Is there an insect that can devour plastic, breaking it down to less harmful components? ( www.youtube.com )
I felt a strange urge to buy me some bugs and let them eat my plastic garbage after watching this video 😂...
Humans are notoriously bad at absorbing iron from plant sources, while herbivores seem to do fine. What's up with that?
… or do they just make up for it with sheer unrelieved quantity of greenery, perhaps?
Is there an easy way to generate a list of CMYK color values that will appear identical to the human eye under 589nm light?
I picked up a low pressure sodium lamp and am working on a Halloween demonstration. I’m hoping to make a display that appears one way under normal light, but looks totally different under the monochromatic 589nm sodium vapor light....
Hypothetically speaking, what alterations to our biology/genome would need to occur in order for us to be able to safely drink saltwater?
Could we, in theory, use something like CRISPR to give a new baby replacement super-kidneys (or whatever organ it is that makes drinking saltwater be a bad time)? It seems like if we cracked that, we’d be set as a species....
If a sun burns hotter with greater mass, does adding a tonne of water make it hotter?
Could, in theory, we merge black holes to prolong the life of the universe?
Seeing as the heat death of the universe occurs once black holes have stopped emitting Hawking radiation, and BH’s life spans are tied to their mass, could a (very, very advanced) civilisation bring two or more together? Assuming nobody’s succumbed to proton decay before then, of course....
Why are so many galaxies symmetrical?
On their massive scale you’d think that several would have opposing arms different lengths due to the way suns and solar systems end up forming. Most of the imagery I see shows almost all galaxies symmetrical. Just curious.
Why do trees stems grow new "parts" inside and not outside i.e. why is the oldest part of the stem the innermost "ring" and not the outermost?
Wouldn’t grow something from the inside require a very strong force to “move” the already present one? Instead growing from the last “layer” towards the outside would require a lot less force, but perhaps a lot more matter....
Do all hearts pump 120 BPM with the same energy?
“Stronger” hearts typically have a resting pump rate lower than that of weaker or less healthy ones. A healthy, athletic male might have a resting BPM of 60, while an otherwise healthy but post-partem female could be closer to 90....
Is zero divisible by zero?
Seems like it should and the result should be one. Does mathematics agree with me on that?
Does physics ever get vague?
As in, are there some parts of physics that aren’t as clear-cut as they usually are? If so, what are they?
Why and how does atmosphere exist? Shouldn't all oxygen (and everthing else) fall down due to gravity?
Why did the sound vanish from all of my recording devices at the same moment?
I am seeking a scientific explanation behind this phenomenon which is unprecedented to me....
What is the current state of research on regional anthropological phenotypes?
I know it can be a hot topic. I have long wondered what the real isolation timelines were for East Asia, India, Africa, and Europe. I’m most curious about the first two as they seem so divergent. Like a group had to be mobile enough to relocate, but then stay within a region for a (?) long time with little influx....
Why were dinosaurs huge?
I mean, why evolution selected dinosaurs to become that huge?
If it were possible for some event to destroy the fabric of spacetime at the speed of light, could we still observe and be safe bc expansion?
Just a thought, if an event happened well beyond the observable universe that caused entire galaxies to be destroyed radiating from a point source event, what would it look like from our perspective and how close could it get on our observable horizon while still being unable to reach us due to expansion of the universe?...
Is humanity accidentally selecting for vaccine-resistant traits in viruses?
I was thinking about vaccines and their usefulness, when it occurred to me that, in using vaccines, we’ve sort of pigeonholed viruses into behaving the way covid does. Haven’t we?...
how does lucky imaging in astrophotography work?
I understand how lucky imaging gets the results it gets, but I’m wondering specifically how the 10% of frames are chosen....
How can we define a robust metric for "most discontinuous country" and then rank all states according to it?
More of a classification question, but I’m really curious about what the metric would look like if we try to be systematic about it....
How could SI units be derived from scratch without the use of modern technology?
Think “you wake up in the woods naked,” Dr. Stone-style tech reset. How could humans acquire a 1-gram weight, a centimeter ruler, an HH:MM:SS timekeeping device, etc. starting with natural resources?...
Why has the percentage of the population that are obese or overweight increased so much in the US?
What's the difference between Force, Impulse and Force of Impact?
I was dealing with a problem which stated that two objects were moving with same velocity v and one was a car with mass m and another a truck with mass M, such that M > m. They collided and came to a halt. Their collision lasted for 1 second. Which experienced a greater force of impact?...
what is the mass of a cloud?
As the title asks, what is the average mass of each kind of cloud? Ignoring things like overcast days, and only considering clouds large enough to identify. Or maybe rather than “average” it’d be better to say “what is the mass of an archiypical cloud of each type?” Eg an archiypical cumulus, cirrus, cumulonimbus, etc.
This might be a silly question, but why do people say "non-negative integers" when they could just say "whole numbers"?
In terms of kWh per kWh, by how much does greenhouse CO2 from running an air-conditioner heat up the rest of the Earth?
It is said that ACs are counterproductive in fight against global warming, in that while they may make the local environment temporarily livable, the greenhouse gases produced while making the electricity needed to operate them heat up the rest of the Earth by much more than the relief from the AC itself. By how much exactly is...