Ask Science

Imagine a sealed container filled with any amount of liquid water at any constant temperature and pressure where water can be liquid. Is the air in the container necessarily at 100% relative humidity?

cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/6822168...

Excess oxygen is actually harmful to humans, but all the climate warnings are about losing oxygen, not nitrogen edit: but when we look for habitable planets, our focus is ‘oxygen rich atmosphere’, not ‘nitrogen rich’, and in medical settings, we’re always concerned about low oxygen, not nitrogen....

Curious non-professional here....

Something that I’ve noticed across most of the microwave ovens that I’ve used is that when they hum while cooking food, I can pick out 2 distinct tones. One of them is pretty clearly 60 120 hz, the 2nd harmonic of the AC power frequency. The other is consistently a minor 7th above that (which would be somewhere around...

Amouranth, the Kick streamer, is allegedly brewing beer with her vaginal yeast. It’s an obvious publicity stunt to squeeze more money from her impressionable and “thirsty” audience....

And if so, how much? Less, same or more than if it was actually charging something?...

So, I learned in physics class at school in the UK that the value of acceleration due to gravity is a constant called g and that it was 9.81m/s^2. I knew that this value is not a true constant as it is affected by terrain and location. However I didn’t know that it can be so significantly different as to be 9.776 m/s^2 in...

I often hear science-adjacent folks stating that a tree needs to be 30 years old before it starts absorbing CO₂, usually paired with the statement that it’s therefore pointless to start planting tons of trees now for slowing climate change....

According to quantum field theory, the universe can be thought of not as isolated particles but continuous fluctuating fields: matter fields, whose quanta are fermions (i.e., leptons and quarks), and force fields, whose quanta are bosons (e.g., photons and gluons). All these fields have zero-point energy.>...

I’ve been trying different searches but everything I find just says “sunlight”. Since sunlight consists of multiple parts such as UV, Infrared and the normal visible spectrum, I’m curious which part is actually responsible for photosynthesis to occur? On that note, depending on what part of the light, would it still grow...

There’s supposedly a variety of different spectroscopy methods but what drives the choice of one method over another? If elements drive the colors, how do you parse out individual elements from a compound?...

My initial thought is “no,” since our eyes, being receivers for specific wavelengths of EM radiation, can’t see frequencies like infrared, no matter how bright. Likewise, my cell phone’s WiFi and cell modules don’t conflict with each other (as far as this layperson can tell, anyway)....

In nuclear chemistry elements beyond Plutonium do not occur in nature and are synthesized artificially. Is it a similar case for Higgs boson too?...

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....

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.

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....

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....

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....

… or do they just make up for it with sheer unrelieved quantity of greenery, perhaps?