Question: Biologically, what gives humans consciousness and why are we the only species with it?

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 Biologically, what gives humans consciousness and why are we the only species with it?

I strongly disagree with your claim that animal is not conscious. * If you look at definitions that google gives for the word the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings. * the awareness or perception of something by a person. * the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world. the first lone of the Wikipedia article * Consciousness at its simplest is "sentience or awareness of internal or external existence" The only of them that can't be true is the one that includes the word person as that is a human with most definitions. But if we use the question is quite meaningless as the answer is we define it to be something only for humans, replace it with living begins. No one doubt that animals are aware of this surrounding, even bacteria react to the surrounding of what is around them. If you look if the animal is aware of themselves look at the [mirror test]( URL_4 ) when you can get a few animal species to recognize that they see themselves in a mirror. It has a problem because it is very visual and some animals use primary other senses like smell for dogs or sound for dolphins Lost of animal can do things you might consider to be human-specific like plan ahead. They can use logic and wait for a reward if it gets better. They can avoid eating now if the amount of food gets higher if they wait some time. You can compare tath to human children int the [Stanford\_marshmallow\_experiment]( URL_2 ) [ URL_5 ]( URL_5 ) So I would strongly disagree with the premise what the common definition fo consciousness [Animal\_consciousness]( URL_6 ) You will even find what could be considered intelligent behavior slime mold that area colonies of single-cell and have no brain or nervous system [how-brainless-slime-molds-redefine-intelligence]( URL_0 ) What you are asking for is not consciousness but [sapience]( URL_3 ) that is the "is the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense, and insight." It gets harder to know if the animal has it but you will still find behave that show that is likely the case perhaps not tot he same degree as human but likely better the toddlers and young children [ URL_1 ]( URL_1 ) If you like to make human unique you can find a definition that only human fits but a lot of fundamental parts like morality, the sens for fairness can be found in other animals.


Question: How do astrophysicists know that the Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago?

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 How do astrophysicists know that the Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago?

Observation and calculation. Astrophysicists noticed that space is expanding, and that the expansion is accelerating. They did a bunch of math and figured out how much it's accelerating and how different things would effect this acceleration. They did more math and were reasonably sure that it was correct. So they extrapolated backwards and found that, assuming they didn't make any huge mistakes with the calculations, all of space would've been a single point ~13.8 billion years ago, which then started expanding because of quantum stuff that is hard to ELI5.


Question: how/why can a person make different pitches/notes when they whistle?

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 how/why can a person make different pitches/notes when they whistle?

You change the shape and forward-/backness of your tongue (and occasionally other parts of your mouth but I'm not that fancy) to modulate pitch. This changes the distance the air has to vibrate in - like when you blow the tops of bottles and how you can change the pitch by having different levels of liquid in there.


Question: Why is that technically too much sleep is bad for us?

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 Why is that technically too much sleep is bad for us?

Your muscles need stress (exercise/movement) to stay strong. If you stay in bed all day your muscles decide they aren't needed and go away. Same for bone strength. Your bones will literally be easier to break. Also too much sleep throws off your sleep schedule. Having a consistent schedule is best. Trying to get extra sleep on the weekends doesn't work too well. If you try to get extra sleep one day you might be in deep sleep (rem phase) where if you wake up in this phase you will feel very tired even if you were asleep for longer than you normally were. This is also the case for naps. If you enter a deep sleep and wake up in the rem phase you will just feel more tired. You need to wake up when you are out of the rem phase. A consistent schedule will make sure you are out of the rem phase of sleep and you will wake up refreshed.


Question: why don’t humans have any real fur, and why does the fur we have feel different than animal fur?

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 why don’t humans have any real fur, and why does the fur we have feel different than animal fur?

Ancient humans where endurance hunters in Africa. We would run our prey down over incredible long distances until they inevitably tired or overheated, and then we would beat them to death with our buddies. This means that humans have evolved things like less fur to prevent overheating and the ability to sweat to cool ourselves while running.


Question: Why are there math jokes about rounding errors in addition, 1+1=2.000001?

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 Why are there math jokes about rounding errors in addition, 1+1=2.000001?

It's not about math, more CS. Floating points are a fast way to approximate real numbers for computer use. They are, however, approximations, and they are base 2 approximations. That means that you have some goofy results to humans, like adding integers and getting a result that has a random millionth digit.


Question: If carbonated drinks are stored similarly in canisters for fountains and aluminum cans, why does the fizz lost much quicker when transferred?

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 If carbonated drinks are stored similarly in canisters for fountains and aluminum cans, why does the fizz lost much quicker when transferred?

Carbonated water loses the mixed CO2 in direct relationship with the amount of surface area the liquid has at any given point in time. Fountain drinks have the benefit of having been immediately carbonated by the fountain (since that's what a fountain does - carbonates water and mixes with syrup to produce a drink), and at most fountains the amount of injected CO2 is pretty high to make up for the fact that a ton of it is lost on impact (i.e. the drink from the fountain hitting the bottom of the cup). Most canned/bottled drinks aren't carbonated as much because carbonation increases the pressure inside the container, and if you add too much carbonation the can or bottle will explode when you shake it (worse than it does normally).


Question: How does this happen without the water freezing before it’s pulled out?

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 How does this happen without the water freezing before it’s pulled out?

It looks like the water is supercooled. Ie it’s pure water that is below freezing temperature - when you cool water in this manner it won’t freeze until there is either an impurity for ice crystals to form around or if you shake the water (you can try this at home - buy a bottle of purified water and stick it in the freeezer for a few hours, carefully pull it out and it’ll likely still be liquid but will freeze if you shake it). When they dip the cherry in either ice crystals already on the cherry or the cherry itself provide a base for the ice crystals from the super cooled water to latch onto. The whole cup doesn’t freeze because forming ice releases heat energy into the surrounding environment (in the opposite process of how you need to add heat energy to ice to melt it), so the ice that does form warms the rest of the water to above freezing.


Question: What's the difference between crack and cocaine?

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 What's the difference between crack and cocaine?

There is a small chemical difference. Cocaine hydrochloride is a salt of the cocaine molecule (slightly alkaline) and hydrochloric acid. Salts generally have high melting and evaporation temperatures and are more water-soluble. Reaction with a more strongly alkaline material, sodium bicarbonate, and the acid is striped away leaving the free base molecule. That has a lower evaporation temperature so the drug can be inhaled in the gas phase for quick effect rather than having to dissolve in the mucous membranes lining places like the nose and mouth and be absorbed that way.


Question: How Is the Universe Infinite?

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 How Is the Universe Infinite?

We don't know if the universe is infinite or not. We do know that it is mind bogglingly big. We don't know wether or not it is infinite because we do not know what shape it is. If it is saddle shaped then it is infinite, if it is spherical then it is finite. It is not intuitive to think of the universe being finite because that would mean there is a boundary and if there is a boundary then our intuition says there must be something on the other side. This is why it is a very difficult question to answer. Our intuition is not sufficient to understand it. The people that have the best understanding of it do so through math. To approach an understanding try to think of the universe as having two physical dimensions instead of three. If you imagine the universe to be the surface of a balloon you might see how it can be both unbounded and yet finite. A person in this two dimensional universe would only be able to conceive of a third dimension through math.


Question: Can somebody explain Bayes’ Theorem?

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 Can somebody explain Bayes’ Theorem?

Consider a Venn diagram of two sets, A and B, with non-empty intersection. Each area denotes the probability of the corresponding set. You can think of it as throwing a random dart at this diagram. Note that there may be area outside of both A and B, since probability needs to total to 1. So the probability of A you can think of as the area of A, same for B. What about the probability of A and B? That’s just the area of the intersection. So what’s the conditional probability of A given B. What’s the interpretation? Conditioning on B simply means that you restrict your attention to the area covered by B. So the probability of A given B is the area of A, within the restricted area covered by B. This means the area of intersection divided by the area of B, that Pr(A|B) = Pr(A and B)/Pr(B). Bayes’ theorem is simply the observation that the same thought can be applied to Pr(B|A), and both equations involve Pr(A and B). What it lets us do is to go from Pr(A|B) to Pr(B|A). How do we do that? Let’s look at the definition of Pr(A|B) again. It’s the ratio between Pr(A and B) with Pr(B). On the other hand, Pr(B|A) is also Pr(A and B), but divided by Pr(A) instead. So to go from one conditional probability to the other, we simply need to look at the ratio between Pr(B) and Pr(A). Concretely, Pr(A|B) = Pr(B|A) * Pr(B) / Pr(A). And that’s Bayes’ theorem.


Question: where do all the bugs go when it rains?

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 where do all the bugs go when it rains?

When it rains most small bugs (and other animals) hide under the surface. They usually hide in tree holes and under leaves, plants and rocks, but when it's really pouring they go further underground until it stops. In the ground, there are multiple layers of tunnels to protect them from floods, predators, and heat. Some bugs are very light so the rain doesn't bother them.


Question: Why does it matter if certain species (like rhinos for example) go extinct? Is every species really that important to the ecology?

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 Why does it matter if certain species (like rhinos for example) go extinct? Is every species really that important to the ecology?

Right now, we lack the data to accurately predict the effects of all endangered species going extinct. It's better to err on the side of caution and try to prevent extinction, because once it's gone, it'll take *tons* more effort and money to bring back the species. And at that point, the ecosystem could have changed so much that it is too late. The more diverse an ecosystem is, the more stable and resilient it is. Functional ecosystems are not only nice to visit (camping, hiking, tourism), they can provide economic benefits such as absorbing and filtering water (one reason the flooding in Houston, Texas is so bad is that a lot of wetland areas were paved over), stop land erosion, and help preserve soil quality. Think of it this way. Anything not saved could be lost, so we might end up with a world populated by us and all the creatures that thrive in our presence whether we want them to or not. Pigeons, raccoons, mosquitoes, rats, mice, feral dogs and cats, and things like that that people generally don't like to have around.


Question: Why should I worry about a hacker getting passwords from a website, if the passwords a supposed to be hashed anyway?

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 Why should I worry about a hacker getting passwords from a website, if the passwords a supposed to be hashed anyway?

Three reasons, really. First, as the end user, you don't actually know that the passwords were hashed at all. All too often we find out that a site was storing passwords as cleartext only *after* an intrusion gets revealed. Or they might be hashing passwords but *also* leaking a cleartext copy of it somewhere. It's happened countless times in our short history. Second: As others have pointed out, a web site may have hashed passwords but failed to "salt" them. For any given hashing algorithm, this would mean that any password maps to exactly one *hashed* password. They can then use a "rainbow table" to quickly look up each hash against this precomputed list of many billions of the most likely passwords: if your password is on the list, the hash will match and your password is revealed immediately. If neither of the above are true, if the passwords are both hashed and salted, stealing the password hash still enables an *offline attack*. The web site itself may limit how many attempts you might make to guess a password, or how quickly those guesses can be made: but if the hacker has your hashed password he can test likely passwords against the hash as fast as he or she can, with none of those software-imposed limits. The remaining defense against this, other than two-factor authentication, is an algorithm that makes hashing the password very slow and costly. PBKDF2, Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2, is among the most well-known of these.


Question: Why is the loudest sound ever reported is considered to be the Krakatoa volcanic eruption, at 180 dB and could be directly heard 5,000km away but rocket launches regularly hits 200+ dB but are only heard within the vicinity of the ignition?

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 Why is the loudest sound ever reported is considered to be the Krakatoa volcanic eruption, at 180 dB and could be directly heard 5,000km away but rocket launches regularly hits 200+ dB but are only heard within the vicinity of the ignition?

200+ db doesn't really exist. At 194 db, the sound is so loud that it's creating vacuums between the sound waves. Any louder, and it isn't really a sound wave anymore, just a shock wave. Rocket launches can reach 165 db, but that's still fifteen decibels lower than Krakatoa. As to why Krakatoa was heard so far away, volcanoes are geological activity: the earth itself was producing the sound and helping it travel. Think of it like a phone on vibrate. If it vibrates in your hand, you can only hear it a few feet away. However, if you place the same phone on a table, you can clearly hear it from across the room. In the same way, a rocket engine suspended above the ground will not be heard from as far away as a volcano erupting within the earth. Edit: [Better explanation]( URL_0 )


Question: Why do we need to sleep? Can't we recover whilst being awake and just laying still?

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 Why do we need to sleep? Can't we recover whilst being awake and just laying still?

The truth is, no one truly knows why we need sleep; we just know that we do. While we understand that we *must* sleep, and we understand at least some of the role sleep plays, medical science still hasn't been able to nail down the why of it all. The biggest hurdle to understanding why we sleep has been that the brain activity that occurs during sleep is largely hidden from researchers. New methods, still in their infancy, are beginning to help researchers understand the purpose of sleep, though. We know that it must be vital to us as a species, because it remained part of our evolution despite the fact that we are most vulnerable during sleep. We know that there are serious health consequences, up to and including death, if we don't sleep. We know that sleep allows our brains to "consolidate" our memories, converting short term memories to long term memories. Sleep also provides the brain an opportunity to 'take out the trash', as it were...cerebral spinal fluid is pushed around the brain during sleep to clear waste chemicals produced as part of a cell's natural activity. There are a lot of theories, but even with all we know, we still are not sure exactly why we sleep.


Question: What is the academic reasoning behind believing we live in a simulation?

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 What is the academic reasoning behind believing we live in a simulation?

IMHO, (layman here) is that there is not a "belief" that we live in a simulation. It is a philosophical position that we cannot rule out by our reasoning that we are not living in a simulation. There is nothing we know of (by observation or reasoning) that contradicts this position. This does not imply belief or support - simply it is something that cannot be ruled out.


Question: How small can we go?

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 How small can we go?

So the thing is we've never actually seen a bare isolated quark. It's actually impossible to separate one! Essentially if you put energy in trying to remove a quark from e.g. a proton, that energy will actually create one or more new quarks in a big 'jet' until all the energy is used up and all the quarks have one or two neighbours bound to them. Therefore, even if we had some theory or reason to think quarks were not fundamental point particles (which we don't), it would be impossible to separate that new smaller particle from the quatk jet.


Question: if a lightyear is the distance light travels in one year, how do we know something is 1000 light years away? Would we not have to wait 1000 years before we know, or do we use something other than light to measure objects in space?

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 if a lightyear is the distance light travels in one year, how do we know something is 1000 light years away? Would we not have to wait 1000 years before we know, or do we use something other than light to measure objects in space?

For distant stars and galaxies, there's some highly educated guesswork based on apparent speed and brightness, but for closer ones, there's actually a really intuitive method called **parallax**! It works like this: suppose there's some distant object like a mountain that you want to know the distance to. Notice that as you walk sideways, closer objects like trees appear to pass you much faster than the mountain. This is the parallax effect. To use it mathematically, simply measure how far you walked, and how far you had to rotate your head to keep the mountain in view. Now the start point, end point, and the mountain itself form a triangle, of which you know the measure of one side and two angles. Using trigonometry, this is enough information to determine the remaining sides, which are the distance between you and the mountain! It would be difficult to walk far enough on earth to see a measurable change in the location of a star, but we can "walk" the entire earth just by waiting 6 months for it to be on the opposite side of its orbit. This enables us to calculate the position of nearby stars, without actually going to them.


Question: How is the relative value of currencies decided? Who decides how many $ = £ = ¥?

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 How is the relative value of currencies decided? Who decides how many $ = £ = ¥?

Literally thousands of traders around the world determine the relative value every second of every day. Large market makers (like investment banks, for example) publish their rates to buy and sell each currency quite freely asks (including market data providers). From these quotes a mid rate can be determined and that's usually what we use when discussing rates. The values will fluctuate based on demand to fund regular economic activity (e.g. international trade, tourism etc), relative interest rates (this concept gets a bit tricky, but basically you would expect the country with a comparatively higher interest rate to have their currency depreciate by the rate differential over time), and various other factors that aftect supply and demand for currencies (e.g some countries purposely alter demand to keep their exchange rates within a target range). The traders that do this every day basically either just sell both sides at a spread (offer to sell a currency for more than they offer to buy in some market place), or will try to analyse the fundamentals mentioned above, along with some statistical analysis on momentum etc. and actively try to be smarter than every one else to eek a profit. The FX markets are probably one of the purest forms of price discovery around (Govt currency manipulation aside).


Question: How do nature documentaries get such good sound? Do they use foley artists?

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 How do nature documentaries get such good sound? Do they use foley artists?

One legendary sound recorder for nature docs is Chris Watson. He used to be in Throbbing Gristle. Now he does the sound for David Attenborough. I once did a workshop in field recording with him. Getting sound to match nature documentaries is really an art all of it's own. They use a lot of tricks with different mics and setups but he tried not to fake sounds, they try and get them all in situ. For example, he told us about attaching contact mics, a type of microphone that picks up sound coursing through a solid object, to carcasses of animals and recording the sounds of vultures scraping off the flesh. Stuff like that..


Question: Why are some people more likely to have sleep paralysis, while others never have it or have only experienced it once?

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 Why are some people more likely to have sleep paralysis, while others never have it or have only experienced it once?

Everyone or, at least, most people are capable of having sleep paralysis. Its nothing special as far as chemical imbalance go or something in genes or dealing with immune (it's been noted to be a common occurrence in narcoleptic people). But experiencing that transition from physically awake to mentally awake can vary from person to person and age. Most children will experience it more commonly than adults due growing and experiencing the world, in general, while sleeping. That's how you get a laundry list of childhood fears relating the darkness, nighttime and sleep.


Question: why are wasps attracted to lawnmowers after they’ve been recently been used?

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 why are wasps attracted to lawnmowers after they’ve been recently been used?

It's basically the smell of freshly cut grass. The thing is, that smell is a chemical distress signal, almost like screaming for help. It's triggered when a part of the plant is cut off, originally by plant eating insects, but now by us. It attracts other bigger insects to save the plant, and in return, those bigger insects get food (in the form of the smaller insects eating the plant)


Question: How do you explain average to My 5 year old kid?

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 How do you explain average to My 5 year old kid?

Let’s say you had three friends come over, and you knew they were all bringing you some sweets for your birthday. Your first friend gives you 3 sweets. Your second friend gives you 5 sweets. How many sweets might you expect to get from your third friend? An ‘average’ is the expected value for an event, in this case ‘giving sweets.’ Since you saw one person give 3, and one person give 5. You can calculate the expected value by adding them all up (8), and dividing by the number of people (2), to say the average is 4. You now know you expect 4 sweets ... but it doesn’t mean you will get that many. After you find out how many you do get, you could calculate the new average from three people to get a better idea of what to expect if a forth friend turned up with sweets to give you.


Question: Why do so many characters in movies and TV series have perfectly white teeth even if it does not fit their role at all? Is there a specific reason why teeth barely get any 'Makeup'?

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 Why do so many characters in movies and TV series have perfectly white teeth even if it does not fit their role at all? Is there a specific reason why teeth barely get any 'Makeup'?

Because it would gross people out and they would be less inclined to watch. It sounds shallow, but is very likely to happen. I actually started watching a show called "Frontier" on Netflix: Ahistorical drama, set during the colonization of North America, all about the fur trade in the 1700s. Some of the main characters (Irish immigrants) are dirt poor and basically stealing to survive. These characters are interesting and endearing (and are portrayed by impossibly good looking actors) but - suitably for poverty stricken paupers in the 1700s - their teeth are yellow and rotten. Their teeth drew my attention a lot, and kind of made me uncomfortable, because I'm a sheltered bigot or whatever I guess. I watched an episode or two, then the next week, when I returned to watch some more, that was my overriding memory - how grossed out I would be by their teeth - and in the end, I didn't watch any more of the show. I would bet my house I'm not the only person who didn't continue with that show because of the historically accurate teeth 'make up'.


Question: If the chord progression number system is i - II - iii - iv - V - VI - VII and your first chord is C minor, how do you determine what chord II and so forth will be? Also, how do you determine which order to play them?

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 If the chord progression number system is i - II - iii - iv - V - VI - VII and your first chord is C minor, how do you determine what chord II and so forth will be? Also, how do you determine which order to play them?

> ELI5 If the chord progression number system is i - II - iii - iv - V - VI - VII and your first chord is C minor, how do you determine what chord II and so forth will be? The numbers indicate the scale degree. i is the first note of the scale, ii is the second, etc. Which means you have to know the notes of the scale. Maybe you understand that now from other responses. > Also, how do you determine which order to play them? You play them in the order the song requires. Or if you're writing a song yourself, you order them how you want to get a particular sound. There are many possible chord progressions.


Question: What exactly happens during a clock cycle in a CPU?

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 What exactly happens during a clock cycle in a CPU?

Ooo, I used to work on these, and I think like a 5yo, so this should be right up my alley. Remember the red light green light game in school? Each time you hear one red and one green, that is a clock cycle. Think of each kid as a different part of the CPU. Some kids are faster than others and can get farther than others in a clock cycles. Think of that less the capability of the kid but the amount of work that happens within a clock cycle. In order to make a CPU work, the kids have to get to a far enough distance or there are errors in the CPU. ELI15: CPUs are broken down into different units. There's parts that do integer arithmetic, floating point arithmetic, memory/cache that store answers, controllers for all of the units, etc. Let's say as a basic example, you want to add 1+1. The steps without any optimization could look like this: 1. Get the code from you program (add these two numbers from memory spots A and B and store it in C) 2. Get the values from memory locations A and B. 3. Add them in the integer arithmetic logic unit 4. Put the new value in memory locations C This example could take 4 cycles to perform. Modern CPUs have insane optimizations that lower the cycle per instruction.


Question: What do no tear shampoos have?

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 What do no tear shampoos have?

Some people are probably going to comment here saying "no tears" means the other kind of tear, as in it won't break your hair, which is just plain wrong. Because if any shampoo is *tearing your hair*, you probably shouldn't use it. Eyes are very sensitive, and normal soap or shampoo has a higher pH than the water in your eyes does. "No tears" shampoo has the same pH as our eyes to prevent that strong stinging sensation. But getting anything foreign in your eyes could still feel irritating, so if you apply the shampoo directly into your eyes it might still hurt.


Question: What is the purpose of the eyes iris and why does it's colour vary among individuals?

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 What is the purpose of the eyes iris and why does it's colour vary among individuals?

The iris controls the amount of light let into the eye. When it's brighter out, the iris is larger making the pupil smaller and letting in less, but light. When it's dark, the iris is smaller, making the pupil bigger and letting in more light. & #x200B; The color is due to melanin (a brown/black pigment that also affects skin color) interacting with blood vessels, connective tissues and other stuff in the eye. The color has a little bit of an effect on vision. Lighter colors tends to be a bit better at night vision and darker colors tend to be a little better in bright lights. I don't know why though. Edit: added more about why eye color is different and effects


Question: Why Isnt There A ‘Universal,’ Type Of Currency? Something Like The Euro, or Whatever Africa Is Currently Working On, But More Widespread

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 Why Isnt There A ‘Universal,’ Type Of Currency? Something Like The Euro, or Whatever Africa Is Currently Working On, But More Widespread

Who would print this currency? Who would control it? Printing and shedding money are powerful tools for tempering the economy, and every country has its own economy. How would it be set up to avoid screwing over poor countries? Who would want to be tied economically to a country they can't control or influence? These are hard questions, and the answers can be subjective in some places. Ultimately any fiat currency is established and maintained by a government, and the biggest disagreements are always around who gets to control it and to what end.


Question: the sun has a peak on instesity at wavelengths that correspond to the Green color, does it has any association with plants being Green?

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 the sun has a peak on instesity at wavelengths that correspond to the Green color, does it has any association with plants being Green?

A good explanation is given here URL_0 There isn't a consensus answer why plants are green. But some ideas are that by reflecting the green light it prevents the leaves from over heating, the leaves are already getting all the light they can use (photosynthesis also needs CO2, so if you are shining a really bright light on a leaf, CO2 will be your limiting reagent and you can't make any more sugar), chlorophyll is evolutionarily the best molecule, early bacterial life used green and plants evolved to use the red and blue light they didn't use.


Question: Could a country capable of space flight send a missile from outer space, down onto a target without anyone knowing who/where it came from?

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 Could a country capable of space flight send a missile from outer space, down onto a target without anyone knowing who/where it came from?

Nope The US Space Surveillance Network is tasked with tracking satellites(active or inactive), spent rockets, debris, and anything else orbiting Earth. There are public ones that exist as well that track most satellites in orbit. If a missile comes from space it'd be pretty easy to track it back to which satellite launched it then just lookup who put that satellite up there, and you've got your culprit We have to keep good track of satellites and debris in orbit to avoid collisions which would create more debris which create more collisions


Question: Do any animals besides humans find enjoyment in listening to music?

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 Do any animals besides humans find enjoyment in listening to music?

I think it would be really hard to qualify "enjoyment" in many species but I would imagine you could see changes in behavior linked to the music- start playing it and seeing a head bob in a parrot for example. But even we can't really qualify how we enjoy or choose our musical tastes you know? I know there was a study on dogs for classical music that found when played in the shelter it reduced stress levels. Hard to say if it was drowning out other dogs barking or if the inherent music itself was doing the trick.


Question: Do our eyes interpolate missing frames?

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</answer>
 Do our eyes interpolate missing frames?

Our eyes are not cameras. There are no "missing frames", that's not how vision works. There are periods of light and periods of darkness, and our eyes ignore the darkness under the right conditions. Movies are smooth because they have motion blur, so moving things are blurred. When you can't afford the computation to do that, you have to use a higher frame rate to get the eye to not detect the jumping.


Question: why do digital numbers bounce?

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 why do digital numbers bounce?

The numbers on the microwave aren't solidly lit, they blink really fast. They have a high enough refresh rate that you can't tell under normal circumstances. When you chew something crunchy, the crunching is shaking your head and making that refresh rate more visible, so it leaves a sort of "trail" imprint on your vision.


Question: How does an infant transition from receiving oxygen through the placenta to breathing? How is there a constant supply of oxygen during labor? Are there dangers to the brain?

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 How does an infant transition from receiving oxygen through the placenta to breathing? How is there a constant supply of oxygen during labor? Are there dangers to the brain?

The umbilical cord attaches the baby to the mother's blood supply, so the baby does keep receiving oxygen (through the blood) during the birth process. If you google it, the minimum recommended wait time to cut the umbilical cord is 2 minutes after the birth; so, basically, no, there is no interruption in receiving oxygen, or danger to the brain. The baby should cough out the amniotic fluid and breathe (and cry) before they cut the cord.


Question: How is reduced fat cheese made?

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 How is reduced fat cheese made?

Literally, they just take the cream out of the milk before they start the cheese making process. You know low-fat milk? Well, that is milk with the natural cream removed. Low-fat cheese is cheese made from this milk. To make cheese, you add a starter culture of bacteria to “sour” the milk, and then add rennin to make it curdle. After a bit of processing, you have curd (cheese) and whey (the milky liquid left over.) You drain away the whey and add salt, and that’s cheese.


Question: When a company commits a gross violation that affects people (physically/mentally/financially, etc.), why is the company forced to pay the government, instead of the people they hurt?

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 When a company commits a gross violation that affects people (physically/mentally/financially, etc.), why is the company forced to pay the government, instead of the people they hurt?

Usually they'll have to pay both. Fines levyed by the state is not meant to replace money companies have to pay for the damages they cause a person. Let's say a company causes you to lose a leg because of negligence, they might be fined by the state if they broke the law, but *in addition to that* they have to pay you money for the damages they caused you specifically.


Question: what is the student debt bubble and what does it mean for those with student debt?

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 what is the student debt bubble and what does it mean for those with student debt?

Lots of young people take out debt to go to school. School is expensive. Therefore there is a lot of student debt. Since this debt comes with a federal guarantee of repayment or comes from the government directly, it cannot be discharged in bankruptcy under most circumstances. The government sets interest rates for its loans by diktat, rather than allowing interest rates to vary by person, school, etc. according to how risky the loan is. The interest rates on private student loans are often artificially low due to the federal guarantee of repayment. This, combined with cultural values about how going to college is important, leads a lot of people to go to school without much thought about what they will do after or what they will study. As such, many graduate without lucrative enough jobs to pay off their debt. Many also criticize this program with contributing to tuition increases in colleges (though there are many other reasons beyond student loans for that). Now, I want to emphasize a few things: Labor economists will say that it is perfectly sensible to go into debt when you're young to invest in human capital. 5, 10, and 20 years down the line you'll almost certain to be earning much more than you are now, and borrowing against that future income to invest in skills (or even consumption) today is perfectly logical. However, no bank will give an 18 year old with no collateral a loan based on their future income. This is why federal loans and a federal guarantee of private loans exists. The government recognizes that it is good for students to invest in their own skills and tries to ensure they have access to credit markets to make that investment. In many ways, the problem is that the loans aren't priced according to risk. There are many reasons that a world where the risk is priced properly would be highly undesirable, though. It would virtually lock poor families out of the student loan market, for one. It would also funnel kids into, say, electrical engineering programs even if they were ill-suited for it. Also, many people in highly lucrative careers (e.g. lawyers) tend to come from, on average, less lucrative majors, which would basically be a penalty on such people. However, in my opinion, the worst part about such a scenario is that it is antithetical to one of the central purposes of college: to become an educated individual. As for the effects of student loans on the economy: It depresses spending of young people, likely causing them to delay marriage and home purchases. However, they are also almost certain to be more productive (the payout of the average college degree in labor market returns still far outstrips the average student loan burdens) and thus the effect on growth is likely positive. However, the issue people have with student loans isn't that they're issued, or that they have to be paid back. The issue people tend to have is what happens when they can't be paid back.


Question: Why are auitoimmune diseases so unpredictable and hard to cure?

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 Why are auitoimmune diseases so unpredictable and hard to cure?

They're "unpredictable" because the number of different conditions with an autoimmune component is just *staggering*. To use a metaphor, think of the immune system as a *very* complicated machine with thousands of moving parts. If any one of those parts breaks, you'd still say the machine "broke down," but depending upon *which* part breaks, the consequences could be anywhere from completely unnoticeable to utterly catastrophic. Same with autoimmune diseases. The immune system does a *ton* of different things using a *ton* of different biochemical/metabolic processes, and an error in one function/process could have wildly different symptoms than an error in another function/process. As to why they're hard to cure, well, your immune system isn't a foreign body or infectious organism. It's *you*. And it's not even cancer, either. Cancer is *you* too, but cancerous growths are completely unnecessary to your body's normal function. They can be surgically cut out of your body (under the right circumstances, anyway) with no ill effects (other than direct side effects of the surgery, obviously). They're not actively *doing* anything to keep you alive and healthy. But your immune system *is*. We don't want it to attack *you*, clearly, but it's not as if we can just make it go away and you can go on living your life. There's actually a disease that attacks your immune system. It's called "HIV," and its effects are called "AIDS". Not a good look. The ELI5 version of autoimmune diseases is that we really don't have any way of getting your immune system to stop attacking the wrong stuff other than just nuking it *completely*, which is pretty much never a good idea.


Question: Not so long ago, everything chargeable needed an adapter; but these days almost everything is chargeable via USB. Why?

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 Not so long ago, everything chargeable needed an adapter; but these days almost everything is chargeable via USB. Why?

One contributing factor was that the European Union legislated that all phones must be chargeable via interchangeable USB plugs. When a lot of electronic gadgets were *forced* to have USB chargers, others followed because it was convenient for them too. Nearly every consumer has USB chargers in heir home already. Made for their locally used voltage level.


Question: What causes small meteorites have large impact craters?

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 What causes small meteorites have large impact craters?

Physics baby! Kinetic Energy = 0.5 x (mass x velocity^2 ) If you add either mass or velocity you get more energy. If you add mass you get a little more energy, but if you add velocity you get *a lot* more. Things falling from space tend to have a huge amount of velocity, so even with just a little mass they still pack a boatload of kinetic energy.


Question: How is a cut down tree turned into paper?

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 How is a cut down tree turned into paper?

The tree is smashed and shredded into teensy tiny bits. Then it is added to a lot of water. I think the mix is something like 98% or more water and a tiny amount of tree pulp. The mix might be bleached so it is white. It depends what kind of paper they are making. This mix gets stirred constantly so the pulp doesn't fall to the bottom. Screens with teensy tiny holes scoop up a very thin layer of the mix on it and shake out some of the water. There are lots of computers to make sure all of this is done right. It all happens very fast. These screens deposit the mix on a conveyor belt. The process is so quick and efficient, it makes one long sheet. Two rollers will heat the mix, making all the water evaporate. Now it looks like paper. The paper then goes through another set of rollers that rub it to smooth out the surface of the paper. This is why you don't feel the holes from the screens. The paper might be cut after that, or it might be spooled on a big roll.


Question: Why does beards exist only on man?

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 Why does beards exist only on man?

Beards aren't thought to be for protecting the face. The two main theories seem to be that (a) beards are a secondary sexual characteristic that indicates either sexual maturity or dominance to women, and (b) that beards are a side-effect of another selection process that themselves serve no particular purpose. If a is true, and beards are an indicator of sexual maturity, then they're unnecessary on women because women have plenty of other indicators already. It would take an extra step of evolution for beards to appear on women, which hasn't happened. If a is true but beards are an indicator of dominance (ie, the better the beard, the better the man) then they're unnecessary on women because on the evolutionary time scale, the men compete for the women's attention; the women aren't competing, so need no sign of dominance over other women. If b is true then beards are just a thing that exist with no particular purpose. There is reasonable evidence for both theories. Beard growth is moderated by a molecule called dihydrotestosterone, which is produced in the body from testosterone. The same molecule is also heavily involved in other important aspects of male-ness, particularly maturation of the male genitalia. This means men capable of growing good beards likely also have good reproductive qualities like high sperm count, and will, on average, be more reproductively successful. So even if beards don't serve their own purpose, they're selected for accidentally by virtue of selecting for other traits caused by the same genes. Women have *way* less testosterone than men, so don't normally grow beards, but disorders that cause significant increases in testosterone can produce beards on women.


Question: why does washing your hands with a soap bar make them feel squeaky and rubbery after rinsing?

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 why does washing your hands with a soap bar make them feel squeaky and rubbery after rinsing?

It is becasue soap is formed from; 1) a lye, sodium hydroxide (bar soap) or potassium hydroxide (liquid soap) and 2) fatty acids, vegetable oils usually but you can use animal fats. Each fat has a known [saponification value]( URL_0 ), the amount of lye required to saponify 1 g of the fat. You always have to have an excess of vegetable oil. An excess of lye would make caustic soap that saponified the oils in your skin. When you use a soap, you end up with some unsaponified vegetable oil on your skin.