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6jfy0v | Technology | Why can't my phone simultaneously use wifi and data? And, given that that my phone is limited to the one or the other, why is my connection interrupted whenever I switch between wifi and data? Is is possible (i.e. does the technology exist) to switch seamlessly between the two? | Although in both cases you might be trying to send data to or receive data from the same server, you're using physically separate hardware to do it--one, a system designed for communicating with routers over Wi-Fi, and the other, a system for telephone communication. These also operate on different frequencies. The operating system must decide to send the signal through one or the other. In principle you could use both, but then you really have two separate connections, which will receive two separate responses. "Seamless" switching between the two is difficult because one of the connections has to fail before switching--otherwise, you would get inconsistent responses by mixing the two. | 2 |
l7i4h3 | Technology | How were video games in the late 80s/early 90s animated before huge digital advances were made? Additionally, how was music added? | In case you're interested, there are some incredible resources for making 8 bit games on retro systems available for free. Arcade Game Designer (AGD) for the ZX Spectrum is particularly fun. Highly recommended! | 5 |
6imtsw | Biology | Venomous means harm is done with injection. Poisonous means harm is done when ingested... But is venom poisonous, and is poison venomous? Like, will eating a venomous critter poison you? My boyfriend joked about eating a venomous critter we found and (oopsie daisy) killed... Even though he won't really do that, I questioned whether or not the venom inside venomous critters will poison you if you swallow them.... And vice versa. If a poisonous substance is pierced into your skin, will you be harmed? | Most venoms are not poisonous. Most poisons are venomous. (That sentence is wrong, but we're having a conversation.) Venoms are *usually* proteins that are produced to do a very specific thing, they are designed to be injected into soft tissue and act very quickly. Most venoms are neurotoxins, meaning they target nerves in some way, like blocking the neurotransmitters from being released and thus paralyzing the muscle. This gets to the heart or the lungs and the victim dies. These venoms are not designed to pass through mucosal membranes like those found in the mouth, eyes, nose, etc, so if someone were to swallow it, it would pass through the esophagus with minimal damage. When it gets to the stomach it's now in a massively acidic environment. The pH is ~2, the pH of blood is ~7.4, so the stomach is ~250,000x more acidic (thanks for actually doing the math) than blood. Proteins are only stable in certain conditions, salinity, temperature, pH, all effect the protein on a molecular level. So the venom passes into the stomach, isn't stable in that environment, and is rendered "harmless". Poisons are a different story. Poison Dart Frogs, probably the most notorious poisonous animal. Arrowheads were poisoned (envenomed?) By rubbing them on the frogs, stabbing it into the frog, or "roasting them over a fire". Which shows that the poison wouldn't be able to be cooked out. But these frogs are also too poisonous to *TOUCH* the poison is on the frog's skin and is absorbed through our skin. You've probably heard of licking toads? They're also poisonous, but the poison isn't fatal and it's absorbed readily through mucosal membranes. Polar bears aren't poisonous. But their livers are, they contain an essential vitamin, which is fat soluble, at such high concentrations that it would kill you to eat. Poison by concentration. Warfarin? A massively popular heart medication? Rat poison. It's a blood thinner, and originally was made as a rat poison, but at very low levels, can be used therepuetically. Whether a poison can be used as a venom really depends on the poison. If I were to dip an arrowhead in botulism toxin, yeah, that will kill ya. Poisons can be proteins, small molecules, drug like substances, pretty much anything, it's a catch all. Venoms are pretty much just proteins, they're produced by an animal for a purpose and evolutionarily speaking it's a hell of a lot easier to produce a protein for a purpose than it is to create an enzyme or an enzymatic pathway that produces a molecule. If you look up rattlesnake venom you'll find "modified saliva", evolution took an existing structure, a salivary gland, and modified it until it produced a saliva capable of killing prey. Also, venoms are usually more than one protein, dozens of them working in concert. Toxins and poisons are generally thought of as a single molecule. Komodo Dragons? Actually venomous, the whole blood poisoning thing with bacteria was a hypothesis that was never really proven and made a good story. Their venom isn't nearly as fast acting as other venoms, which probably lead to this hypothesis of the bacteria in their mouth causing sepsis and death. A bit rambly, but I think I hit most of the key points. Edit: words and I looked up the Komodo dragon I was taught that they causes sepsis and it wasn't until recently that the venom was proven. Also looked up the poison dart frog thing. | 3 |
amsca9 | Technology | If music CDs are burned with the opening tracks towards the center, how are open-world video game discs burned? Like Fallout 4, for example. You can walk anywhere, do anything, talk to anyone, at any time. How is that all rendered onto the disc when it’s not exactly chronological? **EDIT**: thank you everybody! I appreciate you all taking the time and I learned a lot from all of your answers! I read through each and every one. | Other posters mention optimizing disc layout but I can speak firsthand to some of the lengths we went to in days of yore to minimize load times on optical media. In PS2 days I spent the better part of a month writing a layout optimization tool whose goals were the following, in order of importance: 1. Position level data on the region of the disc where linear velocity was greatest under the read head without being so high that re-reads of the data were common due to read errors. PS2 spun its media at constant rotational velocity so this was a thing. (Most DVD players varied rotational velocity to keep linear velocity under the head constant.) Testing showed that bandwidth was highest near but not too near the outer edge. 2. Position streaming data (anything we loaded from disc during gameplay, generally streaming audio in our case) close enough that it could be read with a small move/refocus of the laser as opposed to a full move of the read head. 3. Replicate the same music tracks/voiceovers in multiple locations on the disc if goal 2 was difficult to achieve without. 4. Bake absolute positions on disc into the executable code so that no filename lookups or system queries were necessary. Everything boiled down to "Read N bytes from sector X, offset Y." And yeah, I get nostalgic for this shit. | 18 |
62x3wv | Engineering | How did the western world lay underwater telegraph lines as early as 19th century with their level of technology? | They'd already mastered telegraph lines on land, so what they needed for underwater cables was a way to waterproof them. Unlike today, when we have all kinds of artificial substances, they could only use natural ingredients. So one of the vitally important substances that allowed them to do this was gutta percha, which allowed them to waterproof the cables. It comes from a tropical tree. Once they learned this waterproofing technique, they used existing tech to lay the cables. It was dicey at first and there was a lot of trial and error. By the way, if you want to read about this in depth, Neal Stephenson wrote about the history of trans-oceanic cables in his book of essays, *Some Remarks*. | 5 |
6vwbwi | Chemistry | Why are some liquids, like oil, very slick? What molecular properties make a good lubricant? | Substances like oils have many carbon atoms that are saturated, or completely covered by hydrogen atoms. If many of these molecules are near each other, they will not (generally) form hydrogen bonds because the carbon atoms do not attract hydrogen as much as oxygen atoms for example. On the stickier side of things, sugars such as glucose have many oxygen atoms on the outside of the molecule. Oxygen is much better at attracting hydrogen than carbon, so other glucose molecules nearby (or for that matter any other substances with hydrogen atoms) will be very attracted to to sugars. This hydrogen bonding is what makes sugar sticky. In short, oils generally have hydrogen-to-carbon bonds, which are not as strong as hydrogen-to-oxygen bonds in other substances. This is the same phenomenon which causes surface tension which is also a factor in the "slipperyness" of oils. | 1 |
gxxgka | Economics | how come mobile games can pay for ads in other mobile games | A broader questions is:how much money to spend in advertising? The easy answer is: if putting advertising to get new users is less expensive than the money that users will spend, then it's good to advertise. But it can get complicated. For example, many people prefer games that already have many players. This is usually the case in multiplayer online games. In that case, the more players a game has, the easier it is to get even more player. So the first players are expensive, but the following players are cheaper. Also, not all players are the same. Some play a single game for months. Others switch games every few days. Some spend money upfront in 50-70 dollar games, others do microtransactions every few days, others avoid spending any money. Each type of player requires a different type of advertising. Most games have a jigh peak of players during the first weeks, and then players drop out. So when a company has many games, they make sure to advertise their other games, so players switch to their own games rather than to rival companies. | 2 |
jzbujs | Engineering | When we suck through a straw, the substance follows the suction to the source: our mouth. So how is it that when vacuum cleaners suck up crumbs, the particles fall into a dust bin instead of clinging to the fan or filter in front of it that causes the suction? | It's mostly to do with the large density difference between air and dirt. The vacuum cleaner is also sucking up air and the air easily flows past the solid particles. With a vacuum cleaner the speed of the air is fast enough to lift particles up in the hose, but when it enters a larger chamber the air speed slows down and the particles fall. There's also usually a "cyclone" effect which effectively makes things heavier (centrifugal/centripetal force) and amplifies the difference in density between the dirt and air making them separate easier. A straw only sucks up one fluid with no air so there's no separation based on density. If you've ever accidentally cracked a straw and had air leak into the side you find that it doesn't work nearly as well and you have to suck a lot harder. And you'll notice that inside your mouth the liquid falls to the bottom of your mouth which is why you don't fill your lungs with soda on accident. (Or when slurping soup). | 1 |
6j9hsw | Culture | Why does "The People's Republic of China" have the word republic in it when clearly the country is not one? | I think you are mistaken about the meaning of the term republic. In its most base form it just means that a state is a "public thing" and is used to contrast with monarchies. Outside of the US where it has a slightly different meaning somebody calling themselves a Republican means that they are for the abolishment of a monarchy if one is present of for keeping monarchies away if one isn't. China used to have an emperor and they turned into a republic when the monarchy ended. The Chinese Empire became the Republic of China. then a few decades later the communist took over and created the *People's* Republic of China to make it clear that unlike the previous one they were a communist country. The original Republic of China sort of continues on in the form of Taiwan, where the last remnants of the old republic are gathered both the republic and the people's republic claim all of China including each others territory and don't recognize the other as a legitimate government of anything. So the difference in the name is quite important. But the important part is that 'republic' just means that there is no monarch and does not imply anything about freedom or democracy of anything like that. | 5 |
b1dk73 | Mathematics | How is Pi programmed into calculators? | As most people have said, its either hard coded or estimated using a fraction thats pretty close. HOWEVER, most calculators will also track whats going on with the knowledge that pi is being estimated, so if you do something like 'pi/2' and then take the answer and double it, you get exactly pi rather than some weird approximation. | 16 |
afk38m | Chemistry | What's the difference between shampoos for straight, curly, wavy, etc? Is there really a difference or is it BS? | Followup question; If I have curlyish hair, and i want it to be straighter. Do i get the shampoo that's called "For straight hair", or "For curly hair". The grammar is super ambiguous for me. Ive read the bottles and tried both (and other variations) and I can't work out what would suit me better. | 10 |
as6ggk | Other | Why do professional painters wear white? | It’s similar to nurses. Looks clean and also lets you know where any paint is. Or in the case of a nurse, blood or other human liquids. | 4 |
9lx1zl | Culture | Why does it cost money to get elected to office in the US? | Where do you live that it doesn't cost money? I'm honestly curious. | 5 |
9bn41v | Biology | Why does Down's syndrome give very defining physical characteristics while other genetic disorders don't? | Down syndrome is caused by having an extra 21st chromosome (or a partial 21st chromosome). Many genetic conditions are caused by a mutation in a single protein or protein complex meaning if it were to affect physical appearance then it will usually be minor, but containing an extra chromosome means potentially hundreds of genes that aren't supposed to be there. So down syndrome is more of a chromosomal disorder over regular genetic disorders. Other chromosomal disorders tend to have drastic changes in appearance. | 2 |
5pokog | Technology | How did MS-DOS make Microsoft an OS power house? | I'll have to leave most of your questions to others, but here's the answer to your first one: Microsoft's deal with IBM (to create/supply the operating system for the brand new IBM PC) allowed Microsoft to license the operating system to other computer manufacturers. When the makers of IBM compatible computers started selling their products, they could offer MS-DOS, which helped their computers run the same application programs as the IBM PCs, making the compatible computers more attractive to the market. Microsoft earned license fees from the computers that IBM sold, and also from the ones sold by the other manufacturers. The market for PC computers grew very large. IBM's revenue came from only a part of the market (computers sold by IBM), but Microsoft's revenue came from the entire market (computers sold by all the manufacturers). That was the start of Microsoft becoming a powerhouse. | 3 |
kdziee | Economics | What exactly a "right to work" state is in the U.S and how does it affect workers. | Unions and companies negotiate a contract.The union represents the workers, not only in contact negotiations, but also grievances for violations of the contract. Unions operate by the members paying dues, since some of these dues are given as political contributions, some people think that they shouldn't pay any dues because they don't want to support that political party. Instead of leaving the union, and union contractor, they would just rather not pay for the representation they receive. It weakens the union, it divides the workers. "Right to work" has nothing to do with your rights or ability to work, it's about nullifying agreements between a business and another organization. Once unions start to die, it will make it easier to dismantle laws that protect workers once there is no longer a unified voice. | 5 |
mv6o9o | Other | How can somebody be be convicted of 2nd degree murder, third degree murder, AND manslaughter all for the same crime? | Each charge has a different definition. According to [this article]( URL_0 ), **second-degree murder** is causing the death of a human being, without intent to cause that death, while committing or attempting to commit another felony. The other felony was assault and so Chauvin was found guilty of this definition of the crime. Also, **third-degree murder** is unintentionally causing someone’s death by committing an act that is eminently dangerous to other persons while exhibiting a depraved mind, with reckless disregard for human life. The jury deemed that this definition also fits with what Chauvin did, so the jury found him guilty of that as well. And manslaughter has a separate definition too. And the jury found Chauvin's actions fit that definition too. It's the same crime, but what he did fits the definition for each of those crimes. So he's guilty of all three. Because it's the same crime, he'll serve the sentences *concurrently* rather than *consecutively*. This means "at the same time" instead of "one-after-the-other", so ultimately the harshest crime with the longest sentence is the only one that matters. All of the "lesser" crimes will be swallowed up in the time it takes to serve the harshest penalty. The reason for doing it this way is to "see which charge will stick". For example, suppose the jury had decided what he did was not enough for second-degree murder, but was enough to fit the definition of third-degree murder. In this situation, the jury would've been able to deliver a verdict of *not guilty* on one charge and *guilty* on the other charge. | 3 |
atkqs0 | Physics | When a battery is fully charged, where does the extra energy go? Thank you everyone e! From what I understood, electricity qnd charging is like water and a faucet! | What extra energy? There's no current once the battery is full. | 6 |
ac5mtu | Other | how does Europe and Asia deal with border security with so many countries and boundaries? | There's no real difference between dealing with multiple different countries on your border, and dealing with one long border, so could you explain what specifically you think the difference would be? | 5 |
bnra7b | Biology | How do flying bugs just somehow appear around left out food, almost like the food itself birthed them? | Flies smell rotting organic material (food/animal dead bodies/and animal excrement) are attracted to it by instinct (pre-programmed in their dna - just like you are pre-programmed to like sugary foods). & #x200B; The flies themselves are mature/adults and do not eat, but they lay eggs on or in said rotting food/dead animal/animal pooh. The eggs hatch and their larva (also known as maggots) eat said organic matter and then form a hard shell around them called a pupa, where they metamorphosis (change body type) like butterflies do into flies. & #x200B; They find a mate upon emerging from their pupa and repeat the cycle. & #x200B; If you find flies in your house, they likely came in when you walked in the door, or through a crack in the floor/wall/ceiling/air-duct in their search for a place to lay eggs. | 1 |
b4vf61 | Chemistry | How do hatmakers turn cotton fabric into a semi-rigid, leather-like hat? | *From what I remember so possibly incorrect in details:* Fur-felt is (after being turned, from the finer under-fur, into felt 'sheets' - during which process it hooks together and matts up) extruded (stretched) and dampened and then shrunk and dried into finished form (bit like a banjo vellum). It's at that point quite a dense compacted material. Also from memory - hats can get weird if wet, almost positive non-synthetic modern hats are waterproofed/sprayed. I know there are fixers like a hat-starch. It'd be interesting to see what the knowledgeable answer is to this one, I looked it up once trying to find out what mercury was used for in the hat process, seems it's slightly superfluous. | 5 |
ge1ppa | Technology | How do computers understand programming languages? So I just got into learning JavaScript, and I wanted to know how complex commands are translated into the binary that computers use. Also, how do computers know that a certain string of ons and offs from their transistors mean a certain command, even abstract ones like loops and logic? | ELI5 that concept is challenging. But essentially the Javascript you're writing gets interpreted into another few languages before actually becoming binary code. Binary code is a representation of what is actually occurring in the physical level of your computer. Conversely, the physical component of your computer represent logic structures (if, and, or, etc.) can be translated into binary and move back up through to your Javascript code. This is an odd idea to explain simply to be honest, bit that's the gist of it. I would look into assembly languages of you want to learn more | 4 |
9bzevj | Engineering | How do boat sails work if the wind is going the wrong way? If the wind is going towards you, how are you going forward? It doesn’t seem like a very reliable system, same if there is no wind. | Oh I did this one a while back and found some neat diagrams. Wait a mo: Edit. Damn can't find it and Oh well here's an improv version with not as good diagrams. You can't sail in to the wind but you can sail at 45 degrees to the wind, and use this to zigzag upwind. In fact sailing against or sideways to the wind is faster than sailing with the wind, for reasons we will get into. When you sail with the wind the sail just acts as a bag pulling you forwards, but sail in any other direction and it acts more like an aircraft wing. The curved shape of the sail creates "lift" except because the sail is vertical not horizontal that "lift" is pushing you. [Like this]( URL_0 ) But that doesn't push you forwards, it pushes you sideways. But you've got a keel (to go upwind you need a big keel) and the keel pushes against the water and the water pushes you back, and that stops you from going sideways, so instead that water preventing you from going sideways turns that sideways motion into forward motion. [Like this]( URL_1 ) And it can do it faster than the bag effect can. Say you are going with the wind you can only go as fast as the wind goes. But if you're going against the wind you create your own wind by moving and so the "apparent wind" for you is stronger than the actual wind (because you're making your own wind) and so you can go as fast as *that* which is faster. | 4 |
mh9tco | Biology | Why do our bodies/ every living things body need water to survive? I understand that we need for to survive since we break down the nutrients inside for energy, but the use of water confuses me | Virtually all the chemical reactions in our bodies happen "in solution"...the chemicals are dissolved, or at least free floating, in a fluid. For humans (and all other forms of life we know about), that fluid is water. Water is what lets the molecules that "make us go" move around and interact with each other. Without water we're a pile of non-reacting chemicals. Try baking a cake without the wet ingredients and you kind of get the idea. We lose water to our environment constantly, since we're way wetter than our surroundings and we use some of it to carry waste out of our bodies, so we have to keep replacing it or we shut down and die. | 2 |
9ta3ob | Technology | Why do 4k videos look cleaner on a 1080p panel than 1080p videos? | Video typically uses lossy compression which means, you throw away data about pixels. 100% lossless compression is possible, but it would result in massive video files. For lossy compression, you set up some target of how many bits you want to use, on average, per one second of video. To achieve good compression, this is usually set to far less than the number of bits required to describe every pixel perfectly for every frame. So basically, your compression algorithm will throw away pixel data, but in a way that's not easy to notice. For 4k video, you throw out less pixel data because for higher resolution, this data is less of a waste. Like, you wouldn't want 320p video and 1080p video to use similar amount of data to describe each second of video, right? If you have 1080 video, you expect more clarity in image, ability to better resolve and see details. The same with 4k, you expect more details. So basically, if you look closely, you can see the effects of higher bit rate. More data to better describe what color each pixel should be. The effect should be quite small, but if you can't see any difference, then probably for most purposes you could have compressed the file into way smaller size without people noticing, which for say, streaming video sites would mean totally unnecessary web traffic and bandwidth requirements. | 3 |
i9da33 | Engineering | Why aren’t car tires just made out of solid rubber instead of filling them with air? | 1. Because rubber is expensive and it would cost more. 2. Because solid rubber is waaayyyyyy more rigid than air. Sure something like a rubber bouncy ball might bounce, but trying just squeezing it in your hand and see how much it gives. You’ll find that although it squished a little bit it’s actually pretty hard. You don’t want this hardened sin your tires, you want some of the soft cushion that air provides to smooth out the drive over bumps and cracks in the road. | 3 |
6egy0f | Biology | How is high salt intake "bad for you" if the Japanese eat so much of it and have the life expectancy they do? | It isn't, unless you have an existing heart condition. High-salt meals cause a short-term rise in blood pressure. For much of the late 20th century it was believed that long-term salt intake caused chronic high blood pressure. Chronic high blood pressure is known to cause health problems. But research in the last few years is showing that the link between salt intake and chronic high blood pressure was mistaken. If you have heart problems, the short-term increase in BP can cause complications. But if you don't, there's nothing wrong with a high salt intake. | 2 |
7u54ck | Engineering | I’m lying on the couch and staring at the ceiling right now. Why is the ceiling bumpy as if there were tiny rocks embedded in the paint? How do they get the paint to be so bumpy like that? Is there a benefit from having it like this. | Oh god, textured ceilings. I remember those when I was a kid. They must have been all the rage in the 80s because every house in my development had them. I would always accidentally scrape my knuckles on that shit where the ceiling was lower due to the stairs above it. | 4 |
5xoii0 | Biology | Why do we have an emotional reaction to music? | Wow, I wasn't expecting this thread to be so popular. This is the first time one of my posts has reached the #1 spot on a subreddit. Thanks everyone! | 20 |
70tjzg | Culture | Why was Charlie Brown, a comic strip essentially about a depressed and abused child, so successful? | Depressed, yeah I am onboard with that. Abused? How so? | 26 |
nxnh5u | Physics | How is the newer cars are more fragile during an accident but are more safe for the passengers | They design them to be. Cars nowadays are designed to destroy themselves to take the brunt of the damage. The thinking (and rightly so) is a human is worth a lot more than a car. Seems kindof simple, but in the 50s and 60s, even though every car designer would have agreed with that sentiment, the knowledge on how to do that simply (so it could be made well but cheaply) and safely just didn't exist. I mean the solution back then for an uber survivable car before lapbelts then Volvo's 3 pt seatbelt, then airbags in the 80s would have been to fill the inside of the car with foam or wrap the passengers with bubblewrap. And not that the concept of crumple zones didn't exist.. its just it took a lot of experimentation (build and test) on how to fold, bend and cut metal so that when it received a great impact force, it would warp and deform in a way to send the force away from the passengers. With the advent of computer modelling this got a LOT easier to model, thus a lot cheaper. Also more energy absorbing materials (i.e. plastics, foams etc.) became feasible. The old cars from the 50s and 60s are like giant rigid metal tanks; the most deformable part is the big void in the middle where the squishy humans live. Modern cars, the strongest part of the car is the safety cage with the squish humans - the rest of the car throws itself literally under the bus to sacrifice the humans. Yay car. | 5 |
ai53ql | Biology | Why has the average height of humans drastically increased over the past 100 years? How tall will humans be in 100 years? What about the year 3000? Is there a height that our bodies will definitely cap out at? | If you live in a first world country with a good social net or at least are born to rich and caring parents, once you reach adulthood you are about as tall as you ever could possibly get. There are two things that influence how tall you might get: genetics and environmental factors. Genetics are what you inherit from your parents and they only change with evolution and very slowly at that. A century is nothing on that timescale. Environmental factors come in many different forms but the most important ones are getting enough and the right sort of food early in life. Childhood nutrition is where the biggest difference come from. Your DNA doesn't just contain a single blueprint to build a human body, it actually is a compilation of alternative plans and contingencies and plan Bs around a single main plan. In the case that the growing human doesn't get enough and the right sort of food it falls back on contingencies that are helpful during famines and similar: Build a more compact version of the human. Don't be the best human you could be, just make sure the human survives long enough to have kids. maybe the next generation will be better off. This way if a small kid doesn't get to eat properly often enough the resulting adult will be smaller, which means they would get by with less food as an adult too. There are other ways this economy version human is not all it could be, most worryingly among them it also includes a lower IQ (we use up a lot of resources to keep our big brains going normally). It is not a binary thing were you either get the short human or the one that is as tall as its genetics allow, but rather a bit of a gradual thing, depending on how severe certain environmental factors are. You can see the effect in statistics like Chinese people on average now being 10 cm taller than they were a century ago, just because malnutrition is much less of a problem today and people that used to be considered stereotypical short are now considered stereotypically tall at least amongst other Asian people. Similarly North and South Korean which are pretty much from the same genetic stock have considerable difference in hight, simply because North Korea is not an especially good place to get enough food, while south Korea has become relatively wealthy over the last few decades (older generations still bear the scars of earlier times though when food wasn't always plenty there either). You can also see it among immigrant families from relatively poor countries to relatively wealthy ones, were the first generation to come to the new country may be relatively short but their children and grandchildren easily surpass them in hight. This getting taller however is not an endless process. It just means that people around the world are just reaching their full potential height-wise. People in western Europe probably are now about as tall as they are every going to get. The average around the world will go up as people all over reach their genetic max height in future generations and all over the place older people who live through wars and bad times as kids and are shorter than they could have been are slowly dying off. As peace and prosperity slowly spreads across the globe, average human height will increase, asymptotically to the max genetic height the people can have. So if everything goes well a hundred years from now we will see a further increase in human height, but it will be along the lines of everyone reaching there max potential not simply everyone growing taller endlessly. Once everyone is as tall as they could get we won't see any more drastic increases. So short of genetic engineering and similar the year 3000 will not have people be noticeably taller than the year 2119 (if everything goes well). | 14 |
a57xfy | Other | Why can’t hockey teams just use a morbidly obese person— someone whose body blocks most of the net— as goalie? | The goals are far too big for any one person to block them. Much better to have a goalie who's agile enough to move around and block the puck whatever it's coming from. | 6 |
gxxbgu | Technology | How does restricting password length or repeating characters make a password more secure? If it doesn't, why do some companies enforce it? | They want to prevent people from using "a" as their password, so they implement a minimum length. They want to prevent people from using "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" as their password, so they implement a restriction on repeating characters. For maximum password lengths, no idea. Either they are stupidly storing passwords in plain text (and the database field has a certain max length), or maybe they just want to prevent people from using an absurdly long password like copying an entire novel into the password field. | 5 |
a0pn07 | Chemistry | With all the forest fires recently in the world, how are forest fires traced back to the original starting point? Thanks in advance. | Mostly satellite replay. It’s very interesting what they do, my father is a fire inspector and in 2016 they shipped him out to Fort McMurry (A forest fire wiped their town). It’s different for houses, that’s what he mainly gets jobs at in our small town. | 4 |
5pdva0 | Economics | How come the US spends a higher percentage (25%) of its budget on healthcare than the UK (18%) even though it doesn't provide free healthcare like the UK does? Where is all the money going in the US? I was under the impression that healthcare in the US was mainly private, so how come the UK provides much more comprehensive care for a smaller proportion of its expenditure? URL_1 URL_0 | It's worth noting that you made a small mistake. The U.S. government does not spend 25% of it's budget on healthcare. The wiki link says it's 25% of *mandatory spending*. That is only part of our budget. > Major categories of FY 2014 mandatory spending included: > ... **Healthcare such as Medicare and Medicaid ($831B or 24%)**, ...As a share of federal budget, mandatory spending has increased over time.[11] **Mandatory spending accounted for 53% of total federal outlays in FY2008** We do spend more as a country per capita, but as you noted, that's if you look at total spending (ie, public and private) > According to this the US spends $9451 per capita and the UK spends just $4003 per capita which is massively less. Be very careful, if you're asking about per capita, or government spending. I'm going to assume you meant total spending: We do tend to spend more per capita (~1.5-2x as much), but much of that is private spending. There's a couple reasons for that. A big one is that we do not have a single payer system. Your government has the power to negotiate lower prices as a group (and they can say no to treatments). Individual insurance companies do something similar, but scale is huge in how much negotiating power you have. Having most of the healthcare system as your bargaining chip allows you to achieve scale we simply don't have here. On top of that, the government has a lot better knowledge of what procedures cost (it's hard to price compare as a consumer). A smaller reason is patents. U.S. patent law is fairly strict and long, which allows blockbuster drugs to maintain amazing profit margins. The vast majority of healthcare spending tends to happen with a few sick people. I don't remember the exact quote, but it's something like half of all spending comes from the sickest 10%, and half of that is the sickest 1%. So patents on specialized drugs cause ballooning costs. It's not uncommon for say, certain cancer drugs that extend life for a few months to cost thousands of dollars. People in the below comments mentioned health insurance, but by far the biggest cost come from healthcare providers (hospitals, drug makers etc) | 8 |
fj72gz | Biology | What’s the likeliest scenario for rarely flossing your teeth? | Likeliest scenario assuming you regularly brush, brush effectively, and have no dental imperfections where toothbrushes cannot reach, absolutely nothing. The entire necessity of flossing is being heavily questioned, and some argue it's more detrimental than beneficial. Sure, flossing on a case by case basis is good, with the cases being food actually stuck and cannot be removed. But otherwise it can damage gums as it's hard to do it properly without going too far. | 2 |
6g0a40 | Biology | What advantages did modern humans have over other animals, other than intelligence? People often seem to think that our brains was what put on us on the top of the food chain, but I find that was not enough in the earliest start of our species. I do hear once in a while that humans have a crazy stamina compared to most of animals, but I do not know anything substantial. So what advantages does our human biology offer other than the intelligence that made us stand out in the cruel place called nature? | When I took undergrad evolution we discussed a few things human do especially well: 1. Heat regulation. With adequate water, we're especially good at surviving in the heat. Lions, for example, can only exert themselves for a short time in the heat (think 90 F+), whereas humans can run for hours. This isn't a minor difference, either. Humans are the best large land mammal in the heat. No other large animal can operate at high exertion for hours like us. 2. Musculature. We're not the strongest at lifting things but we are good at throwing things. No other animal can accelerate things to the speeds we can. An average human can throw a rock over 70 mph. 3. Neural plasticity. This is obviously related to intelligence, but it's a nuance. Most animals could be described as more instinctual. Humans are born as blank slates. This makes our offspring particularly vulnerable, and have the longest development time of any species. However, it allows us to be highly adaptable. 4. Selective breeding. Human females have hidden ovulation. Most animals can tell when their females are ready to breed, but humans cannot as much. This allows women to choose advantageous times to breed. Ancient human women may have been less willing to mate in times of food scarcity or disaster. This is also related to intelligence, since it requires intelligent choice. Most animals are less able to make these choices, and will mate even when it's a bad idea to do so. | 8 |
8huf2s | Other | Why Germany had enough resources and manpower to start WW2,despite losing in WW1 just 20 years before? | Well, starting a war requires significantly less resources than actually winning a war. Also it should be noted that the Germany Army is often wrongly portrayed in popular fiction as this high tech behemoth, which it not really ever was. E.g., at the start of WW2, basically all German Artillery was still horse drawn, since Germany lacked motorized transport (and oil, ofc). Germany at no time in war had a surface Navy which could really challenge the Royal Navy. Most of the tanks Germany entered the war with were seriously inferior to the opposition they faced (both in France and in later in Russia). | 17 |
fzltru | Other | How are public opinion polls kept unbiased despite people who are unwilling to participate? Edit: nonresponse bias | In theory, you weight different demographics to adjust for reporting rates based on historical norms. In practice, this is difficult to pull off because those historical norms are themselves subject to bias. Ultimately, you need some sort of ground truth to compare against. So let's say you're polling on whether the new Kanye West album or the new Taylor Swift album will sell better. You poll a large number of random people and then look at the demographic characteristics of each person polled. If you're polling too many people who look demographically like Kanye West fans, then you weight their responses less than you would those who look demographically like Taylor Swift fans. Then both albums are released and you receive your ground truth - the actual number of albums sold. Based on this, you adjust your weights for the next time. However, not only is there a reasonable chance that relevant factors shift in-between these adjustments, but there is always bias introduced based on the fact that someone is paying for the poll - and their dedication to the accuracy of that poll is often less than their dedication to that poll confirming their biases. | 2 |
c43ook | Other | r/RoastMe | From what I've seen, there are two types of people requesting to be roasted: * Those who want a laugh and are willing to have one at their own expense. * Those who think they are "roast-proof" (these people are nearly always wrong). | 1 |
7n8l3h | Physics | Why are there areas of turbulence in a flight and other areas without, even if it is at an altitude above the clouds? | Turbulence is essentially rapid changes in the motion of air around a plane. Close to the ground it can be caused by the air being slowed down by friction, or being diverted around buildings or mountains. Under clouds it's usually because of hot air rising and cold air sinking next to each other, so a plane goes quickly from going up to going down. At high altitude you can get "clear air turbulence", which is dangerous because it's hard to detect and predict. Sometimes you find it at the edge of jet streams, where very fast-moving air meets relatively slow moving air. When a plane moves from fast air into slow air, the air moving over the wings slows down, so the wings produce less lift. That's when you get the horrible dropping feeling! | 2 |
6cnmqw | Biology | Are birds reptiles? | I'll take a swipe at this. Within the vertebrate phylogeny (check out this one: URL_0 ), birds (class: Aves) are sister to the crocodilians (class: Crocodilia). Here's the issue with classifying birds as a separate "thing" than a reptile: if you look at the other groups of reptiles (Turts, Lizards, Snakes, Crocs), the grouping of these vertebrates becomes paraphyletic. Paraphyletic is a description of a group that includes *not all* descendants of one common ancestor, because looking at this phylogeny, birds most definitely descended from the common ancestor of "Reptilia". When naming things in biology (a field called Taxonomy), biologists don't like to name something that isn't derived from a monophyletic group, which is a group containing all descendents of ONE common ancestor. Reptilia is only monophyletic if birds are included. In an evolutionary sense, yes, birds are reptiles. HOWEVER! Birds have a ridiculous amount of bird-specific traits (synapomorphies) that lead them to be treated differently than your classical reptiles in things like comparative studies. All of this hinges on your definition of a reptile. If you take the definition of a reptile to be "anything that descended from the class 'Reptilia', then birds are reptiles. If you don't take this definition, you're phylogenetically inaccurate, but nobody is going to really care because at the end of the day birds are rad diverse and do special things with respect to their biology that other 'Reptiles' don't do. TL;DR. Evolutionarily, birds are reptiles. But birds be crazy with the shit they do that people don't like to call 'em reptiles. | 5 |
6vbdts | Chemistry | What is it about Johnson & Johnson's baby powder that could cause ovarian cancer? Considering the decision today that J & J has to pay a massive fine to claimants regarding their baby powder reportedly causing ovarian cancer, I'm unsure about the science behind the claim. What's in talc powder that could be risky? Are the same risks concerning men who use the powder to dry their groin area? Thanks! | I am not extensively familiar with this particular court case, but be weary of results from lawsuits. Civil cases are decided by the jury or the judge based on the arguments they hear in the courtroom, which can result in ridiculous conclusions. Court cases [have "ruled" that vaccines cause autism]( URL_2 ), decided on [the cause of a plane crash and who was at fault]( URL_1 ) many years after the [actual investigation and report drew a completely different conclusion]( URL_0 ), and countless other settlements that contradicted actual facts. The point is that the ruling of the talc powder case, whether or not it is correct, is not a scientific conclusion. | 20 |
kxlhjr | Technology | Why do some LEDs still glow after turning them off? I got some multicolor LED strips in my room and when I use the remote to shut them off for the night, a few of them still glow. Why does this happen? | The ELI5 explanation is: bad design. There is enough leaked current from whatever the are using to control the current (triac/transistor/SCR) that feeds the LEDs. There are ways to fix it | 1 |
iru7r5 | Other | Why are basements not a thing in Asian countries? | Very few basements in California. When I moved to the East coast and our place had a basement, I was excited. It would be like kids in books... Then I got there and saw the basement. Big letdown. | 8 |
f5scqp | Engineering | Why can we not build a machine to go to the very bottom of the ocean but we can land on the moon? | It's easier to keep 1 atmosphere pressure in than it is to keep many atmospheric pressures out. This is basically it. At the bottom of the ocean you can get up to hundreds of times the normal atmospheric pressure (google says up to 300 times the pressure at sea level) , pressing in on a craft. In space you got 1 atmospheric pressure pushing out. Granted its against 0 resistance but still a fraction of what a sub faces at those depths. | 7 |
keimvh | Biology | why do humans kiss, hug, hold hands or love to come in touch with other humans? | First, this isn't just humans but most mammals (and frankly a lot of other animals) that enjoy physical contact. I'm not aware of the neural chemistry behind it, but essentially it takes a lot of trust to make physical contact with another living thing. Sustained contact means you're probably with a trusted ally and therefore safer than if you were alone. Humans are pack animals; we evolved to work together and have friends. | 1 |
5zi5o8 | Other | What is the red pill? | This is the type of question that is probably better in r/OutOfTheLoop than r/explainlikeimfive [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) | 3 |
kmt1lq | Other | Why do we make road markings white, even in areas that get heavy snow? This has always bothered me. Why do they continue to make most road markings white, when they are almost impossible to see in any kind of snow? | Mainly because white marks are the easiest to see against the black of the asphalt, even under a layer of snow. White is also a supercheap pigment, so it's economical to use on roads. | 2 |
jb28ch | Biology | What process in our brain makes something "cute" and something else "ugly"? | Someone else already mentioned the baby aka "super deformed" preference our brains have. Another preference our brains have is for symmetry. We naturally find symmetry beautiful especially in faces. If someone's face lacked symmetry due to scarring or a deformity, our brain tells us that's ugly. This is why typically villians and monsters in horror movies especially have facial deformities. It's to get us to innately see them as ugly. | 2 |
icvcfi | Physics | - Why do flies not die when you smack them? I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. Why do flies not die instantly when you smack them out of mid air? I’ve been thinking about the relative size and speed of a hand, and I just don’t understand how they don’t die! | There are 2 few reasons. First of all, the power of your hand is divided by its surface, when you slap a fly, it only takes the amount of force you have in the section of your hand in contact with them (so less than a squared centimeter). Their body is basically an armour, so the shock is also shared on their whole exoskeleton. And finally,the wind of your hand will move them backward, so it already reduce the shock. | 1 |
6pw4sg | Technology | Can anyone explain awful dubbing on TV ads? I've noticed that here in the UK some adverts have English actors doing the voice work, but the dubbing is terrible! | It's cheaper to poorly dub a foreign ad than to remake it from scratch. If you're talking about ads where it's clear they're speaking English but it's still dubbed, that's because they try have more local accents. It's easier to sell a product to a Brit if it's a Brit telling them to buy it and not an American. Usually it's just cheaper and easier to do one quick recording than try match it up properly. | 1 |
74emn5 | Engineering | Every month there’s a new micro SD card with more space than the last. We’re fitting gigs of data when a decade ago we could only fit megabytes. But what’s the theoretical limit of how much data we can store in a micro SD card? How can we keep fitting more data in smaller spaces? | [This]( URL_0 ) video from SciShow explains it pretty well. | 5 |
7mu4pl | Chemistry | would sodium chloride gas conduct electricity? | Compounds only ionize when they're forced to. Compare waters polar properties when it interacts with NaCl with NaCl in a vacuum. The NaCl in a vacuum will stay together as a compound and the NaCl in water will have solvation effects (it will be surrounded and ionized). Inside ambient air, its the middle ground, with it only ionizing on the very rare collision with multiple molecules of water. Chlorine gas (Cl_2) has a mediocre ability to conduct electricity. One chlorine is contently bonded to another chlorine, allowing for electron movement through an electrical emission. Chlorine gas also sees its molecules being very far apart from each other, so its ability to conduct electricity depends on a bit of physics (luck) and a bit of estimation due to the ideal gas equation. It does not have the capacity of freely moving electrons like metals do, and so it would not be too good at conduction. | 2 |
97sfyo | Engineering | Why does the brake pedal seem to stiffen up if the car is off, but then go back to normal the second the car is turned on? | Power brakes are assisted with vacuum pressure either generated by the intake manifold (gas) or a pump (diesel). You usually get 2 to 3 presses of the brake pedal before all the pressure is released. If the engine is running, the pressure gets restored, otherwise it doesn't and the pedal gets still. | 3 |
87nbht | Other | Why does the moon look so much smaller when you try to take a photo on your phone? | Next time you go outside and look at the moon, keep looking at it but take a second to become aware of your peripheral vision. Look how much of the sky and the ground your eyes are actually taking in. When you go look at the moon, you're focusing on it and ignoring all of the sights in your periphery. That's a trick your brain can do. Cameras can't, though -- the camera picks up all of that peripheral information and includes it 1:1 with the part you care about. | 1 |
al2ry1 | Technology | Why can torrent downloads resume themselves from their last (download) status even if the (net) connection is lost but browser downloads just get corrupted/lost if the connection is lost halfway through? | Lots of incorrect answers here. TL/DR **Bad programmers and greedy server owners that push ads are the reason, there is no technical reason for it.** The simplest answer is that most modern browsers could resume download but the servers break it on purpose/due to a poor design. How downloading torrent works: * your client program get a list of small file fragments (chunks) with information necessary to check if they're good (checksums) * your client program get a list of peers (essentially serving for you as servers) you can download those chunks from * your client starts downloading e.g. 10 of those fragments at once from multiple peers * if one fragment finishes next one is started * if downloading of fragment fails (broken connection, incorrect data) it is retried, often from a different peer How downloading files from browser should work: * you have an URL (link) to a file - it contains server address and path to that file on the server * browser asks for a file, server responds with a size and starts sending data * the way data is sent makes sure it doesn't get damaged in transit, but connection may get broken * if the connection gets broken the browser will (sometimes you need to click "resume") ask the server for that file starting from the position the transfer was cut - so if 20MB was saved and file was 50MB only the remaining 30MB needs to be downloaded What can go wrong: * the server can skip sending the size of the file and instead tell the browser - here you will get the data in small chunks - it was designed so it would be possible to send a file that is generated and you don;'t know the size. E.g. when the server compresses some data and sends it to you. Some bad coders use this method to send also normal files for which size is know, and if the connection gets broken the browser has no way of knowing if it got everything * the server may ignore that the browser requested the file starting from 20MB and start from the beginning * the server may have crashed and while it will restart itself soon it will first break the connection and when browser retries it will say that it doesn't have more data, or that it doesn;t have the file at all, or that the access to the file was denied - so the browser won't be able to resume * the server owner serves ads and don't want people to be just able to access the file directly. So when you click on link you get to download page with ads and click "download" button - then you get redirected to a temporary link that is valid for e.g. 5 minutes. When connection gets broken and your browser tries to retry it is expired and server says that the file no longer exists. Technically all the programmer would need to do was ensure that the link remains valid for the next 5 minutes if the file is being downloaded in case of broken connection. But they're lazy, don't care or want to serve more ads. | 9 |
dw27ln | Other | How does snow work? Are there places where it snows once and it doesnt melt nor does it snow again until 1-2 weeks later? Or more? | It's not that it's not cold enough to snow. Snow is just like rain. But colder. It can be cold but not snow, the same way it doesnt rain for long periods of time. It is common to see the same snow for a week or more. It doesnt stay fluffy though, it develops this hard layer at the top. But if you punch or stomp through that layer its preserved fresh snow under that. Snow is also a great insulator. Igloos as well as various snow huts are used in extreme climates and you can actually stay warm in them. | 2 |
j2kt3d | Technology | How do fitness trackers know that you actually sleeping but not just laying there resting, being awake ? Edit: Thanks for all the answers and the awards, I’m shook | They don't, they just make educated guesses. When you sleep, you heartbeat slows down and your body is more still than when you are awake. Even if you do move around when sleeping, you will be in one set location while when you are awake, you are more likely to be moving around the area. So what they do is see how still you are, how far you have moved and how much your heartbeat has slowed down compared to your regular heartbeat. I quite often spend my evenings in bed just watching movies or YouTube videos. My tracker will estimate that I was sleeping from 8-9pm while in reality, I didn't actually go to sleep until midnight. But that's because I settle in and don't move much which also slows my heartbeat. | 23 |
k10qe2 | Biology | Why is unhealthy posture so much more comfortable? | Because it takes energy to use your stabiliser muscles. For example when we sit and relax our core muscles, our weight gets supported by the skeleton, not the stabiliser muscles | 4 |
92b22f | Technology | How does internet work? | Most of the Internet is not wireless. The only wireless bits are usually the wifi in your home/office/coffee shop or the connection between your phone and the nearest cell tower. All the connections in the middle use wires. Even between continents there are giant cables that run across the sea bed. The whole thing is a network of networks. You have a network in your home, your devices connect to a router either via wifi or ethernet cables. The router is a device which literally routes messages. It knows which wire (or wireless link) to send messages down to get them towards their intended destination. Your router connects to your ISP. Your ISP has a network which is much more complex than your home one, but it's the same basic principle. They have routers connected to their customer's homes which know where to send messages. Your ISP connects to a bigger ISP, allowing you to communicate with people using other ISPs. That ISP connects to an even bigger one. These ISPs are the companies that manage the Internet "backbone". That includes the giant cables that run across or even between countries and continents. Those top tier ISPs have connections to each other, allowing anyone connected to any of them to exchange messages. | 3 |
cfxk24 | Biology | What determines your body’s ability to fall asleep easily? Why is there a wide range in comparison to others? | Because there's a wide range of things that need to fall in line for you to fall asleep. The brain needs to allow you to sleep. But in order for it to issue that "sleep" command, it needs to have its physiological, psychological, and hormonal requirements met. Think about your car. You put the key in and turn it. Will it start? Well, that depends… 1. Physiological: Do you have a working starter? Engine? Fuel pump? Spark plugs? And everything else that is needed to turn the engine? 1. Psychological: Do you have the minimally required charge in your battery to power all the electronics, including the control units? 2. Hormonal: Do you have enough gas in the tank to actually start the engine and keep it in that state? All of these must be satisfied, before your brain will initiate the "fall asleep" sequence. | 2 |
ffcreh | Technology | Why is that in some animation styles things that are animated are brighter than the static background? As an example here's a clip. URL_0 At 20s you can clearly see what the background is and what are all the animated bits. | Oh I can begin an answer to this. In traditional hand animation, backgrounds are usually painted or drawn with a greater level of detail, because they presumably only need to be painted or drawn one time. The background is a separate piece of art than the character models. Characters, prop, and other moving items are drawn multiple times on multiple cellulose sheets, refered to as "animation cels", that are laid on top of the background image to provide a foreground. These cels may appear brighter because they sometimes lack the fine detail of the background, a static image. It's much simpler to draw the same character multiple times, so they tend to look simpler, with simpler brighter colors. | 2 |
8bowuv | Chemistry | Why does gum lose it's taste after chewing it for a while? | A big part of the flavour of gum is provided by sugar or some other sweetener, which gets absorbed by your saliva so it disapears from the gum. Also there is the brain. the brain is always looking for changes, in the input. Something that was tasted and deemed "safe" becomes less important so after a while the brain stops or decreases the amount of "taste" If you were to give a chewed gum to somebody else, they would experience more taste than you do at that moment. | 1 |
5yry50 | Biology | Why do you get better for a few days after receiving a fatal dose of radiation? An excerpt from this excellent collection of photos: URL_0 "Once exposed, nausea and vomiting will begin almost immediately, and within a short space of time your tongue and eyes will swell, followed by the rest of your body. You’ll feel weakened, as if the strength has been drained from you. If you’ve received a high dose of direct exposure - as in this scenario - your skin will blanche dark red within moments, a phenomenon often called nuclear sunburn. An hour or two after exposure, you’ll gain a pounding headache, a fever and diarrhoea, after which you’ll go into shock and pass out. After this initial bout of symptoms, **there’s often a latent period during which you’ll start to feel like you’re recovering**. The nausea will recede, along with some swelling, though other symptoms will remain. This latent period varies in duration from case to case, and of course it depends on the dose, but it can last a few days. It’s cruel because it gives you hope, only to then get much, much worse. The vomiting and diarrhoea will return, along with delirium. An unstoppable, excruciating pain seethes through your body, from the skin down to your bones, and you’ll bleed from your nose, mouth and rectum. Your hair will fall out; your skin will tear easily, crack and blister, and then slowly turn black." | Why does vomiting occur almost instantly after exposure? (To an emetophobe like me, this and Ebola are my two greatest fears in life.) | 18 |
lbjmld | Technology | What's the objective difference between a 'horror', 'thriller', 'phycological thriller', 'physcological horror' and 'physcological drama'. I can't keep up with all these film sub-genres. What's the difference between them? Or is best to think of the genres existing on a spectrum? Black Swan for instance is labelled as a phycological drama, but felt more like horror to me | The way I look at it Horror : basic hack and slash movies, blood/guts/gore “Friday the 13th” Thrillers : Not that scary/gruesome, but has “creepy” things such as “Bird Box” Psychological thrillers : same as above most most of the movie revolves around tricking your mind such as “Get Out” Psychological horror: mainly focuses on mind games and whatnot to disturb viewers as much as possible such as “The Grudge” | 1 |
bjhg0x | Other | How is it that during the night every activity we make appears to be louder than during the day? | As someone who works nights and sleeps during the day I can assure you that daytime noises are just as loud as those in the night. | 9 |
o7hx4p | Other | can a company claim they're discontinuing a product as a marketing ploy (to sell more product)? I'm writing from New Zealand where the much beloved Pods confectionery from Mars is being discontinued. This has caused an outcry from pod enthusiast and also resparked the age-old debate of which flavour is better (its snickers don't at me). It also got me thinking - can Mars just start selling pods again, saying that they couldn't do this to their loyal patrons? Is this legal?? Im real high btw | As I understand it, it could he classed as a form of false advertising but is unlikely to be punished in any meaningful way - maybe a fine based on a portion of the profits. Companies fake scarcity all the time though, think of any seasonal product. It would be "bad" and mire likely to be punished severely if they increased the cost because of scarcity / limitited stock, but then just made more anyway. | 4 |
6z8xxc | Other | Why would Samsung let Apple use their OLED displays for their next Iphone? Wouldn't that be kind of risky for Samsung to let Apple use their technology since they are rivals? | Samsung there business group that sells manufactured phones is a rival for Apple. Samsung the business group or groups that manufacture parts are not. As an entire company, Samsung is probably better having add many phones as they can in the world using their parts, regardless of how slaps there phone together. | 3 |
aa66d2 | Chemistry | What happened over Queens, NY | It was an electrical fire, but it was a huge electric event. Electricity is blue/white/purple depending on the situation. What you saw was the electricity at the source, the plant, and transformers potentially, going off. This would look like electricity, not fire, at that time. Sound carries at hundreds of miles per hour. The event lasted for quite some time, though. So the sound kept happening. In our sockets, they’d flash and die out. This is due to circuits and breakers that stop overloads. A power plant has those too, but they’re meant to stop the start of it. When a plant goes wrong, everything goes wrong. It’s like your toaster misfired, which caused the fridge to misfire, then the oven, then the microwave, and finally the coffee pot. The plant is huge, so parts going wrong take longer to burn out, and there are lots of parts to go wrong. ELI5 Imagine that you have a static shock from touching a door handle. It’s like when you rub a balloon or blanket and then touch someone. It’s generally white or blue. Now imagine that you’re rubbing that blanket or balloon *really* fast, and touching everything metal. An electric power plant is doing that too, but so fast that you’d be the Flash superhero. When things go wrong, it’s like The Flash tripped. He’s going a long way for quite a while. He can’t stop quickly at those speeds! | 1 |
6x9enr | Economics | - Here in Dallas/Ft Worth all of our gas stations are running out of fuel and panic and worry is already setting in. If our nation has a huge stockpile that thy already want to reduce, why can't it be tapped into enough to help the region? I read the news this morning that they did tap into it but it was only half a million out of the 727 million we have in reserve. Is half a million substantial enough to fuel an entire region until the industry can get back online or am I missing something? It just seems like very little. | The Strategic Petroleum Reserve stores unrefined fuels, not the refined gasoline like you get at the gas station. For it to be useful, it would need to go to a refinery to turn it into gasoline. And the problem we have right now is that many refineries are shut down right now. So, increasing the supply of crude doesn't help the situation. | 3 |
5oovcl | Biology | Why sometimes people have a single hiccup and at other times a never-ending series of hiccups? | I'm not a scientist but what I do know is that it has to do with what the hiccup is actually trying to do, if it can't do (insert what it does) it will keep trying. Wish I was that preserving lol | 3 |
a1vs8s | Biology | How do animals with white fur manage to keep it clean all the time, even after killing a animal and getting covered with its blood. Usually white is the hardest coulor to keep clean as it stains easily. | Wild predators are not cotton tee shirts. Their saliva contains enzymes which begin the digestion process by...ugh! White kitty lick off blood. | 13 |
6sgeu9 | Technology | How does my phone never "freeze" while my computer "freezes" on a consistent basis? | Well, theres a few factors here. 1)Phones are pretty closed off from the outside- There are very few internet auto-downloaders, popups, etc. that function on phone browsers, unlike on computer browsers. Apps available for download are all (mostly) examined and approved before becoming available for public download. These both yield a much safer environment for your phone than the computer. 2)Computers have a lot of moving parts, where phones do not. PCs operate on a hard disc, which is like a stack of CDs with record-player needles reading and writing to them. The hard disc, both the needles and the discs can degrade or break over time. Phones operate with non-moving parts, with virtual storage like a USB flash drive, and are less likely to degrade. 3)Phones are often traded in and replaced far more often that computers are, giving you a new, fresh, well-functioning device ever year or three. 4)Phone operating systems are compact and concise, and automatic updates are usually impossible to avoid. Computer operating systems are very broad, and as programs are installed and uninstalled over and over, it can bog down the computer's registry. (The registry is like the map of all the files, what they can do, where to find them, and how they may do things) Sometimes deleting programs without properly uninstalling them can cause issues. Computer freezes can be the result of many things, and these things are often impossible to do on a phone in the first place. | 2 |
6cmt8c | Technology | Whats the difference in the manufacturing process of 30$ and 300$ headphones They both are headphones, they both make sound. why the price difference? | What you're paying for is the quality of the design, the quality of materials that would make the headphones more rugged and less likely to break under stress, the testing to make sure the headphones perform as designed, and the speed and efficiency of the manufacturing process (mass produced = less cost). For a quality comparison, look at the difference between a pair of Grado [eGrado headphones]( URL_2 ) and a pair of Grado's handmade [Heritage Series GH2 headphones]( URL_1 ). From the design you can tell that one is made to be lightweight & portable, while the other is made of high quality materials like exotic rainforest wood designed to give the headphones a more warmer tonal quality. The lower end headphone drivers are matched a 1db while the GH2s are matched at .5 db, so this shows more work was done to [ensure the drivers match,]( URL_3 ) so at higher volumes the headphones deliver a more balanced sound. While the [frequency response]( URL_0 ) of the low-end headphones is standard 20-20k Hz, the GH2s show to perform at a lower bass frequency and a higher treble frequency (14-28K Hz), which is debatable as to whether you can actually hear frequencies in those ranges. So are the $650 headphones "better" than the $50 ones? In terms of materials used in construction,design & durability, yes. More testing done to ensure a quality product out of the box seems evident, one is far more stylish while the other is more functional... overall they're going to perform about the same for the average listener. | 2 |
bx1otq | Physics | Why do people tell you to turn off your phones when you're experiencing a thunderstorm? Do phones actually affect the possibility of getting struck by lightning? | Old wives tale, or new wives tale. Either way it doesn't affect the possibility of getting struck by lightning. & #x200B; Lightning is formed by ionized particles in the clouds moving to the bottom of the cloud and opposite ionized particles in the soil moving to the top of the soil. The general rule of thumb is that lightning strikes at higher elevations. So rooftops, trees, big metal objects. So if you're up on top of a hill in a plain/mostly flat area, and you're the tallest object around, you're the most likely thing to get hit by lightning. & #x200B; The scale of voltage is absurd btw, we're talking 100 million volts or more in potential differential, your dinky little 5.2v phone battery doesn't make a lick of difference to lightning; if you're the tallest object around and the conditions are just right, doesn't matter if your phone is on or off, you're getting hit by lightning. & #x200B; What you should really do? Get low and seek shelter, stay away from standing water and lanky tall structures (short antennas, trees), you never know when a puddle is the shortest path to ground, or when the result of a lightning strike might cause a structure to fail and fall on you. | 2 |
m5zb2x | Other | How can historians know the medical causes of death of people who lived before the existence of modern medicine? For example I was watching a documentary about Japanese warlords and it said that one of them died from liver cancer. How could they know that? | Ancient medicine may not be perfect, but it was not completely off either. They were certainly able to recognize signs and symptoms of patients, and make certain diagnoses. They may not have been able to cure cancer, or know exactly how cancer affected the body, but could identify it. Through observation, they could tell how a bad liver made a person sick. When dissecting a body, some older doctor might have made a note about how the liver looked weird or diseased. An historian might look at old medical records, and might notice that many people died of something called bile fever (I am making this word up just for this example). They look at medical books and the symptoms for bile fever are very similar to liver cancer. They track this word bile fever over many year of medical books, and eventually they might find a modern source saying something like, "we diagnosed this person with liver cancer, or as the locals call it, bile fever." The similarities between the description of the disease to liver cancer, and the connect to liver cancer with an older term often found in the records allows historians to come up with a modern diagnosis of ancient diseases. | 2 |
81a57i | Biology | why is it better to get some diseases when you’re a child (chicken pox for instance) because they are less severe in childhood than adulthood? Especially when you consider that children have weaker immune systems than adults. | it is because adult chicken pox tends to cause complications like pneumonia and encephalitis while childhood chicken pox does not. Adults’ immune systems are stronger and employ more antibodies (rather than white blood cells) than children’s immune systems do, which is what triggers the immune response and the subsequent symptoms. Some strains of the flu are like this, too, such as the 1918 pandemic. The Spanish Flu killed young adults instead of the usual flu victims (old people and kids) because that strain triggered a severe immune reaction called a cytokine storm which basically shut down the bodies of infected people. A stronger immune system=stronger immune reaction=worse symptoms. | 3 |
g9kd8v | Biology | Why do medics keep you awake when you’ve had a traumatic injury? Why would being unconscious be more dangerous? | Also to add to the other comments, if the patient is actively *trying* to stay conscious and cannot, that tells us things vs the patient maybe resting their eyes or relaxing and falling asleep. We want to know if you just lost consciousness, and how difficult it is to arouse you - be it vigorous shaking, pain, etc. | 10 |
8suuzx | Other | Are stage names legal name changes? | The reason for the name change is because the Screen Actors Guild doesn't allow for duplicate names. You can't have 2 John Goodman's for instance. So many changes are informal but that's what they become known as | 2 |
l21t56 | Other | How does sunscreen work? I (kind of) understand the ones that form a physical barrier. But how does the other lkind work? It baffles me | There's chemical sunscreens and Mineral sunscreens. Chemical sunscreen products typically include a combination of two to six of the following active ingredients: oxybenzone, avobenzone, octisalate, octocrylene, homosalate and octinoxate. [Source]( URL_0 ). These chemicals create a layer on your skin that absorbs the UVA and UVB rays so your skin doesn't. The problem is that these chemicals are sometimes bad for you and absorb into your body. They can also cause rashes and redness. Also, chemical sunscreens are damaging to coral reefs when you get in the ocean. So much so they're banned in Hawaii. Mineral sunscreens are ones containing titanium dioxide and zinc oxide. These sunscreens basically create a force field on your skin that reflects harmful rays back into the atmosphere. Mineral sunscreen contain ingredients that are are safe to put on your body. They protect better than chemical sunscreens in my opinion and they typically last longer per application. Mineral sunscreens are safe for coral reefs. They are good for sensitive skin including babies. SPF 50 is the strongest mineral sunscreen and it's all you will need. [Australian Gold]( URL_1 ) botanical sunscreen is a really good one or anything that says "Mineral Sunscreen". | 3 |
jhbcjc | Technology | why do camera's make noise when they take a picture? Do they need to? | Old-school film cameras had a mechanical shutter that had to move, which created the "click" or "snap" that we've come to associate with taking a picture. Digital cameras absolutely do not need to make any noise at all, but there are two reasons they do so: 1. We expect cameras to make that noise, and 2. as a matter of privacy, to indicate to your surroundings that you're taking a picture. | 1 |
la233u | Biology | How does brain measure light received by retina, to send the signal to increase or decrease the size of pupil? | I hope this helps.. the optic pathway gets a little jumbled with names, but in general: Special cells on our eyes called rods and cones receive light, communicates it to the brain via the optic tract and nerves. From that point it gets processed via our cranial nerves and travels to a special nucleus called “edinger westphal”, which computes that information and tells our iris sphincter muscles to contract/relax in response to change pupil size | 1 |
9mv442 | Biology | When people die from Overdose, would it be peacefull or painfull. | Asphyxiation itself is relatively painless unless you feel the effects of co2 buildup resulting in a desire to breathe. Although opiates reduce the percieved need to breathe and thus induce respiratory depression, leading to death by asphyxiation. You go from feeling good, not caring about anything, and perhaps doze off, and that's it: game over. Stimulants are a lot different. At best they induce psychosis and possibly drive the person to intentionally or unintentionally harm themselves. They might also just cause a heart attack or other cardiac problems in extreme overdose. | 3 |
iblc1o | Economics | Why is Apple's app store a monopoly but Sony's and Microsoft's console stores not a monopoly? | It's not illegal to have a monopoly. It is illegal to use your monopoly to compete dishonestly with other companies. So, the problem with Apple is not that it doesn't allow other app stores, it's that it uses app store access to prevent fair competition by imposing unreasonable conditions - such as insisting that every app that charges its users, gives Apple 30% of all revenues (even if they were generated outside the App Store), or the app gets removed from iPhones. | 4 |
5w508h | Biology | Why do we have to be sleeping to rejuvenate and re-energize? Why are these processes faster/more efficient when we're not awake? | When you sleep your blood pressure drops as circulation slows down and your muscles are paralyzed to prevent you from acting out dreams. Since your body is requiring less energy at this time, extra oxygen can be sent to your brain. In deep sleep your body is at its least active which gives it time to repair any small muscle or tissue problems in individual cells, but your brain is at its most active as it sorts through the information of the day and drops whatever is seemingly useless. So your body is holding still long enough to repair itself and the brain gets a shot of oxygen to drop the useless information bogging it down. | 1 |
7zid34 | Culture | Why was slavery a common practice that occurred in every civilization at some point? It is considered inhumane by today's standards, but why was it considered to be ok in virtually every civilization at some point, regardless of the ethnic groups/people that happened to be enslaved. | Agriculture pros: you can grow more food than you need, creating a surplus of food, which you can use to build a civilization. Agriculture cons: without modern machines, crop breeds, domesticated animals, growing crops is labor intensive hard work. Agriculture with slavery pros: you can build a food surplus and only need to pay your workers with a minimal amount of calories to keep them able to work. | 4 |
9iosur | Biology | Why aren't there any common multi-headed animal? Wouldn't having multiple heads add survivability? | Imagine you have two cars, they don't store the fuel, they're always using it right away. They're identical and you give them the same use. What would be a better option: (a) Maintaining both cars, even though you have to refill both, or (b) maintaining only one car? A similar problems arises with having two heads. I'll go with an evolutionary explanation on why single-headed animals are the rule. The head can be roughly defined as the part of the body where the main neural structure is located, in the case of humans, that structure is the brain. Other structures might be associated with the head, like the mouth or the eyes, but in all cases, the head always carries the main neutral structure. I'll focus on the brain, since it's easier to understand it for the layman. The brain is the headquarters for all neurological information, almost all the stimuli we perceive are reported back to the headquarters, whether it is light through your eyes, a scent through your nose, heat through your skin, etc. Having a second head would mean there's another headquarters. Therefore, every stimuli would have to be reported back to both headquarters instead of only one, which means there would be a lot of redundant information being processed. Why have two brains process the same information? An alternative would be having each brain process different stimuli: Brain 1 will process muscle movement, and brain 2 will process cognitive functions. Everything seems to be working smoothly but... The brain is the main consumer of resources in the body, it consumes mainly oxygen and glucose, and it has to be constantly fed because it works non-stop. This leads us to a constraint, if we wish to have two heads, therefore two brains, we'll have to keep constantly fed. Having to consume more food to have more resources to feed two brain would actually be a huge constraint for survivability. Remember the two cars? In nature, the best option is to only have one, having two would be redundant; they provide the same service and have the same fuel consume. It's better to only maintain one instead of maintaining two of them. Finally, when the proto-head arised millions of years ago, the "single-headedness" got fixed in the DNA, meaning all the lineage of the first headed animal, would only have one head. Every single case of an organism having two heads is the result of a heavy mutation event. | 15 |
o640pw | Biology | How does jumping/landing/falling "correctly" not give your brain concussions? Googling this gives stories about people actually getting concussions on trampolines or doing parkour and that's not what the question is. The question is, if your brain's the consistency of tofu, how does bouncing around "safely" not just bump your brain a bunch? Why can it survive bouncing on the trampoline or jumping down stairs or sitting in a bumpy car or what we consider "normal" jostling in the modern world? | There is a layer of cerebrospinal fluid surrounding your brain that cushions minor impacts. | 5 |
5ovbsl | Biology | How is it that cannabis has so many different 'strains' which change the appearance and other characteristics of a particular plant? Do other plants share similar significant genetic variations? There are countless strains-all with different looks, smells, tastes, colours and other variations. Obviously there are other things in nature that are produced with differing characteristics-red/green apples for instance, or green/purple grapes. Is cannabis unique in how easy it is to 'combine' strains and genetics to produce particular characteristics? Are there any other plants that share this feature? | Variability in the genes of different members of the same species is extremely common of life in general; it's the norm. And that's a benefit since it allows for adaptation if their environment changes which in turn helps ensure the survival of the species as a whole. For example, if some disease came along and everyone was susceptible to it, the entire species could die out^1, but if there's some variability in the immune system of different individuals, some of them might survive and be able to repopulate. Thankfully in nature, it's rare to find a species or population that doesn't have significant variation among its members in at least some of its genes. When there is little to no variability, it's pretty much always caused by inbreeding and/or human intervention. As long as agriculture has existed, humans have been doing this with plants and animals in order to make them more suitable for cultivation, pets and livestock (i.e. to produce more food, make them more docile, resist certain germs/chemicals/diseases, stay ripe longer, have less or no seeds, taste better, etc.). Literally everything we eat is a GMO even though in many cases, this was done unknowingly (long before genetics and science in general were a thing). This process is done by taking your the best individuals of a species, breeding/crossing them together, and from their offspring, choosing the two best for further rounds of mating and repeating the selection process with each successive generation until the characteristics you're selecting for are consistently obtained. In the case of many cultivated plants, this has been going on for thousands of years and so the cultivated plants and their natural counterparts as may appear completely unrelated. Though great in many aspects, it does come with potential issues (disease susceptibility, birth defects, genetic disorders, etc.)^2 In any case, with marijuana plants it's basically the same process. Cross two strains together, select for the offspring that have the properties you're looking for (e.g., that they produce more fruit/buds, grow faster/better, have certain concentrations of different substances in them, etc.), and repeat until you get the result you're after. After that, make clippings, graft, grow, harvest and enjoy. ------------------------- Marginally-related tangents: ^(1. Something like that happened to the strain of banana that used to be grown as food. Eventually it was wiped out entirely by some sort of fungal infection. If you've ever wondered why banana-flavored candy tastes nothing like real bananas it's because the artificial flavor that's used was created to mimic the flavor of those now-extinct bananas. A similar fungal infection is currently spreading through the strain of bananas we're used to today. And even worse, it's not like they can take banana seeds and grow them from scratch; as you may have noticed, the strains we cultivate were engineered to be seedless. Because of that, they need to be preserved by making clippings of one strain and grafting them onto the stems and root systems of another (like grafting skin onto a burn victim or organ transplantation, more or less.)^) ^(2. For example, there were originally only four citrus fruits (citron, pummelo, mandarine, and papeda)^, ^(but from cross-breeding them together and selecting for different features, there are now many different strains/species of citrus fruits today. Fruits like oranges, limes and lemons never existed in nature before people began cultivating them. Another example is the various varieties of apples there are; originally, apples are what we'd refer to as crab apples, which aren't very nice to eat.) | 3 |
ag0ot3 | Technology | Why can’t sound engineers create a consistent volume level throughout an entire movie or TV show, it’s either too quiet or way too fucking loud at different times? | They can, it is just bad. Part of what makes a show or movie better is to have dynamic range in the sound. It makes things more like real life and most of the population enjoys the movie more. | 4 |
6g4n5k | Biology | Why do worms always crawl on the hot sidewalk to die? | Generally they're crawling out because the soil is saturated. When the soil is saturated, they can't get enough oxygen. | 2 |
6xf8xc | Biology | Having high blood pressure is bad, but having really good cardio means your resting heart rate is lower. Doesn't that increase your blood pressure since your heart beats harder? Why isn't this bad? | Your heart is the pump that circulates blood. In order to maintain the necessary blood flow it either pumps faster or pumps slower. Assuming everything is equal and one persons heart pumps at 80bpm and another at 60bpm. The pressure is the same because the flow rate is the same. Now blood pressure usually increases when there's changes in the veins that resist blood flow. To get the same blood flow through thinner veins you need higher pressure which will also cause the heart to pump faster. | 2 |
cagfl0 | Culture | Why do single person restrooms often have a male and female one? I don't understand because it's not like there's gonna be anyone else in the bathroom but you. Also they both have a toilet and sink so there's basically no difference exept if there's a men's urinal, which you don't have to use if you don't want to or can't. | Both men and women are gross when it comes to public restrooms. That's not something associated to one gender. I would say the actual answer is that people expect public toilets to have a mens and a womens, societal standards calls for it. If they didn't put labels people would probably complain about men going in after a woman and vice versa. Or they might be confused and constantly ask staff which is which. Putting labels on it prevents confusion and prevents complaints. Short answer, they put labels on them because people expect it. If anybody were to go to the single person toilet and find no gender label on it, and there was a second toilet, I'd bet there's a significant probability the person checks the second door for a sign to make sure they're not using the wrong one, even though it ultimately doesn't matter. | 1 |
gma6tr | Chemistry | How can canned meats like fish and chicken last years at room temperature when regularly packaged meats only last a few weeks refrigerated unless frozen? | Louis Pasteur would like to have a word with you. Canning basically sterilizes the food eliminating any bacteria and barring any bacterial activity it is shelf stable. Canned food basically has a lifetime based on the lifetime of the can it is in. Note the canning process basically cooks the food to rid it of bacteria so while preserved it isn't exactly fresh either. Can't have your cake and eat it too. | 13 |
6c2xac | Other | Why are women athlete outfits far more revealing than those of men? | [Are]( URL_1 ) [they]( URL_0 ) really, though? TBH it probably has more to do with what is socially acceptable than anything else. I'm sure a guy would be free to wear clothing similar to a girl, like extremely short shorts and a crop top, or a full bathing suit, but he won't because it's not normal right now. FYI, in reference to the Olympics, it used to be men only and everyone would compete naked. Even the audience was naked to make sure no women came to see it, because no women were allowed... and it was fine cause that was what was socially acceptable at the time. | 6 |
abxc61 | Culture | Why do some countries get their names translated and some don’t? | Probably already stated but USA is les etat unis in French . ** missing accent because I'm on my phone and building a baby. Edit: holding a baby!!! | 43 |
8c9isq | Technology | What happens in the background while we see the "loading screen" in video games? | Generally, Data is being loaded from the harddisc into the ram memory. RAM is a lot faster than your harddisc, even if its a SSD, it just has the handicap of losing all data when its unpowered. So we store data on harddisc's that are slower and cheaper, but retain data without power. Then when we need it, we load the data from the harddisc into the ram memory, and use it. When game devs can get away with it, they hide loading screens these days, for example, by placing the character in a slow ass elevator (Think Mass effect) | 2 |
bnhoft | Physics | If photons travel with constant speed and direction, why does light fades away over distance ? Sorry if this title isn't grammatically correct, English is not my native language | Imagine a shotgun being shot at a target on a wall from close range - the scatter of bullets is close together. Move further back and shoot again - the bullets are scattered further from each other. Now imagine the bullets are photons and the target is your eye - the further away the shotgun (photon source) gets from the target (your eye), the less bullets (photons) that actually hit the target (your eye) therefore the dimmer the source appears. | 2 |
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