the opposite starts happening. So, you have all this very finely tuned electrical equipment that is meant operate at 50hz, with two much supply and not enough demand, that rate starts to increase to 50.5,51,52 etc. And the further it gets away from what the grid is designed for, the greater the chance that some equipment in the grid is going to fail increases. So, to prevent the chance of equipment failure, grid operators do their best to perfectly match supply and demand (to the point that in the UK grid operators take into account the half time of major football games like the world cup to account for millions of people getting up and turning on their microwave/kettle). And in this case they can to cut down on supply, so they disconnect some of the solar power.",
"Think about electricity as though it was water - it might sound weird but electricity and water behave the exact same way. So imagine that people start hooking up pumps to their faucets so that instead of water coming out of the faucet, they're pumping water back in. If water consumption otherwise stays the same what ends up happening is that the water pressure in the system goes up, so when you open a faucet somewhere water will come out much quicker than it would previously. The problem with this is that you can't just increase the amount of water getting pumped into the system to infinity. The pressure in the system keeps going up and it will eventually get to the point where there is so much pressure that the system's pipes will burst, at which point no one has water anymore. Electricity works the same way. The only difference is in how pressure works. Instead of the electrical \"pressure\" going up, adding more electricity to the system causes heat in the wires carrying the electricity. And the amount of heat being generated goes up really quickly - even slight imbalances in the amount of electricity can cause the more sensitive parts of the system, such as electrical transformers, to heat up so much that they catch on fire. To add onto this, its typically difficult for power plants to change their output. So if the people managing the electrical grid misjudge how much demand is going to exist a few hours in the future you can pretty easily end up with a situation where there is so much more electricity being generated than being used that the entire grid might burn itself out. If the grid operators have the ability to turn off home solar panels with a few minutes of notice, then that's going to be the easiest way to prevent the grid from overloading."
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m7c9tj | A dead tree rots and decomposes over time. What prevents a house made of wood from decomposing? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A house made purely from wood and used as a shelter will absolutely rot and in a very short period of time. Internal heat from sources of warmth and cooking will keep this at bay for a while and treating the structure with preservatives will keep it going for longer. However, as it is sat on the floor, rising damp will eventually get hold of the wood which will need to be replaced periodically - welcome to home ownership. I am from the UK where most properties are made from brick, this is due partly to the humid and wet environment and the shortage of usable wood with brick or composite materials being the cheaper option these days. Modern production methods of wood however have made the constant need to replace and renew a thing of the past. Pressure treated soft wood now exceeds the performance of hardwood and modern chemicals and techniques can ensure wood lasts many, many years. If you have lots of money to import or live in an area of the world where wood such as ebony or mahogany are commercially grown, you can expect wood to last decades. This is because the indigenous wood has adapted over millennia to deal with the damp and humid conditions by having its fibres tighter together to prevent water ingress. Finally, it’s worth considering that in northern climes, there is an annual frost and thaw which is absent in the tropics. As water is absorbed by wood in the north and south, it eventually freezes which means it expands. What this serves to do is weaken the wood and leaves it with its fibres further apart, this in turn acts like a sponge to suck up more water, eventually causing rot and decay.",
"One of the reasons for rot is the moisture. The wood used for building material has been heated to get rid of moisture. That's certainly not to say it cannot rot, because it certainly can given enough time and direct exposure to the elements (exposed unpainted areas).",
"Houses made from wood do decompose. Fungi that cause wood rot need moisture to do their thing. Examples of things that are used to try to prevent rot, include roof overhangs and paint."
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m7f317 | If plants are completely out of leaves during winter, then how does photo synthesis takes place and how are they surviving? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It doesn’t, really. Trees losing their leaves for the winter is a bit like bears hibernating. They store up a bunch of energy during the spring and summer months, so that when it gets to winter time, they can go dormant and live off of their stored energy until spring rolls back around and they can return to collecting energy again.",
"They are dormant. Actually hibernating like bears. But the amazing part is how they know to wake up once spring begins.",
"A lot of plants will store extra food for the winter as starches in their roots. They have a vascular system which allows the nutrients to flow from where these are stored to the parts of the plants which need it."
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m7fp4k | What is Pi? How was it discovered, and why does such a strange number have so many diverse uses? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It’s just a relationship between the diameter and circumference of a circle. It was discovered because people noticed that the ratio never changes, no matter how big or small the circle, and it’s the only way to calculate the surface of one. It has many uses because many things in nature have circular motion."
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