Is it possible to receive an electric shock when you *stop* touching something?
I seem to remember as a young child being told that it is safe to touch a Van de Graff generator (for the hair demonstration), but that if you let go before it is safe you will get a nasty shock. I know a bit more about electricity now, and I'm a little skeptical now. Is it possible to get a shock from letting go of something?
Could death by starvation be delayed by drinking your own blood?
Let's say you are dying of starvation. You pull one of your teeth out, causing blood to slowly seep into your mouth, which you swallow. The calories from the blood getting digested will delay the time you die of starvation, right? Or will losing blood while starving kill you faster?
Why can't Strings in String Theory be replaced with Springs?
If you have some cold water evaporating, is it possible to make it evaporate sooner by adding hot water?
How hot would it have to be?
Atapuerca – human cannibalism 1 million years ago: what is known about the evolution of human morality over time into the near current era?
I just watched the recent video from Stephen Milo on human life 1 million years ago. He mentions cannibalism evidence across multiple events. That has me thinking about morality in isolated groups and how it might have evolved or could evolve differently....
Does anyone know about fluid dynamics?
I have a question I need to ask but I want to do it privately as the topic it correlates to is pretty taboo. Please comment or dm me, and I’ll dm you back.
If Mars has an impact on Earth's Milankovitch cycles, what instability does the nearly binary Earth/Luna system have on Mars, Venus, and beyond?
Mars influence on the Milankovitch cycles:...
How do we know the Hubble Parameter is constant in space?
Since we know that it isn’t constant with time, how can we be sure that it is constant with space? This might be a reason the variability in our measurements which seem to disagree....
What happens when you apply a force to an object at close to the speed of light?
Was thinking about interstellar travel and the ability to provide artificial gravity by using a smooth acceleration and deceleration across the journey, changing from acceleration to deceleration at the halfway mark....
Do we have any theories as to why complex life eventually started requiring various metal elements as micronutrients?
For example, why did zinc, of all things, start getting utilized by brain and prostate tissue in humans?
Have we been able to reproduce the conditions to bend rocks? (Even if in a lab.)
Tectonic activity bends rocks all the time, even hard ones like granite. That takes a ton of heat, pressure and time. It also makes sense that in the right conditions, sheets of rock simply don’t have the room to shatter so they must bend....
This is probably a dumb question, but if we eliminate the hydrophobia caused by rabies, would it increase the survival rate of active rabies?
I’ve been learning some about rabies and learned about rabies causing hydrophobia. This is just a theory, I’m not saying I know anything about this topic to be knowledgeable, but if we could get someone with rabies to not fear water, could they survive?
How do some animals (or at least humans) manage to generate more force than their own muscles are rated to handle?
Just as an example, there were evidently reports during the 2007 Glasgow airport attack that someone attempting to subdue the assailant and assist police kicked said attacker in the testicles… but somehow managed to do so hard enough to injure one of their own foot tendons.
Is climate change affecting weather forecasting?
I’m in NorCal and the weather has been all over the place this winter. It is hard to get a reliable forecast, sometimes even for the same day. I was wondering if it has something to do with the weather prediction models that were built before the climate change?
Is Australia the core of the last supercontinent?
I saw something yesterday talking about how Australia is geologically dead with the lowest tallest mountain range of any continent due to no landmass collisions. Does that make it the last visage of a supercontinent that everything else broke away from?...
Does stranger matter violate thermodynamics?
I’m just curious.Strange matter, according to my research, is a perfect state of matter with perfect density, etc. If it is like this, does that also mean that it violates the law of entropy?Because let’s see, if it converts matter around it into stranger matter, and after that it doesn’t react with anything else, I mean...
Where does pollution go when it rains?
I unfortunately live in a very polluted area, one where air quality apps mark in red and recommend that I never get out of my lair....
Given a writing speed of one logical symbol per planck time, would the amount of time it takes to write Rayo's Number exceed Rayo's Number?
How much longer will the age of Science last?
I’m curious what your take is on the finite nature of Science. I imagine the fractal “edge” will always remain illusive, but when do we hit 98% or 99.999% documented confirmed, distilled, and well explained? (Centuries? Millennia?) When does it become an engineering corpus?...
How do you clean?
You dirty dirty… It’s time to show off! What is the most extreme cleaning you’ve ever performed?
How do different body parts (specifically shape) emerge from our genes?
I am creating a simulation to evolve simple, multi-cell organisms. (Just for fun!)...
How does the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation temperature variation change over various time scales?
Is the CMB only red shifting in frequency or is there more to it, and over what time scales and distances would one notice a significant difference?
What mechanism is the source for Earth's Nitrogen?
I recall an explanation of the formation of Jovian moons on the Harvard Smithsonian “CfA Colloquium” YT channel that casually mentioned how various elements freeze out of the solar wind forming ices, and this is the mechanism that allows formation of moons with large amounts of water and elements that are not found in larger...
What is known about Persistence of Vision in various animals?
I’m curious about building cat toys that are impractically over complicated with Arduino/Maker stuff. Thus the casual curiosity about persistence of vision. I wonder if other animals have something like a different internal clock frequency where the image only forms at higher (or lower) frequencies than most humans.