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mfi80w | How did Max Planck find his constant when it's true value is still a matter of research? Why is it a matter of research anyway? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, lots of constants are always getting increasingly better researched. We already know what their value roughly is, but more research is done to determine them to greater precision, this is typical. Max Planck calculated his constant by creating a mathematical model for black body radiation, in which that constant showed up. In physics, you often know that something depends on a constant but you may not know what that constant is yet. To determine it, you often have to take the equation you produced with that mathematical model of yours and you tweak the constant so that it matches experimental data. This is more or less what Planck did, and he came within 1.2% of the currently accepted value, which was pretty good."
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mfilso | Why and how can you hear the ocean in a seashells—like spiral conch shells? Is it really the shell or just the air passing through it that you hearing? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"What you are hearing is ambient sound bouncing off the shell, forming random noise that sounds similar to the random noise of crashing waves. You can get similar noises from just a cup held near your ear. It is **not** blood flowing through your ear as is a common myth."
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mfiu3g | How does your body handle drinking large volumes of water? | Since you body can only adsorb water at a certain rate, chugging water if you are dehydrated does little good. I mean, some of it is stored in the stomach, but oftentimes you will need to urinate soon after drinking late amounts of water. How does the excess water get transferred to the bladders quickly if it isn’t adsorbed by the body? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you take in water, it's absorbed through your intestines and stomach. Some is used to expel waste from the kidneys, some is used to provide water to the body's chemical processes that need water as an input, some is used to dilute your stomach acid so it doesn't burn through your stomach lining, etc. It's shuffled off to where it's needed. When you take in excess water over a short time, that extra water is discarded, essentially. Sent to where it's needed, then the excess to your bladder through your kidneys. The same happens with water soluble vitamins taken in excess, they're discarded and you pee them out. The body regulates itself and knows how much water is needed. This process can be pretty fast, as too much water building up can cause problems. You expel water through other means too, not just pee. Your breath contains tons of water (it's why clouds form when you breathe out in cold weather!), your sweat, your saliva (if you spit), etc are all ways of discarding extra water."
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mfj71l | Why do people get cottonmouth after drinking? What is responsible for making our mouths feel dry after having a bunch of alcohol? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Lol, all of the other comments talk about dehydration, which is not the cottonmouth-feeling you get right after drinking. Dehydration only shows several hours after drinking excessive alcohol and not drinking enough water. I think you're talking about the cottonmouth feeling your get while you're still drinking? This cottonmouth-feeling has mostly to do with other ingredients in your beverage. e.g. tannins in wine. These tannins cause the proteins in your mucus to precipitate. Your mouth then is without slimy mucus, resulting in a dry feeling.",
"Alcohol is a diuretic which causes your body to remove fluids and leads to dehydration if you don't drink enough water to offset this.",
"alcohol is a drug that tells the kidneys to release a lot of extra water into the urine. this dehydrates you leaving your mouth more dry. There may be other reasons for the \"cottonmouth\" feeling depending on what other fun things you did while drinking."
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mfk9xo | Why does covering your ears (Headphones etc) make your body temperature climb? | Maybe it's just me but whenever I put my headphones on while I'm PC gaming, even if I'm just wearing my undies only, I get very very hot and start sweating like I'm in an oven. I don't understand what is happening. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Could be ur chair and the adrenaline of gaming. But also, ears (and top of head) release a lot of heat."
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mfkezj | If i have thousands of dollars and nobody knows and i buy stuff, why does it matter to government where did I get my money from? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because your essentially earning an income without paying taxes. Spending money that you didnt earn is a gaint red flag for a crime being committed become there are almost no other way to get the money without paying taxes. Its what Al Capone was taken down for",
"Income tax is a type of tax that governments impose on income generated by businesses and individuals within their jurisdiction. By law, taxpayers must file an income tax return annually to determine their tax obligations. Income taxes are a source of revenue for governments. They are used to fund public services, pay government obligations, and provide goods for citizens. It would be unfair to those that get taxed and you don't.",
"One perspective is that all money is created and maintained by the government in power. It is a measure of value used to facilitate trade and as a store of value. The government enacts laws, builds infrastructure, guarantees security, and tries to maintain a civil society. This gives freedom to their citizens to undertake long term enterprise, engage in contracts, and to go about their daily lives in relative safety and security. In that sense the money doesn't \"belong to you\" - it is an artifact of the society you live in. The government has interest to ensure that this creation is managed to purposes that benefit both the individual and the public at large. The legitimacy of that purpose is enshrined in how the government is created, the laws they enshrine and, of course, the power of the government itself to impose them.",
"Because they need to know that the taxes have been paid for. When you work a legal job a share of that money is taken to cover certain taxes. If you earned your money as a drug dealer, the government doesn't get to take the share for taxes out of your income. In this context all the government cares about is if the taxes have been paid for.",
"So there exists an evil entity (the government), they need to take money from people in order to keep up with their evil costs, on extremely rare occasions, see less than 5% of the time they do actually help people. So if you don't pay them a protection fee they feel the need to arrest you or do other terrible things to you. So remember be a good little cog and pay your protection fee folks."
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mfklk8 | How is it possible that we never feel the ever number of complex things happening inside our body? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Theoretically I think that since your body has been doing these things since before you were born, your brain chooses to ignore them. Like how your nose is always in your field of view but your brain ignores it."
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mfklr1 | Could someone explain this coin flip scenario to me? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"No, it's still a 50/50 chance. Across some large sample of coin flips, it's likely that you'll see roughly half heads and half tails, but it's also likely that you'll see some other ratio, up to and including a minuscule chance of seeing all heads or all tails. Individual flips have no influence on flips after them, though. It's just that each individual one has a 50/50 chance.",
"The phrase is \"the system has no memory.\" The system here is the coin flip. Every time it's either going to be heads or tails, that simple. Over time it will even out, but the odds on a flip is not influenced at all by previous flips.",
"The coin does not remember how it was flipped last time, or any time before that. BEFORE you flip a coin, you can calculate the odds that any given sequence will happen, and draw a tree of all possibilities. For example, the first flip would be heads or tails. If it turns out to be heads, the second flip could be either heads or tails -- but if the first flip turned out to be tails, the second could also be either heads or tails. So in two flips, there are four possibilities: HH, HT, TH, and TT. Any of those has a 25% chance of happening -- but AFTER the first flip, half of those possibilities don't exist any more. If you flipped heads, you know TH and TT can't happen, there are only HH and HT remaining, it's 50/50 again. You can do this for three flips, or four, or any number. If you were to draw out the tree of possible sequences, there IS a path where you could flip a thousand heads in a row. That path is one of many many many more, though, so it isn't very likely. The strange thing is, each specific sequence of one thousand flips is EXACTLY as likely as getting all heads, or all tails, or perfectly alternating heads and tails, or two heads and two tails alternating, or 500 heads followed by 500 tails, or 999 heads with one tail at position 745, or 999 heads with one tail at position 746. MOST (nearly all) possible sequences have no discernable pattern, though many will have short runs where (for example) you get twelve heads in a row. But if you write out a random sequence of H and T to a thousand places, that specific sequence is exactly as likely to happen as getting a thousand heads in a row. Edit: the idea that a certain outcome is \"due\" because of prior outcomes -- like the next flip somehow being more likely to be tails because the last five flips were all heads -- is called the Gambler's Fallacy.",
"Each flip has a 50/50 chance because there are only two possible outcomes unless you figure out how to make a coin land standing up. How many times you’ve flipped it and what side you got won’t change the odds because it does not influence a coins chances of landing on heads or tails."
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mfl38k | How does the brain reward dopamine when the effects are delayed? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Dopamine is not a reward, it is a motivation. Your brain does not release dopamine when you drink, it releases it when you think about your next glass, in anticipation of the actual reward."
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mfm6iq | what’s the difference between a new strain and a new variant? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's usually based on how much information has changed. Think of a \"new variant\" as a \"new type to duck\" vs a \"new strain\" as a \"new type of bird\".",
"If this is about viruses: Any change in a virus's genome makes it a new *variant*. If that change makes a demonstrable functional difference (i.e. it causes different symptoms, can infect different hosts...), it is considered a new *strain*."
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mfo5p9 | How did so many places learn to process and harness Copper to get out of the stone age? | I've been watching heaps of pre-history videos and people replicating how to make tools from copper, iron, etc. Copper alone seems like such a HUGE jump and complicated process. How would have people have known to mine and heat (put simply) copper ore into all these copper tools? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine you're using stone all your life to poke and chop things. You get irritated by the stone always chipping and breaking and you have to go find a new stone to do this... multiple times a day. But one day you find this neat greenish and shiny stone. You start noticing that the gray bits fall away leaving more of that pretty shiny stuff. But that shiny stuff seems more reliable than the gray stuff. You show your friends these cool shiny stones and demonstrate their superiority, so they become the new standard and everyone begins using them. Then your cousin Ugga, who is also the clan buffoon one day drops his stone in the fire. He panicks and cries, then goes to bed. But the next morning, Ugga comes to retrieve his pretty stone. He sifts through the embers of the fire with a stick for it and finds it completely changed by the fire. It's now the color of the sun, shinier, and deformed relative to how it was when he tossed it in the. Both excited and upset, he shows others. One guy decides to do an experiment and discovers that heat makes the shiny stuff more malleable and devises his own tools to make more shiny rock. Then the first metal spearhead is formed and the first foundry is planned. And so of your prior now know that metals are weaker with heat and everybody starts spotting metal more frequently.",
"Humans were already using (and still use) pottery kilns - a kind of a hot-burning oven for making solid pots, hard bricks and other useful stuff like that. The temperature in such a kiln can get high enough to melt copper, so they might have accidentally smelted the new* shiny metal, got interested with its properties and then experimented further to get more of it. *copper was not the first metal to be discovered by humans. Tin and lead had been found and used before copper, as they have a lower melting point and can be smelted in a campfire.",
"Gold and copper could be found as pure nuggets in streams or just in the ground, called placer deposits. They do not corrode away so the large nuggets just lay there until someone found them. This is how more modern gold rushes would happen - someone would find a gold nugget in a stream. So we have found native American copper and gold items made by just hammering out a nugget of the material with a rock. As they used up the larger pieces, they would work the smaller and smaller pieces. Eventually they learned how to melt small copper pieces to make larger copper pieces. They were probably smelting copper before they started mining it. Once they could smelt it, getting more small pieces would be useful.",
"We've been using fire for a long time. First for light, then for cooking, and then for pottery. When you're building fires (and kilns) you put rocks around them, and some of those rocks contain lead and tin. Those metals melt, and leave you with soft metal to play with. Soon, you find out what kinds of rock make metal when they're heated, and start doing it on purpose. Then you start heating other rocks that look interesting. Most of them don't do anything, but eventually somebody puts a copper-bearing rock into a pottery kiln, and finds out that copper makes pretty good (compared to rocks) tools and weapons. Before too long, somebody else discovers (probably by accident) that combining tin and copper makes bronze (or pewter if you do it wrong.) Bronze is vastly better than copper for weapons and tools, and you've just entered the Bronze Age. (Pewter is good for making pretty things, but isn't very useful for tools.) It will be a while before the Iron Age, because iron melts at a really high temperature compared to copper and tin.",
"Copper is one of the few metals that could be easily found in its native form. Most other metals were locked up in ore. More importantly, copper could easily be pounded thin enough to make a sharp blade."
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mfpeq6 | What does hexadecimal have to do with binary? | Confused sounds | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It’s a power of 2, 16 is 2^4, which makes it really handy, that means 4 bits is just one digit (number or letter A-F) in hex So for example 1100 is C in hex but 12 in decimal And a byte is just two letters, so 1100 0011 is C 3, you simply need to split in 4 bit chunks and turn each 4 bit chunk in a digit, which is super simple Compare that to converting to decimal, which requires doing divisions and module operations which are much more time consuming for the processor",
"Binary is good for computers, but it's tricky for humans to read because the numbers get big (as in the written form takes up a lot of space) very quickly. The number one thousand in binary is 1111101000 (10 digits long). So, we convert it to hexadecimal so humans can read it more easily. Let's write out the numbers from 0 to 15 in binary: 0=0000, 1=0001, 2=0010, 3=0011, 4=0100, 5=0101, 6=0110, 7=0111, 8=1000, 9=1001, 10=1010, 11=1011, 12=1100, 13=1101, 14=1110, 15=1111. Now, you can see that for most of that we only used a single digit. Let's suppose we expand and include a few extra \"numerals,\" and we'll label these with A, B, C, D, E, and F. A will be equal to 10, B to 11, C to 12, D to 13, E to 14, and F to 15. Now our hex and binary table looks like: 0=0000, 1=0001, 2=0010, 3=0011, 4=0100, 5=0101, 6=0110, 7=0111, 8=1000, 9=1001, A=1010, B=1011, C=1100, D=1101, E=1110, F=1111. This means we can take any 4-bit binary number (a number in binary that uses 4 zeros or ones) and replace it with a single digit. Take the example of 1000 from earlier. That was 1111101000. We split it in to groups of 4 digits: 11 1110 1000 Pad the beginning with extra 0s: 0011 1110 1000 Then replace each block of 4 with a single hex character: 3E8 Suddenly that 10-digit number takes a lot less space on the screen. And because hex maps perfectly to binary (since 16=2^(4)), it's super easy for computers to convert between them. This is the advantage that hex has over base-10. The computer has to do lots of divisions or multiplications to convert between binary and decimal. But binary and hex is just a nice, easy table.",
"16 is 2 to the power of 4. So every hexadecimal digit is equivalent to a sequence of exactly 4 binary digits. And a byte (equal to 8 bits or 8 binary digits) can be written down as a two-digit hexadecimal number. This allows for a more compact and readable notation of what is still in essence a binary sequence.",
"Let's start with what Base 10 is. When you count, you have the numbers 0-9. When you try to add 1 more to 9, you've run out of ways to represent it, so instead, you count up in the next column, and rollover 9 to 0, giving you 10. With binary, you only have the numbers 0-1. If you try to add 1 to 1, you have run out of digits, so you rollover and add 1 to the next column, giving you 10. With hexadecimal, you have the numbers 0-F (A representing 10, B representing 11, F representing 15, etc). If you try to add 1 to F, you run out of digits, rollover, and have 10. This is true for any Base-N counting system. You have the numbers 0 to N-1, and if you try to represent exactly N, you would write 10. Now as for what Hexadecimal has to do with Binary? It's because it can be directly translated easily. If you were to try and translate the number 192 from Base 10 to Binary, you have to do it more or less via brute force. However, hexadecimal has a bonus. If you were counting up in binary and hexidecimal at the same time, you would notice that as you approached 1111 in binary, you would also be approaching F in hex (15 base 10). When you add 1 to either, you roll over. Because the rollovers happen at the same time, the next 4 bits also rollover at the same time as 1 hex digit (FF vs 11111111). This follows true for any number of digits. This means every single hex digit can represent exactly 4 bits **entirely**. This means if you're converting, you don't need to start from the bottom of the number and work your way up, you can just do it in 4 bit chunks. You can convert between the two freely from the start or from the end, as long as you have 4 bit chunks."
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mfpnox | harvesting salt from sea water | I've just an ace doc on Smithsonian channel, and they explained how it is dried in different pools and harvested when dry, but then mentioned "it is then washed before shipping". So question is: how can you wash something that is soluble? The dirt will still be there when the water is evaporated away.. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The amount of salt you can dissolve in water is finite. Once you've dissolved that much, you can't dissolve any more. So you can wash salt in that brine (it's saltier than sea water, so salt water might be confusing). Dirt and sand still wash off.",
"Wash it with really salty water called brine. Since it already holds a lot of salt there is little room for the salt to dissolve into the water."
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mfq2gb | Are LEDs of varying color doped to get a certain frequency or do they use dyed plastic heads to get the color? | Do they dope the silicon with various element to get the bandgap which matches with the wavelength the color, or do they just dye a transparent LED head (or whatever it is called) and use a single frequency? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yep, the use different materials to get a specific frequency, you’ll sometimes see blue LEDs called “gallium nitride” because that’s what they use to make them. However white LEDs use just blue LEDs, but put a layer of phosphor on top in order to get all the colors of white light in a spectrum. There are some rare colored LEDs that use the same method as white ones, but with a colored phosphor instead for a less monochromatic light",
"They are all clear lenses now. They do as you said use different frequencies to achieve different colors. Early LEDs did use dyed lenses and that's why a lot of older equipment that uses red LEDs, the red is pretty washed out looking and more like a pink."
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mfqjty | What do companies like Intel/AMD/NVIDIA do every year that makes their processor faster? | And why is the performance increase only a small amount and why so often? Couldnt they just double the speed and release another another one in 5 years? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If they can improve speed by 10% and make a new product, they can release it now and start making profit on it instead of waiting 5 years to make a product 20% faster to only get the same relative profit. Simply put, improvements on technology aren't worth anything if they sit around for years not being sold. It's the same reason Sony doesn't just stockpile hundreds of millions of PS5s before sending them out to be distributed to defeat scalpers - they have a finished product and lose profit for every month they *aren't* selling it.",
"Digital design engineer here (working on 5G mobile communications chips, but the same rules apply). Improvements in a chip basically come from two areas: Manufacturing and the design itself. Manufacturing improvements are mostly related to making all the tiny transistors even tinier, make them use less power, make them switch faster and so on. In addition you want to produce them more reliable and cheaply. Especially for big chips it’s hard to manufacture the whole thing without having a defect somewhere. Design improvements involve everything you can do better in the design. You figure out how to do something in one less clock cycle. You turn off parts of the chip to reduce power consumption. You tweak memory sizes, widths of busses, clock frequencies etc. etc. All of those improvements happen incrementally, both to reduce risks and to benefit from them as soon as possible. You should also be aware that chips are in development for several years, but different teams work on different chips in parallel, so they can release one every year (or every second year). Right now there are no big breakthroughs any more. A CPU or GPU (or any other chip) which works 30% faster than comparable products on the market while using the same area and power would be very amazing (and would make me very much doubt the tests ;) ) Maybe we’ll see a big step with quantum computing. Or carbon nanotubes. Or who knows what.",
"At the current level of technology, the complexity and the amount of resources involved, things don't improve in great big leaps quickly. There are so many interrelated areas that trying to make huge leap involves equally huge risks. At the same time, companies cannot design JUST the next generation of product. There are multiple projects going on at the same time each with some planned future launch dates because these projects take so much time to complete. With each technology building on the previous one and all these simultaneous activities, what appears to be incremental increases are all the result of multiple decisions and investments made years beforehand. This is the result of the compromise between performance and risk.",
"They don't always make them \"faster\" in the sense, but better at doing specific things. For example a difference between older and newer CPU might not be in it's speed, but the fact that the newer CPU has extra functions that can do certain things more efficiently or in a different way. Like let say that file format .meme became really common few years ago (CPU development and manufacturing cycles are fairly long), so in the next year the manufacturer could include a special portion on the chip that is dedicated to decoding and working with that file format. That is able to do it faster and better, than just doing it in a non-dedicated manner via the other parts of the CPU. Imagine that instead of trying to translate document using a dictionary and going word by word, you give it to someone who know the language and can translate it easily. In this case the other person is the dedicated function or part of the CPU. It is these features which are better and more efficient at very specific work, that are different. A CPU might (and usually does) have a dedicated portion and functionality for video decoding, or graphics processing. The graphics processing functionality can also be used for different kind of maths like physics calculations, which means that work load is not going through the main CPU. Difference between a CPU and GPU is that one is specialised in graphics, you can also have, APU (Audio processing unit) which is specialised in audio. Or whatever the developer wants to put there. And lets go with the .meme format still. The new CPU has a dedicated function for this, well the next year's CPU might also have a dedicated function that does this slightly faster and more efficient, there for you could say it is \"faster and better\". Now. Another important thing to remember is that if this year's CPU works does things specific way and has these specific functions. Next year's CPU might basically be identical but they just organised everything better in the chip. If you get .1% faster times doing a thing because you moved it around on the chip, then when that thing is done billion times, the speed adds up significantly. But what they actually do to make next year's chips better is a secret. Usually you can get some information by diving deep in to the documentation and comparing. But what they actually did on the chip, is a trade secret. Speed isn't everything on the CPUs. It doesn't matter how fast you do work, if half the work you do is unnecesary. Then someone who doesn't do that unnecessary work can work slower and still gets the same results. Like imagine that you are trying to dig a hole with a spoon, and I'll dig with a shovel. I have to do WAY less work to keep up with you, and if I want to I can dig the with way fewer actions than you, because my shovel is more efficient. Since we are reaching the physical limitations of CPU size and speed. As in if we try to make them smaller we start to get strange problems like charges passing through things they shouldn't be. Things actually getting limited due to speed at which charges can move in the conductors. So when we hit the practical limit of \"It isn't worth the headache\" and \"We just physically can't make this happen because physics limit us\", it is more about the race of being better and efficient. Basically making shovels for every use.",
"If they released only once every 5 years, then people who don't already have a computer (or whose computer broke) in the third or fourth year are shit out of luck. They either have to buy a computer that's about to be shit, or they just have to wait. Sometimes waiting isn't even an option because you need the computer for work. By releasing once a year, they guarantee that their newest product is at most a year old and will still be relevant in a few years. No matter when you buy the computer, you have a decent option that will last for a few years. They don't expect most people to upgrade their rig every year.",
"In addition to what others have said which is valid, to address your question about just doubling the speed - It IS true in a lot of cases (especially mobile processors) that speeds could be increased more than they are. But, things tend to be dialed back from their maximum capabilities in order to balance performance with heat generation and power usage. The more transistors you pack into a smaller area, the more power it takes to run and the more heat it generates. If you're targeting a particular power usage and heat generation point, you'll still definitely see performance benefits with more transistors in the same area - but still a decent amount less than if you just say, packed in twice as many transistors and had it use twice as much energy and produce twice as much heat. It just wouldn't be stable.",
"Ok, so a processor is a wafer of silicon with a huge amount of little wee switches etched into it. So, think of it this way: there are two ways to improve the performance of a processor. The first way is to find better and more efficient ways to organize all these little switches together - these tend to be incremental to provide little bumps here and there, for example imagine instead of having one big long line at the DMV, having several lines, maybe figuring out a way to divide people by what they need and having them fill out the forms needed while they wait instead of when they get to the counter. Then we get more people thru faster. Awesome! The second way is to improve the actual switches themselves - to make them in a way that they can be switched faster (because switching is NOT instantaneous), and/or in a way that you can fit more of them onto a die. If you can manage that, you can increase the amount of thoughts a processor can think in a set amount of time. And if you can fit more, you can have more cores or other bits that allow more thoughts to be worked on at the same time. Great, right?! However, there is a tradeoff - for science reasons, usually if you want to make a switch open or close faster, you need more electrical current. But this in turn generates more heat. Think of it like your stove, the more electrons that run through it, the hotter it gets. The heat generated in just one of these switches isn't much, but when you cram millions of them together, it can become quite a lot. And because the actual silicon part of the chip isn't all that big, you end up needing a lot of cooling to get all of that heat away from that small chip before it builds up enough to damage it. So, in order to improve these things, you need to find a way to get more switches into the same chip, using the same amount of electricity, but also ideally at a higher clock speed. As you can see, increasing one thing makes the other worse. Researchers have worked very hard on figuring out new and different ways of making the switches so that they can still switch fast with less heat. But these discoveries are a lot of work, and have a lot to do with what can be achieved on a large scale - a new innovation doesn't help if it costs 100 times more to make. But those researchers study and study and figure out how to manufacture these improved switches more cheaply, so something that was only for crazy expensive supercomputer processor ten years ago can be found on your phone or laptop today. But the long arc of the story is this: while it seems that processors are just on this steadily improving trajectory, each improvement is, in fact, a breakthrough, a new discovery, a big deal. And a lot of people think we're starting to reach some the limits of what we can improve in silicon based processors, and we're seeing that modern processor specs are no longer improving in the leaps and bounds that they used to.",
"back in the 90's you could have 100% performance gains from one year to the next... today there is little to improve and they launch something when it's good enough to market it...",
"From the actual engineering standpoint, the speed gains come from learning how to put more transistors into the same surface are than before. The small steps thing has less to do with engineering and more with capitalism. Why sell one processor with a huge jump every 5 years when you can sell one every year with a smaller jump? That phenomenon is by far not restricted to processors. It's everywhere. Cars, phones, televisions, fashion. Everything. We are (in the western world) way beyond the point where capitalism satisfies actual needs. Instead, most companies create wants by building competition to their own products. And even [Planned Obsolescence]( URL_0 ). EDIT Holy shit, I'm flattered. Thanks for the award! PS.: Don't tell actual five year olds I said the s word.",
"Best ELI5 i can manage: Processors and GPU’s are like car engines. Imagine if you could shrink down your v6 engine to half size, and it still had the same amount of power. Now you have room for two! Double v6 engines! They’re going to use more fuel, though. Not as much as double (they’re smaller) but more. Then somebody goes “hey, what if we make those v6 engines into v8 engines? Add more cylinders and make the fuel intake a bit more efficient?” Then some year later, somebody goes, “hey, your double v8 engines are cool, but i can shrink them half the size again, so we can have 4 v8 engines!” Repeat as much as they can and eventually: “Folks, we have a problem. We can’t make the metal or cylinders any smaller. The fuel won’t go through, and they won’t be strong enough. Its too dense!” This is the essence of Moore’s Law, and its limits. Shrink, double, shrink, double, every 2 years until a wall is hit. —————////——/- This is what GPU/CPUdevelopers have done since...ever, pretty much. They’re at a wall where they’re having a hard time shrinking and doubling, so they’re looking into making *different kinds* of GPU’s. For example, new GPU’s have cores that focus on just raytracing, rather than everything. Some have new cores that just focus a bit on AI tasks, or monitoring and optimizing themselves. A bit like if someone decided “lets make one engine just for wheels, another engine just for the A/C.” In an effort to improve efficiency and ability, rather than just “More and smaller”",
"Late to the party but what if we can’t make processors smaller , why don’t we just make them bigger?",
"To milk as much money out of the market as possible. Note also most CPUs are one design and then they artificially disable components to make different specs at different prices, but the \"thing\" is very often identical manufacturing wise to the most expensive model.",
"Essentially you don't know what the future holds for you. You don't know you will get 20 percent faster in 5 years. You don't know that so there is no point sitting on 5 percent improvement that you did today lest someone else beats you to market. And that's how it works in pretty much all the consumer industry. This is what we can do today. If something changes we will update it in future. TVs for example we had to go through crt, plasma, led, lcd. 480p, 1080p UHD and so on."
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mfr34l | Why do temperate fruits have more antioxidants and phytonutrients than tropical fruits? | Apples, berries, and plums show up on lists of the most antioxidant-rich foods, but bananas, mangoes, papayas etc., don't. Any idea why? Thanks. | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm not sure if this is really true. Tropical fruits tend to be a bit sweeter so perhaps they're a bit higher in calories and thus have less nutrients per calory. One reason that temperate fruits might have more phytochemicals in them is that they are more affected by fungi (as fungi prefer lower temperatures), and thus need to defend themselves better, which they use these compounds for. Berries in particular suffer a lot from fungi, so they are packed with chemicals to help them resist. Generally speaking though deeper coloured fruits are higher in nutrients (as it's these plant chemicals that that usually give this colour, like beta carotene giving carrots their deep orange colour or lycopene giving tomatoes their deep red colour).",
"Antioxidants and phytochemicals are present in any dark colored fruit. Why there are fewer dark colored tropical fruits I don't know. But plenty of common temperate fruits like apples and pears are also low in antioxidants."
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mfr4ly | How does your stomach make sure it gets emptied? | In my mind your stomach is like a squishy pink toilet, but how does it "flush" and how does food never get stuck? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your entire digestion tract is controlled my musculature. Same reason all the food in your stomach doesn’t just fall out if you go upside down.",
"the stomach does not empty all at once. As you eat food, as as it gets digested, it will exit the stomach and enter the small intestine bit by bit over some time, not all in one go. (obviously if you have very little food in your stomach, like a small snack, than that could go all at once possibly, im talking about when you eat a full meal.) So there isnt a big flush, just the muscles in your stomach/small intestine squeezing the food along its path like squeezing toothpaste out of the tube. So, like how toothpaste can't really get stuck in the tube, most food after youve chewed it, swallowed in, and then it got chemically digested in your stomach isn't hard, its a squishy mass that can get squeezed and pushed around. When you eat things that aren't digestible though, thats when dangerous things like a blockage can happen. A common example is in pets when you hear about how someone's dog ate a sock and had to get it removed. The same thing could happen to a human, but generally we're pretty good at only eating food. Though if something did get into your stomach, hopefully you would throw it back up, because if something does get lodged in your intestines than chances are you will have to have surgery to get it out if it doesn't pass on it's own."
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mfrevh | How is the Pistol Shrimp one of the loudest animals on Earth but in reality their clicking sound is no louder than finger snapping? | Every article I've read states that the Pistol Shrimp is among the loudest animals on Earth, and their size is only 3in at most. Not surprising enough? They are ranked #2 only after the Sperm Whale!. Their claw can shoot jets of water and that sound could reach 200 db, which is louder than a gunshot. Now the problem is (well actually My Problem), I'm an aquarist and I do keep a Pistol Shrimp in my reef tank. But the sound my shrimp makes every once in a while is just like someone's snapping their fingers, there's no way it's even 50 db. I've never dived before, but from what my fellow divers said, the sound these shrimp make when hearing underwater is just like corn popping. So why is that? Am I missing something really fundamental here? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's a \\*very\\* short pulse, so the amount of energy is tiny. The shrimp moves their claws so fast that they create a cavitation bubble (a very low pressure void in the water). The water immediately slams in, runs into itself, and makes a very powerful but \\*very\\* short pressure spike. The 200 dB measure is the equivalent loudness of a sound with that pressure but it's just one very sharp click, not a sustained sound wave. We basically hear total energy as loudness (with some scaling due to how our ears work), and the total energy involved is tiny so it doesn't feel loud to us. The shrimp is only generating about 40W, and for an incredibly short time so the energy is about 0.04J. Compare that to even mildly decent speakers. Cool Stanford paper with the math: [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )",
"You know how you can deafen yourself with headphones that a bystander can’t even hear? It’s like that. There’s a huge peak sound amplitude in a very small area. Since that’s not actually a lot of total energy, the total power is quite low. The pistol shrimp is trying to funnel a small amount of energy into a *very* small space and generate enough peak power to crack shells.",
"It’s quiet outside of the water, but inside the water, right in front of their claws, the pressure is very high and so the loudness is also really high, but water isn’t very compressible and by the time the sound reaches the air outside, it gets quite quiet"
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mfs2d1 | Why are programming bugs seemingly impossible to eliminate? | It seems like with every type of software, no matter what it is, theres bugs, and sometimes hundreds to thousands of patches, and wet bugs persist. Why is it impossible to completely eradicate them? You’d think after enough patches there would be nothing left to fix | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Modern software is very complex, very large, and, crucially, highly-interdependant on both other parts of the software and common shared software that it's getting from the OS or other programs. That last point means that fixing one bug can often create others as it interacts in a new/different/unexpected way with other parts of the software. This is a specific case of what's called \"system safety\" in the safety world...it's entirely possible for a system to malfunction even when every individual piece of it does exactly what it's supposed to do because you get emergent properties from the interactions. There's no theoretical barrier here, very simple or deterministic codes, or those that run basically isolated and iterated for decades (things like calculators or industrial controllers), or things where that level of scrutiny makes sense (banking cores) can be essentially bug free. But in virtually all \"normal\" software, you get into the realm of diminishing returns and killing \\*all\\* of them gets infeasible.",
"Programming is like setting up a bunch of dominoes that knock over other dominoes in sequence down the line. When you mess with one, it messes with others downstream. When you fix one thing, it probably changed the way another domino interacted down the line, and now you need to fix that one, which causes another change and so on and so forth. Almost every event is dependent on the results from a previous event, and so when you change the event it changes the output which changes how a different event processes. Since everything is so dependent on each other it becomes a game of \"fixing one thing to break another\".",
"Software is notoriously complicated. Tens of thousands of instructions weaving in and out in a complicated system that is hard for any single programmer to fully comprehend. Systems and subsystems are interlinked and often changing something in one spot will change a different thing elsewhere that was relying on the first changed system. Because this is a complicated system, and because programmers are human, and because the environment the system itself is running inside changes frequently (web browsers changing, operating systems updating, users mucking about, what have you) often even perfect systems can have very hard to spot bugs, and fixing those bugs can lead to unknown instabilities elsewhere. Then there's always a matter of competence (you think you fixed it but didn't, just masked up the symptoms) or priority (A tiny hard-to-fix bug that affects 0.01% of users is generally left alone over implementing new features or tackling issues a lot of people see)",
"I'm going to answer very generically because without knowing your specific example it's hard to say. No bug is impossible to fix, outside of a hardware fault. But some are very expensive. Programs can be very complex, and a seemingly minor detail somewhere can have unknown consequences elsewhere. So fixing one bug might introduce several more. And it can get to the point where you basically rewrite half a program to avoid a minor bug. That's just not worth the time for most programs. As to why there are bugs, again it's time Vs cost. The bigger a program gets the more difficult, time consuming and expensive it gets to test every possible scenario. So bugs slip through. I've heard an anecdote before that helps illustrate. A company made a program to simulate a bar. They want to test it, so hand it to some testers. One asks for a water, program correctly says tap water is free. Another gets a beer but doesn't have enough money to pay, program recognises there's a negative number where there shouldn't be and handles it. Great. Program works fine. It gets released. First user asks where the bathroom is. It crashes. I may not have told the story well... But it (hopefully) illustrates how difficult it can be to plan for and test virtually limitless possibilities."
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mfsem9 | Why are recessive genes recessive ? | What makes them recessive ? And why there are 2 types of genes ? (Recessive and dominant) | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Usually it's because they code for not having a protein. For example in blood types, a positive blood type means your cell make little chunks of protein that sit on the membrane. If you're negative, it means the cells don't make it. So if you have one allele for positive, and one for negative, you still wind up with these porteins on your cell membrane, like if you had two positive alleles"
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mfsfcs | How Archegos Capital selling $20bn worth of stocks lead to losses at several large banks. | URL_0 | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Archegos took out $50 billion in loans from a bunch of different banks, with a bunch of stock as collateral. The banks didn't talk to each other, so they didn't realize how much Archegos had borrowed. One bank decided to foreclose Archegos' loan because it didn't have enough collateral. As that bank started selling stocks, the prices of those stocks started dropping. Those sales made the value of the collateral at the other banks drop, so all the banks ended up foreclosing on Archegos at nearly the same. Turns out there was $20 billion collateral for $50 billion of loans. They'll probably be able to sue Archegos and win a judgment for $30 billion in unpaid loans, but that doesn't do much for them if that $20 billion worth of stock collateral they've already seized and sold was Archegos' only assets. My layman's opinion: The banks screwed up big time. If you, an ordinary person, decides to borrow $10,000, the bank will not only check if your income and assets are sufficient to service the loan. They'll also look into whether you've taken out loans from other banks. If they find you've taken out 4 other $10,000 loans from 4 other banks, they'll probably deny your loan outright. If Archegos, a giant hedge fund, decides to borrow $10 billion, the bank *should* not only check if their income and assets are sufficient to service the loan. They *should* also look into whether Archegos has taken out loans from other banks. If they find Archegos took out 4 other $10 billion loans from 4 other banks, they *should* deny the loan outright. But apparently, in the Archegos situation, they didn't follow those *shoulds* and let Archegos borrow way more than it was realistically capable of repaying. Astounding. Irresponsible borrowing on Archegos' part, irresponsible lending on the banks' part. This was a very expensive mistake for the banks.",
"In short: the fund was highly leveraged; it had borrowed a lot of money relative to the amount of the fund's money in order to purchase shares of stock. As the value of those shares decreased, the ratio of the amount borrowed to the value of the shares increased to unacceptable levels, forcing the fund to sell of a lot of shares. This massive selloff market order exhausted the amount of buyers willing to purchase shares near the market price, causing a drop in share prices.",
"Supply and demand. Archegos Capital selling a bunch of stocks meant there was a massive increase in the supply of those stocks. This means that price of those stocks decreased. Banks that were invested in those stocks would therefore lose money since those investments were now worth less.",
"Archegos got around reporting to the SEC by doing swaps. They swapped the stocks with the bank and got a loan in return, which they used to buy stocks. When the margin call occurred, the bank sold the stocks that had been swapped to satisfy the loan. Since the swapped stock is sitting on the bank's balance sheet, they book the loss."
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mfsn4y | Incomplete protein in pork rinds and gelatin is labeled "Not a good source of protein" but incomplete protein from beans or peas is not. Why? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Protein content can be misleading. Amino acid content and breakdown is much more important. Gelatin is composed mostly of collagen, a protein which is broken down into 3 amino acids in the digestive system. Whoever, it contains no Lysine, which is an amino acid that the body cannot synthesize and thus, must be consumed. Beans, on the other hand, have plenty of lysine, and while by themselves don't have all the requiered amino acids, they are easily complemented with other food sources, like corn and rice.",
"The Food and Drug Administration controls how foods can be labeled and what claims they can make, or have to make. Since gelatin and pork rinds are animal products they fall into a different category than beans or peas, and are required to have that statment on the label."
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mfsnxv | How did we got to know that out of 10000+ mountains in Himalayas Mt. Everest is the highest one ? | I mean there are other mountain ranges like where K2 is Or maybe in Europe and those mountain ranges also have very high mountain. How do they measure the height of mountains ? I'm sorry if the flair is not right for this question. | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm sure it's possible today using satellites or whatever but back in the 19th century, surveyors used an instrument called a theodolite. Basically it's a telescope mounted on a stand which records precise angular measurements. All you need to do is stand at two or more points whose positions and elevations are known, point your telescope at the peak, record the angles, and do some trigonometry (there are other factors like light refraction you have to contend with, but this is ELI5). Using this technique, Everest was first correctly named the highest peak in the world in 1852. [Several other peaks]( URL_0 ) had been incorrectly named the highest in the past."
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mfsq38 | Why does our voice sound sleepy/different right after awakening? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Haven't used your vocal chords in a while, need to stretch them back out and get warmed up. You may also have more mucus blocking your airway that settled while you were sleeping."
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mfsr4l | How does "optimizing" code actually work? How can just changing a few lines improve a game's fps? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You're going over to a friends house, you know the house number and you know the block they live on. There are 10 houses on this block, They are numbered from the left end of the street to the right, but you can't see the house number unless you go up to the front door of the house. One way to find your friends house is to start at one end of the block and go up to every front door and check to see if it's the correct house. This could take up to 10 visits (one for each house). But why not take less time? If you go to the middle house and look at the house number, you can see that if it's less than your friends, all of the houses to the left of that one are definitely not your friends (and vice versa). Repeat this again and you will continually cut in half the number of houses left that you have to visit to find your friends house. This will take at most 4 visits to find your friends house. With this small number that doesn't seem like that much of a big deal, but imagine if instead of the block having 10 houses, it had a billion houses, imagine how long it would take to visit every single house versus cutting the houses you have left to check in half repeatedly?",
"There's thousands of different ways to optimize but in general it's usually how things are stored and processed. Imagine counting to a 100 but every time you hit a new number you say all of the numbers before it. 1, 1, 2, 1,2,3 etc. It would take you a lot longer right? Another example might be counting to 100 but you have to write it on a piece of paper as you go. These sound silly but sometimes in writing code we don't realize we're doing things like that, optimizations are usually fixing things like that"
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mfuwxm | What does an ISP (or whoever owns the lines) actually need/do to make faster internet speeds? | I have a vague understanding of IT. But I've never really thought what is actually used for increasing speeds. I gather the obvious of new technologies allow for increases as a general statement. But, what are the physical things? Is it just more servers? More interconnections? I'm UK based. So how does my FTTC line go from 8mb max a few years ago, to 25mb now? (Yes its still a rubbish speed), when as far as I can see nothing has changed other than a new router - the roads haven't been dug up at all so assume copper lines are unchanged. Thanks. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One of the major advantages about fiber optic communications is that the wires in the ground are capable of much higher speeds than we use today. In the future when newer technologies come out, all they have to do is put different transceivers at each end and the same cable can now carry more data than before. For your home connection, it's likely a different issue. The equipment they already had could support the faster speed a long time ago, but if they gave that speed to all of their customers it would create a bottleneck further up the stream. Your ISP connects to other major networks at interconnection points. The links between the networks is limited and if every customer tried to use their home connection at max speed at all times, these interconnects would almost certainly get flooded. What likely happened is that your ISP upgraded their interconnects with other networks so that they could safely offer faster speeds to the end customer without flooding the ISPs upstream links."
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mfv3f4 | how do birds stay in the trees on really windy days? | I watch my heavy garbage cans blow over from the strong wind but I have never seen a bird blow away! How do they stay in the trees during storms and strong winds? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They have perching feet that are designed to clamp down harder if something tries to pull them off a branch so they won’t get blown out of a tree, but they’re also not that interested in going for a roller coaster ride as the treetops get lashed by wind gusts. During extreme weather, birds will shelter near the center of trees with good leaf cover or in lower shrubs. They usually don’t try to fly unless necessary, it’s difficult and tiring to navigate in strong winds.",
"Similar question: How do flying insects cope with strong winds for days and days?"
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mfvdtw | Why do some children (usually younger than 10) have the tendency to lie about so many things and tell obviously false stories? | What’s the psychology behind it? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is a developmental stage where children learn that they have the ability to lie. That is, they can tell stories about things that didn't actually happen. Part of the reason they lie is that they're exploring this ability. Another part of it is that they don't have the theory of mind to imagine what their lie will sound like to the person they are talking to. They don't realize how ridiculous their lie sounds because they don't have the ability to put themselves in the position of the other person and hear the lie objectively.",
"Bottom line is that they don’t understand consequences. In their mind there is a trade off.",
"Answer: it's multiple factors. First, they may not know they are lying. Many of them do not have the ability to distinguish reality from fiction/imagination. I think this starts to come together around age 8 but can vary by the child and is going to depend on some environmental factors as well. Second, their ability to imagine your perspective and project what you could know based on evidence available to you is pretty limited. For example, they might tell you a gallon of milk costs $10 because they've never been to the store and they can't imagine that you could just know the price of milk off the top of your head because they don't know the price of milk off the top of their head. Shout out to Lucille Bluth."
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mfvxyc | How does oxygen get into water for fish | I searched it up and it says "oxygen dissolves into water" for fish to breathe, but oxygen is a gas, so it should only go up right? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Water gets oxygen from the atmosphere, and from plants in the water. Undersea algae like kelp and seaweed undergo photosynthesis, just like plants above ground. They breathe out oxygen. (Note: algae aren't actually plants, but they behave like plants) You are correct that oxygen is generally a gas, but gasses can dissolve too. Pour a can of a carbonated beverage (ideally a clear one like tonic water or Sprite) into a glass, and watch the bubbles of CO2 in it. Some of them rise to the surface, but a lot of them stay where they are. The amount of dissolved oxygen in lakes and rivers is a lot lower than the amount of dissolved CO2 in your carbonated drink, and it just doesn't have enough pressure to significantly bubble up to the surface.",
"Gasses can dissolve in water. The water can hold more or less of a gas depending on how cold or hot it is, and how much pressure it’s under. If you think of your standard bottle of soda water, the bubbles in that are dissolved carbon dioxide. When you open the cap, it changes the pressure, and bubbles of carbon dioxide start to escape. Oxygen gets dissolved in water a bunch of different ways. If there are lots of waves and turbulence, the air will mix into the water. Underwater plants will also produce oxygen as part of their growth. On what others have said, fish don’t “breathe” the oxygen molecule in H2O. Water is quite chemically stable, and it takes a lot of energy to get the oxygen to separate."
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mfvz83 | How come when some airplanes fly by they leave the white streak of smoke and others dont?! | I work outside and i just saw two planes fly toward each other at different elevations and one had the white streak and the other did not? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The white streak you're referring to is known as a contrail. It's just visible water vapor from the engines exhaust (like cars make in cold or really humid conditions). It only shows up at certain atmospheric conditions (based on temperature and relative humidity) and those change based on the altitude. Generally the higher you climb the lower the temperature, so contrails will start appearing above a certain altitude where the temperature drops enough for the water vapor to become visible. It is possible to see them at ground level when it is extremely cold out, but normally above mid 20 000's feet.",
"Those white streaks are called \"contrails\" (a mashup of \"condensation\" and \"trail\") and they aren't smoke, they're water vapor. Basically little man-made clouds. When jet engines burn fuel one of the primary waste products is water vapor. Jet engines burn *a lot* of fuel so they push a whole lot of hot water vapor out the back. When atmospheric conditions are right (cold, dry, little or no wind) the hot water vapor in the exhaust condenses and forms clouds."
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mfw5d6 | What does ‘imprinting’ mean regarding animals? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In ELI5 terms, imprinting is when a baby animal assumes/decides the being it sees (usually shortly after birth/awareness) is its parent. Since normally in the wild, the first animal/being/creature it sees would be it's parent, instinct kicks in and tells the little one to follow and impersonate that creature to learn how to become that creature as it grows."
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mfw5pg | How unhealthy are Burgers or Hotdogs actually? | Most of my life I've been told how unhealthy Burgers or Hotdogs are since they fall under "Fast Food" and how eating them is less healthy for a person than other meals. Now, isn't a Burger for example just a bun, a meat patty, some salad, a tomato, some sauce and cheese? If I look at the ingredients like that it doesn't sound far off from a pretty healthy meal, yet Burgers or Hotdogs are often seen as "cheat meals" or "rewards" which to me sounds like they are way less healthy than other food. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Everything is unhealthy, after a certain point, and the same applies to burgers and hot dogs. You could eat a hamburger everyday of your life and as long as you compensated for it you'd probably turn out alright. At the end of the day with food, all that matters is what is going into your body, carbs vs protein vs saturated fats vs unsaturated fats to the other factors of nutrients like sodium, vitamins and minerals, and cholesterol. So the problem is in the nitty-gritty. Is the burger bun made of whole grain or processed grains? How lean/fatty is the hamburger meat? How sugary is the sauce/ketchup? Are you putting any vegetables on it? All of those come into play. So, the problem with fast food is generally that it is the lower quality less healthy version. Processed/refined buns, sugary sauces/ketchup, high fat content meat. If you were to compare a fast food burger with a homemade burger made with lean meat, served on a whole grain bun etc. Chances are that homemade burger will beat the fast food one nutrient wise. But the other problem with fast food is that it is fast, cheap, and can be habit forming. One fast food burger isnt going to hurt you. 100 over the course of the year will start to add up. And the fact that it is relatively cheap and quicker/easier to get than home cooking means some people will start to over rely on it. But again, even if you did eat a big mac everyday for a year. if you compensated by having a low fat diet everywhere else and getting your proper nutrient, you would probably turn out fine. Its just most people don't put in the effort to do that.",
"Fast food tends to be unhealthy because of how they make it, not because the food itself is intrinsically unhealthy. A salad at McDonald's isn't really any benefit than a burger at McDonald's - despite the fact that salad is 'healthy' and burgers not. Some of it is simply portion control. American restaurants tend to serve portions that are much larger than most people should eat for a single meal. Some of it is the ingredients they use - particularly sauces and flavorings. If you make that same hamburger at home, in an appropriate portion size, with the right ingredients, it's going to a healthy meal.",
"Eating meat is generally good for you. What you may want to watch out for are (1) salt - hot dogs have this added; burgers usually cooked with it; salt is only bad in high amounts -- consider whole idet (2) preservatives (depending on your standard of purity and paranoia, could be bad. Pretty harmless IMHO) and (3) additives. For example, frozen Hamburgers often have sweeteners added to them in small amounts. Now, a little sugar isn't bad. But you do need to consider this when considering the health of your diet. Your bun and toppings (i.e. ketchup) add plenty of carbs. I think per your question -- can a hot dog and hamburger be a healthy meal? Sure. I think the stigma you are referring to is mostly about fast food. We're talking about portions that are way too large and manufactured food with lots of preservatives and additives. That in itself isn't alarming. What is alarming is eating fast food frequently. That's definitely unhealthy.",
"The bun is full of carbs, the sauce is probably full of sugar. The portion is large. There is likely a lot of salt added. This makes fast food very high in calories"
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mfwkik | How do NSAIDS cause stomach ulcers? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"NSAIDs inhibit the production of the Cyclooxygenase (COX) enzyme. There are actually two COX enzymes. COX 2 is involved in inflammation and is what you actually want to inhibit. COX 1 protects the lining of your stomach. But, over-the-counter NSAIDs suppress both of them which can be a problem."
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mfy1jy | When adding bleach to fabric, what happens to the original fabric dye? | Is the bleach "adding another layer of white dye" on top of the fabric, "reacting with or dissolving" the original dye, or something else? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Bleach works to remove color from fabric because it is an oxidizing agent. The colors exist because certain molecules in whatever causes the color (fabric dye, grass stains) that are structured in a way that causes certain wavelengths to be absorbed, and others reflected, allowing us to perceive that color. When bleach interacts with these molecules, oxidation occurs. This changes the structure of those color molecules, causing them to become something different. Either they’re no longer color-producing molecules, or they no longer absorb any of the visible light, resulting in white. In short, bleach does indeed react with the dye, causing it to no longer be able to reflect color.",
"Gone. Reduced to atoms. Bleach fucks up lots of molecules. This includes pigment molecules, so they turn white, but also your cloth fibers' molecules, too, so don't overuse bleach."
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mfyrai | Why are solar systems flat? | It seems weird that atoms, planets, and basically everything is a sphere except solar systems and galaxies which are pretty flat. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They are flat because of the conservation of angular momentum. Have you ever spun out a pizza dough? As you spin it, the dough pulls itself away in the same plan that it is spinning. Something similar is happening at a celestial level. What is the solar system now would have started as some blob of stuff in space. That blob would have had *some* initial amount of spin. No matter what happens, unless an outside force interacts with it, that spin can never be stopped. Eventually, all that stuff starts to collapse. However, because it is spinning, it only collapses *towards* the spin. The spin itself keeps it spread out in that plane, even as gravity is trying to pull it inwards.",
"The solar system, initially, would have been a spherical(ish) blob of gas. However, that blob isn't really a \"stable\" shape, as everything either ends up either falling into the star at the center, or assuming an orbit. If you have orbits that are not co-planar, *eventually* one of the two orbits loses out; the particles in the various orbital planes tend to \"democratically\" decide on a particular plane that they're all going to orbit in, and any object not on that dominant plane tends to have a very very unstable orbit. Given enough time (i.e. a few billion years), and you eventually end up with all of the \"stuff\" in a solar system being coplanar(ish), at least in the inner reaches of the system; objects beyond Neptune have wonky orbits that aren't on the dominant plane of the 8 planets, and the Oort Cloud beyond *that* is (very roughly) spherical. You see a similar effect in black holes when they're eating infalling matter; the accretion disk is basically on a single \"plane,\" because matter on every other potential plane orbiting the black hole has an unstable orbit and trajectory, and as a result either runs into stuff in the accretion disk, falls into the black hole, or is ejected from the system.",
"I'm assuming you mean the orbital planes? Before the solar system was a solar system, it was a big cloud of gas that was spinning. The spin caused it to flatten out into more of a disk shape, and as everything took shape, the orbits followed this original spin."
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mfz2x5 | How do nuclear powered ships work compared to a nuclear powerplant? | I get the point that the ships operate with a running nuclear reactor which generates steam which powers the ship. But as far as i know its very important to keep a nuclear reactor as stable as possible and you can't just turn it off like a lightswitch. But what happens now when e.g. the ship is moving at full speed and "full power mode" compared to e.g. standing still and using no power at all? Also, can they simply switch off the reactor when the ship is anchored for a long period of time? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Both land based and ship based reactors are variable to a degree. Both have _control_ rods which are graphite rods that when inserted into the core of the reactor in amongst all the uranium undergoing fusion, slows down all the neutrons flying around - it slows the reaction down. When the rods are fully inserted like when they have to go to low/shut-down power, or in the case of an emergency (you may have heard the term \"scram the reactor!\"), the rods are pushed in fully. But the nuclear reaction is still going on, just very very slowly and doesn't generate anywhere as near as much heat as when the control rods are partially removed. Anyways, there's always need for _some_ steam from a ship-based nuclear reactor (i.e. to run the power turbines to keep the lights and pumps and stuff running) so even in low power mode they're still using _some_ of the power. A shipborne nuclear reactor never really \"shuts down\" unless you are either refuelling it (see nuclear aircraft carrier mid-life refurb) or you're retiring it for good. But it does have lower power modes where it produces just enough steam to run on-board power needs and/or any excess heat can be dumped overboard into the water. This is why you don't see nuclear powered commercial vessels despite it being a very economical way to power large ships - you need a full time crew of highly trained sailors 24/7 to man the thing and make sure everything is tip-top. More sailors (and security!) = high crew costs. Not so important to the military, but $everything to commercial shipping. Even tho, the change from low/standby power mode to \"running\" has to be controlled and gradual. This rapid uncontrolled change - combined with an inherint design flaw of the RBMK reactor - is what happened at Chernobyl. And even in low power mode, water still needs to be circulated, cooled etc. otherwise bad things happen."
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mfzb0d | What does a particle really look like? | I just questioned this to myself now even tho I've been studying math and physics for years. Everytime I've studied particles I saw them represented as balls, but, are they really balls? Like is reality made of really tiny balls? Do they have color? Are they solid? I realized I know what they do but I have no clue what they are. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Although I fully understand where you're coming from, your question doesn't really make sense if you think about it more thoroughly. Single particles are so small that we can't see them. We can only see the effect of particles when they do things to light. Imagining them as tiny little balls is useful in many situations but you can just as well think of them as invisible things just like electric or magnetic fields. > Do they have color? No. Individual particles are too small to affect light in such a way that we see it as colors. > Are they solid? What makes something solid is a weak force between its particles that keep those particles close enough to each other. So, for something to be solid, we need many of them and individual particles can't be solid. We can't say what their state is since they don't have one just like we can't say what color a magnetic field has because it's doesn't have one.",
"So they aren't exactly \"balls\" it's more of that we can only observe them indirectly through the field interference with our instruments, and the interference itself is spherical in nature. As to color, they have none because they are smaller than the wavelength of visible light.",
"The honest answer is that we don't know. The Standard Model of physics treats them as points with no dimension. That is they have no length, width or height. But, everyone understands that is a simplification of reality. String Theory proposes that all elementary particles are actually tiny vibrating strings. But, as I said, we don't know for sure.",
"\\ > I realized I know what they do but I have no clue what they are. So you seem to have a pretty good grasp on the topic then. Different models model them as different things, but *fundamentally* there's not really a good picture that you can hold in your mind as to what they actually look like, and it's entirely possible that's not even a physically meaningful question (or maybe it is. We don't really know)."
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mfzg4p | Pulse Oxygen | My smart watch suggests that I measure pulse oxygen while I sleep, which it can do. For now, it says my pulse ox is between 100% and 97% throughout the day, measured during the first three days I owned the watch. I have no idea what this mean, so please, explain pulse oxygen and the use of the information like I'm five. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your SpO2 (peripheral oxygen saturation) is a close guess to your SaO2, or your *arterial* oxygen saturation. It is a percentage that measures how much of your blood's capacity to carry oxygen is being used. A SpO2 reading below 95% is considered clinical, and should be reported to your doctor immediately.",
"A pulse oximeter gives 2 separate readings: your PULSE, that's the rate of your heartbeat, and your OXYGEN saturation, that's how much oxygen is in your blood. The 97-100% readings mean your blood is carrying plenty of oxygen to your cells. When people have Covid or other respiratory problems, or if they are very anemic, their blood oxygen saturation drops. With Covid specifically, you could feel breathless because you aren't getting enough oxygen, or the breathless feeling COULD be stress/panic because you have Covid! Measuring can help you relax if you see those good numbers, or it could tell you, if it's below 88%, that you should get to the hospital asap. Edit: your pulse tells how hard your heart is working. If you have 97% oxygen saturation but your heart is beating 130 times a minute, you're either exercising (good) or something is wrong and you should talk to a doctor."
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mfzvpc | What do the fundamental particles of the standard model do? | I can understand that quarks are like the building blocks of protons and neutrons which are the building blocks of atoms; but what the hell are leptons?! What does an electron neutrino do and how does it affect our universe? What is a tau lepton or a muon?! What does a z boson do that a W boson doesn’t? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Protons and neutrons are the building blocks of just the atom nucleus, not full atoms. To complete an atom you also need leptons, namely electrons. Leptons don’t do strong interaction like protons and neutrons do, hence they aren’t in the nucleus. Now protons and neutrons (also known as baryons together with other similar heavy particles) as well as leptons are fermions, which is one of the two major classes of particles. Two identical fermions can’t be in the same place at the same time. Bosons are the other major class. One common example is photons which make up light. Unlike fermions, they can be in the same place at the same time. Bosons are also often force carriers, i.e. photons are carriers of the electromagnetic force, and gluons are carriers of the strong interaction. Tau-leptons and muons are very short-lived electron-like particles which don’t make up any stuff because of their instability. W and Z bosons are the carriers of the weak interaction."
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mg08s9 | How does headphones get so tangled up after being in your pocket for a day? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because they get jostled round into random positions, and there are billions of times more random positions that count as “tangled” than that count as “not tangled”. There’s a longer explanation here, with real experimental data: URL_0",
"It happens for roughly the same reason your room gets messy. Even though \"tidying\" and \"making messy\" often are the same kind of action (changing the position of something in the room), a sequence of random actions will almost invariably lead to a messy room rather than a clean room. But it's nothing special about changing something's position, it's really just that there are relatively few room configurations you (or mom!) consider \"clean\" and a near-infinite number of configurations that you (or mom!) count as \"messy\". In the whole near-ininite catalogue of room configurations, any random act of changing something's position is way more likely to lead in a messy direction because almost every direction is towards something we call \"messy\". Headphones are a lot like that. Of all the shapes that a string could be in, there ONE shape that you really like, the one you call straight. This shape itself isn't more or less likely in itself than any other shape, but there's one of it and a gazillion shapes that you call \"tangled\". The string changes shape by random small movements throughout the day, which might bring the string closer or further away from that shape you really like. But given how rare that shape is in the whole near-infinite catalogue of possible string shapes, odds are that most random little movements will move a string further away from straightness and towards one of the others. (You can imagine an alien who really likes ONE particular from-our-perspective-randomly tangled shape, \"smoobosh\", and hates all others... That alien would be equally frustrated by pockets, because if you put smoobosh headphones in a pocket, they almost invariably come out as non-smoobosh.)",
"This may not be the most scientific explanation and I’m sure someone will do a much better job but this is how I remember it being explained to me. Untangled headphones can only really exist in a few states (there’s only so many ways that they can lie unknotted) whereas there’s an infinite amount of ways that your headphones could tie themselves up. As they’re in your pocket moving around throughout the day, the probability that they tie themselves up is way higher than they stay untangled. My understanding - again, super limited - is that the untangled headphones have low entropy and the tangled headphones have high entropy. Similar example is a sandcastle vs pile of sand."
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mg0f0l | How do little insects appear “out of no where” in food that is decomposing? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Funny story: In 1668, Francesco Redi experimented with rotting meat using a series of sealed jars, open jars and jars with a fine screen of silk over the top to allow air in and nothing else. He discovered no flies or larvae on the meat in the sealed jars, he found flies and maggots on the meat with the open jars and larvae ON THE TOP OF THE SILK in the partially opened jars, but none on the meat itself. He concluded, rightly, that flies were laying eggs on the rotting meat and the flies did not spontaneously emerge from rotting meat on their own. Before this, the accepted theory was that animals spontaneously emerged from the mud and rotting meat.",
"Okay so the answer is kinda gross. The eggs are already there. You just usually digest them before anything can hatch.",
"They don't appear out of nowhere. Maggots are the larval form of flies. An adult fly will come to a piece of decaying food and lay its eggs. A few days later those eggs will hatch and the larvae emerges.",
"Among other horrible things, there is a federally legislated tolerable amount of rat poop in your food. And the amount is not zero",
"Insects appearing seemingly magically to appear on spoiled food is such a common human experience that for a lot of earlier civilizations (like up to the 1800's is some places) people thought that maggots, weevils and even mice could be spontaneously generated out of decaying matter. But with a little experimentation that was pretty easy to disprove. [Francisco Reddi]( URL_0 ) is a famous example for insects and Louis Pasteur (of storable milk and rabies vaccine fame) proved that even microscopic life can't just arise from appropriate nutrients alone. Turns out that there are many many steps in life of a food product where it can come into contact with a critter capable of hitching a ride or laying some eggs. It can seem inexplicable but any insects in your food are there because an insect got to that food at some point.",
"You're not going to like this answer. When the cells in the food die they open up tiny portals to a horrifying dimension full of 50 story super monsters. When these monsters are sucked through the portals in your food they appear in our world at their full size, the horrific thing is that we are actually that much larger than them!"
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mg0xmx | What is calculus | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Calculus is how you apply math which originally was used for counting sheep into something useful for observing the world, which doesn’t exist in discrete numbers of sheep but is made up of small pieces, small changes in quantities and time down to differences too small for us to see or feel. On a basic level, think about the population of the world. How would you say what the population will be in 100 years? You’d look at the rate at which people are born, per day. That’s a derivative. The rate of change. Per day. The rate changes with the number of people so you need to make small steps in time (days), multiply by the rate, find the new rate per day, make a new step in time and so on. That’s an integral. The sum of change. Over days. See how simple and basic the concept is? There is little more to basic calculus than applying these concepts to some functions you already know. You would struggle to figure out anything if you didn’t know how things change over another thing. It’s no wonder some people say math is useless before they learn calculus!",
"Put very simply, *calculus* is the system of mathematics that deals with continuous change. Specifically, the *differential* calculus deals with instantaneous rates of change, and the *integral* calculus deals with accumulation of quantities, including the area under and between curves.",
"Calculus is the study of change over time. For example, if you have a graph of the position of a car over time and you want to know what the velocity of the car was over the same period of time, you would calculate the first derivative of the position. Similarly, if you had a graph of the velocity and you wanted to know the position, you would calculate the integral. Both of these calculations fall under the category of calculus.",
"A college calc iii teacher once described it as: \"approximating curvy things with straight things\", which I like.",
"Remember finding slopes of lines in algebra? Calculus is the same thing, except the line doesn't have to be straight. What you end up finding is an equation that defines the instantaneous slope at any point along the line. That is called the derivative. The other half of calculus is knowing the equation of the slope and working backwards to find the original equation of the line. This is taking the integral.",
"Calculus is the magical math that transforms geometry problems into algebra problems. Do you want to find the slope of a curve at any point? Calculus can do that. Do you want to find the area under a really weird shape? Calculus can do that. Do you want to figure out how fast you would have to fill up a leaky bath tub to maintain a specific water level? Calculus can do that. For almost any problem that you can draw a diagram to describe, calculus gives you the tools you need to understand and solve algebraically."
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mg19lq | is fire considered a solid, a liquid, a gas, or plasma and why? | Apologies if this is the wrong flair or this type of question doesn’t belong here, but I genuinely don’t know. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"None of the above. It's a *reaction*. It makes some of those things during said reaction, but fire, itself, is not one.",
"It depends on the fire. Low temperature fires are a gas. Really hot fires will have enough energy to strip the electrons from the gas and create a plasma. For example, a standard candle flame isn't hot enough to ionize the gas into a plasma.",
"Fire is more of an event than a material. You can't, say, grab a box of fire and carry it around. In a fire, a fuel and oxygen combine to produce hot gas, plasma, and often soot/smoke. What we see is usually mostly the soot/smoke, but sometimes we see the plasma as well."
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mg1jpa | Why is it easier for some women to orgasm than others? | I'm sure it's an anatomy thing but why is it more difficult for some women to achieve an orgasm and others can get one pretty easily from penetration or clitoral stimulation? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"An orgasm for anyone is a complex reaction with several components: 1) Psychological: Some people feel inhibited when with a partner. If she can get off easily by herself, but not with a partner no matter what the partner does, the culprit is likely psychological/emotional. 2) Hormonal: our libidos are regulated by a delicate balance of key hormones (testosterone, androgen, estrogen, progesterone etc) If one or more of those key hormones are out of balance you will see changes in sex drive and sexual responsiveness. Depending on which way the hormones are, you might see increased sex drive, decreased sex drive, more or less achievable orgasms and so on. Many women report an increase in their sex drive and sexual responsiveness in the days leading up to ovulation. Likewise, being on hormone based birth control can affect things. Those hormones are the reason why. If she can't get off,even during masturbation, hormonal issues are the first suspect. 3) Brain wiring: When we are born, not all of the brains connections have been made yet. The part of the brain that orgasms doesn't fully develop until puberty. (there is some evidence that sexual abuse before puberty can mess this normal course of development up) That wiring grows mostly guided, but with a small degree of a random element. So some people may find it easier or harder to orgasm than others. Some people may orgasm more or less strongly than others. 4) Technique: It is very common for women to require the majority of sexual stimulation be focused on the clit. Vaginal penetration just doesn't hit the sensitive nerves bundles the way they need. If the woman can orgasm easily through self-masturbation or from oral sex but not from vaginal or anal sex, it's likely that she is one of those who need mostly clitoral stimulation. In addition, it is quite common for women to need stimulation to go on longer than men do to get off. If there is little or no foreplay and the man gets off quickly, she might only get to the point of it feeling really good, but not to the point of orgasm. 5) Physical pathologies: There are a handful of physical problems that can rob sex of its pleasure or even make it painful. (dyspareunia) Causes include child birth, rape, bacterial infections, endometriosis and a host of others. It's quite obvious that if it hurts or is just plain uncomfortable, she is going to have a hard time getting into the sexy mindset needed to achieve orgasm. Note that a woman who has difficulty achieving orgasm will not necessarily have just one cause. It's quite possible to have multiple issues, each not enough to be a problem, but when put together are enough to stop things from happening.",
"I don't actually think there's a lot of easy to find research on this. It's a combination of different things. Some women are more sensitive, how turned on they get, if they're mentally comfortable, confidence and self-body image/esteem. Men are the same way too, just premature ejaculation seems to be more of an issue for both sexes, at least if you base it on time spent studying the subject."
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mg1rj5 | Why do eyes seem to change color based on what you wear? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm not sure if it has ever been studied with eye colours but the brain's perception of colour is not objective. It is quite possible to observe the same colour as different even if they are next to each other - which is often exploited for optical illusions. The cause of this is thought to be twofold. Firstly, the cone cells in the eye adapt to ambient conditions - colour rendering in bright sunlight is different to candlelight. Secondly, the brain interprets the colours to try and reduce discrepancy between different sources of illumination - for instance, most people will view a hot air balloon as having a uniform colour even though part of it is in the shade. As an example of the sorts of weird effects, you can check the blue & black/white and gold meme that went around a few years ago. Essentially, a photo of a dress was shown without any indication of the lighting. Some people assumed it was under artificial lighting - meaning they saw it as blue and black. But some people assumed it was under natural lighting, leading them to see the dress as white and gold. Additionally, if an image is rendered only in red and black, most people will also see greens and blues in the picture because your brain assumes the colours are due to poor illumination. tl;dr your brain's interpretation of colour is not objective, it's easily fooled by what it expects to be there, not what is there. You wear black, it assumes the environs are darker than if you wear yellow.",
"So eyes that are blue, green, gray, etc. aren’t actually those colors. Our bodies can produce pigments in two colors: black and red. Our skin, hair, etc. are made up of those two colors. Light colored eyes are a structural color, not a pigmented color. Like an iridescent bird feather. And structural colors tend to be different colors in different circumstances, like that feather that changes color as you twist it. If a person with light eyes wears a blue shirt, their eyes tend to look more blue. Same with green, gray, etc. It’s an optical illusion."
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mg3jzg | Why didn’t the ph scale just start at 0? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is based on the concentration of hydrogen ions in solution. A hydrogen ion has charge of +1. Even in a neutral solution however there are still some hydrogen ions being produced due to random reactions. So for instance in pure water the hydrogen concentration is about 10\\^-7 moles/liter, which corresponds to a pH of 7.",
"It's not an arbitrary scale, like temperature, where one is free to choose a 0 point. The pH scale is logarithmic and inversely indicates the concentration of hydrogen ions in the solution. pH is the negative of the base 10 logarithm of the activity of the H+ ion.",
"Technically speaking, the pH scale can go from negative infinity to infinity (yes, you can actually get a negative pH!). pH is just a calculated value based on the concentration of hydrogen ions in the solution. The formula is pH = -log[H+] where the brackets represent the concentration of hydrogen ion. In pure water, some molecules of H2O will naturally break down into H+ and OH-, and it turns out this amount of H+ gives a concentration of roughly 1x10^-7 which when plugged into that formula gives you a pH of 7, hence why neutral is 7. Make it really acidic and increase the concentration of H+, and the formula will spit out a lower number. Make it less acidic and decrease the concentration of H+, and the formula spits out a higher number. For practical purposes, the overwhelming majority of solutions occur in the range between 1 and 14, but it is theoretically possible to change the concentration to get outside that range. It just likely would require way too much effort for very little usefulness."
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mg44lb | What is Marshal and De-Marshal in Computer Science ? | All of the function documentation on this particular feature tech not giving me any idea on how it is working. pls help da younglings | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Marshalling usually means that you take an object, and turn it into another format for use by another piece of software that requires the object's data to be formatted differently. It's really similar to serialization in that respect. You may need to give more details here for us to help you better."
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mg4sr6 | Where do flying insects go during heavy rain storms? | Let’s say a major storm with very fast wind and torrential rain rolls through an area. Where do the flying insects such a as flies, gnats, and mosquitos go during this time? How are they able to survive these types of weather conditions? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They have different strategies depending on the type of bug really. Some go and hide in places like under your eaves, or in trees and bushes until it passes. Some insects can detect barometric pressure changes from a coming storm and will just stay somewhere safe if they sense a summer storm coming. Some insects are so small, have such little mass like mosquitos, they are actually enveloped by a raindrop. They are covered in these waterproof hairs though which allow them to wiggle out of them usually before hitting the ground. If this didn't happen the raindrops would be similar to you getting hit by a mack truck for them. Instead by going through the drop it is undamaged. However being so low mass and allowing this to happen gives them the advantage of being able to hunt for resources while other competitors are hiding from the storm. If they are caught on the ground during a sudden deluge it can actually wipe them and their eggs out, so it may actually be better for them to remain airborne. Wind on the other hand can just plain wipe them out, which is why a garden fan is so effective at keeping them away.",
"Some of them only live for a few days to begin with.. wonder if that has anything to do with it."
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mg5y3p | Why is it recommended to not fully charge a battery for any device with rechargeable capabilities? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A strange analogy that kind of works is a bucket made of ice. If you pour some water into it, the bucket of ice will cool it down and hold the water. If you pour more water into that bucket, the water will slowly melt the bucket. If you keep pouring water into the bucket to the point that it overflows, all that water will more rapidly melt the bucket. Bringing this back to the battery, the battery is comprised of consumable materials. The more you charge the battery, the more it wears down the consumable materials. This used to be more of a problem in the past where the chargers will keep trying to charge the battery after the battery is at maximum capacity. This is less of a problem in the present with advances in battery technology that cut the charge down once the battery approaches maximum capacity.",
"So the enemy of modern batteries is parasitic reactions. Shit reacting in the battery that you don't want reacting. Overtime these parasitic reactions causes a buildup in the interface between the high and low voltage electrodes and makes it harder for the lithium to move through the battery, causing the voltage to decrease over time. So what causes parasitic reactions? They basically happen constantly, but the rate depends on how energetic the things in battery are. That's mainly heat, and charge. If a battery is stored in cold temperature with low charge, there's very little energy for parasitic reactions to occur. If the battery is fully charged and hot, there's going to be a ton of random reactions happening because there's so much energy in the system. It's not even just about not charging to 100%, it's bad for a lithium battery to sit at 100% charge for long periods of time. For example my phone will try to automatically detect if you charge at night and pause charging at 80% until morning, then charge to 100%. That's to prevent the phone from sitting at 100% charge for too long. You run into other problems if the battery is fully depleted though. For long term storage the battery charge will drop slightly over time (this is also due to parasitic reactions) so the ideal charge level is around 40%, and the ideal storage temperature up to 10 °C. Still, you bought a battery and the best thing to do for it's longevity is to never use it. Even taking perfect care of it, it's still going to die eventually. At best you might be able to extend the life 2x. On my phone a battery replacement is $20, it's really not a big deal if you burn it out using the phone like you want. If you want to do something overnight charging to 100% is for sure the biggest cause of degradation, so just charge when you need to instead.",
"Heat is the enemy of your battery's health. The process of charging your battery naturally generates heat, but majority of the heat is generated closer to a full battery. Because of this, it puts considerably more wear on your battery to go from 80-100% than it would to go from 20-80% This is why unless you know you won't be able to charge your phone for a while, its better to do small top ups through out the day than just going to full every time."
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mg6p9f | How does writing code for mRNA actually work? What is the actual tangible printed product of that code? And how does it get printed? | God damn I’ve been googling this forever and I STILL don’t fucking get it. So you write code on a computer and print something and what? What the fuck. Help me understand where you are writing this, then what you do with this code, and what is it actually physically printing. Liquid? Solid? What is it? I’m not going to sleep again until I figure this out. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The \"code\" of mRNA are nitrogen-bases, which are molecules. mRNA is a a large molecule that's basically a line of nitrogen bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine and uracil (thymine in DNA molecules). Also known as A, C, G, and U. If you were to synthetically make mRNA, the final product would be an arrangement of these molecules. Due to the way these molecules are shaped, A always pairs with U (or T), and C always pairs with G. Because of this, the nitrogen bases act as a \"code\" that contains the information for creating proteins. Proteins are made up long complicated chains of amino acids, of which there are 20 different kinds. Depending on the specific arrangement of amino acids, proteins do vastly different things. mRNA creates proteins by providing attachment points for the amino acids. The amino acids get lined up on the mRNA where they can bind together to make full proteins. A set of 3 nitrogen bases corresponds to a specific amino acid. In this way, the mRNA \"encodes\" the information for making specific proteins.",
"The mRNA *is* the code. RNA is a long molecule made of chains of 4 phospholipids that combine in pairs, Adenine to Uracil and Cytosine to Guanine. When RNA encounters a ribosome, various amino acids are able to join together into a protein. In the case of the mRNA vaccines, I believe it is a variation of the spike protein that is being created, but I could be wrong on that. This process happens any time your cells make anything, not just with the vaccine. [The keyword to search for is \"protein synthesis\"]( URL_0 )",
"RNA is made of four different molecules that create a long chain, like four different kinds of lego that all interlock with each other. The arrangement of the molecules is the code. Our cells use this code as a recipe to make proteins. As far as the vaccine goes, people are able to synthesize the different molecules that make up an RNA strand and stick that inside a carrier to get it into your cells. The m part of mRNA stands for \"messenger\", because it acts as a message for the protein building machinery. There are other kinds of RNA, like ribosomal, small, silencing, and a whole bunch more. Source: have a PhD in biophysics and 10 years molecular biology experience."
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mg77v5 | What happens to the brain when someone dies? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Nerves in the brain communicate with other nerves by sending signals to one other. They require a lot of energy to do this and energy in cells is made with the help of oxygen Without oxygen your brain runs out of energy and nerves cannot function so all thoughts and functions cease This causes cell death and nerve cells in the brain do not have the capacity to regenerate so turning it back on won't preserve what was once alive",
"Not an expert, but basically, the brain might be what runs us, but it still needs power. It's sort of like a car, once the car is on, it generates its *own* power, which it then redirects back to itself on a circuit. This is what your circulatory system does. Your brain tells your heart and lungs to pump blood and oxygen around your body, which makes its way back to the brain to keep the lights on. When you die, your heart is no longer beating, and your lungs are no longer breathing. This means that blood, and most importantly, oxygen, are no longer making it back to your brain. This lack of oxygen causes your brain stem to die, and it happens fairly quickly. Like, minutes quickly. Even 2 or 3 minutes without oxygen can cause irreparable damage to your brain in the event you're successfully resuscitated. The most important part of CPR is simply to try and keep blood and oxygen to the person's brain. Once your brain stem is dead, you are dead. It's this reason that families of victims can find it hard to accept \"brain dead\" as the person actually being dead. Machines can keep your heart beating and your lungs pumping, but unfortunately, the brain and the brain stem is dead, so without those machines, the body would die too. But the lack of blood and oxygen very quickly causes your brain to die. That's what happens."
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mg787d | How De We Know What Dinosaurs REALLY Looked Like? Why has/is what Dinosaurs Looked like been changed/disputed ? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We don't \"know\". we are making our best models based on the information we have. In the past, we had less information, so our models were likely worse. Now, we have more information, so they *should be* better. That's not to say we are certain. If new information presents itself that leads to other interpretations, then those interpretations will become the dominant theory. It's not a flaw that the scientists changed their minds, it's a feature. And we are fairly confident that some dinosaurs had feathers because there have been feather imprints on fossils.",
"New discoveries lead to different ways of interpreting old finds. If two species are found to have a complex feature like feathers that's unlikely bto have evolved twice the logical conclusion is that they will inherited it from a common ancestor. Therefore everything that's descended from that common ancestor will have that feature unless they lost it secondarily. It's actually been proposed that not only dinosaurs but also pterosaurs may have had feathers but they were lost in many of the larger species of dinosaur. The locations we find fossils can tell us a lot too. We've found fossils of dinosaurs well above the Arctic circle. Based on the size of the juveniles it seems unlikely those dinosaurs could have migrated fast enough to avoid winter conditions that would be fatal to modern cold blooded reptiles and they were far too big to burrow so it's likely they were warm blooded and well insulated enough to survive in the cold."
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mg7dt1 | Why are moldy food bad for us? Molds on foods like yogurt/cheese is fine, but on bread and suddenly we’re sick. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Different kinds of mold are bad for us. Like bacteria, there’s many species; some are harmful, some are harmless or even nutritious. The ones used to make moldy cheeses are carefully selected cultures that don’t harm us. The ones on your old bread or fruit that get you sick generally will digest into chemicals that make you sick. So unless you’re able to determine the species, or it’s meant to be there, don’t eat the mold.",
"Yogurts and cheeses are carefully selected bacteria and the rate at which it reacts is carefully controlled. Mold on bread can be a lot of different things, some good some bad. It's not carefully selected and it grows at its own pace.",
"It's actually very uncommon that you'd be seriously ill from eating moldy food. URL_0 Your stomachs acid will most likely take care of it. It's not recommended to eat because you don't know what type of fungus it is. So there's a chance it might be really bad for you. So why would you risk it given the bad taste.",
"Molds and bacteria are much like advice and information. Lots of really good and necessary advice and information out there but some really bad that are dangerous even deadly. Carefully growing and then sharing the safe and healthy molds and bacteria is based on a lot of trial and error. Same for information.",
"There’s a pretty good chance that eating moldy food won’t hurt you. I wouldn’t make it a habit but no need to freak out if you accidentally eat a piece of food that’s gone moldy.",
"Can you eat mouldy bread if you toast it first? ...I may have just done this at breakfast; it tasted a bit dusty (only way to describe it).",
"With mold, It's \"possible to be bad for you\". I ate mold for a year of my life and never had any problems. Like literally, almost daily. I had no way to refrigerate food and had to keep it in the trunk of a car in a hot country. Stuff like bread lasted barely a day or two, even though I tried to choose most terrible chemical-filled one in hopes it'll last longer. Didn't. Got used to it, stopped caring about it. Of course, there's 3-day mold on your bread, and 30-year mold in your basement, happily collecting dust and insect poop. Definitely wouldn't risk with latter.",
"Most mold and bacteria doesn't want to get eaten and will do things to stop getting eaten. Mold that is worried about big animals eating it will make things toxic to big animals like us. So if you eat it you get sick. Lots of mold or bacteria never really had to worry about big animals eating it and is instead worried about bacteria eating it. So it will do things like poop out sour juice to try to kill bacteria. But it turns out we love sour juice and love what it does to things like milk, so we love when that bacteria gets into food."
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mg7l1h | How are metal forges made if you need to forge the metal they're made of? | Or rather how can equipment that's made to work with very high melting temperature metals be possible to make? And if there is some non metal material that is used for forging high temp melting point metals, why not just use it for everything? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In simplest form, early forges were made of dirt and mud. So over time (copper age, bronze age, iron age) more complicated materials could be forged and forges were improved. I guess you could compare it to cooking, fire on the ground and now ovens in homes. You can still cook over an open fire and you can still forge with a dirt forge, but there are better ways.",
"A lot of answers here are talking about non-metals in forging, this is strange because that's fairly rare. Hot forging tools are basically very large hammers or presses, ceramics don't work great in this application because they are so brittle. They will fail by surface fatigue, spalling and other mechanisms. Most forging tools use what are known as \"refractory metals\". These metals are generally extremely hard and strong, and retain that strength at high temperature. So why don't we use them for everything? Well they are expensive as shit, not just because they're a rare element (they usually are though), but also because how do you shape and work and create tools out of something so strong and heat-resistant? Add to this the fact that they generally have some major downsides (brittleness, high density, corrodes easily, toxic etc.) and there really isn't any point making your water bottle out of a refractory hafnium-molybdenum alloy(not sure that's a useful alloy but w/e). Tools and dies for hot-working of steels are often made from molybdenum, sometimes tungsten alloys, and high-temperature steels(high nickel and chromium content) if you can get away with it. All of materials science is a game of compromise, there is no \"perfect\" material in terms of cost, hardness, toughness, cost, density, stiffness, cost, machineability, formability, hardenability etc etc etc. But steel comes pretty damn close. Edit: I wanted to add that careful design of a forging tool can allow you to use relatively poor refractories for the process. An anvil is a very simple forging die, you can work very hot metal on an anvil because it has a lot of mass, and the hot metal only contacts the anvil intermittently. You could (but shouldn't) make an anvil out of aluminium and work steel on it with some success, you will damage it a bit every time. This is true for all tooling, they are always consumed by use, these exotic refractories are only used because it is cheaper to use a more expensive material. Edit2: I think a few commenters are mixing up their terminology. A forge is where metal is shaped, the metal is heated in a _furnace_ which can easily be made out of refractory non-metals (bricks).",
"Ceramics are nonmetals that can take the heat of being a forge. Then, you take your metal out, and beat it into the shape you want. We don't use ceramics for everything for the same reason a spring isn't made of glass. It's way too brittle.",
"It's only until people start smelting iron that forging is needed. Metals like copper and bronze can be melted and cast into forms in order to get hammers, anvils, and other metalworking tools. Iron has to be forged though since melting it to make tools is impossible if the best heat you can get is charcoal. The first iron workers already had bronze tools to work the iron metal that came from the smelter. That works just fine since even though bronze loses strength and melts at lower temperatures than iron, the hammering and shaping isn't done in the heat of the forge and the tools aren't in constant contact with the hot metal which keeps them from heating up. The same idea is how we can use steel machinery to shape white-hot steel into whatever we want. The steel rollers, cutter, etc don't continuously touch the hot steel. Technically, the roller as a whole does, but any one part of it spends most of its time not touching the work material which limits how much it heats up.",
"In my country, people collected bog iron (reddish mud in the swamp that's rich in iron) and just smelted it in very primitive limestone ovens built next to the swamp during Viking Age. Access of air is more important than material the smelter is made of. Many rocks can take the melting point of iron. True, bog iron is easier to refine than mined iron ore because all the non-wanted stuff (mostly soil) simply burns off (they also hammered the pieces a bit), so there's that. Once you get iron, you can do whatever."
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mg9bvk | How does Stephen Hawking's speech "computer" work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The software that the late Stephen Hawking used was custom-built just for him, because nothing similar existed at the time. Now, however, this sort of software is available for just about any computer and it comes built-in on iOS, Android, Chrome OS, macOS, etc. The general category is called \"switch control\". The idea is that you figure out a way for a person with very little motor control to somehow manipulate a single \"switch\", which can mean pressing a button or whatever. Some blow into a straw, some wiggle a finger. Stephen Hawking had one cheek muscle that he could control really well, so he hooked up some electrodes to that. In a nutshell, the computer highlights one thing at a time, and when you get to the thing you want, you press the switch. It sounds tedious, but by carefully organizing things and with a lot of practice and patience you can do anything. Here's an example of using switch control: [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) You can use switch control with any app, but there are special apps designed to facilitate communication, called AAC apps. These apps basically let you pick words and then they speak those words for you using synthesized speech. While Stephen Hawking used 1970s speech technology and kept it because it was associated with him, today you can get very realistic sounding speech."
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mg9f07 | Can you exercise the heart by short term nervousness? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"No because cardio exercise is not just about making the heart beat faster but the whole oxygen uptake /utilization process in the body. To a large extent it's just using the heart rate as an indicator of exercise intensity, not an end in itself.",
"Your heart really needs to be working less, not more. I know it seems counter intuitive when doing exercise, but the long term benefit is an improved cardiovascular system where your heart is having to put in a lot less effort in general to get blood around your body. A healthy persons resting BPM is usually around 60. An unhealthy persons might be around 80. So you could see how that would be detrimental to their heart, versus yours in the long run. ELI5: If you're driving around with flat tyres, the engine will have to work harder in general. Fixing the tyres reduces the strain on the engine, without making any changes to the engine itself. What you described would just be increasing the power to the engine to make up for the flat tyres, eventually it's going to wear it out quicker."
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mg9ggr | How do low serotonin levels affect the rest of the body? | Asking due to personal reasons. Also wondering if those levels can ever recover naturally. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Serotonin is synthesised naturally in the gut and the brain. Tryptophan is the amino acid used as the fundamental building block for serotonin but it's not as simple as consuming more Tryptophan to synthesise more serotonin due to something called the blood brain barrier. There are many serotonin receptors throughout the body that are classed in the 5-HT family with many subunits of th 5-HT receptor. As well as playing a vital role in mood they also play roles in blood pressure, heart rate, appetite, nausea, memory, sleep and many more. If you are worried about your serotonin levels you should speak to your doctor. There is also a condition called \"serotonin syndrome\" which is caused by an excess of serotonin but also has very negative side effects."
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mga8v8 | Why are the ads in games for other games? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Someone who plays a computer game is more likely than the average person to be interested in buying *another* computer game."
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mgapal | Why does it look like lava is falling in slow motion? | I've been watching this livestream from the current eruption in Iceland, and lava that has been ejected high into the air appears to fall down rather slowly, almost as in slow motion. Why does it seem like this, when lava is actually very heavy? Here's the stream: URL_0 | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I think the scale of that is hard to process. At a glance it looks like the lava isn't traveling far and with that in mind it does seem slow. In reality the lava is being thrown much higher in the the air than you think and thus falling from a greater height than it appears. I think if you had closer camera angles the effect would be gone. It could also be an artifact of the camera they are using too.",
"They are just big chunks and look slow for that reason. Like if a small stone fell from some height it might look passing a thousand of its lengths in ten seconds. A hundred times larger stone falling from the same height in the same ten seconds time will look passing just ten of its own lengths. We will perceive it as slow. It really isn’t."
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mgc19u | How does international money transfer create value for the receiver? | If you think of a country's economy as a closed system limited to the country, then how do they create value out of purely monetary transactions coming in from other countries? Example: Say USA uses Dollars and Germany uses Euros. Then if the govt of Germany pays government of USA a sum of 1000 euros that would mean money disappearing from Germany's financial system into nowhere and reappearing into USA's economy from nothing. From what I see as a layman this should cause some issues such as inflation for the US if they take that incoming 100 Euros and generate the equivalent Dollars in their system, since its new money being generated without circulation. On the other hand , what is preventing Germany from printing millions of worth of euros and paying USA with it for anything ? I guess the mode of transfer has something to with it (Electronic vs cash). If its an electronic transfer then who decides if that sender even had enough currency of required amount in their account to begin with? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Ideally USA would use those 1000 Euros to buy something they need from Germany. This would achieve a neutral trade balance - Germany got something from US, US got something from Germany, everybody is happy. In reality USA has a large trade deficit - they buy way more stuff than they sell. The reason for this is the fact that the US dollar currently serves as a reserve currency. People all over the world want to have some dollars just in case, or to trade with each other (without US). So when they sell something to the US they are likely to hold on to the dollars they’ve received rather than buy something from US. As for the question about Germany printing lots of Euros. Thing is, USA are fully capable to simply not take those Euros as payment and demand something else in exchange for goods or services delivered, for example US dollars. In fact, should Germany try it, this is exactly what would happen, because Euros would rapidly lose value. That’s what stopping Germany from doing it. And no, mode of transfer has nothing to do with it at all. It’s almost always electronic nowadays anyway.",
"It's easier to understand if you think of money as a physical object. Think of coins and bills. If you want to exchange your dollars for euros you need to find someone who wants to exchange their euros for dollars. When you do that in person you will have to negotiate the exchange rate. ETA: If you think about exchange physical money then you realize that no new euros are printed and no dollars are destroyed. The same is true when dealing in electronic money. The banks performs that as a service. Many people transfer dollars to the euro zone but a lot of people transfer euros to the dollar zone. The bank gives your dollar to somone who wants dollars and gives you their euros instead. If there's more people who want euros then the exchange rate is adjusted. You will have to give more dollars for euros.",
"Let's say I'm in the US and am willing to send computer processors to Germany in exchange for euros. Why would I do that? Well usually because I want to buy something with those euros. Which probably means I'm going to buy something from Europe, meaning that money goes back over to Europe in exchange for some delicious French cheese or a German car. Now in fact most of the time if you buy something from another country the seller with receive payment in their own currency. Because they're much easier to use - you can use dollars to pay your American workers, your American suppliers, etc.. So actually that German buyer is more likely to send dollars rather than euros to the US. How do they get those dollars? Well basically by finding someone who has dollars (probably an American) and wants to buy stuff from the EU, so they need euros. One side wants dollars, the other wants euros, so it's a trade. If Germany (or rather, the European Central Bank) starts printing loads of euros and the amount you can buy with those euros starts to fall (inflation) then people will just start demanding more euros for every dollar (or if they're an American company pricing in euros, increase their prices). (This is a 'floating currency regime'. There are systems that work differently, but they're not common these days.) Of course, in practice all that trading will usually go on 'behind the scenes' in the financial system, with those currency trades being done by banks, currency traders, etc.."
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mgco8z | why do we lose all memories when we get blackout drunk? | As stated above I'd like to understand how one does not have any recollection what has happened from one moment in a night of alcohol consumption. How does alcohol triggers this and why ? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Our brain builds memories, think of memory like a house.The material to build the house, is the information that you see, taste, touch, hear, smell. These materials are transported by nerves, which are the roads, to the building site in your brain (known as the hippocampus) so you can start building your houses. When you drink around 3x the driving limit, alcohol acts like a roadblock, stopping the delivery of your materials. If they can't reach the building site, in the end, you can't build your houses. It's this blockage that causes the gaps in your memory, aka blackouts.",
"Found this: Alcohol affects short-term memory by slowing down how nerves communicate with each other in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. The hippocampus plays a significant role in helping people form and maintain memories. When normal nerve activity slows down, short-term memory loss can occur.",
"You don't lose the memories. They are never created in the first place. Basically as others mentioned - as alcohol via blood vessels reached into deeper levels of brain, brain functions less efficiently and some processes are impaired. And when your intoxication reaches critical level - brains simply abort all processes and abort. You pass out. And all of that in order to save autonomic functions, which you do not control a.k.a. breathing, beating heart and so on. Each millisecond there is a signal to contract and signal to expand the muscles of your heart or breathing. If this rhythm is impaired - nothing good happens.",
"True ELY5: Imagine your brain is the camera on your phone. Normally, your brain *always* in record mode, so the video is being saved constantly. When you get drunk enough, the alcohol taps the button to stop the recording. No more saved memories until you sober up.",
"Alcohol, in excess, turns off your brain's long term memory recorder. Memory formation takes a lot of work and your brain is now running in an impaired state; it cannot effectively move data from short term memory to long term.",
"When you’re blackout drunk your brain actually doesn’t make any memories. It’s not that you lose them, you never make them in the first place. Same happens with benzodiazepines like Xanax"
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mgd13o | What causes people to sleep walk? | This morning I woke up to a kitchen full of snack wrappers and sugar all over my counters; but neither my bf or me remembers getting up and snacking in the middle of the night (or why the sugar was out and everywhere). So either one of us sleep walked or someone broke in last night and helped themselves to some snacks. Either way, it’s made me wonder- what causes people to sleep walk? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You don’t dream right away during a sleep cycle. Right before your dreaming period begins, your body releases chemicals that have a paralyzing effect. So when you dream, your body doesn’t really move much, just your eyes (REM stands for rapid eye movement). For a typical person, dreaming ends before the paralyzing effect wears off. In a sleep walker, the dreaming period outlasts the paralyzing effect. This is usually caused by high serotonin levels (the natural version of melatonin). Most people’s serotonin levels decrease as they approach puberty which is why most sleepwalkers are children. High stress can trigger your body to produce more serotonin because your body thinks you need more deep, restful sleep.",
"True ELI5: At night, your body sleeps and your brain sleeps. Sometimes they don’t talk to each other about sleeping at the same time. When your brain is asleep and your body is awake, that’s called sleepwalking. When your body is asleep and your brain is awake, it’s called sleep paralysis.",
"There is a specific chemical released during sleep into the brain which prevents commands going from brain to muscle - specifically so we would not sleep walk or do anything else while dreaming of doing it. If there is some problem with this chemical - it’s either not released or not working properly - people begin sleepwalking. Conversely, if this chemical is not flushed from the brain before waking up, we can sometimes experience sleep paralysis, which is when you are lying awake but unable to move for a few minutes.",
"How can neither of you tell? Wouldn’t your mouth be majorly dry from snacking after you’ve cleaned your teeth/ slept?"
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mgd5fy | What is the difference between regular light bulbs and growing lights for plants? | Some grow lights look like normal LED light bulbs some are like colored led strips, cant you just use regular led bulbs and strips? I try to find what makes them "grow lights" but cant find any explanation i can understand | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Growing lights are just designed in a way to deliver the maximum amount of light that specifically plants can use (they don’t use all light frequencies equally, e.g. they don’t use green light, they reflect it back, which is what makes them look green) with the minimum amount of electric power. Seeing that growing lights can be kept on for hours and days on end, they can rack up quite a bill."
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mgeoqh | Why is fruit/vegetables so cheap despite the time and resources needed to produce them? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you want to grow 1 carrot, you'll need a lot of preparation, time, and equipment compared to the output. If you want to grow 100.000 carrots, the amount of equipment, preparation and time doesn't increase by the same amount. If you want to grow 1 million carrots, you'll be churning out carrots at a rate that pushes price down. ETA Thank you kindly for the awards",
"Economies of scale. Due to large overhead costs (equipment, land, etc) being present in farming even at low volumes, but being relatively stable as production grows, that overhead cost shrinks when calculating cost per unit as production increases. Let's say you have a $100k tractor to plant corn. If you plant 1000 stalks of corn, the cost of that tractor is allocated as $100k/1000 units, or $100/unit. If you plant 1 million stalks, your cost per unit shrinks to $0.10/unit in terms of operating that tractor, presuming you have the land to do it already and all else stays equal with the tractor. Mass production farms capitalize on this significantly, but building these economies of scale takes time and investment. This is why there is a saying that farming only pays off by third generation if you're starting fresh (pun intended, awww yeeeaahhh).",
"Also important to note that fruit and vegetables are NOT cheap everywhere. In Australia, certain vegetables are insanely expensive compared to the states...and if there's a drought, forget it.",
"On a per-unit basis, the time and resources needed to produce them is almost nothing. Yeah the farmer works 7 days a week, but he does so to produce a proportionately huge volume of produce. Machinery and automation (sprinklers, harvesting machines, pesticide distribution.etc) have allowed it to scale up and remain profitable.",
"Cheap relative to what? Meat and dariy? Meat and dairy require fruit/vegetables/grains as an input and is very inefficient at converting those calories into the final product.",
"Migrant immigrant labor is a big part of it. You get paid something like $2 a flat picking blueberries, strawberries is maybe double but its backbreaking. Piece work basically,with no insurance or benefits. Bananas are cheap because the banana republics still exist ruled by American led dictatorships. Chocolate is still cheap because its produced in the 3rd world with the backing of Nestle, aka the most evil corporation on the planet. A lot of chicken is cheap because they ship it to china for processing.",
"Here’s a fun YouTube [video]( URL_0 ) showing economies of scale. This guy spends 6 months and $1500 to make just one sandwich completely from scratch",
"Just to add on to this: a lot of crops in the US are subsidized. So even if they’re expensive to produce, the consumer still gets a low price because the government pays for it.",
"I feel like a lot of the responses in this thread miss something or are just in a very different situation than my country. In Italy farmers invest to cultivate lets say tomatoes, they invest 50k hoping they'll earn positive from the investiment, thing is that supermarket chains or big corps have a clever strategy, they know when tomatoes(in this example) are going to rot, so they present themselves to the farmers when they fear they could lose both earnings and harvest, so they're forced to sell at whatever price, this leads to sell off even at 5 cents per kilo even the famous pachino tomatoes, because \"that or nothing\". This also leads to farmers ghost hiring(not legal) immigrants at low cost to contain costs, this is called caporalato. This way supermarket can sell cheap and the times when vegetables and fruit are not cheap is because of transport costs(not that alone), for example in sicily tomatoes cost much less than let's say in Milan, because usually tomatoes are produced and exported from south of italy to north, tomatoes in sicily cost 1 euro per kilo, in milan 5 euro per kilo.",
"As someone who lives in one of the most expensive cities in the world (NYC) and yet routinely buys perfect apples, strawberries and blueberries for $1 a pound or less in my neighborhood market (and if I wanted bananas for 39 cents a pound and seedless grapes for .99 a pound and...) I too have wondered about the economics of this. Noting that the berries are not always this cheap, but when they are in season, we will buy 10-20 pounds at a time and freeze them. Blueberries have been (3) 6oz containers for a dollar for the past 2 weeks. Strawberries tend to peak at 50 cents a pound in the early summer.",
"Depending on where you live, the real answer is that many agricultural products are heavily subsidized and sold so cheaply that they can barely turn a profit.",
"The real question is why do people act like fruits and veggies are so expensive? As of eating healthy is just gonna cost them too much money. Then keep buying the over priced over processed foods and act like it's the price of veggies that's stopping them from being healthy. It's only costly if you buy veggies to sit in your fridge til they go bad instead of eating them.",
"A whole lot of it is mechanized and automated to a degree. And farmers use migrant labor paid almost nothing to do the labor intensive parts.",
"Another explanation is that farming has overtaken dentistry for career with the highest instance of suicide. Our food production system is seriously undervalued and mismanaged. The government subsidized certain crops but not others, meaning if you grow apples and corn and they don’t fruit the way that you expect, meaning you don’t have a crop to sell, the government insures corn through legislation, but not apples. This is why we have so much corn and soy beans. Then there’s the whole Monsanto monopoly. The main reason I would say is it’s because farmers are undervalued. Same reason Walmart has low prices. I’d say it’s",
"In the US., farms are increasingly consolidating into mega agricultural corporations. They have the resources to lobby for laws and tax codes that favor them. They can lower per item costs by being able to grow, process, purchase, and distribute in scale. They are able to save on labor costs through the use of exploitative labor practices (migrant/undocumented/prison labor).",
"slave labor in 3rd world countries. Out of sight out of mind. The only way for you to be able to buy a 30$ cordless drill, a 10$ cotton shirt, a 2$ hamburger, etc.. is if it was assembled/produced/grown/raised in some shit hole by people making 1/100th what you do per day.",
"They arent? Damn things cost a fortune. A bag of peanut chips/crisps is cheaper",
"Because they literally grow on trees. For the most part, or they just spring out of holes in the ground.",
"Economies of scale and paying below minimum wage to \"the illegals\" are the two big factors already mentioned. There is also the influence of GMOs. It lets them make some crops more pest resistant, grow with less water and other nifty tricks.",
"If you plant a zucchini you'll understand. By the time you stop harvesting you'll be sick of them, all your family members will be sick of them, your neighbors will be socks of them, as well as all your coworkers."
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mgf9op | Why is 0,99999... equal to 1? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Fastest mathematical proof: x = 0.99999999... 10x = 9.9999999999... 10x - x = 9.99999999... - 0.99999999... 9x = 9 x = 1",
"Lots of excellent comments already, but another way to convince yourself is to think what number would be between 0.999999... and 1, if they're not equal. Its impossible to make a number greater than 0.999999... but smaller than 1.",
"It's just another way to express the same number. In math, a specific number can be expressed multiple ways: “½ ≡ 0.5” or “1 ≡ 1.000000…”. You can convince yourself: * ⅓ ≡ 0.333333… * 3 × ⅓ ≡ 3 × 0.333333… * 1 ≡ 0.999999…",
"like many things in math, the ELI5 version must be incomplete. For this question, we have to think about \"when are two numbers equal?\". For the real numbers, two numbers are equal if we can't find a number in-between them. For 0.999... and 1 you won't be able to find this number.",
"If you subtract 0.9 from 1 you’ll get 0.1. Subtracting 0.99 from 1 will get you 0.01. And so on. Subtracting 0.999... from 1 will apparently give you 0.000..., that is zero.",
"If two numbers are different, you can find a number between them (for exemple the middle between those two numbers). Since you can't find any number between 0.99999999999999... and 1, they are the same number.",
"Lots of equations being presented - but the only true answer is almost philosophical: \"because you can't find a number between them\" In the set of real numbers, this concept of \"nothing in between\" is literally the definition for equality. It's also an example of the differences between the set of Integers - \"what comes after 2?\". For Integers and Whole Numbers the answer is \"3\". But in the set of Real Numbers, there isn't an answer ... because anything you can come up like \"x\" with I can find \"y = (2+x)/2\" which is closer."
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mgfxv7 | What's the Dialectic Materialism? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Ok so before Karl Marx there was a theory called the Hegelian Dialectic, based on Hegelianism, in which Hegel states a famous philosophical quote, “ the rational alone is real. “ which really was to say that anything can be rationally thought out. Hegel once talked about the concept of freedom. If there is total freedom, then we know that people will abuse it in certain ways. Get away with murder, act completely unrestrained because there is no reason to. So that is why people will give up freedom in favor of law, which will lead to liberty. Freedom under law, allowing for a more enriched life despite the limit to true freedom. In essence, Hegel proposed the concept that everything has a logical reason behind it. If there is a problem, there is a reaction, and a solution that follows. Which sounds obvious to us now, but is still a very valid lesson for people to learn nonetheless. Things are never just the way they are. This is the essence behind dialectics, and many times, like the above example, it was used to answer contradictions. Why do people feel more free when giving up freedom? Because if there is too much freedom the natural actions of unrestrained men may make them feel less free to act how they wish. If what you say can get you killed, that is a freedom taken away by the lack of a system. The problem with this is that it tries to answer questions after the fact. Why DID this happen? Trying to logic out why law in order happened and putting the blame on people in such a basic and pure way makes sense, logically, but realistically, there are more reasons why law and rule happened, why people ended up being governed. The Hegelian Dialectic surrounding freedom and order was so logically simple because it completely ignored more complex systems in play, and Marx very easily pointed out our social systems that put people into structures of people, be that leadership, social standing, the labor you do... everything changes who you are in society and that makes life complicated. Social standing like being a king or a lawmaker may have also evolved by pure chance, but those things also affected what laws get made, how they got formed, and also possibly why they got formed. Marx himself never came up with the term Dialectic Materialism, but it was based upon his writings and work. In short. Dialectic Materialism is a philosophy trying to address life issues involving socioeconomic struggle, classism, and labor by proposing that the issue is with the system of social organization. If the social structures were changed, then issues caused when they came about could be negated. One way to think about it, in a different context, is that America and other democratic societies came about in rejection of a patriarchal society in England, where individual persons decided that a king and his closest advisors shouldn’t be ruling people so directly. This was a major era where the structure of rule was altered so that way it was no longer a single person in power and that democracy would be extended to other people. This is an instance where Dialectic Materialism was in fact used to change the social structures around in order to benefit the society as a whole. However, we don’t usually think about Dialectic Materialism like this, as what Marx tended to address was the kind of social issues that came about because of more democratic nations. What happened in many countries is that, while the spread of power certainly extended out to more people, the abuse of power still happened down the line, and it usually causes issues with the working class. A good example of this would be America now, as we are dealing with a power imbalance between the middle class, average working man, and the wealthier classes of people. Not only are people above a certain income line taxed a lower percentage than the middle class ( I think $200k a year is that line? But i honestly am not keeping up with tax brackets rn ), but nowadays to even get that much money in the first place, you’re usually part of a larger corporate empire that has influence on our politicians and, as a whole, on our daily lives. This is leading towards a lot more of what a working person has to do going through a corporate, privatized middleman versus what could possibly have been a burden on the government. For instance, the USPS is one of the only government run systems that has to prepare pensions decades in advance, due to the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act in 2006. In comparison, UPS and FedEX have no such issues put in place against them because they are private companies, even if they still take into account postal duties. This is what has made the USPS seem so expensive in the US government’s eyes, and in turn, the government has on multiple occasions tried to regulate our postal service to be far more bare bones, trying to close down postal offices left and right and cutting employees, removing overtime as a concept for USPS workers who are expected to do all the work they used to ( and pick up the slack of their cut coworkers ). This was something that also was very obviously pushed to its limits in the recent election, as a lot of the more recent cuts happened in the year leading up to the election despite the current COVID pandemic clearly indicating that the more likely outcome was that there were going to be a larger influx of mail in votes - which all have to go through USPS. While it’s tough to point fingers at exactly who was the reason the PAEA was passed during the Bush presidency, it’s very clear who it benefits and who it hurts. By burdening the post office, who was forced to keep its costs low and affordable while also being saddled with the excess cost of decades of advanced pension, the whole system became an overinflated expense, while private companies like UPS and FedEx continued to thrive uninterrupted. It will never be officially stated, but a bill like this is likely caused through corporate influence, as politicians tend to do what they can to fund their next election, and taking corporate money is pretty much the best way to do that. So if a company like UPS or FedEx essentially helps fund their next election and maybe a cool car to boot, or something, in response for a vote in favor of PAEA or even in an unspoken agreement to bring PAEA into legislation in the first place, they are abusing their resources to burden a cheaper government system, it’s employees, and everyone who has always used them as a cheaper alternative to the private system, all for the hopes to crush that system and force more people to use them. We as individuals do not have the option to influence public officials like this, as we do not have hundreds of thousands of dollars to throw at them and say “ hey, please don’t mess with government programs that benefit people please “, but corporations do. A proper Dialectic Materialism approach to this would be to change the system. This could be done through a revolution, but this would likely lead to the same result of the new system getting corrupt politicians to take corporate money down the line. It’s not off the table, but it’s certainly not one likely to succeed in the first place, let alone one that would actually solve the problem without the right guiding hands. This could also be done through the government forcing more regulations on itself. There are already some in place that try to prevent government logrolling and under the table money deals, but in general, clearly it is not enough, not enforced, etc. of course, the people who would need to pass these laws are also the government, so that is unlikely to happen. And unfortunately, the third option which would be to more closely regulate companies, increase their tax rates, etc in order to make them have less money as a whole... also fails, for the exact same reason. This is one of those issues that unfortunately does not have a clean solution."
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mgg39k | What happens to my data if I ignore the "accept cookies" button on a website and continue to browse it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That message is telling you they use cookies or might use them, it isn't asking your permission. You are accepting that you read the popup. Some sites will close if you hit no/cancel, which is neat.",
"Depends on the website. Pro-Tip: Use U-block origin. It blocks many \"accept cookies\" buttons along with most data collection.",
"remember when there was this huge deal about privacy and they announced these new measures to control it better and all that? All we got was that annoying ''accept cookies or die'' message and changed absolutely nothing",
"I'm pretty sure it just continues to use cookies regardless of whether or not you accept it.",
"Well cookies are just a text-string in a key/value pair, so they aren't doing anything to your data. They're just storing temporary data about you, either to identify you should you visit again, to keep some settings about you in memory, or to store some miscellanous information that's better used on the fly than stored in the database (Lat/Lng coordinates can be one if you've used a location lookup for stores, as an example). Cookies aren't inherently malicious, and can't be directly traded/used between websites. It's when used in corellation with other code that they can be used to actually track you, but that's a active choice on the websites behalf, and it's only then that there's any kind of data exchange really happening (profiling you usually).",
"I've noticed on some online employment applications they ask my race, age, sex, and I will ALWAYS check \"prefer not to say\" because these questions are labeled \"optional\" and I don't give anyone any info if I don't have to.YET sometimes you can't continue until you fill in the \"required information\"- you know,the ones saying optional.Ive also seen the question \"Are you older than 45?\" Wait-- it's not illegal to ask a potential employee that? Yeah,I've been sending resumes out for awhile now.Its garbage, and I hate it.",
"Information Security student here, I started working with cookies in the browser this semester, from what I understand (but im no expert) there are different kinds of cookies. First of all, what is a cookie: cookies are locally saved data that the browser/website needs to keep track of, but can't/won't safe on their servers cause reasons. From what I know there are many uses for cookies, you have more essential type of cookies, for example the ones that safe the fact that you are logged in, if it didn't, you'd have to log in every time you do anything.... ather types of important cookies are anti fraud cookies etc. won't go into those now. usually when you only check essential cookies you only get these. these can be saved for a limited time, or very long. Cookies can also be used for ather purposes. most of the time when you have to accept them, you are dealing with third party cookies. these are cookies mostly used to keep track of behaviour, trends and intrests. see it as a automatic enquete. this info will be used by the receivers to get insights into their users, and also give you personalized ads and info. People are always scared that people are looking at your data, and even though I also try to avoid accepting cookies, I don't believe actual humans are looking at my data. It's mostly a digital process that will happen automatically and there is a very slim chance that someone is looking at your data specifically. though data is power, so if you don't like giving these parties your info for free, you have all the rights to decline these cookies. this is my take though, please add any missing info"
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mggar6 | Why can’t you eat the ‘Do Not Eat’ bags? | EDIT 1: Yes, it’s Silica Gel, I understand that now EDIT 2: I understand now, thank you! | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because they're not food. It would be like eating the plastic packaging a candy bar came in.",
"If you swallow them whole, you'll (probably) be mostly fine. If you bite them it's like eating sharp rocks. Relevant video: [A Dad Ate 25 Packs Silica Gel For Breakfast. This Is What Happened To His Stomach]( URL_0 )",
"You mean the small paper bags with silica gel balls? Mostly because they taste horrible and dry out your mouth. If they have moisture indicating paint, then they are also poisonous, but the colorless ones are basically the same thing as sand.",
"Silica gel absorbs water out of the air, if you eat it, it will absorb the water out of you."
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mggjnw | Why does being sedentary degrade our bodies and deteriorate our health faster than being physically active would if exercising is more directly stressful on our bodies? | Now that I think about it, it's seems counterintuitive that causing your body to work more will preserve it better than being less physically in the long run (assuming that you have the same body mass and composition in each case). Why is that? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In essence, it's because your body is lazy, and it's evolved to be. In the environment we evolved under, being sedentary for long periods of time was simply not something that was possible (you'd run out of food and die) - so which muscles and other tissues you regularily used was a pretty good measure for which ones you needed. As a result, muscles you aren't using or are using less essentially gets maintained less well to save energy, because your body doesn't think you need them. Evolutionarily speaking, being efficient and saving energy is far more important than maintaining less-frequently used tissues. On a more mechanical level, a lot of the mechanisms that repair and maintain your body rely on signals that are produced by exercise to get started. (This is also why physical therapy is important for healing many injuries - without the stresses of appropriate exercise a lot of repair mechanisms simply don't start.) A lot of cells in your body can sense mechanical stress and respond to it, and quite a few growth and repair pathways are the result of such responses.",
"Exercise damages your body. Your body is adapted to build itself back stronger to combat the damage. If there's no damage, the body doesn't have to build. And, it deteriorates to match the level of effort required to live your life. My doctor once told me, \"You have the body of an animator.\" I wasn't particularly unhealthy. But, I had the physique of someone who spends all day in a chair pushing a mouse.",
"This isn't a direct answer to the body per se, but I draw parallels to car maintenance and jet aircraft maintenance. If a car sits in the garage or jet in the hanger, the parts will start to corrode or break down, but if they move, then the oil and lubricant start working. Sure, there will be time to replace tires and brakes and parts here and there, but much like our bodies, these things were designed with the purpose of movement, denying that purpose means that the body isn't working as it should and will break down.",
"Think of your body as a big city with lots of infrastructure to get all the workers where they need to go and do their jobs. A busy city will have workers constantly driving on roads, traversing neighborhoods, going in and out of buildings, etc. This means that any damage in the infrastructure is much more likely to be found and repaired. Can’t have a traffic jam on the highway, that’s costing the city revenue! A city that’s not so busy will have less traffic and therefore a lesser chance of finding damage to repair with less eagerness to do so since the workers aren’t as busy."
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mggm03 | Why is it harder to sing in a secondary language despite having a certain level of proficiency in it? | So I tried learning a song in Mandarin and despite being of Chinese descent and having grown up learning mandarin (even though i speak english a lot more), I realised that for some reason I struggled to get the pronunciation right. What got me thinking was that if I were to simply recite the words without a melody, i'd be fine, but once I added in the melody suddenly my brain went haywire. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Singing in a language uses a different part of the brain than speaking it. You will find with Choirs that many people sing in foreign languages without being able to speak said languages at all. They are taught how to sing the specific words in a specific manner and no language processing is occurring for them, just music production."
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mgi5gq | What exactly is a shadow biosphere? | I've looked up definitions of it before but it's filled with so much specific terminology that I can't follow it clearly. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The biosphere as we know it is all living organisms on Earth that we know of. And it just so happens that all those organisms share the same basic biochemistry. All organisms on Earth (that we know of) — whether they are plants, animals, fungi, protists, bacteria, archaea, or viruses — all use the same DNA base pairs and coding language to encode their genes, they all use the same kinds of amino acids to make their proteins, they all rely on the same kinds of ribosomes to assemble those proteins... etcetera. The reason these organisms all share the same basic biochemistry is because all these organisms are descended from a single common ancestor in the ancient past. In fact, all this life is just one big family. But, we can imagine the possibility of life that is *not* as we know it. We don’t have any direct evidence of such life, but it is hard to rule out the possibility that there could be life that we don’t recognize as life or that is hidden away somewhere where we can’t find it. And we can’t rule out the possibility that this hypothetical life might not be related to all the life as we know it, and therefore that it might have a biochemistry that is radically different from life as we know it. This hypothetical “weird” and “unseen” life is called “the shadow biosphere”.",
"Our definition of life as we know it is fairly well defined. The critical elements of life, such as carbon, oxygen, phosphorus and nitrogen are used to build amino acids which in turn form the building blocks of DNA and RNA, the core mechanism of cellular life. There are no exceptions- life as we know it can't exist without them. The shadow biosphere *hypothesis* is that there exists, or existed a different form of life on earth that doesn't work this way. Different molecules, elements, different machinery. Problem is, we really don't have any good idea of how to search for it, because we don't know what it looks like. In a sense, you're looking for something that doesn't fit the parameters of life, but can still be defined as life. Predictably, research in this area is tenuous at best."
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mgihua | How did Bill Hwang of Archegos Capital Management lose his entire portfolio? | [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm making a very simplified version, non-finance version. * He had a ton of money and banks and other people gave him a ton of money more to invest for them because he was a good investor. * He took that money, and took out gigantic loans against it, something like 5X his original, already massive amount of money. * He invested that all. Things ended up not going so awesome, so the people who loaned him money said \"give us back our money\" and per the deal of the loan, he has to pay them back, like right away. * In order to get the cash to pay the loans back, he had to sell off insane amounts of his investments, which also caused the stocks they were invested in to crash, making it even harder to get the cash, making him need to sell even more investments. * In the end, he had to sell so much, and at such low prices, that a lot of money was lost for people who gave him money to invest.",
"It says in the article that Hwang was subject to a margin call. Margin trading is when you borrow money and invest it. This increases the \"leverage\" of the investment, which is essentially how much risk you're taking. For instance, if I have $1, I might be able to go to a bank and borrow $9. If I invest that $10 total in a stock, and the price rises by 10% up to $11, I've doubled my initial $1. However, if it loses 10% and drops to $9, I've essentially wiped out my initial $1. Stocks go up and down all the time, and leveraged investments can survive these drops so long as the owner stays in the market until the investment recovers. However, sometimes the organization that lends the money sees this loss and asks for their money back. This is a \"margin call.\" It essentially freezes the loss and makes it so that the investor's initial stake is completely wiped out.",
"To my understanding: the fund had essentially owned large parts of many stocks, and had entered into positions which gave the fund a highly leveraged (high change in value for a small change in share price) position. When at least one of the stocks owned started decreasing the losses started piling up, and when one is trading on borrowed funds, one has to maintain a certain amount value per dollar borrowed or else they can be forced to liquidate positions to meet this requirement. To make matters even worse, an immediate order to sell off a large portion of a company's stock will trigger large price swings as there will not be many buyers with outstanding orders to purchase shares."
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mgis8w | How are desert Oases formed? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are underground \"lakes\" or \"rivers\" called aquifers. these massive amount of water underground, protected from the sun, exist all over the world, even in deserts. say you have a river, miles of desert, and then a mountain chain. When rain falls in the mountains and gets absorbed by the ground, it has to go somewhere. Chances are that water is going to go downhill towards that river, underground. This is the Aquifer. if along that path the ground suddenly dips down low enough that the water is back on the surface. you get a spring, or an oasis. Where the water is coming up from an underground source. Check out this image as a pretty good way to visualize it: [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) its a scroll or two down the page, the drawing."
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mgj4w2 | How does an Oasis form in a desert? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's an underground spring or an underground water flow near the surface. That irrigates the local area, and maybe feeds a small lake, which allows plants and trees to grow and animals to drink."
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mgje3a | Why is cancer so prevalent and has such a high rate of reoccurrence among individuals who’ve gotten treatment? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"cancer is basically a series of stacking failures in a cell's genetic code that alter its normal behavior. self-destruct functions to prevent abnormalities from reproducing, differentiation that distinguishes e.g. skin cells from liver cells from muscle tissue, functions to stop cells from growing where they're not supposed to, all these things are coded in a cell's DNA and those things can break and stop working. people can be genetically predisposed to cancer, and there are environmental factors as well, but every time your cells reproduce there are copying errors. if you live long enough, eventually somewhere in your body those errors will stack up in the right ways to cause cells to become cancerous. that's part of why it's so prevalent. something like 80% of men develop mild prostate cancer in their lives. as for why people tend to get it again, there's multiple reasons. if there are environmental, genetic, dietary, etc. factors that increase a person's risk of cancer, they still apply and are still increasing their risk after they recover once. they're more likely to do regular cancer screenings and catch cancers that might've gone undiagnosed in other people. some treatments like radiation therapy increase your risk of future cancer, etc. ultimately it's just statistics. if you live long enough, eventually your number's gonna come up.",
"There are a number of factors that all play a part. 1) Our ability to detect cancer has gotten better over time. 2) The things people are exposed to will impact their chances of getting cancer. People who drink more are more likely to get liver cancer, people who smoke more are more likely to get lung or throat cancer, etc. 3) People are living longer, which greatly increases the time period over which cancer can develop. 4) There are more people in general, so you have more people that can potentially get cancer."
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mgkajl | How do computers use binary code? | I understand the basic layer of computation: computers work in binary signals (basically electricity/no electricity). But, what do they do with these signals? To what are they translated if so? What is the 'next layer'? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The basic structure of a computer is the transistor. It's basically a switch that when it's turned on, it allows current to flow from the input to the output. The real power of transistors comes when you start wiring them together. Now, the output of one transistor can go to the control of another. That means that when you turn on transistor 1, it turns on transistor 2. By combining multiple transistors in specific ways, you can build simple logic circuits. For example, an AND circuit has two or more inputs and will only turn on if all of the inputs are turned on. An OR circuit will turn on if any of the inputs are turned on. From basic logic gates you can build calculation circuits. These will take numbers (in the form of binary) and add, subtract, multiply or divide them. These are the basic building blocks of performing useful operations on a computer. From there it's just building more and more complex circuits that perform more specialized functions. But, since the inputs and outputs are either on or off, 1 or 0, everything works in binary.",
"The wires that carry that electricity/no electricity signal are connected to transistors. The transistors are like electrical switches. You have a wire in, out, and a third wire that controls whether the \"switch\" is on/off. By carefully arranging these transistors you can build up circuits that behave basically however you want. In a computer, they create circuits to handle the binary signals as either a number or an instruction. Typically, when some binary is sent along input wires into a CPU or microcontroller or whatever, it's both. The first portion is the instruction, the second is some number. So you might see: 0010 0001 Where the first half 0010 stands for the LDL instruction (called the load literal) and the second half 0001 stands for the number \"1\". That entire line tells the CPU to take the number \"1\" and load that number into the register of the CPU (the register is a circuit that holds onto numbers that you want to do stuff with). The next question is usually, \"but how does the CPU know that 0010 means load a number?\" The answer is because it's built into the chip. We arranged the transistors so that when 0010 comes in, that's what happens. It's like \"how does a transmission know to convert the power from the engine of a car and send it to the wheels?\" The transmission doesn't know anything. We just arranged a bunch of gears so that that's what happens when you hook it up to an engine. If you want to go through all the layers of abstraction that are happening there's a lengthy series of videos by Ben Eater where he builds a very simple 8-bit computer from scratch, which you can find [here]( URL_1 ). I believe the only step that he doesn't show is building up the circuits like logic gates, latches, etc. from transistors. If you'd like to see a quick, intuitive analogy for how computers do stuff, there's [this video]( URL_0 ) where they build a very basic adder using dominoes instead of wires."
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mgkzvb | whats bad about popping your neck? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"*Once you pop, you can't stop* The sound and feeling from popping a joint is caused by compressed gas in the joint getting released. It's usually not harmful if there is no swelling or pain after popping. However, if you get used to the feeling of having your joints popped, you'll always want to keep popping them to maintain the \"popped\" state. This can be distracting or even off-putting if you constantly try to twist your neck when doing things or interacting with others."
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mgmmhm | How does Apple manage to waterproof a phone that has ports, which, from my understanding, would be a way for water to make it into the device? Are certain ports easier to make waterproof? If so, is this part of the reason Apple decided to get rid of the audio jack on the iPhone 8 and on? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A well-made jack or port can fairly easily be made waterproof. Electrical signals can pass from the outside to the inside without any openings at all. A well-made phone body can also fairly easily be made waterproof, though this wasn't always done in the past, especially with user-servicable parts. Remember when you could actually change the battery in your phone yourself, with no special tools and without breaking the warranty? Good times. But the ports create holes in the body. That's where the water is most likely to get in. It takes extra effort to tightly seal the crack between the port and the body.",
"Because the port itself can be water resistant. there is no reason that a charging port for example can't be completely solid, add gaskets around where the port joins to the phone and its very water resistant."
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mgn04e | How is it that the dust and smoke from the comet created an Ice age 65 million years ago, but the pollution we're putting in the air now is creating a greenhouse effect? Wouldn't both block out the sun? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"No, dust and smoke acts like clouds, blocking and reflecting the sunlight. greenhouse gases dont carry the dense particulate that blocks light from reaching the ground/reflects it. Instead greenhouse gases still allow the sunlight through to the ground, where it gets absorbed and heats up the surface. That heat from the surface then starts to rise up away from the ground but greenhouse gases act as like an extra blanket over the atmosphere keeping that heat in that would normally dissipate and radiate back out into space. So the dust and smoke keeps the light (which would then become heat) from ever making it to the earths surface to begin with.",
"Dust, most likely from volcanic eruptions, absorbs the radiation from the sun causing a cooling effect. 1400 had a huge volcano eruption in Iceland that spurred the famine and black death in Europe. Greenhouse gasses work like a magnifying glass. It allows not only light and heat in, but it intensifies it and traps it in the atmosphere.",
"Physical dust blocks light coming DOWN from the Sun, making it colder. Greenhouses gasses block infrared radiation being emitted UP by the Earth, acting like a blanket and stopping the Earth from cooling down through radiation as it normally would.",
"Sunlight coming directly from the sun has a different wavelength to sunlight that has been reflected off of the Earth--the Earth is colder, which causes the reflected sunlight to have a longer wavelength. The shorter wavelengths of incoming sunlight aren't blocked by greenhouse gases, but the sunlight reflecting off of the surface is blocked (partially). This is why greenhouse gases trap heat rather than blocking it entirely. Dense dust and smoke block the incoming sunlight, which cools the Earth down because the heat can't get in. Greenhouse gases allow the heat in but don't allow it back out, causing the Earth to warm up."
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mgnbbr | the temperature tends to stay the same for most of the night. Yet just before sunrise the temperature drops the most significant in the night. Why does it drop the most before sunrise? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This may not be a consistent effect everywhere - it may have to do with your locality. Of course, the temperature is going to drop through the night without any additional heat input, but it will, as you observe, reach an equilibrium rate of change within a few hours. If you really are seeing this as a consistent effect where you live, then I suspect you'll also see the wind kick up a little before the temperature dips, bringing in newer, cooler air, and/or cooling the air due to evaporative cooling against all the damp plants and surfaces."
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mgo26e | Why does toothpaste make juice taste bad? | Exactly what the title says I’m not sure why toothpaste makes things taste bad. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Toothpaste commonly includes an ingredient called *sodium laureth sulfate* (SLS) as a foaming agent to make the toothpaste foamy. However, SLS also has two distinct effects in your mouth: * Its chemical shape blocks the receptors on your tongue that detect sweet flavors. * Because SLS is a detergent, it tears apart other chemicals called *phospholipids* that work to keep you from tasting bitter things. So, since SLS both prevents you from tasting sweet things, and destroys the chemicals that *would* prevent you from tasting bitter things, substances like orange juice get a double whammy."
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mgogyd | If hydrogen is flammable why isn't water, since water is just hydrogen and oxygen | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Water is formed as a result of the combustion of hydrogen. In simple words, water is what you get when you burn hydrogen. So, water doesn’t burn because, in a way, it has already burned",
"Combustion is a reaction between a substance and oxygen. When you are burning something, you're forcing it to react with oxygen in the air. You can burn hydrogen, but you can't burn water, because water is an extremely stable molecule that isn't going to take on any extra oxygen.",
"Hydrogen is flammable *because* it forms water. Water, and the bond between oxygen/hydrogen, is very stable and low-energy. Before this bond is formed, the hydrogen and oxygen are separate, and the burning process is them snapping together sort of like magnets. Once they are fully bonded, as is water, no more bonds can form and no more 'snapping together' can take place. In order for some oxygen to react with the hydrogen in water, it has to punt off the other oxygen first, and this has zero net change in energy (the bonds take just as much energy to break as they release when they form), so while it can happen from time to time it does not produce heat or a chain reaction."
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mgoqbn | What is a heuristic? | I have Googled and searched and despite the definitions given i still can't wrap my head around it. I'm wondering if an example (or three) would help, but, if I 5 year old would get it... :P | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is a 'shortcut' to problem solving that may not produce the _exactly_ right answer, but will produce an answer that is close enough for your purposes. So, for example, lets say that I have to order lunch for 100 people. I know that _about_ 5-10% of the population is vegetarian/vegan, so I order 90 meat sandwiches and 10 veggie wraps. That 5-10% was a heuristic - I could have asked all 100 people if they were vegetarian, but I didn't need to be _exactly_ right, and using the estimate saved me hours of time.",
"It's kind of a shortcut for thinking: Instead of actually thinking a situation through and arriving to a conclusion based on that, you rely on your intuition or experience to make that decision. Such a \"shortcut rule\" is called heuristic. For example, you're leaving the house in November to go to work. You take your jacket with you. You didn't check the temperature, or whether it will rain, you're just applying your experience \"In November, it's often cold or rainy, so I should take my jacket.\". Often, you will be correct, and sometimes you'll carry your jacket around on a warm sunny day - that's how heuristics work: \"Good\" heuristic are right a lot, but can still go wrong sometimes.",
"Let’s say there’s a 4 number bike lock that someone gave to you and you forgot the code to. An algorithm for this would be starting at 0000 and working all the way up to 9999, you for sure will get it right eventually, but this takes an long time An example heuristic would be like only trying years as the code from like 1970 to 2000, because a lot of people use their birth year as a 4 number code A heuristic is just shortcut rule that you try out that will probably work, but it’s always possible it won’t work That’s why computers are awesome at algorithms, and humans are good with heuristics",
"Let's say you are looking at a road map and you want to get from one city to another city a fast as you can. To truly solve this you would need to have solid timings for each segment of each road on the map, and then you would move in every direction from your starting direction and create every path you can that ends with the destination and pick the one that is the shortest But a heuristic is more like a list of good educated guesses. So your heuristic may be something like \"prefer highways to regular roads\", and \"try to move in the direction of the destination\". You aren't guaranteed to find the correct/best possible answer, but you can probably find a \"good enough\" answer much faster which might matter more to you.",
"Like others said, it is basically a fancy word for \"a good guess\". Often it is enough to guess an answer when computing the actual 100% best answer is too hard/computionally expensive. Example: How long is the drive from Paris to Rome by car? One might look up the streets, check every possible path, calculate their distance in km/miles and then choose the shortest one. However (for a human) this task is way too hard. It would be easier to take the direct air distance between the two cities as a guess. It will not be 100% accurate but depending on what you need, it might be enough. So in this case the air travel distance is the heuristic for the actual driving distance. TL/DR: Optimal calculation: 100% correct answer, but takes a long time to calculate Heuristic: not 100% correct but should be close enough, very fast and easy to calculate",
"Well, a heuristic is basically when you try to solve a problem not by getting the correct answer but getting a close enough one. A famous example is the travelling salesman. You have a list of cities. All of them are interconnected. The salesman wants to travel to every city once, and he wants to take the shortest route to do so. Now, for 3 cities, you can probably do this calculation in your head, as, assuming a set starting point, theres only really 2 routes. 4 routes is a bit more complicated, but even that can be easily done in the head. However, all the computing power mankind ever built combined would only be able to calculate the definite shortest route for 27 cities before the universe dies of heat death. Now, computing is full of examples like this. So instead, rather than trying to calculate the fastest overall route, you might decide to just go to the closest city that you have yet to visit. This isnt a perfect solution (as you may have situations where taking a longer route once may actually save distance over always going the shortest route) but its close enough. tl;dr: A heuristic is an attempt to solve a problem that is possible to solve perfectly, but would be too much work to actually solve in such a manner. So instead, you use a less work intensive method that gets you a good enough solution."
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mgorp5 | How does a program become "unstable" after running for long periods of time? | Title, how do programs (like server software and sometimes operating systems) become unstable and need to be restarted after running for long periods of time? Does the code simply stop performing the function it's supposed to? Why? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cooking recipes tell you to use all sorts of spices and measuring cups and utensils, but they never tell you to put them away when you're done cooking. They don't need to, because a normal person would clean up the kitchen after a meal and make sure that everything goes back to where it was, even if the recipe doesn't say that. Computers aren't as smart, and sometimes programs leave utensils lying around in the kitchen even when they're no longer needed, because the programmer who wrote the recipe forgot to tell the computer to put things back into the drawer. And if this goes on for long enough and measuring cups and tasting spoons accumulate on the counters, it becomes impossible to work in the kitchen at some point. When a program becomes unstable after a while, chances are it failed to clean up after itself after a certain operation, so it may be creating temporary objects without destroying them properly afterwards, or it may be asking for more and more additional memory without freeing up that memory after a certain operation has finished.",
"Imagine a small public library. At the beginning of the day, every library book is in its correct spot on the shelf, and everything is nice and orderly. As the day progresses, more patrons use the library. As they patronize the library, they are pulling books off of the shelves, reading them, and then putting them back. The library rules state that patrons must put the books back where they found them. As long as everyone follows the rules perfectly, the library will function at optimal efficiency. However, humans are not perfect. Sometimes, the library books are put back in the wrong spot. Other times, the books are simply left out in the reading area. As the day progresses, the library gets more and more disorderly. It takes longer for patrons to find their books, and the library becomes less and less efficient. It still functions, but not as well as it did originally. At the end of the day, the library is closed, and the employees clean-up all of the shelves and reading areas. In other words, the library gets reset to it's proper state. When it reopens in the morning, then it once again functions at optimal efficiency. Think about the library as your program, the library books as \"blocks of memory\", and the patrons as the programmers. As a program carries-out its tasks, it uses blocks of memory as needed. When it no longer needs the memory, it releases it back to the operating system. However, programmers are not infallible. In some cases, a program will consume memory and then fail to release it. This is known as a \"memory leak\". Restarting the program is like closing the library, cleaning it, and then reopening it. When a program terminates, the operating system reclaims all of the memory that it was using, and the memory leak vanishes. In a perfect world, programs will never have memory leaks. However, software is complicated and humans are not perfect."
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mgpw8z | Why is a sternum rub so painful? Paramedics and hospital workers rub the sternum to see if the patient is conscious. It's the most common painful stimuli thats administered but what about the sternum makes it so painful when you rub it. | I've always wondered this. Its the most common painful stimuli technique used. But what about the sternum makes it so painful when you rub it? Slapping the face is always used in the movies (I know movie stuff isnt real) and I feel like slapping someone in the or pinching them is a good way to get them to respond. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A sternum rub is better than slapping someone because that could be really bad if they had a broken neck, a jaw fracture, a brain injury, etc. Pinching in the extremities may not work if that extremity has nerve damage or is otherwise numb. The sternum rub is painful because it crushes tissue against the bone of the sternum, and because it is central to the body it minimizes the possibility of nerve breaks from injury along the way. If you can't feel your sternum then you probably can't breathe either, so... you probably aren't responding because you are dead.",
"FYI: it's *not* suppose to be used anymore. [No sternal rub]( URL_0 )"
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mgrtky | How does this man survive holding his breath for 24 minutes? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"He has years of practice holding his breath and can slow down functions like the heart to conserve oxygen. He breathes pure oxygen for a while before so he has more in his blood. He also learned to ignore the fear/pain your brain sends when your blood has excess carbon dioxide, which is usually the real reason people can’t hold their breath past a minute.",
"On top of what others have said [here]( URL_0 ) is a bit more in depth explanation by david blaine who held a previous record. The level of devotion to not breathing for long periods of time is insane.",
"Another question.. how does he not get brain damage?"
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mgs7is | Why do eyes track motion closer rather than staying on the far away target | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Closer motion is more dangerous motion. We evolved to pay much more attention to things closer to us because those things are more dangerous to us."
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mgs7y9 | are there any practical applications of non-Euclidean geometry other than navigation via boat or plane? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Absolutely. One example which I can quickly make up: AC electric current tends to flow around the surface of an object, rather than through its volume. This is called the 'skin effect'. If you have an object with a curved surface, and you have an electrical current flowing over/through it, then finding the path of least resistance across that object becomes equivalent to finding a geodesic on a non-euclidean space. And that's just for measuring real-world objects, which is the most literal way of using geometry. If you consider more abstract problems too, there's *tons* of domains which feature non-euclidean geometries."
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mgsgqg | How do Michelin star restaurants find the time to cook every single dish? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Lots of employees. There might be a person whos only job is to just make the sauce, or just cook the protein. The really time consuming components are done a head of time like making the demi-glace.",
"You are absolutely correct. Every restaurant, even the best, pre-cooks certain food items, especially anything that takes hours or days to prepare - barbecue, stocks, braises, etc. A lot of other ingredients can be parcooked or parboiled - cooked until they're nearly done, with just a few more minutes of cooking needed to finish them. This is really common for things like rice, which would take a while to boil to order, or blanched vegetables, which can then easily be added to a pan, quickly get sautéed and brought up to temperature, and tossed into a dish. Don't get me wrong - lots of your food is still made very fresh, because not everything keeps its texture and flavor when parcooked. If you order a steak, it likely wasn't cooked an hour ago, because it'll get tough and dried out. But the sauce that they serve on top of it was likely made from a stock that was produced in a huge batch and frozen, with a portion defrosted and used each day, because stocks freeze very well. But a big part of managing a successful restaurant is keeping track of what ingredients are used each day and being able to anticipate \"okay, we won't be too busy on this Wednesday, so let's not throw too many briskets in the smoker or else they might go to waste and we'll lose money.\" It's a tough balance between not wasting food and not running out!",
"They have a [hierarchy of chefs]( URL_0 ), each of which has a different role in the kitchen. The Head Chef is in charge of the overall \"make sure food gets made properly\" role but that doesn't mean the Head Chef is the one actively preparing food, they're just overseeing the others. They are also the one making the menu, which probably means creating a dish and teaching the other chefs who need to make it how to make it. Under them is the Sous Chef, which is like the second in command, actively supervising the other chefs and stepping in when necessary to make sure the kitchen is running smoothly and the dishes are being made correctly. Down the line there are station chefs (or line chefs or line cooks or *Chef de partie*), which focus on one particular thing in the kitchen, like the *saucier* or \"Sauce Chef\" which is in charge of sauteeing and sauces, and is the \"most in charge\" of the station chefs. There's also the soup chef and fish chef and veggies chef, each in charge of their station. And even *those* chefs in a large restaurant will have an assistant. So the saucier might carefully choose the ingredients and start cooking, then tell an assistant to watch it and stir it and finish it while the saucier moves on to start another dish. A dinner course with many intricate part is assembled as each part comes off of its station. From lots of practice, the chefs know how long each part takes to prepare so they time everything to be ready to go at about the same time, or in time for one bit to move onto another station.",
"It depends. Things like stock are a consumable in many dishes and has a few days hold time. Make a 1 plus worth and make more every day after to stay at that value. You have a buffer so you do not run out. Specific dishes with long prep times (e.g., peking duck) and short keep times are frequently by special order only. Some menu dishes just \"run out\" during the day and can't be ordered after they do."
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mgsyfl | / How are watermelons transported cost effectively? | Watermelons are fat and cheap. How are they cost effective to transport? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The sheer number of them you can fit on a truck makes them cost effective to ship. They also pack well. The are piled into a large heavy duty box the same size as a pallet. This allows them to be easily moved onto trucks and around warehouses with fork lifts and pallet jacks. The watermelon itself is pretty rugged and has a decent natural shelf life which is extended even more when it is chilled during transport or sale."
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mgte3x | What is the business benefit of staggering days off? | I work in customer service, I have for 10 years actually, and it seems every call center doesn’t like to give 2 consecutive days off. How does this help from a business perspective? Several companies I’ve worked for do this. Does it help productivity? Please explain. | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I can't say specifically on your position or call center jobs -- however, not allowing 2 consecutive days off in a row is by far the exception, though its not unheard of course. One reason its done is when places operate long hours, 7 days a week, 365 type places, but are not hiring or operate the traditional 9-5 weekday work, yes something like a call center may fit into this. In those cases, one thing companies often try to do is make sure people aren't always requesting their days off to be weekend based like fri-sat or sat-sun, since when they allow that, it can essentially become a fight for weekends off among employees, then when people get those times off, its hard to get them to return to a less favorable schedule. Another reasons is that its just easier to staff a place that operates 7 days a week when you don't have to account for 2-day blocks off for every employee and you can better accommodate day off requests and changes as they come",
"I wouldn’t say that they don’t like to give consecutive days off, just that they might not particularly care if they do or don’t. What it boils down to in a 7 day a week call center environment is that they are using workforce software to place bodies in the places that would be most efficient. The systems decide what schedule they need based on a number of factors. Maybe the bosses decide they want to answer all 80% of all calls within 30 seconds. You feed data into the software (and to keep this from getting too complicated) and it breaks information out in 30 minute intervals. So there are so many calls per half hour and each call takes x minutes to resolve. The system uses a variation of a formula called Erlang C. That tells you how many bodies you need every half hour to answer the calls within your given parameters. Then the system will spit out schedules based on where the need is. Also, there is a constant attrition and hiring that goes on throughout the year. New schedules are backfilling for vacated schedules. However, maybe only 3 of the 5 days need to be back filled. Maybe call patterns changed or they added a new product line that changed call handle times. That all being said, the biggest factor is human. Some VP gave the OK to make those schedules. Sometimes they require that one weekend day has to be a day off. Sometimes they require two days off in a row but don’t require a weekend to be one. There a lot of variations. If the workforce team has to work with a certain headcount/budget then they are making schedules with less parameters. But from my experience, non-consecutive days off has very little efficiency increase over giving consecutive days off. Some bosses care more about their employees. There is a lot more that goes into it too. Call patterns aren’t linear, newer employees don’t handle calls in the same time as seasoned call reps, Hours of operation, open 5,6, or 7 days, how many call centers (same or different time zones?). These are just off the top of my head. I worked in workforce for call centers for over 10 years. I also worked in a call center. First schedule I had was split days with split hours with Tues/Thur off. TLDR: It’s to get the most bang for their buck."
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mgtfhn | Why do people say they feel drunker when they leave the pub/bar and "the air hits you?" | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I would suspect it has more to do with just walking. In general, when you are just sitting and drinking you may not really be using your depth perception and balance. When you actually have to get up and walk to go outside, it will simply seem like you are drunker because you are changing to an activity that is actually impaired by drinking.",
"I think it has to do with adrenaline and dopamine excreted in the brain when you're in a high energy place. The alcohol buzz takes a back seat to all these excitations, and the reality hits when you leave."
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mgu4mg | Why is the housing market in Canada so screwed up? | I just don’t get it. Are we not building enough houses? Are we building enough houses but inflation is just wildly out of control? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Also, Canada had a large influx of cash being funneled into their real estate market from China. All that cash has to be invested into something that will be allowed by the CCP. It is a rough situation for the natives."
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mgul1b | why does applying pressure to a wound help? (Or, say you bumped your side on the corner of a table) | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Adding pressure slows down the blood flow at the region of the wound and makes it easier for the blood to start clotting so healing can begin."
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mgur83 | why does condensation on eyeglasses cause light to have a prismatic effect? | i know the water droplets act as another layer of refraction for the light, but why does it have the "rainbowy" effect through my glasses? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Because it's splitting the white light beam into it's component color beams. It's how you get rainbows."
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mgv2uv | Why do face create way more oil than the rest of the body? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The face and scalp have a higher concentration of sebaceous glands, which produce 'sebum' (a skin oil). Generally, it protects/hydrates the skin and may have antibacterial/antifungal properties. However, your glands can overproduce, leading to oily skin, acne etc."
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mgv60w | how do tornadoes form? | one of my biggest fears is tornadoes and i only know where they are most common and how to survive them. i want to know how they form | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"On the simplest level they form when warm air is near the ground and cold air is above the warm air. What happens is the hot air wants to move up and the cold air wants to move down so they start to flip , and when this happens a vortex can form. Or there is the sudden flip and it all happens at once and it’s a microburst. Though I am not fully confident on that, and the full explanation is more technical",
"The others are pretty much right but the shear component should be elaborated on. Shear is a difference in wind speed/direction with height. Most commonly in tornadoes you have low wind speeds at the surface and high wind speeds aloft, this area in between the difference will start to roll like a barrel falling down stairs. That roll will get knocked upwards, forming what’s called a mesocyclone. That mesocyclone can be stretched upwards and as it does due to the conservation of angular momentum the meso will tighten and speed up, when combined these can start to lower the pressure in the meso enough to creep down to the surface and if they connect you can have a tornado."
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mgvlvi | What causes the muffled hearing often experienced shortly before fainting? | This afternoon I was in a slightly traumatic incident, to which afterwards I showed every tell-tale sign of fainting. Within a minute, my hearing became incredibly muffled, with all sound dampened. Thankfully, it wore off quickly and I didn't faint. What causes this muffle of hearing, and why does it happen? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Perceiving sound is quite a complex series of events which includes the pressure waves, the eardrum, two tiny muscles that can tighten the eardrum, some small organs in the ear, electrical signals to the brain, and lots of neurons in the brain that listen to the sound, interpret it, and send it to your consciousness so you can choose how to react. Nobody really knows where along this chain the break occurs for all situations. However, some situations we *do* know what happens. A similar thing to what you described can happen when blood pressure drops quickly (in which case the temporary reduction in oxygen to the brain reduces perceptive and processing abilities), or when one is too close to a really loud noise like a gunshot or race car (in this case it's the middle ear muscles tightening up the eardrum), or when one is about to have a seizure (in which case it's a disruption/scrambling in sound perception/interpretation in various places in the brain)."
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mgvuuc | If a chimp of average intelligence is about as intelligent as your average 3 year old, what's the barrier keeping a truly exceptional chimp from being as bright as an average adult? | That's pretty much it. I searched, but I didn't find anything that addressed my exact question. It's frequently said that chimps have the intelligence of a 3 year old human. But some 3 year olds are smarter than others, just like some animals are smarter than others of the same species. So why haven't we come across a chimp with the intelligence of a 10 year old? Like...still pretty dumb, but able to fully use and comprehend written language. Is it likely that this "Hawking chimp" has already existed, but since we don't put forth much effort educating (most) apes we just haven't noticed? Or is there something else going on, maybe some genetic barrier preventing them from ever truly achieving sapience? I'm not expecting an ape to write an essay on Tolstoy, but it seems like as smart as we know these animals to be we should've found one that could read and comprehend, for instance, The Hungry Caterpillar as written in plain english. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The human brain goes through some quite interesting milestones as it develops. To start off with it's basically identical to a mid-range animal brain - hence why babies are dumb as shit. Towards about age 4, it first develops an ability called Theory of Mind, which is a set of skills that allow it to understand that other creatures perceive the world differently to itself. This can be demonstrated quite well by [tests]( URL_1 ). Here, the child named Alfie is demonstrating theory of mind when he says that he thinks his mother will think the sun is a lion. A younger child would think that its mother would know it was a sun, because they do not have the theory of mind necessary to know that other people do not know the same things they know. Many animals don't have a complete theory of mind. Chimpanzees, however, [do]( URL_0 ), which is a big part of why some people say they're about as smart as a 3-4 year old. Theory of mind isn't a continuous effort though. For a long time, children have absolutely none of it, then over quite a short period of time, they gain the entire thing all at once. This is how developmental milestones all behave in humans, and these milestones have specific brain structures that cause them. So you have milestones like the ability to use symbols and the ability to do abstract thought, and those are steps rather than slopes as well. These steps act as basically caps on development. An animal that doesn't have the brain structures necessary for abstract thought will never gain them. You'll still have a range of intelligence within the species, but none will be able to overcome milestones they lack the structures for, so the smartest... salmon lets say, will never be smarter than a 3 year old because it won't develop a complete theory of mind. These steps aren't strictly ordered though. There's nothing in particular stopping an animal from having two milestones but missing the one that comes inbetween in humans. That does make it harder to compare to humans though. If an animal can do something an 11 year old human can do but can't do something a 3 year old human can do, what's the point of comparison for that? The other major difference between human brains and the brains of other animals is that we dedicate a *huge* amount of our brain power to language. This is the [cognitive tradeoff theory]( URL_2 ), the idea that language was such a huge advantage to us that our brains sacrificed cognitive power in other departments for the sake of becoming even better at communicating. This would mean though that even if all other aspects were the same, humans and chimpanzees would still have intelligences you can't directly compare, because it's kind of like comparing a submarine to an aeroplane - both have similar aspects like being made out of metal, but they're designed to do very different jobs. A plane would suck at diving and a submarine would suck at flying, but that's not a very useful comparison to make. Edit: I woke up to 159 notifications because of this post.",
"One reason is that human brains and chimp brains don't work the same way, they each have evolved to adapt to their environment and needs. Human brains are built to develop language and abstraction, whereas chimp brains are better adapted to agility and other chimpy things. What this leads to is that chimps can easily get *really good* at simple tasks, but it would take a particularly special chimp to get anywhere near being able to read. On the other hand, humans need a lot of practise for even simple stuff like walking, but we're able to go much deeper and form much more complex models in our minds, which is why we can read and write, do mathematics, design machines, etc...",
"Watch \"Ape Genius\" on YouTube. It will answer your question completely. The big points are: Lack of the ability to cooperate as readily as most humans. Lack of a desire to be taught complex tasks, mostly due to lack of joint attention. Lack of language syntax (e.g. chatting about how the weather makes you feel). Lack of mental time travel (e.g. making a decision based on past experience, present circumstances, and future consequences). Lack of emotional regulation. A lot of the above differences are due to a prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain behind and above your eyes) that isn't nearly as large compared to humans, but it's never just about differences in brain structure. Brain structure does not equal function, but that's another story for another time.",
"Well, there's some disagreement, but some people like Chomsky think that using language- as in formulating sentences according to rules, not just individual words- is a matter of the specific way human brains are set up, not just more raw intelligence.",
"I read a funny and sad comment at the same time. There was a question that went something like \"why is there a problem to design a proper trash can\" in one of the public wilderness parks. And the response from the forest ranger was that there is a significant overlap from the dumbest people and smartest bears. If that makes sense? English is not my first language so it might have been worded differently",
"I think it is about its construction. I think brains as computers. It could be similiar in power but without having the spesific hardware or softwares it won't do what the other one does.",
"I think it was in Carl Sagan's book \"The Dragons of Eden\" where I first learned about Imo, a potential genius in the primate world. It's been a long time, so I may get some details wrong. Apologies. Imo was a Macaca fuscata (Japanese monkey also known as the snow monkey) who lived on the island of Kōjima in an archipelago. She lived near the coast/beach. They were studied by Japanese primatologists in the 1950s who would leave them food. The other members of her tribe, would ignore food that had been dropped/covered in sand, and search for clean fruit. Imo was the first to realise that sweet potatoes could be held under the water, (running fresh water was best but the sea would give a salty flavour) and the sand washed off. Human researchers, watching the tribe, saw that she tried to pass this trick on to the male leaders of the tribe, who weren't interested. She was able to pass it on to her offspring though, so they were able to claim a lot of previously unavailable food. Proving the first discovery wasn't a fluke, Imo also learned how to sift wheat grains out of the sand by throwing handfuls of sand and wheat into the water, then catching the wheat that floated to the top. You could argue this was her EUREKA moment. Like the washing, this technique also spread. But there were too many monkeys on the island with too little wheat coming from the humans. Competition became too fierce and the stronger monkeys would steal the collected wheat from the weaker ones, so they stopped the learned behaviour in self-preservation. The stronger ones (the jocks?) were happy to steal from the nerds, but not to do the sifting themselves. Imo (or her sibling) started another innovation after the submerging of food and wheat in water - the monkeys started submerging more of their bodies in the water, and play-splashing in the ocean. They lost their fear of the water. They can swim up to half a kilometer, but they usually do not like to. Lyall Watson came up with a theory (in the 1970s) called the 100th monkey effect to explain the sort of psychic Jungian group-mind as the means by which this skill propagated even to monkeys on other islands, because it never occurred to him that Imo might have used her newly found love of water to swim to a nearby island and spread the technique there. His new-agey type theory has since been debunked and discredited. Imo was a genius of her kind. She used to run down to the shore when the primatologists came with their food. Which might explain why she didn't flee from poachers, who came to the island, captured and presumably killed her. Poachers often grab the snow monkeys - which can end up as food in China, where they are said to be an aphrodisiac, and for laboratory studies in countries like Holland. Imo, which first washed the sand from sweet potatoes, and realised wheat floated while sand sunk, was killed by a member of the primate species homo sapiens.",
"The actual answer is that chimps aren't as smart as 3 year old human children. The number is made up. Chimps can equal toddlers in some tasks, but their general intelligence is far lower. As for why? Genetics. Intelligence is almost entirely controlled by genetics. Humans evolved to have vastly larger and more sophisticated brains. Chimps are smart for animals but are vastly below human intelligence. Same goes for parrots, dolphins, corvids, and parrots. Humans underwent some really strong selection for intelligence. Why is unclear.",
"You should check out the book Humankind by Rutger Bregman. He’s got a whole section about the evolution of humans and why we are more emotionally intelligent than the chimpanzee, and then goes onto explain how our cultural ancestry is more closely related to that of the bonobo. He makes the really compelling argument that we’ve been looking at our evolution wrong. It’s not survival of the fittest, it’s *survival of the friendliest* We evolved to work together as a team, learning from one another, mirroring one another, and it’s often the most friendliest of us that gets to reproduce (you don’t learn dad jokes when you become a dad, you become a dad because you make dad jokes and she thought you were cute and fun to be with) It’s a great read either way and has given me the hope that I needed for humanity. That in spite of what our television and media has been telling us, that alone won’t stop our genetic growth towards being a kinder and gentler species.",
"Are truly exceptional three year olds as smart as the average adult?",
"The average 3 year old line is a useful comparison, but you're taking it too literally. It's like when someone is pregnant and they say the fetus is the size of X fruit at each stage - that doesn't mean it's exactly that sized, and it certainly doesn't mean it's literally that fruit. In short while it's a useful laymans comparison - chimps simply don't have the same level of potential capability as a human. There is a ceiling there which is much lower than humans. So while a human 3 year old can be very bright and act more like a 4 or 5 year old, chimps hit their ceiling long before that.",
"The 3 year old level is not that accurate though. Chimps have for example extraordinary and fast memorization capabilities. Take a look at this video: I don't think your average 3 year old could do that let alone the average adults.",
"They can't communicate well. A 20 year old man isn't just a 20 year old. He has the knowledge of thousands of years of research. A chimp just has his own knowledge. Being able to talk is the biggest reason we are 'smarter'.",
"The cerebral cortex is where most cognition and conscious thought happens. The cerebral cortex of a chimp is a lot smaller than that of a human. It's not a direct link, but the chimp brain will be fully developed and only be the equivalent to a 3 year old human. Humans develop a lot further than chimps can.",
"Part of the basis to this question has more to do with the way study results get twisted in reporting and the way intelligence testing is flawed in the first place than anything else. Intelligence testing, particularly early childhood intelligence testing are based on estimations through the observation of specific skills appropriate for an age group within a given society. A toddler's limiting factor on language skills is experience, a chimp's may be total ability, observers from the outside see the same level of evidence of mastery, but the internal process can be quite different and difficult to judge. Apes would likely do much better if we had standardized IQ tests based on something they actually had use for in daily life, but they would still not surpass adults on anything where reasoning can beat dexterity. Dogs beat chimps in some of the more human centric tests because they have better skill at reading the human intention in some situations and natural abilities that make some of the tests easier. This gets further muddied by the reporting that takes a paper that says something like \"ape trained in sign language for 12 years now has language recognition scores approximately equivalent to the average intelligence 3yr old\" and says 'ape as smart as 3yr old' The other thing that at least used to be true was that most of the tests from 0-3 involved very little problem solving, so any animal that could be trained to recognize things could score reasonably well, after three many of the common tests started to introduce reasoning which most animals have limited capacity for compared to humans unless it is something that the animal has an evolutionary reason to be concerned with. At the end of the day, while interesting, the results of giving human IQ tests to non-humans is rather apples and oranges and since most animals have no interest or need for most of the skills we measure they will always score in the range of early childhood development. In all likelihood larger primates are smarter than a 3yr old, we just aren't giving them a fair test, but the scale on a fair test for other primates would be different and diverge into it's own direction away from the human measures as it moves up the scale.",
"Biological fact: they held back by a gene responsible to regulate the jaw muscle thickness on the skull. Sounds funny tho but HSS gave up bone cracking bit force for bigger brain cavity, ergo brainsize. Source: some documentary on nat geo back in the days when they still fluttered around science stuff.",
"Lol, maybe they're so smart they just know to not get involved in human studies on chimp intelligence.",
"Regarding the language component specifically, Language is a trait that is unique to humans. Animals have communication systems, but no animal species has shown *language*. Not in the way that language is understood. Even when we say that a gorilla speaks sign language, that is a bit of a false statement. It is not speaking English through Sign Language. Gorillas are smart so they are able to turn what we provide to them as “sign language” into a communication system that works well between humans and people, however the gorilla is not truly creating full sentences the way rules of language dictate (I’m not taking grammar, I mean innate knowledge of sentence structure that humans have) and does not follow the milestones that regular language learners would have, either child or adult. That is why there is no chimp (from what we know so far) that can read language and understand it to the point of the human can. That language ability is innate to humans, based on what evidence linguistic sciences have so far.z Linguistics was my major in university and this was a topic we discussed often. There is an article and short video I found here if you are interested URL_0",
"**Do you want planetoftheapes? Because that's how you get planetoftheapes.**",
"I'm pretty sure the chimp is much more intelligent than that; has anyone met a 3 year old? Lol",
"A chimp might have the raw processing power of a 7 year old. But it won't have the brain structure for it. In GPU terms a 3 year old has 100 compute units, 50 are rasterization, and the other 50 are ray tracing. Super chimp has 200 compute units, but all of then are rasterization. If it tries to run Ray tracing it won't really work. Basically even though a 4 year old might be more stupid than a chimp humans are hardware optimized to do certain tasks like language and writing, while even a superior chimp can't grasp those things.",
"This is not scientific but just a way of imagining the issue. The average adult has a 100 IQ. Above 120 is superior. Above 150 is genius and getting into the tail of the distribution. So, the variation is not that huge. Assuming ape intelligence follows the same population distribution for simplicity , A superior ape would be 20% smarter than an average one and a genius ape would be 50% smarter, maybe the smartest monkey every is twice as smart as an average one. That’s still only twice as smart as a 3 year old. They’re just not in the same order of magnitude.",
"Language would likely be a barrier to us knowing. You could be as intelligent a chimp as you like, but if you couldn’t communicate it in human language, none of us would ever know. Stephen Hawking is a pretty good human example of this - think about it; we only knew of his immense intelligence a) because his debilitating condition occurred when he was already an academic, b) through a combination of luck and technology he was able to carry on communicating his theories. Now imagine a chimp of vast intelligence, or a dolphin, or whatever member of the animal kingdom; even if they’d worked out the meaning of the universe, how would we humans ever know? They might be able to communicate this to other chimps/dolphins, of course, but they’d likely be considered weird outsiders who should be concentrating on more practical matters like gathering more food or keeping the kids safe from killer whales rather than dreaming about that kind of nonsense all day. Language also shapes conceptual thinking, and abstract thought, etc., but again the question is, even if they were geniuses in these regards, how would we ever know?",
"Well I read somewhere that an adult Labrador has the intellect of a 2-3year toddler also. Just to throw a spanner in the works.",
"I haven't seen it yet so I'll just say a huge difference is that humans have an incredibly large amount of cortical columns compared to other animals. These cortical columns are like the hidden layers in neutral networks. The more you have, the more objects are better understood.",
"I don't think a chimp can ever be as intelligent as a human, the way humans classify intelligence, but I believe there is a Humanzee named Karl Pilkington who has something resembling human intelligence. He was documented extensively on an old British podcast with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. I recommend listening.",
"If you are into reading and got some time, read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. This will answer many of your questions and you'll know what sets us apart. I am telling this because I don't have a short explanation of the really long and interesting evolutionary process that humans went through.",
"I got to watch my youngest go through this, we were driving and he asked me if \"i heard that\". I turned the radio off and told him to repeat it. He was thinking. I explained in kid terms. The next week he was a different person, not in all ways and maybe its just me over analyzing. But it was surreal.",
"I'm sure there are many people here who can give much better explanations, so I won't even try but what I *will* say is that \"The Dragons of Eden\" by Carl Sagan is an incredibly fascinating book that explains this among many other cool things. He wrote it for the layman but I had to still read most paragraphs twice (I guess that just shows how smart that dude was)",
"One issue is brain size. Chimps have much stronger jaw muscles than humans. This is connected to skull size and when it fuses. Chimp skulls are fused by 3 months. Human skulls fuse between 2 to 5 years. This can be linked to the use of fire by human ancestors. Fire allowed them cook and break down foods for consumption, as opposed to raw foods that require stronger jaws to chew.",
"If the average chimp is like a 3 year old, then why would it be surprising that we haven't come a cross a chimp with the intelligence of a ten year old? I have never heard of a human three year old that is as smart as a ten year old and there are less chimps then humans so it should be assumed that we won't find a chimp that is as smart as a ten year old if we assume that the intelligence divergent between individuals is the same for chimps as it is for humans.",
"At a neural level there are two big differences scientists are looking at: Robustness vs efficiency and pattern separation vs no pattern separation. These were only discovered recently using neuron tracking technology. Basically a primate brain neuron tends to fire the same pattern while a human brain neuron tends to fire more different patterns. Primate brain neurons tend to pattern separate neural inputs (emphasize differences in neural inputs) while parts of the human brain do not pattern separate (the human hippocampus seems to store disparate memories more mashed together.) Both of these are believed to allow humans higher intelligence and creativity (with some negative tradeoffs.)",
"I think the people in this thread are greatly underselling animal intelligence based on dated knowledge of the subject. For example, we're starting to have some confidence that dogs can utilize expressive speech, including using new and untaught word combinations to express emotions and desires. Sure, there's are a chance that this language ability is unique to dogs and has evolved through a long process of dogs being selected by humans for speech ability. It's also possible, we've also done this to horses or goats without being aware. That's nothing to address if cetaceans or corbids or primates are just far better at this than we realize. I mean we only just discovered that trees in forests are communicating fairly recently and you'd think that's some pretty fundamental science. Here's more on the very rapidly evolving dog research. URL_0 URL_1",
"You'll get a lot of crazy answers to this question. The truthful scientific answer is we really don't really have a solid understanding or explanation of why animals can't be as smart as humans. We can analyze physical processes and have some ideas of what areas of the brain generally do, but no one on this planet could tell you in complex detail why only the human psyche has developed where others haven't. The second, less popular reason, is that humans aren't that much smarter than a chimp but our pattern recognition stat is extremely high compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. If you took a single human and a single chimp and taught them the same things, the human only wins because it can recognize patterns like language, social cues, and drawings. Humans are unique only in their ability to preserve history and learn from their deceased. Language processing and pattern recognition is really the only major factor that has catapulted our minds to be \"ahead\" of the animals we consider less intelligent."
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mgwqwd | Why is it that our ears don't require our environment to be acoustically treated to process sounds properly, such as the case with microphones? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One factor is the brain is a very powerful sound processor. More powerful than any computer currently in existence. It's able to do a lot of things like filter out some environmental sounds, or match sounds we hear to something we *think* we're hearing (like Yanny/Laurel and other audio illusions) which can reduce the number of individual sounds we hear. Our ears are also a little less sensitive than many microphones as well, as far as frequency range goes...so there's \"less\" sound we are capable of hearing than a microphone can record. Microphones also aren't typically able to capture sound as cleanly as our ears do, so any extra sound that you aren't trying to capture gets added as extra noise. Therefore to capture the most crisp, natural sounds, we need to reduce background noise that muddies up that sound because once it's recorded, it plays back from the same source instead of coming from different sources like it would in the natural world."
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