Ask Science

This is an abrasive disk, rotating at 1500 rpm. When I shine my flashlight at it, it carries the glow with it, approximately halfway around the disk. What am I seeing happen here?

They say it's a picture of atoms, but what are the atoms: the glowing yellow balls or the entire meatball including the darker red? If it's the meatballs, then why do some have apparently two nuclei?...

What are the consequences of not severing it? I imagine you’d have the weirdest bellybutton on earth if nothing else....

I under stand that the lower the air pressure, the lower the boiling point of water. Also, some primitive desalination kits are basically evaporators....

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

I don’t care about the math and statistics. I went looking for visual comparisons, where image exposure is adjusted to show how a sunny day on both planets really compares, but I didn’t find anything....

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?

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....

I felt a strange urge to buy me some bugs and let them eat my plastic garbage after watching this video 😂...

I know evolution is governed by chance and it is random but does it make sense to "ruin" sleep if there's light? I mean normally, outside, you never have pure darkness, there are the moon and stars even at night. In certain zones of the Earth we also have long periods of no sunshine and long periods of only sunshine....

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....

There are many other bee species that can sting Humans and survive, but the European honeybee has a barbed stinger, so it cannot remove the stinger once it's stung. In attempting to remove the stinger the bee will rupture its lower abdomen and then die....

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...

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

Seems like it should and the result should be one. Does mathematics agree with me on that?

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

Famously, Oppenheimer and co worked out how close a nuclear bomb test would be to causing a chain reaction of nitrogen fusion in the atmosphere. They made a lot of worst-case-scenario assumptions and still came to the conclusion that no, a nuclear bomb test wouldn’t scour the surface of the world....

As in, are there some parts of physics that aren’t as clear-cut as they usually are? If so, what are they?

For example, why did zinc, of all things, start getting utilized by brain and prostate tissue in humans?

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....

I am talking about gadgets we see in science fiction movies that obey the laws of physics of our universe and could theoretically be constructed, barring the limitations of materials, energy and time faced by our civilization at the moment.