Ask Science

Greetings, everyone!

Wolfram alpha has a sunburn calculator:

How do scientists predict the future climate? Do they just calculate the current trends of temperature growth and take the causes of it into account? Or is there some other way. Is it basically some model y = a1*x1 + a2*x2 + ... or something more complex?

You can look at certain structures in one animal and show how they're made from repurposed parts of an earlier animal (like fish gills becoming human ears). Can that be done with humans and those animals with Xenomorph double-mouths? Can you say "in humans, this particular piece of tendon in the neck is what eels reused for an additional mouth" or something along those lines?

If the answer is YES, a related follow-up question: if each visible color of the spectrum were to measure a centimeter in width, how far would I have to move the sensor from the red to detect the change from infrared to microwave, then to radio?

Energy in physics feels analogous to money in economics. Is a manmade medium of exchange used for convenience. It is the exchange medium between measureable physical states/things.

Now I'm just being the curious layman here, but a Google/YouTube search proved fruitless.

I keep seeing commercials for Gross Pointe Garden Society it made me wonder.

Since I haven't found a sub for sociology I decided to post this question here looking for a scientific answer. I'm looking for a more empirical answer rather than opinion based since I think this is critical in understanding such a complex and nuanced topic.

So, AI can do a lot of things. But it needs input data. So I was thinking, do we currently have any technology that could generate metrics that an AI might be able to train on such that it could estimate calories gotten from a meal. Not what was in the food, but what the body actually absorbed.

Any recommendations on good introduction books for kids? Any science or engineering book would be good!

Basically, my question is the title. If a black hole crosses the Roche limit of another black hole, what happens?

L-methylfolate for example.

Context: I am not a fridgy, I work with electronics. I would love to answer my question by tearing open a dozen different aircon units, but I'm sorely lacking in that department.

An often repeated statement about any extraterrestrial object is: "*if it has liquid water it might suport life*". On this assumption a lot of space probes, robots and rovers include the sensors and the instruments the search for traces of past life. This has had high priority in many missions to Mars and it will have high priority also in future missions to the satellites of Jupiter.

Just using a silly example, I'm just curious how pouring water like liquid into another water like liquid can create short lived bubbles

I am trying to understand the limitations and weaknesses of a system of complex human social hierarchical display based on reputation and accolades instead of the accumulation of wealth. Academia is one such example of a hierarchy based on reputation.

There's been a few probes sent over, and the link lists a lot of "got a few pictures before being crushed by pressure" because the surface is so harsh. If we were to land another probe there, assuming we managed to land right next to where the old ones landed, would there be anything left? Or would the pressure and wind have scoured away any trace?

Most people know that a microwave works by exciting water molecules, but I'm not interested in the dangers of the high voltage/current of a magnetron. I wonder what might be possible with scrap consumer drivers such as a piezo, speaker drivers, or ultrasonic inducers, preferably at a frequency outside of the core human audible spectrum.

To which degree in your FOV would the plane reach?

(Disclaimer: So first I wanted to emphasize and acknowledge that this can be a sensitive and emotional topic. This question is solely because I'm curious and am trying to understand it from an educational/sociological perspective. I know that a lot of people online can have a short temper but this is not a bait, I just genuinely wanna understand. I hope I will find a few more intellectual people here who won't get offended and can give a more empirical answer. And please apologize if my English is not perfect, English is not my native language and I'm just 21.)

I had chagas as a kid, and it wreaked havoc on my body. One doc pointed out I probably had some organ scarring. That was over ten years ago. So, as the title, do I need to be on my toes as I get older?

I'm thinking that hanging still doesn't stress the fiber but possibly makes it stiff and brittle while a gentle motion caused a small wear but keeps the textile flexible. Any material science people in the house?

Is it just a matter of not being worth it? I see cooling towers releasing what appears to be a ton of steam, pretty high up. If that steam were captured at the top and allowed to condense, wouldn't that result in a ton of water with a lot of gravitational potential energy? That water could then be released and used to power water turbines. Maybe I'm overestimating the amount of water being released as steam, or underestimating how much is needed to spin a water turbine to get a meaningful result, but it seems like wasted energy to me.

They seam to have a flatness of λ/2 - λ/4 and are quite cheap, 10 bucks for a 25mm diameter one (that 1/5 the price of a normal 25mm secondary elliptical mirror)

Could they reasonably survive? If so, what would be the effects of such an introduction?

Whether it be social media use or access to pornography, are there valid studies that have looked into this? I feel like I've only seen anecdotes, or "inappropriate for children", but no evidence, studies, or journals to support this claim.

I have a stomach flu. My government recommends me to eat as normally as possible.

This study is talking about two groups, one with a target INR of 2.0-2.5 and the other with a target INR of 2.5-3.5. The higher dose is the current standard dose.

Say we have all the empirical evidence from 19th-century science prior to the observation of the wavelike diffraction of matter particles, plus 21st-century math and theory to construct an alternative explanation.

I feel the obvious answer should be "no" but help me think this through. It came from the previous Q on blackholes and am posting here for more visibility.

In the same vein, what about a stellar-sized black hole like Cygnus X-1? At this size the rate of evaporation is quicker, right?

I love space, I have since I was a kid but I'm not a professional by any means. All my knowledge comes from years of watching documentaries, reading space/science magazines, and looking things up on wikipedia/stack exchange etc.

I've long toyed with a mid-life pivot into a different field. Mostly, I lean towards IT as the most practical for me, but I love the idea of finally studying a hard science, which I grew to love, but never really got a good formal education in.

What might prevent metal "blowing" and other forms of shaping from working if gravity was not a factor? Let's handwave-ignore the extremes of temperature as it relates to techniques and the present primitive space habitats and craft.

Sometimes, when I'm really cold, it can take over an hour to warm me up, even with a heating blanket. The quickest solution, a hot shower, feels really inefficient with all the heat going down the drain.

In other words, is there any individual cell that can decide between two or more options, or all they all solely chemical and mechanical reactions without any self-determination at all?

Like fossil fuels come from organic matter that grew because of the sun. Is there any form of energy on that cannot be traced back to the sun in some way?

Like the title says: when you see "heat rising" (the wavy/blurry area above a heat source), what are you actually seeing?

A few minutes ago I suddenly woke up , I didn't sleep well

Or in other words which forces keep electrons in orbitals and prevent it from flying away or crashing into the nucleus according to modern understanding?

I live in Vancouver Canada, my house was built in the 1950's and the basement has the floor joists of the kitchen [above it] exposed.

I understand that hurricanes get their strength from warm ocean water but do they take a measurable amount of heat from the water? ('Not going anywhere with this question, just wondering.)

My 8-year-old son asked this question and i couldn't give him a definite answer. So he's wondering if it would do the same thing as a balloon pushed underwater in the bathtub (which kind of makes sense to me, due to the density differences, not just gravity alone).

OK, I had a hard time coming up with a single sentence title, so please bear with me.

I'm researching all of this, and it seems cats are the main(?) host for T. gondii. And yet it can infect humans as well. As far as I know, it does (sometimes) virtually nothing except either *maybe* give you schizophrenia or make you a "Risk-taking Asshole" for lack of a better term. What is even the purpose of doing this to infected humans??? WHY??? What kind of parasite infects a human with the only real side effect of "I'm just gonna make you gamble a lot and give you road rage."

I've noticed something interesting that I cant get an answer to online. Whenever I leave out watermelon in my house (After eating it of course. I cut slices from the melon so what gets left behind is the rind), it attracts lots of gnats and flies without failure. After cutting and eating a Yellow Watermelon for the first time and then leaving it out, There wasn't a single fly that cared for it, it was never swarmed or landed on or fed upon. it just sat there for a day or so before I finally threw it out.

I know animals can have limbs surgically replanted and still work. But can the same be said about plants? Could I cleanly cut down a tree, then stick it back on, and have it still grow into itself?

I couldn't find anywhere that would tell me what kind of motor is usually used there. And I don't know enough about motors to be like... well of course it's this kind... But once I know what it is... how does it work? Like different adjustable bases move different intervals for a single push of the remote button (at least according to my wife). So that got me thinking, what controls the minimum interval of difference between two positions the motor will support? I don't hear clicks, so I don't think it is a ratchet type thing which would have a clear min interval. Yet, if you unplug it, it doesn't just go flat. So there must be some sort of passive hold mechanism of some type...

I find fractals extremely fascinating and way, way, way out of my depth. One example being the Barnsley Fern, which I find so cool. It feels a bit like someone cracked a little piece of the Matrix code.

In the color lines of a spectrograph and what seems to be an area with a certain color, zooming in shows that this color is delicately split in half by a black vertical hairline, on one side it's the emission of photons of color by a hydrogen atom with a spin up electron, on the other it seems to be the same color but it's a spin down electron.

There is a tendency for real doctors with backing from Academia or whoever's in charge of deciding how you science to just plain getting it wrong and not realizing it for a long time.

What if I am just imagining the high pitch sound in my mind whenever I hear about or think of tinnitus just like how someone tells you to imagine a whale and you form a mental image of a whale? I don't pay attention to the noise while I'm busy doing stuff but once I think about it, it is as hard to stop noticing it similar to being told to breathe manually, and it gets very annoying after some time. Is it what tinnitus really is?

I know that lions can be scared away when they see humans approaching without fear, but what if they're ambushed? How about a tiger, or a polar bear? If I manage to sneak up on one of these apex predators, and jump out, screaming, and running at it, will it run? Or will it just turn around and kill me? I guess I'm wondering if apex predators have a fight or flight reflex, and how strong it is if they do. Do they tend to resort to fighting more often if they're the baddest tiger in the jungle vs the runt of the litter? Do they quickly assess the threat and respond accordingly, or does a flight instinct kick in and send them running?

Could someone recommend examples of high-fidelity, best-practices Western Blots from Open Access Papers? I would like to use these examples to see what kind of distortions or corruption might occur to these images when they are reproduced or archived in various ways.

So every time we get bread it comes in a stretchy bag. However, once we pull it out of the freezer later the bag is noticeably more crinkly and brittle. Anyone know why this is? I can't seem to find an answer to this phenomenon anywhere.

Hi,

I am simply on a quest to find an effective non-distillation method for purifying isopropyl alcohol used for rinsing resin 3D prints.

I'm referring to the human race evolving in the African continent and then migrating to the rest of the world.

There are many other bee species that can sting Humans and survive, but the European honeybee has a barbed stinger, so it cannot remove the stinger once it's stung. In attempting to remove the stinger the bee will rupture its lower abdomen and then die.

We often talk about the climate impact based on greenhouse gases, but extracting fuel from the ground and using it in exothermal processes of course also releases energy as heat.

Say a dissolvable spring is compressed with a bolt and nut that do not melt in a sulfuric acid solution. The spring has quite a bit of potential energy at this point since it is compressed. Assuming the spring dissolves perfectly (no breakage, just complete disintegration), what happens to the potential energy of the spring?

Famously, Oppenheimer and co worked out how close a nuclear bomb test would be to causing a chain reaction of nitrogen fusion in the atmosphere. They made a lot of worst-case-scenario assumptions and still came to the conclusion that no, a nuclear bomb test wouldn’t scour the surface of the world.

Okay, so I know this might be a bit hyperspecific, but I don't know where else to ask it. I'm working through a microbiology lecture, and the professor says the the B strain of *E. coli* has a tRNA suppressor that allows it to transcribe phage genes that have any nonsense mutation. That seemed a bit vague, so I decided to look it up. But the only thing I can find that's even remotely similar is that that strain doesn't express T7 RNA polymerase, which doesn't seem terribly helpful. Is there anything like this in that particular strain? It seems like a load of bs to me that a bacterium should just be able to ignore any stop codon.

Asking because while I see that paint hardeners exist in the USA, there doesn't seem to be anything similar in my country (Brazil)

Now that late spring/early summer is upon us, there's increasingly more headlines about less rain in various places (recent floods notwithstanding). I'm assuming that's because water is evaporating and not returning to those places, but where is it going?

I assume it would break into smaller particles similar to the formation of microplastics. I hear about the effects of microplastics all the time. Are the effects of disposed rubber on the environment studied as extensively?

I know evolution is governed by chance and it is random but does it make sense to "ruin" sleep if there's light? I mean normally, outside, you never have pure darkness, there are the moon and stars even at night. In certain zones of the Earth we also have long periods of no sunshine and long periods of only sunshine.