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mhvujk | Why and HOW do plants create fats? | Take coconut trees for example. They photosynthesize, and consume water and nutrients from the soil. They create coconuts that are very high in fats. But where does the fat come from? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Plant metabolism. Little organelles called plastids assemble chains of fatty acids from carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. Then these go into a weird structure called endoplasmatic reticulum where they get assembled further.",
"I don't know the exact chemical process, but we turn food into fat as well. You can eat a lot of carbs and little fat, but still gain a lot of weight stored as fat. Life is an extremely complex chemical process, it takes inputs and creates outputs. Fat has to be created by something at some point. Fat isn't a base element or simple molecule, its fairly complex. So plants take the precursors and combine them into fat."
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mhw709 | What is post-structuralism? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Structuralism is the philosophical idea that phenomena in life are only intelligible as they relate to other experiences. For example, you see King Kong and you are able to understand the creature as a giant version of a gorilla. Your knowledge of gorillas builds into your understanding of Kong Post-structuralism is the rejection of structuralism, saying that Kong requires no predefined explanation to understand. Naturally, as this is a philosophical movement, and not an art movement, examples include the formation of language or, perhaps most famously, \"The Death of the Author\" Death of the Author is a post-structural idea that when a writer fixes a book, film, or other form of art into the public consciousness, they lose all control over the themes and ideas in the work. Not in any legal sense, of course, but in the artistic sense. The viewer of that media gets to decide what they believe is happening. It doesn't matter if the author intended a movie to be about strong, masculine men who always get the girl, if the viewers see the characters as homosexual... Then they're homosexual."
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mhwgcu | How do Incentive Stock Options (ISOs) work? | When I was hired, I was granted 1,000 ISO stock options. I have vested 500 and have not exercised any because I don't really understand the implications of exercising them. What happens to the money I spend on them? What is the potential gain? What are the risks? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"ISOs are like coupons to be used to pay for discounted shares of stock. Let's say the current stock price is $10 and your ISO discount or strike price is $5. When you exercise an option, you pay $5 to get something that is worth $10. If you sell it immediately, you get your $5 invested and $5 profit. However, that $5 profit will be taxed as income. If you hold the exercised share for at least 2 years before selling, the profit will be taxed at the capital gains rate which is lower than the income tax rate. The risk is that the stock ends up at a lower price than your strike price so it's not worth using the options. These options also expire usually 10 years after the grant date. They may also be taken back if you leave the company. The stock may also lower after you exercised the options and hold on to stock. These incentives help employees focus on working to build the company's worth so the stock and thus the value of the ISOs goes up."
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mhy5ev | - why are horses put down if they suffer a leg brea? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Horses spend the vast majority of their lives on their feet, and unlike other animals like your dog, they don't lie down very often except for deep REM sleep, usually they doze on their feet (its a fight/flight thing, always gotta be ready to run). Complicating matters is that a horse's hooves are designed to carry a set amount of weight in a certain way and things go wonky if you throw it (literally) out of balance**. if you _were_ to manage to convince a horse to wear a cast for the many months to heal a broken leg bone, it would spend all that time with its weight shifted onto its other 3 legs and that would, depending on which leg, cause all manner of other problems from uneven hoof wear to ankle and joint problems. So yeah, the leg might heal but now its lame in another of its legs. If you can afford to do so (i.e. its a prize stud or a race horse) you can keep it lifted in a sling, but thats hella-expensive. ** a horse carries most of its (and any rider/cargo) weight on its front legs, the rear legs are more for propulsion. A horse with a lame or broken front leg is really kinda screwed.",
"Horses are hard to operate on, and most likely, they're not going to stay off their feet to let themselves heal. financially, putting the horse down is the best decision"
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mhybgy | Why Can Humans Grow a Whole Baby but Not Grow a Whole Finger Back? | How is it that we can develop whole people inside of our own bodies, but our bodies couldn’t make another finger if we lose it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"How come at an auto-assembly plant they can put together a while car, but I can’t even change my oil? We don’t have the right mechanisms in place at every part of our body to properly assemble the full thing in location. We don’t even have mechanisms in our body to figure out what is missing. It just isn’t built to do that.",
"Our bodies are made up of cells that have special abilities. We don’t have the cells that grant us the ability to regrow our own appendages."
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mhyef8 | what happens when a fever ‘breaks’? What’s with the grand finale of sweat | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your body has a thermostat--much like the one in your house. It says \"I want to be at this temperature.\" During a fever, the thermostat is raised; instead of 98.6 degrees, your body wants to be at 102 degrees (or whatever that particular fever is). When your body raises its desired temperature, the rest of your body tries to get there--this is why people who have a fever often feel chills, as their body is reporting that it is way under its desired temperature. When the fever's done, your body sets the thermostat back to where it should be. But, suddenly, the body is way too hot for its desired temperature. So your body tries to cool itself in the only way it knows how--sweating."
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mhzca7 | when people get a birth control implant in their arm, what keeps it from moving around and cutting up flesh? | I get that they aren't sharp, but u don't understand why they wouldn't still move around or cut through muscles/tendons/veins. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your body has two ways of dealing with foreign invaders: killing and disabling. It will send out white t-cells first to deal with the implant and an inflammation will indicate their losing battle. After this has failed the body will build cells around the object and encase it in an inert goo like structure. This will scarrify and attach itself to surrounding tissues stopping it from moving."
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mhzpht | How come a lot of cryptography involves the use of prime numbers? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because when you have big numbers multiplied together, it's very easy to multiply them, but very difficult to divide and find all the numbers that have been multiplied. Example: find what numbers have been multiplied together to give the result of 298178561. Those numbers that have been multiplied together are the passwords to the encryption.",
"Many forms of basic cryptography don't need primes at all. The big one that does is called \"public key encryption\". Slight sideline into why public key encryption matters: this is where you have two keys, one public and one private. The public one can encrypt messages but not decrypt. The private key can decrypt. So you can share your public key with anybody without worrying about it so they can send you encrypted messages, but as long as you keep the private key private everything is secure. Public key cryptography is the backbone of the system that most secure internet systems use to exchange keys so they can talk to each other. Public key encryption systems require a function that is basically \"one-way\"...given the inputs, it's easy to compute the output. But given the output, it's nearly impossible to compute the inputs. There are several functions that can do this, but a \\*really\\* important one is factoring very large numbers (figuring out what numbers multiple together to get the very large number). If you create a very large number by multiplying two large prime numbers, you know that there are only two factors because of how primes are defined. Computing the product of two large primes is easy. Figuring out which two large primes multiple to make your particular really large number is very hard (basically because there are infinitely many primes and there's no good algorithm beyond slightly cleaned up brute-force to find them). So a lot of public key systems are based on using really large prime numbers to generate the public and private keys. If you know both large primes, you can decrypt the message. If you don't, you have to factor the really large number to figure out what they were, and that takes so long that it's functionally \"impossible\"."
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mi0ez4 | Why does smoke travel the way it does? What determines it’s “shape?” | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It simply is carried along with wind. Smoke from fire typically rises because the air containing the smoke has been heated by the fire, making it less dense than surrounding air which subsequently pushes it upward."
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mi0ib0 | Where does the water go during low tide? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To wherever high tide is. Imagine you fill a big bowl with water, and rock it side to side a little bit so the water is gentle sloshing back and forth. When one side of the bowl gets lower, that's like low tide, at the same time the other side of the bowl the water is getting higher, that's like high tide. Now i'm not saying that same particle of water on your beach is moving hundreds of miles, but just that the oceans as a whole shift and move. Here's a really good gif to demonstrate this: [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )"
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mi0z3v | why was adoption from Korea very popular in the 90s? | I'm watching Bling Empire where one of the participants was adopted from Korea by a white family. Growing up, there were also a few adopted Koreans in my high school. My conception used to be that children are adopted from developing countries, but that doesn't characterize (South) Korea now, and I'm not sure if it did 30 years ago. Is adoption still as popular? And if not, why? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"South Korea wasn't third world, but was noticeably poorer 30 years ago. Their per capita GDP has increased about 5 times since 1990. (The US has increased about 2.5 times, half as much) They were considerably poorer than Japan. Considerably *richer* than China at the time, but also more politically accessible. Today they're much wealthier, and their birth rate has dropped quite a bit, so imagine overseas adoptins are relatively rare now. This is a HUGE threat to their long-term national stability. Replacement fertility rate is about 2.1 children per woman. [South Korea's is currently 0.84, the lowest in the world.]( URL_0 )",
"Also, the South Koreans aren't big fans of adopting orphans themselves- particularly not in cases of deformity and such. Likewise, having a child out of wedlock is apparently quite shameful, so many of those kids get given up to orphanages. So the supply was a bit higher than would be expected, and the domestic demand was very low, which was the perfect recipe for foreign adoption."
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mi21sd | If carbohydrates are a form of energy, why do we feel tired when we eat alot of them? | Basically the title. I made a bowl of spaghetti for lunch a few hours ago and now I'm crashing. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Eating carbohydrates temporarily raises blood sugar levels. This in turn raises insulin - insulin is a hormone that helps transport blood sugar into your cells to use as energy. However eating a large amount of carbs raises your insulin levels and they stay up even after you use the energy from the carbohydrates up. This means that the insulin takes the remaining blood sugar from your blood - and this causes your energy levels to crash.",
"So im no expert on the topic but i do know there are two kind of carbs. Simple and complex. Simple carbohydrates your body breaks down immediately for energy. (Yogurt) Complex however is much more intricate structure and take much longer for your body to breakdown into energy for your cells. (Pasta, white bread) If you eat alot of complex carbs your body ferociously tries to digest them and if im not mistaken when your body digests heavy meals it releases a chemical called tryptophan which makes you sleepy, also alot of blood and water is required for digestion so that can cause lower blood pressure which can also make you sleepy. Hope im correct on this."
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mi2re7 | Why is obsidian so sharp? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because obsidian is a glass. So the boring answer is it's really sharp for the exact same reason a dropped cup will shatter into those curved chips like impossibly sharp little razors. When you sharpen anything, what you're doing is littrealy breaking bits off of it, removing material until you get an edge. However a lot of materials, including metal have a crystal structure when you get down to the atomic levels. Crystals like to break in specific ways, defined by the structure of the crystal. If you've ever broken a piece of quartz or something you'll have seen this. It prefers to break along flat planes, and edges form at the same angles. You can have large breaks or smaller chips, but large or small it'll be the same. So when you're trying to sharpen steel, eventually you get to the point where you're trying to break those crystals. That will prevent you from getting finer or cleaner edge; chip off any more material and it'll break in exactly the same way it did before, and thus not be any sharper. Another problem is that the atoms in steel can move around each other fairly well, so even if you get the edge as fine as possible, it wont stay that way. Still good for cutting a tomato in the kitchen, but if you're doing something where it needs to be a sharp as possible as long as possible, it doesn't cut it Glasses like obsidian don't have that problem. They're amorphous solids: They don't have a crystal structure at all. So unlike crystals they don't break in any preferred way (the fancy term is conchoidal fracture). If you do it right, you can get a very very clean edge that's only a few atoms thick. [Someone stuck an obsidian blade and a steel scalpel under an electron microscope]( URL_0 ) so you can see the difference at the atomic level. The steel is still jagged and rough and no matter what you do it will always be that rough. The obsidian meanwhile is extremely smooth even at that level."
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mi2rom | why do phones battery discharge slower when the phone is fully charged? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I assume you're referring to the fact that the drop from 100% to 90% take longer than 20% to 10%? Firstly, there's definitely a part of it in your head/due to useage. Another part is the phone never really knows how much it has left. It's an estimated guess usually based on the voltage detected. Accurately measuring battery capacity is something every device struggle with as it's difficult to do. Voltage drops off much more quickly when it's near the end, which can contribute to difficulties and seemingly dropping % faster at the bottom.",
"It doesn't seem like they discharge slower or faster based in how much charge it has, I think it may appear that way because when it is low you are constantly thinking about the battery, but when it's full you aren't and won't notice it going down."
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mi2waw | What really is a probiotic food? I’ve been told these foods “help digestion” or “promote gut health”, but I have no idea what that really means. | I absolutely love Kefir and drink it regularly, and I realized I never thought to get a clear answer on this before. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Probiotic food is plain and simply just food that contains live bacteria and yeast. Claims like those you mention are claims that are vague enough so they don't get punished for unsubstantiated health claims, and clear enough that they work well as advertisment. Probiotics may not work as many think, but that doesn't matter because yeast and bacteria poop is TASTY!",
"i think probiotics are meant to promote bacteria growth, so say: if someone has a low number of good gut bacteria, increasing probiotics may help them get it to a normal level. the good gut bacteria would then help promote digestion! feel free to correct me if i'm wrong!! :)",
"Probiotics are defined as “live microorganisms... that confer a health benefit on the host”. There is “probiotic” the marketing term, and there is “probiotic” the scientific concept. This is an ongoing subject of research, and if something doesn’t meet that definition (provides a proven benefit) it really shouldn’t be called a probiotic. We have live bacteria in our bodies, mostly in the intestines, which play a role in digestion and other biological processes. For example, certain necessary nutrients are not well absorbed in the chemical form in which they exist in food; or in some cases may be exclusively produced by bacteria from other materials. [Germ-free animals]( URL_0 ) generally die quickly without special diets to correct vitamin K deficiency. Several B vitamins are converted from plant-use-version to animal-use-version by gut bacteria when the animal eats a plant. Certain probiotic organisms produce necessary enzymes in the gut that we don’t produce ourselves. Some impact ph and other characteristics of your system to make it a hostile environment for pathogens. Some directly attack certain pathogens, but are otherwise inert as far as our body is concerned. Some of these healthy organisms only live for a short time in our gut, but continually recolonize from food. Note that this doesn’t mean any particular product, food, or supplement that calls itself a probiotic will actually provide you with a benefit. That’s a much more complicated question! But in a nutshell, that’s what probiotics do.",
"I found this helpful overall. It's got lots of good information about stuff you mainly already know, but now you know why. Plus the Dr. Dietitian has a great Scottish accent AND a sense of humor. [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )"
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mi3t9u | Why do human baby/toddler milestones appear to arrive all at once like a binary system. One ment a toddler is unable to do a thing and then next they suddenly are capable of it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's usually a lot of buildup. The milestones are intentionally chosen so that they're really binary...either you can crawl or you can't. But they don't just sit there like lumps and then crawl one day, there's a whole build up of sitting up, pushing up, army crawling, rolling over, etc. until they can finally patch it all together and crawl. Walking is really similar...either you can walk (badly) or you can't, but there's a whole period of standing, wobbling, walking while holding stuff, etc. before you actually get to walking. Same for talking...making an intelligable word is fairly binary. But babies make noises all the time and they get fairly expressive and specific before they final tip over into a recognizable word. Edit:typo",
"Baby development was originally thought as gradual because the check points were at doctor visits spaced weeks apart. One researcher performed daily checks on a set of babies and found that babies would remain the same size for days and the suddenly grow in the span of a day or two. The growth spurts were also linked to days when the baby was extra fussy. Therefore babies could grow quickly and unlock new abilities in a matter of days. Babies are also figuring out their bodies all the time. Some movements we don't really notice like moving their legs during tummy time help train the baby's muscles and coordination for when they crawl.",
"The reality is it’s a gradual process. Some milestones need a number of developments to happen independently, so that nothing happens until all the pieces are in place. One kid I knew couldn’t speak until he was two and a half. You could see that he had things that he wanted to express, but he didn’t have the motor control to speak, and he was frustrated by this. Sometimes the control to do something can be there, but the child lacks the physical strength to do it. Seeing you kids grow and develop is an amazing experience."
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mi44mq | Why can’t we pick up and use all of the trash in the ocean? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We could, but we would need to pay people to do that, and no one is willing to spend a ton of money hiring people to clean up the ocean on a level that would make a difference.",
"Because no one wants it. If there was an economically viable use for the stuff, it wouldn't get dumped in the ocean to begin with.",
"Why can't we house all the homeless? Nobody who can wants to.",
"URL_0 There are other projects aswell. Its not a global scale but there are ppl who develop ideas",
"Yes, we could pick it up. No, there is nothing we can use it for. Much of it is plastic and worn plastic is completely non-recyclable. So, it's not going to happen because there is nobody willing to pay for it.",
"You probably massively under estimate the size of the ocean. It not just trash floating on the surface of the water, even that's a large surface area. There is more water surface than there is land surface. And that doesn't even cover the massive volume of water that needs to be cleaned. There are tons of bits of trash floating at various depths in the ocean. Many of those are small flecks of plastic \"dust\" just floating about. Sorting out the big pieces is the easy part of an incredibly large and difficult problem, sorting out small plastic fragments from important natural material like small living marine creatures (plankton, algae, krill, larva, eggs, etc) and floating seaweed, leaves and trees that floated out to sea and are now habitat and food to all kinds of sea creatures.",
"Because governments don’t give a damn. In 2050 the weight of all plastic in the world’s oceans will exceed the weight of all fish. Every person and every government is responsible, yet nobody takes the lead. You know there are micro plastics in your food, and consequently in your organs? You know that hundreds of fragments of plastic are ingested by babies every time they drink from a plastic bottle? You know that “recycling” plastic causes the liberation of plastic into the environment? That fleece clothing (about which there is so much environmental credit given) is polluting everything, including your lungs. We need to go back to 1800s clothing and packaging, throwaway plastic bags should attract a levy of $10 each and stop buying plastic wrapped landfill presents."
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mi5nzi | What causes us to hum a hymn or catchy song subconsciously and why do we do it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That's called an earworm. It's closely connected to memory. Your brain needs to fill the empty parts but you don't know the full lyrics or the melody. Then the brain enters into a repetitive cycle of humming or singing the same part of the song. So basically what your brain is doing is to ask for the whole song and fill the parts missing. Look for the song, sing it and the earworm will stop."
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mi5z2o | how does quenching steel work? | Been binge watching Forged in Fire lately and I see them constantly heat,beat,hammer steel so why when they heat it a final time and cool it mega quick with oil does it make the steel harder? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Steel and iron respond different to non-ferrous metals (copper, silver etc). When you heaT up a non-ferrous metal, it's mollecules become disorganised, making it malleable. Quenching it quickly prevents the molecules from reorganising, so you have a soft piece of metal to work with. This is called annealing. Steel and iron work the opposite way. Quenching hot steel doesn't leave it soft, it hardens it. To anneal steel to keep it soft and workable, it needs to cool slowly. I worked as a die sinker and engraver for 15 years. When I made punches for letters/decoration etc, I'd heat my punch to red hot, then let it cool in charcoal to leave me with a soft steel. Then I'd reheat, looking for the steel to change colour to a light straw yellow. When the tip went yellow, I'd quench. This left me with a punch that was super hard at the top, where the design was, but softer along the shaft (no sniggering), so that it didn't shatter when I hit it with a hammer.",
"I don't know if I'll actually have enough patience to get this entire explanation out in a format that's concise and readable, but I'll try. basically, steel is not a single homogeneous material. If you start looking at the Crystal or granular structure of it, it's made up of multiple different components. A few of which are austinite martinite, and there's a whole bunch of others that don't come to mind right now. Heat treating stee (the process that refers to the heating AND cooling processes) is all about pushing those different components within the steel structure around to different places. So when you heat something up and then cool it down, all the different components inside move around at different rates controlling the rate at which you cool it can invoke certain properties like hardness or softness. So what they're doing when they're quenching it is pulling the harder components of the granular structure of the steel to the surface and minimizing the presence of the softer components. I'm radically simplifying, skipping a ton of details to try and make this an Eli5 answer. There's a lot more to it but I think that might give you an overview of roughly what's happening."
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mi62x1 | Absorbed and Absorber | Recently a friend of mine made a claim that water does not have the ability to absorb anything other than energy. For instance, he claims that when you dissolve sugar in water, it is in fact the sugar that is absorbing the water and not the water absorbing the sugar. Unfortunately, I was not able to find anything on the topic, undoubtedly because I'm not using the correct terms. & #x200B; Can water not absorb matter? How do you determine who is absorbing and who is being absorbed? Any help would be appreciated, sources even more so. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It depends on what you mean by \"absorb\". At a molecular level, a sugar molecule dwarfs a water molecule, so a water molecule can't \"absorb\" a sugar molecule into itself. Going by this interpretation, then yes, a water molecule can only \"absorb\" energy, since it's one of the smallest molecules we normally come into contact with. However, what actually happens when you mix sugar and water is dissolution, which is a phenomenon dealing with bulk material. A single \"grain\"/\"crystal\" of sugar is made up of tons of sugar molecules in a solid structure. When it mixes with water, that structure is broken up, and individual sugar molecules get carried away by water, kind of like crowd surfing. The water molecules are attracted to each other (cohesion), so the suspended sugar molecule gets carried along for the ride wherever the bulk of the water goes. So in bulk, water dissolves a lot of things. But if you're looking at water and sugar one-on-one, molecularly, than water doesn't really do anything to it.",
"I think the root issue here is that Absorption isn’t quite a word you can use on the particulate scale. Sure, a glass of water can “absorb” sugar, or a teaspoon of sugar can “absorb” water, but at the end of the day the chemistry behind each is very specific and has been experimentally described in detail. In this example, a large macro structure of a solid (the sugar cube) breaks down into many individual molecules that scatter amongst the water molecules, forming what’s called a *solution*. This happens because of each molecule’s chemical properties like how polar they are. Absorption just isn’t a word that fits with what we mean when we say the word *solution*.",
"Water can certainly absorb things. Water for example absorbs gases. Next time you drink a soda, consider the CO2 absorbed into the water which is being released.",
"Depending on how you’re looking at it. A sponge for example can absorb water by sucking the water into its structure, but on a chemical level it’s not incorporating the water molecules into the molecules of the sponge",
"when you're dissolving something it isn't really equivalent to absorbing. instead one of the things would be considered the solvent (water) and the other the solute (sugar) and the solute is dissolved in the solvent. so you would probably say water is the 'absorber' since it's what dissolves the sugar but in reality it's just a mixture of stuff. molecules of both are mixed together, neither is within the other or anything like that.",
"If you put sugar in water. The water isn't absorbing the sugar and the sugar isn't absorbing the water. The sugar is being dissolved into the water."
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mi696k | - Why can't we just dig a human sized hole from one side of the earth to the other? How would gravity work in that situation? Do we even have tools that could do that? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Gravity compresses and that compression heats things up. FAST. The Earth’s hard rocky “crust” is at thinnest 3 miles thick under the deep oceans, but usually 20-30+ miles thick under continents. But the deepest *any* human has ever dug was the Soviet “Kola Superdeep Borehole” at 7.67 miles (only about one third of the way through the Earth’s crust). Beyond this, is the 1,800-mile deep mantle and beyond that, right at the center of the Earth, is the core. We’re talking just a radius of around 6,300 miles, or a diameter of over 13,000 miles through the most dense and hot things on the planet (literally). Nothing we know of would survive a trip down there even if you could bore some kind of hole through it.",
"> I don't know if humans possess the capability, but if for example, we did have those tools, what would happen if I jumped into the hole to the other side of the earth? Assuming hypothetically that we could bore a hole arbitrarily far, we wouldn't make it past the mantle. The temperature deep in the earth's crust can reach as high as 600 degrees Celsius; we'd cook to death before we made it into the mantle.",
"First, you can’t dig a hole to the other side of the earth with modern tools. The deepest we ever dug was about 12km and at that point it was so hot the tools couldn’t work. The earth is about 13000km thick, so we didn’t even get close on our best attempt Say we did tho, what would happen? If you jumped into the hole you would fall to the center of the earth until you passed the center, at which point you would be shooting up until you slowed to a stop, then you’d start calling again. You would keep falling back and forth, loosing energy each time until you eventually stopped in the center",
"The pressure at the center would be so intense from gravity you would be squashed not to Mention the magma in the earth which would toast you so no, it would not be possible. It would be interesting to think about if those factors didn’t matter.",
"you cant even dig a hole past the earths mantle because the layer underneath that is kinda fluid and fluids have a habit of not doing holes (and a lot of other problems the other comments mentioned) also *if* there was a hole, you'd get stuck at the core, otherwise you would fall up, which is against the rules of gravity + you die along the way due to temperature",
"the earth’s gravitational field actually grows weaker as you get closer to the Earth’s core, with the absolute center having a gravitational field of zero, so strictly accounting for gravity you’d be essentially weightless. The earths core is also about 9000 degrees F and the pressure is roughly 3 million times that of the earths surface so if you somehow found your way down there, you’d be crushed and incinerated before you even got close"
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mi6paq | Why do mouth ulcers form and how is the healing process different from a non-mouth wound? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Mouth Ulcers (also called Canker Sores) don't actually have a known reason for forming. There are lots of triggers that we can identify, but we don't really understand the actual problem. If you're prone to getting canker sores, there are steps you can take to avoid the triggers that we've identified, but there likely isn't going to be a way to avoid them entirely. The healing process isn't any different to any other kind of sore (blister, bump, legion), but the mouth is incredibly moist, warm, and full of bacteria, so the healing process just takes longer."
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mi6trx | How do lagrange points work? | These are stable orbital points where you can park a satelite. There's a wiki page on it, but it makes a loud WHOOOOSH as it zooms over my head. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Two heavy objects each have their own gravity. If you use the Earth and moon as examples, each will have a \"pull\" on any object placed between them. The Lagrange points are where those \"pulls\" balance each other."
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mi6uq4 | Is there any aspect of reality in action movies where the characters can find out someone’s personal information/record with only said person’s name? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes. Especially in the US. Edit: I’m making this as simplistic as possible because I’m on mobile. Sorry for grammar/spelling, as well. If the name is slightly uncommon, a few searches can reveal a person’s name and address. Phone numbers can also be found. You take the new details and search using those details. Then you go down the rabbit hole of the internet and try to find social media nicknames/aliases. Searching those and narrowing down photos and interests can get you a ton of information. Note: This can be done with common names as well, but take a lot longer. Age matters. It is easier to find someone between the ages of 25 and 45 as those individuals have built up larger online presences. The older of that age range tend to also have more social media connections tied directly to their legal name. Younger than 25 tend to be stricter in using aliases. Those older than that range tend to be less involved in social media but if they are active, they, like the older of the 25 to 45 group, tend to tie things directly to their name. Associations also matter. Say you target a name and you’re fairly certain you narrowed it down to your top 5 candidates. You can then research friends/relatives and familial last names in common. Searches for the the friends and relatives may lead to a better hit on even more aliases in social media, narrowing you down to the specific person you seek.",
"Yes. It depends on the person youre trying to find and what kind of resources you have at your disposal. If the person your looking for is trying to not be found its substantially harder however if they arent hiding and you have resources like the fbi or cia then it wouldnt be very hard to locate someone. Take these US captial riot suspects as an example. the fbi has been tracking some of them down with nothing more than a picture."
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mi6vzq | What on earth is Metaphysics? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that deals with the abstract concepts in relation to the actuality of the universe: Time, history, cause, existence, identities, etc. Similar to how metahumor is the humor found within the concept of humor itself, metaphysics is the physics pertaining to concepts.",
"I'd say dont be misled by the name. 'Metaphysics' is not the 'meta' version of physics, where 'meta' means self-referential. It's not physics about physics, it's only called 'metaphysics' by historical chance, and because it sounds cool. Some metaphysical questions relate to physics, but lots of them don't, and they're no less metaphysical for that. So what is metaphysics? It's a term with broad application within philosophy. Almost every question which could be rephrased as a 'what is x' or 'does x exist' or 'is x real' question could be said to be a metaphysical question. So metaphysics is the term philosophers use to categorise theories about existence. (By contrast, 'how do I know I have hands?' is not about existence, it is about knowledge, so that's not a metaphysical question.) Because metaphysics is a broad term, it has been used in lots of different ways, which might not always seem related, such as theories about the nature of time and theories about the nature of ethical value, and also theories about the very meaning of the word 'real'. The common thread running through all these uses is that they're studies of what the thing fundamentally _is_. Of course you can study what a thing is without doing metaphysics. For instance a biologist studies alleles, but they're not doing metaphysics. My best explanation for that might be that a question counts as metaphysical if none of the sciences have 'claimed' it. There was a time when all study was called philosophy, and through the ages, as branches of 'philosophy' became more sophisticated, like physics and biology, they acquired their own names and methodologies and were no longer associated with philosophy. You could see metaphysical questions as questions about what exists that we can't answer satisfactorily with any current scientific discipline - that's just one view though."
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mi8bs7 | why do headaches go away after you sleep? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"headaches has a lot of causes. Like stress, eye strain, lack of sleeping, muscular tension. So in that way, lots of headaches causes are correlationed with sleeping. By sleeping you can relax your body, your eyes, take some rest, etc.",
"i think it might be because if you’re headache is caused by eye strain from looking at a screen for too long or tension in your neck, sleeping will calm it down",
"Depends on what's causing the headache. If it's something to do with tension or blood-flow, then there's a good chance that when everything relaxes and your heart-rate slows while you sleep that it \"resets,\" everything",
"One of the reasons for sleep is to clear out a bunch of gunk from your brain that got left over from your brain's daily operation. Sometimes our headaches are caused by having an excess of gunk and you need to sleep to clean it all out. Headaches are also caused by other interactions (some of them are listed here) and sleeping can sort of reset some of those issues. Keep in mind it doesn't cure all headaches or anything like that Edit: a word"
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mi8cw4 | Why do futures markets exist for non-commodities? | When I looked this question up most of the answers gave the textbook example of an oil/corn/soybean producer wanting to protect themselves from unfavorable price swings so they are willing to pay for insurance via option contracts while speculators will take up the other side of contract. I get that. For non-commodities though, why do these markets exist? Why are there futures for Apple or any other equity, other than pure speculation? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're just pure speculation. And so are the commodity futures markets. The amount of oil futures traded by financial institutions is something like 10x what is traded by oil companies.",
"So this may be getting a little bit above \"ELI5\", but in our theory of financial markets there are good reasons to allow futures of other stocks. Basically, the main idea we have about stock markets is that we want the price of a stock to reflect the actual value of the company. In order to do this we want everyone who has information regarding the value of the stock to be able to affect it's price. So if you believe that the stock is undervalued, the market wants you to make a bet that the stock price will increase. If on the other hand, if you think the stock is overvalued, the market wants you to work to lower the stock price. & #x200B; Now, lets say you own 100 shares of stock. If you think the company is worth more than the current price of the stock, then you can just buy the stock. That will send a signal to the market that people think the stock is worth more, and the price will go up, getting closer to the true price where the stock should be valued. On the other hand, what if you think the stock is overvalued? Well in that case you take your 100 shares and you sell them. Again you send a signal to the market that the price is too high, and the price of the stock will go lower, getting closer to the true value. & #x200B; That is all well and good, but what if you don't actually own the stock to begin with? & #x200B; Well, then if you think the stock is undervalued, then you can still buy shares. This will still send a signal to the market that the price is too low, and increase the price. BUT, what if you think the price of the stock is too high? Well you can't sell shares you don't have. That means under the traditional system, even if you have information that the stock is overvalued, you can't affect the price. Your information, no matter how good, doesn't get incorporated into the price. & #x200B; In general, that isn't good. We want the price of stock to reflect ALL information that is available about the company and it's value. So what can we do? Well, if we allow people to take short positions in a stock. A short position allows someone to affect the price of a stock without owning it in the first place, and thus it incorporates the private information that some people may have into the price of the stock."
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mi8mo8 | - What makes Pedialyte go “bad” 48 hours after opening | The ingredients list looks very minimal. Can someone explain to me why they instruct you to throw away the remaining contents of an opened bottle after only 48 hours?? Thank you for the insight! | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"From Pedialyte's [website]( URL_0 ): > Q. Why does Pedialyte need to be discarded in 48 hours? Once Pedialyte is opened/prepared, environmental microorganisms can potentially come into contact with the product from the air or from direct contact. For example, if someone touches the surface from which the product is poured, any bacteria on the person's hands can be transferred to the product. This is called touch contamination. The bacteria grow slowly at refrigerator temperatures, but over time, the amount of bacteria can become significant. Children with gastroenteritis are at increased risk of a second infection from these bacteria as their immune system is already working to fight the gastroenteritis."
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mibdc2 | How do noises travel between rooms? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most of the time, the large majority of sound transmission between rooms happens through openings in doors/air vents/etc. Anywhere that air can freely flow, sound can also travel. I don't know if this applies to very low or very high pitched sounds, but for average household sounds this applies.",
"Sound is vibration. Our ears are designed to pick up the vibrations in the air and the brain interprets them into the sound we hear. When vibrations in the air strike the wall, the wall will also vibrate, passing that energy through to the other side and into the air there. It sounds muffled because the denser wall material vibrates differently than the air. Also, sound can pass through the air in vents that may run between rooms."
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mic56f | : How and why do the crust in our eyes form when we wake up? | Enlighten me please. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's rheum. When you are upright it is usually cleared away by your tears via the nasolachrimal duct. [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )",
"It’s something that builds all the time, but the regular motion of the eyelid, during daylight hours, clears it away. At night it’s not. So it accumulates and you find it in the morning.",
"Our eyes are always washing themselves. When you’re awake your eyes are able to blink away dirt,skin cells, fluid, etc. When you’re asleep your eyes are still washing themselves the same way, the debris has no where to go and accumulates on your eyes.. leaving crust."
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mic9yh | Why is "fiery" not spelled "firey?" | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In Middle English, the word \"fire\" was spelled \"fier\". Apparently in subsequent updates, the spelling was changed for the noun but not for the adjective. Heads will roll for this, but maybe not this century.",
"If you spelled fiery like firey, then it would sound like firey instead of fiery. The same is true if you spell firey like fiery. Now it sounds like firey instead of fiery. Am I making any sense yet?"
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michi9 | How do kettles know when to turn off? | The electric ones, not the ones with a whistle | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They have a switch made of 2 different metals which expand at different rates. They're designed to move away from each other at boiling temperature. When they push away it opens the electrical circuit and it turns off. As they cool, they return to the original position and you can turn it back on."
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micigx | Why do thunderstorms seem to be more intense at night than during the day? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A thunderstorm's intensity is a direct result of the moisture in the atmosphere. During night the radiation from the sun is not hitting the surface of the Earth; this increases condensation, which increases clouds, which cause thunderstorms.",
"I think a key word here is *seem*. They seem more intense because everything else is quieter, it’s dark outside, etc. Another important word here is intensity and what we mean by it. The MOST intense storms—supercells that produce hail and tornadoes—most often occur in the late afternoon and early evening. But later in the evening these isolated storms can become more organized and longer lasting. That’s my amateur take, anyway."
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micmpk | what is anxiety? How would you describe the feeling? Does everyone have it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"For me, it’s the sudden feeling of panic and feeling helpless... following a butterfly feeling in the stomach to the point where I’d feel nauseous. It happens when I have an overwhelming thought.",
"Anxiety is the the feeling of negative outcomes about an event occurring before the event occurs. Social anxiety, for example, is thinking that being in a social environment will cause embarrassment or make others think differently of you. It can be described as overthinking a situation or making something more than it really is. To some degree, everyone has something that they are anxious about, which is in part due to the risk vs reward motivation system, but people also learn to cope with it so that it can benefit them rather than hinder their performance."
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mictd8 | When old-school DJ's make beats from scratching one record, how do they know where each individual sound is? | Just watched Beastie Boys video for Three MC's and One DJ, for reference as to what i'm talking about | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A combination of marks on the label and knowing the records. It's as simple and complicated as that..",
"If you mean where specifically on the track they are scratching, that comes from them studying the track until they know exactly when it would sound good to scratch, usually using musical theory of rhythm. If you mean how to scratch (direction, force, etc) that comes from a lot of experimentation and experience."
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midrhe | What does a dryer sheet do exactly? Why do we need it? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Its a piece of plastic (polyester) with greasy waxy resin that reduces static. You don't need them. IMHO, they make your clothes smell when they don't need to and make the cloth feel heavy and feel mildly draped or oiled. I roll my eyes when these commercials come on TV about making your clothes smell \"fresh\" for longer. That is made up.",
"I've always wondered if it's an American thing because here in Europe I've never even heard of them, let alone known someone who used them...",
"They’re a key component to making a simple device to cover the smell of marijuana smoke. You just need a half gallon container of juice (emptied out), the type with the plastic spout piece built into it, and a couple dryer sheets. Poke a small hole in the bottom of the container and push a dryer sheet through the hole so that it’s about halfway through, leaving some sticking out. Take a couple more sheets and stuff them into the container through the spout. You can now take a hit of your weed, hold it in, then exhale through the container and it will filter the smoke scent, replacing it with the scent of the dryer sheets. For best results, use a one hitter for the weed so you don’t have a smoldering joint or bowl putting smoke into the air.",
"You don't need it. I never use them nor do I use fabric softener. They are actually bad for your clothing.",
"They help reduce static. Add a small amount of liquid repellent in case of small spills. So don't use with bath towels. If scented, it gives your clothes that smell most of us associate with clean."
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mif0qy | They say muscular people are often stronger. So, what exactly in the muscles allows one person to be stronger than another? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Muscle fibers have strength, and use that strength to exert force. Generally speaking, bigger muscle fibers usually have the ability to exert more force. However, if you look at, say, lower weight classes powerlifting competitions, you'll see guys in their 130s outlifting guys who don't compete in powerlifting, but have objectively bigger muscles who are in their 160s-180s. The reason is that size alone doesn't account for the entirety of force potential, so there is a degree of variance to this \"size = strength = force\" idea between individuals -- one person's muscle fibers being the exact same size as someone else's, or even smaller than that person's, doesn't mean the two people have equal strength due to other factors, like joints or motor skills or muscle architecture or length/tension relationships affecting range of motion or the quality of their connective tissue or even psychological influences, like their confidence in their ability to perform a certain task that requires strength. That being said, when you compare the fiber size of *the same person to themselves*, a larger muscle fiber will almost always be able to exert more force than their own smaller fibers were prior to gaining that size, so \"muscle size\" is closely associated with strength for that reason."
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mifxb5 | Cyclical Unemployment | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Jobs cycle in and out. People get hired during harvest season and fired when that ends. Shoppers go full stupid in a buy-stupid-stuff craze before Christmas for whatever reason that needs people to sell the stuff to them. People get hired during the planting season because agriculture needs people to plant the seeds. Building/construction has a bit of seasonality to it if in a colder climate where task are not needed as much if it is bitter cold."
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mig82d | why do computers (motherboards) still have ps/2 ports by default, but no such keyboards or mice have been made in at least 20* years? | Sorry if wrong sub, couldn't think of where else to ask. *To my knowledge - not meant to be hyperbole, i think I'm probably underestimating here. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"All modern computers are built to the ATX standard in order to be compatible with all the hardware and software built for this. This means that they need all the components in place that is expected on the IBM 5160 from 1983. This includes things like an ISA bus and the PS/2 keyboard and optional mouse. Most motherboards are however capable of emulating their own keyboard from an USB keyboard but it does not cost much to put the connectors in place as well. Of course not all motherboards have them but they are quite common. Another use case is in server rooms where you often have quite a lot of infrastructure in place to extend the Keyboard, Video and Mouse cables from all the servers to the operators. And this infrastructure often standardize on PS/2 and VGA. So in order to sell servers you have to have these ports in place to fit the existing infrastructure.",
"Mostly it's special use cases. Some point of sales equipment still uses PS2. Some manufacturers still make PS2 keyboards. Ie. URL_0",
"Fun fact - the last update on my Windows decided that it doesn’t need USB anymore, so I couldn’t log on, because neither USB mouse nor USB keyboard would work. After spending some hours I ended up with having to order a PS/2 mouse, because nothing else helped (I really was not up to reinstalling the system altogether). So I’m actually glad the computer at least had that port."
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migabf | how do beauty marks that show up later in life, “form” ? | like I’m 18 and I’m slowly getting a small darkening beauty mark on my cheek that only showed up about a year ago! So what’s the biology of it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cells on your body are constantly replicating and regenerating, they do this *a lot*. Sometimes, they get it wrong. The effect of this is often benign, but sometimes can be serious. This is how cancer starts for example. But a mole, freckle, or beauty mark, is not cancer. Hurray! Basically, what happened is that the cell whose job it is to maintain your skins pigment, called a Melanocyte develops a fault in the instructions it gets when it tries to do its job. Basically what happens when a mole has formed, is that a cell receives different instructions to the other cells around it, begins spewing out a disproportional amount of melanin pigment in the affected area. The more melanin in the vicinity of the faulty cell, manifests as a brown or black mark. That's all! It's just a cell that has gone wrong somewhere, and is overproducing melanin, making that very specific area of your skin appear darker than the rest."
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migoh5 | what actually signals our bodies to cause diarrhea and how does the body decide when it has evacuated enough to stop diarrhea? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That's a question you can't really give a general answer to, since there are different types of diarrhea that have different causes. I'll try to explain the most common ones to the best of my knowledge. At first you have to know how the digestive system works. You eat something and it passes your esophagus and goes into your stomach. Your stomach is really good in splitting up proteins, but fats and carbohydrates are mostly split in your small intestine in which your halfway digested food mixture goes after its been in the stomach. For this pancreatic enzymes and gall are needed. Gall is produced in your liver and stored in your gallbladder, from where it is released into your small intestine when it's needed. The pancreatic enzymes split fats and carbohydrates and the gall emulates the fats so they can be split by the pancreatic enzymes. This mixture goes through your small intestine where it's chemically digested further, but the nutrients and liquids your body needs are mostly absorbed in your colon. The entire mixture is really liquid until it gets to your colon where all the things your body needs are absorbed into your body. They need to be chemically digested before this happens, because otherwise the molecules are too big to absorbed to put it simple. Your bowel moves a lot to let the food mixture pass so it can reach your rectum and be pooped out in the end after all the good things are absorbed. Now to the diarrhea. As you can see there are a lot of steps in food digestion and this was a very short and simplified explanation of what happens. Depending on where the problem lies the reasons for diarrhea are different. 1. Diarrhea can be caused by certain substances that attract water, for example medications or lactose. When a person is lactose intolerant, the body cannot produce the enzyme needed to split up lactose so the lactose stays intact during the entire digestive process. Lactose attracts water and because of this the water cannot be absorbed properly in your bowels if you are lactose intolerant and ate something containing it. Due to the high amount of liquid in your stool you get diarrhea until you pooped out all the lactose. 2. Certain medical conditions or stress can cause your bowels to move way more than they usually would. Because they move so much the food mixture stays there for a short amount of time and the liquids and nutrients cannot be absorbed properly. Again, higher amount of liquid leads to diarrhea. Depending on the cause of the increased bowel movements it will just stop or you need medications to control it. 3. If someone has issues with their pancreas, liver or gallbladder a lot of digestive enzymes cannot be produced in a big enough amount or work properly. These mostly affect the digestion of fats so you get really fatty stools that can, but don't have to be, diarrhea. You can actually see the fat in the poop in this cases. That's why people who have liver disease or had their gallbladder removed shouldn't eat very fatty foods. 4. If you have food poisoning, infections, chronic inflammatory bowel disease or took laxatives your bowels can actually secrete water (or phlegm and blood) instead of absorbing it. This stops when the cause is successfully treated. Chronic inflammatory bowel diseases cannot be cured, but there are treatments available that can increase the quality of life of the people suffering from them. There are a lot more mechanisms involved and I am not a physician, I only went to nursing school. I feel like this should be enough information to give you a general understanding. I'm sorry if there are any formatting issues, I'm currently on mobile. If anything sounds weird English is not my first language and I had to look up some of the specific terminology, feel free to correct me if I made any mistakes. Edit: As u/Corlatesla commented nutrients are mostly absorbed in the small intestine and water and minerals are absorbed in the colon. I mixed this up while writing the comment Edit: it seems that gall is not the correct word for the secrete stored in your gallbladder, the correct term is bile. I didn't know that word, so I'm sorry if it caused any confusion",
"There’s a great post from a few years back that explains this with traffic, I’ll see if I can find it... Edit: [found it]( URL_0 )",
"There is something bad in your body (germs, parasites, spicy food, trigger foods), that your body needs to get out. It cannot wait for digestion, and it uses valuable water, which normally your body would absorb, to ensure that it gets out.",
"There are 3 mains types of diarrhoea and they all have to do with the movement of water - osmosis. Essentially think about it like the intestines want a certain strength of cordial (poop). Not too much water or it’s a weak drink (diarrhoea) or when there’s too much cordial than it’s super strong (constipation and hard stool) Essentially the intestines will remove or add water to match the desired concentration it wants (a Bristol 3-4 poop) But sometimes there are issues with the intestines walls which cause it too have extra cordial syrup (in this case it can be due to not being able to process certain foods, damage to the wall causing stuff to flow into the intestines, and viral/bacterial infections which cause the intestines to secrete more electrolytes) There are 3 types of diarrhoea. 1. Secretory - your body secretes electrolytes into the lumen (open space in intestines). 2. Osmotic - your body lacks enzymes to absorb certain foods so these foods (like lactose) ends up causing water to be pulled into the intestines making it watery. 3. Exudative/Inflammatory - damage to the wall causing further electrolytes to flow in - sometimes blood.",
"u/redwineandpizza already answered the most of the cause of the changes in the stool underlying diarrhea (something drawing water into the bowel, excess fat, increased motility, etc.) but I can throw in a little information about what leads to the part you experience (urgency, mondo dumps). The sensation of needing to void is tied to the rate of filling of the rectum. If it fills fast, as is the case when stuff is flying through your GI tract real fast due to the previously mentioned causes, you feel that \"oh shit\" sensation where you need to get to the bathroom ASAP because that turtle is coming out of it's shell whether you want it to or not. & #x200B; On the flipside, this is also why in many cases constipated people don't necessarily feel like they need to poop constantly. This is especially the case in people on opioid pain killers, where the rectum fills so slow they almost never get the urge to void, and they just wind up with a massive log backed up. That eventually does need to come out though, and it is very unpleasant when it does. So pro-tip, don't shoot up heroin.",
"The one type I haven't seen mentioned yet is the dreaded period poops that all women know about, which is mostly diarrhea. Prostaglandins are largely responsible for that. Prostaglandins aid in uterine contractions, but can actually effect other organs, including the digestive tract. So in addition to cramps, many women also get diahhrea around the onset of menses.",
"First, you need to realize that the body is not \"deciding to have diarrhea\". There are many processes of life going on simultaneously that amount to **you**. One of those processes is the regulation of the amount of water that is taken up out of the digestive tract for use in other life processes. When you become infected with certain microbes, that process goes wrong. Especially as an infection that was consumed orally, it's in the body's best interests to minimize the amount of everything that is taken up from the digestive tract in order to not allow those disease microbes any more access to your systems, esp. blood, than it already has. This results in more water being left in, as well as mild dehydration, and that excess water being left in your bowels is what we experience as diarrhea. It is the dehydration that makes diarrhea, esp. in babies, since they don't have a lot of water in their bodies to begin with, such a killer. Especially bad cases will see the body rejecting water introduced orally (vomitting), meaning there's no conventional way to get water into the infected person's system, and death by dehydration can happen, even when their body could be swimming in a pool of clean water. Usually, if first world medicine is available, the dehydration can be combatted by IV saline, since that introduces clean water directly to the blood stream, by-passing the gut, which is in turmoil. Diarrhea is the body attempting to flush out Bad Things™ from your digestive tract. It's one of many evolutionary biological behaviours that are baked into the human animal at this point.",
"I'd like to add on to what other people are saying about the function of digestion: neurotransmitters are heavily involved and that's why psychological stress is a contributing factor to diarrhea; 90% of the serotonin in your body is in your stomach. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter heavily involved in cognition, mood, memory formation and bodily regulations like temperature and digestion. Fluctuating neurotransmitter levels can contribute to diarrhea.",
"As someone who ate korean food last night and is now on the toilet thank you for the post and answers",
"This is the perfect topic to read as I am evacuating said diarrhea at this very moment. The more you know!",
"I swear I have a full switch. Like my body is like ok. You've been going regular, but that's not good enough. So your gonna empty COMPLETELY out right now. And well see you in a week again in the bathroom and everything will be fine for three weeks. Then repeat."
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migpgd | Do light sources produce infinite number of photons? | If we can see light from distant sources such as a star, and you can see that light from anywhere and everywhere in space, does that mean that this light source produces an infinite number of photons? With photons being energy, does that mean infinite energy? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"No. No light source produces an infinite number of photons. Number of photons corresponds to intensity or brightness of a light source. The Sun appears very bright from Earth. it would appear less bright the further you get from it. That's because the closer you are to it, the more photons are 'hitting' you. Stars burn energy and release it as light and heat. They do have a finite amount of energy though. One day every star will run out of energy and die.",
"The light that comes from stars is thought to be finite: when the star's energy depletes, it won't create any more light. It is thought that for many smaller stars, it's the end of their life cycle: they go dark but still have a gravitational effect. See this article, for instance: URL_0"
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migrh5 | Why is newly formed skin more "glossy" than the outermost layer? | Like when I peel off a bit of skin, the layer beneath is always smoother and shinier, if that makes any sense. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The outermost layer of skin consists of dead cells. They are weathered and beaten by the elements, so it’s not as smooth as new skin. Basically the same reason why any old stuff tends to not be shiny."
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miguln | Are the nerves for touch, pain, etc.. the same that allow me to move ? | I mean are the nerves which allows me to move my muscles and my entire body the same than the ones which allows me to feel something ? Are the ones which send informations the same which receives informations? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"No, they are different nerve endings. The feeling nerves have endings in your skin. The motor nerves have endings in your muscles. They are attached to different places in your brain or spinal cord."
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mih3vs | why some species have white part in the eyes and others don't ? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It used to be firmly believed that we were the only primates with white around our eyes. Out of the 60 western lowland gorillas scientists considered, only 30% had completely dark scleras. The remaining 70% had some degree of white in their eyes. Of these, a small sample of 7% had all white, human-like sclera. This trait does not seem to offer the gorillas any advantage or disavantage For humans on the other hand, one idea is that the whiteness of our eyes is important for our social world. \"This is why it was selected to become a robust trait common to all humans.\" The theory, called the cooperative eye hypothesis, proposes that the advantage of having white sclera helps us to follow the gaze of others more easily. URL_0"
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mihtz6 | - How can you tell when sounds are in front/behind or above/below you? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The weird shape of our ears very slightly distorts sound based in the direction the sound comes from and our brain can decode that into a direction."
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mij48l | Why do shortsighted people see far away things better on phone's camera but holding mirror close makes things behind still fuzzy? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Mirror reflects actual light, so focusing your eyes on a mirror image is essentially the same as focusing your eyes on a thing reflected in the mirror. Phone camera produces a new image on the screen, and to focus on it you just need to focus on the screen which is much closer.",
"ELI5 answer A mirror reflects the same light. The origin of the light is still far away even if it got reflected closer. A phone takes in the light, processes it, and displays a picture on the screen made of new and different light. This new light's origin is the phone, which is very close.",
"When looking at a screen you focus on something close, when looking in a mirror you focus on something far away. Take your phone up and look at it while in camera. You'll see that the phone itself is in focus, but everything around it is still out of focus. When looking in a mirror your eyes adjust to the reflected objects actual distance, which means your eyes are less \"cross-eyed\"."
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mijcpv | Why is Dew Point Important? | I am having trouble wrapping my head around Dew Point. I know the exact definition, but I don't know why its an important number to know. I am currently taking an FAA class, and there is an entire section explaining dew point, but not telling me why it's so important. & #x200B; I apologize if this has been asked here. Thanks in advance. | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Dew Point is important because it tells pilots how likely they are to encounter foggy conditions.",
"When the temp and dew pt are equal clouds form at what is called the LCL or cloud base. In the right conditions for you that’s when you’d switch from VFR to IFR flying. Along with this, the higher the dew pt the more moisture is in the air and logically the more moisture you have the easier it will be for rain/storms to develop which would be somethinf you’d need to watch out for"
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mijk80 | what makes something “sharp”? In technical terms, why is one thing sharper than another? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sharp things cut by pushing the atoms and molecules out of the way, rather than cutting them. The thinner (less atoms) something is, the better it's able to push those atoms put of the way (i.e sharper, cuts better)"
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mijlrn | What is the role of Cache in a CPU? | I’ve noticed some new processors have a difference of 16mb cache and 8 mb cache (I think), but I don’t what cache even does 🤔 | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's so the CPU can store a little bit of information without having to read it from RAM every time.",
"Think of it as super-ultra-fast RAM. RAM is already fast, but it's still not fast enough to keep the arithmetic and logic cores of the CPU fed with data. The solution is to put the data you're using right now into an even faster storage, which is the cache. It's on the very same chip as the CPU itself, and therefore extremely fast. And since you're only storing data there fore very shortly, it doesn't need to be that big.",
"It’s a buffer, temporary memory that is faster than ram, because it’s physically in the CPU, this way the CPU can keep more commonly used stuff is die the cache rather than the ram and it’s able to go faster, but the catch is there’s not much of it, so the more the better (however there’s finishing return) The problem is it’s expensive to make the CPU larger, so cheaper CPUs tend to have less cache",
"Cache is similar to the memory (RAM, not disk): it stores data that the processor may need at tht moment. The larger your data storage is, the slower it gets: HDD or SSD is horribly slow compared to RAM, RAM is horribly slow compared to processor's registers directly inside the CPU but the latter can only store a few variables. If a processor requests data from RAM and has nothing else to do until it's delivered, it stops. That. of course, reduces performance. So, we can get a small but fast piece of memory, call it a cache and store some data from RAM that is used most often. Processors today have several levels of cache, getting progressively smaller but faster.",
"RAM access takes time, because it's far away on the timescales of CPU computation. Typically, when the CPU needs to read a value stored in RAM, it will need to wait 100 to 400 cycles for it to arrive. When you consider that a CPU is supposed to make (approximately) one operation each cycle, waiting for a hundred ones while doing nothing is a massive problem for performance. That's what the cache is for. It provides a much smaller space to store things, but with much faster access (1 to 20 cycles depending on the cache). Cache is part of the CPU chip so is much more expensive than RAM for the same memory, but is much faster to access. As a result, the CPU stores the currently uses data in the cache to speed up operations. Any time it needs a value not in the cache, it will request its value from the ram, and will keep it in the cache in case it needs it again. Once the CPU runs out of cache space, it will take the oldest values in the cache (the ones it hasn't accessed for a long time), and will write them back in RAM, making space for other values. As a result, the more cache you have, the more data you can keep close to your CPU, and the less you have to perform longer RAM access operations."
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miku1b | What causes the "classic" sitting down with the head in both hands position from depression. | Suffering from various issues I find myself in this very position many times, I don't know why, or what comfort it brings, but without even thinking about it, when really down I'll find myself constantly slipping into this position and simply staring down at the floor / my feet. I consciously try to sit back up and within minutes it's back to head in hands facing the floor. What is the reason behind this? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's comfortable(ish), stable and energy efficient. It lets your mind wander without having to exert energy to sit up straight or bend your back uncomfortably forward onto a table to lay your head down.",
"Often I feel lethargic and like I don’t have the energy to fight gravity, so it’s a bit like the closest you can get to lying down whilst staying upright."
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mil65x | How are RFID tags read with antennas and readers, and how is the information sent back and analysed by a computer? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"An RFID tag is really two parts - a small chip and an antenna. When a reader scans the tag, it supplies a small amount of power over the air. The antenna picks up that power and it is _just_ enough to activate the chip. The chip then broadcasts a message, which the reader receives and stores. It then takes that message and compares it to a database to achieve the desired output, be that firing a command, pulling up a record, etc."
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mil6bx | Why emulated ps2/ps3/x360 games still run horribly on newest CPUs? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In order to run the games themselves, emulators need to also simulate the hardware the game runs on. Sometimes this can be as simple as translating some CPU instructions. Other times it can mean using CPU power to simulate a whole other CPU. In the worst cases, like with some old arcade machines, this can mean running complex physics simulations to reproduce analog hardware components.",
"Software developer here, There are big physical, structural, and conceptual differences between processor architectures. It's not so easy as map the ADD instruction from that CPU to this. The fundamental differences have damning consequences. Most common emulators do try to map instructions, and try to implement feature and architectural differences as performant as possible, but whereas the original CPU was doing work in hardware, your emulator is taking more steps having to do it in software. The best emulators will emulate the actual physical hardware circuitry itself, including signal propagation and latency. These take massive amounts of compute power to run, what your typical CPU can't handle - it doesn't matter how many cores you throw at the problem. The best desktop CPUs today can emulate original NES hardware this way at its original speed.",
"With the exception of a few games pcsx2 runs very well. You do have to acquire bios file though.",
"Some analogies that might help: * Imagine being dropped in a foreign country with no knowledge of the local language, and only a Google Translate app at your disposal to facilitate communications. That app is doing the work of an emulator. * Imagine a top-ranking F1 driver suddenly being told to operate a forklift with no prior training. Luckily, there's an owner's manual. A fully-functioning emulator requires an understanding not only of the CPU, but also of all of the related specialized hardware (e.g. SPU). Much of that information is a trade-secret and won't be available for programmers to research, so a lot of it ends up being best-guess approaches. Meanwhile, these games may have been built to take advantage of system quirks or low-level optimizations that might not function appropriately in an emulated environment. All of this is being funneled through a layer of indirection. A naive approach to emulating a CPU's instructions would be to have an entire function of native code to make sense of a single instruction, which could have several orders of magnitude more work involved than the original platform. I'd liken it to that scene in Apollo 13 where the astronauts are losing the CO2 scrubbers, and the engineers on the ground are trying to figure out how to reproduce the problem on their side, solve it, and somehow communicate it all back to the flight crew.",
"Usually a console has a very very very different type of CPU and GPU and it doesn't just translate and run, but has to run inside a simulation of the real console, which is very tough to do especially for more recent and powerful multicore specialized console CPUs. SNES emulates perfectly by now, because desktop CPUs are 500x faster than the old 16-bit things. Some day when desktop CPUs are 500x faster than an IBM/PowerPC or MIPS or whatever thing (currently only like 2.5x or so) then those consoles will emulate smoothly. Sometimes there are very undocumented things which need reverse engineered and since most emulators are not well funded that work takes much longer, almost as long as it takes for the CPUs to get fast enough. DMCA complicated things even more since reverse engineering is essentially illegal, even if just for kicks.",
"Because the emulator is not optimised. It doesn't matter if you have a super powerful CPU with infinite multithreads if the program you are running (the emulator in this case) isn't programmed to utilize the CPU resources. Imagine you have a 10 lane super high speed freeway. But all the drivers have been taught to only drive 50 km/h (30mph) and only in the right most lane. Then you will still have slow traffic even if there is a lot of space you can use. The emulator is kind of the same. Unless the programmer specifically has programmed the emulator to run on multiple threads or to utilize as much memory as possible etc then it will still run poorly.",
"Emulating the actual game code is the relatively easy part. PS2 for example is a MIPS CPU. which has a handful of very simple instructions. Some emulators will convert the game instruction set into native x86 assembly instructions, which can make the game code run fast enough. What is more difficult is all the support chips (sound, GPU, vector multiplication) that need to be emulated. Even with a GPU in your system, there needs to be translation done between the graphics commands from PS2 games to the GPU driver on your system. Keeping everything synchronized is a challenge as well, as your CPU likely will not run at the same rate as the game console."
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mila6e | How Does National Debt Work? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The US Treasury issues debt instruments called bonds. A bond is a promise by the government to repay the cost of the bond, plus interest, at a later date (10, 20, or 30 years). People buy these bonds because they are an incredibly safe investment. The US government *always* honors its bonds. The biggest single holder of US bonds is the US Social Security Administration, and the majority of bonds are owned by US citizens and US companies. International companies and foreign governments also invest in US bonds, because they are such stable investments. So a country's debt isn't really like personal debt at all. The \"worst case scenario\" for national debt is a default. That is if the government just can't (or won't) pay the interest on its bonds. The consequence of a default is a loss of confidence in the value of bonds, which makes it more expensive for the government to borrow money. As long as the government can afford to pay its bond obligations there's really no downside to national debt. If you're the US and your bonds are the safest investment on Earth you reap major benefits because you can \"borrow\" money at insanely low (or negative) interest rates."
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mim198 | what happens to radio frequency waves after they have passed? (When you listen to a radio where does the sound go once it’s passed) | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Some fraction of the wave hits your antenna, is absorbed and turned into electricity, and the electricity is turned into sound by your speakers. The part that doesn't interact with your antenna just keeps on going until it eventually spreads out so much that it's indistinguishable from background radiation.",
"It extends outwards from the planet. You go far enough out into space and you'll hear radio broadcasts from the past. The earliest radio waves emitted from Earth are approximately 200 light years away"
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mim4wc | How can things like tobacco (cigars) and alcohol (bourbon, scotch etc.) have all the different tasting notes that people describe when they don’t contain any of those things? | I watch a lot of YouTube videos of people reviewing different spirits and cigars and they always come up with tasting notes like vanilla, bread, earth, pepper, graham cracker, cinnamon, etc. How could a bunch of rolled up tobacco (cigar) taste like vanilla or pepper or anything else? Same thing for whiskeys. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's nothing essential to an orange that makes it taste like an orange. It contains a combination of chemicals that, when they interact with your nose and mouth, make your brain say \"that tastes like an orange\" Other things can have the same or similar chemicals, or some combination of chemicals that produces similar sensations, and they may also produce an \"orangey\" flavor. Taste is also *very* subjective."
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mim6sk | Why do we sometimes feel dehydrated/thirsty even when we have drunk a lot of water? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You body also needs various salts like potassium chloride and magnesium something or other. Or sometimes regular sodium chloride if you have need sweating a lot. You can actually die if all you have is plain water and not enough salts. Under normal conditions it's not a concern, but working and sweating like military or marathon athletes, you need a supplement, there's gatorade and the like, and back in the day they used to have salt tablets in ww2"
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mim7fj | Where do old e-car batteries go? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Lithium batteries are among the most difficult to recycle, given their unique chemistry. However, they can be reprocessed and the technology is rapidly improving with the advent of electric vehicles. You've got two big ways of doing it. Both are focused on extracting the precious metals- lithium, copper, cobalt, nickel, and others. Everything else is waste. One method, smelting, involves literally putting the battery in a furnace to burn off anything that's not made of metal. Then you can smelt out all the different metals in a conventional smelter and reuse them elsewhere. It takes a lot of energy and recovers only a fraction of the battery material. Another involves putting the battery in a corrosive acid bath, dissolving the metals and leaching them into an aqueous solution that they can be extracted from later one. More efficient, but also difficult and expensive. The problem is (currently) that it's cheaper to mine new metal for batteries than it is to recycle them. However, with the explosion of electric vehicles, the scale of battery recycling is expected to increase greatly and hopefully refine these techniques.",
"/u/notorioussouthpaw has a good breakdown of battery recycling, but there's actually a step in between the car and the recycling plant. Electric cars need a new battery when their original wears down to the point that it can only recharge to about 70% of its original capacity. The battery is still functional, but is no longer efficient for vehicle use. The 70% battery can be removed from the car and sold to someone on the power grid, like a municipality or power company. They'll hook the battery into an array for backup storage. From there, they'll use the battery for grid storage until it no longer functions, at which point it gets recycled or destroyed or stored away for future recycling."
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mimhto | How do pill manufacturers get the same amount of drug in each pill? | So many medications provide such a tiny amount of medication, with the pill obviously weighing more. How do pill manufacturers make sure that each pill has precisely, for example, 50mg of medication and 450mg of fillers rather than 48mg of medication and 452mg of fillers in one and 52mg of medication and 448mg of fillers in another? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"Lots and lots and lots of mixing, and entropy. As long as your fillers and drug are about the same density, once they're thoroughly mixed (i.e. evenly distributed) they're \"never\" going to unmix. They're already in the maximum entropy state (most disordered) and it'll tend to stay that way because, on average, any particle motion that tends to make it a little more ordered is countered by one making it a little less. You can't get \"more disordered\" than totally mixed. So start with the exact right amounts of bulk substance and drug and then mix the bejeeezus out of it. Then test, possibly several times, to make sure that the mix is both homogeneous and correct.",
"They make them out of one large, master batch of material that is mixed together before being formed into pills. Since the original batch is (relatively) huge, it's much easier to be precise with the measurements. Making the pills is done by a machine, so proper calibration/tuning will make each pill pretty uniform and accurate in terms of weight.",
"Ratio of large volumes. 20 kgs of filler and 500g of active ingredient. Or something like mixed evenly and then distributed into pill making machines"
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mimip9 | Why does pain or symptoms get severely worse after you sleep ? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It isn’t the sleep per se that is causing more pain. But sleep is a several hour period where your body can continue its inflammation and/or immune response to the injury/stressor. For example, you sprain your ankle at 8pm and go to bed at 10. You wake up at 6am with a very swollen ankle. Sleeping didn’t swell your ankle - your body’s inflammation as a result of the sprain just increased over the 8 hour period you were sleeping. This is also an 8 hour period where you likely didn’t take any pain medicine, so you’ll experience un-moderated pain upon waking.",
"Not a doctor, could be related to inflammation, your immune system kicking into gear. Or, could be that you go from no-pain to some pain, and it feels worse because you skipped the gradual"
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mimppa | Why do cells have the urge to replicate? | We, humans, have reasons and motivations to keep living in this world, animals have a survival instinct. Beeing cells the smallest unit of life, what makes them want to replicate? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Ultimately this is just a wrongly composed question: Cells don't \"want\" anything, they don't \"think\", they just \"**are**\". So cells don't *want* to replicate, they *are* things that replicate. They are this way because they are based on cells in the past which replicated best; there were some variants which didn't replicate very well but as a consequence there weren't very many more of them and they aren't around today. Cells which replicate well become more numerous, and if you wait long enough only those which are good at doing so are left.",
"Cells that didn't replicate, died. Cells that continue to replicate mean that things continue to be alive. Any cells that tended to *not* replicate never had a chance to pass that tendency along. There is no \"want\"; it's just what cells do.",
"It’s not about wanting. They just do it. It’s a reaction to their internal conditions and external conditions. For the cells in our body, they’re triggered by certain factors to replicate and are also triggered by certain factors to stop replicating. Single cell organisms do the same for asexual reproduction, they just have slightly different triggers",
"Evolution by necessity favours living things that replicate. The living things that didn't replicate died out extremely quickly, leaving only those that constantly replicate themselves as the only living things. A cell on its own has no consciousness and no ability to think, it just follows what its genetic programming tells it to do, in which case nearly every cell in existence contains code telling it how to copy itself and when. It just blindly follows that programming to the letter.",
"Yeah as the others have said, cells just “do” that, not intentionally. Everything going on inside is governed by the physics of the particles involved, most of them proteins or similarly composed big molecules that have complex shapes and respond to different intermolecular forces. Certain ones react with each other to create new shapes and molecules and it just ticks on and on and we call it life."
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mimucd | How are taxes on crypto calculated? | Tax Question: I’m in Canada and I heard that 50% of gains are taxable and added to your income for that year you sell I believe so would this math be correct for example say you bought a crypto at 1.50$ and since then your gains are at $319,998.5 or just $320k from that point would you just take 50% of that 160k and multiply that by the tax bracket that associates with that? Our highest federal tax bracket here is 214k+ means 33% the second highest is between $150k to $214k 29% so would the profit you get be $273k? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That's not how tax brackets work. You don't get taxed 29% on all your income if your income is between $150k-$214k. You get taxed 29% on the income you make *between* $150k-$214k So if the $320k is your total gain, and you're only taxed on 50% of your gains, you would be taxed 29% on $10k (because you're being taxed on $160k of income and only $10k of that income is over $150k - ignoring any deductions for simplicity), and you would be taxed *less* on the remaining $150k (based on what the lower tax brackets are). So you would owe $2.9k for the $10k *over* that bracket you are, **plus** all the tax you owe for the lower brackets. Think of it like buckets of money. The 29% only holds about $64k worth of money (214-150), but you can only put money in that bucket once the previous buckets are full (and add up to $150k). So if you make $160k, only $10k gets put in that 29% bucket because the rest is already in the other lower taxed buckets. Example: Lets say there are 3 tax brackets - $0-$50k at 10%, $50k-$100k at 20%, $100k-$200k at 30%, and your taxable amount is $160k. You pay: * $5k for the first bracket (10% of the first $50k, reaching the $50k limit for this bracket) * $10k for the second bracket (20% of the *second* $50k, reaching the $100k total limit for this bracket) * $18k for the last bracket (30% of the final $60k remaining, reaching your total taxable income of $160k) So your total tax would be only $33k instead of the $48k it would be if your *entire* income was charged the higher 30% interest."
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min6c7 | Why do different countries have different power outlets? Is it on purpose? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Countries didn’t all develop their electric grids together, they were slapped together independently in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Eventually the entire developed world was electrified, but you had a problem at the borders - they hadn’t all selected the same voltage and frequency for their grids. Some had picked 50Hz, others 60. Some were at 200V, others were at 110V. Plug in a device that’s expecting the wrong flavor of electricity and it might explode. Rather than tear down their entire grid and start over, countries just made sure their plugs were unique so you can’t plug in a Russian toaster in Boston and burn the house down.",
"They have different power outlets because there is no universal, global authority on what power outlets should look like. So whenever a country implemented them, they just came up with whatever design they though was appropriate.",
"There is the IEC 60309 standard, best example is the blue 'Caravan Mains Socket' you see in campings across Europe. The red socket is standard use in three phase power network in theatres, events and construction work. URL_0"
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minn52 | Why is Ireland divided into two separate countries? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Britain. Ireland said “We want independence”, Britain said “fuck off”. Ireland said “Ok, we’ll just take it then” and Britain said “lol”. [12 years later.]( URL_2 ) Britain said “Im tired, wanna have like most of your country back but we’ll have like 3 cities?” Ireland said “NO!” 11 months of fight later... Britain said “how about now?” Ireland said “...” Britain said “Cheers! What a very fair and fantastic deal that you had voluntarily agreed to under your own terms!” Ireland used to be its own country in 1801 until Britain’s overtook it. Britain basically treated the Irish how Americans treated the Africans: like utter shit. They enforced their religion and practices on them and [exploited their resources]( URL_1 ) at a time when there was [a literal plague going on.]( URL_0 ) Ireland has been doing far better as result of the independence but Northern Ireland is absolutely disgraceful and has become a hotbed of crime, drug trafficking and illegal arms dealing. The reason why those particular cities were chosen by Britain? Oh well, it’s because those cities were **80 percent of industrial output** and by far the richest constituencies in the whole of Ireland at the time. So Britain purposefully chose the most advanced area at the time to keep and exploit, until today, where Northern Ireland is the [most poorest country in the United Kingdom.]( URL_3 ) But the Republic of Ireland has [has actually grown during a major pandemic.]( URL_4 ) Like, I hate to bash the UK and carry on the circle jerk of hating the UK, even though, the country is a good nation... but the fact that they parasitically exploit and destroy many nations is absolutely horrendous and it’s even more shambolic they themselves (the current British government) act in blatant ignorance of their diabolical past. Obviously, the situation is far more complex than the way I have explained it as, it still cannot be simplified to any other reason other than: Britain, and Her poisonous Majesty. (Words of Brit; because you cannot criticise Britain unless you’re a British teen living in the UK)"
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"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_War_of_Independence",
"https://scopeni.nicva.org/article/northern-ireland-has-the-lowest-poverty-rates-in-the-uk",
"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-05/irish-economy-defies-pandemic-to-grow-in-2020"
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minnvc | Why do news anchors always stack thier paper script then write on it while talking to the co-anchor in a zoomed out shot at the end of the news? | Like i never see them look at the papers. Why do they stack it like they just spent a hour reading it. I know they might read it during a commercial break but they stack it like they read the paper the whole time. Like They very affirmatively stack the papers. Why is it always in a zoomed out shot? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Because it makes them look natural in a way just staring blankly and silently into the camera does not.",
"I worked in tv news for a decade. The reasons vary, but part of it is to look professional and uphold a certain image that was developed back in the day when most notes were hand-written. Some of the older anchors on my station still used pen and paper extensively because they are often adding things literally last second before broadcast or need to remember something for later. One anchor I knew well had a special pen that he could not go on air without or he felt completely insecure. A lot of it is probably routine, it's a very stressful job, you are performing in front of a lot of people and it's easy to get totally derailed and lose your place if you don't have certain routines. Also, teleprompters BREAK ALL THE DAMN TIME! Those damned things, I can't tell you how many headaches they cause.",
"It's just theatrics to make them look business-like. Decades ago, they actually used written notes, but they usually have computer monitors set into the desktop, now. In those wide shots you mention, you can often see a flat piece if glass set into the desktop. There's a screen under there."
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mio2od | Why do birds waste their time migrating back north in the spring/summer? Wouldn’t it be easier to just chill down south year round? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Birds migrate north for the summer because there’s untapped resources and less competition up there. Down south you have competition from all the non-migratory species and threats from all the local predators. Rather than deal with that while trying to raise that year’s chicks, they fly to a place where there’s fewer local competitors and predators due to the harsh winters.",
"Sure, which is why there are birds that don't migrate. Some are native to the area. But imagine if no birds migrated and they all just stayed in the south. Now summer rolls around and all the birds are in the south and the north is entirely empty. All those birds competing over the resources in that area of land while just a bit north there are resources entirely untouched with no competition. Why wouldn't the birds that can move a bit north? And a bit more north, etc., until they can't do so anymore. Of course they would be pushed more south in the winter but not needing to fight other birds over food seems best.",
"you're gonna want to go north to have your babies, where there are no crocs or gators or confederates. Sure, it's nice to go south for vacation during the winter, but you wouldn't want to live there.",
"Nobody else has mentioned this one... Day length (meaning sunlit hours) in the summer in the northern hemisphere increases the closer you farther north you go. Longer day length means more time for adults to gather food for nestlings...and those little guys are hungry!",
"The southern hemisphere has the opposite seasons as the northern hemisphere. Spring and summer in the northern hemisphere are fall and winter, respectively, in the southern. By migrating to the hemisphere with spring/summer, the birds are always in seasons where food and living conditions are the most favorable."
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mioa7g | Why are human babies so fragile/weak? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We have big brains and stand upright so we can use our hands to do smart stuff with our big brains. But, big brains need to be encased in a big skull, and walking upright only works well if our hips are relatively narrow. But the skull needs to fit through the hips at birth! There is pressure to be smart and pressure to walk upright, so to avoid giving up too much of either the human child is born relatively undeveloped so its noggin can grow outside the womb.",
"Humans have huge brains and a small pelvis. To fit the brain through the pelvis, the baby has to be delivered severely undercooked. It’s a compromise we made during evolution to enable an upright posture and a supercomputer brain.",
"Answer: there's not a hard \"this is why\" answer, because often enough evolution doesn't work that way. But, the general explanation is that human babies have big brains, and end up putting a lot of their growth energy into building and maintaining that brain even in the womb. A huge percentage of the nutrients and blood flow goes directly to the human brain, far more so than just about any other animal, right from the start. As a result, a human child is born with a weeble wobble head, that it is physically incapable of supporting on its own. That's why everybody always says support the head of a newborn baby, it's own weight break the baby's neck if you don't. We traded the ability to run on our first day for a brain, because the advantages of having a big brain all your life made it more likely that we would live to reproduce."
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mioely | the Hubble Telescope - how does it take the high definition space pictures that people post all the time? | I keep seeing all these high definition renderings of galaxies over my feed with the caption that says Hubble Telescope but I’ve never questioned it until now. Are they really photographs and if so how are they generated? Is the telescope like a really good camera? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well the camera isn't particularly super amazing, or the optics super amazing at least compared to earth telescopes other than that it's designed to work in space. In space though you get some really really major benefits from not being in atmosphere. The downside of being on Earth is that air doesn't transmit light perfectly. Different temperatures of air moving around in particular wiggle light around. (Side note this is why stars twinkle). This makes long exposure photographs end up blurry. The amount of sharpness you can get from a photo depends on how well you can compensate for that. With Hubble you can take ridiculously long exposure photographs of dim things and be able to combine them together by referencing some brighter nearby star for aligning the multiple images, with essentially zero loss in sharpness. For example the total exposure time for the hubble deep field was 22 days.",
"They are data collected by the telescope and then processed by people on the ground. The telescope operates in a number of frequencies of light, and most of the processing is mapping those colors into colors that look attractive. Where the telescope points and what it takes pictures of are managed by the [Space Telescope Science Institute]( URL_0 ) in Baltimore, who will also operate the James Webb telescope. Scientists make requests and describe why that collection would be a good idea. The data in generally available to all.",
"It's called a telescope, but it's not like there are humans up in space looking at the image that comes in through the lens. Images are captured digitally, just like any phone camera, then transmitted to earth. Pics are different from anything that can be seen from earth, because the light isn't filtered through the thick atmosphere."
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miprhl | Is the Earth's Orbit around the sun linked to the Seasons? | The tilt of the Earth is 23.5 degrees. As I understand it, this causes the Earth to warble like a top, and this will then cause the seasons. A tropical year (time between two equinoxes) is 20 minutes shorter than a calendar year (time it takes rotate around the sun). & #x200B; My question is: Are these two related? It seems like a very small margin of error between the two. Or is it a huge coincidence? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"Earth does warble like a top, but it’s not noticeable within one year. It takes several dozen thousands of years to make one full warble. So seasons are not about that. The Earth keeps its axis straight, but the northern end of that axis looks away from the Sun in December and towards the Sun in July, making these months cold and warm respectively. That’s in the Northern hemisphere. For Southern hemisphere it’s the other way round.",
"The tilt is what causes the seasons. [Nasa has a pretty good ELI5 explanation]( URL_1 ), particularly that graphic most of the way down the page. The 20 minute difference between tropical years and sidereal years just means that the seasons happen in a slightly different part of the orbit each year. [This diagram helps explain this]( URL_0 ); so where the Earth is in relation to the Sun during Winter *now* will be spring in 5,000 years, and summer in another 5,000 years.",
"The 'warble like a top' thing is probably not quite what you're picturing it as. Put a chair down in the middle of the room and imagine it's the sun. Now, stand facing the north wall of the room, with the chair on your right. Lean a little bit towards the right. Now, take a step forward and a step to the right, while still leaning to the right. Now the chair is behind you. Now take a step to the right and a step backwards. Now the chair is to your left. At the beginning of this exercise, you were leaning toward the sun, and now you're leaning away from it! Even though the direction of your lean hasn't changed a bit. That's what seasons are. Now, imagine that your sense of direction isn't perfect, and after circling the chair once, instead of leaning perfectly due east, you're now leaning a tiny fraction of a degree *north* of east. (in the Earth's case, this is because of something called gyroscopic precession.) That's where the 20 minute perturbation comes from. The less your lean drifts, the smaller that perturbation will be. So no, it's no coincidence. The tropical year and the time of Earth's revolution are so close in length because the precession is small. If the precession were nonexistent, they would match up exactly."
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miq6ka | Why are big dump trucks not responsible for broke windshields, but a regular four door truck is? | I always see these stickers on the back of a dump truck asking people to stay 200 ft away, and how they aren’t responsible for broken windshields. No one ever really stays 200 ft away anyway, but if something were to fly out of the back and hit a car’s windshield- are they really not responsible? Most won’t even read the sticker of they’re even 20 ft away. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That sticker doesn't mean shit. Thats not the law just because they have a sticker. It kinda just means \"if you're stupid enough to drive close to me then it's your own fault\" but in a politer way.",
"The sticker is out there by the company to try and pass the blame onto you, it's a lie. Commercial vehicles are always responsible for properly securing their load. The company will argue with you that it's your fault, and hope that you do not have the wherewithal to actually take them to court to get a payout. In order to pursue it, you would have to identify the truck, the driver and date/time/location of the incident, which is very hard to do (without a dashcam).",
"They are still responsible for any damage they cause - the sticker doesn't magically get rid of their liability. The goal is to try and convince people not to hassle them about damages caused by the truck. Enough people assume that they can't press for damages, so the stickers do their job.",
"Never believe things like that and parking lots that say they're not responsible for damages, and that kind of thing. While you may not actually be able to win a case against them, it's their attempt to keep you from even trying.",
"They are still on a legal thin ice even with the sticker. Their arguments is that they are warning you about falling pebbles and for people to keep their distance so they are not responsible if people do not follow their warnings. How well this would hold up in court depend on a lot on the conditions. It is likely not going to help that much, but it will make people stay a bit further back then they normally would."
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miqjym | What happens with a video is taking a long time to load and the circle keeps spinning? | What goes behind the scenes? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you're watching a video, there is a connection between you and the server. Let's use youtube as an example. YouTube will start sending data packets to you. These packets contain tiny bits of the video you want to watch. Since the internet is unpredictable and unstable, a buffering system is used. Ideally, the packets will arrive faster than the video playing speed and get stored until it's their turn to be used, so you can watch without any interruptions. However, what happens if the network is slow, and the video speed is greater than the packet sending speed? Well, the video obviously can't be played if there are no packets arriving. So the video has to pause, wait for more packets to arrive, then continue playing."
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miqwjk | why can't other species talk? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well. They can! We just can't understand it without a lot of study. I want you to think on what the first words of humanity may have sounded like. With no language, no translation, and big brain. Our first words were probably just screaming and whimpering. A bunch of humans together and one noticed a LION! Scream and point! Do that enough times and you have the word for lion. Other intelligent animals already speak and communicate in there own way. Dolphins squeek at high frequency and it sounds like just noise, but they can coordinate well enough to literally Hurd fish into groups and create big enough waves to force them into shallow water with teamwork. Apes and monies don't need to be too vocal unless they are far away. So they will communicate by body language and other things.",
"Chimps can’t talk because their larynx (voice box) is too high. Human larynx is low in the throat, so that the upper throat serves as an additional resonator along the mouth cavity allowing us to make fine-tuned vowel sounds which a chimp simply cannot produce physically. Chimps can be taught a sort of sign language though. They’ve been known to learn several hundred different signs and use them different combinations. But it seems that they are unable to do grammar like humans, so their sign sentences remain very very simple. The reason for that is that don’t have the brains for that, obviously, not like we humans do."
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mirqc5 | How do game servers handle millions of persistent connections at the same time? | If there are a million gamers connected to a server, are they connecting to one computer or something masquerading as one computer but actually many? Are the connections "held" open for each player through out the session? Once a player connects to a particular physical server, do they always connect to the same server during the session? Does this server (or many servers) communicate to a database on a single computer or again, many masquerading as one? (Also, how much data is transmitted during say, a 1 hour session of an MMORPG?) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"MMOs are made up of a large number of servers. Looking at World of Warcraft, each 'realm' that you can join is a separate server. You can also have different parts of the same 'realm' hosted on different servers. In Eve Online for example, there's only one 'realm' to join, but various star systems are hosted on different servers, so as you move around you'll be moved onto different servers. The databases would also be duplicated and split over various computers for redundancy and whatnot. Amount of data transmitted and the nitty gritty of server architecture will depend on the game in question.",
"No server handles the gameplay of millions of gamers at the same time, the game client will reach out to a server, which will tell the client which game server to connect to. Most mmorpg will use geographic areas to break up its main server farms (to reduce latency), Then they split it up further into instances, which usually have 20-50 players around in most areas, (mostly for quality of gameplay then technical limitations). Those instances are usually virtual computers that run with a small percentage of a large powerful servers hardware. Allowing multiple instances to run on a single hardware server. In recent event's there was a huge battle in eve, where a few thousand people joined into one instance which pushed the hardware to the limit, causing that one area of the game to have terrible performance, the game developer's said that when the hardware is pushed to the limit, that unpredictable things happen to players/ships, but they allow this. Other games like wow and destiny do not allow the server hardware to become overloaded to protect the game play."
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mis5pm | Why does a bruise turn every color under the sun before it heals? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A bruise happens when small blood vessels underneath your skin are injured and leak blood into the surrounding area. This causes the red/purple color we usually see first. That blood will then begin to lose oxygen, turning it a darker blue. The bruise stays blue/purple for a few days as the cells continue to break down and release iron. In the final step of the healing process, the bruise turns from purple to yellowish green as the hemoglobin breaks down into biliverdin (a bile pigment). TL;DR it's our body's process of breaking down blood underneath our skin."
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misqo8 | what are mosfets, and are they interchangeable with transistors? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Mosfet is a type of transistor. Mosfet stands for Metal Oxide Semiconductor field effect transistor. They are generally considered superior in most applications to the main alternative, known as the Bipolar Junction Transistor (BJT). Field Effect Transistors (FETs) are a kind of transistor that work a bit different from a BJT. Field Effect Transistors kind of work like capacitors, where the gate itself behaves kind of like a capacitor, and when this capacitor is charged or discharged determines when the FET conducts between its source and drain. The cool thing about a FET is that it requires very little current to get going, you just have to charge the gate capacitor and at that point you don't need more current beside to supplement capacitor losses to maintain the channel between the FET. The field effect here is the whole capacitor thing, referring to how capacitors store charge by creating an electric field across two plates disconnected from each other. The metal oxide part refers to the dielectric between the gate and body of the transistor (remember, capacitors contain two conductive regions separated by a dielectric, something that does not conduct). Typically dielectric is silicon dioxide, putting this between the gate and body of the transistor creates the capacitor we want with our mosfet. Why silicon dioxide? Because we are making these devices on big slabs of silicon anyways, we just have to add oxygen in the right places and everything works."
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misyiu | - Why is tooth pain so intense? | I understand that pain exists as a protection mechanism but what useful purpose does tooth pain have? Today we can go to the dentist if we have pain - this obviously want always the case ... | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Tooth pain isn't any different of a 'protection mechanism' than any other kind of pain. Dental infections can quite literally kill you. \"People\" have known about the necessity of tooth care for millennia. A recovered tooth in Italy showed signs of rudimentary dental cleaning with flint tools; it was c.14,000 years old. Studies suggest that Neanderthals had basic dental tools. The first \"filling\" made from beeswax is 6000 years old. Long-tailed macaques use feathers or string as dental floss.",
"The primary purpose of tooth pain is to make it your #1 priority--above food, water, shelter. Because if it's not attended to, what was once a small cavity can cause a huge infection, making it nearly impossible for you to eat in comfort. So your body makes sure that you attend to it ASAP so you don't mess it up more.",
"I think some of the reason is because the inflammation is in such a narrow space. Think about getting a splinter in your finger. The area gets red and a bit swollen (because blood vessels dilate to get more blood and white blood cells to fight the intruder). It's always somewhat painful, maybe even throbbing pain. If you don't get the splinter out, the wound will start to develop pus, which is ultimately your body trying to get rid of the foreign material. It's not completely analogous, but when the same happens on a tooth the inflammation ie the swelling is inside a very narrow space called the pulp of the tooth, where the blood vessels and nerves of a tooth are. Blood vessels dilate and press on the nerves which causes the well recognizable throbbing pain inside the tooth. In a case where the tooth pulp is already dead (sometimes it happens slowly and painlessly), the necrotic tissue and bacteria get in contact with the bone around the tooth roots. Your body is trying to clean it up, since dead tissue and bacteria in the bone is not good. But it's hard, because blood flow inside the tooth is gone and also the vessels inside the bone are sparse and small. That's how you ultimately develop an abscess, which is collection of pus inside the bone. Again, not very much space, so a lot of pressure is caused and a lot of pressure is often translated as pain. If it gets too far, the pus will find a way out of the bone, because bone is hard but quite porous. All the body's products that fight infections irritate the surrounding tissues, making them swell and there you go, your whole cheek is swollen because of one stupid tooth. This is a very simple explanation but trust me, I'm a dentist lol."
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mit6wl | How are ISPs able to handle internet traffic coming from so many different places at once? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Think of the photos you've seen of old manually operated telephone switchboards. Now take that, expand the size and connections by several orders of magnitude, and shrink it all down onto specialized silicon chips, dozens or hundreds of which are packed into each physical switch and router. Then, these specialized switches and routers use light, as in fiber optics, to transmit data. Then, there are many, many nodes containing all this data transmission gear distributed across a global network. There is a hierarchy, principal nodes to secondary ones and tertiary, to route the data to where it's supposed to go. All of this happens at the speed of electricity, so, for our intents and purposes, light speed. So, in summary, they use specialized switches, fiber optic cable and lots and lots and lots of both to handle the traffic. Hope this has helped!"
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mitd58 | Why is printing sutff the hardest thing to do half the time with my printer? | Like, am i just dumb? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"you didn't buy a Brother. no one should let a brother buy something other than a brother. fr.",
"I doubt you are dumb. It is most likely your printer. I found the ones that the paper is flat in a drawer work more consistently. The ones where the paper drops down have more problems. In my case, the flat drawer is a laser printer and the drop down is a color inkjet."
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mitjaz | Why are Arcades not considered gambling like slot machines? | In the arcades i've been to, i've seen that there was "jackpot" machines and such, but obviously you insert real money, and then get a bunch of tickets in return. Although I was watching a YT video and these guys used £500 of real money to use at jackpot machines in Arcades and managed to get a bunch of stuff worth an easy £1000. And I just thought, how could this not be considered gambling? You're putting in real money, and depending how lucky you are will determine what you recieve back. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Arcades are considered games of skill, not gambling. If you get a bunch of tickets when playing a basketball game, that is because you are skilled at making shots, not because you got lucky and won a coin flip. Games of skill that offer rewards are legal. Also, since these games gift you tickets and not money, it also falls short of gambling. You cannot trade away these tickets for money, so you are not waging money for money.",
"Gambling rules typically don't apply as long as real world money isn't being used as a prize. That's just the way lawmakers have decided to draw the line on what's acceptable and what isn't.",
"Did they really get £1000 though? The only arcades I've been to, the prizes were cheap imported consumer stuff, mostly toys, with a wholesale value definitely less than you spent playing and with zero resale value."
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miuc4f | How do rich people and corporations manage to pay so little taxes compared to the regular John Doe ? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"For individuals, a lot of their income is actually from dividends and stock sales, which get taxed at lower capital gains rates. And remember income (salary) != net worth (assets). Jeff Bezos's only made $1.6 million salary in 2019. Yet his net worth increased $67 billion. If he doesn't sell any shares in a year (Amazon doesn't pay dividends so no capital gains) he pays taxes on that $1.6 million. Corporations have lots of attorneys. You only pay taxes on profits, not revenue. If you lose money, you don't pay tax. Amazon for many years was making lots of money, but they were spending more money on expansion, so never made a profit. There's weird and different rules for buying equipment vs hiring someone full time vs hiring them as contractors, that all would contribute to the 'loss' side.",
"The top 1% of taxpayers in the US account for 20% of the country's income and 40% of the country's taxes. That ratio is consistent with what you would expect given the tax rates in the country. Typically people who say that someone isn't paying taxes don't understand how taxes work. Specifically, neither people nor corporations are taxed on revenue - everyone is only taxed on *income*, which is the amount of money you have left over to spend on yourself. For low wealth individuals nearly 100% of the money you make is income because the only cost involved in you making money is your time. But for high wealth individuals and corporations that isn't true. If you have to pay someone else $100 so that they can earn you $150 then it doesn't make any sense to take you on that $150 in revenue, it only makes sense to tax you on the $50 in income that you actually made. If you do tax on revenue then all you do is create a situation where people can't afford to both pay taxes and hire employees. Imagine if you have to pay someone $100 to make $101. If you get taxed on that $101 of revenue then you end up losing money on that, so no one would do it and its rare for anyone to have a profit margin higher than a few percent. What this means is that just because someone or something has huge revenue doesn't mean that they have much income. That is, just because Company X is making $50 billion per year doesn't mean that it has $50 billion per year to distribute to shareholders. In reality it has far less than that, and its that disposable income that the company gets taxed on. This makes for good headlines but, again, actual tax receipts in the US more or less match their expected distribution based on the current tax rates.",
"When a business make profits, it pay taxes. But when it has losses, companies don't get tax rebates (ie. the government doesn't pay them for losing money). However, companies can carry forward previous years' losses and subtract those from future profits. So Company A is a startup and lost $10m in 2018, and $12m in 2019. In 2020, they grew enough to make a $2m profit. But because of those $22m in losses, they can carry those forward and report $0 profits. And in 2021, they make $10m but again can apply past losses to bring down tax liability. It's only in 2022 when they make $40m in profits and only have $10m in carryover left that they have to pay taxes on $30m in profits.",
"There are a lot of bad answers here. You’re not going to get a good answer for this on Reddit. Tax law is widely difficult to understand and Every. Single. Person’s. Taxes are different. There are some rich people who pay taxes out the ass and others who pay very little. It should also be stated that half of the US population pays no federal income tax, that would be the lower earning half, not the higher.",
"Premise of question doesn’t make sense. The top 1% pays more taxes than the bottom 90% combined.",
"To be fair, they pay a lot of taxes: > the top 1 percent of all taxpayers (taxpayers with AGI of $480,804 and above), earned 19.7 percent of all AGI in 2016, and paid 37.3 percent of all federal income taxes. So, the top 1% paid for 37% of the country.",
"There are two very different tax questions here. Personal taxes and corporate taxes. Let us tackle the \"rich people paying less tax first\" -- quite honestly people are lying when they tell you that. There are different taxes that people pay 1. Federal taxes: Rich people almost always pay more than most (read > 99.999%) of regular John and Jane doe. That .0001% paying more than rich people is likely due to really bad tax planning or windfall events, not a normal occurrence. Rich people typically will likely have 2 streams of income -- earned income, which is the pay you make working a job, and unearned income, which is the money you make put putting your money to work (stocks, rental properties, savings account etc). * Taxes on earned income: Most rich people make more than average joe, so the taxes they pay almost certainly be more too - considerably more - as the more you make, the more you pay (it is not linear, there is graduations where your tax rate goes up for additional dollar earned). However, some rich people can take, for example, just 1 dollar in pay, and rest in stock grants/options, so they will not be paying taxes on a regular basis. However, whenever they sell their grants/options, they will pay a portion of their stock proceeds as regular, earned income, and the rest as unearned income. - Taxes on unearned income: Unearned income is taxed in 2 separate styles. One that you earn within the last year, one that you spent considerable time in earning it. Interest income, and stocks that you buy and sell within a span of a year are called short term income (short term capital gains), and will be taxed at the same tax rates as regular income. Stocks that you held on for more than 1 year is given special treatment and is taxed at a lower rate (long term capital gains). Most rich people will have a mix of short term and long term capital gains, with the mix leaning mostly towards long term gains rather than short term. The long term capital gains rate for people making less than 40k (single filer) is 0%, 15 % for people making between 40k and 440K, and 20% for people making above that. Note that the rates are determined based on AGI, so it is not 40K of investment income alone. Further more anyone making more than 200K needs to pay an additional 3% due to Obamacare provisions. Which means unless your rich person is only taking less than 40K out they are paying close to 15%, more typically it will be 18% and 23%. Your average Joe after, all said and done, does not beat that number for federal taxes. So you can reduce the number a little bit, if you donate you money to certain types of charities, you can deduct that amount from your taxable income. Say you made $100 and donate $50, you will be taxed on the $50. So if for $100, you would have had to pay a tax of $30, but because you donated half your income, you fall in a different tax bracket, you may pay only $12. People will propagandize and sell a false narrative that the rich person paid only $12 while making $100. While a person who made $60 is paying more than then rich person making $100. 2. FICA taxes: These are taxes like social security and medicare that you pay for government to take care of you when you are old. Medicare is to be paid on every dollar earned (and sometimes unearned money), but the social security tax has a cutoff, where you dont have to pay anymore, but till you reach that dollar amount (currently around 150K), everyone pays the same rate. The criticism here is that a person making 500K will pay less as a total percentage of his salary than a person making 20K. Which is true, but the person making 500K still paid a lot more than person making 20K. The criticism is somewhat true, but misplaced. FICA are security nets for when you are no longer working, and people making 20K will see a far better return on their contribution than a person making 150K, also rich people will be taxed on their social security earnings (as they are likely going to have other income) whereas poor people will not be taxed on their social security. Overall it is unfair to compare just the tax rate for this type of tax. What most people do is mix the tax rates of FICA (6.3%) and your Federal income rates and make it appear as if the regular joe pays is more than the rich person. This is disingenuous to do, as they are separate taxes and serve different purposes. The people who are telling rich pay less taxes also are not tell you the true picture, the top 5-10% pay more than 70% of the overall tax (numbers are fuzzy, but it should be in that ballpark). Corporations: Some of the criticism is valid here, there are many benefits and tax code for corporations. 1. unlike individuals, corporate can shield the income from international operations from being taxed in US. So while Amazon or Google, or Netflix can claim they made $100 million, they pay taxes on only the money they make in US. 2. Special credits : Like if you invest in R & D, you get a tax credit (not deduction, which reduces your taxable income, credit reduces your tax), so for tech companies who would anyway invest in R & D, this credit allows them to reduce their taxes. 3. Losses: Most businesses can write off losses from earlier years (individuals can also write off, but only 3K a year), so if you made loss for a lot of years, and then started making profits, you can recoup your losses. Amazon was running under losses for a long long time as they prioritized growing business (killing smaller competitors by taking a loss), now they can make a profit and use the previous losses to not pay taxes for a while. The other cool trick companies can do is buy a failed company and use their losses to reduce your profit!!! (ain't that cool?). Having said that, no corporation is paying 0% tax. Corporations hire people and they are paying 6.3% of FICA for each employee they hire (which is in addition to taxes individuals pay), they will also pay in terms of business licensing, unemployment insurance, and other taxes.",
"The top 1 percent of Americans, the very wealthy, pay 39.5 percent of the taxes here. URL_0 They aren’t “getting away” with anything imo they are taxed very disproportionately."
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miuftc | Why does crying makes your nose and eyes watery | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Why does crying makes your nose and eyes watery Because your tears drain directly into your nasal cavity. Every ml of tears that does not leave your eye via your face ends up as snot."
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miurw3 | Why would a movie get delayed by one week? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A lot of times, especially with big budget movies, the movie is not actually finished until maybe a few weeks before release. So it’s possible that some kind of issue or delay may add a few weeks to production and push the date out. But more likely, moving your release date by a week is done because the producers think that the movie will do better if released a different weekend. This is usually because that weekend has another movie that’s expected to do really well and the studio doesn’t want their movie to compete. Edit: are you talking about Uncharted? For a release that far out, it’s definitely the latter. I would guess Sony doesn’t want it released the same week as Death on the Nile. Edit Edit: the original weekend is also the super bowl."
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miuzz1 | Why can't you take a good picture of the moon on your phone but you can with a camera? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Phone cameras have wide angle lenses that make everything within the frame look smaller. Even the zoomed in lenses on newer phones are closer to being standard lenses on an interchangeable lens camera. Plus, phones have very small sensors that perform poorly in low light. They are increasingly good at adding automatic noise reduction and sharpening, but the quality still doesn't compare to using an ILC. With an ILC, you can use a lens with a much longer focal length to make the moon larger in the frame, and also get a better image because of the larger sensor."
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miw8nv | Why is our moon is called “the moon” yet other planet’s moons have actual names? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Actually. Our moon is called Selene from the Greeks. And from latin it is called Luna. Also, the word moon can be traced to the word mōna, an Old English word from medieval times. Mōna shares its origins with the Latin words metri, which means to measure, and mensis, which means month. So, we see that the moon is called the moon because it is used to measure the months It's referred to as \"THE moon\" because it's our moon. Just like we call our sun \"THE sun\". \"Sun\" and \"moon\" can be countable nouns. ... Moon is demonstrated as a countable noun with this sentence: Jupiter has many moons. It used to be common to refer to any star as a sun, and in this context it makes sense to say \"the\" before it to make sure we are talking about our sun or moon",
"Some consider the name of the moon to be Luna after an ancient Goddess. The idea of the moon as the name of the moon is related to the word months because of the lunar cycle. The name of the moon was given long before we knew other moons existed around other planets. When these had been discovered, they were named. Our moon's name remains the same."
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miwve8 | With all the freshwater rivers of the world flowing into the seas over millions of years, why is the saltiness of the seas not reducing over time ? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because just as much water evaporates into the air. That water then falls as rain that goes into the rivers and ends up in the ocean.",
"1) those rivers are actually dissolving salt from rocks and sweeping it into the ocean. 2) when water evaporates out of the ocean, it leaves the salt behind in the ocean.",
"The freshwater carries a little bit of salt with it but the water evaporates leaving the oceans slightly saltier over time. URL_0"
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mix7tb | Why are people able to eat/drink gold leaf and not get metal poisoning from it? | It’s fairly common for gold leaf to be added to alcohol or desserts to make them appear more luxurious. Why is it possible to get lead or mercury poisoning just from skin contact but gold seems to be safe to ingest? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Gold is non-reactive with the human body. It doesn't trigger an immune response, and it doesn't tend to chemically bind with anything important in our bodies. That's the same reason Gold doesn't corrode, it doesn't react with Oxygen to rust (oxidize) That's why Gold is edible and why it's often used in dental work.",
"Not all metals are poisonous. Gold in particular is very nonreactive and so causes no problems. There are several metals that we need to live, like sodium, potassium and iron though, as with everything, too much can still be toxic.",
"Because it’s mostly inert. It will not significantly react with anything in your digestive tract. Same why it’s safe to put it on your skin in form of jewellery."
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mixbra | Why do you have to refrigerate some items after you open them? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When they are vacuum sealed some products (like Mayo, Ketchup, or BBQ sauce) can last for long periods. However, once that seal (or even freshness seal) has been broken all manner of bacteria is able to get inside. Refrigeration does not stop this process, but, only slows it down. Mayo will stay fresh sealed on a shelf, but, turn after a month or so opened and in the fridge."
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10
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miybey | What is the Fourier decomposition technique? | I was reading [this paper]( URL_0 ) in stellar astrophysics which discusses how they use the Fourier decomposition technique to analyze light curves of variable stars? What is this technique exactly and why is it so useful? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"i don't know how it applies to astrophysics, but i see no answers so i'll write what i do know basically, fourier decomposition is breaking down some function into simpler trigonometric functions. literally any function can be turned into three parts. 1- a constant 2- sine waves 3- cosine waves this applies to ANY function. even a square wave or a random scribble can be broken down into these parts. most require an infinite series of sine/cosine waves, so for any applications (such as signals in electrical engineering) they must be approximated. but just reading a little bit in the paper makes it seem like they use the sine/cosine equations to represent light curves. which makes sense, since it's a good way to represent irregular signals/functions with math."
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miykq2 | why does shaving your face after about a week of not shaving it not hurt at all with very little irritation, but shaving every day or so, causes a lot of cuts and irritation? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"From I was told the hair follicles get exposed after shaving. Its a tiny pocket of skin hair grows out of. URL_0 If a person shaves everyday the follicles is always exposed. This allows bacteria to get an irritate the follicle. It really depends on the hair type and skin type but everyone can can \"razor burn\". This is why people use after shave or witch hazel or the really complicated post shave rituals. Do not look up folliculitis."
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"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4d/Hair_follicle-en.svg/1200px-Hair_follicle-en.svg.png"
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miyz6l | Why and how does eating substantially bellow your BMR make your metabolism slow down? | Biology/nutrition | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"It’s mostly about nutrition rather than total consumption / calories. If you get plenty of nutrients, all the important building blocks your body needs, then your body can use them to build / repair, so it gets busy doing that which uses lots of energy (high metabolism). If you don’t get enough of the good food content (either not eating enough, or eating poor food like takeaways, processed foods, etc.) then your body can’t do what it needs to, and actually does less of the building / repair work. If this continues for a long time, the body acts as it would with a famine, the same way it responds to starvation, and cuts back on energy use as much as possible (low metabolism). The key to healthy diet and high metabolism is ensuring you get a fully nutritional intake. A bit of junk on top of that is alright, as long as you get all the necessary nutrition."
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miz00j | How do scientists determine the age of Old structures like Stonehenge? | I recently came across a post of Stonehenge in Spain claiming to be older than the one in UK. Now, how do scientists determine the age of Stonehenge? Usually for structures, there will be a supporting document to determine the age. I don’t think any exists for Stonehenge. I can possibly take the rocks from Stonehenge right now and arrange it in a square. If one carbon dates it, the rocks are going to be old but How to prove it’s not done recently ? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"My expertise is not on Stonehenge, and I’m not sure which of these techniques has or hasn’t been done at that particular site, but I can give some insights into how we do this kind of stuff in general. Dating stone structures is very difficult but there are a number of approaches. One relatively recent technique is called cosmogenic exposure dating. Basically (ELI5) once a rock is exposed at the surface, it’s continually bombarded by particles that are created in the upper atmosphere from cosmic rays. The flux of these particles is relatively steady over time and you can measure how much of them have accumulated on the surface and work out the age since the stone was quarried. Another approach: If rocks have been coated with carbonate minerals, (which is common in caves and rockshelters...I’m not so sure this would be valid at Stonehenge) you can do something called Uranium Series dating that is based on the decay of uranium into lead and can tell you how much time has elapsed since the carbonate coating began to form. There’s also something called Optically Stimulated Luminescence dating that can date the time since a soil that contains particles of quartz was last exposed to sunlight. If you could get a sample from beneath some of the stones, it could tell you when the holes were dug to set them in place. Finally, in a more traditional approach, people don’t actually date the structures themselves, but rather look for artifacts that are associated with the structures that can be dated. Carbon dating only works on organic material, not rocks. This could be bone or charcoal or other organic remains that can be dated by radiocarbon, or it could be things like stone tools or pottery that are known to be distinctive to a particular time period. There are a lot of details and caveats I didn’t go into for the sake of ELI5. Again, I wish I could speak more to what people have done specifically at Stonehenge, but those are some of the ways we generally try and do this type of thing.",
"Context from other cues in the environment. If it's buried naturally, how long does it take that much soil to build up? Were evidence of tools, middens (trash pits), etc found at the site? Age of trees on the area, and then using the tree rings to correlate to known dates (huge science in tracing history via tree rings). Were modified organic materials (like wooden beams, carvings) found on site? Are they above or below the site in the soil profile? You can date things above it and say it's at least this age. Items below will tell you that it's younger than such and such age. Hunting through unrelated documentation like histories, myths, art to look for mentions of it. It's not often an exact science, and ages of prehistoric/early human sites get changed all the time, even when it's been agreed for years that it's x age. Knowledge is power, and more knowledge has the power to make change.",
"From what I understand it has to do with the weathering of the tool marks left by whoever built them that or some kind of under ground imagining to see how deep it has sunk or some combination of the 2."
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mizx98 | Why Do Cold Or Rainy Conditions Promote Sickness? | When I was a kid, all of my friends and I used to love playing outside when it was raining but all of our parents wouldn’t want us to stay out for too long because they all believed that we’d catch a cold or get sick. I specifically recall one day there was a huge amount of rain for a sustained time and we had a creek behind our cul de sac that basically turned into a small running river. Our parents all said we shouldn’t go outside but we all went to the creek and just floated down it over and over again. Over the next few days all of us got colds. Is this a commonly spread myth or is there any scientific basis behind this belief? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"People tend to stay inside more often when it’s cold. When people group together inside there is a higher chance of spreading the virus to more people, hence why more people get sick in the winter. It’s not so much the cold weather that makes us sick but how we shelter from it that increases the spread.",
"One of you had a cold virus and passed it on to the rest of you. That's the only reason. They've tested the cold Theory by having people in ice rooms sitting on blocks of ice, no one got sick because of it.",
"Plz someone correct me if im wrong, but i once read. That the body is constantly fighting with viruses and bacteria and if your getting very cold your immune system gets suppressed and you loose the fight more easily .....",
"The studies claiming that there is no connection between being cold and catching viral infections were methodologically wrong and there actually **is** a connection for two (as of yet identified) reasons: 1. Our immune system works worse in cold temperature. (there is a reason why our body temperature rises when we combat a disease). 2. Our cells are less likely to commit voluntary cellular suicide. That means, if they get infected by a virus, they are less likely to prevent it's propagation.",
"Being cold is one thing, being wet is another, but being cold & wet can really put the body through the ringer. An adult will be sensible in the cold rain, but a kid will do a backflip into the creek and not think twice about their blue toes. Little bodies can get hypothermia a lot faster than a big one, and parents worry. Also, it's possibly a holdover from what their parents or grandparents told them. Way back when, damn near everyone had TB and cold, wet air is really bad for TB (fluid in the lungs is not helped by more fluid). It was also not always 100% obvious someone had TB until the weather turned (maybe it seemed like a minor cough in dry weather). Great-Grandma never explained those particulars to her kids though, and thus it's gotten passed down unaltered, unquestioned for years.",
"Only one of you had a cold when you went to the creek and gave it to the rest of you. As far as the myth... well, I believe that putting stress on your body like trying to keep warm in wet conditions, will make you more likely to get sick, it's not a direct result of the weather, more how well you handle it."
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mj025u | why can’t a plane get to a certain altitude and in the rotational path of the destination, switch to just floating in the air, wait for the Earth to rotate, and then just come land down? Instead of flying to destination. | Or if they actually can do this, but choose not to, then why not? Thanks! | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The same reason you don't immediately go flying when you lift a foot above the ground: momentum isn't immediately zeroed out, and you continue moving with the earth",
"To elaborate a bit more on the other answer, you can’t let the earth rotate because both you and the air around you are still rotating. If the atmosphere didn’t rotate with the earth, we’d have winds going at 1000 miles an hour as the atmosphere passed by. Therefore, even if you managed to get rid of the plane’s momentum, the atmosphere would push you along",
"Planes don't float. They push air in such a way that there is more pressure under the plane than over so it rises. If they stopped, they would plummet to the ground.",
"Newton's first law: An object in motion tends to stay in motion Planes + balloons don't drift over the Earth's surface waiting for it to rotate for the same reason you don't go flying off into space when you jump straight up. Your angular momentum is carried with you even when you leave the surface of the Earth. You are traveling roughly 1000 miles per hour sitting still because of the Earth's rotation. To hover in place over the spinning Earth something would have to act upon you to slow you down.",
"What you usually think of as \"flying west at several hundred miles an hour\" is essentially that. The problem is that the *air* is rotating along with the rest of the Earth, and the movement you feel in midair depends on your motion relative to the movement of the air."
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mj094j | How is it that in a pitch black room and you bring your hand closer to your face, you can sense how close it is? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's a sense, such as taste. We have more than 5 senses, but the 5 ones we're taught are the main ones. One of our 'minor senses' includes *proprioception*, which is the sense of where our limbs are in space, and what you're describing."
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mj0bde | Aspirin saves lives in during a heart attack | ELI5, how does aspirin save lives during a heart attack? The only information I've found online is either "it stops clotting and reduces the size of a clot" or really technical medical terminology. As a first responder, I've physically seen someone "get better" after chewing aspirin when having the textbook signs and symptoms of a heart attack and I'd like to know how it works. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Heart attack = clogged artery Platelets in your blood stick together to form a blood clot. Aspirin is an anti-platelet, hence it decreases the blockage that may be causing irreversible damage to a person by the minute. Blood thinner is a layman term. But really there are anti-coagulants (ex. Warfarin) and anti-platelets (ex. Aspirin) that targets different mechanisms of the ‘clot formation’ process.",
"As a block to blood clotting, the overall result is that blood has less viscosity. Thinner blood is easier to pump and takes some of the work off an injured heart. Anything that makes things easier for the heart is going to be a good thing during a heart attack. Plus, if they have a partial blockage, blood gets through easier, helping out, too.",
"Aspirin does not decrease the viscosity of blood. The reason Aspirin helps during a heart attack is because most heart attacks occur when a clot forms in one or more of the blood vessels that are providing blood flow to the heart muscle. Aspirin inhibits the clot formation process, helping to break up the clot or stopping the clot from growing, which makes it easier for the heart muscle to receive blood. This has nothing to do with making the blood less viscous. The term blood \"thinner\" is a euphemism - they do not actually make the blood less viscous.",
"A truly ELI5 answer (that I use all the time at work as a nurse) is this: The aspirin makes the parts of your blood that clot more slippery so they don’t stick to one another and form a new clot or make an existing clot bigger.",
"Be very very careful if you are going to do this. There are people with allergies to Salicylates and an aspirin could kill them. I am one of those people.",
"Eli5: aspirin blocks thing in your body which causes your blood to clot. If the blood is thinner, your heart can pump it out easier. Imagine trying to suck a thick shake out of a McDonald’s cup vs drinking a coke - it’s so much easier. This is the same for the heart - as during a heart attack, part of the heart is essentially not working so by making the blood thinner, you make it easier to pump. Non eli5- aspirin IRREVERSIBLY blocks something called cyclooxygenase. COX is responsible for the production of prostaglandins and thromboxane a2 which are incredibly Vital in platelets forming (things which make you clot). So by blocking COX it sets of a chain reaction stopping clotting and as these cells have no nucleus, they can’t reproduce with an unblocked receptor, so essentially they become useless to form clots until they die and are remade.",
"This is not an ELI5, but since you’re a first responder, I think you can handle a little more detail. COX-1 and COX-2 are enzymes involved in the inflammatory pathway. COX-1 promotes inflammation and clotting while COX-2 does the opposite. Aspirin blocks both COX-1 and COX-2, but it slightly prefers COX-1 which is why in low doses, you can block COX-1 without blocking COX-2 necessarily (this is why many old people take one baby aspirin a day). During a heart attack though, the priority is to block COX-1 ASAP as much as possible to prevent more clotting so you have them chew a full dose of aspirin."
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mj1lrc | how does skin hold moisture , and what causes dry skin? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Water and oil don't like to mix together. You've probably noticed this when cooking, as oil will float on top of the water. Well our bodies, being clever and all, secrete oil onto our skin. This layer of oil traps moisture from escaping, as water doesn't like oil and won't want to cross this barrier. Dry skin is what happens when this oil barrier is removed and moisture is allowed to leave.",
"Lots of animals can’t vomit- for example also squirrels and gophers. In case of horses it has something to do with the muscles around the opening of the stomach. Basically the reverse pressure of the stomach is not strong enough to force its way through the opening backwards."
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mj1rmx | What does animacy mean (linguistics/language)? | I can't understand it from the definitions I found online. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"It just means how \"alive\" the noun you are talking about is. & #x200B; The biggest example of English is pronouns. *He*, *She,* and *They* are used to refer to people and animals we connect with. But *It* is used to refer to things that are not alive or many animals you really don't like. You probably wouldn't call a person \"it\" but you definitely would call a table \"it\""
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mj1sjt | Wind chill and exposure time. | Riding my motorcycle to work in the morning it was 74°. By the time my shift was over a cold snap passed through, and I hadn’t checked the forecast that day, so I had to ride home in 49° weather. And I’ve always had a sort of conundrum about riding in the cold. Should I ride faster and experience more wind chill for a shorter period, or ride slower and experience less wind chill with a greater exposure time? TL;DR Is exposure time or severity of cold temperatures more dangerous? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In theory. Wind is more dangerous but it only matters if it's \"just\" cold enough Your body will try to heat itself and if you stay still, the heat that is expelled from the body will stay in a relatively close area and warm up the air and objects around you(kinda like how blankets start cold but then warm up once you are in bed. Wind will take all that head you put out into the environment and move it somewhere else. An example is when it's hot, you sweat. Your body will still produce heat and the sweat will pick up that heat, wind will blow the sweat away and effectively cool you off. Now that is why you need a Wind breaker or insulation to keep warm. Your body will heat the area close and the insulation will keep the wind and other objects from taking it It's exposure that will kill you. There are stories of ancient Scots that wore great kilts.( about 12 feet x 3 or so) it would be an awful cold day and they would most definitely freeze to death! So they would find a river and dunk their kilts into the water and let it freeze around them in a dome like shape. This would keep the wind off them and the frozen wool would actually keep the temperature about 20 degrees warmer. They got out of the exposure and gave themselves time Edit:never answered the question"
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mj1ycb | Identical twin sexuality | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"From what I remember, the other twin is not always the same sexuality. However, there was a more frequent occurrence of twins sharing a sexuality happening in identical twins than there was with fraternal twins, suggesting that there is some form of biological or genetic component. (Note: I heard this information in high school and am currently in college, so it's likely that either the information has since changed, or I am misremembering. Feel free to correct me if Im wrong!)"
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mj1ydq | What are "natural flavors" in food products? | I see them in absolutely everything but what the hell are they? Why aren't these flavors listed as individual ingredients? What prevents a spice from being labeled a "natural flavor"? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Lets say I want to make almond flavored cookies. I can grind up a bunch of almonds for that, but to get the flavor I'm looking for, my cookie will be pretty much just crushed almonds. What I want is just the chemical responsible for the almond flavor. Then I can add a tiny drop of it and have my cookies taste as strong as I want. I want an extract! But almond extract is principally just one chemical - benzaldehyde - and benzaldehyde isn't unique to almonds. Lots of plants make it in varying amounts. So why extract it from expensive almonds when you could extract it from apricot pits, which are essentially free? I can use benzaldehyde and a few more chemicals and make a cherry flavor (ever notice almond extract kinda smells like fake cherry flavor?) Theres a ton of overlap in nature. The chemical responsible for the smell of a not-quite-ripe melon is the same as the smell of freshly cut grass (cis-3-hexanol, best described as \"green smell\"). Vanillin goes into everything, and acetaldehyde is in practically every fruit. A flavor house will source a few thousand of these chemicals, along with various exracts, oils, fractions, and oleoresins, and a flavorist will mix them together to make it taste like whatever. They're listed as natural flavor because 1. The mix is a trade secret. 2. Complex flavors have like 60 ingredients and ingredient decs would be a mile long 3. The substances used have been individually vetted as safe by either the FDA or the FEMA GRAS panel. So what do flavors look like? A natural vanilla flavor with other natural flavors would be something like: A little vanilla extract Vanillin St. John's bread extract Propenyl guaethol Fenugreek extract Maltol You can keep adding to make it more convincing.",
"I work at an ice cream company. For vanilla ice cream, they add “natural vanilla flavor” which contains dyes, alcohol, preservatives etc. it’s the same for pretty much all flavors.",
"The scare about \"anal extract of beaver\" being used for vanilla flavor is pure BS. 1. It's expensive 2. Vanilla derived from other natural vegetable resources is cheap 3. Almost all natural flavors sold by large flavor companies are vegetarian, kosher and halal to make them easy to use worldwide. 4. If they did use it, there would be a public relations disaster.",
"'Natural flavor' is an extract or naturally occurring chemical from a natural thing, that gives said thing the flavor in question, e.g. strawberry extract. 'Nature-identical flavor' is an artificially produced copy of a chemical that is found in nature, e.g. they'll find out what chemical in strawberries gives them their natural flavor, and then they'll replicate the same same chemical outside of strawberries. 'Artificial flavor' is an artificially produced chemical that is not found in nature, but mimics or tries to mimic the natural flavor of something."
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