Question: If a soda has gone flat, why does it fizz like it isn't when you pour it out?

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 If a soda has gone flat, why does it fizz like it isn't when you pour it out?

So soda fizzes because of dissolved Carbon dioxide(CO2). We call a soda flat when there is less CO2 dissolved than we would like, but there is still considerable CO2 in solution - pouring agitates the gas out of solution and we get fizz as the (now gaseous) CO2 rises through the soda; the same reason you’ll get a little “puff” if you shake a closed bottle of flat soda, then open it, instead of the explosion you’d see with a “fresh” soda.


Question: Why does heavy rain come down in "sheets"?

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 Why does heavy rain come down in "sheets"?

The sheets of rain are following the pattern of the guessing wind. As a gust passes through, it will move around the droplets of rain falling - blowing some ahead of it, and slowing down the fall of some by blowing them upwards into the air again. Once the first has passed the rain 'caught' by it will then all fall at once in a slightly heavier sheet.


Question: how do we know the entire universe is expanding, and not just our region of it?

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 how do we know the entire universe is expanding, and not just our region of it?

Totally possible, just very unlikely from what we know now. There's no evidence that suggests that the expansion is dependent on some position, but a ton of evidence that it's everywhere that we looked so far. Nothing we "know" is absolute truth. But if a theory matches the observations every time and nobody has ever seen something that contradicts, it's *likely* to be true.


Question: how does solar panels work, and how do they generate power?

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 how does solar panels work, and how do they generate power?

When a light particle lands on the solar panel, it lands on an atom. The energy of the photon (light particle) is just enough to knock an electron out of the atom. The electron is then free to flow over the atoms in the solar panel, creating a current. This creates electricity.


Question: What creates the mushroom cloud when an atomic bomb blows up?

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 What creates the mushroom cloud when an atomic bomb blows up?

The air, dust, and ash caused by the explosion is *very* hot, which means it's way less dense than the cooler air around it. Like a hot air balloon, the hot mixture gets pushed up above that cooler surrounding air and rises. The atmosphere gets thinner as you go up, so even though it's cooler up there it's less dense. Eventually, the atmosphere will be less dense than the hot explosion mixture, which means the mixture can't rise anymore. It hits this "cap" of thin air and spreads out. Think of it like releasing a big bunch of balloons in a room, and when they hit the ceiling the ones on the bottom push the ones on top out of the way. The ground is also still *really* hot from the explosion so as cool air rushes in to fill the space left by the hot air it gets heated by the ground and gets pushed up, too. As it does, it carries more ash and dust with it, creating the thin column of the "mushroom", squeezed inward by the cool air all around it. That hot column of air keeps pushing up, forcing the hot gas mixture already up there out of the way. The mixture cools off, too, which makes it begin to sink back down a little. So hot column of stuff in the middle pushing up, which pushes the hot gasses out, and then down, to form the "cap" of the mushroom. All explosions *kind* of do this, but they don't typically get hot enough to really show it. The layers of the atmosphere can be pretty distinct but they're still really deep, so it takes a big explosion to get the mixture of gasses hot enough to go all the way through the bottom layers and run into that really distinct line between two layers that makes the effect so pronounced.


Question: why have the reposted pictures less quality than the original post?

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 why have the reposted pictures less quality than the original post?

Iirc: whenever you post to, say, Facebook, the platform compresses the picture, by default. So, you take a pic with your phone and post it... Suppose its quality is defined by a value which is defined at 1'000'000. You post it and it goes to 100'000. Someone saves it, and reposts it, and it goes to 10'000. Someone else saves it, reposts it, and it goes to 1'000. And so on.


Question: If there are strong signs of an impending recession, are there actions that can be taken to fend it off?

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 If there are strong signs of an impending recession, are there actions that can be taken to fend it off?

Typically there are tools in the Fed's toolbox to do so, but Trump already has used many of them when the economy was good so there are fewer options available... typically things like lowering interest rates and tax cuts help, but interest rates are already super low so there isn't much room to drop them and tax cuts have already caused major issues with deficit since they're cutting so far into revenue (while, sadly but predictably, causing middle class to pay more in taxes while the wealthy and corporations save) and the government needs revenue to spend on increased demands for social services in recession.


Question: Why did China ban imports of plastic waste? Isn't recycling the plastic cheaper than making more plastic?

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 Why did China ban imports of plastic waste? Isn't recycling the plastic cheaper than making more plastic?

China has extremely high levels of corruption and the rule of law is practically non-existent there. Once the waste is in the country, the national government is almost powerless to determine what happens to it and so it gets disposed of in the most profitable way possible. Plastic is extremely expensive to recycle and the recovered plastic has very little value. Because of this, the most profitable way to deal with plastic waste is to charge the person sending you the waste a "recycling fee" and to then dump the waste in a river or on an open field. In fact, that was what was happening and the overwhelming majority of the waste imported for "recycling" to China was being dumped. Because the Chinese government can't stop the dumping once the waste is in the country, its only option is to stop the waste from coming into the country at all by banning its import.


Question: What is the difference between white box and black box testing?

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 What is the difference between white box and black box testing?

Black box describes a device which you can view its inputs and outputs, but not its internal workings. Therefore black box testing means testing something only by feeding it various inputs and then analysing the outputs. For example, black box testing a website works by sending it various requests and analysing the responses. This way you are testing the product the way that an actual user uses it. White box testing is when you have access to the internals of the software. You can look at the actual source code, you can test individual components, etc.


Question: What's the problem with food stamps? Why do they cause issues in the U.S?

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 What's the problem with food stamps? Why do they cause issues in the U.S?

There are no problems with food stamps in general. The public generally has a negative attitude to individuals in need (seeing them as lazy and undeserving) and has a gross misunderstanding of how any of these programs work or who benefits from them. The problem isn't the program, its the incorrect public perceptions and resulting attitudes.


Question: What decides what type of energy something turns into?

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 What decides what type of energy something turns into?

> What dictates what percent of the energy turns into what type of energy, etc??? There are energy thresholds that are required to be met in order for things to happen. Like.. heating up oil doesn't just cause it to combust, but if you put enough energy into it, i.e. with fire, it will. Also, the material for the reaction affects how the energy is absorbed or change. In the case of flint, it's a matter of the hardness of the material and it being able to absorb and distribute the force applied without breaking, while also shaving off some electrons and molecules from the metal used. This is really only scratching the surface though, no pun intended.


Question: How did we standardize the unit of time? Did we have a standard physical reference for defining them?

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 How did we standardize the unit of time? Did we have a standard physical reference for defining them?

The standard was that a day or more exact a solar day is the length of time which elapses between the Sun reaching its highest point in the sky two consecutive times. The smaller units was then defined as a fraction of a day. It was good enough initially. & #x200B; When clock got better we have determined that is is not good enough in the 1940s with new quartz crystal oscillator clocks and in 1950s it a fraction of the year 1900. & #x200B; In 1967 is changed to a "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom" when atomic clocks was invented. That is still in used with the addition of "at a temperature of 0 K" & #x200B; So before the 1940s time was just a fraction of a day and it was good enough.


Question: How do scientists cure cancer?

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 How do scientists cure cancer?

Good god, now THIS is a question with some serious scope. Long post, but I'm gonna try and lay the big issues out on the table. To give just a little context to the size of the effort against cancer: in JUST the US alone, tens of billions of dollars are spent towards just research alone (not counting costs of treatments)...yearly. I don't have the exact numbers on hand (sorry). The big problem with cancer is that it's not some foreign body invading your system. It's not a bad hip that can be cut out, replaced, and only require a few meds and periodic check-ups to make sure everything is okay. For cells, it's not uncommon for errors to happen as they age and affect important functions such as repair, regulating immune response, growth, or cellular proliferation. Generally, either the error is fixed or the cell is destroyed. For any biological multicellular organism, cancer is when enough of those errors happen at once. That cell becomes a selfish monster: it no longer does its job and all it cares about is multiplying, even at the cost of the healthy cells around it (and it's darn good at it). But it's still using the cellular mechanisms that we need to survive, so shutting those down will basically kill the person. And because cancer starts as one cell, it is very hard to completely eliminate. Like a vampire/zombie/outbreak movie; if you don't get it all, it will come back EVENTUALLY. Or another, unrelated cell may mutate into cancer even if the first "attack" was stopped. More to your question: what is being done? A lot of research goes into how cancer works. How can we identify cancer cells from normal cells? How do cancer cells control blood flow to feed themselves? What happens to allow cancer to metastasize (move from where it was made into other parts of the body)? How does cancer suppress and hide from the immune system that would normally get rid of trouble-maker cells? Through studying these mechanisms, scientists hope to figure out specific molecular pathways that could be used to target cancer and only cancer cells. Chemotherapy, for instance, is roughly an indiscriminate destroyer of cells. A poison of many forms meant to kill cancer cells...but it also hurts normal, healthy cells. That's what causes those patients to deteriorate so predictably (hair, weight loss, vomiting, etc). Chemotherapy is more an art than a science, trying to balance destruction potential against unintended casualties, but it's the best active solution we have at the moment. The ideal, at this time, would be to better train the immune system against cancer or, perhaps, inhibit its metabolism/oxygen supply. But that research is still very much in flux. Once scientists pieces together enough mechanisms (accounting for how cancers of different tissues like bone vs brain act differently), then they have to start developing and testing treatments. Computer model simulations of chemical reactions, Cells in a dish, animal models, and ultimately human trials; each more expensive and time consuming than the last. And most things don't work the first time around, so it is back to square one or two. There is promising work happening that is moving in the right direction, especially in regards to some specific cancers, but I haven't yet heard of anything universally golden yet. Is it realistic to expect a cure in our lifetime? That's a hard question to answer. If I was betting money on this, I would say "no,"; in my opinion, whatever this "cure" would be would have to be shown to prevent cancer reemergence over decades of time before widespread approval...so those human trials would take a while. BUT, on the optimistic side, human scientific progress is not linear. Who knows how our knowledge will grow in the coming decades. Every day we learn more and more and we build more and more potential solutions, and we're THAT much closer to piecing together what we need. The golden technology could be just around the corner. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask and I will do my best to answer!


Question: How do mathematical powers work?

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 How do mathematical powers work?

> Why is 1^k = 1 You're really asking 4 questions here. The first one is why is 1^k = 1 when k is an a natural number? And that's a pretty easy question, because we have 1^k = 1\*1\*1\*1\*...\*1 (k times) = 1. ----- Here is the second question: Now, what about 1^k where k is an integer? Well, for exponentiation on negative numbers, we want to use the fact that (1^(k))\*(1^(-k)) = 1^(k-k) = 1. Now if k is non-negative, then we have 1^(-k) = 1. ------ Here is the third question: Now, what about 1^k where k is a rational number? While, if k = p/q, then we have (1^(p/q))^q = (1^(qp/q)) = 1^p = 1. Now, this implies that (1^(p/q))^q = 1^p = 1. In general, for any x, we want (x^(p/q))^q = x^p. We make the choice that x^(p/q) should always refer to the positive root. So, this implies that (1^(p/q))^q = 1, and the only number that can be a positive root of 1 is 1. So, 1^(p/q) = 1. ------ Here is the fourth question: Now, what about for real numbers? Well, we can't use any of the multiplication conditions anymore, but we can use continuity. If you recall from your calculus class, continuity essentially means that you should be able to draw the function without lifting the tip of your pencil away from the sheet. More formally, continuity states that the limits should move through the function. That if x_n is some sequence with limit x, f(x) = limit (n - > infinity) f(x_n). So we force continuity upon the exponential. So, if r is a real number, we say that 1^r = limit(n - > infinity) 1^(k_n). Where k_n is some sequence with limit r. Now, the rationals are dense in the real numbers. This means that for every real number, we can find a sequence of rational numbers that approaches it. So, we can let k_n be a sequence of rational numbers that approaches r. Since each k_n is rational, limit(n - > infinity) 1^(k_n) = limit(n - > infinity) 1 = 1. So, 1^r = 1. Where r is a real number.


Question: What would be the last place(s) with water in case of a widespread (extreme) water drought? An apocalyptic scenario, but just for the sake of argument.

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 What would be the last place(s) with water in case of a widespread (extreme) water drought? An apocalyptic scenario, but just for the sake of argument.

The 2 biggest fresh water reservoir are located underground in South America, the biggest one is in Brazil, known as "Alter do Chão Aquifer", and is estimated to provide fresh water for world population for 250+ years in case of shortage. The second one covers Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay and is known as "Guaraní Aquifer" and could provide 200+ years of fresh water. Other estimatives say if world population stagnate at 7 billion people in the future each Aquifer could provide around 1500+ years of fresh water. Edit: Also every continent has some aquifer system beneath the surface.


Question: Why is it best to apply moisturizer right after a shower / face wash?

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 Why is it best to apply moisturizer right after a shower / face wash?

When you use an oil cleanser like soap, it removes all the oils from your skin. This is layer is actually an important part of your skin. It’s what’s referred to as the moisture barrier. This layer of lipids (in this case natural oils), help you skin retain moisture so it doesn’t try out. It also helps protect the skin from contaminants. Moisturizing after a shower helps your skin retain the moisture until this layer can be replenished. Water can permeate into your skin, but only up to the top layer (epidermis). There is a layer of tissue here called the stratified squamous epithelium which prevents water from permeating deeper. Not to be rude but please don’t listen to the other commenter. Pores being able to grow/shrink is a complete myth. All a hot shower does is help clean out all the dirt and contaminants that were clogging them.


Question: How acid rain becomes acidic?

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 How acid rain becomes acidic?

As rain falls through the air, it dissolves small amounts of gases in the surrounding air. Some gases, like sulfur trioxide or nitrogen dioxide, produce acids (sulfuric acid and nitric acid respectively) when they dissolve in water. Since these gases are common by-products of human activity (both are emitted in car exhaust, for example), human pollution contributes to acid rain.


Question: Is there an underlying biological cause behind serial killers, mass shooters, child molesters, and violent criminals?

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 Is there an underlying biological cause behind serial killers, mass shooters, child molesters, and violent criminals?

Kind of, kind of not. Kind of in that everything a human brain does is biological. So if you could somehow create a new human brain building neurones and neurone connections from scratch, you could theoretically create a brain that does whatever you want. You could build a brain that knows Pi to 314 decimal places. You could build a brain that thinks it likes the music of U2. And you could also build a brain that had both the desire and will to kill a specific person. This also extends to genetics. Genes can't *absolutely* cause someone to do something criminal, but they can increase the likelihood of them doing it. For example, a gene that made someone behave more aggressively than normal would make them more likely to commit violent crime. On the other hand, it's also kind of *not* biological, because a much larger contributor is environment. Someone born with an aggressive gene but raised in a situation where they have no real reason to be violent will probably never commit a violent crime, even though on a population level, the gene makes them more likely to do so than others of the same environment. If you were to round up all the people in the world who had a particular violent gene, most of them would never have committed a violent crime. For example - most men have not committed a violent crime, despite the fact men are biologically programmed to be more competitive and aggressive.


Question: Why do songs get stuck in our heads? more specifically why do certain verses get stuck?

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 Why do songs get stuck in our heads? more specifically why do certain verses get stuck?

I asked the google man: In order to get stuck in your head, earworms rely on brain networks that are involved in perception, emotion, memory, and spontaneous thought. ... Also, if you have a musical background, you may be more susceptible to earworms too. Certain personality features also may predispose you to being haunted by a catchy tune.


Question: What is the difference between consumable ethyl alcohol and non-consumable isopropyl alcohol?

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 What is the difference between consumable ethyl alcohol and non-consumable isopropyl alcohol?

All alcohols have what are called hydroxyl groups, which is an oxygen atom bonded to a hydrogen atom. These are attached to some carbon atoms, which are also attached to some other hydrogens. There can be different numbers of the carbons and hydrogens, and the structure can be different, but they all have that single hydroxyl group somewhere. Isopropyl has one more carbon atom than ethanol and is shaped differently. This changes how it interacts with other molecules, such as making it poisonous (or more poisonous, I guess). Specifically, when it gets to your liver, it breaks down into acetone, which can kill you in large amounts. A little bit of acetone is made in our bodies naturally and we're equipped to handle it, but if you drink ispopropyl alcohol, you'll have way too much and your body won't be able to get rid of it fast enough. Ethanol is (mostly) safe to drink, and effects the brain. It mainly increases the amount of a certain chemical that the brain uses to suppress neural activity. Basically, it slows down the brains ability to think. However, it also increases some other chemicals, such as dopamine, which is why it feels good at first.


Question: how does the LHCb experiment (if proven correct) violate the Standard Model of particle physics?

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 how does the LHCb experiment (if proven correct) violate the Standard Model of particle physics?

So most people will have heard of electrons, but in the Standard Model there exists 2 additional particles very similar to the electron but with more mass (known as the muon and tau). In the Standard Model we expect them all to behave the same in processes where mass doesn't matter. The LHCb experiment is interested in the behaviour of particles that contain a particle known as the b quark, and they found that one of these particles will decay to electrons more often than it decays to muons, which violates the Standard Model since if electrons and muons should behave the same then the particle should decay to electrons and muons with the same likelihood. It's important to note that currently there is only "evidence for" this observation as there is still about a ~1/1000 chance that these results would be happen randomly, and in particle physics we don't claim a discovery unless there's only a ~1/1000000 so we will have to wait for more data to be collected before the discovery can be made official.


Question: How is volume typically calculated on devices like iPhones, laptops, TVs, etc...?

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 How is volume typically calculated on devices like iPhones, laptops, TVs, etc...?

Usually it's because of how we percieve sound, and limits on the speaker hardware. For one audio amplification doesn't directly correlate linearly to loudness. It's logarithmic, ish and if you try and use a linear scale for volume it's bad. It's a pretty big mistake so that shouldn't be the reason -too- often. Though there isn't much engineering put into cheap TVs. What should generally be causing the problem is that lower frequency bass sounds are both percieved as louder, and harder to generate with small speakers. So at a point the low frequency sounds stop getting louder while the high frequency ones have a lot more room to increase because it's easier to make louder high frequency sounds with small speakers, and less electrical power. End result is a sudden drop off in how loud everything seems in total. In principle of you hooked up a nice audio system to your TVs audio ouput the scale would seem more accurate.Or if the TV programmer had enough time to actually adjust the scale based on real hardware rather than using whatever default settings were in whatever software/hardware library they were using.


Question: How does the front of the plane look higher than you when it's taking off?

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 How does the front of the plane look higher than you when it's taking off?

Because the front of the plane _is_ higher than you. It's literally tilted upwards. The are off gravity points to the center of the earth at all times and you measure yourself compared to that, not the cabin of the plane. Imagine yourself sitting on top of the plane. Just like on a teeter-totter or a swing set, unless you're falling at 9.86 meters per second squared you feel the polar gravity. And you measure yourself compared to that pull of gravity. The fact that the inside of the cabin stays fixed relative to itself while you do not is why it is so obvious and disconcerting. In fact even when landing the front of the plane is slightly higher than you. All modern aircraft fly with what's called a nose of attitude. That's because they get extra lift when the air just literally bangs into the bottom of the wing.


Question: Why does everyone say to get a lot of Vitamin C when you are sick/how does Vitamin C help the immune system?

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 Why does everyone say to get a lot of Vitamin C when you are sick/how does Vitamin C help the immune system?

In a nutshell, it doesn't. This is a myth propagated by companies that sell things like orange juice or fruits. An increase of vitamins has no bearing on immune response or recovery time, and studies show that an overabundance of vitamins may actually be detrimental. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.


Question: Why do we lose motivation to complete a task when told to do so, whereas we would have motivation otherwise?

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 Why do we lose motivation to complete a task when told to do so, whereas we would have motivation otherwise?

It's not totally known. We know that this "overjustification effect" does happen, but why is something psychologists disagree on. It could be to do with the way that you perceive a task, and the kind of activity it is, the way you perceive *yourself* doing a task, or the way things you pay attention to or expect during the task change. Social context also seems to have an impact, so that being told to do something with someone else might produce a different kind of motivational effect than being told to do it alone, or being told to do it yourself in the presence of other people who aren't told to do it. So on the level of experiment there's quite a lot of variables to work with. Stepping back from psychologists though to my own introspection, I would say that motivation can sometimes be lost when I'm expected to do a task, that can be regained by making sure I have the ability to alter task parameters to suit my interests. Having confidence that I'll be able to do a task at my own pace, without later corrections etc. allows me to invest in doing something well without worrying that I'll be asked to do more than I'm comfortable with or undo something I'm proud of. Real control over your work is much better for motivation, and it can sometimes be useful to intentionally regain that by clarifying how much leeway you have, if you're doing something for someone else, so you can get a sense of comfort and confidence of being able to shift things around without interfering with whatever relational reasons lead you to do the task in the first place.


Question: Knowing the discrepancy between the sound of our own voice IN OUR HEADS vs. how others hear our voice, how are we able to mimic someone else’s pitch, or any sound really, if we are matching it to our internal voice?

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 Knowing the discrepancy between the sound of our own voice IN OUR HEADS vs. how others hear our voice, how are we able to mimic someone else’s pitch, or any sound really, if we are matching it to our internal voice?

Pitch (the musical note) is unaffected while the color of the sound is affected. Imagine playing the same note on a violin in a closet vs playing it in a concert hall. The same note will have a different quality of sound based on the acoustics but the pitch will be the same. So we can match pitch. Likewise we can imitate sounds and sound qualities but if you want to do a perfect impression you’ll probably be checking your recordings and training against those.


Question: Why password managers are considered safe?

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 Why password managers are considered safe?

Password reuse is a huge security issue. If it is compromised in 1 place, it is compromised everywhere. Without a password manager, many people resort to using the same password everywhere. If you have malware on your system, it is easier to compromise your browser, clipboard and log keyboard/mouse inputs than to compromise an encrypted password manager. A chain is only as strong as the weakest link. While a password manager may not be perfect, it is unlikely to be the weakest link.


Question: what causes loss of memory from drinking alcohol?

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 what causes loss of memory from drinking alcohol?

The short answer? We don't know, because we're still not *exactly* sure how short-term memory becomes long-term memory. We know it happens in an area of the brain called the hippocampus, and we know it requires REM sleep to happen. Past that, we're fuzzy on the exact biological processes involved. Now, about blackouts. Blackouts are caused by the failure to convert short-term memories to long-term. We retain short-term memories for anywhere from a few seconds to several hours, depending on how important our brains consider that information. We know that alcohol doesn't completely prevent the formation of short-term memory (though it may impair it), because otherwise you'd be incapable of carrying on a normal conversation while drunk, and there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that people converse, travel, or even fuck while in a blackout. Likewise, alcohol doesn't prevent you from recalling preexisting long-term memories - you'll still recognize a cop car or your ex when you're plastered. So, the problem is that there's a disconnect between the two, an inability to "back up" your short-term memories (which as I said will disappear within a day) to long-term memories, which can be recalled weeks or years after their occurrence. I also said before that this back-up is thought to take place during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which occurs in phases throughout the night. If you disrupt or prevent that deep sleep from happening, you'll end up with patchy or fuzzy memories - that's why you start losing track of time if you stay up for a few days on end. Incidentally, alcohol (and most other depressants, like opiates or benzodiazepines, which can also cause memory loss) has a terrible effect on that REM sleep. You get fewer, shorter cycles of it after a night out drinking, even if you sleep for a full eight hours. The working theory I've heard is that alcohol's deleterious effects on sleep is al least partly responsible for why you can wake up passed out in someone's front lawn, wearing someone else's fursuit and little else, with no idea how you got there. I'm sure there are details I've skipped over, and probably some science I'm not aware of, but that's what I know.


Question: How do companies based on pyramid schemes such as Amway, Tupperware, and Herbalife stick around for so long? Why aren't they more widely frowned upon?

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 How do companies based on pyramid schemes such as Amway, Tupperware, and Herbalife stick around for so long? Why aren't they more widely frowned upon?

Bored housewives are always looking for a way to feel like they are contributing to their household income - so they simply trade money and feel like they are helping. Becky sells Tupperware. Susie sells Avon. Anna sells Pampered Chef. Maria sells Home Interior. Each week, one of them hosts a party and invites the other three. They all spend $75, earning the Hostess some trivial swag that makes Hostess feel like she's has "earned" something. The next week, they all do the same thing for the second friend. They tell themselves and their spouses that they've earned some necessity for life, but the reality is that they're just sucked into the rabid consumerism fallacy that convinces them that "having more" will make them happy.


Question: How does raytracing work? Not what it does, but how it does it.

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 How does raytracing work? Not what it does, but how it does it.

A fundamental theory of light and rays and reflection is that how it reflects doesn't matter which direction it travels. A beam of light fired from point A to eventually point B (bouncing off whatever) can be fired back in the opposite direction from B to A successfully along the same path. Normally we see things because light comes from a light source (the sun, light bulb, etc), bounces off things causing colour filtering, and eventually into our eyes or a camera to be seen. Raytracing does it the other way around - starts at the camera and fires "scanning" rays to see what it hits and hence what it could see. That ray may also bounce or scatter in the same way light would. Historically raytracing has been a pixel-by-pixel computationally expensive process. Obviously "RTX" graphics cards have changed that in an attempt to make it a nearly real-time thing. I don't know what magic nVidia has thrown in their cards to make it so fast, but I'm kinda impressed.


Question: How can we be sure that super colliders work the way we want them?

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 How can we be sure that super colliders work the way we want them?

Well the theory of how we measure them is based upon how we think they act, so it's not like those are two completely separate problems. But in regards to this latest anomaly, my understanding is that the tests are seeing the expected byproducts of these particular collisions and those byproduct particles are reasonably well understood and they're fairly confident in what they're seeing. The issue is that the ratio that those two byproducts are being produced seems to be slightly different than the prediction. That doesn't completely rule out some sort of experimental error, which is why they're going to do more testing, and hopefully either figure out what the problem is, or just build more confidence in the fact that muons are acting unexpectedly.


Question: Is there a difference in the performance of an aircraft in sub- trans- and supersonic flight? Why?

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</answer>
 Is there a difference in the performance of an aircraft in sub- trans- and supersonic flight? Why?

The properties of supersonic and subsonic flow and thus flight at those speeds is very different. In order to try to make this ELI5 I'l talk about the simplest major difference between subsonic and supersonic flow, behavior in a pipe that changes diameter (found as the inlets and nozzles of engines) which results in completely opposite behavior. Most airplane engines require subsonic "slow" flow inside in order to burn fuel without the air "blowing out" the flame and thus use a device called a Diffuser at the inlet or behind the fan to achieve this. When subsonic flow enters a conventional diffuser, basically a tube which widens as you go further into it, the flow slows down as there is more space (cross section) to be filled by air and thus the air speed slows down. Supersonic flow does the complete opposite for reasons that are not ELI5 but if the diameter of the tube gets larger, the flow gets even faster like in a rocket nozzle. Thus if your plane is not designed for the transition from subsonic flow with a variable geometry inlet, your engine can blow out - loosing all combustion/power or just straight up disintegrate as the even higher speed airflow creates very high pressure shock waves inside your engine. Aerodynamics overall isn't ELI5, but in short most major airflow properties change dramatically when crossing the speed of sound. Transonic regimes are even harder to deal with as you have both local areas of supersonic flow and subsonic flow which is a pain to engineer around.


Question: How do animals that swallow their prey alive (e.g. frogs, lizards etc.) ensure that their prey doesnt struggle and hurt their internal organs? Are they crushed during the swallowing process?

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 How do animals that swallow their prey alive (e.g. frogs, lizards etc.) ensure that their prey doesnt struggle and hurt their internal organs? Are they crushed during the swallowing process?

Feeding pet lizards worms and grubs and then having the worms or grubs erupt from the lizard later is like, a serious problem that happens to old or sick lizards. You get a big huge warning from a lot of lizard care taking stuff to stop feeding a lizard worms if they are having any sort of other issue. Because yeah, the lizard's body can't guarantee it and if the lizard is having other issues it totally happens. & #x200B; The truth is, lizards and frogs kinda just suck. They have a real live fast die young construction to them. Humans have two or three babies that are meant to live 90 years, a lot of little animals are cheaply constructed by the dozen and fall apart constantly.


Question: What does the military refer to by unconventional warfare?

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 What does the military refer to by unconventional warfare?

"Conventional warfare" basically describes wars like the World Wars*. There's defined battle lines, both sides have defined territory and clear goals. To win, destroy the enemy's means of production, demoralize their population, push into their territory and capture their leaders. Unconventional warfare is more like what we see today in say the Middle East. The enemy is undefined. The civilians you're protecting one day might be tomorrow's terrorists (or even yesterday's). Enemies come out of nowhere, perform a devastating attack, and then return to their normal lives. Think of 9/11 for example. A group of people who were just normal Saudi citizens (some had already lived in Europe) flew to the US. Trained on US air simulators. Booked themselves onto regular US flights. And then flew planes into the Twin Towers. It can also, although less commonly, refer to things like Cyber Warfare. Which simply aren't a style of battles we've fought before. *While the World Wars were mostly conventional, there was plenty of unconventional warfare as well - such as the French guerrillas who sabotaged German operations while living in German occupied France.


Question: How do phones (and other devices) show the exact date and time even after being switched on after a while?

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 How do phones (and other devices) show the exact date and time even after being switched on after a while?

It has a battery-backed clock on the inside. You don't *have* to sync your time with the internet, and you don't always have an internet connection. If you don't, the phone still keeps relatively decent time while it's on. How? There's a circuit somewhere in the phone that serves as a clock. It might even be part of the CPU. One neat thing we figured out a long time ago is certain crystals vibrate at predictable frequencies when you run electricity through them. That's why you see a lot of watches say they have a "quartz movement". Both watches and computers take advantage of this. So basically a tiny quartz crystal gets installed in a thing that can count how many times it vibrates. Then some electricity is applied. The person who designed the circuit set it up so once the right number of vibrations happens, a "tick" happens. That "tick" might be once per second, but usually it's much faster so smaller amounts of time can be measured. The smallest amount of time that can be measured is whatever one vibration of that crystal takes. So even when your phone is "off", it's probably still running a tiny circuit that updates the clock. This only takes a teeny tiny amount of electricity. Many simple watches can go 3+ years on one battery charge. So your phone can stay off for a long time before that clock circuit drains the battery. PCs have this too. If you open most cases, you'll find a small watch battery attached to he motherboard. This is used to keep the clock running even when there is no power. There's also a battery inside some early Game Boy games like Pokemon Crystal that had a clock. By now many of the batteries have run out and those clock-based features don't work anymore if you turn off the game! Pretty much anything that has an "off" state and keeps the time is likely using a small battery-backed quartz clock to do so. These clocks aren't always the most accurate, though. Very accurate ones are more expensive. That's why computers tend to sync with an internet time source. My last PC could be as much as 5 minutes wrong if it went a day without internet connectivity.


Question: Why is Chiropractic considered an alternative medicine, and not something you get done in addition to receiving health care?

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 Why is Chiropractic considered an alternative medicine, and not something you get done in addition to receiving health care?

Chiropractors fall into two camps. One group recognizes science and uses the practice to treat things like pinched nerves and physical therapy. The other group will tell you that almost all ailments are caused by your poorly aligned skeleton, including things that are very much unrelated, like immune system disorders. Their arguments don't hold up to scientific testing and many of them also promote quackery like accupressure (beating the soles of your feet to promote things like liver health). If you go into a chiropractors office and they have posters that say things like "Subluxations are real", you have found a quack. (Subluxations *are* real, but the chiropractors who have that poster are the ones that think they're responsible for all kinds of things...) If it's mostly posters about lifting safely and sports medicine, you have a higher chance that they're reasonable. It's viewed as "alternative medicine" when it's being used to treat things that aren't verified, verifiable or even appropriate. Physical therapists usually work with the ones that don't make these claims. This is a gross generalization but it's held true for me for 20 years.


Question: Why do Canadian websites end in .ca and U.K. Websites end in .UK but United States websites don't end in .us?

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 Why do Canadian websites end in .ca and U.K. Websites end in .UK but United States websites don't end in .us?

Basically because the US created the internet and the US government controlled all the non-country specific Top Level Domans (TLDs) in the early days (.com, .net, .org, etc). Some of them are still controlled by the US only like .mil and .gov. Countries had more control over their specific TLDs like .ca and .uk, so were more easily able to give them to businesses in their country. However the US had more strict rules for getting .us in the beginning while .com and .org had fewer restrictions. So the US got used to not using .us even though it is available (and more open) today.


Question: How come a person gets dehydrated when drinking certain liquids, such as beer? Shouldn't all liquids provide hydration?

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 How come a person gets dehydrated when drinking certain liquids, such as beer? Shouldn't all liquids provide hydration?

Alcohol prevents the pituitary gland from secreting something called Antidiuretic Hormone (ADH). ADH signals your kidneys to return water to your bloodstream instead of sending it to your bladder. Enough alcohol means that ADH isn't reaching the kidneys, so they stop returning the water they filter. So yeah, you're adding water when you drink the beer, but not enough to overcome what the kidneys are removing. That's why pee is clear when you're drunk, and then dark when you wake up the next day. The alcohol has worn off, the pituitary can secrete ADH again, and your kidneys start returning water to your blood in an attempt to counter dehydration. TL;DR: Kidneys remove water unless told otherwise. Alcohol blocks the 'return water' signal, so the kidneys drain as much water as they can, dehydrating you.


Question: Genetically speaking, how can a beard have brown, blonde, and red hairs?

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 Genetically speaking, how can a beard have brown, blonde, and red hairs?

I have dark brown hair but a red beard, after a haircut yesterday I actually looked this up out of curiosity. I'm no professional but from what I gathered this can happen because there is no single gene that determines our hair color or whether we have straight or curly hair. There are a number of genes that affect our hair and sometimes they can be expressed in different ways. So in my case brown hair is a dominant trait that is expressed everywhere on my head except my beard. The red in my beard comes from someone in my family with the gene for red hair, and that trait just happened to be expressed in my beard. Edit: a word and spelling


Question: Cold symptoms are your bodies immune response, cold medications suppress these symptoms. Do cold medications slow down your recovery?

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 Cold symptoms are your bodies immune response, cold medications suppress these symptoms. Do cold medications slow down your recovery?

I used to think this for the longest time when I was little. I would refuse basic stuff like cough syrup and tylenol because I knew it just treated symptoms not the cause. I thought if I tampered down my natural responses to infection (like coughing) I was making it easier on whatever pathogen I had. I was a dumb kid who didn't know better. The reality of the situation is your immune system only cares about eradicating whatever it has registered as a pathogen, it doesn't give a damn how much damage you take in the process (only that you survive). You already seem to know that the majority if not all your cold symptoms are caused by the immune response to the virus, not the virus' infection. In fact, the deadliest virus are those that trigger the immune system the greatest. The 1918 Flu that killed tens of millions did not attack the elderly but rather the young and able bodied. Its infection prompted cytotoxic storms that wiped out healthy adults in a matter of hours, leaving those without a great immune system unscathed. So no, suppressing your immune system for colds that you are not life threatening is not damaging, its the best thing you can do. A "suppression" is the key word here. Do not worry that you are totally turning off your immune system, you are just turning down the heat. Luckily, we now have access to antiviral medications if you are really worried and want to combat the virus directly. Edit: forgot to add, fevers are a particular dangerous element of the immune system and should be your primary target. In babies, they can destroy entire senses like sight and tough. In adults, it can still cause real damage, especially on your brain (fever dreams anyone?). Living in 1st world conditions, you do not need a fever in your life. It will do you more damage than good. Stay cool


Question: Why does sticking your finger in your ear cavity slightly open up the ear if it's clogged, but then go right back to a clogged state when you take it out?

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 Why does sticking your finger in your ear cavity slightly open up the ear if it's clogged, but then go right back to a clogged state when you take it out?

You're temporarily opening up your [Eustachian tubes]( URL_0 ) which connect from your middle ear to the back of your nose. If they're inflamed or gummed up, they'll quickly settle back. Swallowing can jiggle them the same way - used by divers to equalize the pressure in their ears to the water; also why if you have a cold, you can sometimes hear some squelching noises when you swallow - that's mucus moving around in those tubes.


Question: Why do we like foods better in certain shapes?

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 Why do we like foods better in certain shapes?

Different shapes of food have different ratios of surface area to volume, which can affect how they're cooked or how they soak up sauces. For example, thin fries are crispier than thick fries because most of the potato in a thin fry is on the outside getting itself fried in hot oil. Thick fries keep a lot more of their total potato content on the inside, away from the oil, which keeps them softer. Shapes of macaroni that have lots of little holes can absorb more cheese sauce than standard elbow macaroni, so you tend to get more cheese sauce per bite with them. So the shape of food can do a lot to affect the texture and the way it'll end up tasting.


Question: What does it mean, or what happens when an atom changes energy state?

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 What does it mean, or what happens when an atom changes energy state?

I'm gonna cover two different situations: 1 - Electrons in the atom can change state. Skip to point 2 if this isn't what you're asking. If an electron absorbs energy, it can jump to a higher state if there isn't a pair of electrons in that state already. These are all very particular states dictated by the atom itself. I might have a hydrogen atom. By default its electron is in the 1s orbital, which is a spherical shell around the nucleus. It could then be pushed up to the 2s orbital, which is another sphere farther away from the nucleus. It could go to 2p, 3s, 3p, and so forth. The orbitals are areas that look like [this]( URL_0 ). In general the higher the front number, the farther from the nucleus it is. 2 - The atom itself can have different energies. This is generally thought of as its thermal (heat) energy. You can have translation energy (moving back and forth), rotational (spinning), and vibrational (wiggling around in place). By adding energy to an atom or molecule, you're making it do more of one of these things. Different atoms/molecules have access to different energy states. We call these 'degrees of freedom'. A gas molecule, for instance, can move around, whereas a solid molecule is stuck in place. So a gas molecule can have translational energy, but a molecule in a solid can not. You can also have say, two atoms bonded together. The atoms in the molecule can rotate around the bond, like unscrewing the end of a barbell piercing. Changing atoms (but not the electrons in them) of a substance to a higher state generally means it's raising in temperature. By forcing enough energy into something to give it access to additional states, we're getting phase changes. That is, giving something access to its translational energy means it's becoming a gas.