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o49i5l | How does gravity affect time? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Gravity is the curvature of spacetime. Therefore, just as the paths objects take through space is altered by gravity, so is the rate at which objects travel through time."
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o49lwf | If HDR is just a monitor having better contrast, why do games/videos have to specifically support it? | I'd imagine the game's graphics engine for example just saying which areas are bright and which areas are dark and the monitor doing it's best to display those differences, with HDR Monitors just being better at it. Where am I wrong? Like why can a monitors contrast get better and better and still support the same games, but once it apparently passes a specific barrier it stops supporting certain games with that contrast? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The recorded and transmitted video data has to conform to a specific set of standards that constrain the possible quality you can achieve. To get HDR, you need to use a suitable standard such as Dolby Video, which adds more precision to each pixel than would be possible in normal (non-HDR) video. If you really want to see an example, the wikipedia HDR page gives some detail as to the specific codecs used: URL_0"
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o49s1n | How do newborn turtles know they need to bum rush the ocean when they hatch? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's an innate behaviour (meaning that is genetically determined). If I remember correctly their orientation is triggered by light, they usually hatch at night and they're attracted by the most bright/open area they see, which is toward the sea. After reaching the water they use a magnetic compass",
"Ultimately, they don't actually \"know\" that that's what they need to do, or maybe even exactly what they're doing - they're running on instinct. You know how humans take a year to learn to stand up and can still barely functionally walk for another year or more, yet deer, horses, etc. are you and walking around within minutes of being born? Their walking is kind of learned, but just as much instinct. They don't have to be carefully taught how to do it. Something similar is going on with the turtles - they just have an overwhelming desire to go, together, in that direction, which is maybe downhill, maybe towards a certain smell, maybe towards a flat-looking horizon - but they just want to go that way together. One answer I don't have is exactly what stimulus/i are necessary to orient the turtles, such as the ones I just mentioned. It could be one or multiple of those, or other ones."
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o4ajam | How does cooking meat destroy potentially dangerous microorganisms, but doesn't destroy the nutrimental value of meat proteins? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you cook foods, what you are doing is sort of \"pre digesting the food\" if you want to think of it that way. High heats break down really complex molecules into simpler molecules which makes them better for *our* stomachs to digest as it takes less time/energy to digest. So, when you cook food you *are destroying* the complex chains of proteins/fats/carbs, but they usually just break down into smaller chains so nothing is really lost. At the same time, this is what kills bacteria! High heat breaks down the long chains of molecules that make up bacteria, so they effectively die and just become short chains of molecules on the surface of your food. You are eating bacteria sludge whether you know it or not! But it's okay because they have to be alive to be deadly (for the most part, botchulism being a good exception, but that's a different story).",
"Microorganisms are dangerous because they are alive and trying to reproduce. In that process, if they are inside us, they take nutrients from us and poison us with their poop, essentially. The protein we eat isn’t alive like that, so it doesn’t get damaged like microorganisms do. There is some damage, but not in the same way; we’re still able to get nutrients from “damaged” proteins."
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o4bb9y | how does the storage and RAM memory limitations work | Manufacturers can't build a 100TB flash drive or a 256GB RAM memory for desktop computers? Why popular modern computers only have 1TB of storage and 16gb of RAM? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cost. There are limited usability with those kind of specifications, however with special use cases they do have those kind of specifications (machine learning, high performance computing etc.). You are also limited by what the cpu can address, where consumer hardware doesn’t have the number of addressable ram and pcie lanes like higher end cpus have.",
"> Manufacturers can't build a 100TB flash drive or a 256GB RAM memory for desktop computers They can, but [you're not]( URL_1 ) in the [market for it]( URL_0 ) Consumer goods are driven almost entirely by cost. There are generally things 3-4 tiers up that are pushing the limits of our technical capabilities but are ludicrously expensive. Your average person makes their purchasing decision off of price. They're not going to pay 8x more for 2x the capacity unless there is a really compelling reason for it like they're actually building a server or a workstation that needs it General desktop hardware is the stuff at the happy point of the price and performance lines where you get pretty good performance for a pretty good price and this is because they can use parts that aren't pushing the limits of the processes and have pretty good yields (aka lower per piece costs) than the maximum performance ones where over half might not meet the requirements",
"You most certainly could build a 100TB flash drive, or 256GB RAM for consumer PCs, it's just that the flash drive would be way too big physically to be useful and have more storage than anyone would need, and not many people would need 256GB of RAM. It's a supply and demand thing. Hardly anyone wants 256GB of RAM because it's simply too much and would cost too much, it wouldn't sell for consumers. A 100TB flash drive would be way too expensive to manufacture and would be really big physically, for something that most people won't need because it's just too much storage. Popular computers have 1TB storage and 16GB of RAM because those are both a sweet spot of cost/performance. Most people don't need more than that, and those that do need more than that do have consumer parts to buy instead."
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o4da8h | Can the internet run out of space? | If we keep creating new websites and never stop uploading new content to the internet, there must be some sort of upper limit or maximum load. What is that amount, and how will we know when we’ve reached it? Or is the internet infinite? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I might be wrong but iirc, the “internet” is just a network that connects computers. So technically each website or video you see is actually saved on a server computer at a physical location, just like you would save photos on your phone or laptop. When you go to the website, you send a request to access it and to see the video and the server sends the corresponding data to show you what you requested. So the amount of data the “internet” can hold is theoretically infinite if you just keep adding computer to the network and expanding the storage of said computers",
"The internet isn't a unified entity. It is just a bunch of computers linked together. As long as people buy new computers or add hard drives when their specific website starts running out of space you can keep going.",
"As others have stated, the internet is merely a connected network of servers, so in the sense of will the internet run out of storage space, no it won't. Looking at your question from a technical perspective: yes. The internet has already run out numbers to assign to those servers that host your websites and to those devices accessing the internet. Each server or device needs a number to access the internet, an IP address. Those numbers reside in a protocol called IPv4. We no longer have any free IPv4 addresses. To solve this problem, we have adopted and are currently using another protocol called IPv6. IPv6 significantly increases the amount of IP addresses we can generate, but it still has a maximum amount of numbers. So in theory, we could once again run out of space on the internet."
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o4dbr7 | why do we have a runny nose when crying? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Bottom eyelid has a tiny hole near the nose and that is where tears leak into the nose when you cry. If you cry a lot then tears spill over the bottom eyelid and we call that crying. Go in front of the mirror, get really close to it and you can see it, tiny hole in the bottom eyelid."
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o4dkh8 | what is the significance of the closure property in math? | The closure property basically says that a set of numbers is closed under a certain operation if you can run that operation on any of the numbers in the set and the result remains in the set. But as far as the practical application of this, it sound rather trivial and I can’t imagine why it would be important to know whether or not a set is closed under a certain operation. E: to those who’ve answered, I appreciate your insight. I have nothing more intelligent to ask or contribute so I won’t individually reply and waste your time. | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It matters because with a closed operation you never have to worry about \"handling\" any numbers outside the set. Several mathematical operations do weird things under certain conditions: some things go screwy with negative values, divide by zero, infinity, looping around 360 degrees for trig function, logarithm of zero, etc. Several physical functions do something similar...trying to address memory addresses larger than the computer has memory or numbers larger than the computer can store causes all kinds of programming issues With a closed operation, you're mathematically assured that your results will always land inside the set (assuming your input came from inside it). That means, properly implemented, you can't accidentally get a value outside the set that will break your operation or something downstream that's using the output. Error handling is a \\*huge\\* deal for many practical engineering systems, having closed outputs helps a lot with cutting down how much and what kinds of errors you need to handle.",
"Closures can be a very valuable hint at where you might find interesting undiscovered math. If you were an ancient person who only had a number concept for the positive integers, you *might* get the idea to invent negative numbers, by thinking about closures, and the operation of subtraction. It might bug you that there are some kinds of subtractions you just can't do, and you might propose \"Well, *what if* there were some other kind of 'opposite number' which could be the answers to these forbidden subtractions?\" And you would be suggesting, there, a closure. And later, if you were an ancient person who knew about integers but not about rational numbers, you might be bothered about how there are just some *divisions* you can't do! And then, by thinking about closure, you might go on from there to invent rational fractions. In a similar way, the theory of complex numbers came from thinking about closure in the solutions of polynomial equations, and a bunch of other algebraic topics like Galois theory, depend very fundamentally on the idea of closure under other transformations.",
"In quantum mechanics, it's really important that sets are closed. You don't need to know QM to understand this, but I'll try to give you a good reason that they are needed for application. Imagine you have an electron described by a wave function and another electron described by a separate wave function. In QM, it's common that we assume that the set if wavefunctions is closed. But why? These electrons are real, physical objects. They live in our world and we see their interactions with things. Their interaction with our world is described through their wave function. Let's say we add the electrons together, or add their wavefunctions. Should the result also exist in our world? Absolutely. We are taking physical things, we are going to make them one physical thing. It should still be describable by a wavefunction! It must be closed under addition. If closure wasn't enforced here, we would be saying that it's possible to take two *very real*, *very physical* objects and make them into one object that seemingly defies the laws of physics. We know that can't be true, so closure is the solution. Every wave function or every system of any number of particles *must* have a wave function that is also the addition of any number of wavefunctions. The set of physical systems/wavefunctions must be closed! This is extremely useful when you want to talk about how an entire system behaves because you can essentially \"add up\" the weighted behavior of the individual systems (it's obviously a bit more complex but that's sort of fhe gist) I think the other answers here are good mathematical intuition, I just hoped to give a physical one too :)"
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o4e0z7 | Why do teeth shift around once you reach adulthood and stop growing? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are alot of reasons this could be happening (jaw structure, stress, grinding, how you sleep, etc) but the simple answer is teeth are set in bone which is constantly being broken down and remade. So as pressure (for any reason) is placed on teeth, the bone holding it in places is either created or destroyed leading the teeth to move. Braces create tension by using a wire to place teeth in a desired location, later retainers use their shape to maintain the pressure at predictable locations which maintains the teeth shape, so when you stopped wearing the retainers, your teeth wanted to return to its \"natural\" location. So without the retainers, any of life's tensions (stress, grinding, natural jaw structure etc) is creating a new pressure causing your teeth to move when you arent using your retainers to keep them in place"
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o4fb6j | Why are new spacecraft so much smaller than the Space Shuttle? | Looking into the future, many of the new spacecraft being developed are small when compared to the Space Shuttle. Why is this? Especially regarding the Orion which looks incredibly uncomfortable for any journey. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The shuttle was mostly cargo bay. It was designed to haul spy satallites into orbit (though they never actually used it for that) with some people on top. Now people are smart and they just launch the people and hardware on two different rockets",
"New technology means more efficient fuel usage, and many rockets today are carrying much smaller payloads than the shuttle did. If you look at the starship, which is meant to carry much larger payloads, the shuttle is smaller. [image.]( URL_0 )",
"The space shuttle did more than transport astronauts to another site as most space vehicles do today. It was meant to be the orbiting platform, so it had the crew quarters, research station, payload, and everything else wrapped up in one vehicle.",
"The shuttle was a compromise, born out of a desire to keep US human spaceflight going without the astronomical budget of Apollo. It could only achieve its budget goals by obtaining the support of the US Air Force, which could only be achieved by including the big cargo bay and a delta-shaped wing that enabled a significant cross-range capability. It succeeded in meeting the Air Force's requirements, but failed in reducing the budget as much as they wanted. New spacecraft are smaller because the human-carrying part doesn't need to be that big, and any mission that it might carry out will be supported by other modular spacecraft."
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o4fkwq | How exactly can a bilateral epididymectomy fail (thus causing an unplanned pregnancy to result) when the tunica vaginalis is both stitched shut and so incredibly thick? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Two options. One, the person who just had surgery doesn't use backup birth control until their samples come back negative, meaning they are still ejaculating sperm and can therefore get someone pregnant. Or two, the body can heal, and occasionally a new pathway between the testicle and the rest of the epididymis is formed instead of an impenetrable mass of scar tissue, which is usually how this happens a few years after surgery. Of note, the later can also happen to people with fallopian tubes, though it is even rarer still as there is a lot of other organs interacting in the area."
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o4ghda | Werther effect and how it works | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Werther Effect is the trend/correlation that can been seen when there is a highly publicized suicide, and after that there is a spike in similar “copycat” suicides. It’s a mix of both individual psychology and broader social psychology. But the generally thought is that when people who are suicidal see a broadly publicized suicide, that it is either enough to push themselves over the edge, or it gives the suicidal person a “map” or plan to follow through with it. Suicidal people might feel suicidal but not have a plan of committing the act, but when presented with a plan someone else has done it removes that barrier."
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o4gidq | why are grocery store strawberries (around here we get Driscoll’s brand) big with a hard white interior? Why are they so different than homegrown strawberries? | Even when overripe/rotten, the insides seem to be white. Compared to homegrown strawberries, they are flavorless. Are they a different variety? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Picked too early. Strawberries don’t ripen after they’re picked. Smaller strawberries are generally sweeter than the big fat ones. As a kid growing up in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, spent many early summers picking strawberries back in the late 60’s. Fat ones are only good for strawberry fights.",
"A lot of fruits are picked before they’re ripe and are artificially ripened using ethylene gas. They do this for tomatoes too. It keeps the fruit from going bad on its way to the store.",
"2 things at play. Being picked too early so they are hardier for travel and have more time before they spoil. Being bred for hardiness and pest resistance rather than flavor.",
"One big factor is likely to be the variety of strawberry that is grown. Commercial varieties are chosen for their pest resistance, storage and transportability etc. Homegrown varieties are more likely to be chosen for flavour, colour etc"
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o4gltj | When building muscle through exercise, how do you tell the difference between good weight gain and bad weight gain on a scale? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You can't tell with the scale on its own, but combine it with a measuring tape and a mirror and you'll get more of the information you're looking for.",
"On a scale, you really can't tell the difference. There are scales that measure body composition such as body fat percentage, but from what I've read those aren't particularly accurate, and only give you a rough idea about your body composition. The best way to ensure that you're gaining 'good weight' (muscle) is to gain weight very slowly (if weight gain is your goal) or maintain the same body weight (if gaining muscle while losing fat is your goal), and make sure to consistently measure your strength. For example, if you can bench press a maximum of 150 pounds for 10 reps while weighing 150 lbs, then if a few months from now you can bench press 175 pounds for 10 reps at 150 lbs, you've probably gained a bit of muscle and lost a bit of fat. Weight fluctuates quite a bit, and you can gain/lose 5 or more pounds over the course of a couple days from water alone. If you eat a lot of salty foods, for example, your body retains more water. So if you eat a bunch of salty food and drink a lot of water (or eat a bunch of fruit or other food that has a lot of water in it) one day, you might gain 5 pounds in water alone. Then a couple days later if you're a bit dehydrated from being outside on a hot day, you might go back down 5 pounds. But over 2 days, any muscle gain/fat loss would be significantly less than a pound (especially muscle gain, since weight gain from muscle happens very, very slowly. If you're trying to 'bulk up', just do it very slowly, and eat a bit more if you start to plateau on your strength gains. You're not gonna gain 20 pounds of muscle in a month, so if you're gaining a lot of weight quickly, it's mostly fat.",
"If it jiggles, it's fat. If you're getting stronger, you're building muscle. Bodybuilding often involves mixing heavy weight training with some cardio and calorie restrictions. If you ignore cardio, you will get fat."
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o4h6wm | How do we observe a recent event happened only few hundred years ago in a distant galaxy which is few thousand lightyears away? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The explosion happened around 5000 BC and only was visible on earth in 1054, not 1604. You are right in that we can't detect events faster than when radiation from that event reaches us at light speed.",
"You're a little mixed up about a few things. First, you're mixing up 2 different astronomical events. The 1604 supernova was 20,000 lightyears away, which is a different even from the supernova that created the crab nebula. That one was 6500 lightyears away (with a large uncertainty) and was seen in 1054. And those events didn't happen in the years mentioned, that's when the light from those events reached us. So the 1604 supernova happened 20,000 years before 1604.",
"You ready got a few good answers but the crab nebulah is a tually inside our own galaxy. The milky way is much larger than 6500 light years across. I think it's about 100.000 light years",
"When people say that the Crab Nebula went supernova in 1054, they mean that the supernova was observed in 1054. That is when the light from the supernova reached us. From wikipedia: > The nebula was discovered by English astronomer John Bevis in 1731, and it corresponds with a bright supernova recorded by Chinese astronomers in 1054."
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o4hhef | How is insulin produced? | I tried looking this up but it's way over my head. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They basically splice the DNA that codes for the production of insulin into a bacteria and then let it reproduce in a big vat. Then all they have to do is feed the massive bacterial colony and harvest the insulin.",
"Proteins, like insulin, HGH, must be made inside cells. We know the amino acid sequence of them and actually make them quite easily in a lab, but they don't fold correctly unless made in a cell. So, most proteins like insulin are produced inside bacteria and then purified from the bacteria."
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o4hkzm | how come drinking cold water feels refreshing, but cold water on your skin is shocking like a cold shower? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cold water in nature is *generally* cleaner (don't go out drinking water that happens to be cold, please), whereas tepid water has probably sat and may harbor dangerous microbes. Drinking tepid or warm water is unpleasant, likely due to an evolutionary \"memory\" and preference for cool/cold water. Conversely, there's never been an evolutionary advantage to jumping fully into cold water--probably a contraindication even.",
"In addition to what others have said, one reason drinking cold water feels refreshing is that a cooling of the tongue is believed to be one mechanism for satiating thirst. [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) The mechanisms to feel thirst have to do with the volume of water in your blood and organs and concentration of electrolytes in and around your cells. Drink a bunch of water, and those levels will balance out. But it takes 15-20 minutes for the water and electrolytes to get where they need to go, and for these changes to be registered by the appropriate sensory organs. If you continued feeling thirsty that whole time, you'd be in danger of drinking too much water and damaging your organs or dying. So the mechanisms that satisfy thirst (cooling of the tongue and possibly the muscle movements associated with swallowing liquid) are different than those of feeling thirsty (special organs that detect salt levels in the blood and low blood plasma volume). As to why cold water feels shocking, this might be due to the fact that the same sensory receptors that register hot and cold also register pain (bare nerve endings in the skin, in contrast to the other sensory receptors that register pressure and vibration). This also might be why extreme hot and extreme cold can feel so similar -- and feel painful.",
"It’s because it’s cold, your body needs to stay a certain temperature to keep you alive so it’s telling you that “this is cold, cold is bad, cold is death”",
"It's because, as a first worlder, you are used to bathing in hot water. Plenty of people on the rest of the world bathe in cold water daily and it doesn't feel shocking to them. And not just people in hot climates; the Inca bathed daily in cold water and they lived in high altitude mountains. If you do it every day, you get used to it.",
"I'd always seen it as an evolutionary response to drinking out of cold fresh springs or glacial melt run off. Less chance of disease vs warm, stagnant water."
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o4hl9o | Whats the difference between age, year and vintage in whiskey ? Thank you | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Whiskey is aged in wooden barrels to get some of the flavor of the wood. The longer it spends in the barrel, the more of that flavor it will pick up. Once it goes into a bottle, that process stops. A whiskey that is 18 years old doesn't necessarily mean it was *aged* for 18 years. It could have spent 18 years in a bottle on a shelf, which means it has only aged for the months or year or two it spent in a barrel. Vintage matters less for whiskey than, say, wine. Grapes have a fair amount of variety due to things like weather. Different grape qualities will affect the flavor of the wine, such that wine from a particular year may develop a reputation as being particularly good or bad. Some people also attach sentimental value to a year, like if something really good happened that year. So the *age* of a whiskey generally means how long it spent in the barrel. Year and vintage depend on who you're talking to, but it's probably the year the grain was harvested to make it."
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o4ijga | Over time, inflation leads to higher average household incomes. Where does all this extra money in the economy actually come from? Is it literally being printed by governments? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is a central bank in America called the Federal Reserve (the Fed); the Fed has one lever it can pull to slow down or speed up the economy and its raising or lowering interest rates. When the economy is doing well and jobs are abundant, it raises interest rates to encourage people to save money, when it's slow it lowers interest rates to encourage people to borrow money. The Fed lends money to banks when in turn lends money to consumers. When a person walks into a bank and borrows $1,000,000 to build a new factory $1,000,000 is added to the economy. Part of that $1M might go to pay the wages of a construction worker that now has a steady job to take out a $270k loan for a new house, so now $270,000 just got added to the original $1M. The Fed tries to target the rate of inflation at around 2%. You want to encourage people to spend money; if money were getting more and more valuable every day and prices were steadily dropping, the economy would drastically slow down. The money you borrow today would be paid off tomorrow in more expensive dollars; why would you buy a house today for $300,000 when you can buy it next year for $275? Inflation happens because the ratio of money circulating in the economy increases faster than the amount of goods and services being produced. In the case of the inflation we're seeing now, COVID-19 caused the amount of goods and services being produced to drastically decrease, but people still demanded those goods and services because most world governments sent their citizens money to prevent the economy from collapsing."
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o4j7ke | why are the outside (tops) of leaves shinier and more vibrant than the underside (bottom) of leaves? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The bottom of leaves typically has the stoma which are like small vents, while the top is usually waxy which helps protect against the elements",
"I'm going to answer with an analogue: Imagine you're building a solar panel. Do you put photocells on both sides? Of course not. Why? Because the sun only hits one side. You _could_ build out both sides but that would take extra cost with no real additional benefit. For leaves, one side is optimized for sunlight because there is a net energy and nutrient cost for optimizing both side which isn't justified by the increased photosynthesis. The development on the backside of the leaf is sufficient to maintain the durability of the leaf and not really much more than that. (There are example which counter this, because of course there are, but generally, this is the reason.)",
"The question and answers thus far are very focused on dicots. Monocots don't have to do tops and bottoms and can have stoma on both sides."
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o4jc9l | How can a poorly coded videogame "brick" your computer or console? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm not sure this is even possible. The only ways I can see software bricking a system is if the software has OS or kernel-level permissions. Which video games never do. Pretty much any software that tries to get those permissions are easily recognizable as malware. More commonly, systems get bricked because of an oversight in the system's internal design. The Xbox red ring, the solid blue light on ps4, etc. A video game might push a console to its limits, and due to a faulty capacitor on the PCB for example, some components get more power than they were designed to handle and they get fried. All because the manufacturer cheaped out on capacitors and got them from a shady Chinese company. There are many other ways a system can be bricked, but it's always due to an error or oversight in the manufacturing of the system. A well-made system can't generally be bricked by using it for its intended purpose. Unless the user messes around in the BIOS and changes things they shouldn't. More often than not, the user causes it. Edited to add: The worst a poorly coded video game by itself can do to a system is crash and become unplayable. Computers have failsafes in place to ensure too much power isn't drawn, temperatures aren't too high, and big errors (like a blue screen) simply mandate a restart to flush the memory. It's very hard to brick a system nowadays if you're not a tinkerer. Another edit: People seem to not understand what \"bricking\" a system means. A bricked system is effectively useless to the point where it's only \"as useful as a brick.\" A system that can be fixed with a simple reinstall of an OS is not bricked. A bricked system would require extensive software patching and/or hardware replacing to get running again, often requiring a professional. A motherboard with bent pins in the processor receptacle is an example. A BIOS update with a bug that inadvertently stops recognizing hardware during boot cycle is another. Hell, it could mean you submerged the whole darn thing in water while it was powered on. That's a bricked system.",
"This used to happen more in older systems and isn't as common these days. When it does happen, the actual cause is usually pretty different in each case. Systems usually run in 2 main parts: the Operating System (OS) and the software. The OS's job is to run the software, and manage things about the software such as memory and file system access EX: The software asks the OS `\"Hey, can I save a file?\"` and the OS responds with `\"Sure, tell me where and give me the data and I'll put it there for you.\"` If the software asks to put a file somewhere it shouldn't, or access memory addresses it shouldn't have access too, then it's the OS's job to say `\"Hey wait a minute, you shouldn't be doing that,\"` and stop the software either by gently tapping it on the shoulder and reminding it so it can correct itself, or straight up nuking it if it really has to. Sometimes though this doesn't work the way we want it too. Software (whether the product software or the OS) is incredibly complex, and it's impossible to foresee and plan for all the ways the two can interact with each-other. Sometimes software writes to a place it shouldn't be able to on accident and the OS doesn't catch it, sometimes it modifies memory it shouldn't and the OS then interacts with that modified memory and unexpected things happen, and sometimes both work fine but the hardware they were interacting with got confused and started sending unexpected data. There are practically infinite ways these systems can mess up. For example say a piece of software accidentally writes to an incorrect spot in memory but the OS doesn't catch it. The OS then writes this modified memory to a file on disk for use when booting the system (not knowing it's been incorrectly modified). When the OS tries to read the borked file next time it starts up it might be unable to boot since the programmers of the OS never intended the file to be modified by something other than the OS itself and it now contains a bunch of gibberish in place of important instructions.",
"The chance of a game actually \"bricking\" your computer is very low. On most consoles, games are heavily sandboxed and dont have the priviliges to directly cause permanent damage to the console, unless its something like runnings so poorly it physically overheats a specific component. Games can most definetly crash due to unhandled errors in the code. On PCs, I guess there could be a very small chance some filesystem write function accidentally overwrites a system file *somehow*, but the chances of a legitimate game making a device permanenetly unbootable is extremely low.",
"They can't; they can be made to appear to, however. In the hacking world, \"binders\" are programs that look like a normal shortcut or executable but actually run two programs. The first program is usually a trojan horse server or RAT server. The second shortcut is the normal program, steam.exe for example. Often RAT servers will be programmed to send out to a beacon service so that the blackhat on the other end will never be directly connecting to the victim PCs. This can often allow a volatile script that bypasses firewalls and uses admin level to push data out. Because these programs are typically relying on exploits that will eventually be closed...or the program can simply go bad after a change to the OS...or the RAT developer wrote an untraceable server that works for most OS setups but not all...you get the idea. This can often result in the user noticing nothing, and then one day their OS is corrupted and the computer is \"bricked.\" The user thinks the steam.exe is what caused the issue, and no one ever investigates the possibility of a RAT. Source: Former years in the security industry, been following current developments out of interest since then. There was a Defcon Talk about this exact issue. I can talk your ear off about this stuff."
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o4jsut | What happens when you "throw your back out"? Why does it seem to happen easier as you get older? | You know, you reach down to close the cupboard, and Whamo. Shooting pain, inability to stand straight up without holding on to something. What is happening? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Pressure from a weakening disc is causing a bulge which is pushing on the nerve root. As we age, natural disc desiccation occurs. These are commonly referred to as slipped discs, although they have not actually slipped.",
"\"Throwing your back out\" often refers to busting a disc. What we learned in physical therapy school is that your discs contain a jelly like substance that causes pain when it extrudes. It's uncommon to bust one as a young person because the connective tissue that holds the jelly in is healthy and does not have wear and tear that can lead to larger rips. It's also uncommon to bust a disc as an older (like over 70s) person because aging dries the jelly out so it doesn't get squished around as easy. But ages 30ish-60ish are prime disc busting years, because cumulative damage in the outer layers has occurred, but the inner layers are still squishy and prone to protruding.",
"From my experience, the vertebrae in your spine slide or move from deteriorating cartilage between them. This can cause inflammation or the vertebrae itself to irritate a nerve (usually sciatic) that causes immobility and flashes of pain that make it nearly impossible to move. That’s what has always happened to me, but I’d be interested in hearing if other people have a different experience. Some require surgery, but although mine has been chronic for over 20 years (I’m now 38), it has been vastly corrected with foot surgery, orthotics, and breast reduction. Yoga and core strengthening has also helped.",
"Talk to your doctor. IME with my bad back, which was from an injury when I was younger, it was due to weak core muscles. It sounds counterintuitive but I started doing Bar Bell Squats and deadlifts of decent (but not excessive) weight and with proper form and haven't had any issues since going on 2 years now. Also erging (rowing) with proper form helps too.",
"I'm not a doctor. What you're describing sounds like sciatica or other temporary swelling which is putting pressure on the nerves of the spine. The short answer is that one or more discs which act like shock absorbers have shifted, putting pressure on the spine and the strong, shocking pain is your body's way of getting you to stop moving so it can heal. The spinal cord is built of different vertebrae or segments and discs between them which act as shock absorbers so you don't have bone grinding on bone as you bend. If you put too much force on these discs, they can slip and depending on how they slip and how much, they can put pressure on the spine. Like any other injury, there is some swelling involved, which helps immobilize the segment so it can heal, but it also puts pressure on the nerves causing the pain. A common kind of injury like this is called sciatica, it's a 'pinched nerve' in the lower back which sends pain radiating down one or both legs especially when lifting the leg up or bending the back. Another common point is between the shoulder blades and this is the one you more commonly get when closing a cabinet door, drying your back off after a shower, etc. Bad posture, poor physical activity, a poorly designed chair or mattress can all make it easier for these injuries to occur. They are seldom serious, just painful and anti inflammatories like Naproxen, Ibuprofen, can help with the pain by reducing the swelling. Regular stretching and moderate exercise helps the muscles of the back support your weight more evenly and help provide support to the spine to make pinched nerves / slipped discs / sciatica less common. This isn't medical advice, if you have concerns you should talk about them with a doctor.",
"Easier when you're older because people stop working the supportive muscles in core area. Important to keep those muscles working, so get thyself to the gym before back problems start!"
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o4jzov | What makes a rainbow a single large rainbow? If raindrops act as prisms wouldn't that make up millions of little rainbows and the colours would line up? | The sun is a single light source, and the back of my eye is a single reference but if i had 2 prisms near me i can make two rainbows. | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are, in actuality, millions of rainbows being projected all over the place by the millions of water droplets. But only the ones in a very specific orientation to you are the ones projecting into your eyeballs, and each of those droplets are only projecting a very particular section of their spectrum into your eyeball. One particular drop at a very particular location is projecting only a very small part of its red spectrum, for instance, based on its very specific orientation from you. Then another one nearby is projecting part of its yellow spectrum. Etc... All together they will collectively show the entire spectrum as they all fit together like puzzle pieces, but each one is only a very small component depending on its location.",
"Well, It's more like you have a hundred million tiny prisms refracting in every single direction, and also being re-absolbed by other gases and such in the air, so what you end up seeing is your brains interpretation of a \"rainbow\", depending on where you are located vs the actual refracting rainbow. A rainbow from above is an irredecent circle, and again, you only see the light color spectrum based on your relative position. It's like looking at an image up close vs far away. You are seeing the rainbow very far from the original refracting source, and even then, a water molecule is fairly impossible to see with the naked eye, so what you are seeing is the brain interpretation of millions of tiny light refraction."
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o4l3jl | How do egg cells “know” not to accept more sperm once fertilized? How do they keep the rest out? | This question is courtesy of my ten year old daughter who meant to search “cornception” on YouTube but got autocorrected to “conception.” The videos that came up were fortunately educational in nature. Thanks for reading this far! | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The cortical reaction! To ELI5 it: First, you need to know that egg cells are surrounded by a thick layer of jelly-like goop (Zona Pellucida) Sperm cells have to burrow through that goop to actually reach the egg itself. The first sperm to make it through the goop to the egg sends its genetic information into the egg cell. This triggers a kind of intruder alarm, which releases chemicals (enzymes) that turn the jelly-goop into a hard, thick shell. Any sperm that was still in the goop is now trapped, and any sperm that is late to the party has found the door closed. This makes sure that only one sperm can actually make it to the egg. Edit: Because a lot of people are asking about twins and how they come about: Identical twins are the result of 1 egg + 1 sperm- very early on in development the ball of cells that will become a baby (these are stem cells, cells that can become any part of the baby or the placenta, they haven’t ‘chosen’ a job yet) splits into two balls of cells, each of which develop into their own baby. Since these babies started from the same fertilized egg, they will be genetically identical. Fraternal twins are the results of 2 eggs + 2 sperm, each fertilized egg will develop into its own unique baby. This can happen because Mom ovulated two eggs at the same time (the tendency to do this runs in families!). This also means that you can have fraternal twins with different dads, if Mom had more than one set of sperm around when the eggs were available. Fraternal twins are no different than any other set of siblings (genetically) except that they happened to share a womb. Bigger sets of multiples are usually a combination of both processes, or the result of fertility treatments like IVF. For example, triplets may be caused by 2 eggs + 2 sperm then one of them splits (so 2 identical babies, plus a 3rd fraternal triplet), 3 eggs + 3 sperm, or, most rare, 1 egg + 1 sperm that then splits, and splits again to make three identical embryos.",
"Once the first sperm cell hits the egg it creates a reaction from the egg to block other sperm. This is an almost instant reaction where the mucus lining gets thicker and creates a “fertilization envelope” that’s basically like a giant barrier that no other sperm can get through.",
"Hey, this sounds like a question for me! I'm a researcher studying cell division mechanisms, including meiosis (the process of getting egg or sperm cells ready for fertilisation). There are several ways to prevent polyspermy (when an egg gets fertilised by multiple sperm cells). The first is that although millions of sperm cells are ejaculated, they need to make their way to the egg, which is not easy. In the end, only a few hundred sperm cells will be able to reach the egg. Second, there is the cortical reaction. There is a thick, gelatinous coat around the egg called the zona pellucida, which sperm cells have to get through before being able to fertilise the egg. This slows down the sperm a lot. As soon as one sperm has managed to make its way through the zona pellucida and fertilise the egg, the egg immediately triggers the release of an enzyme that causes the zona pellucida to harden. This stops any further sperm cells from making their way though it. This is considered the \"slow block\", as the cortical reaction can take a little while to occur. Third, there is depolerisation of the egg's plasma membrane. This is considered the \"fast block\". It is a little more complicated to explain, but once a sperm cell has made its way through the zona pellucida, it must still get through the membrane of the egg. This membrane has properties that allow for a sperm cell to bind it and get through when the egg is unfertilised. As soon as a sperm cell has got through the membrane, it \"depolerises\", which (in simple terms) changes the properties of the membrane. Even if other sperm cells had managed to make their way through the zona pellucida, they would no longer be able to bind the membrane and penetrate it. This happens on a very short time scale, so it is considered the fast block to polyspermy. I happen to have studied these very mechanisms. In humans, they are extremely important because if an egg is fertilised by multiple sperm, the outcome will be a spontaneous abortion. The fertilised egg would simply not be viable.",
"A human egg is surrounded by a protein matrix “shell” called a zona pellucida. This layer has special docking sites called ZP2 proteins that a sperm can “see” and attach to. Once one sperm gets in to the egg and fertilization occurs these docking sites fall off, and the matrix shell changes and hardens, making it difficult for more sperm to try and enter the egg. Secondly, an egg, like all cells has a membrane around it that selectively allows some things in, After fertilization, it “depolarizes” which means it changes its electrical charge so it is difficult for more sperm to get inside, even if they made it past the first barrier. It is not a foolproof system and sometimes extra sperm get in, creating a condition called polyspermia. Around 10% of spontaneous abortions are due to triploidy , the presence of an extra set of chromosomes in a fetus, usually caused by polyspermy",
"This backstory is great; better than whatever I found on \"cornception.\" I like that you asked for some real answers for her. In the meantime, did you tell her to hold on, let me ask the reddit?",
"Not a biologist but I recall a line from sex egg that may or may not be true. But multiple sperm attempt to penetrate the egg at once. When one makes it through, it releases a chemical which tells the other sperm to stop attempting penetration. Then they wait around to be devoured by the immune system or flushed out...I think.",
"I just want to add to the other great specific answers that these biological don't \"know\" anything, as your quotes imply. You can think of biology as a chemical Rube Goldberg machine, where everything is a consequence of an upstream event, resulting in a domino effect. So a chemical in the sperm reacts with a chemical in the egg, that causes it to release a chemical that reacts with the outer layer in a way that causes it to harden.",
"If you don't mind me tacking on another question: If eggs are locked in with one sperm's code, how is it possible for cats to have split liters with two mates?"
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o4l5bf | why are you not supposed to use warm water when thawing chicken? | I’ve heard that warm water fosters bacterial growth or something but wouldn’t that take much longer to get to a harmful level than it takes to thaw? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The problem is that warm water will thaw the outside of the chicken much faster than the inside of the chicken. So bacteria on the outside of the chicken will have a lot of time to \"wake up\" and start multiplying before you cook the chicken.",
"This is mainly to prevent accidents that have occurred in the past. Short answer, if you ensure your cooked chicken is properly cooked using a thermometer on the coldest region of the meat, you will not have an issue other than potentially unevenly cooked meat...The issue with thawing chicken this way is mainly that you will end up with a false positive, thinking your chicken is cooked properly based on the recipe you followed but the inside of the chicken is actually undercooked and has salmonella. Source: this topic is addressed considerably when you cook Sous Vide. A lot of the visual indicators of conventional cooking (making sure there is only clear color from chicken) are different with sous vide method, so the apps talk to you about this stuff so you aren't blaming the cooking process instead of the improperly prepared ingredients.",
"You want to keep the temperature out of the \"danger zone\" which is 40-140. Bacteria grows best in that range, so it's best to not use warm water.",
"Mega red pill: Honestly there’s not a huge threat of bacteria growing before the chicken is thawed and this is just a “better safe than sued” thing that is reserved for actual professional food industry. At home the real reason is just that warm or hot water can actually start to cook the outside of the chicken."
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o4lhr4 | Why is radiation in space such a problem? | I have read that the biggest danger to astronauts is radiation in space or on Mars, for example. But why? I get X-rays and they have shielding. I use microwaves and they don’t give me cancer. Is it that space radiation is of a different type that we can’t shield from or that such shielding is impractical? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The sun gives off a lot of radiation. This doesn't concern us as much here on Earth because we have an atmosphere and magnetic field that blocks much of it so it doesn't harm us as much as it could. But once you start to venture out past those protective shields then you are potentially exposed to the full impact of the radiation, which is very harmful to your health if not mitigated by shielding like large amounts of water or very thick spacecraft structure, and both of those things are heavy and therefore expensive and difficult to drag along. At least the water would be used for other practical purposes.",
"The radiation from your average kitchen microwave really doesn’t compare to the radiation from the sun: a ball of gas 330,000x as massive as the earth and 10,000 degrees F on its surface. All of that in a near vacuum, leaving very little protection"
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o4lox7 | Aging meat and cheese, how it doesn't spoil | Especially cheese, I've seen videos where it's basically just kept on a shelf at room temps. Stuff in my friend goes bad after a few days and I see steaks aged for like 45 days or some crazy long time. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It does spoil. Aging is just controlled spoilage. If you introduce a certain harmless bacteria and it is a formidable one. Then there isnt any room for any bad bacteria. Usually lactobacillus is the culprit in most aging processes. It's a mean sucker that is healthy for us but bad for ecoli, listeria, or salmonella.",
"Aged cheeses usually have a lot of salt and relatively very little water. For something to spoil, harmful bacteria or fungi have to eat it, but the only bacteria and fungi that can survive dry, salty conditions are harmless."
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o4m56s | Do all birds lay unfertilized eggs sometimes? | I get it that chickens lay eggs frequently and without a rooster, their eggs never get fertilized. But what about other birds? Do they lay less frequently, thus decreasing the likelihood of an unfertilized egg? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes. But also keep in mind that chickens have been bred for egg laying so they can lay eggs almost every day, while other birds lay eggs far more seldom.",
"Yes, it's similar to a human on their period. The only difference is humans are always fertile where as most animals are only fertile during certain parts of the year. It's not advantageous for a migratory bird to be pregnant in the middle of a 5000 mile migration so they are only fertile certain parts of the year, and when they are, they're probably going to mate."
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o4mj2t | Why does spoiled fish or seafood make you so much sicker compared to other spoiled foods? | I understand that spoiled or old fish can make you very very sick, I just don’t understand why it’s so much worse than other perishable foods. Can someone explain this for me? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It isn't, it's just much easier for it to happen to fish and some other seafoods as they are sometimes prepared or eaten raw or less cooked than other meats."
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o4n7in | Why eyeballs are soft instead of hard | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Light needs to go thru them to the back where they stimulate nerves. So it's filled with a watery transparent jelly. So it's soft and squishy. It's protected by bone on all sides except the entry point of light. No other transparent material would work for the purpose because if it were harder, nutrients could not flow between the lens, the entry, and the nerve. There can't be blood vessels in the eye cos that would block n refract light in wrong directions. That's why we need a watery substance thru which the stuff blood should carry (oxygen and nutrients) can diffuse easily to all the parts. I'm a doc.",
"They are filled with a fluid called the aqueous humor, which maintains the appropriate pressure required for the optic nerve to function. I mean, there’s not even really any bodily structure that’s particularly hard aside from bones. It’s just not how the body works."
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o4o3e3 | Why do our bodies get goosebumps when we think of or read or hear something touching/heartwarming/meaningful/spooky? | I understand that there would be an answer for us getting goosebumps when we are cold, but why do we get them in non-temperature related situations? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A strong emotional response can trigger the “shock” response which includes but is not limited to goosebumps. Other possible physical changes could include focused vision/hearing, increased heart rate, a decrease in fine motor skills, etc."
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o4ozbv | Why is gun control such a controversial topic in the USA when the rest of the world sees it as a no-brainer? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"For a lot of people in the US, they have been raised since childhood to believe that owning a gun is a crucial and vital part of their lives, that the right to own guns is the only thing preventing a tyrannical government from taking over, and that anyone trying to regulate guns will be paving the way for a dictatorship to conquer the nation because the average person won't be able to fight back. If you genuinely believe that owning guns is that important, then you're going to oppose attempts to pass laws that make owning guns more difficult.",
"TL;DR; It's mostly about trust for officials and feelings surrounding self security. Guns are seen as a security in the US, while most of the developt world sees them as something that you kill with. This would be one reason. Another is that the trust for the US government and policeforce is way lower than, for example, most European countries. This leads a lot of Americana feeling like the gun is the barrier between you and a robbery, while Europeans (and others) see the police as the barrier. While many complain about the Swedish police here in Sweden, we mostly trust them to handle guns better than the average Joe."
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o4p1iq | The difference between Athiest, Agnostic, and Secular | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You're probably going to get several different answers. But in short: Atheist = there is no god(s) Agnostic = I don't know if there's a god(s) Secular just means separate from religion/theology. Has nothing to do with any claim on gods. There are some who like to claim all Agnostics as Atheists, but you'll find plenty that disagree with them, such as myself.",
"Atheist: I don't believe in god. Agnostic: I don't think it's possible to know if there is a god or not. Secular: Fuzzy definition, originally meant \"anything not related to religion\". Often used to describe \"people who aren't religious\", or even \"people who are religious but want state and church to be separated\"."
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o4p3zc | How does lightning not strike homes more often? Houses and apartments are everywhere , surely some stray lighting strikes should hit them and cause them to burn up. Even if they're not the most conductive objects in the area, shouldn't at least more be struck? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They do hit them pretty often. Usually houses have lightning rods in them. They are usually steel rods on the roof which goes down all the way into the earth a few meters deep, where it is grounded. This protects the houses from any harm that a lightning would do to it.",
"Well, over the years home's have been built to not attract lighting. And also electrtions put most of the major electrical things (like a huge wire that splits off into different directions to give power to all the homes in the vicinity like a condo complex) away from homes to greatly decrease the chance of a home being struck. I'm not the best at explaining so if there's anything that you did not understand in this comment please feel free to ask me and I will explain it better.",
"There are two things to consider. The first is that lighting aims for the tallest items in the vicinity - in a suburban area this will often be things like large trees which can regularly be taller than the houses surrounding them. The second is that when taller items aren't nearby, structures will take the hits. We know this happens though, so we can prepare by fitting tall buildings or other structures with lightning conductors that will safely transfer the energy from the lightning to ground. So this means that trees end up being fairly obvious targets - as we can see the damage impacted on them - while buildings tend to get hit in a much less spectacular and firey way."
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o4pcu1 | We can create artifical gravity by rotating a spaceship (or anything else). Does it mean that there is a universal zero rotation (steady state) and it is the same for the whole universe? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Artificial gravity isn't actually artificial gravity, it's Centrifugal force, which feels like gravity when applied to you.",
"There is indeed, in a sense, only one state of \"not rotating\": you can, without external reference, tell if a system is rotating; and if two systems are of the not-rotating kind, they don't rotate relative to each other. I'm not really sure what you mean by \"the same for the whole universe\".",
"No. There are no global inertial reference frames in general relativity. An inertial reference frame is one that is not undergoing acceleration. A rotating spaceship is a non-inertial frame but you can always convert an non-inertial frame into an inertial one. There is no \"universal\" inertial frame."
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o4q2a2 | The difference between hardness and toughness | I’ve read online explanations on this topic but I can’t understand them so any help would be greatly appreciated | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hardness is how resistant the object is to scratching. Toughness is how resistant the object is to bending without fracturing. For example, a diamond is very hard but not very tough. In order to scratch a diamond, you have to use another diamond. To fracture a diamond, you hit it with a lightweight hammer and it shatters. Steel, on the other hand, isn't super hard, but it is very tough. You can scratch it pretty easily, but it can bend really well without breaking.",
"Hardness - ability to resist crack initiation Toughness - ability to resist crack propagation. Usually you trade one property off for the other. For example glass is hard, but not tough. It takes some force to start a crack but once it does start the cracks spread like crazy."
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o4qd3g | Down Syndrome | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sometimes human chromosome replication can glitch in a certain way and a baby is born with an incorrect set of DNA, one chromosome gets duplicated. This messes up the development of the body and the brain. Since it's one specific way the DNA gets glitched, it is recognizable and got labeled as a syndrome."
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o4r81d | most muscles get stronger if used consistently, but why does holding pee in makes sphincter muscles weaker over time? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I think I'm right in saying this... You have different types of muscles, the muscles in you arms and legs for example is a different type of muscle than your heart. Certain types of muscles like arms and legs regenerate quickly and have evolved to get bigger or smaller depending on their needs. Other muscle types regenerate more slowly, they're \"designed\" to last a life time with minimal maintenence so if it gets damaged (by holding your pee in for too long) it doesn't have the ability to regenerate as well so scar tissue builds up which in turn doesn't help the strength of the muscle. That's an over simplification but I hope it makes sense.",
"On the contrary, the pc muscle is the muscle that you hold when you stop yourself from peeing. And strengthening this muscle can help with things such as premature ejaculation. They have pc muscle exercises for this purpose actually that can be done while urinating.",
"What?? I thought you have to train those muscles and it's good to hold your pee for a bit?! Damn..."
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o4rban | Why is lightening more likely to strike trees and skyscrapers rather than other places? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Air is a really poor conductor of electricity and literally everything else is a better conductor. So lightning takes the path where it's offered least resistance which can be anything, not just trees and skyscrapers.",
"Lightning likes to travel from the ground to the sky, but sometimes needs help. Its easier for lightning to follow tall objects to the ground, like trees or buildings, than to just zap around willy-nilly."
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o4rf72 | Why can you test a nuke underground but on the surface it would be devastating? | If a nuke would explode on the surface of the earth it would be super devastating for the nature, for humanity etc. but underground its ok and nothing happened like earthquakes, the radioactivity?? Why? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When a nuke explodes underground, the mass of the ground absorbs most of the impact, and radioactive remains mostly stay in the crater. It's not powerful enough to create an actual earthquake, though the seismic wave can be registered. When it explodes on the surface or in air, the shockwave (hot compressed air) is free to travel around, demolishing everything in its path. Radioactive dust also spreads much easier this way.",
"It is easy to both overestimate and underestimate a nuclear explosion as contradictory as it sounds. The explosion is more devastating than anyone can imagine. But at the same time, the earth (and nature) is very large and very resilient. A single nuclear explosion would destroy nearly everything in an area but that area is miniscule compared to the size of the earth. The Hiroshima explosion (admittedly small) destroyed about 3 square miles which is about a circle with 1 mile radius, which is around the size of a fairly small town. Underground, the radiation is contained and most of the explosive effect is absorbed by the surrounding rock. Rock is very tough and very heavy. There will be some tremors felt nearby but nothing resembling an earthquake.",
"There have been a total of 528 above ground nuclear weapons tests. They aren't really all that devastating since they were done in fairly remote areas. The damage caused by any explosion is the pressure wave. The biggest problem with above ground testing is the nuclear fallout. This is dust and dirt kicked up by the explosion that itself gets contaminated with radioactive isotopes, which then is then carried by wind and settles out across the landscape. Everything on the surface of the Earth is contaminated. We are all slightly more radioactive because of it. Most nuclear weapons use some 8-22 lbs of fissile nuclear fuel, ostensibly a hollow sphere about the size of a baseball. It's not a lot. In contrast, a nuclear reactor, like Chernobyl will have approximately 100 tons of fuel, and the facility will have cooling tanks for spent fuel rods. A plant can have thousands of tons on site. Uranium has a half-life of 700 million years, plutonium about 21,000. So uranium, at least, is actually fairly stable. With so little material and spread out over hundreds to thousands of of square miles, the dosage isn't necessarily terrible. Mind you, I wouldn't want to be down wind, but it's why after 528 tests, we don't live in a nuclear holocaust hellscape. After a few weeks, the radiation levels will drop to \"acceptable\" levels. The underground tests were meant to help control the mess that testing caused, by entombing the debris several hundred feet under ground. It wasn't perfect - there were the occasional jets of radioactive material blowing out of the holes, and the fastest projectile ever recorded was accidentally a manhole cover. A nuclear weapon, in order to cause maximum damage to a cityscape, would be detonated several hundred feet above the city, where the shockwave would be focused down and out. It would also minimize fallout. If it were detonated on the ground, it could carve out a crater several hundred feet wide and several stories deep, and the shockwave would be reflected up into the atmosphere. Bonus fact: the scientists designing the US testing procedures suggested we do all our nuclear tests on the east coast, in and around Virgina, so fallout would blow relatively harmlessly away from dense American populace. The military brass, however, chose the desert because it was closer to the uranium and plutonium production facilities, and fuck the American people.",
"When one tests a nuke underground, it isn't just in some hastily dug hole. It's _deep_ underground, or inside of a mountain. And if you were sitting with the nuke when it went off, it _would_ be devastating! But the people testing the nukes know how large they will be (and tend not to tend huge ones underground), and how much of the effects the (tons and tons and tons) of dirt and rock are going to absorb, and take all that into account when figuring out how deep the hole has to be in order to not have any of the effects leak out. (And even then, they sometimes make mistakes! There have been several cases where the radioactive gases [have broken out of the test hole despite their best efforts]( URL_0 ).) As for earthquakes, underground nuclear testing _does_ produce earthquakes and aftershocks. [Here's a map showing 640 aftershocks and fault displacements after an underground test in 1968]( URL_1 ). This is one reason you don't want to do it near cities or in a super seismically active area, ideally."
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o4rtj1 | what is rollback in fighting games and how come it makes it feel like there isn’t really any lag? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you play online it takes time for control inputs to get from player A to player B and vice versa. In a rollback scenario, player B's computer is constantly trying to predict what input it will receive from player A and animates the game based on the predicted inputs. When correct, it appears lagless. When incorrect, the game basically skips a small amount to correct the mistake. So for example: Payer A presses X (punch) at time 0.00s Player B's computer predicts player A pressed Y (kick) at time 0.00s. So now player B's computer starts to animate a kick. At time 0.1s B receives the command player A pressed X at time 0.00. Player B's computer \"rolls back\" the game 0.1 seconds, works out what would have happened if a punch was thrown over those 0.1 seconds, and then skips forward again to adjust the game for the actual input. From player B's point of view, half way through a kick, it changed to a punch. However player B was able to press block, which is equally valid on a punch or a kick, so in this case the incorrect cue from the prediction algorithm was still helpful. When lag is low (say 30ms) this isn't noticeable, but when high, the quality of the predictions becomes important and artefacts like teleportation become apparent. To further improve things some games include a small amount of input lag, say 20ms. This lag is always there, and it's always constant so you're used to it. This 20ms input lag gives the game a little window for the game to \"catch up\" in during a rollback event.",
"There are two ways you can write up the netcode for a game. You can either handle the button presses when they were originally pressed, or you can handle them when they get to the central server. Let's say you're starting with the central server timing. This is also referred to as Delay-Based. If you press a button on your screen, until you receive an acknowledgement from the server that the button was pressed, nothing happens. This creates a lag that you have to overcome that just isn't present with in-person gaming, and is going to vary greatly depending on your connection at the time. However, everything you see on your screen is guaranteed to be what actually happens. The other way, handling buttons based on when they were originally pushed, is what is referred to as rollback. Imagine each button press gets sent to the server with a timestamp. Your local game can start playing the actions right away, because it expects that the server will accept that button press at that time. When it gets to the server, it will look at the timestamp of the button press. If it has already done any calculations for any button presses later than that, then it rolls back those button presses, adds the new one, and then replays them, and sends the correction to both clients. This means that you effectively always get your button press at the time you pressed it, without weird lag making it much later than you intended. This also means that, if there is substantial lag, you can see the game stutter as it corrects itself, but if there is very little lag, then everything appears very smooth for both players, making them feel as if it's a local game."
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o4rtwy | How do birds and other animals know not to drink saltwater? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because most animals can taste water much better than humans. They have more taste buds that can actually identify a difference in flavour between a pond, a puddle, and the ocean. And if you wanna go even simpler, try drinking a glass of seawater. Not very pleasant, most creatures quickly learn to just go for fresh water",
"Some good answers here. I will also add that some birds and animals can drink salt water and have evolved techniques to rid their bodies of the excess salt. For example, some birds produce extremely concentrated tears to excrete salt."
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o4t8st | ; Why does too much caffeine cause jitters and a hard crash? Why do some caffeine sources not cause a crash compared to coffee? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Caffeine's main effect is on the brain. It functions by blocking the effects of adenosine, which is a neurotransmitter that relaxes the brain and makes you feel tired. Normally, adenosine levels build up over the day, making you increasingly more tired and causing you to want to go to sleep. The structure of the caffeine molecule found in one source (say, tea or coffee) should be exactly identical to that found in other sources. The body reacts to overall levels of caffeine, and hence the pharmacodynamic response is different depending on how much is consumed per unit time."
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o4teh2 | how we grow | Like how do we get bigger and more developed. How do we physically go from a baby to a strong adult | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The cells in your body make extra copies, making you bigger."
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o4ti6p | What is the difference between operating profits and net income ? | I was looking WWE's business operations, then I saw there was a vast discrepancy between operating profit vs net income. I've heard the same thing applies for real estate and stocks. | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So every country and state is different. They each have their own tax codes, rules and stuff. Operating profit doesn’t care about that. It’s how much you made off your product or service. Net is more real world in the places you file and service.",
"Operating profit is the money earned from actual operations - the revenue taken in from whatever the business does minus the expenses associated with running that business. A business can get revenue/income from other things besides its actual operations and it can have expenses due to things other than its operations. As an example, let's say WWE has a large amount of cash in the bank and that cash earns interest of $500K. WWE isn't in the business of investing cash to earn interest - it's in the business of professional wrestling and associated marketing and promotion. So that $500K, which is definitely income to WWE, isn't operating income, it's investment income. Similarly, WWE might have an expense unrelated to its operations (like settling an SEC lawsuit about manipulating stock pricing) - it's not an operating expense since it has nothing to do with actual operations, but it is still an expense. Investment income and depreciation of certain assets are frequently non-operating revenue and expense, but it depends on lots of particulars. As a rule, operating profit is useful to inform investors of just how good or bad the company is at doing what it does everyday as its main business."
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o4tvxz | What are banked curves / turns? | I've been researching curves and splines for a videogame project of mine. I'm not 100% sure what it means to have a curve 'banked'. It seems to help vehicles with turns on curvy roads, but I don't quite understand how exactly a curve is banked / what it means to bank a curve (visually) / how it helps with turns. I have seen some formulas / math for it, but I'd like to understand the concept before exploring potential implementations. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It means the outside of the curve is raised up in elevation, putting that section of road at an angle to reduce the risk of sliding off due to the centrifugal forces involved when taking turns at high speeds.",
"It means that the surface of the road tilts to the side - down on the inside of the curve, and up on the outside. Imagine an airplane turning. When it turns left, the left wing drops, and the right wing goes up. A road can do exactly the same thing, and for the same reasons.",
"The old Brooklands racing circuit in England is a great example of one. There are quite a few pictures on URL_0 but if you do a search for \"Brooklands track\" you should see plenty, including some video clips. EDIT: You can see the banking in action at URL_1 from 1938."
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o4ty6b | Why do our stomach churn perhaps also called heart in mouth(?!) in an unprecedented event? | As I was driving yesterday, I had a pedestrian walk in front of me, out of nowhere. Thankfully, was within the speed limit and was able to reach and brake on time. No harm done. Except.. When I first saw him , as it is said..'my heart stopped' but not really, what I felt was this big compression in my stomach and as things went okay...it was over..all in less than a second.. Why do we feel it in stomach when there is a sudden event...what is called , why does it happen. Thanks | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is called an adrenaline rush. Adrenaline is released when you are in trouble; it numbs pain and makes you more able to exert yourself. The feeling you get in your stomach is from your body diverting blood away from your digestive system and into your legs - it's an evolutionary response; usually in situations like this we would have had to run away and having more blood flow to our muscles would have aided us in that."
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o4v5h5 | What is happening to us physically when we hear the ‘nails on a chalkboard’ sound? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The part of the brain that analyzes sounds we hear and turns it into useful information is right next to a part that handles emotions. Sometimes activity in the one area can stirs up activity in the other area. People with a condition called Misophonia actually feel anger, sometimes extreme, when triggered by particular sounds, most often chewing or clattering sounds.",
"I always thought we associated it with the actual feeling of scratching a chalk board with our fingernails, which to me, is far more unpleasant than the sound",
"The explanation I was given is that the frequency resonates with portions of our nervous system, which we find unpleasant.",
"I don’t think I’ve ever heard the sound. I’ve even tried to do it myself, and just got a dry sound, similar to scratching your nails on almost any hard surface. Is it high pitched?"
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o4vu37 | Why are most songs around 3:30 minute long? | Ofc there is some exceptions i.e G’n’R ballads, which are ~5 min long. I was just wondering if is it a rule for whole music industry? Would you listen to your favourite song if it was bit longer? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It actually goes back to the size of records. There used to be a specific record size that would hold up to 5 minutes on one side. This created the initial idea of the ~3 minute song (you didn't want to use the full size of the record). As Radio Stations started playing music, they got used to this 3 minute length. Even as records came that had much more capacity, you didn't want to break that 3 minute rule, since radio stations wouldn't want to play it, since they would lose potential ad time by playing such a long song. As for today in the streaming world, a lot is dictated by how Spotify and similar services pay artists. For example, Spotify pays an artist when their song is listened to for at least 31 seconds. It doesn't matter if the song ends at 31 seconds, or if it goes on for an hour. They get the same payment. This means that long songs aren't as great on Spotify, since you get paid per song play.",
"It has to do with the old 78 RPM records. A 78 can hold about 3 minutes of music without having to flip them, so a song couldn't really be more than 3 minutes long in practice. While modern media can hold songs of much longer lengths the practice of having a song be about 3 minutes never really changed. People expect at song to be about 3 minutes long, so songs are generally written to be about 3 minutes long."
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o4wtuf | How do giraffes function on such little sleep? | I've recently read that giraffes only require 5-30 mins of sleep per 24 hours, and they often take this in 5 min chunks due to the risk of predators. But how do they survive off such little sleep? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is well worth noting that many animals use the two halves of their brains in sequence rather than in parallel: one half of their brain sleeps at a time, meaning that they don't need as much \"true sleep\" because they are often half asleep in a very literal way. Sharks don't truly sleep at all and cats can sleep up to twenty hours a day. The amount of sleep one needs is different between species due to behavioral and metabolic differences that have evolved over millennium to suit an ecological niche."
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o4x838 | Why haven't we sent more deep space craft like Voyager 2 out? Technology has become much better over the years, so why haven't there been new a long distance deep space craft? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Voyager craft were launched at a specific date when the planets lined up (as far as a spacecraft is concerned) so that as each planetary flyby occurred the craft could get a slingshot boost meaning that the mission was completed in a relatively short length of time, there was even a rush to get the craft ready in time to match the timing. URL_0",
"The Voyager probes were getting a lot of funding and were rushed out due to a very favorable alignment of planets which meant we could send out a single probe (or in this case two for redundancy) to multiple planets. These aligments of the outer planets is quite rare and only happens about every second century. So it made sense to spend a lot of resources on something that were way ahead of time. Since then our probes have been much more reasonable in terms of budget. However they have been able to take advantage of more modern technology. We have revisited the planets and moons that the Voyager probes visited with better instruments and more time. And currently we have New Horizons which did a flyby of Jupiter, Pluto and Ultima Thule and is aiming to flyby more objects in the Keuper belt if the opperutiny presents itself. It is already studying several of the structures that the Voyager probes discovered at the edge of the solar system.",
"We've sent a few more out! They just take a really long time to get there. New Horizons was launched in 2006 and it just went past Pluto a few years ago.",
"When explaining the alignment necessary for the Voyager missions, NASA said that the last time the alignment was correct, Thomas Jefferson was President, and he blew it."
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o4xgk7 | If egg and sperm form first cell of baby, then why does mtDNA comes from mother only? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Just like any other cell, the egg contains mitochondria--they're required for it to make use of energy and divide, which are both quite important functions for an egg! Since the mitochondria are already present in the egg before the sperm gets anywhere near it, they contain only the mother's DNA. The mitochondria in the sperm, which are far less numerous than the ones in the egg anyway, are destroyed as part of the fertilisation process, nobody is entirely sure why."
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o4xq3f | What’s the benefit of a seed box in relation to torrenting? | I know how torrenting works, and I guess I know what a seed box is for the most part. But where I’m foggy is exactly why people use them and what their benefit is over not using one. Every explanation I’ve looked up just doesn’t clear that up for some reason. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A seed box is an external box that is dedicated to seeding torrent files. They are usually VMs on an external server. People use them because many private torrent trackers require seed to leech ratios, so you need to seed a torrent for longer than you leech (usually at least 2x). You _can_ do this from your home PC, but it would require the PC be on all the time, using your bandwidth, and potentially exposes your IP address to the swarm (which can result in lawsuits). A seedbox resolves both of those concerns"
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o4xzo2 | - How do schools use substitute teachers? How do substitute teachers make reliable income? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"People don't become substitute teachers to make a reliable income. To become a substitute you get a background check, and sign up to be on the list along with all the other basic employment documentation. You get called if they need you / want you, and if you do a good enough job they will call you back later. If you didn't do a good job, or they caught you logging into your account in a swinger website while you were babysitting the special needs class, they wont call you back ever. Source: IT staff of a school.",
"As how they make a reliable income… most substitute teachers I have known have been part-time. Sometimes it’s someone in grad school who works part-time only while they focus on school. I have known a few that were full-time moms but did substituting once or twice a week. I have also known a few retired folks who worked as substitute teachers. I don’t think people necessarily do it for the great income, but do it because it works well with their life situation or circumstances.",
"my old substitutes worked at multiple schools as they were needed, and some worked as a custodian or assistant while they were not being a sub",
"If you're in a populated metro region, then substitute teachers are generally going to be qualified teachers who do not have a permanent position. They are getting teaching hours this way to help them get seniority to get a permanent position. Being in a metro region also means there is so many schools in the system that the amount of positions that need to be filled is pretty constant. In a remote region, where the need for substitute teachers isn't as high, they aren't necessarily going to be the same type of substitutes. This is where you'll find the stay-at-home moms or retirees picking up the occasional substitute day here or there. This is not a primary source of income, but basically occasional extra income.",
"Obviously as a substitute teacher if you want to make an income you have to harness the musical abilities of your class to win music competitions. Source: jack black.",
"It varies from district to district, but generally a school board has a “call list” of substitute teachers. When regular teachers need a day off, because they are sick or have an appointment or whatever, they let the school board know that they need a substitute teacher. The school board then contacts people on the sub list, by phone or internet, to find one who is available. Many school boards allow teachers to contact substitute teachers directly, and then inform the school board about the arrangement so the sub gets paid. As far as reliable income goes, it’s not usually that reliable. A substitute teacher with good availability and a good reputation might get quite a bit of work, but many substitute teachers are lucky to get more than a couple of days of work each week, and have to have a second job on weekends/evenings to make ends meet.",
"It depends. For short time substitutions such as if a teacher calls inn sick they make sure that other teachers can cover for them. Teachers do not have classes in all periods as they need time to plan future classes and to score tests and such. But this work can be deferred to later if there is an accute need for a substitute teacher. It is therefore preferred if the techers are not completely filled up with classes as they might not have any spare time during working hours for this kind of unexpected events. Some schools might even hire dedicated substitute teachers for this purpuse who normally do not have any classes. I do also know of schools where they have teachers working as administrators and can step inn as substitute teachers. For longer periods of time it may be necisary to hire a temporary worker to work as a substitute teacher for a class while the teacher is unable to attend. Payment of these substitute teachers does depend on their work contract. It is reasonable to expect that any work would be counted as overtime. For dedicated substitute teachers they might have two different hourly rates for when they have classes and when they are just sitting idle. Or they may be paid full time anyway and just given other tasks when they are not substituting."
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o4y3q6 | why do we get random tunes stuck in our head even for weeks? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The brain interprets the song as an unfinished task, and therefore gets fixated on it. This happens especially if you only remember one line or lyric of the song. If you listen to the entire song again, it can help to get it out of your head"
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o4yabq | if certain organs can regrow [like livers] why can't we just keep some on ice until they're needed? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Organs do not live that long on ice. There is a reason why transplants that takes place in different hospitals use ambulances with sirens, helicopters and in some cases even fighter jets to get the organs to the destination hospital as fast as possible even if the organ is on ice. We are able to prevent it from dying for a few hours but not much longer. Therefore we can not just keep an organ on ice for long periods of time. It may be that we just have not researched the right technique but currently it is not possible.",
"Because organs are made up of cells, millions of cells, and these cells need to be alive in order for the organ to function and/or \"regrow.\" And cells die very fast without a supply of blood flow to bring oxygen and nutrients so the cells can function. Matter of hours. Ice, and in general, freezing temperatures, will freeze the water that is inside most cells. Water *expands* when it freezes, which is why ice floats, and also why any glass container with water inside that's left to freeze will be broken up by the ice. The ice \"grows\" in volume compared to the water that was previously in the container, shattering it. Needless to say, freezing cells inflates them so much that they burst and die. \"Ice\" kills cells, rips their membrane/skin apart. The current best methods that we have for preserving organs and keeping them alive, are basically reducing the temperature a little (chilled, not freezing), but mostly they're trying to put the organ in a medical liquid that approximates blood as much as possible, with hopefully enough oxygen and nutrients in there to keep the organ alive. It's a [colorless liquid]( URL_0 ) (looks like medical plasma liquid actually), and again it can only manage a few hours of keeping the organ's cells alive, then they start dying rapidly and the organ starts to fail."
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o4yaj3 | What is light made up of? Where does it come from inside a torch? Is light just un-containable luminous particles than can never be studied as a single unit inside a Microscope? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Light is made up of photons, which in turn are small packages of energy moving at light speed. Light is created whenever small amounts of energy are released in subatomic processes. This usually happens when electrons around nuclei are infused with energy, then revert back to their \"natural\" state - they get rid of the excess energy by emitting a photon. This also happens during lightning strikes (infusing the air's electrons with massive energy, then releasing it as light) and inside light bulbs (infusing a gas' electrons with energy through electricity, which then releases the excess energy as photons). You can't study light particles in a microscope, not just because of their speed, but also because in order to see them you need them to be absorbed by your retina, i.e. destroying them. When you study a microbe in a microscope, you do that by bombarding it with photons (light), then capturing the light that gets bounced back from the microbe, concentrate a lot of that in the lenses and absorb it with your eyes' retinas. From that absorbed light you then infer the qualities of the microbe. If you were studying photons, you would basically bombard photons with other photons, which would combine their energy and possibly emit different photons; Either way you'd actually see the result of the merger, not the original photons.",
"light is a vibration of the electromagnetic field. It comes from the electrons within atoms and molecules, when they lose emergy they emit light.",
"Hi /u/po4165! > What is light made up of? The term \"light\" is usually used to describe the visible part of the [electromagnetic spectrum]( URL_1 ). That is, light is a wave comprising of excitations in the electric and magnetic field, with a wavelength of roughly 400-700 nanometers. [Quantum mechanics]( URL_3 ) tells us, that these waves do not transmit energy in a continuous stream, but instead energy is transmitted in discrete packages. These packages are called [photons]( URL_0 ). > Where does it come from inside a torch? I'm not sure if you are using the word torch to describe a the candle-looking thing or a flashlight, and the answer would differ slightly depending on the meaning. Modern flashlights use [light-emitting diodes (LEDs)]( URL_4 ) to generate light. LEDs typically make use a process called [electroluminiscence]( URL_2 ), where photons are emitted when electrons transition to a lower energy-level (so-called \"holes\"). An intuitive understanding of this process can be gained, when considering conservation of energy: when an electron is excited and at some point later drops back to a lower energy-level, the energy has to go somewhere. In the case of LEDs, the energy between the excited state and the lower energy state is emitted in the form of a photon. > Is light just un-containable luminous particles than can never be studied as a single unit inside a Microscope? Photons are a bit special in so far as they are mass-less particles. And as it turns out, all mass-less particles must always travel at the speed of light c (through vacuum). And crucially, it doesn't matter how fast an observer is traveling relative to the source of the light, she will always measure the photons to travel at c. A consequence of this is that there are no valid frames of reference, relative to which photons are at rest. While photons *do* slow down when traveling through a material, they can never be studied on their own and at rest."
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o4yzbn | How does our sleeping body know when it's time to wake up and how does it do it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We have an internal biological clock called our circadian rhythm. Or circadian cycle. Essentially at certain times of the day a part of our brain starts to secrete Melatonin, a chemical that bonds to parts of the Brain and makes us feel that “sleepy” feeling. And then several hours later, that gland in our brains stop secreting melatonin, signaling your body to wake up. This schedule isn’t set in stone and can actually be altered by new or irregular sleep patterns (which is why if you wake up for work at 7am, you might find yourself to naturally wake up around then without your alarm) For how this rhythm keeps its time schedule, the theory is that it reacts to light changes (like the setting sun). Which is why people say the blue light released from so many electronics messes up our sleep because we aren’t getting that natural change in light."
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o4zdr3 | Why do bones burn completely in campfires but in house fires the skeletons are always intact? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It depends on how hot the fire is. To my knowledge skeletons aren't always intact in a house fire, it really depends on the temperature of the fire.",
"Do bones burn completely in campfires? I don’t think they do. I know cremation is between like 1400-2000 degrees F to get the bones to essentially evaporate and break down, and [this website]( URL_0 ) says the average campfire is around 930 degrees F while the largest bonfires can reach just over 2000 degrees F.",
"This is extremely variable and will depends on each case. Not every house fire is the same, not every campfire is the same. A small backyard campfire might not burn bones, or if it’s well ventilated and well fuels maybe it will get hot enough. A small bonfire again might not get hot enough, or if it’s well ventilated it will get hot enough. The temperature of each fire is going to vary on these things. And also consider the house fires might have the potential to get hot enough to burn bones away, but house fires are rarely ALLOWED to get that hot. 9/10 times house fires are at least controlled by the fire department with water to keep it from spreading/keep the building form collapsing. Only in rare instances do they allow the house to just burn completely down. So that intervention by the fire crew may keep the house fire from getting hot enough to burn bone.",
"They don’t. Not even the kilns used for cremation will burn bones in totality. If you’ve ever had a pet or family member cremated, If you shake the receptacle you will hear hard clacks. That’s from the bone fragments that are mixed in with the ash from everything else. If you open the receptacle, you will find thousands of sharp tiny bone shards. What’s happening is the heat from the fire causes the bones to shatter and fracture (due to remaining moisture within said bones) into smaller pieces that then char and essentially look just like the rest of the coal pile. How do I know this? Take a guess. That being said? The kind of heat required to turn bone into actual ash? Prolonged exposure to a volcanic pyroclastic gas flow. Like what happened in Pompei and even there, some bones were still found in tact or shattered, as opposed to vaporized. Edit: it’s like what happens if you try to have a bon-fire on wet concrete. The concrete underneath the fire will swell, explode and shatter."
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o4zfoa | What is the spin of a particle? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine you have a collection of balls, and they differ in three ways: some are red and some are green; some are big, some medium, some small; some are heavy and some are light. To uniquely identify a type of ball you clearly need three pieces of information: colour, size and weight. But you don’t need the exact value on a continuous scale; just knowing that a ball is “big” is sufficient. These properties are “quantised” which means that they can only take certain values. Well it turns out that subatomic particles can also be sorted into types by specifying the value of a number of quantised parameters, called “quantum numbers”. So for example an electron needs 4 numbers to describe it. One number corresponds to how much energy the electron has, and two correspond to the pattern it makes as it goes round the nucleus. The fourth number doesn’t really correspond to anything we can easily describe, but it got called “spin”.",
"\"Spin\" is the name given to a specific kind of inherent angular momentum in a particle that can take on discreet directions depending on the particle. It doesn't make lots of sense because there isn't really any macroscopic counterpart. As a note, you can take Quantum Mechanics classes, know all the properties of spin, use it to solve the wavefunction of the particle, and still not know \"what\" spin is."
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o50ui4 | How does coal / sand not fly off the back of an open train truck or bed while the train is in motion? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It does sometimes. My grandfather used to walk along the train tracks to pick up the bits of coal to heat the family home with his brother, back in the Great Depression."
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o510ws | how come food gets utterly obliterated by stomach acid, yet stuff such as bacteria and parasites that cause food poisoning doesn’t? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most do, but only a very small number of bacteria need to make it to the intestines to start multiplying again and produce ill effects. Actually the impressive part is probably how many bacteria your stomach acid *does* blitz every day and how rarely pathogenic bacteria do make it through! Also some food poisoning (such as from rice) isn’t caused by bacteria, but by toxins which the bacteria have already produced, and which don’t get destroyed in the stomach.",
"It isnt just bateria or fungi that can make you sick, its the stuff they make that can make you sick. As the are eating the food, they are also excreting waste products. Those products make us sick. There are molds that produce aflatoxin. The aflatoxins are very bad for us.",
"Along with some bacteria being more adapter to acidic conditions, the stomach also becomes less acidic as it fills with food. Your stomach's contents can get as high as pH 6 after a meal. This makes it much easier for bacteria to survive and make it further into the GI tract.",
"Well \"utterly obliterated\" is not what happens. Eat some corn kernels without chewing them really thoroughly to confirm. Food is broken up the minimum amount needed to extract the nutrients."
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o527hv | why do we get headaches? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Headaches are really poorly understood. It's not entirely known why we get them. There are though a few ideas. One is that they're muscular aches in the shoulders, neck and head and this causes the pain of a headache. You don't always feel pain exactly where it's coming from. Another is that the tissues around the brain for some reason become hyper sensitive and then the brain misinterprets signals coming from them as pain. And another is that the brain just goes, \"I'm going to make you feel pain for absolutely no good reason,\" which then results in a headache.",
"Constriction of the capalaries that run through your brain. The reason why these constrict is not known. This is why soaking your feet in freezing water will reduce headaches; you're forcing the blood to rush to your feet to warm them, meaning less blood in your shrunk capalaries. I also often utilize very hot showers to again, make he blood go away from my head.",
"It can be from trauma to the brain, dehydration, withdrawl, stress, and several other causes. If you're having headaches every day, you might have a migraine or a concussion. In either case, you should probably see a doctor."
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o527rl | - I collected seeds from my black petunia and the resulting flowers were shades of green, yellow, pink, white, purple, black, and striped . How? | [a picture of the flowers]( URL_0 ) | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The petunias sold as plants are hybrids of petunia between P. axillaris and P. integrifolia. These hybrids don't breed true to form, like many plants."
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o52ciz | How come we can’t actually bring back dinosaurs like Jurassic world? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Jurassic World was based on the idea that we could get enough DNA from mosquitoes who bit dinosaurs and then got trapped in amber, and extract information from the blood inside those mosquitos. In reality, DNA breaks down over time, even if trapped in amber, and thus there wouldn't be any genetic information we could get that way.",
"Their DNA is decayed; most experts agree that DNA can, at the absolute maximum, only be recoverable from cells that are under 1 million years old. Dinosaurs, however, have been extinct for far longer than that. It would be theoretically possible to engineer DNA so that it creates a dinosaur-like creature, but that technology is a long time off (if it ever winds up working).",
"It’s not as easy as that as the DNA is not intact, then there is the issue of what host you need to grow the egg in, how do you overcome the host’s immune system’s rejection? Eventually we will understand genetics to the point that we can code whatever creature we can dream up, or resurrect a dead species as in Jurassic Park. To get there let’s start by resurrecting more recently extinct animals where we have a near complete genome."
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o538gk | How do cars rust underneath the paint? | I have a 04 SUV, and I’m starting to notice the rust getting bigger underneath the paint. How does that happen? How do cars rust underneath the pain? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It starts at some scratch/dent/hole in the paint. Paint helps prevent the metal beneath form rusting, but once there is some kind of opening in that shield, rusting will start at the opening as water and air get into the opening and react with the metal beneath. Then, since rust has more volume than the original metal (since there’s extra oxygen atoms mixed in now) it causes that material to expand, this popping up the surrounding paint and exposing more metal to the elements, this repeats over and over as the rust patch grows and grows.",
"Paint is very, very thin. There can be cracks too small for you to see which prevent the surface from being water-tight. That was one reason cars are waxed very often by enthusiasts, but if you're not doing that then rust is a matter of time. Also, if your roads are salted, that increases the speed of the reaction by 10X.",
"It means water is getting inside the body panel through some other means. The way the body panels on cars are overlapped is so they form channels for water to flow around and down to the ground. But if there's a missing seal or gasket somewhere, the water gets inside and rusts the panels out from the inside. For example if the weatherstripping on your door windows isnt' in good shape, water can get into the door itself. Now there should be drain vents to let the water get out of the door, but sometimes those get clogged and voila, now you have water in the door. My car has rocker panel drain plugs in the front of the rear wheel well. Well my model year and a few years after it, the drain plugs didn't fit quite well enough so they let water from the wheel splash get in... and the rocker panel was full of sound-deadening foam for those model years, which just soaked up the water like a sponge. Now my rocker panel is rusting out."
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o544ct | Why do producers choose to release weekly episodes of tv shows/cartoons/etc on Sundays? | It might be just a coincidence, but I have been noticing that most shows I watch that are released weekly, air on Sundays. Is it really a thing? And if it is, what is the commercial reason behind it? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The typical American family is most likely be home on Sundays. Church and then family days. Most jobs also don't operate sunday so it's likely to have the highest potential audience.",
"Traditionally, the best slots for TV shows are in the evening time, Sunday through Thursday. The reason for that is, especially before DVR's and streaming services changed the game, the best time slots were when the most people were likely to be at home, watching TV. Most people work during the daytime, so evening times after dinner are considered \"prime time.\" And people are most likely to go out or travel on Fridays and Saturdays, so those are considered the worst evenings - though Saturday can be great for kids' programming like Saturday morning cartoons. In fact, Friday nights are often called the \"death slot\" because of how likely the shows that air on Fridays are to get low ratings and get canceled. Of the good days for primetime TV, the premiere slots are typically Thursday night, because most people stay in and plan to go to out on Friday night, and Sunday night, because people are likely to be at home, relaxing and getting ready for the next week (and typically Wednesday is next in precedence). Shows that air in those times have a tendency to do better and pick up higher ratings, which means that good shows sometimes gravitate to those prime slots. After all, if your network has a new show that you want to succeed, you'll try to put it in the best timeslot possible. And if you have a show on another night that's doing well, it might be good to switch it to one of those dates, to take advantage of its popularity and get even more viewership and ad revenue. Basically, good shows are more likely to air on Sundays or Thursdays, on the major networks at least - those slots tend to select for the best quality programming, so our favorite shows are more likely to air on those days. Though, of course, streaming is changing the game a bit, with Netflix and Hulu releasing shows on any day, and Disney+ choosing to release everything on Fridays, hoping to get a big weekend boost."
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o54cfk | Why are some cells permanent(like fat cells), regenerative(like skin cells) or lost permanently (brain cells) | I just wish my brain cells were permanent like my fat cells I’d be smart until I die | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"1) Fat cells are permanent as we don't always know when our next meal is, this means they need to be around when we need them, we can't have food and just wait for fat cells to form-storage is needed immediately. 2) Skin is external-it is subject the most to environmental damage-UV, water, heat, scratches, etc. If they didn't regenerate DNA and other damage would pile up leading to higher cancer incidence and poorer protection from the environment. 3) Brain cells regarding memory (\"smarts\") and movement are actually regenerative though at very low levels and decreasing as you age. Use it or lose it."
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o55ut1 | How did cavemen or ancient Vikings avoid sunburn? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"People tended to spend more time outdoors and their skin gradually produced melanin to protect them. Sunburns is worst if you have spent a lot of time indoors for a long time and have quite pale skin to show for it and then go out into the strong sunlight. If you are out all spring getting gradually more and more sun then the sunburns do not get as bad if you even get sunburned. In addition people did have clothes to protect them and may have covered their skin in a thin layer of dirt to give them some protection. However I do suspect that some vikings had quite a bad time sailing from Denmark to Morocco or from Sweden to Istanbul and getting their first taste of the Mediterranean Sun after a winter in the cold dark north. It was too hot to wear clothes and the sun was too strong not no wear clothes. It is no surprise we have little evidence of viking battles in this part of the world even though they had a strong presence."
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o56kuq | The pronunciation of ù vs ú vs ū | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Depends on the language in question. Some of those letters appear in different languages and despite having the same symbol will not make the same sound. Some of them will be pronounced differently in languages depending on what word they appear in."
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o58cry | During a live televised sports match, how do they get the replay footage edited in so quickly? | I’m curious as to how a ref will blow their whistle and get instant replay footage within seconds. Can someone explain this process to me? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's a whole room (or trailer) full of directors, producers, and editors watching dozens or hundreds of feeds simultaneously. They're pretty much constantly cutting highlight shots, different angles of play, etc to be ready when the lead director wants a replay. It's a huge amount of very fast-paced work.",
"There are a few different systems but one of the most widely used ones are made by [EVS]( URL_0 ) [LSM-VIA]( URL_1 ) It’s basically just a multi channel video recorder on steroids with instant access to recorded video w/audio Hope this helps ya.",
"Unrelated: captioning for live broadcasts is also being typed live by someone. Gotta go fast!",
"I design control rooms and their replays systems, and its not quite as bad as one might think. On large shows (if run properly) each replay op will have 4-6 camera inputs to watch, with one or two outputs. Ops that have been working for a long time get used to the rhythm of the sport theyre working. Cameras angles are arranged roughly the same way at every venue (partially cuz I do that too, and obviously we have guidelines), so you know the looks you have available. Like others have mentioned, theres a certain adrenaline rush to having a show go well, and when a production crew is working well together the whole thing feels like a well practiced dance.",
"A lot of the camera feed is inserted into a system that is recording multiple angles and that is fast to create \"events\" with ins and outs. What happens is that someone is watching and every time they see something cool they will create the event, there is usually shortcuts for -3, -5, -10 and -20 seconds, this way a event is created where the start point is on the correspondent time you pressed. After that it's just a matter of knowing if your shot is good when the director calls for the replay, on bigger games and bigger budgets you will have multiple replay operators with multiple cameras, since there is people covering the ball, the off-side line, players near the ball for random stuff, there is the open shot, close shot, slow motion... It's really cool to see it happening, it's a lot of people working together to make it happen and, like a lot of people said here, there is this adrenalin rush that you get on a good show that you can't describe. I'm working with live events for the past 3 years, did eletronic sports for 2 years and I'm on corporate events for the past year, because the market exploded with covid. I love what I do now, but, there is way more adrenalin on any kind of sport coverage.",
"I've only worked on small set-ups/crews but there's usually a replay operator in sports broadcast control rooms. They'll have a rolling recording of a handful of camera angles on a specialized piece of equipment. When the director of the production asks for a replay to show on air, usually of a big event like a goal, they'll ask the replay op to cue up the goal. The replay op will \"jog\" back to the point in the recording where the goal happened (usually just a few seconds to a minute ago), while the replay machine is still recording the camera angle in real time. The director will \"take\" the video signal from the replay machine, while telling the replay op to \"roll\" their footage and put it on air for the viewer at home. It's a lot less editing, in the traditional sense, and a lot more of switching video signals on the fly. Kind of like putting a puzzle together as 5 different people are throwing pieces at you. Sometimes you'll see a heavily edited video as the broadcast is going to commercial break, kind of a highlight reel of the last period, inning, etc. I don't have much experience with that but as far as I can tell, that is done with video editing software (Adobe Premiere, etc.) and played directly out of the computer or done with a much more advanced level of replay equipment.",
"they use a piece of hardware that holds all of the \"streams\" in a sort of memory to be instantly brought back up and spliced in to the broadcast. many places use one by a company called EVS, but there are others as well. when there are longer times, they may edit items in using traditional editing software and then importing that, but in cases where it's nearly instantaneous playback it's usually a hardware solution. in these control rooms multiple people can see all of the angles happening at once and usually it's someone's job to request to the operator specifically what they want to be played back live.",
"This is sort of an ELI5 of how a single replay feed works: Imagine you are walking down a path at a magic zoo. At this zoo, at the end of the path a new animal exhibit will always pop up and the path gets longer, you will never run out of animals to see. You and your friends start walking with a zoo keeper, and as you walk, the keeper puts a flag in the ground in front of every animal exhibit. No matter how far you and your friends walk, you will be able to instantly go back to any animal exhibit by using the flag she put in the ground. Even if your friends keep waking and new animals keep appearing at the end of the path, you can go back to the flags and see an animal you already walked by. When you're done looking at the animal you saw, you can use the flag to catch up to your friends and the zookeeper. It's not perfect, but in this example, your friends are what is happening live at the football game, you are the person watching on TV, and the zookeeper is the EVS(Instant Replay) operator. The video feed is constantly recording what is happening. The EVS operator can go \"back in time\" along the path to an event they made (the flags) and show you the viewer at home a replay. While you are watching the replay, new flags are being made for new replays because the machine is always recording. There is also a producer sitting next to each operator in the truck that keeps notes of what replays are located at which point along the path so that when the director calls for it, it can be found quickly. Like I said, not a perfect example, but nobody else here was really trying to explain it to a 5 years old.",
"I worked for live TV news for a few years in the production room and it was fucking nuts. The answer to your question? There is no one answer haha… just a ton of people playing rough shot with a director putting it all together and piecing together a “show” on the fly.",
"It is a system called EVS. Oddly enough it is a program created for architecture and drafting but that's another story. The EVS machine takes feeds from 4 cameras and has 2 output channels (it can take in more or put out more depending the configuration but 4in 2out is prob most common configuration). There can be as many EVS machines as you want and they all work together on a server called Xserve. When you see something that looks good or is a good play you \"clip\" it but spinning a wheel that moves the playhead forward and back. You mark an in and out point and save the clip. You can then push the clip to the server if it's a really good one. Now, any machine on the serve has access to all the other machines clips and can make a playlist. So, you simply grab all the clips you want (throw in a aux clip with audio at the top of you want it to music) pick the speed you want and transitions you want and when the director calls for it you hit play (or push your speed bar up to the top... Kinda looks like a speed shifter from a boat) This whole process is done by working with the producer or AP and filling whatever is called for in the runsheet. So, it's easy to plan what you want ahead of time and have it ready to go.. but a skilled replay op can have one made in seconds... Like a rollout to commercial. Also there is jobs in the truck called r/o (replay only). They do JUST instant replay. So they clip things and have replays ready but don't make playlists. This helps give the other EVS ops time to make the fancy packs while letting the r/o have whatever just happened at the ready for the director The EVS outputs get named GOLD, SILVER, BLUE, RED and so on. This makes it easy for a director to call out directions on what output is going to air next. Example of EVs chatter: (After a home run) Director \"going to red for the replay. Who has a good look at the bat flip\" r/o1 \"I got it on green\" Director \"ok, green next\" r/o2 \"great picture reaction on blue\" Director \"thank you, blue next then back to gameplay\" EVS \"can you push (send) those clips to my machine of the flip and pitcher react\" ... He then proceeds to put them into his bumper to break and plays it as announcers throw to next commercial break. Hope that lays it out clearly for ya",
"Been saying for a long time that challenge /replays need to be handled by TV crews who have the correct angle and call within 15 seconds 99% of the time",
"honestly, they could just stream every event in a 1 minute delay and it would save them a lot of effort",
"Money, money, and money. Seriously though, production comes down to investing in more people with more advanced machines working more angles to get all those sweet replays. Professional sports are all about revenue from spectators. Even in-person spectators sitting in the stands still watch replays or moments they missed on the big stadium screens. The more they invest in making it exciting, the more spectators they will have and the more cash they will make. It’s a self feeding cycle, really.",
"Basically, you have a device that is recording footage the entire time. It has a single job, which is to remember the last few seconds of an input, and when prompted it plays it back in either in real time or slow motion. The more inputs and footage it can handle, the more expensive it is. My dad uses them when he shoots football, and they're useful when I have to break a shot and run up the field to get in position for the next play. You can actually do this yourself in OBS on your computer for streams, with a little effort.",
"Expensive machines. With turning knobs. Makes the work do much easier. Perhaps you've seen the replays done live when they rewind it.",
"how do they do the lines that shows the trajectory of the ball? is there some sort of tracking software or are the editors drawing these by hand like the American football announcers circling plays? the lines shown when golfers hit or putt is extremely accurate so 🤷",
"Former Instant Replay Equipment Installer Here - I set up equipment, tested it, and trained refs on it for the NFL and US college football. At least as of 15 years ago, the network truck (ABC network, for instance) is set up with experts that have control over the ability to switch and replay any camera feeds to the network feed. The instance replay booth was startlingly simple: in our configuration, there were three operators, two of them refs, each in front of one of three touch screens. The operator on the far left, usually a non-ref and tech person, would wait for the network to send footage from multiple angles out onto the network, and mark the beginning and end of the plays. These plays would show up as icons on the center screen for the first ref. If more angles were needed, the operator called down to the network truck (i.e. ABC, NBC, CBS etc.) and ask for more angles. Believe it or not, this is why viewers would sometimes see so many slow motion shots from various angles replayed on TV. Not for the viewers, but for the instant replay refs! The first ref, in the center, would then touch icons to show plays from various angles on the right-hand screen, in front of the second ref, and the refs would discuss and relay information to the field. An interesting mix of high-tech with low-tech to solve a problem."
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o58srv | Why do doctors press on your teeth with the metal hook tools? | Sorry for not knowing what they’re called, but they’re like little metal hooks for getting rid of plaque. I told my dentist that two of my teeth were really sensitive when I eat sweets, and he started pressing on them with the hook. He said they were fine. What are they doing when they do that? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Checking for cavities and holes in your teeth. Being sensitive like you described is one symptom of a cavity.",
"If you have tooth decay then the hook will stick in your softened tooth. That's how they check for decay.",
"It sounds like your dentist is trying to narrow down where the pain is originating from to see if there is an underlying infection below the gums. I had to have a root canal recently, and he did this to pinpoint the source for the pain so that he got the correct tooth. Turns out I had an infection, which caused the bone to break down. He also could be looking for cracks in the tooth, or nerve exposure, due to receding gums or enamel that has gone. They also use these tools to measure the depth of the recession.",
"Do you have some information they need? Like “Is it safe?”",
"There's a few different tools they use. They have robust hooks with hard angles to scrape away plaque. There's another that has a hook with a thin straight end to it which is what they use to test for cavities. They press it into your tooth to see if 1 it causes discomfort or 2 it \"sticks\" in a cavity for lack of a better term when they pull the tool away Cavities leave a bit of a rough surface and traps stuff in them which let's the hook stick in the cavity. My grandpa was my dentist growing up and always answered our questions about his tools when we went in"
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o5ah0n | why do some swollen areas on the body (toes, fingers etc) have a sort of sheen on them? | I finished a trail race on Saturday and might have sprained my toes as they are swollen. I’ve noticed this with other swelling on myself and others that it seems to have a shine to it, almost as if I just put lotion on the area. What is happening? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Skin when \"at rest\" isn't smooth but full of very small dips and crevices, which could be colloquially called \"texture\" as we witness it. When something under our skin expands (swells up) it stretches the skin and as such we don't see the \"texture\" of those small imperfections anymore, because there's no place left for crevices and faults."
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o5bfi3 | What is the hot material they pour into the rolling thing to line stripe & write things like “stop” on the road and how does it instantly dry? | You know the ones from the videos on Instagram. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's hot melted stuff. It's not \"drying\" so much as \"cooling\" when it hits the pavement. The pavement has a lot of heat capacity, so it only takes seconds to get the stuff to the ambient pavement temperature.",
"It's not paint but a type of thermoplastic like what pop bottles are made of but a different molecule. It's a specific type made to melt to a very liquid state. The thinness of the layer makes it cool in seconds"
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o5bisc | What happens if somebody gets a blood transfusion with blood that doesn’t match their body? | Just curious. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The immune system attacks the new blood often clotting around it. This can lead to a stroke, heart attack, or necrosis of tissues it get stuck in. Oddly one of the first and most remarkable symptoms of incorrect blodd is \"an impending sense of doom\" in the patient which is appropriate for the situation",
"Somebody that got the wrong blood type would get huge blood clots and likely die of an embolism. We did this in a biology lab in petrie dishes, mixing blood types, the blood gets thick and lumpy,, it congeals as the white blood cells attack the foreign blood type. Mixing the same blood types did not have this effect, also mixing any blood type with type O negative did not have that effect, that's why that type is considered universal donor blood.",
"It depends on the blood. If you have A+ blood, your body likes and accepts types A+, A-, O+ and O- and the body says \"This is nice.\" Any other type the body goes \"Wt? Heck no!\" and rejects it and you die. If you have A- blood, your body likes and accepts types A- and O- and the body says \"This is nice.\" Any other type the body goes \"Wt? Heck no!\" and rejects it and you die. If you have B+ blood, your body likes and accepts types B+, B-, O+ and O- and the body says \"This is nice.\" Any other type the body goes \"Wt? Heck no!\" and rejects it and you die. If you have B- blood, your body likes and accepts types B- and O- and the body says \"This is nice.\" Any other type the body goes \"Wt? Heck no!\" and rejects it and you die. If you have AB+ blood, you're a vampire. Your body likes and accepts any blood and says \"This is nice.\" You're extremely lucky and won't die. If you have AB- blood, your body likes and accepts types AB-, A-, B-, and O- and the body says \"This is nice.\" Any positive blood, the body goes \"Wt? Heck no!\" and rejects it and you die. If you have O+ blood, your body is finicky and likes and only accepts types O+ and O- and the body says \"This is nice.\" Any other type the body goes \"Wt? Heck no!\" and rejects it and you die. If you have O- blood, your blood is a super hero that can save everyone, but you're screwed bc your body only likes and accepts type O- and the body says \"This is nice.\" Everything else will kill you and you'll die.",
"apparently you pee brown and you nearly slice your hand off with the sharpest knife on earth",
"A bit of a side bar but as an O negative mom, I had kids with an O positive dad so I had to have shots with both my kids to keep their potentially Rh positive blood from attacking mine. In other words, I can give y’all my blood but cannot take yours wtf",
"The immune system attacks the new blood cells and destroys them. The bursted blood cells will act the same was as what happens during a wound: It will clot together and these clots will block the flow of blood.",
"Your body's immune system attacks the transfused red blood cells, which can be life-threatening.",
"Their blood starts to clot. Depending on the amount, this could cause a lot of clots. Clots can float around in the bloodstream and get stuck, causing serious problems. A blood clot in the brain can cause a stroke and/or kill you. Not good.",
"Go to r/TIFU and the current top post is about a dude who this happened to for more context too!",
"The wrongly transfused blood cells are destroyed by the patients immune system (referred to as massive intravascular hemolysis). The content of the red cell (iron, basically) is toxic as hell, which destroys your kidneys first, then liver and lungs. Basically multi organ failure, clotting is the least of your problems. Source; clinical chemist responsible for blood transfusion"
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o5bojv | How adhd affects adults | A friend of mine was recently diagnosed with adhd and I’m having a hard time understanding how it works, being a child of the 80s/90s it was always just explained in a very simplified manner and as just kind of an auxiliary problem. Thank you in advance. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It doesn't help that as an adult you have a lot more responsibilities and many times a schedule you have to adhere to. Staying on task and finishing basic chores can really be difficult. The biggest takeaway I learned with ADHD is that *edit: due to a lack of neurotransmitters* your brain is always looking for stimulus, that's why ADHD people are prescribed stimulants *edit: because they affect neurotransmitter function*. (Edit: For a more in depth explanation of medication see the edit below my example.) Example: I need to empty the dishwasher. Puts away a stack of bowls and silverware. Notices the kid's tablets aren't plugged in. Plugs them in. Speaking of the kids, they are going to want a snack in a few. Grabs 2 plates from the dishwasher and starts prepping snack. Wait, I need to finish the dishes, the kids aren't asking for food yet so that can wait. Starts putting away cups. I need to use the bathroom. Replaces TP with last roll from pack. Goes out to garage to grab a new pack. Notice I forgot to put away a few tools from yesterday. Puts tools away. Why did I come out here? I know there was a reason before I saw the tools. Shrug. It'll come to me later. Go back inside. See half made kid snack. Finish making snack. \"Kids! Snack is ready!\" Sit down with kids. Chit chat, eat a snack. Puts dirty dishes in sink. Oh yeah, I need to finish the dishes. Finishes emptying dishwasher. Oh that's right! I went into the garage to grab a new pack of TP. Grabs new pack and puts in bathroom. What should've taken 10 minutes to both empty and fill the dishwasher has taken an hour and the sink is still full of dirty dishes. Edit: some of you have pointed out my over simplification of medication above. Here is a more in-depth look. Generally, it's a 2-fold problem. The reason your brain seeks the extra stimulation and is easily distractable is because of the lack of neurotransmitters in your synaptic pathways, specifically dopamine and to a lesser extent norepinephrine. Certain functions, including attention, are affected by the lack of binding neurotransmitters. Your brain may be \"seeking out\" stimulation in order to stimulate the release of more neurotransmitters but is also easily distracted due to the impacts of low neurotransmitter binding. This may be because you are either not producing enough dopamine and/or the neurons are reuptaking it before it is able to bind to the receptors. (This is an example of why many ADHD people can play video games for hours, they're stimulating the extra release which in turn allows them to focus.) Stimulant medication either floods your brain with neurotransmitters or slows down the reabsorption. Either way this allows for the dopamine to remain in the synapse longer to allow for receptor binding. This helps people with ADHD in 2 ways: your brain now seeks less stimulation to release said neurotransmitters and it is now able to function more \"normally\" (what is \"normal\" anyway...) as influenced by neurotransmitter function in the brain. ADHD medication simply helps to regulate how neurotransmitters are absorbed in the brain which can mitigate certain symptoms. They do not restore missing executive functions but rather increase the effectiveness of messaging pathways affected by these neurotransmitters. You can still be distracted and unfocused even with medication. All that being said, medication is not for everyone.",
"It's a common misconception that ADHD simply means being hyper and/or being unable to focus, when a more accurate way to describe it would be not as an attention deficit, but as an [executive function]( URL_0 ) deficit. That's why so many parents of children with ADHD are skeptical of the diagnosis--they see that little Timmy has trouble sitting still and paying attention to homework and chores, yet he can sit down in front of a video game for hours at a time! *See, he must be slacking off, he doesn't really have trouble focusing!* A true ELI5 on how this actually affects people is 'ICNU': Interest, Challenge, Novelty, and Urgency. If something doesn't meet one of those four categories, someone with ADHD just isn't going to be able to do it. Let's use doing the dishes as an example--is it interesting? Not even slightly. Challenging? Not really. Novel? Nah. Urgent? Not *yet*--but once that person with ADHD actually needs clean dishes, *then* it gets done, because it now meets one of those four criteria. In that sense, putting things off until the very last second is essentially a coping mechanism for ADHD, rather than a symptom of it itself. And on a related note, that's also why video games in particular are like *the* stereotypical ADHD hobby/addiction--most video games check all four of those ICNU boxes at once. They were practically *made* for us.",
"The best way I've heard it explained is \"A chronic inability to maintain intention over time.\" When explaining it to people I tell them that I have no follow-through. Which is the worst problem to have because how do you fix that? Make a plan? Then what? It always gets a laugh when I say it, but the laugh belies the fact that I feel like I'm trapped inside my own life watching as it just *does* things (some good things, some bad things) with no real ability to do anything about it. You ever watch Star Trek? And sometimes the computer would have an issue and Picard would say \"Run a self-diagnostic\"? When I was a kid I used to think, \"But what if the part of the computer that runs the diagnostic is the part that's broken?\" That's me. The part of my brain that I need to solve the problem is the part of my brain that HAS the problem. If I was capable of enacting a plan to solve the problem, I wouldn't need the plan in the first place. It's like telling a paralyzed person that the solution to their problem is to walk more.",
"Imagine two college students: Student A and Student B. Student A is currently working their way through school. A lot of their time is spent at their minimum wage job since rent and tuition are expensive. Student B on the other has a trust fund from a grandparent which pays out based on how many units they're taking. They still work a part time job a few hours each weekend, but it's at their family friends business where they're getting paid under the table above minimum wage. Student A has to work in order to go to school. And at minimum wage they have to work a lot of days and a lot of hours just to be able to attend class. Maybe they don't even take a full load each semester because they just don't have the time or money. Maybe some weeks they just have to skip a class all together. Student B doesn't have to worry about that. They get paid when they attend school. When they *do* work, they make well above minimum wage, so even if something happens with the trust fund payout during enrollment they're set; they have money saved up. Also, if they have midterms or finals coming up they can just take time off from work. In this analogy Student A would be the brain of a person with ADHD and Student B would be a neurotypical brain. The \"money\" in this analogy would be neurotransmitters like dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin. \"Work\" would be some fun or interesting activity/task, and \"school\" would be some task you *have* to do. Now, as to the why. Basically those neurotransmitters play a part in making sure animals do things they're supposed to do in order to survive like eat, sleep, and have sex. Since humans are still animals the neurotransmitters do that for us too. But they also play a part in making us do things that, while not necessary for our survival, play a part in making us more successful humans. Things like finishing homework, doing a project for work, or even doing the dishes or taking out the trash. People with ADHD usually will get less of these neurotransmitters for performing a task, or will get none of them at all for some tasks. So often, in order to complete these neurotransmitter-negative tasks they will have to complete neurotransmitter-positive tasks either prior to or simultaneously. That's where the attention deficit and hyperactivity come into play. The task that's not holding their attention is not providing any dopamine and/or the surplus from their previous task has run out. So they have to (sometimes constantly) search for a new task to provide that dopamine/neurotransmitter. Taking medicine makes the brain create more of these neurotransmitters so our brain is okay with us doing tasks that aren't immediately or inherently gratifying. Taking Ritalin or Adderal for Student A in this analogy would be the equivalent of getting a full ride scholarship. Now, Student A doesn't have to work and make money anymore in order to go to school. They have all the money they need so they can just focus on school. Now, that ELI5 takes a lot of liberties and has a lot of inaccuracies for a number of reasons, but it's the general gist.",
"I work at a high school in a position that is more or less a combination of teacher and counselor roles. I have ADHD, 27, and have a lot of students that I work closely with on executive functioning and academic coaching. Diagnosed in 1st grade, medicated 1st- 8th then from college to now. Pretty much researching my whole life on it, and am involved in a lot of intense intervention work with ADHD students. This is going to be long, but I promise it’s worth your while. Positive factors that affect myself and adults with ADHD: It would help to know your friends age and background, but if he’s generally successful despite being undiagnosed his whole life, he’s developed behaviors to cope that have helped him succeed despite some of the difficulties. ADHD has given me a lot of positive things that actually have given me my success. These are the general positives, but they’re a double edged sword to the negatives. It’s all in how it’s approached by the person and their support systems. - Hyperfocus: people with ADHD can put an incredible amount of concentration and effort into things that interest them. When used correctly, it’s an insanely powerful tool. I owe my job today to writing a rap song about metaphors and similes in my college teaching course due to hyperfocus on the task. - Empathy: ADHD individuals tend to feel emotions stronger and are more empathetic than others. People with ADHD can make very strong leaders in fields where genuine empathy is valued as an important skill - Creativity - ADHD people tend to be big picture and not detail oriented Negative factors: - [Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria[Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria]( URL_0 )] I’m putting this first because this is the one you don’t hear about, and it’s perhaps the most important for you supporting your friend. TLDR, ADHD peeps take criticism especially hard, and can often break down because of rejection. I haven’t read into it in a while, I believe the figure was 90% of people with ADHD say it’s a factor, and 30% say it’s the most difficult part of having it. Simply knowing this was a part of it and putting a name to it CHANGED MY LIFE, and has made it so much easier to cope with. This is the flip side to the empathy piece. This is a piece that therapy helps with a lot. - Distraction in general: This is the flip side to the hyperfocus. People with ADHD need stimulus that interests them, or it is much more difficult to maintain attention than an average person. Of course there’s a lot more to it, but perhaps the biggest aspect procrastination is a case of hyperfocus on the wrong thing for a long time, leading to poor time management. Medication helps this aspect most. The most successful people with ADHD will have the intention and plan to regularly evaluate and take concrete steps to change these habits. Therapy or some kind of other mentor can assist with this, while the medication can bolster that process to make it successful. Success factors: - while medication is absolutely the most effective treatment, I disagree with the sentiment that it is necessary for everyone to be successful. My dad went undiagnosed until I did, had a masters degree, and was a high up manager with a team of people under him at Coca Cola. That being said he is currently medicated as I am, and finds it much easier to function properly. Like I said before, if your friend is satisfied with the way he is handling life in terms of work, friends, and family, he probably Hs the coping mechanisms from years of building it up. Ultimately it’s his decision on whether or not it’s the best path for him. - therapy: while on the topic of coping mechanisms, a lot of times going undiagnosed can lead to bad habits that need to be unlearned. For the HS kids that I’ve seen go undiagnosed until around sophomore year, most common bad habits i see revolve around making excuses for not getting work done to avoid embarrassment and general work avoidance due to lack of confidence in ability. Therapy can do wonders with identifying these things and making the changes you’d need to reach your full potential - growth mindset: have your friend read into this. If he can commit to and believe in the philosophy of it, it can work wonders. Changed my life. - support system: finally, like any person, everyone gives support plays a huge factor on whether or not a person is successful. Seems like he’s got you, which is a great sign. Thanks for reading my novel and hope this was helpful. I skimmed on a lot of the important things, though there is much more I could write on. Please, please, please do not hesitate to ask for question or clarification, anyone! I do this for a living and would love to have something to hyperfocus on while I’m bored at home on summer, and am happy to help :) Edit: this info is a combination of years of personal research, my own experiences with ADHD, experiences working with a decent sample size of ADHD students, some conferences I’ve been to for school on ADHD, and weekly meetings with learning specialists who have SPED degrees (mine is English Ed). As I say to my students, I am sometimes wrong. Feel free to correct me (gently, don’t wanna set off that RSD, haha) if something looks incorrect. I will look into it.",
"At a technical level, it takes a lot more stimulation to maintain psychological arousal. You know how velociraptor vision is based on movement, and if you keep still, they can't see you? ADHD brains are a bit like that. If it's not 'popping', if it's not reactive, if it's not clamouring for attention or scurrying away or generally on fire... then it fades into our mental background and becomes incredibly hard to stay aware of - like having a big blurry floater that inevitably moves in to blot out whatever you look at for more than a few seconds. Think of the number 3 for five minutes. Not things there are three of, not triangular things, not multiples of three, not that song about three being the perfect number, not how you're trying to think about 3, not *anything else*, just 3. Keep thinking 3, and don't let your mind wander or slip off it. You won't last one minute, let alone five. The longer you go, the less traction you have - and the harder you scrabble to keep your position, the worse it gets. It takes increasing effort for decreasing results, and after a while all you're thinking about is the effort you're making to think about 3, instead of thinking about 3. Okay: now imagine that *everything is like that*. Every single damn thing that isn't actively jumping up and down or that doesn't yelp when you poke it. Your mind gets fatigued to hell staying on-task, if that task takes active concentration but is not reactive. A task you can autopilot, like tidying up, cooking, sorting stuff, etc is fine because you don't need to be mentally present for it. You just start going and you can be miles away down some weird-ass chain of thought, but your hands keep doing the work. And even for the bits you do need to concentrate for, there's some interactivity that keeps it changed up. But a job that needs your ongoing mental involvement, without giving anything back - like, say, copying numbers into a spreadsheet - is absolute hell. You can't park your attention elsewhere, because you need to think about the numbers, look over here, remember the number, click on the box, type the number, cursor down, rinse and repeat. After a few minutes, you *just can't make yourself* keep thinking the same thing; it simply doesn't work. Try as hard as you want, your effort has no effect. And of course *literally any distraction*, either internal or external, becomes infinitely louder, clearer and easier to follow. Any stray thoughts or sensations get sucked into the mental vacuum, and just take over. This means that our short-term working memory is constantly getting overwritten, so our task management is *utterly fucking nonexistent*. It's not that we don't want to do the thing, it's that it's been *completely wiped from our awareness* until something reminds us of it. It's not a matter of effort, or of wanting to - there's just nothing there for volition to act upon. Imagine being in a 24/7 Skype call with a bunch of 7yos who are being paid in sugar to loudly comment on and argue about everything they see or hear, and you can *never ever shut them up even for a minute*. And imagine that you're trying to do your taxes in the middle of this, or keep track of a list of verbal instructions from your boss, or ensure that you pick up the shopping on your way home, or pay the phone bill on time. We rely *heavily* on autopilot and routine. Once we can make something a background habit, we can do it without having to remember it - unless someone kicks us out of our routine, and then everything goes to hell. I've been successfully distracted out of taking my lunch to work by my wife reminding me to take my lunch to work. I've walked into and out of a supermarket chanting 'must buy milk, must buy milk' to myself, only to walk out without buying milk, because I was so focused on reminding myself that I forgot to actually do it. One time my wife called and asked me to take her notes to her at uni. I agreed, picked up her notes... then she called me again and asked me to bring her jacket as well. So I grab it, take it to uni, hand it to her... \"My notes?\" \"... Fuck.\" That incident was hilarious, but a lifetime of shame and disappointment and being called inconsiderate and selfish and lazy... can really add up. Other less-fun stuff is that we can be prone to sensory overload, a bit like the ASD folks. We have to work a whole lot harder at filtering out irrelevant stuff, and it's pretty much a conscious process for us, so it's easy for us to get overwhelmed in noisy or crowded places, if a bunch of people are talking to us at once, if we're in too many people's eyeline... it can all get way too much, very quickly. You'll notice that if we go to parties, we're the ones that stay at the edge of the crowd, and probably spend a lot of time helping in the kitchen. And similarly we can just spontaneously get into this unpleasant state that's not quite anxiety, not quite excitement - it's just wound up and jittery and pacing, without anything to pin it on. The meds do help. They're mild stimulants that lower the threshold for that psychological arousal, so things don't have to be quite so on-fire for our brains to track them. The blind spot takes longer to settle in, we're a little harder to distract, we can keep at least a couple of items in working memory without getting crowded out by irrelevant shit. From the outside they *look* like we've been sedated because we're able to calm down - but that's not the case. We're calmer and steadier *because* we've been powered up, so we're no longer flailing for context, we're no longer running to catch up all the time, we're no longer losing track of our thoughts, so we're able to think in straight lines instead of zigzagging all over the place and teleporting around like we're lagged to hell. They aren't a magic wand, and they take discipline to make use of - but they let us carve out a little tiny place to stand, instead of getting blown around like leaves on the wind.",
"I'm currently trying to get an ADHD diagnosis as an adult, which is tough. I'm 36. For me, everything in life is like that puzzle where you have a chicken and a fox and a bag of corn, and you have to cross a river but you can only fit one of them in the rowboat at a time. You can't leave the fox with the chicken or the chicken with the corn. So let's say it's my day off and I want to get up, work out, have some breakfast, shower. I have to go to the store for breakfast. But I don't want to go to the store without having showered, so I should work out first. Then shower. Except studies show that you should get protein in right after a workout, so I need to go to the store to buy food. But I'll need to shower. And there's no point showering BEFORE I work out. But I'll need food. I read it in a magazine. Which magazine was it? I need to find that magazine, it had some good workouts... Three hours later and I'm in the attic reading old X-Men comics I found whilst initially looking for the magazine. I have not exercised or showered and I am hungry, but I also need to Google this \"Count Dante\" guy who used to advertise in comics. So I have to put the chicken in the row boat first. Then the fox. Then, wait, why did we even bring a fox? And couldn't we buy corn on the other side of the river? I should shower...",
"The easiest way to think of it is the inability to focus on tasks. In children, it often comes across as hyperactivity (not being able to sit in one place). But in adults, its more just being unable to work on stuff that needs to get done. ADHD adults struggle with things like work, school, chores etc which require focus with little to no immediate reward. In contrast adult ADHD sufferers prefer quick, easy tasks that give them that instant gratification dopamine hit. Its also very common for them to have extreme sensitivity to rejection. They think everyone hates them, which leads to low self esteem and depression. Have some friends who have ADHD as adults and long story short the only thing that helped them in the end was medication. It doesn't seem to be something that can be tackled long term with just cognitive therapy.",
"It's a constant state of want. Those with ADHD lack stimulation, so the brain puts a priority on finding it. It's like hunger. When the body lacks nutritian, it _demands_ that you find food and eat it. All you can think about is finding and eating food. With ADHD, it's stimulation you're lacking, so the brain switches gears and demands that you find it. That's where the concentration problems come into play - a lot of tasks don't offer stimulation, so the brain forces you to look for it elsewhere. It's basically clinical boredom.",
"(ADHD sufferer here. Diagnosed at 35 at the urging of friends. Medication changed my life). ADHD is at its core a brain chemical deficiency. ADHD brains do not produce enough of the usual \"happy juice\" - the chemicals that, in short, make you happy. There's a lot of them. Human brains need this happy juice to encourage us towards normal human behaviors. Everything you want - food, fun, self-improvement, social activity, even sex, is driven by happy juice. Additionally, human brains make a low level of happy juice (which you get used to) to mitigate the sudden spikes when it makes a bunch of happy juice at once to encourage you to do something. ADHD sufferers don't make enough of this low-level happy juice. Just imagine the passive contentment that you feel every day plain *gone*, replaced by a nonstop feeling of boredom and pointlessness. This has the side effect of a very high incidence of depression (the comorbidity of ADHD and depression is ridiculous). But it also means that ADHD sufferers get *strongly* encouraged by anything that creates this happy juice. One of the things that generates this happy juice is thinking about interesting things. Boring things don't make much. But boring things are sometimes important. The bad news for ADHD people is that their brains will start rigging their behavior to ignore the boring but important thing to hyper-focus on the interesting but less important thing. There is also a certain continuity to this interest. It's a misconception that ADHD people are easily distracted - they're the opposite. Instead they are hyper-focused on a single train of thought and all the stuff other people think is important is what is trying to \"distract\" them, to no avail. The happy juice is too strong. This means a lot of impulsiveness. Imagine a starving man who only gets to eat every few days, while you get your regular meals. When food does arrive, the starving man is going to chase that food much harder than you. You're wondering why this fool is so obsessed with a few slices of toast, not realizing he doesn't get to eat the toast you have for breakfast literally every morning. Now we talk medication. Stimulants (we're not sure why entirely) suddenly make the ADHD brain produce happy juice. Stimulants have hours-long durations, so while they are in effect, ADHD sufferers suddenly have their happy juice deficiency eased. For a long-time sufferer, the effect can be quite dramatic. This is not perfect or universal - different people react differently to different drugs. The big two are methylphenidate (Ritalin) and amphetamine (Adderall). About 70% of sufferers will have a major positive reaction to one or the other. Look up there - does amphetamine ring a bell? If you watched Breaking Bad, you will know that this is (same name, different salt) part of the name of a street drug called meth. Meth also eases the deficiency on ADHD sufferers, though abusers tend not to be properly regulating their doses and can go overboard from the (mental) addiction to the happy juice. ADHD sufferers have a VERY high rate of addiction to meth, and this is progressively viewed as a desperate attempt at self-medication. If you're wondering if this might extend to addiction to other things, you're absolutely right. Lots of ADHD sufferers end up addicted to specific things of varying healthiness (sports is generally good, video games not so good, drugs pretty bad). The thing these addictions have in common is a proven source of happy juice that they've gotten used to. ADHD is not a condition I would wish on anyone. Even in the best case scenario it makes your life needlessly more difficult. At the worst it can compound with other disadvantages (poverty for example), making the combination impossible to solve without intervention. Keep in mind that no matter how difficult a life situation is, there's probably someone who has that *and* ADHD. Every time I look back at the difficulties I overcame, I wonder where I would be if I didn't have to deal with ADHD at the same time. A diagnosis and proper prescribed medication can be a literal lifesaver for us. For many of us it's the first time we feel like a normal person - and I mean this in the most primal, fundamental sense. It annoys me to no end that ADHD constantly gets maligned in news and media. There was a very important paper published about how lots of child ADHD diagnoses are wrong - this has had the effect of people suspecting adult ADHD is not real. I happen to be a straight-A student because I was obsessed with science, math and reading. But my professional life was basically so much hell keeping afloat that I tried to kill myself in my late 20s. Am on Ritalin now and things are finally livable.",
"I have ADHD and I’m 30 now. So, it basically means I have trouble focusing, and more generally, prioritizing long term and medium term goals over short term goals. For example, I could do my homework, get good grades, get into a good school, and get a good job…and eventually get that long term reward. Or I could scroll through Reddit. I could do my tax returns, or instead, I could avoid that and not do them! Then I could play a video game! My first job was in IT Desktop Support, go to a computer, spend 30 min fixing it, then move on. It was really easy to do, psychologically. But then I became a software developer, and I need to sit for 8h a day working on the same thing, and it’s a lot harder. ADHD meds like Ritalin and Adderall (but for gods sake use modern ones like Vyvanse or Concerta) basically increase your alertness, your focus, your willpower, and your desire to prioritize your long term goals. So as you can imagine, they’re handy for quite a few people, even if they don’t have ADHD.",
"I've got diagnosed with add after I graduated from my Uni. I'm 31 now. Didn't want to do it earlier because I feared people would just think I do it for the pills to pass exams. A good friend of mine recognised the symptoms and shared his ritalin. Passed with magnum cum laude. If you're diagnosed as an adult, you probably always had it. For me, it's a maelstrom in my head, best illustrated if you take a neurtypical brain, they would play \"Call me maybe\" the original song, while [I would have this playing.]( URL_0 ). I procrastinate boring tasks. I look for random stuff to keep me occupied while I should be working (millions of unfinished hobbies and projects), resulting in having to crunch deadlines and having anxiety. I'd like to think it makes me stress resilient, but that's a lie I tell myself, cause my stress will leak out and affect relationships. Speaking about affecting relationships, if find it difficult to keep in touch with everyone, it's just so much work, until you get emotional and hyperfocus and try to make plans, and you know how that goes. Taking ritalin makes me really blunt and impatient with people, and hyperfocus it gives can make me seem distant. My SO doesn't like when I take it, so I try not to take it over the weekend. But then I'd procrastinate on chores, which again stresses the relationship. Can't believe she stuck with me for 10 years already. As a tip I can give you, small victories man. Don't do something tomorrow if you can do it today (I know this sounds like saying \"be happy\" to a depressed person) but chopped into small tasklets, the progress itself will give you enough dopamine to reinforce that behaviour. Anyways, back to work I've been procrastinating. EDIT: I also can't relax. Like some people can go sunbathing, and just lie there and get roasted by UV. I'm unable to do that. Well, maybe 5 minutes. But lemme check what the beach bar has on the menu. Hey they sell fishing gear over there!",
"The most simplest understanding is that ADHD is a disorder that manifests in a whole bunch of different ways in different people but ultimately has one overarching 'main' symptom - it is a disorder that affects *executive functioning*. When we think of what a brain does, a lot of the time what we're really thinking about is the frontal lobe and executive functioning. These are the \"brainy\" things that come to mind when we think of the brain. Things like: memory, ability to pay attention and concentrate, the ability to shift your focus around to different hings, the ability to plan and organise, the ability to recall previous experiences and act in a way that reflects that. Your brain does a whole bunch of different tasks all the time that I can't even go into, but these are what we typically think of when we think of the brain and these are the things that ADHD impacts. Now - the thing is is that every single person on this planet has trouble will all of these things at certain points in the day and at certain points in their life. The difference is that people with ADHD have a level of difficulty with these basic and essential brain functions that goes beyond what is normal and that goes into a level that is pathological (i.e. a disease or disorder). Where a normal person might be late to an appointment because of laziness, a lack of care or bad habits that can emerge from a whole bunch of non-pathological causes - a person with ADHD is also having trouble making it to an appointment because of *perceived* laziness, a lack of care or bad habits but the real cause is problems in the way the brain is functioning. Where you might have a friend who is constantly late to everything, but otherwise is on top of things in life - a person with significant ADHD might not only be late to everything, but they might also be very disorganised, they might also have poor memory, they might also be awful at maintaining deadlines, they might not be able to focus or concentrate, they might suffer in workplaces and academic and **the key point or difference is** is that **all of this is happening *at the same time and to the same person*.** At a certain point it becomes overwhelming and, untreated, they may not be able to life a normal and successful life.",
"This is great to hear everyone talk about it. It’s nice to see that it’s not “just me” and I’m not a total failure because of this. My business partner had to take some time to learn about adhd to understand how to work with me, and stop being on my case all the time about me switching between projects Edit: spelling",
"I’ve never had a formal diagnoses, but have all of the symptoms. I took Sudafed as a stimulant for many years and eventually found a sympathetic doctor to prescribe adderall - without it I just wander from room to room accomplishing nothing. I’m a 70 year old woman and a successful lawyer with a family. Don’t give up! Find what works for you.",
"A person with ADHD has a different brain structure than people without — they have a hard time producing their own dopamine, which is the “feel good” chemical that you get when you accomplish a task. This tends to affect people with ADHD in three different ways: hyperactive/inattentive phases, executive dysfunction, and emotional sensitivity/rejection dysphoria. The hyperactivity is the one symptom most of us think of when it comes to ADHD — it’s the typical kid who can’t sit still in class. However this isn’t always a physical hyperactiveness. Sometimes people are mentally hyperactive, with their thoughts unable to settle down or they’re emotionally caught up in something. You feel restless even if you’re physically exhausted. You also have the other type of ADHD: inattentive. Have you ever been so tired while talking with someone very boring that you find yourself nodding off in the middle of the conversation? It’s like that, except you are always tired and it takes extra energy to stay focused on the conversation. There is also a personal tendency for me to daydream or get distracted by something else. Either way it’s hard for us to focus. This can look like an adult being easily distracted, bouncing from task to task without really getting anything done, not paying attention during conversation, and just generally acting scatterbrained. Executive dysfunction is the next big obstacle. The executive function of your brain is basically the task prioritizer — it tells you what stuff needs to be done now and what needs to be done later. With executive dysfunction, this part of your brain is impaired and can lead to two extremes: hyperfixation or burnout. With hyperfixation you get started on something and literally can’t stop — it takes up all of your attention and focus and you can’t stop thinking about it. People can hyperfixate on hobbies, other people, even simple tasks. For example, when I finally got all the parts to build my own computer I started right away and didn’t stop putting it together until I was finished, which took me about 4 hours. This would not be a problem except that I started at 11 PM. I didn’t stop to eat or sleep because this one thing took up all my focus. The other extreme is burnout. Because of the energy expended hyperfixated on something, we get very tired and don’t want to do anything — especially mundane tasks that do not provide as much stimulation as something more exciting. So chores don’t get done, laundry piles up, and we put off writing that paper until it’s due the next day. Its not that we’re lazy, but that those boring but necessary tasks don’t provide the excitement or satisfaction a normal person would have. To me, it feels like I’m constantly waiting for something that will let me start working on those tasks, but it never comes despite how badly I need to do them. The last bit that not many people talk about is the emotional sensitivity and rejection dysphoria. ADHD causes us to act different from neurotypical people — we ramble on and on about our hobbies for hours, it’s hard for us to keep track of time, and we don’t always pay attention when you want us to. We know that we are not “normal” and people make fun of us or get frustrated with us at times. Furthermore our brain chemistry does not lend itself to good impulse control; we often say the wrong thing at the wrong time. For both these internal and external reasons, we can become hypersensitive to any perceived rejection we may face — even if it’s not true. For example, any time someone says that a hobby I like is a waste of time, I instantly get angry because it’s like they’re saying that I am a waste of time. They’re criticizing a thing I like so they’re criticizing me. It also can lead to just being emotionally sensitive in general and having a hard time regulating our emotions. I often have issues when people are negative or venting around me because I feel that negativity intensely and it makes me miserable. This can lead to relationship issues, people pleasing, or getting irrationally angry at little things that stack up over time. In the end, the crux of it all is that our brains need stimulation that neurotypical brains don’t need, so we find methods to try and make our own stimulation. Not all of these are healthy, which is why we need medication and therapy to help us out and manage time, emotions, and energy.",
"I recently got diagnosed too. I've been struggling with it my whole life, and as a result I developed anxiety from trying to cope with the symptoms, and more recently I developed depression too. The way I described it to my friends is it's like I felt I was constantly running around trying to keep up with everything. I was constantly in sprint mode just trying to keep day to day life going. Obviously sprinting everywhere is not sustainable and eventually you just have to stop. When I started getting treatment (Counselling, self help, medication etc) it felt like I had been gifted a car. I could suddenly keep up with everything. I realised everyone else was sitting behind the wheel of a car and was able to move from one task to the other with ease and without using their own energy to do it. For me starting or switching tasks is extremely difficult. It's the actual putting myself into the right position/place or whatever to do the thing I need to do. I could spend hours *thinking* about the minutia of the next task I need to do. I could go over every muscle movement again and again in my mind, but no matter how small I break down the task, starting is a mammoth effort. Event if it's something I love to do... Hyperfocus is a big one for me. If left alone doing something I like I could completely forget about time. I might miss a meal or forget an appointment, it could be hours since I've had some water and I won't even notice I'm thirsty. But as soon as I stop what I'm doing, I find it extremely difficult to go back. If I can't finish a drawing/painting, short story in one sitting, then chances are it's never getting finished. Switching tasks is anxiety inducing at times. Even just the idea of stepping away from my desk in work to go pee can play on my mind for an hour until I'm absolutely bursting... Because I know that it'll only take 2-3 minutes to go pee, but it might take me 30 minutes to get back into my groove, and by that time it's nearly lunch so I might as well just wait for lunch. But then I'll go time blind again and suddenly it's 2 hours since I originally planned in having lunch and I still haven't peed. BUT sometimes I'll be working, and generally it's when I'm going something repetitive that doesn't require much brain power, my mind will drift. And then I'll have a question like \"which of the Everest Sherpas has sumitted the mountain the most\" and then I can't stop thinking about that question. So I google it, and then I fall into a bit of a rabbit hole and before you know it an hour has gone by and I've done barely any work. Now apply that to everything. Getting out of bed. Getting dressed. Brushing your teeth. Showering. Eating. Cooking. Shopping. Tidying up after yourself. Doing the dishes. Vacuuming. Laundry. Refilling your water bottle. Turning on the tv. Turning off the tv. Standing up to grab your guitar/controller/book/whatever hobby to genuinely want to do Going to bed. Meeting up with friends. Packing for vacation. Packing your bag for the next day. Going on a bike ride. Going to the gym. Every single thing you need or want to do takes an enormous amount of mental energy just to START.",
"It's a nightmare. Imagine your head running at 100 mph all the time thinking about nothing, because it's just 100 mph of TV static. Makes it a struggle to socialize when most of the time your head is a blank slate. Memory is shit, attention span is shit.",
"I've noticed when I don't take my meds I'm extremely unmotivated, will take naps, and I have a lot of trouble following conversations. I'd say the biggest impact is on work ethic and communication, which is huge.",
"Depends, are they inattentive, hyperactive or both? I was recently diagnosed inattentive as an adult, and basically the biggest thing I find is that I have huge issues doing things with delayed gratification - I KNOW I need to start working on my assignment early, or clean my room, or get ready for work early, and as a (mostly) functional adult I understand the reasons why I need to do all these... But whatever I'm focused on at the moment takes precedence. Or I'll intentionally go back to whatever I find the most stimulating at the time and end up procrastinating on everything that actually needs to be done. And then that assignment will be due in 24 hours, so I'll procrastinate until it's due in 10 or something where I'll finally have the push and anxiety I'm needed to actually get off my ass and do it, or I'll get to work literally within seconds of being late, and my room will never get cleaned, etc. As a child you would have been lucky getting me to hand in a homework task at all. I'm honestly amazed people never thought I had it.",
"What OP didn’t know is people with ADHD tend to love talking about ADHD. I’m laughing at all the essays of comments out there including my own novel",
"Adhd effects literally every part of my existence. I have to work twice as hard to get something accomplished, there are typically other things involved like rejection sensitivity, imposter syndrome, depression and anxiety, insomnia, executive function challenges, memory, and insomnia. It is literally interfering every moment of the day.",
"I've had it since I was 12. Your friend will simply have to adjust to it. It may lessen over time like mine did, but they will have to make it their new normal and be mindful of their eccentricities. Just like everyone else has too, only theirs is due to their ADHD. It'll be hard at first, but once they're used to it they won't imagine life any differently.",
"I went to an elementary school for the gifted. Then I went to a normal middle school, because there was no gifted school for that age group in my town, I failed out of most of my normal middle school classes. They were uninteresting. Ended up graduating high school with like a 3.6 or something. Mostly not studying a flying by the seat of my pants in the 11th hour. My standardized tests were also just pretty normal… Went to college. Got a meh… scholarship. Nothing great. Started out honors business > moved to architecture > moved to art… I couldn’t really spend too much time with anything unless I was allowed to be creative. My career started as the best salesman in my company. Got bored. Moved. Got bored. Moved. Etc… Finally at 33 I talked to a childhood best friend that was dealing with his adhd… and really started delving into the psychology (when I could pay attention) and it became so much more than “knowing you were the hyper kid” and really understanding how adhd interacts with things like jobs, relationships, even your love life… My parents told me that I was diagnosed at like 8 but the Midwest didn’t really acknowledge adhd at the time… the Midwest had that whole “not my kid” type of mentality that used to think of adhd as a disorder… I got it easy though. Those are the narrow-minded states that are pro-life, racist, bigoted, enacting laws to diminish gender identity, etc. etc. etc. Not bad-mouthing my parents here… adhd was just becoming a thing… they barely even understood it at the time and my mom worked for a nationally recognized healthcare system. Now, as an adult, addressing it at 33 was a life changer. It’s now about understanding how it affects me, even going to therapy to recondition the bad habits I’ve built up over a lifetime… like extreme procrastination, addictive personality traits, and oppositional defiance. It’s still an everyday thing. For example, I parked my car today on the street in downtown LA and left my keys on my seat in an unlocked car… thankfully came back 3 hours later to a non-stolen car lol… those are the little things… the things that people think to themselves, “oh I’ve done that, and I don’t have adhd” but the when you compound it all together it really REALLY makes sense. I’m not saying “woe is me,” I’m just saying… when I really dove deep, it cleared a lot of things up for me and helped me to start addressing them head on… If you’re really interested in delving deeper there is a really good YouTube channel with this red-haired woman that talks about adult adhd. I forget the name, but I guarantee if you google that, you’ll find her. ;)",
"So there's a lot of really great descriptions here, and I wanted to add the social element in too. It's really hard to explain, but it's so hard to follow conversations because everything else is as important as the conversation. For example: I am at the table at a restaurant with three other people. One is talking directly to me. I can hear them but it is taking me an extra second or two to process what they're saying. I am lagging behind a bit but that's okay, I know how to repeat the last phrase or words to follow along a bit. But I get so focused in on that that I forget what we are talking about. I'm trying to follow along. Sometimes I catch enough to ask for a rephrase. \"Wait, can you say that again?\" But the other two are talking too and I can't filter out their conversation. I wonder, who should I listen to? This other conversation sounds interesting too. I heard a word I liked. Do I try to merge the conversations? Is that rude? Is the other conversation done? How do I know? Wait, what did my conversation partner just say? I need to respond. What do I say? Focus. Listen. I forget what we're talking about. Focus. Keep going. I am also drinking a coffee. The coffee is good but I need sugar. I need to do that right now. I need to find the sugar. I'm supposed to be responding but there are two conversations and I need sugar. Also, that table over there has a baby and I like the mother's shirt. The cut of the fabric is so nice. It looks like a sailboat. Oh, is the conversation still happening? Focus. Listen. Respond. One person is looking at me. They want to join the conversation. Respond to both the partner and the table. Let them join in so I can add the sugar. The sugar falls so beautifully on the foam of the cappuccino. The spoon rests on a napkin. The empty sugar packet needs to be balled up and tucked away. Now we are all talking. The conversation is a ball we toss back and forth. I miss my catch and fumble the ball and hold on to it for too long. I ask a question to direct the attention from me so someone else holds the ball. I nod and hmm. The breeze brings a strange smell. I want to ask about the smell, but the conversation is a river that has moved around me and I am lost. I look at my feet. There are two pairs of disembodied feet under the table in matching sandles. The sandles match. I love this. My mouth feels dry from the coffee so I take another sip. I listen and catch the conversation again. It's jokes. I love laughing. There is a quick round of jokes. I say something hilarious. Someone responds with incredible wit. This is wonderful. I touch the earring in my left ear and feel the shape of the music notes that are cast in silver on my fingertips. I twist it so it's the right way and fix the other side too. How do earrings turn themselves around in my ears, I wonder. I lean in to catch more conversation. The conversation is quieter, we're saying things in quieter voices now because it's a touchy subject. I half hear and am half attentive, so maybe my response is a little out-of-context. It's fine. I'm usually a little out-of-context. The woman at the next table is staring. Her eyes are so green like the green on her shirt. Does she know how well that matches? I smile at her and she smiles back. The conversation has taken the shape of complaints about work. I know this one well. I have space to float away and look at the dried foam on the coffee cup and murmer well-rehearsed lines about workload. My necklace is tangled. I gently untangle it. I don't remember anything that we've talked about. I remember the sugar on the foam. I remember the white shirt and a baby falling over and a kind-hearted one line joke someone made about the baby. \"What are your plans for the summer?\" I don't have any. I don't think about planning. When I am home I am too distracted by everything to sit and plan. I don't know where to start making a plan. How do people make plans for something unknown and then make them happen? This is a mystery. Others don't understand that this is a mystery. \"Just to relax,\" I say. This is something they understand. They nod. \"It's been a crazy year.\" The sun is on my left arm. I am caught up with the gentle wamth. I'd like to get up and take a walk. It's not time to get up, though. I change position to take the edge off wanting to move. I refocus. I look at everyone's hair. I drink more coffee. I nibble on leftover food. I look like I'm listening. I try so hard to listen. All I can see is my thoughts, and all I can hear are my thoughts. I wish I could listen. I like everyone here. I try again to focus. I like this but it makes me tired and frustrated. Please just let me focus on one thing.",
"I imagine my brain like one of those plasma ball things. Just a bunch of random tendrils shooting out all over the place being pulled by whatever is interesting enough to “touch” my mind. (Quick detour to read about Plasma Globes and watch a few videos) Taking medication is like holding your whole hand on the plasma globe…one focused tendril and less chaos. ~~Yeah and the~~ Edit: hah, evidence of an interrupted line of thinking!",
"Just as an addition to all of the other great comments - take a look at the average comment length on this post. This checks the Interest and Novelty boxes, so everyone is locked in and telling their stories. No quick, succinct, broken conversations here - it's full story or nothing. Sure, most of us should be working, but this is captivating, so we're out here spending 150 words to say, \"This. This right here\". These are definitely my people, lol.",
"To add to this people with ADHD often experience significant [sleep problems]( URL_0 ). I've actually wondered more and more recently if I have ADHD or ADD. My brother is diagnosed ADD borderline hyperactive, and my dad also has it. But what really made me go \"... Huh\" were some of the comments about sleep schedules on this video. Someone mentioned pushing their sleep back little by little until eventually it's all the way back around the clock. That me. I do that.",
"That's actually quite a complex question. There's a lot more to ADHD than most people realise, and it affects everyone in different ways. If you're interested in learning more, r/ADHD is a great sub. Off the top of my head, these are the ways that ADHD affects me (25F): - forgetfulness - physical restlessness (need to fidget) - trouble processing information, need extra time to absorb it - trouble focusing and paying attention especially for long periods of time and if I have to sit still - auditory processing issues - Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (basically extreme sensitivity and fear of failure) - constantly have a billion thoughts racing around my head - time blindness - sensory issues (for me it is mostly that certain sounds especially when loud feel like I'm literally being stabbed inside my ear) - executive dysfunction - gets very overwhelmed by a lot of stimulus and by large tasks that involve a lot of steps. When this happens it feels like my brain is short circuiting Edited for formatting",
"I'm pretty damn sure I have it. Seriously, not in a \"I HaVe AdHd cAuSe I'M sO cReAtIve\" way. I can more or less function, but the biggest problem for me is that, no matter how much I like the job I do, there always arrives (around 6-9 months) a point where I become disenchanted by it and start losing motivation, become sloppy, and eventually lose it. I feel like it's really taken a toll on my career (29, M, Producer at a museum). I have never really held a proper job down for more than 1year and a half. I could get diagnosed and get medicated, BUT, I'm terrified more of the idea of medicating (with what fundamentally is amphetamine) for the rest of my life, than having a bit less of a career. I've progressed a lot over the years (when I was a teen, there wouldn't be a day that went by that I didn't lose or forgot something), but to those who have medicated, would you say is the best course of action, or does it make more sense for me to just \"work through it\" until I arrive to a point where I'm functional enough to be \"normal\" and get through life? I ponder...",
"Man, I love this clip. Meaby you recognize some of you in this short clip. URL_0",
"Well the only affect my ADHD rlly has is that I switch between what I'm doing a lot, like if I'm playing a game I'll just suddenly play another game and stimulants (like caffeine) just make me tired",
"A big problem that isn't mentioned here is sleep. When ADHD brains try to sleep, they instead look for stimulus. So it's very easy to stY awake until 5am browsing on a phone when your brain just won't turn off",
"I don’t feel like anyone here is explaining it like I’’ 5. But for me it’s like a classroom full of kids with no teacher. Everyone is doing something different at the same time and there’s no leader To organise it. It’s loud and messy and I don’t know where to start",
"I’m sure this will get lost in the sea of comments but for people who menstruate, symptoms and struggles relating to ADHD can worsen with your cycle. Pmdd is often more severe in people with ADHD. Estrogen and dopamine are related and when estrogen is low at certain times in your cycle, dopamine will drop too. This was a recent discovery for me. I had a particularly hellish year due to endometriosis in which I’ve been on a hormone that puts me in a low estrogen state. At which point I’ll add: if you have ADHD and are one hormones that lower estrogen and are having a lot of issues with regulating your emotions and executive function, your struggles might be more than pms or pmdd 💛",
"ADHD, Inattentive Type here. How ADHD affects me: Come home, finally emptied letterbox after two weeks, see that I received some bills that have to be payed in the next week. Make a mental note, put bill away. Immediatly forget about it. Skip ahead 2 weeks, receive a reminder to pay that bill, get fined 15 euros, make mental note that I have to pay that bill, put bill away. Immediatly forget about it. Skip ahead another 2 weeks, get an invoice (is that what it's called in english), panic, summon all of my mental strength to make a phonecall to apologize and promise that I will this time definitely pay that bill. Beat myself up. Go empty the mailbox, there's another bill I have to pay. Make a mental note, put bill away...",
"My wife was diagnosed at 40. My son was diagnosed at 7. Women often display differently then males. My wife primarily showed with emotional disregulation. She would overreact in many situations, immediately fly off the handle to stimuli. She hyperfocuses on tasks I would consider unimportant. Right now, she's sitting in the disaster of a living room, surrounded by her mess, supposed to be cleaning, but had been organizing her paint and paintbrushes for two days rather than tackle the larger job. ADHD often presents along with other psychological problems like depression, OCD, anxiety, etc. My life is definitely better since both my wife and son have found the meds necessary to help them. The meds do not solve the problems, you still need to find coping mechanisms, but they at least enable them to stop and think before acting or reacting.",
"First of all, big thanks for trying to learn and understand, you're just the type of people the neurodivergent community needs. I personally have a very supportive environment, and they are always trying to understand better how it is to live with this, so I try to explain and compare things just as they happen. For instance, one of the comparisons I feel work best is using the noise of a fridge as example. Everyone has had a noisy refrigerator once in their lives, the kind of that starts humming or rattling for a while. The feeling when the fridge suddenly stops and makes you think \"man that was an annoying noise now that is gone\"? That's like the relief of taking meds. They stop that background awful noise, and makes you think about how it is to live with that constant distraction in the background. This one might be a little abstract, but for a Spanish makes total sense, you'll see. Let's try to imagine that we need to cook the biggest omelette in the world, exactly made of 1237 eggs. Just as you start someone turns on the christmas lottery, with [this lovely kids]( URL_0 ) screaming into your ear random 6 figure numbers. This is exactly how I feel when I'm off meds and try to organize the simplest tasks, or understanding someone talk with any background noise or distraction, any task that requires a bit of concentration turns into this shitshow. The big problem is that neurotypical people expect us to be \"onpar\" with their concentration and executive skills, and ontop that they tend to tell neurodivergent people that this problems are things that happen to everyone. The key is not what happens or not, but the amount of times or the magnitude what hinders day to day life.",
"As someone with ADHD it can be kind of hard to explain. I don’t know what it’s like to NOT have ADHD, so I’d describe it as normal. ADHD affects the part of the brain that chooses what to pay attention to. It’s a misconception that we cannot pay attention. Spill a tub of legos in front of one of us and watch us hyper-focus for six hours (hyper-focus can be really awesome, actually). What we struggle with is controlling what we pay attention to. So for example it’s like pulling teeth to get me to focus on grading the papers of my class, but I have no problem focusing on Facebook or YouTube instead. Another common issue is time management. Trouble focusing often means a terribly off internal clock. Sometimes we have trouble reading people. When I was in college it seemed like my roommates could communicate telepathically. Anxiety issues often come along with it, too. There are pros, though. We tend to be very creative, energetic, and are excellent at staying up very very late. I can’t think of a single party in my life where I wasn’t the last to leave or last to fall asleep (except a few where I had way too much to drink and passed out). And hyper-focus can be like a superpower if it’s directed toward something productive. We can entertain ourselves for hours with a paper clip and a rubber band (flick the rubber band with the paper clip, flick the paper clip with the rubber band, build a piece of abstract art, enact little dramas with Dr. Horacio Paper Clip and Countess Catherine Rubber Band, make a little guitar and try to play a song, etc. etc.) Again, all this feels ‘normal’ to me. And what’s more, when on an appropriate dose of meds I don’t feel any different, I just notice more of my shit gets done. A common mantra is, “Don’t ask me how I’m different on meds, ask the people around me, because they can tell much better.”",
"My son has adhd (so do I) so this is how I explained it to him when he was younger: You're standing at the bottom of a large, overgrown hill that you are expected to mow in two hours. Given the time frame and size of the hill, it should be doable. It's not a mountain, after all. Just a hill. It will suck, but there's no way out of it - and at least you have a lawnmower, right? So you try to pull that chain and get started... but it pulls right out of the mower. You tinker around for too long and finally get it fixed, but you suddenly realize that this mower seems to have no motor. The blades are somehow spinning and will cut the grass, but you have to use every last bit of strength to push this thing yourself. Uphill. So you start going. It's the hardest work you've ever done because this damn mower is spitting at you and almost seems to pull you backward with every step. But it's cutting the grass so you keep going. Five minutes in and you're already insanely thirsty. You notice that you only have an hour left to finish, which now seems insanely UNdoable. It's hard to imagine being able to get this done without killing yourself in the process. Your inability to focus on this bullshit meaningless task (who cares about this hill again?) only gets worse now, because you start to notice that your next section of the path is lined with televisions. They're all playing something different that you reeeeaaally want to see. Sure would be nice to have water too. Your tongue is sandpaper and you've lost both shoes. 30 minutes to go, and you've covered 1/3 of the hill. You start to look around and question everything, because seriously wtf? Then you notice all your friends in the distance... they're all doing something together... what is it? You abandon the mower and walk closer to see. They're all drinking water. They're also done mowing their hills. HOW?? Oh... because they were all given riding lawnmowers. They finished their tasks on their hills and then they all met up with water and TVs. Ok fine. FIIIINE. You can just finish your hill then. So you turn around to head back. You grab some water and stop at one of the TVs to give yourself a break for a minute. Then you turn around and notice that the mower has fallen back down to the bottom of the hill. Oh good. That's the part you already mowed isn't it? You check your watch. Time's up. This is literally how it feels when a teacher asks you to complete a 5 min task that isn't stimulating. It's also every dream I've ever had.",
"So let's make this simple. TLDR (because ADHD); ADHD is a lack of happy juice in the brain. Only the brain can pick when a task is good and gets happy juice. How important a task is for an ADHD brain is completely crazy because normal things are now so boring that the brain won't bother thinking of them. Whole Explanation: ADHD comes about because the brain of the person with ADHD cannot take in happy chemicals (dopamine) in the amount that the average brain can. This results in a few different things. Everyday things that are boring which give a normal person a little happy juice, will give the ADHD person no happy juice at URL_0 why do the thing? This leads to very important adult chores (laundry, taxes, paying bills, cleaning, or even eating/going to the bathroom) getting skipped by the ADHD brain because there isn't any happy juice. **** This doesn't mean the ADHD person has decided to skip them consciously. The ADHD brain has decided that if there's no happy juice, it's probably not important. The person with the brain does not get to choose when they get happy juice. **** This shows itself in real life as problems with FOCUS. The average ADHD adult would like to pay bills on time to avoid late fees, so they try to think about the task more. This is hard to do. If you don't like watching history documentaries then forcing yourself to watch them takes a long of work. This is the same way everyday things can be with someone who has ADHD. This also makes doing more than one important thing close to impossible. One of the best ways, and frequent tricks, people with ADHD might use is to make a lot of lists and write notes for everything. What lack of happy juice also shows up as is problems with SHORT TERM MEMORY. Many people with ADHD lose important objects frequently because puting down a thing doesn't give much happy juice for a normal person, so it DEFINITELY doesn't give any to the ADHD person. Both of these problems can cause a los of DISTRESS to people with ADHD. The person knows that these things are important, sometimes to a level that can change their entire life. But their brain isn't giving them what they need to be able to finish the task. (They need more happy juice) Many people with ADHD are diagnosed with anxiety and/or depression when it isn't found until they're an adult for this exact reason. Many blame themself for forgetting anniversaries or being unable to finish their work quickly enough, which builds as problems with self-love. In some cases, hobbies that the person with ADHD enjoys are still very hard to do because their brain (not them) said no more happy juice. The reverse can be seen as something called HYPERFOCUS. Playing a phone game? The colors and puzzles give the brain SO MUCH HAPPY JUICE. KEEP PLAYING. and then four hours have passed... Some people may blame the ADHD person for just not wanting to work well \"because you can play that game for hours why can't you wash the dishes in the sink?\" This can be helped a little, but it takes a lot of time and practice to be good at tricking hyperfocus. ****The person with ADHD does not get to pick how much happy juice they get for doing a thing!**** As a personal example, I wanted to learn to play the guitar in high school and found it was something I really enjoyed. Brain decided we should play sudoku for 5 hours instead of play guitar, do homework, eat, or sleep. If you want extra information maybe check out the SciShow videos explaining ADHD, and how ADHD medications work in the brain. There's also the comic artist ADHDalien who posts great stuff. Take it easy on people with ADHD. It can be pretty crippling, trust me."
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o5bvr8 | Why do we get dehydrated while flying? | Does it have something to do with the altitude affecting certain organs, or is it entirely unrelated? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The air is very dry. Also, because of the lower partial pressure of oxygen in the pressurized cabin, you breathe deeper and faster to compensate, thus losing more water",
"It's dry air sucked in from the outside, which is very cold, and very dry (-40 < 1% humidity), and when you heat cold dry air, you get warm even dryer air. Depending on the age of the aircraft it is either engine bleed air, or outside air pulled in and compressed, or a mix of the two. Both are very dry. The humidity from people breathing helps moisten the air up and it's more comfortable if the air is recirculated in the cabin as it keeps the air a little more humid. It's also much lower pressure (Usually equivalent of 6000 to 7000 feet) at cruising altitude inside of the aircraft. Lower pressure reduces the boiling point of water and increases the rate it evaporates. The lower the air pressure, the lower the vapor pressure and the more easily water boils and evaporates. This is why food often has high altitude instructions that require you to cook it longer because the food doesn't get as hot because the boiling point is lower. Water can never get hotter than the boiling point so lower boiling point, lower temp, longer cook. Really though most of what happens is not dehydration, it's just drying of the mouth, sinuses, and throat, which prompts the body to feel thirsty.",
"The air within the plane is dry and warm. It is intentionally kept that way to minimize the effects of corrosion on the metal parts within the plane. Some of the newer planes are using more carbon fiber in their construction which means that the ambient humidity in the plane can be raised without risking damage to the plane itself. Dehydration is a contributing factor of jet lag. Also, consumption of alcohol while flying adds to the dehydration. To combat the effects of dehydration, the staff aboard the plane encourage frequent consumption of non-dehydrating liquids."
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o5bwlk | How come all the electromagnetic waves around does not affect eachother or get mixed up? | I was watching this Feynman's talk where he said to the reporter that "I can see you because you're in front of me, and person on my left can see person straight to him, on my right",because light waves are always reflecting and bouncing off, it's our perception. That got me to question this about light and then all electromagnetic waves in general. Apologies if this is a stupid question, just curious. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Photons don't interact with each other. They interact with matter (actually the electrons on the outside of matter), but not other photons.",
"They do interact, but they don't get \"mixed up\". This can be seen through things like diffraction (e.g. Young's double-slit experiment), where the interaction between waves causes constructive and destructive interference, and that's where you get your fringes from. This characteristic of light and all other EM waves is used in a whole bunch of things - from the way we use lasers to read certain media, to measuring distance or even the warping of space (e.g. LIGO). Indeed, the idea of constructive and destructive interference is what enables things like waveguides and cavities to work! Why don't they get mixed up? Well, because one photon doesn't have an effect on another photon. They can add together (the magnetic and electric field can combine for an instant and interfere), but the total sum of the fields is still recognisable as two separate photons - their individual fields don't change the direction of each other, and there's no attractive or repulsive forces that cause any sort of collision."
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o5cc27 | Why isn’t the longest day of the year also the hottest? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Earth's longest day is not the hottest day because a significant area of the Earth's surface is water, and water takes a long time to heat up or cool down. This causes what astronomers refer to as \"Seasonal lag,\" where the warmest day lags behind the longest day. On Earth the lag varies from 15 days to as much as two months. On other planets in the solar system, particularly the gas giants, there is also a great deal of seasonal lag. But on Mars, where there's not much atmosphere and no liquid water, there's basically no seasonal lag. The hottest day on Mars is the longest day.",
"The sun shining more directly into the hemisphere heats it up gradually. The heat buildup doesn't dissipate completely at night, so the next day is a little hotter as a result. By the time you are at the longest day, only half of your summer days have come, so there is still more time for heat to build up until the sun isn't shining as directly such that the heat can dissipate at night."
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o5co3t | how can disney own a tradmark for things they don’t own or make? | Like I can understand why they’d have a trandmark for the character Loki as presented in the MCU, because they own marvel and marvel created that representation, but how can they be shutting down people from selling items depicting the actual norse god from norse mythology, not the disney depiction? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In many cases, people are playing with fire and are not *quite* far enough away from Disney's Loki for their merch. If you're too close, Disney's Lawyers can send you a Cease & Desist, and then begin the legal proceedings. They may be wrong, but you'll have to meet them in court to find out, and odds are your total profits for that product will cover maybe the first hearing. Better to close up shop and sell the stuff on the DL via Facebook. If Disney doesn't defend their copyrights every time they're aware of an infringement, it can set a precedent that makes it easier for anyone else to infringe on Disney's territory. After all, if Mom didn't punish your brother for copying your homework, why is she punishing YOU for it?",
"There's an old saying; The mouse has more lawyers than animators. Disney understands that its intellectual property is the most valuable thing they have, and if you don't vigorously defend it, that sets a precedent that allows artists and other companies to profit off that IP. A lone artist is hardly a threat to Disney, but Disney is notorious for launching take downs of anything even remotely resembling their Intellectual property. They hire the so called 'fun police' people that do nothing all day but to search social media for such potential violations and flag them. The movie and music industries do the exact same thing. With current DMCA laws sites like RedBubble and Youtube have no choice but to comply. It's essentially corporate bullying. Disney knows full well that the artists can't afford to hire a lawyer, let alone go through the lengthy legal battle to win such a case. So it's better for the artists to just let it happen."
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o5d8ro | What does “fails-to-deliver” mean when shorting a stock? For some reason I don’t understand this term. | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Say you order a pizza. *its pizza time* I show up 30 minutes late and without your pizza. I've already accepted your money via online payment. I do not have your pizza. I do not have your extra large diet dr kelp drink. I failed to deliver what you paid for."
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o5dxmx | Why are green screens green? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's a color that stands out and isn't usually a part of the actors wardrobe etc. so that you can tell the computer that that specific shade of green is what needs to be replaced with CGI.",
"The color green they use doesn’t occur often in the subject matter they shoot (film). Modern Green screen works by keying on a specific color and then programmatically removing that color (I.e. making it transparent.) Additionally, the color leaves an edge that blends well with whatever image they put behind the Green-Screened footage So, they use that green because it’s rare. If they used, say a skin tone, then people would look partially transparent after the color-keying removal is done",
"In modern times it's just because it's the furthest away from human skin tones. Technology wise there's nothing special about it, and it just works as a nice solid color for the computer to basically just do a \"paint bucket,\" style fill/erase like you would in MS paint. [Back in the day before computers]( URL_0 ) though, they would use the color blue (one of the primary colors) and run the footage through filters in order to get a black and white \"matte,\" they could use for blending the foreground and the background together.",
"There is a really good explanation of this by captain disillusion. This is one of his more entertaining videos in my opinion, and he goes on to cover multiple aspects of green/blue screen technology and what tools and software does in motion pictures. URL_0"
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o5edam | How do child actors exposed to gruesome scenes (like murder on a horror film) not get traumatized/PTSD? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Simple answer: they aren’t. My son recently finished filming some scenes for a horror show and although his character witnessed a murder, he actually didn’t because they used various camera tricks and split the takes up so when it’s all put together, it looks like he was there. I imagine for some scenes this simply isn’t possible, but so far all of the things he’s been in have been done this way. The union is very very picky about things like this.",
"Several years ago, I was helping with some rated-r level Halloween decorations and someone brought their nine year old daughter. They thought the kid would be fine but when she saw one of the hyper-realistic masks in situ and flipped the fuck out... So like twenty minutes later, we grabbed another one of the masks and folded it up and put it in a box like it was new. The interaction basically went like this: \"Hey, so I want you to help me do some Halloween decorations. Inside this box is a mask and I want you take it out and unwrap it and put it on and be super scary.\" Kid opens the box and sees that it's a similar mask and puts it on and now lord jesus, she was the scariest motherfucker in the room and I played into that fact. Her mom played into it. Everyone played into it. And then I showed her how the decapitated head on a table works. \"Hey crouch down in this box and put your head right here.\" She did and I closed the back and she was the scariest decapitated child's head I've ever seen in my life. She had an absolute blast and wasn't scared at all. Being part of the scary makes it not scary.",
"Lots of scenes are cut/edited in. The actor isn't really looking at the \"scene\" as the viewer is. CGI is everywhere. The set is usually busy and brightly lit. What the viewer sees is immersive - how the director wants it. But the set itself has people walking around, moving lights and cameras etc. This is why they're called actors - they're faking it. It is far less scary when you see a person manipulating the controls of a robotic dummy getting killed, for example.",
"Generally they stage the scenes in a way that the kids don't know anything going on, if memory serves the kids from The Shining didn't even know it was a horror movie until they saw it as an adult.",
"It’s a very simple answer. It’s fake. Most the time the kids aren’t even actually there when the scene is filmed and when they are its explained thoroughly to them before. Also you gotta remember what you’re seeing in the movie is not what it looked like on the set. Stuff looks really fake on set and only looks real to you because of all the editing.",
"Because they're not actually gruesome. We see them perfectly edited with a scary soundtrack and without knowing the script and without seeing 50 people milling around holding coffees and snacks. You can spare the kid the most realistic portions, but even more than that, the assistant director can just come over and be like, \"So, Tim's going to jump out of that box, covered in red syrup and yelling, and you've gotta run away, and then we'll make you a sandwich?\" And this kid has been around Tim for a week, and he's a really nice guy, and he's winking and being all funny scary before the scene, and the kid can barely get the giggles under control to shoot it. He wasn't actually scared, he was just playing make believe for 5 minutes, stitched together 10 times.",
"Child Psychologists have found that if viewers are shown that something is demonstrably fake, they are often not as affected by it. I remember seeing a video in my \"Children and the Media\" course with a bunch of actors in the 70s showing how fake glass bottles were made (and broken over heads!) and how to make fake blood. These simple demonstrations lessen the impact for children viewers of faked violence on TV or film. For the actors, the experience of filming a scene is usually nothing like the end movie; the experience is even more fake. Filming a scene includes a ton of stopping and starting, cameras and lights and friendly people everywhere... Lots of food and crafts services and parents and agents everywhere. The boundary between movie making and scary experience is really stretched to the limits when you are on set filming. That said, the recent film about the Underground Railroad had a staff psychologist on set in case the actors were disturbed by being involved in scenes of slave masters torturing slaves. So the movie making process can be a bit of innoculation against confusing things on set for reality but sometimes it's worth going further just to be careful, especially with children.",
"They minimize the child's exposure to the actual gore and violence, and make it look real in post production. For example, the kid who played Georgie in IT spent a lot of time with Bill Skarsgard, and was allowed to play with the props before the sewer scene. When the time came to film the scene, he liked Skarsgard, and he knew it was all just pretend, so it didn't even faze him.",
"It's very easy to make it look like the actor is witnessing the events when they actually aren't. The scenes in set also look a whole lot different than they do in the final screen version. A \"night\" shot can't actually be very bright on the set and then is darkened in post. This will make the scene far less scary. The sets typically aren't scary at all, everyone really is acting.",
"A lot of comments saying that they are edited in is true, but also you have to understand that even those scenes that are \"scary\" aren't really that scary in person, there is no creepy music or sound effects, they have a camera crew standing around, and a director that tells you what to do and say, it's difficult for this to be scary when you put these things together. Also, the person who is the scary monster or killer is actually just a dude named Mike that likes to drink coffee and eat donuts, and they were just chatting with each other a few minutes ago, or the monster is just cgi so it's just a dude running around in a green suit, or nothing at all"
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o5eei7 | ..... How do you talk to your doctor so that you come away with the best treatment plan? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"What I can say as a biomed graduate is actually fairly straightforward -- be entirely transparent. That doesn't just mean not keeping secrets and leaving out anything that can possibly affect your diagnosis/treatment, but it also includes voicing your concerns if you ever feel confused or hesitant. Doctors are there to help, and most of them sincerely care about their patients' wellness. If you're not sure if a doctor is correct on their judgement, that's completely okay. Tell them that you'd like to take an extra test or why you think those specific pills aren't the solution. Let them know your thoughts, because communication is key. What you shouldn't do is keep your anxiety bottled up, which could possibly lead to physiological consequences in the future. There's no trick to getting the best treatment because the treatment you get is a direct reflection of what you say and voice out loud. If you'd like more in-depth answers you're likely to find better luck in one of the medicine-focused subreddits.",
"1 Details are important. \"My stomach hurts\" will get treated very differently than \"after some meals, my stomach hurts, so here is a list of foods that have made it worse, and here are some things that don't hurt it\". Make a list of what you have tried, what's helped, what's made it worse. This gives a clinician the ability to help rule things out and prioritize others. 2 Ask why. It's an underused question. Be curious and engaged in your care. \"I'm curious, why did you order an X-Ray?\". This serves a couple of functions, firstly, it helps you understand what is going on with your care but it also functions as a self-check for the clinician. I explain my process to my patients, because it ensures I'm reviewing what I'm thinking and I have on occasion identified something I could do differently or better. 3 Be honest. Just because something may seem minor doesn't mean it isn't important. Making it out to be more severe or adding symptoms can complicate the diagnostic process. 4 Follow through and follow up. Sometimes plans don't work. It happens. The body can be incredibly complex, and not responding to one treatment may be a further symptom that helps in a more definitive diagnosis. Even if it doesn't seem to be working, as long as it isn't worsening, give it time and follow up with the provider. Attend scheduled followup visits, even if symptoms have resolved. This helps build a management plan for future issues. 5 If you're not a good fit with your clinician, consider changing. I know this isn't always possible, but people are people, regardless of title and education. Sometimes you just don't jive with someone, and that's okay. I've had patients who don't like my coworkers, but will only see me, and others that tell me to get lost and will only talk to a coworker. I'd rather see a patient comfortable and happy with another than miserable with me.",
"It depends on what medical condition the medication is supposed to be treating...some conditions have non-pharmacologic treatments that you can try first, some have only one pill that works for most cases, some have lots of options to try. Unfortunately medications can effect everyone differently (as far as how effective or what side effects they have) so sometimes the best option is the trial and error of just trying it and see if it works, and move on to the next option if that one isn’t effective. You can try asking what other treatment options are available, why does he/she recommend that specific treatment, how this treatment has worked for their other patients, what the side effects are (short and long term), what are the dangerous side effects (ex - if you feel racing heartbeat, stop taking and go to ER immediately). Also it’s important to know what time of day they recommend taking it, especially in relation to meals (some medications must be taken before meals, some with food, some 30 min to an hour after eating)"
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o5egbi | Why does a gunshot to the head cause immediate death? | This sounds very obvious, I know. I assume it doesn’t immediately stop the heart, and people can still survive even while being “brain dead”. So what exactly happens in the body to cause immediate death once a bullet enters the brain? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The bullet will have multiple effects. The first will be a high pressure wave. Water, what you are primarily made of, does not compress. So the force of the impact will cause powerful waves of force inside the skull. These force waves will shred neural connections. Then you have the physical damage of the projectile passing through the brain tissue. It is probable the bullet (or bullet fragments) will be tumbling - shredding tissue as it passes. Then you have the exit. The pressure wave will open a hole at the exit many times larger than the entry wound. Out of this hole will be thrown large quantities of destroyed brain tissue. Your consciousness most likely ended at the moment the pressure wave scrambled your brain. Since you have no awareness after that point it really doesn't matter when your heart stops or other tissues die. You effectively no longer exist.",
"A heart beat isn't what determines if you're alive or not. If your heart just stopped beating right now you'd live for quite a few minutes. Why? It's the brain that is you. Your heart doesn't think. It isn't conscious. Your brain is. Someone who is brain dead with a beating heart isn't really alive. They're just a corpse with a beating heart.",
"Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head and she's alive. People can and do survive being shot in the head.",
"It isn’t. People can survive devastating injuries and loss of brain tissue loss. This is only true in movies and games. The brain is not immediately dead in contact with a bullet.",
"The *brain stem* is the part of the brain at the back and bottom of the skull, and merges with the spinal cord. It has critical roles in regulating cardiac function and breathing. Someone who is **brain dead** but still has a beating heart and may be still be breathing probably still has some brain stem function, but they are not showing any of the indications of higher brain function. If the brain stem is destroyed by a traumatic injury, everything immediately required for life (breathing, heartbeat) stops. As a general rule, the further away the injury is from the brain stem, the more likely the patient is to survive, with varying levels of impact depending on where the damage is.",
"Your entire body is basically a vehicle and support system for your brain. Everything that is 'You' lives here. When a great trauma such as a gunshot happens the brain is mostly or completely destroyed and although otherwise perfectly functional the rest of the body no longer has a purpose and shuts down. Think of it like a TV which relies on a power supply to function. If you shoot out the power supply the TV is still good, but without electricity it won't function.",
"If a bullet penetrate the skull, the hydraulic shock from headshot alone can severely damage the brain stem. And since the brain stem directly control breathing, the heart will quickly run out of oxygen and stop beating.",
"Not sure if anyone has mentioned already but you also have your control centers for respiration in your brainstem. So if that gets damaged your odds of survival are extremely low."
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o5elii | Why does inside pain hurt so much more than outside pain? | Is there an explanation as to why pain caused by something internal to the body (ie tooth pain, stomach ache, ear ache, kidney stones, etc) always seems to hurt so much more than pain caused by something external to the body (ie you get a cut/scrape/bruise or step on something like a rock or a lego or a thumbtack)? It's something I noticed recently and was hoping for an explanation as to why that was the case. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I would assume it’s because there are more nerves inside the body as that’s where your organs are etc…"
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o5euq9 | How do so many satellites stay in obit without crashing | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"How do about 8 billion people walk around the Earth without constantly walking into each other? Space is a lot bigger than the surface of the Earth.",
"Think about how much sky planes occupy. At any given time, there are up to 20,000 planes in the sky, compared to about 6000 satellites currently orbiting Earth (most of which are no longer operational). Satellites orbit at different heights, ranging from 160km-2000km above the Earth’s surface (“Low Earth Orbit”) up to about 36,000km above the surface (“High Earth Orbit”). That is a tremendous amount of space. In fact, even though there are 3-4 times *fewer* satellites than there are airplanes, satellites have **38,000 times more space** to orbit than airplanes have to fly in.",
"Every satellite's orbit is known and tracked. The physics of putting objects into orbit and maintaining them is very well understood. Granted, this may become a problem eventually, but for now, it's manageable."
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o5f7as | How does fat gain/loss actually work? | It’s my understanding that most fat (re: loss) is essentially metabolized and exhaled as carbon dioxide. What I can’t wrap my brain around is that even after eating a calorie surplus the weight doesn’t INSTANTLY appear - maybe after a heavy meal, but if it’s something just really calorie dense this isn’t the case. But the calories have been consumed so I don’t understand why the weight doesn’t reflect that instantly. So it seems like the fat gain side of thing might be actual magic. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you eat something, the weight is in your gut as you digest it. Your daily meal is maybe 2-5 pounds total. Then you pee and sweat and poo and breathe and that 2-5 pounds mostly leaves you. But if you eat excess, your body may take a small amount of that daily food intake and store it away “for later” as fat. Maybe an eighth or quarter pound here or there or less. Most people move up and down 2-10 pounds per day in weight depending on hydration, food intake, etc. The actual fat gain is a tiny fraction of that but say after day it can add up.",
"Your body isn't 100% efficient at metabolizing calories. Calories are locked up in the food you eat. Some foods are easier to digest than others. Sugar for instance is extremely easy to digest and largely is absorbed straight through the stomach lining rather than going through the digestive system. When you eat something like a chocolate bar, you get a huge energy boost followed by an immediate energy crash as all that energy is made available all at once. Other foods, like green beans, are much more work to digest. The calories are there but they're only gradually released as your digestive system does its work. That chocolate bar can be processed in minutes while a healthy and diverse meal can take 36 hours or even more to fully digest. And the process to turn non-fatty calories into fat also takes time. Your liver has to do work to convert things like carbs and protein calories into fat. So part of it is that you can eat something and simply excrete some of those calories again before your body unlocked them during the digestive process. Part of it is that some calories are much easier to unlock and use (or store) than others. And part of it is timing. If you have a good meal and then later enjoy some exercise, those calories are more likely to be put to use than stored. If you gorge on food and then go to sleep, those calories are likely to go straight into storage. If you eat a chocolate bar, you basically eat an energy bomb so big that you're unlikely to use up all that immediately available energy and it'll get shunted into storage. And since all that energy is made available at once, you'll likely be hungry again soon after and eat something else. Which prevents you from using that stored energy. If you eat green beans, that energy is unlocked gradually and you get plenty of time to use it instead of storing it. And since your body is busy gradually digesting it, you won't feel nearly as hungry."
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o5g6pn | Is zero a number or the absence of a number? | I have looked at several different articles/explanations but they either have contradictory statements or they use esoteric language that I cant wrap my head around. pls help | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"From a programmer perspective zero is a number: for example if you have 1+0 the result will still be a number. But if you have 1+NaN(not a number) the results will be NaN. From a mathematical point of view 0 is also a number, because it respect all the requirements to be one. You know exactly where to find 0, you can use 0 in operations and 0 is a valid result. But let's think that 0 is not a number for a second. If you have the equation x=1-1 I would say that x=0 but if 0 is just the absence of a number, I should probably say that x does not have a value",
"Zero is definitely a number. When you're measuring or counting something, zero represents the absence of that thing - but that doesn't mean that zero itself isn't a number, it's actually a very important number! Almost all of the math we learn in school and use in everyday life and also in banking, science, engineering, and elsewhere all depends on there being a number zero to work with.",
"A number can be defined as a quantity or amount. If I have none of something, then the quantity (or number) that I have of it is zero.",
"Modern mathematics is formalized in the so called \"peano axioms\". This is a set of statements that define what is a number and how numbers behave. The first peano axiom is exactly your answer: \"**0 is a natural number**\". URL_0",
"Yes it's a number. -1 is a number as well. Pi is also a number. I'm not sure how anyone would argue that it isn't a number. It is just the absence of whatever someone may be counting.",
"0 is as much of a number as any other number. Whether numbers exist or not is a philosophical question. Depending on how you view numbers, one might say that some numbers exist but that 0 doesn't. But it doesn't really matter if it exists or not, it's still a number, and a very useful one at that."
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o5gbfb | How does heterochromia affect offspring eye color? | Hey there, I was just watching a YouTube video explaining the chances/possible out comes of children’s eye color based on their parents. It said if one parent has green and the other brown the chance for blue eyes is around 12% however all my siblings and I have blue eyes. My mother has green eyes while my father has one brown and one green. I tried googling but got no answers. So does his heterochromia affect eye color probability different or is it the same chances and they just got “lucky”? Thank you! | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Heterochromia iridium is not a singular disorder. It is just a description of a symptom that may present as a result of many different syndromes; whether [congenital or acquired]( URL_0 ). With Heterochromia iridium, there is an affected eye that usually does not reflect the genetics of the person, the color is simply caused by the condition itself. It's impossible to be sure due to not knowing the specifics of your fathers condition, but it's likely that your father has a recessive blue allele. This would mean that likely both your mother and father have a recessive blue allele and a dominant brown/green allele, thus giving a 25% chance for blue eyes in their children."
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o5gn2e | Why won’t we just start colonizing the moon? Is it because we don’t have good enough tech or cause it’s pointless? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's the whole lack of an atmosphere thing. This means you'd have to live, work, play, etc inside of buildings. The entire liveable environment would be inside. Water, air, etc would need to be transported there. Any damage to the structure, say from a meteorite, would be potentially fatal to everyone in that structure. Now let's look at the ISS. That thing is barely in space and so far it's cost over $US150b. And it's tiny. Not exactly the size of something that you'd need on the Moon to support a colony. And then there's getting the people there. So far the biggest spacecraft ever built to get people to the Moon could ship over 2 at a time. Granted, that was about 50 years ago so maybe they could build one that could ship over like 4 now?",
"The NASA Artemis program is working towards building a permanent base on the moon. There are all sorts of challenges to overcome (radiation, dust, water, power). It's a multistage program that will take years.",
"Economics. Anything we could do or get on the moon now we could do cheaper on earth or in low earth orbit. For now we can get more bang for our buck elsewhere. Eventually it will be cheaper to mine and refine metals on the moon to use in space construction projects, and we will also start mining water on the moon. But that will require a giant upfront investment so we will need to have a huge demand for it first."
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o5ht5x | Why do spices in your cabinet get hard?? And what’s the best method to soften them back? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If ground spices accumulate moisture, they will form clumps and harden. The best solution is to keep them in the fridge so they will not break down.",
"For a good few of them they are ruined at this point if they are ground spices. Maybe not ruined, but they will have lost a great deal of flavour. Usually ground spices start to lose their flavour after about 6 months. You’d be as well to dump them and buy fresh, but you can also revive them by gently warming them in a dry pan. Whole spices will stay fresh for much longer, easily a couple of years. Dried herbs will maybe get 2-3 years.",
"They will trap moisture over time and as a result will harden. The easiest way to get them back in a powder form is to empty the contents into a pestle and mortar, and grind it up until the clumps break down. You can then put it back into the original container and use as you like."
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o5i4cm | what is insomnia | I don’t know what it is, but would like to know | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It’s a sleep disorder. It can either mean someone has difficulty falling asleep or they have difficulty staying asleep. Usually it’s caused by sleeping habits, such has screen time in bed or irregular sleeping patterns; but it can also be caused by a lack of something called ‘melatonin’, which is basically the chemical your body uses to send you to sleep. Some people, like me, just don’t naturally produce enough of it.",
"Insomnia is the inability to fall asleep. It is 3:30 am in Texas, I am not awake on purpose"
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o5ig8q | Why is there a mouse plague in Australia? | A mouse plague is ravaging through several states in Australia, causing widespread damage to crops, damage to buildings and infrastructure. A prison had to be evacuated. Why is there a mouse plaque? What can be done to resolve the mouse plague, aside from the obvious pesticide? What can be done to prevent it from happening again? | Earth Science | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The mouse plague has been caused by a \"perfect storm\" of optimal weather conditions for breeding and the end of the 2017 to 2019 drought. The mice first appeared in the spring of 2020 when farmers were harvesting a bumper crop. There was plenty of grain in the paddocks and in storage for the mice to eat, as well as fewer predators, which died during the drought. URL_0",
"It’s happening because mice are non-native and have few natural predators. What can be done? Nothing.",
"TLDR:Environment around farms trashed by drought, fire, flood and farm practices. Mice, a rapidly breeding invasive species, survived and moved into these areas and had no competition and lots of food as rains came. Farmers didn't realize that this was a perfect storm and didn't do anything different (more baiting/changes to storage and harvest practices). Mice started invading farms in December 2020. Smaller mouse plagues happen regularly so everyone is still chilled (except the farmers who were getting hit) March 2021 the mouse are out of control and have completely overwhelmed baiting on many farms. Farmers started freaking out and asking for help. Government slow to react for various reasons (politics, covid, rural v city divide) Videos started going viral in April and May. News (local and international) makes big noise about cities being overwhelmed. Government finally reacts and offers millions of dollars in support and is trying to get a banned poison approved for emergency use... All that can really be done is continue baiting, trapping and improve storage of grain and wait for the the balance to return...but this is costly for farmers and not guaranteed to succeed... There is also talk of bio controls like tailored viruses that kill or sterilize the mice but that will be years away... Long version: Mice are an invasive species to Australia that breed rapidly and can thrive around humans. Most local animals are not super adapted to eating mice and can't survive around humans. At \"normal\" times mice would be a problem but 2020/2021 was not a \"normal\" time. A very long drought and the massive fires and then floods killed lots of the local animals that ate or competed with mice. Now the mice also suffered. But remember they can live around humans and enough mice made it through the bad times by hanging around the houses and farms. When the rains came the wild land around farms started to recover and plants began to grow creating lots of food. Some of the mice left the farms and houses and moved into these areas where there was a lot of food and nothing to fight with or eat the mice. Through the Autumn and Winter of 2020 the population was growing unseen in the wilds and everything seemed okay. But when spring came around even more food became available and the mouse population exploded. At around the same time Australian farmers were taking in some of the best harvests on record and processing and storing them. Many farmers store grains in MASSIVE plastic bags or leave them open and rely on trapping and baiting to prevent mouse populations from exploding...they did this at there usual levels not realizing what was going on in the waste land around the farms... As Summer came (December 2020) and water and food resources reduced in the wild the thousands of mice went in search of food and found the grain. Through the summer farmers were doing extreme baiting but the mice kept coming...the many surviving mice now gorged themselves on the stored grain and the surging population was further boosted to the plague levels... Individual farmers and communities began sounding alarm bells around February 2021...but localized mouse plagues are actually pretty common in Australia and so these warnings were ignored by government. Things continued to grow and the viral videos started coming out at the end of March and into April...the farmers were like \"we're serious there is a major problem we need financial help and scientific support. Politics and the distraction of covid definitely played a role here: they had received bailouts and support from the government during the drought and fire...there are fewer farmers than there are city dwellers so provincial/state level politicians pay less attention to farmers \\[at least according to the farmers\\]...things like that...kept the local government from paying too much attention. But by around 12 May 2020 things were so crazy that they had to pay attention with local and international news running stories about mouse plagues overrunning the cities...so the government had to start paying attention...there were also some local elections around this time that could harm the party in charge of New South Wales (the state most impacted). The government went from offering very little support to offering 50 million dollars for baiting which was then increased to 100 million (in the form of rebates on zinc phosphide bait purchases). And they also tried (and are still trying) to get a banned rat poison authorized for emergency use. Bromadiolone (the poison in question) was put forward as a quick fix that would act like \"Napalm\" and cut through the mouse population. But almost everyone, including a lot of farmers think this is a terrible idea...as it will napalm the environment along with the mice... Basically the way out is increased baiting and improved storage facilities and a coordinated response where hot zones receive specialist support and help...but this will take months and will cost farmers millions in expenses, lost crop and lost planting seasons. [I made an explainer video that may help...]( URL_0 )"
],
"score": [
20,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2021-06-11/mouse-plague-australia-why-it-happens-and-can-it-be-stopped/100195082"
],
[],
[
"https://youtu.be/02FW-nP6NKE"
]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
o5ja1r | Why are hotel prices seemingly random and different? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"h2mw6ik",
"h2mw138",
"h2mvwkn"
],
"text": [
"Appreciate the insight, everything said makes total sense... but still mind blown!",
"Tip: when using an internet browser to search for rates... do so in \"incognito mode\" so you can't be tracked. Hotel, airfare and car rental rates tend to appear to go up on your screen as you search forcing you to want to book that ticket ASAP. Using a safe incognito browser prevents this.",
"It’s largely due to hotel occupancy. Even if it’s the middle of the week in the middle of nowhere, if a hotel is at 90% occupancy the rates are going to be inflated. On the flip side, if a hotel is at 10% occupancy then the room rates will be extra low for the purpose of raising occupancy. There are other factors as well but this is a major force behind room rates. Source: I was a hotel manager for 5 years"
],
"score": [
3,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
o5je0q | Why do we have that ‘sour face’ when eating sour food? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"h2mxgcv",
"h2mxi3r"
],
"text": [
"It's not entirely known but there are some hypothesises as to possibly why. One is that we're a social species and communicate a lot through our facial expressions, especially before language evolved. Certain tastes, such as sour, can denote that food has spoilt or it poisonous. The facial expression may be to warn others of our tribe. Another is that when you make that face you put pressure on your salivary glands which squeezes out extra saliva which then dilutes what's in your mouth and makes it more bearable. Could also be both. Could be something else we haven't thought of.",
"Its probably a hangover from very early primate/human evolution where facial expressions give a clue to other members of the group as to what is good to eat and what isn't. We still use similar to babies and very young children, making expressions and noises of appreciation to communicate non-verbally that something will taste good."
],
"score": [
6,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
o5jkz0 | Can someone explain the "occupy 962ml" and how? | 900ml of water weighs exactly 900g. If we dissolve 100g of sugar into this water the mixture will have a total weight of 1000 grams but will only occupy 962ml. What does occupy mean? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"h2mxrx1"
],
"text": [
"ml is unit of Volume and g is unit of mass(consider weight for all general purpose here on earth). Volume is about how much space any matter takes i.e. occupies. Now when you add sugar(high density matter) into water, it will add to the same weight as addition of sugar and water weight but it will not be of same volume. 100g of water = 100ml of water because density of water is 1g/ml(1g/cc) 100g of sugar not equal to 100ml of sugar consider sugar density of 1.59g/cc"
],
"score": [
13
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
o5joep | the difference in shark and whale tails | So why do sharks have the tail that goes up and down but whales have the tail that goes side to side. Is there an actual reason for it or is something that just kinda happened? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"h2mxqxy",
"h2mxsyn"
],
"text": [
"Evolution. When animals evolved to live on land their skeletons evolved for this when they evolved legs. The spine needed to move up and down for walking on land rather than the side to side motion fish have as up and down is way better suited for walking on land than side to side motion. Whales are animals that returned to the sea. They have kept the spine movement of up and down and so that's how their tail works. Evolution doesn't plan and moving up and down works well enough so it seems there hasn't been any pressure to change it back to how fish use it. Edit: As to why fish evolved side to side in the first place? Probably just chance. Either would have been fine. There doesn't seem to be much of an advantage of one over the other.",
"Whales are mammals, and our mammal bodies have a spine that articulates (moves) up and down. Try wiggling side-to-side like a fish in water. You’ll drown. They had to compensate with what evolution already gave them, so a tail to flattens out horizontally will provide the most propulsion while accommodating for the spine to move up and down like any other mammal. Sharks don’t have this problem, and side to side is actually more efficient in water. Because they never moved on land, they move side to side when swimming too be able to use their entire body to move."
],
"score": [
10,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
o5kuyv | How is a SIM card identified as switched off and not just outside of a phone instead? | Like, I lost my sim card. I'm sure it's somewhere in my home. I have a ton of old phones. When I call the number it says switch off, I wanna know if it's the same even if the sim is outside of a mobile? How does it all work. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"h2n3bwq"
],
"text": [
"does it say \"the phone is switched off\" or a different message? It's quite likely that it's just a generic network message. they can't see if a sim is in a turned-off phone or if it's sat on a shelf, they just know they can't connect to a phone that has that sim card in it"
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
o5m0cs | How do large scale coffee roasters coax the same flavors out of beans in each batch? | As far as I know, roasting the beans produces the flavors, so how do companies like Starbucks ensure every batch of beans they roast produces “Verona” and another batch produces “Pike Place”? Do they add flavorings? Different bean sources? Roasting process factors? It just blows my mind that Starbucks, Dunkin, McDonalds, etc. can all produce such different coffee from the (same?) coffee beans. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"h2n9eau"
],
"text": [
"this is part of the reason that starbucks roasts their beans so dark. most higher end, smaller batch coffees tend to be roasted on the lighter side, since this allows the origin characteristics of the coffee to stand out most. these roasters are not aiming for a specific flavor profile or trying to match previous roasts, they are simply trying to take the green coffee and make it taste as good as it possibly can in the cup. large companies like starbucks, however, are not catering toward a smaller specialty coffee clientele, they are marketing to less concerned consumers who only want consistency. in order to achieve this, a darker roast is used that will fry out any variabilities in the coffees year to year and produce a similar tasting cup. dark roasted coffees tend to be made from somewhat lower quality beans with less remarkable flavor since the actual flavor of the origin is mostly replaced by the flavors of the roast itself. lastly, the beans that they use don't come from smaller lots like a single origin coffee would, they try to get a larger sampling from entire regions since this tends to even out inconsistencies from specific farms or localities. hope this makes sense!"
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
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