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moxrgt | Why do bones that have been broken hurt more in the cold | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you are cold, blood comes away from your extremities into your core. Your extremities get cold. When you have a bad injury, the pain nerves around that injury get more sensitive than they were. This is because whenever you use something in your body a lot, it gets “stronger”. Your body likes to build up anything you’re using, and unfortunately pain pathways are included in that. So when you have a significant injury, your pain receptors in that area can get easier to set off. This is how we develop chronic pain when there is no injury anymore - hypersensitive pain receptors keep firing off for no reason. When you get cold, your extra-sensitive pain receptors surrounding the area where you broke your bone can be sparked by the change in temperature. They send the message up to your brain, which interprets the signal as pain, even though all that has happened is that you have gotten cold.",
"I'm an engineer not a doctor, but it may have something to do with thermal expansion/contraction. Every material has a coefficient of thermal expansion which is a measure of how much the material changes size with a change in temperature. If you have two different materials bonded together that have different coefficients of thermal expansion when the temperature changes an internal stress will be created in the part. This phenomenon is how old style thermostats worked. If the bone scar tissue that bonded the two broken bone pieces together has a different coefficient of thermal expansion than the original bone the induced internal stress in the bone may cause the pain."
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moyksw | Why do we work more hours today than our ancestors, even though we are objectively more productive than they have been? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The man would labor, dawn to dusk, just to provide a very meager existence. The wife would work just as long, if not longer, and just as hard to keep the household going. Both would be in bed not long after the day's labors were done. Life is insanely easier today than in 'the good old days'"
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moyobx | Why do certain types of images get gradually worse in quality after being repeatedly downloaded and respread? | Images like .jpg for example | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your premise is wrong; images don't get worse by being downloaded or being re-spread. When you download or share a file, you are sharing an exact copy, barring the rare case of data corruption. Images compressed using a lossy compression algorithm like JPEG will degrade over time only if the image is constantly being re-encoded. Different online services may do that automatically to ensure their images are in a consistent format (file type, file size, resolution, dimensions etc) or some users may do it manually (especially if they are cropping it, or adding custom bits of text, like they would with a meme). But that's an artefact of how people or online services change the image on purpose, not a side-effect of it being downloaded or shared."
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moyun9 | why tape doesn't leave sticky residue on itself when wrapped in itself | Often when I peel tape off of something there will be some stickyness where the tape was, but on the roll of tape the back of the tape where tape was once stuck onto isn't sticky at all. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The tape material is coated on one side with something the adhesive doesn't adhere to very well. Think a piece of paper with wax on one side, glue on the other.",
"Okay, so the smoother a surface is, the less things will stick to it. Think of a rock climber and the handholds he has. Less handholds, less grabbing. For this reason, they rough up surfaces before applying glue, like patch kits for bicycles, or tile floors. It helps if the glue has more to grab onto. So when they make masking tape, they take a paper roll, and wax one side to make it smoother, so the adhesive won't grab very well. The other side stays rough, so it grabs just fine. As it rolls around itself, the sticky side always meets the smooth side. Of course, if the roll is left in a hot place, it all melts together, and the whole roll DOES get stuck to itself."
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moyxh4 | Why does high volume damage speakers. And why are TVs designed with the option to go so high if it damages them | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Speakers work by moving a cone back and forth with a magnet which creates sound waves in the air. To make something louder, you need to move the cone a bigger distance. Rapid movement over bigger distances can physically damage a cone. Also, the higher you go with volume, the more distortion which can also cause damage. The reason TVs have settings beyond the damage threshold is that input 'line level' us not normalised, so some inputs are quieter and need more amplification.",
"High volume does not damage speakers. Too high of a power does. Speakers should be rated for more power than the amplifier can put out. If it's even something modest like 2 times more power handling (speaker) than power output (amplifier) it's almost impossible to break the speakers. If you have undersized speakers / oversized amplifier, the problem doesn't show up when the volume is low. Power output goes up with volume, but if the amplifier runs out of power before the speaker reaches its limit, speakers won't be damaged. There's a secondary problem where clipping causes excessive high frequency power. All of that goes to the tweeter, but the tweeter is too small to handle the excess. Using an appropriate sized speaker, and turning it down if you hear anything distorted mostly prevents it from happening. (It sounds bad when there's risk of damage.)—You can also prevent the problem entirely by using a low power amp. If your 100 W speaker has a 10 W tweeter, it would be impossible for a 10 W power amp to break it. But that's extremely impractical.",
"Not sure if this is exactly your issue, but speakers in the low/mid range typically use a voice coil actuator - it pushes and pulls air when an electric current or voltage is applied. If that were to exceed a practical input voltage range, the actuator could be damaged by exceeding a physical travel range. High frequency speakers (tweeters) typically aren’t voice coils but some surface vibration that can operate faster (but not push more air). Not sure if those are “blown out” often. With a nominal range of power input and control voltage/current, they would “filter” out the out-of-range frequencies using an electronic filter (crossover) or just not be able to reproduce them.",
"Speakers can be damaged by physical over exertion or heat related melting or changing shape. The electricity from the amplifier goes into a thin wire wound in to a cylinder shape. This is an electro magnet, called a voice coil. If too much power is applied, the thin wire will heat up. This can break the wire, thereby breaking the circuit. It can also cause the cylinder to warp, which means that it no longer fits correctly in the small gap it has to fit in. The voice coil pushes and pulls a surface that in turn moves the air. If the surface moves too far it can tear. TVs can go loud enough to break them selves because the program you are listening to might be quiet and the TV allows you to turn it up enough to compensate. If you leave the volume set high but then play a louder program, it may be loud enough to damage the speaker. Usually the user hears unpleasant distortion and turns the volume down. It is possible for manufacturers to build systems that aim to protect the speakers. Eg, limit the voltage that goes to the speaker",
"Every conventional speaker has three parts: a frame, a voice coil, and a cone. The coil is essentially an electromagnet with a permanent magnet at its core. Passing current through the voice coil sets up magnetic fields in it that are either amplified by the permanent magnet, or oppose to the permanent magnet. These magnetic forces move the voice coil in and out at the same frequencies as the audio signal applied. Regardless, the design of the speaker sets firm, physical limitations for how far in or out the voice coil is allowed to move. If it moves father, the cone, which is attached to the voice coil as well as the frame, will be torn. The cone is made of thin material, like paper or polymer, and so too much force, or force in the wrong directions, will tear it. Once the speaker cone tears, that's it. It's trash. There's no meaningful way to repair a torn speaker cone in a way that will have it regain its former ability to reproduce sounds from the audio signal input to the voice coil. Much like the adage, everything is air-droppable at least once, every speaker is capable of a voice coil excursion of three feet… at least once. However, whether it's material dropped out of an airplane or a speaker after the voice coil has been propelled three feet from its resting position, there is no guarantee that it will still be functional. As to TVs with audio amplifiers capable of blowing out their own dinky little excuses for speakers, most TVs also have provision for attaching a so-called soundbar along their lower edge. The speakers in these soundbars are more robust than the built-in speakers. Poor design choices lead to passive soundbars, which do not have their own amplifiers built in. Therefore, the audio amps in the display itself must be powerful enough to drive these larger, external speakers, even if it means having to implement software limits to try to restrict their output when relegated to only driving its own internal speakers."
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moz1yw | Why/how does a lightning strike produce sound? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Lightning is very, very hot. When it arcs, it superheats the air it's passing through--which rapidly, violently decreases in density, making a very loud noise as it does."
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mozu9a | What is in hot chocolate powder that makes it effectively unstir-able when it’s at a cold temperature?? | Always wanted to know why it can’t be a ‘cold chocolate packet’ too... | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The main reason is that cocoa powder is fatty and fat does not mix well with water. What needs to happen is the water molecules need to get in between the cocoa grains. When water is hot, the water molecules move faster which increases their ability to get in between. When cold, fatty material just sticks together in clumps. Applying shear force (by stirring) helps the water get in between the powder grains. Mixing also works better when it's a small amount of water. The reason for that is the shear force of the spoon is more effective in forcing the molecules to mix. Because it thickens, the clumps can't escape the spoon so easily which also helps. In a full cup, the clumps of fatty material just stick together and just float away from the spoon.",
"Hot water dissolves the solids. Cold water doesn’t. They don’t put anything in it to make it not dissolvable, it’s just the nature of the ingredients.",
"Fat. Water and oil don’t mix. Heat dissolves the hot chocolate mixture, which overcomes the tendency for the two to remain separate - due to the *other* ingredients in the hot chocolate mixture. You can reach the same end result with anything that adds energy to the water. Shaking it vigorously, pressurising it, etc.",
"You can probably use the slurry method to stir it at cold temperatures. Can test if desired."
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mp14h9 | How does training your heart (example: doing cardio) lower your resting heart rate? | ELI5 Bonus: if someone with anxiety has a high resting heart rate why doesn’t that count as cardio exercise and strengthen your heart? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If your heart and lungs become stronger and more efficient at getting oxygen from the air to your cells with each beat then it takes fewer beats of the heart to get the required oxygen where it needs to be."
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mp1a11 | What does “based” mean? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Good connotation, although it’s sometimes used sarcastically. Usually used to show agreement with something."
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mp20ev | Why does streaming videos in 4K on platforms like HBO or Netflix always have such great, seamless quality but streaming a YouTube video at high quality always needs long buffer times and still sometimes has pixelated quality? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Netflix doesn't have to deal with timelines for when videos go live. They can spend the time and effort to process the video for quality way ahead of time. I mean it's not like their library includes things that were produced and/or released TODAY. Even if it was released today, that's usually netflix's decision so the video was likely processed a week ago. Whereas youtube takes uploads from anyone at any time and videos are expected to be viewable within a few minutes, maybe an hour at most on an average day. Advantage, netflix. Also youtube content is uploaded by all sorts of people. Professionals and people who do this as their main income will tend to be better at it but the quality of the video you send to youtube matters. If it's crap, youtube will show crap. That's the creator's fault, not youtube's. Advantage mostly to netflix as their videos are professional across the board. As for buffering, that's a risk vs reward thing. Longer buffer times means the player loads more video before it starts playing. If there's an internet connection problem it will have more data downloaded already and have more time to cope or wait out the problem than if it hadn't. So there's the risk Netflix is taking, but on average it works out pretty well."
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mp23f3 | What do ants do with the corpses of other ants? | Hello. So today I was watching closely the ants on the backyard and I saw one of them carrying another (apparently) dead ant. I was wondering what do they do with that. Do they eat it? Where do they leave the corpses? Do they pile them somewhere? For what? I've seen this happening many times before and I don't know anything about it. Thanks. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"ants produce oleic acid when they die, which produces a smell that alerts other ants to take them away to a designated 'grave' site. i believe it is to prevent disease. i did read once that a researcher dropped oleic acid on a live ant and she was taken to the graveyard despite still being alive. but because she could smell the death on herself, the ant i guess stayed in the graveyard until the smell wore off. and then she wandered back to join the others Edit: [source]( URL_0 ) they kept throwing her back!!!",
"They carry the corpse to a corpse room filled with dead ants. Source: mom had ant farms for years as a teacher. At end one lone ant would be dragging bodies to the cemetery room. It was very sad imo.",
"Almost all living things have a symbiotic or parasitic relationship with various bacteria, fungus or parasites that control behavior. There are types of fungi that control many ants, and just before the fungus is ready to send out it's spores it makes the ant climb somewhere and bite on a tall branch above the nest. Possibly infecting more of the colony. To prevent that, dead or dying ants are taken away before it can infect others. Check out this video URL_0"
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mp3a4g | Why do movies/TV shows show credits both at the start and end of said show/movie? | Not gonna lie, I've been wondering this since I was about 5 | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It used to be that all the credits were shown at the start of a movie but who wants to sit through 20 minutes of credits before the movie starts? So nowadays generally only the big names get credited at the start and everyone else at the end. I believe George Lucas paid a fine to one of the guilds he belonged to when he made Star Wars because he put the credits at the end when the guild rules were credits at the start. He then quit the guild.",
"The ones at the start are generally the “important” people (director, cinematographer, producers, actors), whereas the ones at the end list the full crew for each department. That doesn’t really explain why, per say, but that’s just generally how it is, as it’s not the same credits you see. (I work in film/TV, and would only ever be seen at the end credits 😆)",
"Union contracts. And there are a lot of different unions involved with making a production. Here’s a good starter article about how things are laid out: URL_0"
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mp3gsx | Why can we focus on something better in the dark using our peripheral vision instead of direct eye contact? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If I remember right, the parts of the eye responsible for seeing in low light are more dense around the periphery of the eye whereas the parts responsible for daylight visibility are closer to the center.",
"Difference in the distribution of rods and cones means that peripheral vision is better at seeing in black and white which helps with low light vision. URL_0"
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mp3s8z | When you look directly at a bright light, why does it "stain" (for lack of a better term) your vision when you look away? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Photoreceptors, the things in your retina that \"see\" the light that enters your eyes and send it to the brain for processing, can only handle so much light before they have to \"recharge\". Typically, they're able to recharge fast enough to keep up with the light that enters them, which is why you're not always dealing with light spots. However, when a ton of photons enter all at once, such as when you glance at the sun or peer into a lamp, your photoreceptors get overwhelmed and spend all their light-receiving molecules at once, so they take some time to recharge. The vision center of your brain isn't able to process nothing, so it fills the gap in your vision in with the \"white noise\" from the photoreceptors around the empty spot, which is why you see that white-ish blob or spots. Here's a good post about it from a medical blog URL_0 Edit: to the people complaining that a 5 year old wouldn't understand this, please read the sidebar"
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mp40qj | how ivy, poison ivy, Virginia creeper, any other fast growing vine or plant, don't take over an entire area and destroy a forest? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Virgina Creeper likes more light than forests provide... as far as I can tell with my endless fight with it! Where I live it doesn't go far beyond the borders of the woods, but it loves partial sunlight!",
"Every living creature has a limit of size produced by the physics of their biology. While the capillary effect can transfer water very long distances with minimal resistance, the transfer of nutrients becomes a different story. If you wanted to transfer supplies a long distance, it requires resources just to maintain the route, so your need to carry resources for maintaining the route along the way and the evolutionary infrastructure isn't quite capable of that. Especially since they're competing for resources to grow further in the process.",
"Kudzu does this thought the South. While fronting down the interstate you can sometimes see patches on mountainsides where every tree is covered add it's a slowly spreading circle of kudzu.",
"Native species usually have native predators (well, herbivores) in the area that act to control their population. After all, if something becomes super common in an environment, it represents a big untapped food source. Additionally, local plants are likely to be adapted to deal with it because anything that just gets overgrown won't survive. If you introduce species (like, say, Kudzu) from somewhere else, though, then they can expand to take over an entire area because they lack these balancing forces.. Although your standard yellow honeysuckle isn't actually native, but invasive species don't always overgrow everything like kudzu. Kudzu in particular is good at growing really long vines from a large central tuber, honeysuckle usually can't really get way up in trees.",
"Contrary to what the others are saying, but in line with what /u/spamattacker says, kudzu also prefers to live at the edges. Sure from the interstate all you can see is kudzu as you drive through, that's because the interstate strip is one big open slash through the forest, and both sides of it are edges. Kudzu loves that. Same with the banks of streams or whatever. But deeper in the forest, there's not much of it at all. It doesn't like fighting through the undergrowth and shade on the inside of the forest. > Railroad and highway developers, desperate for something to cover the steep and unstable gashes they were carving into the land, planted the seedlings far and wide. There were kudzu queens and regionwide kudzu planting contests. By the early 1940s, Cope had started the Kudzu Club of America, with a membership of 20,000 and a goal of planting eight million acres across the South. > > [...] > > Kudzu has appeared larger than life because it’s most aggressive when planted along road cuts and railroad embankments—habitats that became front and center in the age of the automobile. As trees grew in the cleared lands near roadsides, kudzu rose with them. It appeared not to stop because there were no grazers to eat it back. But, in fact, it rarely penetrates deeply into a forest; it climbs well only in sunny areas on the forest edge and suffers in shade. > > [...] > > It was an invasive that grew best in the landscape modern Southerners were most familiar with—the roadsides framed in their car windows. It was conspicuous even at 65 miles per hour, reducing complex and indecipherable landscape details to one seemingly coherent mass. And because it looked as if it covered everything in sight, few people realized that the vine often fizzled out just behind that roadside screen of green. > > [...] > > the U.S. Forest Service reports that kudzu occupies, to some degree, about 227,000 acres of forestland, an area about the size of a small county and about one-sixth the size of Atlanta. That’s about one-tenth of 1 percent of the South’s 200 million acres of forest. By way of comparison, the same report estimates that Asian privet had invaded some 3.2 million acres—14 times kudzu’s territory. Invasive roses had covered more than three times as much forestland as kudzu. > > -- URL_0",
"Like others have said, kudzu does exactly this. There are places in the South up through Kentucky where you'll see nothing but seas of it."
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mp4c4n | When people are struck by lightning and survive are they actually experiencing a direct hit or something else? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The survivability of any lighting strike depends primarily on how much current you receive. How quickly you receive medical attention afterwards can also play a big role. There are 5 ways to get struck or injured/killed by lightning. The most common are ground strikes, side flashes, and contact injury. 1. A direct strike means the main bolt of lightning hits you, and you get the full current and heat flowing through you. These are the least survivable, but are relatively rare. 2. A side flash is when something gets struck by lightning, and some of the current comes off the object and on to you. i.e. You are standing next to a tree that gets struck by lightning, and an arc of electricity comes off the tree and on to you. The amount of current you receive varies on how close you are and how much of the energy gets grounded elsewhere. 3. A contact injury occurs when something that conducts electricity like a metal fence gets struck, and you are holding onto that fence and get zapped. Most indoor strikes happen this way which it is wise to stay away from doors and windows during a lighting storm. The material struck and the distance from the stike can determine how much current flows through you. 4. When lighting hits the ground or an object, the current is spread out over an area in the ground. If you are too close, some of the current can flow from the ground and through you as well. How close you are to the strike, how big you are, and what the ground is made of (dirt, asphalt, gravel, concrete, etc) determines the amount of current you receive. 5. The instant before lightning fully strikes little streamers (mini bolts of lightning if you will) come up from the ground and down from the clouds. When two of these streamers connect, they form the main bolt of lightning, and the other streamers disappear. If you get hit by one of the streamer strikes that doesn't become the main bolt, it could still injure or kill you. These are extremely rare but still can happen.",
"Most of the time, people aren't directly struck by lightning. It's often that lightning strikes nearby, and the current flows along the ground, and shocks them. However, people die from that, and people who are directly struck can survive, it's not binary that someone directly struck will die and someone indirectly struck will survive. Everything is dependent on how bad the burns are, and whether the heartbeat gets disrupted."
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mp4wxg | What are those eye floaters/squiggles that people randomly see? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Ophthalmic assistant here! The vitreous gel fills up the back half of the eye. It starts out thicker, like a gel, and will get thinner as we age. The floaters/squiggles happen as the gel clumps up, as someone mentioned already. It’s part of the aging process and people with myopic eyes are more prone to see them, but anyone can get them! If you see a sudden increase of these floaters, a lot of tiny black floaters, flashes of light, cobwebs in your vision, or curtains coming down on your vision see an eye doctor ASAP!",
"Fibers in your eye jelly, all clumped up. Shadows cast by them produce the “squiggles” you see."
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mp50m3 | Why can't we just add artificial flavors/extracts like vanilla, lemon, caramel to alcoholic spirits like whiskey and sell them rather than putting in so much effort and time to age the spirits in barrels and hoping they naturally develop a hint of these flavors. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We can and do flavor neutral grain alcohol in the form of schnapps and liqueurs. Gin is a flavored liquor, too, of course. Some whiskeys are also flavored, such as Fireball. When we drink something like that, we want the novelty flavor of cinnamon rather than the actual flavor of whiskey. The other kind of whiskey, the more traditional form, is intended to taste like whiskey. Getting just echoes of those other flavors is best achieved through time and aging in certain kinds of barrels. It's just a question of how intense you want the flavoring to be, how much depth it should have, and how well it enhances (rather than conceals) the base flavor of the whiskey.",
"You're looking at this from the wrong direction. We don't add flavors 2 Whiskey like we add flavors to ice cream, the point isn't the flavor. When you hear people talking about whiskey tasting of vanilla or caramel, what you hear is people trying to express the flavors that they're tasting using something familiar. The terms are descriptive not proscriptive.",
"Because nobody is going to pay $50+ for a bottle of grain alcohol and artificial flavors. The process of making it is part of what makes it interesting and valuable. Even the high-volume producers like Jack Daniels still make it barrels and age it. If it's just mixed up in a food science lab like a new flavor of Oreos, then it's just another industrialized food product.",
"What others haven't mentioned is that real flavors are *incredibly* complex. Simply adding vanilla extract may add pure vanilla flavor, but it can't replicate all of the other subtle flavors that come from the wood tannins. That's why, for example, it's super easy to make the molecule mostly responsible for grape or strawberry flavors, but pretty much impossible to make something that actually tastes like a grape or a strawberry. There's more than just that one molecule. There might be tens or even hundreds of different compounds in very specific ratios to make that flavor. By the time you figure out exactly which molecules you need and in what ratios, make them, and add them... it's easier just to age the alcohol in a barrel and be done with it. For someone just looking to get buzzed, sure, artificial flavors are fine. For someone wanting the complexity of flavors the artificial flavors won't be the taste they want. I'm not arguing which is *better*, only that it's not what consumers want."
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mp5d6l | What does P=ND mean? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"You're gonna have to give more context. Where is it from? Do you mean P=NP?",
"SO, in computer science (and related mathmatical fields) we measure the speed of things by how the time it takes to do something changes as you have bigger inputs. Something like \"If you give this program twice as many things to do, it will take twice as long\" or \"if this algorithm gets double the input, it will need four times as long to complete the task\". We quantify this by big O notation amongst other things. a task that is O(n^2) will on average take about n^2 as long to do something with n items. double the n, time goes up by four. Triple it, it goes up by nine, and so on. If n is of the form n^4, or n^2, or n^5 or n^x we call that polynomial time. For the purpose of this question we can call that \"fast\", because there are a lot of values of n that are much, much slower than polynomial. The question of P=NP is as followed: Say you have a problem. If I give you an answer to the problem I can check if you're right quickly. Is it true that because I can check if any given answer is correct quickly that I can also solve the problem quickly? This has wide range implications because among things that we can \"check quickly\" are for instance checking if a key to an encrypted lock is correct. If P=NP we'd know that there exists some method of taking a locked encryption and breaking it wide open without the key in polynomial time. So far the common agreement is that P =/= NP because all the clues we have point that way. However nobody has been able to prove it either way, and so the question remains."
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mp5vcp | Why do poles reverse themselves and how disastrous would it be for living things? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It is likely a product of the Earth's magnetic field being created from the movement of liquid metals in the core. Lots of simulations find reversals happen when you have a combination of fluid dynamics and electromagnetics. We don't know much about the effects on living things, as we have never seen one in written history. However, it is likely they take place over thousands of years, leaving little effect on individual organisms. In all, we don't know much, but you shouldn't be worried about it.",
"On the second point, we can be reasonably sure it isn't that disastrous to living organisms, as if it was we would see significant extinction events in the fossil record corresponding to the field reversals (and both extinction events and field reversals are pretty well documented). As for why we don't know much about what actually happens at a reverse, the last one was geologic time ago, and on that kind of timescale 10,000 years is a click of the fingers. It could be instant (\"holy hell - north is now south!\") or the field could collapse for thousands of years (less than great but we'd survive it without too much hassle)."
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mp5w9b | why do our noses run when we’re cold?? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The air that gets to your lungs needs to be prepared so it's 'safe' for your lungs. Alveoli are kinda delicate. Warmth, humidity, particles. The cold air is very dry, and could hurt your lungs. The mucus increases the heat and water transfer to the inhaled air, and helps filter it. If the air you inhale is 3% humid, it's basically 99% by the time it hits your lungs. That's part of why your breath is visible when it's cold, too humid for the world to deal with!"
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mp60kw | What did nestle do? I’ve heard so many people just hating on Nestle but never heard why. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One that I heard was in regards to going to developing countries with next to no education and advertising aggressively their baby formula. Families were even given samples to encourage the mother's milk to dry up. They were told that the formula was better than breastfeeding milk. Then the price went up and families were guilty and forced to buy expensive baby formula (because they lost their breast milk supply), which they couldn't afford. The cost made families chose between feeding their baby or feeding their other kids. Add to that the fact that a lot of these places have poor water supplies and drinking the formula mixed with their dirty water made a lot of babies sick. This kind of predatory behaviour is why a lot of people hate Nestlé.",
"They've done a variety of unethical things over the years, as many large companies are wont to do. I'll just go over 3 examples in living memory. In the 90s, they pushed baby formula to be as, or more, nutritious than breast milk to poor and uneducated communities. This is a huge issue because A) it's not better, and B) many of those communities didn't have access to sterile water. Breastmilk would be safe for babies, formula made with poor quality water was not. There's also issues around how they pushed it, free of charge, to many new mothers before only selling them the formula. If a mother doesn't breastfeed regularly, milk production can slow or stop. If baby is on formula and mother can't make milk, then mom *has* to buy more formula. They've got an incentive to create this captive market. I can't say for sure if that was the intention, but it's been an effect. A second issue is their bottled water operations. It's not only environmentally bad and unsustainable, but in some areas they don't even have the permits to do so. They just don't give a crap. The 3rd big one is that they are aware of various human rights abuses from their suppliers, including child slavery. Instead of doing something, like not buying slave sourced products, they... Just don't give a crap. Slave sourced products are cheaper than the ones that aren't.",
"There is a track record of them being one of the worse food companies comunicationwise, and in real responsibility. From slave labor in chocolate production, monopolies in the 3rd world, water hoarding and just plain evil shit their directors and CEO's say. URL_2 URL_1 URL_0 The Motherload URL_3",
"Few people know it, but Nestle is actually the world's largest producer of bottled water. At the second World Water Forum in 2000, Nestle pushed for making access to drinking water from a \"Right\" to a \"Need,\" a defining change. California doesn't know how much water Nestle uses, because they have no legal grounds for making the company divulge this information, and Nestle hasn't published any reports. In the case of Bhati Dilwan, people are getting sick because if the community had fresh water piped in, it would deprive Nestle of its money source - bottled water under the Pure Life brand. A 1997 report found that in the UK, over a 12 month period, water pollution limits were breached 2,152 times in 830 locations by companies that included Cabdury and Nestle. Alongside companies such as Kraft or Shell, Nestle made several environmental violations. Another article claims that Nestle capitalizes on China's already-polluted waters to make a good profit, while Corporate Watch highlights the fact that Nestle continues to extract water illegally from Brazil for their Perrier brand.",
"Thank you everyone for the info, now that I know everything I’m really not surprised so many people hate Nestle."
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"https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nestle-ceo-water-not-human-right/",
"https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/29/the-fight-over-water-how-nestle-dries-up-us-creeks-to-sell-water-in-plastic-bottles",
"https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/business/hershey-nestle-mars-chocolate-child-labor-west-africa/",
"http://www.pauldonahue.net/Nestle.html"
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mp6fdb | Why are cold showers much more difficult right after waking up? It just feels harder to do. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"gu894wg"
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"text": [
"You go from feeling warm, comfortable and happy to cold, wet, and uncomfortable. Brain no like that."
],
"score": [
3
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mp6lkk | When on an airplane why does it feel like we’re not traveling very fast (although we are), compared to when we’re on a car going only 80 miles an hour and it feels really fast ? | Sorry if my question is worded weird I tried to explain it as best as I could. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The simple answer is that we don’t feel speed. We only feel changes in speed or direction (aka acceleration), like hitting the gas, taking off, potholes, turbulence, braking, and landing. An airliner cruising through the upper atmosphere encounters very little turbulence, giving the passengers few cues to its speed. We also don’t have the same visual cues in a plane; in a car going 80 mph you can see the pavement whizzing past mere feet away. In a plane, the ground is several miles away and appears to move slow.",
"its relative to what you see and how close you are to what you see. in a car youre next to things and because they are so close you seem fast in a plane things are tens of thosands of feet away, so because you see them so far away you dont have the fast feeling",
"Next time you’re in a window seat on a plane, watch the shadow of the airplane on the surface of the Earth while you’re at cruising altitude. You’ll have a generally accurate sense of how quickly that same object would be cruising at ground level."
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mp6ssd | Why does our body have a preferred sleeping position? | And why does it change over time as well? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"I see sleep as a form of relaxation and a way to unload a hards day of work. With that being said in order for me to feel most relaxed as I can be, I must choose the most comfortable position. Although anyone can sleep in any position, there is always one that just feels like heaven. To use an example in order to give another perspective we can use food. I love burgers they are my favorite the thing is I will always choose my mother's homemade ones rather than any fast food or even fancy restaurant. That is because it is something that I find comforting and makes me feel a sense of pleasure. Many of us can say that about foods we grow up eating it just reminds me of home. Obviously, as times change we grow and so do our likes and wants. Our body adjusts and creates a new form of relaxation, but the form of pleasurable sensations remains even though it is a new position."
],
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mp6xt0 | How creativity comes in our brain? What is the science behind this? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Well first off, what is creativity. Creativity is two things one is to generate original ideas. The second is to determine if those original ideas are useful. So in the brain there's a network that helps us generate new ideas. It's the region that activates when your mind wanders, or you're \"brainstorming\" Like your brain had all these memories of things, and starts triggering them a bit randomly with, I'd call it noise to be simple. Les noise gets you common ideas, more noise gets you weirder and usually less useful ideas as things less relevant to what you are thinking aboit get triggered. Then you have an executive control network that helps you evaluate ideas. It simulates what you've got in your head based on previous experience and guesses at results. And from that you figure out how good or bad of an idea you've had. Then there's a third network that coordinate the two, figuring out how much noise you should be throwing around during brainstorming, and how much effort you should be putting into analyzing the ideas, switching back and forth between the two."
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mp7nnd | Why does it take a lot of hot water to make a tub of cold water handwarm, but only little cold water to make a tub of hot water that same handwarm temperature? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gu86pm3",
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"text": [
"It likely depends on the temps. Lets say \"hand warm\" is 95 F. Hot bath water is likely 100 F. Hot tap water is likely say 115 F. Cold tap water may be 55 F in the winter. So to go from cold tap to warm, you need to climb 40 F. But to go from hot bath to warm bath you only need to drop 5 F. Now I ASSUMED the \"cold bath\" was cold tap 55 F. If it was a bath that cooled off it is likely 75 or so, so a 20 F climb to \"hand warm\". That said, everyone has a slightly different value for cool vs warm vs hot. Also, well water on a January day in New England is likely colder that in say Texas or Florida.",
"As you add hot water to cold water they're both still losing heat to the environment. Same with adding cold water to hot water, so the cooling is occurring from more than just adding cold water. A hot temperature in a cooler environment is more difficult to maintain"
],
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6
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mp900d | How come we can chew food perfectly, thousands of times, then suddenly mess up and bite our tongue/cheek? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gu8e4wo",
"gu8hodv"
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"text": [
"As often as you do it you're statistically bound to have an error every once in a while. I screw up tons of things I'm good at including walking, swallowing my own saliva, or sleeping. Just too many variables in life to be guaranteed the same results every single time",
"Don't ask me how but sometimes I bite the little ball things under my tongue. Hurts 100 time more than the tongue"
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mp92qm | Why do people in videos seem to walk faster than normal? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gu8dxgl"
],
"text": [
"If you are talking about old videos (1920s), they were recorded with a much lower fps because of technology limitations. So, the theaters often played them at a faster rate than they were filmed to avoid stuttering, and this became the norm at that time."
],
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mp9hsv | What exactly is a flame made of? And why does it have that specific shape? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"When you heat stuff up to high enough temperatures, it begins to glow. This is just the energy that's been crammed in being released as heat. Red is a cool glow, then as we get through yellow and white and eventually bluish, things are hotter and hotter. This is how filament light bulbs work. The electricity makes them so hot that they begin to glow. Fire is when stuff reacts with oxygen. This reaction creates gases (carbon dioxide and water vapour) and a lot of heat. The colour you see as a flame is just these gasses glowing because they are really hot. The shape is basically because gravity means hot gases will float upwards. The hot gases released by burning begin to drift upwards. As they do, they cool down, meaning they stop glowing at some point. The gases in the middle of the flame stay hotter for longer because they are surrounded by other hot gases, so the middle of the flame is taller. Here's a [video]( URL_0 ) about it :) Oh, also, the gravity thing means that flames in space (inside a ship) are spherical :)",
"The flame is made of hot gas rising out of the “burning” matter and undergoing the actual chemical reaction of burning with oxygen. For example, if you are burning some firewood, the wood itself has to become hot enough first so that some of its compounds evaporate and become gas. This gas then mixes with oxygen in the air and burns, producing the flame. This reaction produces a whole lot of heat, keeping the wood hot and continuing to evaporate more compounds which can then burn and so on, until there aren’t any volatile (i.e. able to evaporate) compounds left in the wood."
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mp9iwf | How exactly does losing weight work? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gu8hnrx",
"gu8gygy",
"gu8gzir"
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"text": [
"Fat is basically an energy source made from carbon hydrogen and oxygen as that energy source is used it is converted into water and carbon dioxide using oxygen to \"burn\" the fat, the by-products are then exhaled making the air you breathe out slightly heavier than the air you breathe in.",
"I'm sure quite a few people will answer more comprehensively but important things to consider is that sugar without appropriate fiber intake to help process it is a big contributor to fat storage and a lot of modern diets are higher in sugar and lower in fiber than they should be so a good starting point is minimizing sugar intake to things like fruit and veggies with higher fiber in them!",
"> Is it enough to just figure out how much calories you lose everyday and then try and eat less than that and/or reduce it through physical activity? Or is there more I have to do and take into consideration such as carbs, proteins, sugar and what not? You have to if you want to make your diet easier to follow - eating your daily calories in form of cookies will work but leave you feeling hungry for the most of the day."
],
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mp9o1c | Why does platinum act as a catalyst? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gu8hyl4"
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"text": [
"Hard to answer in general, since there are still unknowns about metal catalysis (which is why making a good catalyst for an application is a lot of testing and research, and not just putting in a hunk of Pt sponge and calling it a day). But in general, think about what a catalyst needs to be: * You want to use it a long time, so it mustn't be changed by the chemicals you're reacting * You want the molecules to interact with it * But you don't want them to get stuck permanently So what you're looking for is a material that is rather chemically unreactive, but makes molecules stick to it. But also not so strongly that they will never get away from it again. Pt checks all these boxes."
],
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6
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| [
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mp9rtr | How can humans feel nothing when touching their own bodies with their fingertips but feel wonderful sensations when touched by someone else’s fingertips? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gu8n1ik"
],
"text": [
"Your nerves/brain know what is expected when you are creating the action. With another interacting with you, they don't. Another's touch also is a socal interaction leading to other brain signals. You can hug yourself, but the hug from another shows a level of trust. We are socal creatures."
],
"score": [
10
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mpa09l | What is artificial meat made up of and how is it created? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gu8ilmb",
"gu8il31"
],
"text": [
"You have two kinds of artificial meat: * Plant-based synthetic meat, which is made from various plant proteins that are structurally similar to the muscle tissue that makes up real meat. * Genuine artificial meat (which is not yet commercially available - last I read about it researchers had successfully produced the equivalent of food-safe ground beef, but the production costs were around $200 for a burger), often also known as cultured meat. Cultured meat is made by taking tissue/cell samples from animals and then growing muscle cells in a lab. This is essentially artificially-produced real meat - it has all the same components, but is grown in a lab rather than in an animal.",
"It depends on what you're talking about. If you're talking about vegetarian/vegan artificial meat, it's basically a meat flavoured cake with a relatively close texture to meat (not aways though). If you're talking about the grown lab meat, it's meat that didn't grew in an animal. Simply put, your cells grow when exposed to the right things (food, hormones, stress,...) so people expose animals cells to the said things, the cells duplicates over and over to create a steak."
],
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mpb62o | What is the connection between diabetes and loss of feet and not your hands or other extremities? | I'm asking out of pure curiosity. I hear time and time again that diabetes messes up your blood glucose levels, but how come it affects only feet like having socks specifically made for people with diabetes? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gu8pm28",
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"text": [
"In some cases, diabetes can lead to peripheral artery disease (PAD). PAD causes your blood vessels to narrow and reduces blood flow to your legs and feet. It may also cause nerve damage, known as peripheral neuropathy. This could prevent you from feeling pain. If the infection cannot be stopped or the damage is irreparable, amputation may be necessary.",
"The hands do get affected but diabetic neuropathy usually causes damage to the longest nerves first which would be from the spine to the feet. After that if steps aren't taken to reduce diabetic symptoms the fingers and hands would likely be next. The nerve damage doesn't really go away, so even if you take steps to keep it from causing further damage, the damage is already done to the feet"
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"score": [
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mpbh8d | How do baby wipes stay wet ? | Was just wondering how baby wipes stay wet for so long without drying out ? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gu8q09v"
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"text": [
"Well, as long as the package is sealed, the humidity has nowhere to go. If you leave the package open, the humidity will eventually evaporate and dry the wipes."
],
"score": [
7
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mpbhoo | Why there are different grades of Gas and the differences. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gu8r88x",
"gu8qcv1"
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"text": [
"I assume you're talking about the different grades of gasoline. The biggest difference between them is their octane rating. The engine in a car mixes air and fuel, squeezes it together (compresses it) and then burns it. The more you can compress the air/fuel mix before burning it, the more power the engine can make. If you compress the air/fuel mix too much, it will ignite too early and damage the engine. The difference between say regular and premium gasoline is how much you can compress the air/fuel mix without running into such problems. High-performance engines are usually designed for high octane (premium) gas, whereas regular cars can use lower octane fuel.",
"Gasoline is a liquid that's a mix of \"hydrocarbons\" - a chemical that has hydrogen and carbon in it. There's really light hydrocarbons like the butane in your lighter or the propane in your barbecue, and really heavy, solid hydrocarbons like the tar on your roof. Gasoline is in the middle of the bunch. Each type of hydrocarbon molecule has a certain number of carbon atoms in it, and a certain number of hydrogen atoms. Propane has 3, and butane has 4, for example. And the less the number of carbon atoms, the faster it burns - this is why propane tanks can explode - but that comes with a lower amount of burning energy. Gasoline is a mix of octane (8 carbon atoms) and nonane (9), and your car's or lawn mower's engine is specifically designed to best use a certain mix percentage of those two chemicals. Most cars love \"regular\" but special smaller motors often work best with \"Premium\" grade. Premium has a higher percentage of Octane compared to other hydrocarbons in it (that's the number like 87 or 89 that you see on the pump - that means 87% octane or 89% octane - and premium used to be called \"high-octane\" for this reason.). Gas stations generally sell less of it, so they charge a little extra for it. It goes the other way too, with some fuels having much more carbon in their molecules - diesel is a special fuel for a special type of engine that works with much bigger hydrocarbon molecules. It's more energy-dense, and so is really good for big engines like transport trucks."
],
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mpbu1c | how can something cut your skin below clothes without cutting the clothes | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gu8u6nh"
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"text": [
"If you poked a needle through your jeans, and then slid the needle left and right, it could cut you without cutting your clothing. Many pokey things can do this."
],
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4
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mpbyiv | in computer hacking, what does it mean to get in via a back door and how does it work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gu8snnz",
"gu8w7n2",
"gualpfw"
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"Lots of things have a normal way to get in, where you just are a user and log in and use the site, that would be the front door. For a lot of reasons a lot of things also have numerous other ways other things get in, like special code for the advertising bots, or debug stuff that programmers use, or admin tools, or testing software, or a million other things. These often are not as well tested or protected as the \"front door\" so hackers get in using them. Basically it's an intentional way to get into something, but not the one intended for you to use.",
"Did you ever learn the \"Konami Code\" for video games? On some Nintendo games, if you hit ↑↑↓↓←→←→BA **START**, you would get a bunch of extra lives and power-ups for the game. This was invented so the game developers could test their game without needing to be exceptionally skilled. This is an example of a back door in a computer system. Other networking systems will sometimes have these, usually in the form of administrative tools. A common practice in an organization I used to work for was the \"Troubleshooter Account.\" This was an admin account that anyone troubleshooting computers on the system could use. Of course, this was a major security vulnerability as well -- if a worker stopped working for that organization, or even just the department that did computer work, they still had access to everything in the network. In other cases, they exist for the same reason as the Konami code: developers put them in so they could work with all parts of a secure program.",
"Say you live in a house on a busy street. When you leave your house, you lock it. You're the only one with a key. You don't want anyone to get in unless you use your key to allow it. But there may be circumstamces where you want a backup solution. What if you locked your key inside? What if someone you want to be able to enter your house arrives, and you're not there to let them in? To solve this, you devise a brilliant plan. You'll leave a spare key under the doormat by the the door behind your house. A clean backup strat to get you in in a pinch and easy instructions you can grant to trusted parties that you can revoke at any time. Sure, it would be devestating if someone you didn't authorize found it, but someone would have to jump through the mental hoops of going around back of your house, moving the doormat, and finding the key. And the sad fact is, some clever people DO manage to take the time to scope things and figure that out. In the real world, we call them burglars. In the digital world, we call them hackers."
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mpcapy | How can a motor be used as a generator and vice versa? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"[Electromagnetic Induction]( URL_0 ) is the phenomenon where electricity that flows or oscillates causes magnetism, and magnetism that moves or oscillates causes electricity, in nearby metals. This is because electricity and magnetism are actually two aspects of the same thing: electromagnetism. And also because metal atoms have [loose electrons]( URL_1 ) that can \"move\" through the metal like a river among pebbles (the atoms), so the electrons can be moved very easily by any electromagnetism. So anyway, to answer your question, when you put electricity into a motor, the flow of electricity creates a magnetic force and it forces the motor to turn; if instead you connect the motor's shaft to a source of motion (a small gasoline engine for example), then you're moving metal wires relative to the magnets inside the motor, and that creates electricity. [Generators]( URL_2 ) are a small gasoline engine connected to a motor, the gasoline engine \"pushes\" the motor to generate electricity.",
"A motor takes electrical energy and converts it to kinetic energy. It takes electricity and turns it into motion. A generator does the exact opposite. It takes motion (kinetic energy) and turns it into electricity. The principles behind them are the same, they just work in opposite directions. So if you input motion (kinetic energy) into a motor it will become a generator, and vice versa."
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mpczk7 | What causes that lump in your throat feeling before you're about to cry? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So pretend, if you will, that someone is breaking up with you. When the news hits, your nervous system kicks into gear and triggers your fight or flight response. Your body starts trying to circulate more oxygen to your muscles.. when you cry or are on the verge of crying, your glottis is trying to stay open in search of that oxygen, but gets forced close every time you swallow(like your saliva). This tension messes with the muscles in your throat, giving the sensation of a lump. [Source]( URL_0 )",
"Stress causes you to unconsciously tighten your throat muscles. This causes your larynx to tighten which prevents it from moving as freely as it would otherwise. This gives you the feeling that swallowing becomes more difficult or in some cases even painful.",
"Our bodies responded to all kinds of stress - physical or emotional - by prioritising breathing over eating. As part of this instinct, your ~~trachea~~ *windpipe* opens. This forces your ~~oesophagus~~ *foodpipe* to close. When you swallow and you feel resistance, that's you pushing back against your body trying to focus on breathing instead of swallowing. Your windpipe and foodpipe are joined in your throat, and there's a little flappy thing called an epiglottis that makes sure only one is open at a time. It's much more focused on keeping the windpipe closed usually, since getting air in your tummy makes you burp, but getting food in your lungs makes you choke. When you're stressed, that priority shifts over. We tend to notices this more when we're sad vs. when we're scared or angry, because of two reasons. Firstly, fear/anger generally means you're more focused on something else, and paying less attention to your body. Second, our eyes are linked to our noses through little ducts (which is why we get snotty when we cry), and our noses are linked to our mouths and throats, so you'll eventually need to swallow some of the tears that go that route. Edit: To be a bit more detailed and less eli5: the epiglottis doesn't actually cover your oesophagus (foodpipe), just your trachea (windpipe). But the motion of opening the epiglottis (and thus trachea) squeezes your oesophagus shut. [This]( URL_0 ) is a good little animation of the process. When we get a lump in our throats, you can kind of think of it as the oesophagus 'pre-closing' a bit, to make it easier for the trachea to expand and stay open. It also means the trachea can open more fully, so you get more air into the lungs.",
"Stimulation of the [vagus nerve]( URL_0 ) causes that feeling. The vagus nerve is a fascinating link between the brain and body.",
"And your brain tells your salivary glands to make more saliva to act as a lubricant and protectant before you vomit. So if you feel nauseous and start getting a lot of saliva build up.....get ready to get to the nearest garbage can, toilet, bush, etc."
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mpd02e | How do people with Alzheimer's not forget everything? | How do people with Alzheimer's not forget everything? For example, I have seen people with Alzheimer's who do not remember loved ones and other stuff, but they still remember how to speak and how to move etc. What stops them from forgetting every single tiny little thing they know? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Not all memories are stored in the same way. The brain is a mishmash of billions of connections, all interacting and interacting with other interactions. There's some general rules for what gets stored where though, facial memories and memories of people are stored in one area, while muscle memory and memory about how to do things is usually stored in a different area.",
"They do, eventually. In advanced Alzheimer’s, the ability to swallow, move, talk and all muscle control decreases until it’s gone. The last thing to go is breathing. Often, people in this state die from malnourishment, or infection/pneumonia. It’s a horrible, protracted way to go.",
"Alzheimer kills Neurons. There are different amounts of neurons for different memories/tasks. The more a often neuron gets used, the more neurons of the same type form. (Yes I know it's more complicated but it will do for this eli5) Saw a film yesterday but weren't really paying attention. Not many neurons. So few, you might just completely forget this movie without even having akzheimers. Your favorite movie of all time that you have seen 10 times, talked about with multiple friends and read about in multiple forums? That has a good chance of staying with you till the day you die. The neurons responsible for triggering your breathing many times per minute, 24/7, 365 days a year for your entire lifetime? There are a lot of those. They are among the last to go.",
"My eng not good but i'll try explain it. Alzheimer's occurs when proteins in the brain's memory areas are produced incorrectly and accumulate in nerve cells. This build-up is happening slowly. Therefore, things forgotten happen slowly. First of all, while memory areas are affected, even the ability to swallow is lost in the later stages. I'm not sure if the answer you wanted is something like this. I hope it works."
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mpdsbl | How does DNA carry behavioral characteristics? | I understand that DNA carries physiological human traits like skin tone, hair, athleticism, etc. But how is it that children mimic the same mannerism that one of the parents had. For example, a ditto sleeping position, or in the case of a guy I know who used to hold on to his moms/dads ear as a child, and now his son does the exact same thing. How does DNA carry behavioral characteristics/traits? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you are actually interested in knowing what humans understand about this question, check out Robert Sapolsky's lecture series on [behavioral genetics]( URL_0 ). It is free on Youtube from the Stanford channel. It might not be accessible to a five year old, but he certainly makes it accessible to the average Joe who knows a little bit about the scientific method.",
"As the previous comment said, a huge part of it is just children mimicking their parents. However, there is a genetic component as well. The DNA codes, among other stuff, for the neurotransmitter receptors in the brain. The receptors can therefore differ in their senzitivity to the specific transmitter or to some of the modulating factors which causes differences in behavior. The DNA also codes for the factors that play role in the development of the brain. Slight changes in these factors may cause the brain to be structured slightly differently which could also influence the way a person will behave. Of course, there are so many genetic influences and they are so subtle that there is no way you could just read someone's genetic information and know how the person will behave. Therefore, as of now, there's no practical use for the genetics of behavior. Also, I remember that some time ago I watched a series of lectures about behavioral biology with prof. Sapolski on Stanford University's Youtube channel. I don't remember how much into detail it went, but if you're interested in this kind of stuff, it might be worthwhile for you.",
"> I understand that DNA carries physiological human traits \\[...\\] Well some physiological traits will also induce behavior change, eg: A painful knee joint may affect the way someone walks, different sensitivities to taste and smell affect dietary preferences and so on..."
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mpggg8 | What actually is food poisoning and what is happening in our bodies that make them respond so violently to it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Food poisoning happens when you eat some bad bacteria living on/in your food. These bacteria (commonly staphylococcus aureus and bacillus cereus) make a toxin and spread that toxin all in your food. When you eat that toxin, your guts are like “this is a bad thing so let’s get rid of it” and your guts get rid of it with vomiting and diarrhea. The vomiting and diarrhea get rid of the bacteria and essentially clean you out. Some bacterial diarrheas last longer but that’s because those bacteria can live in your guts and make their toxin instead of these food poisoning ones that make their toxin before you eat it.",
"Food poisoning is a catch-all term for bacteria and viruses that cause gastrointestinal problems. We associate them with food, but that's not the only source. Generally anything contaminated with fecal matter or handled by someone already sick with whatever version of it can cause food poisoning. The physical mechanism that makes you sick varies with the cause.",
"Okay, so I’ll try to make this as ELI5 as I can. Just imagine that you’ve kept a pot of water on the stove for it to boil. Now you go about doing your work, but when you come to the kitchen, you accidentally wind up touching the pot on the stove. What happens then ? You instinctively and immediately pull your hand back. Because the heat from the pot hurt your hand. And your brain took less than a second to register this heat and realise that it’s bad and can burn you and told your hand to move away. Similarly, some foods are bad for you (just like the boiling pot), and once your body realises they’re bad for you (which takes more time than moving your hand away from a boiling pot, because in this case, the threat is not immediate, so your brain and your gut takes some time to respond), it tries to expel the bad food out. Now once something is in your stomach, it has only two possible ways to be expelled. Which are either pooping or puking. Which is basically what happens in “food poisoning”. As far the “why do our bodies respond so violently to it?” part of the questions is concerned. Well, due to millions of years of evolution, your body (and almost everyone else’s) has learnt to tell the difference between good and bad stuff, and it’s so good at its job, that it even knows what bad stuff is really really bad and can harm you drastically if it stays in your body for too long. So to prevent that from happening, your body tries to expel the “bad food” as soon as possible, which manifests as diarrhoea and vomiting. Edit: typos"
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mpgrc4 | How do parental filters work? Is there a list of all adult content sites? Does someone manually add them, or is it automated? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It depends on the system used to monitor the adult sites. Some are manually added by the parent(s) themselves, some are automated to block known adult sites (or games, or whatever else needs to be blocked), others are a massive list that's added to manually. It can also depend on where you're monitoring, too. For example, school districts can have district-wide filters based on an automatic list, with individual schools adding their own rules into that."
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mphf1d | How EXACTLY does hydration (or lack of it) affects your running training or exercise in general. What is the science behind it? | You can feel the difference but how does it work exactly? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A large part of it is that you need your cooling system to work by having water in you to sweat. Sweat helps rid your body of bad stuff that is carried out by the water. Without enough water, your organs can't work properly because the water helps your blood pump more freely. At least that's my most high level explanation.",
"There is much confusion over dehydration. your body contains three types of water. Your body maintains a careful balance between these three types. Dehydration affects ALL three types. the three are: blood plasma, intramuscular fluid, cellular fluid. Consider. When you eat something it enters your digestive system. In your small intestine the food is liquefied - using water from those three sources. it is suggested that a 5% dehydration level can affect cognitive functions. For a 80kg person approx 40% (a half) will be bone. So a 5% loss of fluid equates to 2 litres. Which is a LOT. Something you WILL notice. for general running dehydration has NO effect on you whatsoever. Just take a drink at the end."
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mphm05 | If a photon does not experience time and exists in its full trajectory at a given instant, how does it "perceive" a body moving to cut its path? | OK maybe ELI12 would do. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In this way of envisioning the universe from the point of view of the photon, “movement” does not exist because time doesn’t really have meaning. The object that intersects its path can be visualized as a 3D object smeared through the 4th dimension, and that smear at some point intersects the ray of the photon in the 4th dimension. To make an analogy, imagine you are looking at a road that crosses a railroad line. How does the road “see the rail line move and interact with it”? It doesn’t, they exist simultaneously with a particular point of intersection.",
"For a particle that moves at light speed, there is no time. It simply exists everywhere on its path instantly and simultaneously. Nothing ever changes.",
"Don't take the analogy and GR thought experiment of the photon not \"experiencing time\" too far. Photons don't experience _anything_, they don't. An object moving at the speed of light can still run into something, quite obviously. It still moves from point A to point B, and that takes a very finite amount of time. IF you were a photon moving at the speed of light, you'd perceive the rest of the universe passing by in an instant because of the exponential nature of the Lotentz curve which dictates the effect of time dilation on a moving object. However, you're not, and you don't, and you can't, and massless photons aren't conscious.",
"It doesn’t perceive it. It just interacts with a body somewhere on its path. From the POV of the photon, no time has passed or will ever pass. But that doesn’t mean that every photon everywhere exists forever; from the POV of the body in its path; there was no photon at one moment, then there was a photon hitting it and being absorbed. The photon experienced no time, but the electron cloud of the body that absorbed it did.",
"What a bunch of bologna in this thread! * *\"A photon experiences no time\"* * *\"To a photon, the universe is compressed into a flat 2D space\"* Nonsense! This is not physics! A photon does not experience anything, and we can't construct a photon frame of reference. People are taking the \"limit\" solution of relativistic effects, but you can't just do that. One of the fundamental postulates of relativity itself is that the speed of light is the same for everyone (= there is no photon reference frame). The rest of relativity follows. You can't use those *new* rules, based on the assumption that there is no photon frame, and apply them to the photon frame, and expect a meaningful answer. The whole machinery breaks down in the process. As is evident by all the wishwashy explanations in here to the thousands of paradoxes which emerge as soon as you try to talk about photon frames. It can be fun to *speculate* about photon reference frames, but it has *nothing* to do with relativity. It is the complete *opposite* of relativity. And unless someone has some groundbreaking physics to share, this thread belongs in the philosophy department.",
"It can't interact with anything, so it doesn't experience anything, it just goes from point in space-time to point in space-time instantly, there is nothing in between. If you think of time as a series of 3d snapshots, then for photons it breaks down as from their perspective, they never exist, they just are created at point A and instantly get absorbed at point B.",
"The faster you travel, the smaller distances seem. This can be hard to envision, since it takes a pretty good bit of speed to actually see this in action, but imagine a car speeding past you really fast. The faster it goes by, the less time it takes to pass you, right? This is partially a function of speed, but it's also because the car literally looks smaller. However, this is only from the point of view of someone observing the car. From the guy driving the car, he's sitting still and not moving. In fact, YOU are the one moving very fast indeed. He's simply sitting still while the world zooms by. As a matter of fact, you are the one who shrunk a bit while he drove by. This is because while fast things shrink, fast things also view everything else as shrinking instead. This all comes to a point when you reach the speed of light. At the speed of light, everything else has shrunk so much that distance is meaningless. Everything is at the exact same point and can't shrink anymore. Therefore, movement is meaningless. Movement is just moving some distance over time, and distance no longer exists. So a photon wouldn't \"perceive\" a body moving to cut its path. To a photon, it doesn't have a path because a path implies some distance to be travelled, some point B to get to from point A. Point A and B are the exact same point, as is everything else, because everything is shrunk. Either there is an object for it to collide with, or there is not, and the photon would never know the difference, because it would happen instantly by its personal timescale."
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mpj0ps | if colour is a spectrum going red thru purple then why do we have colours like magenta or pink, which seemingly connect purple back to red? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your eye has three types of color-detecting cells. Each has a color they’re most sensitive to: one is red, one is green, and one is blue. But they aren’t sharp, specific colors that they’re sensitive to, there’s some overlap. Yellow light, for example, is seen by both the red and the green cells. Which means that you can trick your brain into seeing yellow by mixing red and green light, like in a computer display. For violet, the blue receptor does most of the work, but oddly enough the *red* receptor can also see things in the extreme edge of visible. So when violet hits your eye, the blue receptor and the red receptor see it. Magenta is a strong blue plus a strong red, when adding light. It’s not a spectral color, it’s the mixing of two colors. There are a lot of different pinks, some can have some blue in them and some are more accurately described as a pale red, which would be white (all colors) with some extra red.",
"There's a difference between the possible colors that a single wavelength of light can produce (monochromatic light), and the possible colors that we can see. You can mix \"pure\" colors of single wavelengths to make a new color that your eyes can see. The single-wavelength colors make up the spectrum you described. The other colors are a mix. The image below shows the colors we can see. The line around the outside is made up of the \"pure\" monochromatic colors. Draw a line connecting two of those colors to see what they can create when mixing. URL_0 Edit: Purple doesn't connect back to red. The color wheel is a lie."
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mpjjk3 | Why do recipes for cakes say store in an airtight container when there is air in the container anyway? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The air in the container sucks up some moisture from the food and then just sits there. If you let the air circulate the new air will grab more moisture and your stuff dries the hell out.",
"Air tight means air does not flow in and out. If moisture from the cake leaves the cake and enters the air, you will increase vapor pressure in the container and slow down further moisture loss. If you have air movement into and out of the container then you’ll lose moisture and come back to a dry cake.",
"Two reasons. Firstly, it helps keep the cake from drying out. The air inside the container isn't changing so it some of the moisture from the cake leeches out into the air, it'll reach an equilibrium and stop losing moisture pretty quickly whereas the outside air is constantly changing and you don't get as much protection. Secondly, it reduces the chance of any contamination, especially from things like mold spores but also bugs and stuff."
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mpjvoo | Is acne a hormonal glitch in the human body? | Acne being caused by an overload of sebum being produced makes perfect sense, but I've never understood why this is all caused by hormones. Why do the sebaceous glands freak out due to hormones and androgens when the body isn't benefiting from, rather being harmed by large amounts of sebum? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm sure others can explain it better but think of it like alergies. Allergies are your body having a strong immune response to something non threatening. Your body missidentifies for example peanuts as a threat. But the immune response is an integral part of your body. Same with hormonal imbalances. Different parts of your body regulate or react to hormones as a normal part of your healthy functioning body. But they arn't equipped to read handle sudden or extrem fluctuations of hormones thus they 'do their job' but this time it's completely overboard. Kind of like someone cooking and the recepy has a typo saying 'leave in the oven 20 hours' and he just does what he is told even if this is clearly a terrible idea simply because they learned to always trust the recepie 😅 So the function is not useless. the functiuion is very important. It's just the handling of extreme circumstances that's not optimal.",
"Sebum production increase actually does help the body. The increase helps to keep the skin healthy and retain moisture, and has other uses as well. Having low sebum (dry skin) actually causes problems such as irritation and acne also, as well as potential for cracked skin. Acne is just a possible side effect from the increase in sebum and androgens, and often has other factors, such as what cleansers are being used, what type of acne it is, genetics, environment, exercising, etc. Sebum is regulated by your androgens. They are called the male hormones (but females have them as well, in smaller numbers). When androgens increase, sebum increases, that’s just how it goes. Hormones are regulated by the pituitary gland. When you hit puberty, your hormones increase and change levels frequently. This is natural as your body is adjusting. This hormonal imbalance causes your sebum levels to change as well. If the body is producing a large amount of testosterone, your sebum will increase and your chances for acne will increase. This is in puberty though, when your hormones are at much different levels then when you become an adult. As an adult, your hormones and as such sebum production should begin to balance out. As such, your skin should only produce its normal amount, and not change as often as puberty. Increases in testosterone at any age can increase sebum production, though. As you get older, your body will produce less androgens and less sebum will be produced. This results in dry and damaged skin, this shows that sebum production is important, it’s just acne takes advantage of the times when oil production is high. Think of how when people get older, the skin begins to seem more damaged. But acne can happen anytime really, just keep to a good skin care routine! Interestingly, progesterone might cause skin problems at higher levels also, despite not being an androgen. Balancing the levels of progesterone might help as well",
"The other posters have explained it well, but one other thing to keep in mind when considering why this happens is that evolution doesn't optimize a species' development across all dimensions and doesn't operate on the subjective well-being of the organism; it operates on mutations and variations within individual species that increase survival rates of offspring (really genes) overall. There are a ton of features of the human body that are far from ideal and that no bio-engineer would ever design that way from scratch; they're byproducts of the trajectory that species has evolved into over time. As noted sebum production is very beneficial to the skin in moderation, and humans evolved to go through a hormonal transition around 12/13 years of age or so which ultimately increased the survivability of the species as a whole. The fact that puberty brings with it very awkward and uncomfortable physical changes including acne is just a byproduct of that."
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mply2g | What makes us feel embarrassed, like biologically? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is a really complicated question without a lot of good answers. What we do know is that embarrassment is mainly mediated by a brain structure called the 'pregenual anterior cingulate cortex', which is a small part of a brain system called the limbic system, which deals with processing emotions and factoring them into motivation and behavior. Essentially what will happen is your brain will check all of its current inputs (vision, touch, smell, etc.) against your memories. Based on these memories your brain will decide how your behavior should be modulated and the appropriate emotion to make that happen. Embarrassment is essentially saying 'hey, in your past this situation has been detrimental to our or other people's social standing or relationships.' Your cingulate cortex would then take that information and feed it to (via other structures) your prefrontal cortex (which is where decisions will be made), and your parasympathetic/sympathetic nervous systems (which are responsible for the fight/flight vs. rest/digest states of your body). This essentially primes you to make a decision based on this emotional response, and prepares your body to carry out that decision. Disclaimer: I'm not an expert here, just an undergraduate neuroscience major, and this is a mega oversimplification about something we really don't understand perfectly. If anyone has any additions or corrections please go ahead.",
"Humans are pack animals. If you think about how our brains evolved, a lot of our base instincts and reactions (including emotional reactions) to stimuli benefit being a successful member of the pack. Embarrassment is the result of behavior that is perceived by the group to be detrimental or wrong or different in some way, which is therefore threatening to the pack, & your good standing within the group, which is threatening to your own survival. That’s bad. The individuals with the ability to perceive these cues, the ones capable of feeling embarrassment, are able to course correct their behavior to fall in line with the pack and ensure their survival as the grow up. Ever see that person that just CANNOT be embarrassed by anything and acts a little ridiculous, or without regard for social cues? Probably not a lot of close relationships. Just a few thousand years ago, that was a death sentence. Embarrassment kept us alive.",
"can't give you a neurological or genetic-specific answer, but emotions like embarrassment evolved because we are highly social and cognitive creatures, and even other social animals, like our primate cousins, can experience embarrassment. Humans start learning really early through parents and other peers and mold emotions like embarrassment based on the feedback they receive (and genetics obviously play a big part in which knobs get turned the easiest, and features like attractiveness and intelligence play a part in how others give you feedback). Getting a good read on your kin and neighbors was and is a huge driving force in our evolution, so emotions like embarrassment can get very complex and confusing in us."
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mpmgs4 | Why are embarrassing moments SO hard to forget compared to other negative emotions? | I can remember times when I felt afraid, angry, upset, any other negative emotion. And when I remember those, I usually just don’t care and move on. But when I think of embarrassing moments, it sticks to my head like crazy. I cringe and blush about it for a VERY long time, even if it’s been YEARS since it happened. Am I the only one who feels this way, and why? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Positive pathways and negative pathways are different in your head. Your brain prioritises negative pathways when it comes to laying down memories. That is why your single moment of embarrassment at your fifth birthday party overwhelms the memory of your four hours of fun. The reason your brain prioritises negative experiences is because your brain is trying to keep you alive. We are very much still wired up to be in a prehistoric setting, and we don’t suit our modern situation very well. Your brain is constantly scanning for danger and burning those memories deep into your mind. Humans are social creatures. We literally *need* other humans to survive. Embarrassment is a survival mechanism. It’s a way of keeping ourselves in check, stopping us from straying from the group. Our monkey brain tells us: “without the group, we die. Don’t upset the group. Be embarrassed when you do something weird, so that you don’t get so weird that you are ousted from the group.” That’s what embarrassment is for. You remember embarrassment keenly because your brain is training you to stay within your social group and therefore survive."
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mpnuo0 | what makes programming languages like go and rust memory-safe and c++ not? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In old languages like C and C++ it's up to the programmer to not make mistakes. For example if you type: int a[10]; a[16] = 0; The first line gives you an array (like a group or collection) of 10 integers/numbers. The second line, you set the value of the 16th integer to 0. This doesn't make sense, you asked for 10 numbers, you can't set the value of the 16th number. In languages like C and C++ the is called undefined behaviour. What will happen, nobody knows. Your program might crash, it might act strangely, or it might work perfectly fine for 10 years and then start crashing. Newer languages came along, and the designers said, people make mistakes, the language shouldn't just allow it, but help them see their errors. So in a newer language, if you type a[16] = 0; before it sets the value, it checks if position 16 is even valid. If not, it throws an error. Otherwise it sets the value. This check takes time, so people who like high performance have stuck with C and C++. The other issue is sometimes the programmer doesn't know how much memory is needed. For example, if you are creating an image editor, you don't know the size of the image the user will open. So you need to wait until they open it, look and the width and the height an the request enough memory to hold the image. Something like: auto image = new Pixel[width * height]; and then when the programmer is done with the memory: delete[] image; Again, it's up to the programmer to not ask for a pixel at a position outside of the image. Or to ask for a pixel after they've already deleted the image. Go takes a different approach. The programmer still has to ask for the data for the image, but they don't have to worry about deleting it later. Instead, the language, every few milliseconds, looks at all the memory being used, and can see if the image data won't be used again and deletes it for the programmer. The downside here is this checking takes time, and the program will be using memory it no longer needs, but go hasn't noticed it can free it yet. Most programmers use safer languages now, they are a little slower, but it's not an issue for most things, maybe other than operating systems and video games. So Rust came along and took a different approach. It's goal is to be fast and safe. Also, if you are going to write an operating system, you need to be able to poke around in memory in weird and unsafe ways. So it has unsafe blocks, you can write all you weird and crazy code in there and do anything. The rest of the program will be safe. The advantage here is if you do have a crash, you only need to look in the few unsafe spots and check them carefully, compared to C++ where the crash could be anywhere.",
"Languages like C++ and C allow you to handle memory allocation yourself. This means you have the power of managing when an object gets created in memory and when it gets destroyed. It's a wonderful thing, since it gives you complete freedom. It's also a curse, because you must make sure that you know what you're doing. If you allocate memory for an object and you never free it, you create a **memory leak**. If you do this repeatedly (even worse: in a loop) you can easily hog memory until the program crashes down with the rest of the system. If you free memory for an object, but you keep pointing to its old location in memory, you created a **dangling pointer**. Trying to access that means crashing the program, in the best of cases. Trying to deallocate the object a second time results in a **double free** - again, with dire consequences. If you allocate a certain block of memory for an object, but you keep reading well past it, you end up accessing memory that you shouldn't. This can result in more than crashing your program: you can pave the way for the next vulnerability to be exploited by a malicious user (**buffer overflow** attack). In C++, and even more in C, this is dangerously easy to do simply by operating on strings and forgetting to put a terminator character at the end. Higher level languages don't allow you to this do kind of damages. They employ boundary checks to avoid buffer overflows. They might use a **garbage collector** - you can see it like a little program inside your program, constantly overseeing memory and automatically freeing memory when it's no longer used. In short, they take away the power to manage memory yourself - depending on the cases, this can come at a cost in terms of performance. But in exchange they give you the safety of not shooting yourself in the foot.",
"The \"compiler\" is a program that converts a language that's relatively easy for people to read like Go/Rust/C++ into a language that the computer reads, which is called \"assembly\" or \"machine code\". (There can be some other steps in the process but we'll stick with the simplest answer.) The C++ compiler doesn't enforce a lot of rules. You can write code that is very obviously flawed and it won't complain. This is a blessing and a curse. It means very clever C++ developers can do ridiculous things and yield performance benefits for it. It also means developers who aren't as clever as they think can create serious problems. Rust and Go have more \"discipline\". They have rules about how you are supposed to use memory. If your code breaks those rules, the compilers refuse to convert your code to machine language. Sometimes the bad stuff happens in C++ because the code makes the status of some memory ambiguous. A stricter compiler's response to ambiguous memory use is to treat it like an error until you remove the ambiguity and prove you're following the rules. Imagine you're playing the Shell Game with someone. This is the game where a ball or some small object is placed below one cup, and several identical cups are placed next to it. Then, the person running the game slides the cups around to try to disguise where the ball is. If you pick the cup with the ball, you win. C++ is like a version of that game where anything goes. The person might spin the table around and, while you're not looking, take the ball away so there's no way to win. Rust and Go are like a version where the person running the game can't leave, can only make 5 swaps, and you also win if he's sneaky and takes the ball away. Under these rules, you're much more likely to win because the game's operator can't do cheaty things. So why isn't C++ more like Rust and Go? Well, history. First, if people are very careful they can write code that's just as \"safe\" in C++. It just takes an awful lot of care. Second, when C++ was being developed, we didn't know as much about what isn't \"safe\". Computer Science is a pretty young field, roughly 60-80 years old by certain definitions. We had to make a lot of mistakes to learn what mistakes look like. Third, compilers are very complex and can take up a lot of computing power. The computers we have today are hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than they were when C++ compilers were developed. It may not have been possible to implement the features Rust and Go enforce *and* maintain feasible compilation times. We could update C++ compilers today, but it's usually hard and dangerous to dramatically change how such an old compiler works. There is a LOT of C++ code written that might stop working if the compiler suddenly required everything to be safe. That could be really bad, since that code probably does a lot of important things and the cost of reworking it to be \"safe\" could be immense. There are tools and compilers that do perform more rigorous checks, and I'm sure people use them. But if a C++ compiler suddenly *required* it, that would be a very unpopular change and people would refuse to use that compiler."
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mpnxu5 | What Actually is Adam's Apple? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Thyroid cartilage. Protrudes more in men with puberty because of larynx development behind it."
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mpo99u | What is tensor flow, and how is used in gaming and data analytics? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A computer comes with chunks of code to do simple math operations like adding two numbers. Then, you can install extra code from someone else that uses those simple building blocks to do something a bit fancier, like solving an equation. Tensorflow is a collection of extra code implementing a whole bunch of building blocks useful for neural networks. Neural Networks are a family of mathematical functions (like, f(x)=ax for some constant a is a family) that have lots and lots of free parameters (instead of just 1 a that you pick, there are hundreds, thousands or even millions of different as that you need to set). Neural Networks have the nice property that, if you make a big enough network, they can approximate any other function to arbitrary accuracy (if you can figure out what to set the parameters to). So tensorflow provides bits of code to evaluate a neural network for particular parameter values. It provides code to efficiently save a particular set of parameters to disk. And it provides code that is useful for searching for the right set of parameters to approximate some other function you have. The other thing tensorflow does, is it provides versions of all those code bits that can run on your GPU, since a lot of these operations can be run in parallel (you don't need to wait for the first operation to finish before starting the next one). So how is tensorflow used? It is used to define neural networks for things like image classification. It's a lot easier to define the network using tensorflow building blocks than it is to do so from just code snippets that let a computer add and subtract two numbers."
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mpocxi | why do we get shivers down our spine listening to a song or a powerful speech, and what causes it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Our emotions are connected to our hypothalamus, so during periods of intense emotion we sometimes experience goosebumps or shivers as they have triggered the production of adrenalin in our blood. Sauce: URL_0 Incase you’re interested, the end of “in the flesh?” By Pink Floyd gives me a crazy feeling that is similar to getting a fright or being chased, so I would’ve guessed it was to do with adrenaline.",
"Not everyone is able to experience it and it just has to do with having more connections between your auditory cortex and the area of your brain that’s responsible for emotional processing, leading to more powerful reactions when listening to music or powerful speeches",
"I’m pretty sure this feeling is called frisson. Frisson- is a psychophysiological response to rewarding auditory and/or visual stimuli that often induces a pleasurable or otherwise positively-valenced affective state and transient paresthesia (skin tingling or chills), sometimes along with piloerection (goose bumps) and mydriasis (pupil dilation).The sensation commonly occurs as a mildly to moderately pleasurable emotional response to music with skin tingling. I’ve been experiencing this since I was young age and I can it makes me feel good because I get all excited etc",
"Like asmr? I used to watch those videos and nobody knew what they were and thought I was weird. Now people know what they are, but still think I'm weird. Lol",
"I thought that this was a figure of speech; I have never experienced it. Am I a sociopath?",
"So someone already answered the neurological response in the hypothalamus, but physiologically this is referred to as frisson. Frisson is a psychophysiological reaction for an emotional response to auditory stimuli. We know it's connected to the reward system in our brains which releases \"feel good\" chemicals when we encounter something that may have been considered evolutionarily beneficial in the past. This anthropological theory has been cited to explain why some people experience frisson such as \"spine tingles\" and paresthesia like \"goosebumps\" in response to sounds such as rain and thunder - as these conditions may have meant our ancestors were safe from predators making the promotion of relaxation beneficial. Not everyone experiences frisson and even fewer can trigger these sensations without stimuli. Somewhere along mankind's journey our big ol smarty brains crossed these responses with sensory stimulation that we found enjoyable (or perhaps the other way around), resulting in shivers when we experience a song or speech or image that we find particularly emotionally compelling. Sources: I don't have them on me at the moment. I am a Bio major studying pre med and this very specific topic is something I dove down the rabbit hole for after finding my family had the ability to trigger frisson freely while a friend of mine could not."
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mpofxo | How does the body read the DNA? | Ok, so the DNA has the instructions on how to build a specific living thing right? But the DNA is just a molecule. It doesn't form a living organism on its own. So, how does the DNA tell the cells what kind of cell to be and how to build organs? How does the body "reads" the DNA to know what to do and how to do it? It's a question I always had. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's another molecule called RNA polymerase, which makes a copy of a piece of the DNA in RNA. Then, that RNA makes it's way to a ribosome. At the ribosome, the RNA provides a key for amino acids to combine together and form proteins which do things.",
"It doesn't read the DNA. It makes a temporary copy of the DNA, and then reads that, as this allows multiple readers to read at the same time. Now, stick with me on this, cos it's going to be a bit of a bumpy ride. And yeah you can't really get it more simple than this without reaching a point where you're not actually explaining it anymore. You may want to read it twice. So the first part of this is the [structure of DNA]( URL_2 ). DNA is a long strand of smaller molecules all stuck together. Those molecules are called nucleotides. A nucleotide is itself made up of two pieces. The first piece is called a phosphate sugar, which can come in two varieties, ribose and deoxyribose (deoxyribose is more stable than ribose, but they're otherwise identical), and the second piece is called the nucleoside, and can come in five varieties: A, T, C, G and U. The phosphate sugar is the part that binds together to create the chain, a bit like the binder of a book. It holds all the nucleotides together. The nucleoside is the bit that actually contains information. The order of the nucleosides is what gives different bits of DNA different meanings. A strand of AACGTCTGA has a different meaning than a string of CAGGGTCAT. The way these nucleosides represent information is that they form weak bonds called hydrogen bonds with other nucleosides. The number of hydrogen bonds they form and the location of those bonds on the nucleoside is different for each one, and this causes them to pair up like magnets. A and T nucleosides naturally stick together, and C and G nucleosides naturally stick together. U is an unusual one - it does the exact same thing as T, but is less stable. These nucleosides only stick together like this to nucleosides on another strand of DNA though, like how a zipper only zips together with the opposite side, not with another part of its own side. This has meaning as information because the different patterns of stickiness can cause them to stick to different things, and that differential stickiness can be linked to different kinds of other molecule. It's a bit like a cipher really. That'll make more sense later. You now have all the information you need to know what DNA stands for: Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid. It's a Nucleic Acid that uses a Deoxyribose phosphate sugar. DNA has a cousin called RNA (Ribose Nucleic Acid). RNA works exactly the same way, but its phosphate sugar is ribose, not deoxyribose, and it uses U instead of T. That's a fun quirk of evolution right there. DNA evolved from RNA with the explicit purpose of being more stable, and T evolved from U because T is a more stable form of U, but since RNA does a different job to DNA, they don't compete with one another and RNA retained its U instead of switching to T. Bit of a wall of text there, but DNA is super complicated so there's a minimum level of background information required to explain this. Normally, DNA exists in a paired strand - that iconic DNA helix. There's the main strand, and then there's a second strand that's stuck to that main strand using that pairing stickiness between nucleosides. Any A gets a T stuck to it and vice versa, and any C gets a G stuck to it, and vice versa. That's a very important aspect of DNA that prevents mutation and facilitates cell replication, but it does get in the way when the DNA needs to be read. So the first thing that the cell needs to do is get rid of that second strand to reveal the nucleosides on the main strand. A special protein complex called DNA helicase slides down the DNA, unzipping it like a zipper. After that, the main strand has been exposed. Not the whole strand though, just the specific bit of the strand that needs to be read (the gene). A series of nucleosides on the main strand tell the DNA helicase where the gene starts and ends so that it doesn't unzip too much or too little. This happens because the DNA has a series of molecules on it that preferentially stick to a specific order of hydrogen bonds, which can only be created by a specific order of nucleosides. This demonstrates the fact that nucleoside stickiness is given meaning by the way it sticks to things. Oh also if you don't know what a protein is, I'll put that at the end as an addendum. So you've exposed the main strand. That's great n' all but you haven't read the DNA yet. The next thing you're going to need is a second protein complex called RNA polymerase. This performs the process of \"transcription\". It sticks to the DNA in the same way as the DNA helicase - it sticks to a specific string of nucleotides and then moves along the DNA. Each time it gets to a new nucleoside, it waits until an RNA nucleotide that matches that nucleoside finds its way into the \"active site\" of the RNA polymerase. When it does, that RNA nucleotide sticks to the DNA nucleoside as a matched pair. The RNA polymerase detects this and glues the ribose sugar to the ribose sugar of the previous RNA nucleotide, then moves along to the next nucleoside on the DNA. As it does this, a strand of RNA is gradually built that matches the DNA strand (but inversed because of the fact matching pairs are A=U and C=G, not A=A, T=U, C=C or G=G, which fun fact means that technically, DNA stores the *opposite* of the information it actually sends out to the cell). Here's a [diagram]( URL_1 ) of the process. Note that \"template strand\" is what I've been calling the main strand here. See how the DNA has been opened up, and the RNA is being made by seeing how it sticks to the template strand? Now you've got an RNA strand that's the matching strand of the DNA. This is called the [messenger RNA]( URL_4 ) (mRNA). That RNA then finds its way to a third set of cellular machinery called the Ribosome. Now it gets exciting, because the Ribosome isn't actually a protein at all - it's also made of RNA! Which means that RNA can spontaneously evolve into Ribosomes! And if you don't find that exciting, well then you should, because that's how life started existing - RNA spontaneously evolving into Ribosomes! Anyway... the job of the Ribosome is to look at the nucleosides on the mRNA and then find matching pieces of tRNA (transfer RNA) and stick them together. Transfer RNA is pretty weird. What this is is like, structural RNA instead of meaningful RNA. Most of the tRNA doesn't matter. The tRNA simply acts as that cipher I mentioned, translating the nucleoside pattern on the mRNA into a meaningful output. That meaningful output is a protein, and proteins are made up of smaller molecules called amino acids, just like how DNA and RNA are made out of nucleotides. Each molecule of tRNA has a single amino acid stuck to it, and which amino acid that is depends on the type of tRNA molecule. The other thing the tRNA molecule has is a string of three exposed nucleosides. These nucleosides stick to nucleosides on the mRNA, with the help of the Ribosome, and only do so if they match. So a piece of tRNA with string UCG will only stick to a piece of mRNA with a string AGC. When that happens, the ribosome sticks the amino acid onto the previous amino acid that was brought in by the previous tRNA, shifts along the mRNA and boots out the now empty tRNA. This produces a string of amino acids just like the string of RNA produced by the RNA transcriptase. You may notice that this creates something called a triplet code: Each string of three nucleosides on the RNA corresponds to one amino acid in the resultant protein, and which triplet it is determines which amino acid it is. For example, the sequence GAU puts the amino acid Asparagine into the next position on the amino acid chain. Each set of 3 nucleosides is called a codon, as shown in the image of messenger RNA above. And here's a [Diagram]( URL_0 ) of that process happening inside a ribosome. Note the emerging amino acid string at the top and the mRNA at the bottom, read in threes. And just for fun, here's a [Diagram]( URL_3 ) of the structure of tRNA too. Note the anti-codon loop, the three nucleosides that stick to the matching pattern on the mRNA. The amino acid is on the acceptor stem. Almost at the end now, there's just one step left. So the mRNA has been fully read, the amino acid string has been completed. The last thing to do is to fold that amino acid string into a protein. And yes, it's literally folding. This happens because the different amino acids have different molecular shapes, which creates kinks in the string. They also have sticky bits on them that stick to other bits of the string and hold the shape together. Once the amino acid string has a shape, it's a protein, and proteins *do stuff*. This seems like a good point to explain proteins then. A protein is a shaped amino acid chain that does something. Some proteins stick together to create big structures - for example, muscle cells have massive protein structures called myofibrils that are capable of contracting and expanding. Enough cells doing this can move entire bones. Some proteins are things called channels, which embed themselves in the cell membrane and let specific molecules in and out of the cell, like doorways. The vast majority of proteins are things called enzymes, which cause chemical reactions to happen. All life is is a complex series of chemical reactions, so the right enzymes supplied with the right materials will build entire humans as the result of a sequence of countless quadrillions of chemical reactions. A And that about does it. Ain't biology cool?",
"The answer to your questions is very complicated. The entire field of genetics essentially exists to answer your question. As Emyrssentry said in their answer, what's coded into the DNA is the recipe for making thousands of different kinds of proteins, and these proteins are what perform the vast number of things the cell needs to do. A gene is the term used for the region of DNA that contains the code for a specific protein. The regulation of these genes, in other words controlling whether they are \"on\", meaning that protein will be made, or \"off\", meaning it won't be made (or finer regulation like whether a lot or a little of the protein is made) is the key to your questions, and something that is still in the process of being discovered and understood by biologists. What makes a skin cell different from a brain cell is which genes are active and which are turned off. > How does the body \"reads\" the DNA to know what to do and how to do it? This question can be answered more directly. You may have heard that DNA contains 4 \"letters\": A, C, T, and G. The proteins that are ultimately created from \"reading\" are chains of molecules called amino acids, and there are 20 of them (we'll say 20 to keep things simple, don't @ me biologists, I know it's not entirely true). There is a \"genetic code\" that is basically a mapping of 3 letter DNA sequences to amino acids, so AAG codes for Lysine, for example. The cell copies a region of DNA to an mRNA, and then there are molecules called tRNA (transfer RNAs) that are in the cell which are carrying the different amino acids, and bind to the specific three-letter code for the amino acid they're carrying. So a tRNA will bind to the AAG of an mRNA, and be holding a Lysine amino acid. Other tRNAs will bind to different three letters of that same mRNA with different amino acids, and so the amino acids will all be lined up and connected to form a protein. That's a very simplified explanation of how it happens, and there are some inaccuracies I did on purpose to keep it simple, but it gives you the basic concept of how it works."
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mpooul | Why are animals able to maintain good dental health despite lack of cleaning unlike humans? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"For a number of reasons. They don't eat refined sugar. Refined sugar feeds a lot of bacteria which then cause tooth decay. They eat uncooked food. This food is tougher and rougher and naturally scrapes teeth clean. There are animals which also produce a number of sets of teeth throughout their lives and others in which their adult teeth keep growing.",
"Animals don't maintain good dental healthy, they maintain a dental health just good enough to keep them alive, just like human. Yes as human we decided that brushing out teeth and going to the dentist everywhere is best for our teeth, but that doesn't mean it's needed. Nature doesn't care that the teeth become yellow or fall after 60 years. As we evolved what mattered was by the time most human died, their teeth still did the job alright and it's the same thing for all animals. Now today it's a bit different since modern human 1) Have a diet that is EXTREMELY rich in sugar, which attack our teeth a lot more than what we would naturally eat. 2) We have a very high standard when it come to dental hygiene that is rather recent in human history.",
"It's because of a few reasons: 1. Animals don't eat cooked food. This means they aren't eating food high in refined sugar and carbohydrates. 2. They drink only water. Not sugary cocktails designed to feed the bacteria in your mouth. 3. Some animals do have dental hygiene, such as sharks and crocodiles for example. 4. Most animals don't have a long enough life span for the rate of teeth rot to matter.",
"If you look at animal teeth, many have very yellow, but very intact teeth. If you look back a few hundred years ago, you will see that most humans had rotten teeth. However, if you look back a few thousand years ago, before agriculture, humans had intact teeth, like animals. Because we eat so many mushy sugary grains now, we don’t use our teeth the way they were intended, so they rot. TLDR, our diet has more sugar now than before agriculture, and our teeth weren’t meant to handle it"
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mpp6uu | How is the energy in our bodies converted into for example muscle movement | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Electron transport chain (ETC). The ETC pumps hydrogen into one side of of a cell wall and electrons onto another side. To get energy a protein allows a hydrogen to pass through but extracts energy using the gradient. It’s like a little motor turning to extract energy in the form of ATP. ATP has a bond that holds energy and is easily broken. The bond releases energy when broken. This energy is used by cells to do what they need to do"
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mpp92w | why does cleaning an old coin devalue it? | I get that the rust and buildup is impressive, but if that’s what gives the coin value then wouldn’t a coin forgotten in a swamp be more valuable than one that’s perfectly preserved in a time capsule or something? If the cleaning process damages the coin then that’s obvious too, but why is all coin cleaning considered that bad? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not going to lose any of its material value from cleaning. It'll always have that. It *will* lose the part that makes it valuable and interesting to many other humans, its tangible and authentic connection to a distant past. Whatever corrosion it collected on its way to through the ages is part of the story it can tell. Removing that removes the story. Repainting the Mona Lisa with modern materials, in more vibrant colors and on a bigger canvas will not somehow create a more valuable piece of art. Look into Walter Benjamin's \"aura\" terminology of you're more interested in this."
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mppa1f | Can I reduce my blood pressure by draining some blood? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes, temporarily. Blood pressure drops with blood loss. If it drops below a certain point then your heart can't get blood to the brain. The body doesn't like this, and so will typically respond by making you get very thirsty so it could then add the fluid you drink to your circulatory system. Draining blood doesn't address the systemic problems that typically are responsible for high blood pressure like a high sodium diet or stress. If the problems leading to high blood pressure aren't taken care of, it'll just return soon after. It's a very poor temporary solution to the problem."
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mppkfo | Humans have for example, built in flight or fight responses to protect themselves from danger and predators. This is hard coded and I assume, not learnt. Why then do humans have the uncontrollable ability to feel shame or guilt? Are these "modern" reactions or would early man have had these? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We're social animals. A lot of the emotions we feel are so we fit in with others. Humans don't do well by ourselves and so we've evolved to cooperate with others. Showing shame, guilt, etc tells others that you're sorry for what you did to them. This then enables the group to carry on.",
"Even dogs know when they've done something wrong and know to look sorry once their caught, but feelings like shame or guilt, that are NOT just \"I got caught and I'm sad that I'll be punished\", are a little more complicated than that. They have to do with ideas of right and wrong, and are felt even if you're not caught and don't suffer materially. Babies don't really act like they have any idea of right and wrong - babies are crazy selfish, because they only think about getting what they want and avoiding what they don't. We spend a lot of time teaching kids that it's important to do the right thing, and that doing the wrong thing comes with social punishments, even if there's no material punishment. Different cultures or groups have very different ideas of what is worthy of guilt or shame. I don't think that feelings of guilt or shame are hardwired into us in the same way that \"bear scary, run away\" is. That said... we're the most social animals to have ever lived, we've had social relationships more complex than any other animal for at least hundreds of thousands of years, and have been essentially modern in body and brain for like 50,000 years. That's COUNTLESS generations all raised from birth within social networks, and the social expectations that exist within those networks. Ideas of right and wrong are incredibly strong within human culture, even if they're not necessarily baked into our lizard brains."
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mpq6q7 | How does medicine like gas-x help eliminate gas in our body. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Simethicone (the active ingredient) encourages a very large number of very small bubbles (which are hard for the body to expel) to combine into a smaller number of large bubbles (which are easy to fart out). So, Gas-X doesn't stop you from farting -- it actually makes it easier. Its primary purpose is to relieve the bloating/pressure/pain that gas can cause."
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mpqbm0 | Why do your eyes get red after certain activities? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"dry ass eyes i’m willing to bet you don’t sleep w your eyes fully closed. you don’t blink enough when you stay up late. don’t blink enough when you look at screens. pot and allergies give you dry eyes."
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mpqqmu | Where does the light go ? How it disappears ? | This sounds so stupid but I've always wondered when you turn off the lights they immediately disappear (I know the light travels fast but where to ?? ) Does each light wave/particle go from its source to disappear continuously? (The more I write the stupider it sounds sorry) | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Every time light hits a surface and bounces off of it, some of that light gets absorbed into it. That's actually how you can even see things, your eyes are sensitive to absorbing light. This happens approximately a hundred million times per second in a 3 meter wide room, so even if only 1% gets absorbed in each reflection, it all gets absorbed very quickly.",
"It's a good question, when light hits something(a wall for example) a part of it is absorbed (into heat) and a part is reflected(which is why you see the wall) when you shutoff the light it bounces around while being absorbed each time until it's all absorbed, also this happens so fast that it's basically instantaneous."
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mpraq8 | When we break bones, how does our body know how much bone to regrow exactly the amount there was before? | Essentially, I've broken bones before but when they heal its never a case of excess bone created and for all intents and purposes its the exact same aesthetically once healed, but how does our body know exactly how much bone to make and where, and is there cases of it making too much bone for example so there would be "lumps" for want of a better word? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The body actually does create excess bone at first. This is why the area of a fracture feels raised in the initial stage of healing. Cells called osteoblasts create the bony framework that becomes calcified into mature bone. After the break is sealed then cells called osteoclasts shaves down the excess bone creating a smooth surface again"
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mprdnn | Most cooks know that opening the oven releases heat which slows cooking. But on cooking competition shows, many skilled chefs check their oven often, resulting in undercooked food. Do these chefs know something we don’t know, or are they actually making this rookie mistake? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Professional working chef here. You can open an oven when something is cooking often depending on what oven you have. Most ovens in professional kitchens have multiple fans or an advance heating method as opposed to what most people have at home with just a raw heating element. It heats up really fast so opening it and checking to see what your food looks like won’t really drop the temp that much. Overcrowding the oven will mess with the heat source more than opening it a lot.",
"Professional ovens tend to be convection ovens. They have a fan that moves the air around which prevents uneven cooking (hot and cold apots) and will bring it up to temperature faster. Standard home ovens have radiant heat, which will take longer to get back up to temp once it has dropped from the door being opened a lot.",
"Does that really result in undercooked food? It seems to me that undercooked food would only happen if the chef checked the food, found it to be undercooked, and then *removed it from the oven prematurely*.",
"On cooking competition shows, there's some range of cutting and editing going on depending on the show. If your only comparison is shows, you're probably overestimating how often their ovens are being opened.",
"The oven door opening is more disruptive when baking a cake (which likes consistent convention heat) compared to baked potatoes under the broiler or something. I think being on camera makes a lot of people nervous too.",
"Not an expert chef but I would say it’s not all about saving the heat like you say. Also consider that they don’t want to over cook what’s in the oven and the only way to check is to open it. So it’s a risk either way but they might still open it less than a rookie does?",
"If you've made the same recipe a thousand times using the same equipment, it's probably safe to go by a time measurement. Chefs on cooking shows are using ovens they've never used before, so they don't know the irregularities of their equipment. The only way to know if something is done is with a thermometer or by looking at it. A measurement of time is not useful on equipment you haven't used.",
"One, on a cooking show, your audience doesn't eat the food, they see it. Likewise, in competitions, your food has to be as perfect as you can possibly get it. Losing a little heat and upping the cook time a bit is a small price to pay for knowing the exact status of your food. You lose drastically more time by having to redo it if you burn it, and being able to see exactly how it looks allows you to know exactly when to take it out. Two, those ovens are mad good. Your glorified toaster doesn't even begin to compare. These ovens cost thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of dollars. They heat up far more efficiently than what you're used to, and reheat faster after they're opened. Three, anxiety. In competitions, the *only* thing you're doing is cooking, and there's money on the line, so it's stressful. Especially in baking shows, there's a lot of downtime while stuff is in the oven, so they're sitting there stewing in their own stress while they wait. Opening the oven to check your food is similar to checking the clock when you're almost off work, or peeking out the window when you're expecting someone to come over. It's just a tic, and a way to distract yourself from the stress.",
"It depends what you're cooking. Something like a soufflé or a puff pastry of any kind you do not touch. Just time it out. Now, if you're cooking a turkey, you need to open the oven every 20 minutes to baste for what could be 4 hours of total cook time. The thermal mass keeps the oven from getting too cool. The food will still come out the correct temp. Nothing will be undercooked unless you pull too soon. Braised short ribs need a bit of fussing too sometimes. My recipe only needs one fussing but my wife's needs 3 fussings. Bread, you usually don't have to check on. Just use time and check when you pull it. In the end, open the oven if you need to, but if it's something that is baked based purely on time, don't. Once you know your oven, you can adjust times accordingly."
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mpskaz | How do bees survive on a diet of essentially pure sugar? | I have seen lots of posts about the diversity of the human diet compared to other animals and have learned a lot about how animals can synthesize nutrients or they have diets that are more diverse than we realize. But am I wrong to think that bees only eat honey which is essentially sugar? Could a human live on a diet of a proportional amount of honey to our size? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Bees feed on nectar, not sugar. Nectar is mainly a watery solution of the sugars fructose, glucose, and sucrose but also contains traces of proteins, salts, acids, and essential oils. Bees need a narrower range of amino acids than humans and nectar provides all they need. Humans could likely survive indefinately on breast milk, but you wouldn't be healthy. A British teenager collapsed and was taken to the hospital from eating only chicken nuggets for 15 years once. Potatoes are another one that people can live on exclusively for years. Technically cows milk could sustain you for a long time as well. But eventually if you're eating only one thing, you will form ailments and finally die, but it could be a decade or more of ill health survival first. Not something worth experimenting."
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mptcps | how does the feeling of nausea happen in the body? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So we actually know way less about the mechanics of nausea and vomiting than you'd expect, but here's what I can find. Nausea is triggered by the irritation of nerves in the stomach, which can be caused by a ton of things (hunger, overeating, illness, motion sickness, etc). Those nerves tell your brain (not eli5: specifically, the nausea and vomiting centers in the medulla) what's going on, which then activates nausea. The weird part is that so many things cause nausea, including things that are nowhere near the stomach. Motion sickness, for example, is caused by your inner ear. Stress can cause nausea as well. Surprisingly, it was really hard to find anything that suggested why so many seemingly unrelated things cause nausea, so I can't help you there. **Edit: see u/maniacalmustacheride's comment below for more info**. To boil it down, when your eyes see motion that's offset to the motion you're feeling, your body thinks you may have poisoned yourself and tried to get rid of what you ate. From what I can tell, the way it feels and the place we feel it in are just how evolution decided it should function. It makes sense for nausea to affect the stomach area, and it also makes sense for it to feel different from regular pain."
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mptqp8 | Why do we NEED to drink water? | I just don’t understand it enough to motivate me to drink enough. Hoping to “see” something in the explanations that will open the floodgates. :) | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your body is made up of around 60% of it. It uses water as a solvent to clean out dirt and grime. It combines water with other things to make lubrication for your joints. Your blood cells cannot travel without it and without it your blood becomes a sludge that your heart can't move. Your eyes are only round because of the water inside them. Without water, you could not see. You use water to balance as well, little tubes in your ears use water like the accelerometer in your phone to be able to tell where down is. You need water to breathe safely as it helps filter out pollutants in the nose and even the throat. You need water to eat, otherwise your throat would be so dry food would stick to it and you would choke. You need water to move as electricity moves through fluid the nerves are coated and surrounded in and the muscles would be dry and brittle otherwise. You need water to keep your skin flexible instead of stiff and hard like leather. You need water to even survive! Your brain - containing all that you are and will be - is basically a sea slug in a calcium jar. It sits in a carefully balanced and carefully pressurized mix of water and other things we call Cerebrospinal Fluid. Since it is about the same density as the brain - which itself is mostly water - it helps hold the brain in place and protect it from impact. It helps prevent collisions with the skull. It keeps the brain wet so that electricity and chemicals and all sorts of things can move through it and allow you to learn and think and grow and flow through the world like the water-based being that you are. We never truly left the sea... We just learned how to take it with us.",
"Because it's necessary for your body to function properly and it's constantly being lost due to sweat, urination, and other factors; thus, you need to regularly replenish it. It's so critical that you will die faster from lack of water than you will from a lack of food.",
"A lot of the chemical reactions in your body requires water. Do note that when you hear recommendations about drinking X glasses of water a day a lot of that comes from the food you eat, drink when you’re thirsty",
"> motivate me to drink enough Just wondering what you mean by \"enough\". The advice that you need to drink \"x amount per day\" is not correct. The amount is different per person and stuff like coffee, soda etc DOES count to keep you hydrated. Also electrolytes are equally important to keep you hydrated."
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mpu53q | How are NFT's bad for the environment | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Such tokens are typically issued and traded on the Ethereum cryptocurrency's blockchain (taking up space in blocks where they are issued/transferred) The process of mining Ether consumes a lot of electricity, and a lot of electricity is generated using fossil fuels.",
"For scale, it consumes 26.5 terawatt-hours of power per year. As much as the entire country of Ireland. URL_0"
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mpuo52 | Why does getting a massage from absolutely anyone else feel so much better and effective than massaging yourself? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You can relax when someone else gives you a massage, compared to stretching and straining to reach a certain area. Maybe also the surprise of not knowing where they’re going to touch you, what the pressure will be,etc. and they may be able to put more force into a spot especially one that’s hard to reach",
"You’re desensitized to your own touch. Similar to how a dish tastes better when it’s prepared by someone else.",
"Same reason you can’t tickle yourself, you’re desensitised to your own touch, as the other comment says"
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mput81 | why does a stomach flu cause muscles to ache all over your body? What mechanism is causing it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not the flu that's causing the pain. It is your immune system. Think of it like a newer model vehicle. When the computer in new cars determine that something potentially catastrophic is wrong, they will switch the car into limp mode. Typically reducing max speed, turning off climate control, and sometimes shutting off the infotainment controls. Your immune system is like the cars computer but for your body, it's trying to keep you safe...sure it might be annoying, but it's doing the right thing.",
"There needs to be a little history here to explain things. We call any generic illness involving nausea or GI symptoms a “stomach flu” because we *used* to call those same illnesses “cholera” (which is a word which means “bilious illness” - an illness involving vomiting or GI issues). Then the disease now known as cholera, caused by the bacteria *Vibrio cholera*, took over that word. And we shifted all the others to the label ‘stomach flu’. It’s not that “the stomach flu doesn’t exist”, it’s that it’s a generic, non-specific, colloquial name for a host of non-specific illnesses. Now, no illness stays in your stomach. Everything always affects everything else. When you are infected with a virus, your immune system activates. This is bad for your body, and causes damage, but is necessary to fight the infection. That damage causes pain and discomfort. This discomfort is what you are describing as muscle pain."
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mpuuc8 | Anyone with an aquarium snail has watched their snail meander across the glass, their smooth "foot" looking like a suction cup along the glass...but how does a snail actually move, if it doesn't ever seem to take a "step"? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The snail has muscles in its foot, which it can contract to cause ripples in the foot. And those ripples are what propels the snail forward."
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mpv7nw | What are those floating bacteria like things that appear in the human eye? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"My optometrist JUST told me this the other day. He said when you've been using your eyes for an extended period of time, the fluid in your eyes start to clump. So if you ever 'see' little hazy organisms floating around, that's typically what that is. I think that is what you're referring to.",
"These are harmless usually. These \"floaters\" aren't in the surface of your eye. They are in the viscous fluid inside your eye. They are made of old eye cells or tissues that have died naturally. They will be removed by your eye by itself. If severe or lasts a week, see a doctor."
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mpvggx | What exactly happens to our brains when we immediately forget what we were meant to do or say? | It seems odd to relate this to phenomena to short term memory loss as it can affect anyone with a normal functioning memory. I'm referring to moments where we forget why we entered a room, while only deciding to action a task a few seconds prior. Or forgetting what you wanted to say next in a discussion, while the subject is still fresh in your mind. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The thing about walking into a room is so common that it's been studied quite a bit - the \"doorway effect.\" But it's not exactly the doorways themselves, it's the change of what's around you. Certain things like that signal your brain to sort of \"dump\" your working memory, and not everything gets stored because your brain favors what's in front of you when things change like the room you're in. Short term memory is really only about 30 seconds - certainly long enough to lose what you were about to say while you let someone finish or you have your hand raised."
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mpwez2 | Why do Girls use so much toilet paper? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I guess it's because we wipe regardless of what we do. If you pee, wipe, if you shit, wipe. Therefore we use more toilet paper than men.",
"We bleed. A lot. Also, when we aren’t bleeding, we use it for both urine and BM’s while males generally use it only for BM’s. Female anatomy is different, too. There’s lots of places for urine and blood to go. Therefore, we usually use more tp. That said, I have a friend who is eco conscious and tries to use very, very little. So, there are some exceptions. Pro tip: If you want women to appreciate you when coming to hang out, make sure you have tp, a trash can, soap, and a hand towel in your bathroom. Cannot tell you how annoying it is to have to change a tampon and there’s no trash, no soap, and the tp is running out.",
"Let's not forget the post recently about the woman who had to explain to get bf that he was not wiping effectively. Maybe use a little more tp? I am a male. I use a lot of tp. I like it clean. If the paper does not come back clean, I am not clean. Edit: auto correct fix. Tp > to"
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mpx28s | Why are most Animal's nose holes facing forward, while human's are underneath? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The cartilage/skin overlying the nose hole has become more prominent. I’ve heard theories that Neanderthals and humans evolved that feature in cold environments, to help warm up air as it entered our lungs (longer path, picks up more heat on the way in.) The same feature would help remove heat as it exited the nose (longer path drops more heat on the way out.) Exact reason is unknown, and fossil record of human face bones is missing a lot of transitional stuff.",
"There are multiple factors. Primary is the simple fact that humans are the only fully bipedal animal with dexterous hands. Our noses are no longer close to the ground and our hands bring our food to our mouths. Whereas animals don't grab their food, they get their mouth and nose close to it and take a bite. For both humans and other animals scent is the primary indicator of the risk of eating something. Things we find smell gross often do because they contian similar aromas to that of rotting or poisonous things which obviously we wouldn't want to eat. So instinctively we find those scents disgusting. So how we smell is heavily connected with how we eat. Edit: this is one theory. There are multiple",
"There are some interesting ideas here, but the one thing I would like to point out is that evolution is not a rigidly linear process. It also doesn't trend towards perfection, good enough is fine, so the reason could be incidental, but as long as the condition doesn't cause a disadvantage for those that have it there's no reason to \"get rid of it\".",
"Humans are catarrhine primates. This is a catarrhine trait shared with most old world monkeys and apes, barring a few of the odd nosed monkeys. The variability we see in humans appears to be related to environment, with the nose shape related to the need to humidify or warm air depending on context. Source: Am Primatologist/Anthropologist.",
"I'd learned that it was too do with swimming. Humans have a number of adaptations that are good for water, again what I remember so this may not be factual, but: * More webbing between fingers than other primates. * skin on fingers and toes that wrinkles when wet for extra grip. * Feet that are more paddle shaped. Is any of that true?",
"So water doesn’t get into your nose when you swim. Aside from humans, every other mammal swims with its face above the water.",
"I sort of like the theory that at one point in our evolution we started to live nearer the ocean, and in it, and down-facing nostrils help keep water out. Then we gave up on that for some reason."
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mpxyo0 | Why does cleaning your ears give you a wierd feeling in our mouth region ? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because your ears, nose, and throat are all connected. That’s why you can “pop” your ears by holding your mouth and nose shut and blowing. It’s also why a sinus infection can give you a sore throat and make your ears ache. They’re all one “tube,” so to speak. In fact it is it’s own branch of medicine. You can be a doctor specializing in ear, nose, and throat."
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mpz1q1 | Differential equations | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, I like to remember that Newton invented calculus to explain things in motion. So a practical example often helps. Like we know distance as here to there. And speed is d = r/t And Acceleration is v = r/t/t Those are differential moments. If we know your position, given by some function, then your speed can be derived from distance from the initial point as a function of time. and your rate of speed over time tells use your positional Acceleration. So what the differential calculus is helping us to understand is that if your position changes we can figure it out where you are by the rate of change over time. And even more accurately if we know the rate of change at a specific time (or as your rate of velocity changes over time) And, in a concrete example. If you throw a ball, and it's arc in space is described by some function. We can calculate its distance, velocity and speed at different points in time, using differential calculations (the ball goes up, but is acted on by wind and gravity) so it's not a straight line - but a function that we can manipulate"
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mq05j8 | How countries could technically erase any debt they have? | On Twitter I saw some post about universal income, some mentions that would add even more debts to countries (but that's not the point of this) and some answers that countries, well their central banks actually, can just say "nope" to any kind of debts applied to them. Is it technically true? And if so, what are the reasons it's not applied, diplomatic, economic, capitalist unwritten rule? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If a country was to say, \"We don't have debt now. We just magic waved it away,\" then 5 minutes later when they go, \"Oh, we still need to borrow money,\" the rest of the world would tell them to get lost. There's also the possibility that they might even get invaded by their neighbouring countries who want the money they're owed.",
"The problem with this thinking is that it is one sided. The premise is that \"government debt is BAD and EVIL and must be eradicated\". This is generally naive. Transactions involve at least 2 parties - the borrower and the lender. Do you assume that \"ALL lenders are EVIL and should simply be stiffed.\"? The lenders can be investors, financial institution, pension firms, insurance companies, normal companies etc. So here are some easily understood reasons why simply \"cancelling\" debt is a very bad idea: 1) Insurance companies collect premiums and hold a sum of money to pay off claims. These holdings are usually invested and a significant part will be government debt (ie they lend to the government). So now these insurance companies cannot pay claims (since their assets just \"evaporated\"). The person who is in hospital cannot pay the hospital. Now the hospital denies treatment or is out of their payment. Now what? Hospital and insurance company goes bankrupt? 2) Depositors hold their savings in banks. Banks reinvest some of this in debt because they need to hold these deposits in \"safe\" assets like government debt. Now this debt is cancelled. Depositors lose their funds. Now the government has to print money to reimburse the deposits or the entire financial system and economy goes into chaos. Why do this? The government can just as simply print money and pay off the debt rather than cancel the debt. This has far fewer economic consequences in the short term. Economies are complex things that don't lend itself to slogans and naive actions. The most important thing for government is to maintain confidence and stability. The debt isn't as important as maintaining productivity and social order. The idea of unilaterally cancelling debt is like burning down your house to destroy a termite infestation.",
"Countries can default on their debts. It usually happens only in times of extreme crisis or after a major change in who is running the country like revolutions or takeovers. The new government comes in and says that they won't honor any of the debt that the previous administration created and that debtors can get lost. This works out well for the suddenly debt free nation until they try to take out any new loans. People are generally reluctant to loan money to someone who has a track record of not repaying their debts. The only way to get anyone to risk loaning you money is to offer very high interest rates, to make it worth the risk for them. Having to take out loans with high interest is a very good way to get deeper and deeper into debt very quickly and then having to default again. It is a bad idea for everyone involved. Of course the very idea that universal basic income would require countries to increase their debts is silly, since if done the way many people want it to be done it would actually save the government money."
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mq0drv | What would happen to our intestine we didn't get a diarrhea from eating spoiled food? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The intestine wall can get infected by the bacteria or fungi from the spoiled food. So when contact with spoiled food or some harmful microorganisms is detected, the intestine starts an emergency flush protocol to get rid of everything in it - that is diarrhea. It technically serves the same purpose and works in the same way as runny nose.",
"Our body has ways to regulate what it wants and doesn't want inside out body. In terms of harmful things like pathogens or fungi, it does this by sneezing, coughing, throwing up, or diarrhea. These methods are usually crude in terms of sterilizing the body as a lot of bad stuff will obviously be left behind, but it helps a lot. It can mean the difference between the body having to fight hundreds of millions of something and just millions. If we didn't have these things, our immune system would probably have a really hard time fighting off illnesses and we would probably get sick a lot more often."
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mq0r8d | What is intersectional feminism? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So far none of these posts address the theory in ways I've actually seen it discussed. Everyone seems to be saying that it's all about how much more oppressed someone is when they are in multiple oppressed groups, and casting it in a negative light. This is not how intersectionality is discussed by feminists or any other activists. Intersectionality is the idea that all forms of discrimination and oppression have the same root and none can be fully solved without solving the others. It goes beyond identity. For example, if we cannot solve the climate crisis, we can't fix economic inequality. In this way the issues are \"intersectional\" (in other words, they intersect) as they are problems that are intertwined whether we like it or not. In this way intersectionality advocates for solidarity and coming together to solve problems of justice be it economic, environmental, racial, social. Don't let people convince you this is some \"oppression hierarchy\" meant to elevate certain voices and suppress others. It's meant to bring people together for the common good."
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mq0u26 | why does fire or flames burn away into those jagged/spiky shapes? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Short answer; gravity. Let's look at a match for example. After you strike the match and it's burning away nicely there's a few things going on. The heat is vapourising the wood which releases flammable gases. These gases combine with oxygen in the surrounding air and the heat causes a chemical reaction, producing more heat. While this is going on the gases being hotter and less dense want to go up, pushing the out of the way. The air is dragged in from the bottom to replace the consumed oxygen and is dragged along for the ride. If you light a match in the ISS, it will burn with a spherical flame as the density differences don't make any difference."
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mq1l1k | why does shaking help us to relieve pain? | Okay for example, when you burn your finger your immediate reaction is to shake it and somehow it relieves the pain, or if you’re desperate for the toilet you start shaking your leg it makes the pain more bearable. Why is this?? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Shaking or moving your body part helps increase blood circulation, which in turn brings in pain relieving enzymes to the wound. That's why they suggest exercising your arm after getting the vaccine, to help spread the vaccine around and keep your arm from getting too sore."
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mq24kp | Whats responsible for the sudden falling sensation? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Can you explain the context? The sudden falling situation when and where? If you are talking about the sensation you get when you actually do start suddenly falling, that is almost entirely due to the acceleration being noticed in your ears and other organs and relayed to your brain.",
"I'm assuming you mean when we sleep? In any case it's theorized that it's practice for sleeping in trees, from way back in time when we did that. If you start falling then wake up and protect yourself before you hit the ground."
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mq2tm0 | Why do hamsters (and possibly other rodents too) sometimes freeze, motionless, for seemingly no reason? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They have poor eyesight and saw something that startled them. Many predators use movement to track prey. Prey animals are just playing it safe.",
"This is common behavior among prey animals in general, especially small ones. Many predators--ourselves included!--see movement more easily than anything else. This is especially true for predators with less color vision than we have. Prey animals have evolved to freeze when threatened so that predators overlook them. The thing is, animals can't always tell what is and isn't a threat. And it's all right to freeze when there's actually no danger, but not great if you *don't* freeze when there *is.* So rodents and other small mammals are constantly on alert, and anything that catches their attention as a potential threat is a reason to freeze momentarily while they check to see if it was actually something that might eat them.",
"Like that scene from Jurassic Park with T-Rex. If you don’t move, he can’t see You. Hamster probably think of You as a T- Rex. 🦖",
"Same reason rabbits do, I'd think. \"Oh shoot, there's a human. He doesn't see me. He doesn't.... ooop.... he's too close! RUN!\"",
"The unofficial term for it is going \"tharn.\" Coined by Richard Adams in Watership Down. Don't know what the scientific term is. There's reasons to believe that humans also exhibit a form of this, where under periods of immense stress a person just shuts down.",
"To simplify, the responses to threats are *actually* \"Fight, Flight, or Freeze\", and the newer understanding of that has massively changed our interpretations of intelligence among animals, which was previously based on the wildly-flawed \"mirror test\"... which plenty of *children* can't even pass if they're unfamiliar with the concept of reflections.",
"They have predators, and a lot of their predators have \"hunter vision\". We look at a room and see square things, round things, tall/short things, /red/blue/green things... Hawks look at a meadow and see gentlymovinggrass-gentlymovinggrass-gentlymovinggrass- gentlymovinggrass-gentlymovinggrass-gentlymovinggrass- gentlymovinggrass- **wigglewiggle**- gentlymovinggrass- gentlymovinggrass-gentlymovinggrass-gentlymovinggrass-gentlymovinggrass-gentlymovinggrass-gentlymovinggrass- and their brains zoom RIGHT IN on that different spot because THAT'S LUNCH.",
"Yeah, it's a stress response. It's often said that \"fight or flight\" should more accurately be called \"fight, flight or freeze.\"",
"Fight or flight is often mentioned but there's also another evolutionary trait seen in some animals which is freeze.",
"The mammalian freeze response. You have it programmed into your brain too. It is actioned by neurons in the basolateral amygdala. It is hypothesized that it evolved to prevent predators nearby from hearing our movements until we can calculate how to escape them.",
"They’ve evolved the response of holding very still when startled, since that reduces the chance they’ll be seen by a predator. That doesn’t mean they feel horrified or are even consciously aware of their survival strategy. It is all instinct. Animals can and do learn from experience, but they don’t get a chance to learn what not to do because they’ve already been eaten at that point. So this is an automatic response that has to emerge even when they are too young to understand it. Incidentally humans can also freeze from fear but it takes a lot more fear to initiate this reaction because in humans it’s competing with a lot of other inputs and strategies. When it comes to prey animals, they do this constantly, dozens of times a day, without experiencing negative health effects that you’d expect if they were under extreme stress. Even when rabbits are just playing with other rabbits they freeze up sometimes.",
"So I have found that hamsters will be still for a few reasons. If my hamster “meerkats” as in stands on her back legs and is still with her ears up, she is generally listening to figure out something, like where she is or what is around, or perhaps a noise she can hear. When my hamster “chameleons” as in takes careful back and forth steps, it means she is trying to sense and find out what is ahead of her by lettung her whiskers and nose try to sense something . When she “eggs” as in sits really still with ears up and on all fours, normally a sudden halt whilst going about regular activity, it means something has startled her and she is listening out and smelling for any clues as to what that is, trying to see if she is in danger. When she “sploots” as in is sat on her bum tilting to the side with her eyes closed, it means she is ready for bed. These are reasons that I have observed for my hamster being still.",
"Heard a good example of fight, flight, or freeze today, specifically on the \"freeze\": If you're birdwatching, and there's a bird in a tree, you probably won't spot it until it moves, even if it has brightly colored feathers. That's why fear can make you freeze up and breathe more shallow, because movement is really noticeable to predators obviously, even very slight movements. So it's kind of hiding.",
"I have pet Guinea pigs (not the same as hamsters but close enough). What I have found to help with the freezing and startled movement is just being around more often. I place their cage in a frequently inhabited area like my bedroom or the living room so that they can see people often; therefore, becoming less afraid of our movements. I try to socialize them as much as I can with myself, my partner and yes, even my cat! So that they are less afraid and more trusting. When I enter the room, I bring them a small snack so that they begin to associate my entrance (a huge human) with something that is beneficial to them. I’ve raised my cat around them so that neither parties feel the need to run/attack. I also talk to them and pick them up as often as I can & give them lap time with a treat so again, my voice, hands, movement and body are now associated with something good for them rather than to be afraid of. I’m hoping that this helps. Main take away is try to socialize & desensitize your pet with your presence.",
"When I'm walking my dogs in the fields I often spot rabbits, but the dogs don't notice them. Until the rabbits move, then they attract attention. A lot of hunters are motion detectors.",
"So we've established they're scared and likely would respond to any sudden movement but it also conserves energy. If they ran every time they got scared, they'd die of starvation (maybe not in captivity)",
"u/printers_of_colors the real answer is that most predators have excellent vision but not always full colour so holding still makes it harder to see you especially if your colouring camoflages you against the background. A hamster or mouse will stop motionless instinctively because they think you won't be able to see them.",
"It's their response to being startled. In most creatures a startle or fear response will trigger one of three responses: Fight (they will fight), Flight (they will run away), or Freeze (they will freeze -- totally motionless). These are fundamental responses to fear which aid different species in survival -- so it's not really for no reason, it's for survival."
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mq3g08 | A wormhole basically connects two points in space through a passage made over space. How exactly is the space "folded" to allow for this faster passage? | I understand the fundamental functioning of a wormhole, just take a sheet of paper representing space time, and then fold it to make a hole with a pencil, so there you go, you have a faster passage to the other side of the sheet. However, what I don't understand is how exactly space-time folds to allow for this passage. I always thought that space was something flat that has leveling according to the mass of stars and planets, so how exactly is it folded up allowing it to pass through a wormhole? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Wormholes are purely theoretical. The maths works for them, but there's no evidence that the physics works. Imagine having to find a path between two points on a piece of apper. There may be a whole number of different paths you could take (an infinite number), but given any two paths you can always turn one into the other by nudging it bit by bit. The idea behind a wormhole would be that there could be paths where that isn't possible; say if there is a hole in the middle of the paper; you can't nudge a path that goes around one side into a path that goes around the other side. And this leads to some interesting results; there are some maths/physics things that don't change between paths where you nudge one into the other, but might get a different result if you take a path that goes the other side of a hole. So with our wormhole, there may be two regions of spacetime that are connected via two separate sets of paths (\"normally\" and \"through the wormhole\") and that could be interesting as it could mess with causality, leading to time travel and so on. But there is no evidence that spacetime is disjointed in this way. It appears to be more like the piece of paper without the hole. The problem with the \"folding a piece of paper\" analogy for wormholes is that the paper is a 2-d surface being folded in a larger 3-d space. Whereas spacetime is a 4-d \"surface\" that isn't (as far as we know) embedded in some higher dimensional space. So it doesn't necessarily make sense to talk about \"folding\" spacetime and trying to join different bits together.",
"Space is flat, at least the part around here is. However, that's like standing in a parking lot and determining the Earth is flat. There could be places in the mountains or the ocean where there are deep channels that connect one place to another place. On a small scale, humans make these, they are called tunnels. The tunnels humans make are 3D, just like the mountains, because the Universe is very, very flat around here. It could also be that the Universe has more than 3 spatial directions, many string theories depend on this. Perhaps around here, three are flat and all the rest are tightly curled at a sub-atomic scale. In some other place, our three flat ones might have a different shape and other dimensions might be flat. If that's a thing, and you can go to one of those places (for cause one of them to form) then you might find exceptions where a small movement in a new dimension brings you to a place that's far away in our regular 3. The line between physics theory and science fiction is thin in this area.",
"Current experiments indicate space is \"flat\", but none of these experiments are precise enough yet to truly rule that it is. They just indicate a high likelihood it is. Even an extremely slight curve to spacetime would change the nature of our universe drastically from flat, to positive curve or negative curve. Wormholes are still purely theoretically to our knowledge. As in we haven't actually found any yet. Or at least any that we are aware are wormholes (lookin' at you black holes!). The theory behind them is that they provide a shorter path between two points. Similar to drilling a tunnel through a hill instead of walking around it. Except you aren't really drilling through anything, you are just decreasing the distance between two points compared to the distance involved using a different path. The paper-pencile metaphor is one of the best ways to visualize it."
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mq3ind | - Why can you see reflections of the sky/clouds/passing vehicles in mirages on hot highways? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is because the heat changes the density of the air compared to the air around it. This changes how that heated air refracts light, and effectively turns that heated air into a “mirror”."
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mq3xd5 | Why are red onions called red onions when they’re clearly purple? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's lots of varieties of onions, even the deepest purple-looking onions are colored so because they have a large amount of red in the outer skin. Additionally, the dark purple onions you see are the same variety as onions that appear red when harvested earlier in the year. A late harvest tend to deepen their color but that doesn't make them a different type of onion. However, even the most red onions *generally* have white flesh, so shouldn't we call them white onions instead? Linguistically, red onions (as well as red cabbage) were named so back in a time when purple wasn't commonly used in language. They were effectively named before languages had a well-known word for the color they appear to be, so at the time the more common word for the color *closest* to how they appear was red (even though today that color would be called purple). So \"red\" stuck around for that type of onion and it was just never changed.",
"language develops and evolves and merges over time. there wasn't always a word for every single potential color and hue in a language. take red haired people, most of the times is more orange right? well there wasn't a word for orange so we used red and just ran with it. same principle applies to your purple onions and all sorts of things. color appeared and people just called it whatever word they knew that was close enough.",
"Much like the Orange, the color purple wasn't named until the fruit was discovered. Up until that discovery, everything was either refered to as red-blue or fancy pants (lower class mocking royalty). And, because people like to drop excess in wording, the red-blue onion was simply called a red onion, much like a redhead."
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mq3zro | What is the difference between being wise and intelligent | I've looked it up multiple times but it never clicked with me, I can hardly see the difference. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Intelligent is knowing that tomato is a fruit. Wise is knowing that tomatoes don't go into a fruit salad. (Charismatic is knowing how to make people love a fruit salad with tomatoes)",
"Intelligence is about your mental capabilities, I.E. how fast you learn, how many things you can keep in your mind at once, how easily you can imagine abstract concepts. Being wise is a lot more about experience, having heard and seen enough things to be able to sort something new into a bigger reference frame. So someone who is intelligent but not wise is a quick thinker, but will still make mistakes out of lacking experience with the topic. Someone who is wise but not intelligent knows how the world works, and how to respond to problems but doesn't necessarily understand why exactly things work, and they take longer to learn something new.",
"Intelligence is having the knowledge; wisdom is knowing how to apply it. It's possible to be very intelligent and yet highly unwise."
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mq4wam | Why do companies combine several types of sweeteners instead of increasing the amount of one? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As well as the aftertaste comment, another reason is if you use just one sweetener, or even just plain old sugar, it will be one of first ingredients listed on the packed (maybe even the top ingredient). However if you use three different sweeteners, they each will appear much further down the list, giving the impression that it is healthier/more natural.",
"If you put too much of one, you end up with a noticeable aftertaste depending on what you use. If you use a little bit of a few of them, you get the same sweetening effect without as much of an aftertaste.",
"1. Different sweeteners have different side effects. Some affect the viscosity, mouth feel, and after taste. They try to balance all that by using different kinds of sweeteners. 2. Cost. Some sweeteners are expensive, some are cheap. Again, they balance that out to a certain target price point.",
"Some sweeteners in large concentrations don't have pleasant tastes, try a tablet of saccharine straight to the tongue. Is not good",
"All sweeteners come with more than sweetness alone. Sugar is the most common sweetener but is also known to have unwanted side-effects. Some sweeteners have a unwanted aftertaste when consumed in higher quantities. Others have a bad reputation because we don't know that much about their side-effects. So companies try to find ways to meet consumers demand."
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mq5eat | . If the primary colors are RYB, why are all electronics RGB? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Light and pigment are different. If you mix all the colors of crayons together you get black. If you mix all the colors of light together you get white. RGB is used in lights because red is the lowest frequency, blue is the highest and green is in the middle."
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mq6csn | How do we know that trillions of neutrinos pass through our body if we almost cannot detect them in the first place | I've seen many videos on the topic, but none seem to answer the question, How do we know there are trillions of neutrinos passing through our body when we have a really hard time detecting them. Why do we say there are so many of them when we cannot prove it? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Physicists have the premise that nothing just appears out of nowhere or vanishes without a trace. Much like balancing a chemical formula, the interactions of tiny particles must balance when something decays. In the case of beta decay a particle was theorized would need to be emitted, the neutrino, but due to the properties it must have it would be very difficult to detect. We know beta decay is happening in the sun in huge quantities so if this particle was being emitted we would expect huge numbers of them to be passing through us, and only very rarely interacting in ways we can detect. It turns out that we can build detectors to find those very rare interactions. Since we expect them to be extremely rare even if there are huge numbers of them around, even our small number of observed interactions is enough to prove their existence and their high volume. If there weren’t trillions passing through us then not only would beta decay in the sun be unexplained, we also wouldn’t know why the neutrinos that we did detect were inexplicably interacting far more frequently than expected."
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mq6cv3 | What’s keeping me from manually partitioning the hard drive on an M1 Mac, putting Windows on one of the partitions and booting from that? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"ARM speaks a language that Windows doesn't understand. Microsoft has attempted to make Windows understand it, but it isn't quite there yet. Until Microsoft teaches Windows a different language, Windows cannot understand ARM. & #x200B; ELI15: Windows currently only offer full support for talking with a type of processors based on X86 architecture. For Windows, ARM based architectures is about as foreign, as a foreign language would be for you. While Microsoft has attempted to port Windows to ARM, the current results have been mediocre at best, and not the full Windows experience."
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mq6orf | What is a photon? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"A photon is a teeny tiny little packet of energy. Specifically, a photon is an excitation of the electro-magnetic field. We can think of the electro-magnetic field like a pond. When we disturb the surface of a pond by tossing a pebble into it, waves ripple out, carrying the energy of the pebble. Similarly when we disturb the electro-magnetic field photons ripple out, carrying the energy that was applied. There are a couple of ways we can interact with the EM field. One way is to wave a magnet over an an electrical conductor. The energy from that motion is converted into electricity which interacts with the EM field and produces those waves. Side note: If we had an electronic current moving back and forth very quickly then we would be creating a bunch of photons (EM waves). If we had a way rectify (read) those waves then we would have a radio! That's what a radio is. :)",
"A photon is a packet of energy. They are ripples in the electro-magnetic field, and so are crucial to electro-magnetic interactions (one of 4 ways things can interact). They \"carry\" electro-magnetic forces (including via electro-magnetic radiation, i.e. light), and generally are responsible for anything involving electro-magnetism.",
"A small vibrating particle of light. I'd explain further but I'm not up to date with quantum physics."
],
"score": [
6,
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
|
mq7zd4 | In the biological way, why does some food taste good, while other food doesn't? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"guebqld",
"guebgvp"
],
"text": [
"The biological and evolutionary reason humans are drawn to some foods is because our bodies want our brains to want them. We like the taste of sugar and fat because our bodies burn sugar and fat for energy. If we like the taste of it, we'll be more likely to seek it out.",
"What do you mean in the biological way? Are you not simply asking why certain foods / meats, etc are more appetizing than others?"
],
"score": [
12,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
|
mq80is | Why are advertisers allowed to show their products on a lot better light compared to the actual product? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gueby9n"
],
"text": [
"It’s white light, often it’s also about the arrangement and placement. McDonalds for example uses the same ingredients as the advertised food, it’s just prepared by an artist and’s looks good in only the angle of the camera. URL_0"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://youtu.be/oSd0keSj2W8"
]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
|
mq8efi | What are these circles with a dot in them that I see sometimes floating before my eyes? | Very often, especially on rainy days, I see those circles before my eyes, and I always assumed them to be dust particles on my eye or very round floaters, since I saw that on Wikipedia. I however just stumbled across exactly those circles with the dot in a YouTube video which made me doubt the dust particle theory. Since this description is very vague, [here]( URL_0 ) is a screenshot of what I meant. & #x200B; Thanks in advance | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gufpx80"
],
"text": [
"Supposedly floaters are bits of your vitreous humor (the gel inside your eyeballs) coagulating/jellyifying and breaking off. When they pass through the eye, they block light and cast shadows, appearing as floating objects. Another explanation I've heard, but can't find any science to support, is that floaters are made of bits of torn cornea (the outer surface) floating by in the liquid of the eye. I don't put much stock in this as I can watch the same one for a while--and they always move when you try to look at them."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
mq8hx6 | Why does the shape of a light source/bright object linger as a blob in our field of vision after looking at it for a bit? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"guegko6"
],
"text": [
"Think of the light-sensitive parts of your eyes as squeaky balls. The light hitting those parts squeezes the balls and the amount of squeak generated gets interpreted as vision. Extremely strong light squeezes the ball until it's nearly deflated. As the ball slowly reinflates, it wheezes as it fills back with air. Group many of these reinflating balls together and the combined wheezing sound gets misinterpreted as something in your vision, an afterimage. More detailed explanation is that the light sensitive proteins react to light and break into separate pieces. This triggers nerves that send light information to the brain. Rebuilding the light sensitive proteins back together also triggers a very low amount of signal. If you have a lot of protein that needs to be rebuilt due to a strong light exposure, this low level signal stacks together and appears as an afterimage. It only disappears when the proteins fully recover which can take single digit minutes in bright environments to 20-40 minutes in dark environments."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
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