Can a desert turn into grassland through artificial means? How have deserts naturally turned into other forms of environments, historically?
After seeing the photo of a hammerhead skull today: Can someone tell me what evolutionary pressure caused it? What is the advantage of the hammerhead skull shape?
How can you replace your addiction with a more healthy one? And will this lead to a negative spiral? Can you break from an addictive personality?
Does everyone learn the same gravity in school or is it different everywhere?
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...
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....
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....
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?...
Is it worth closing the lid on a toilet before flushing?
This seems like something that should be true, but I think I remember seeing a Mythbusters episode where they decided it didn't make a difference. That show was more about entertainment than science, so I wondered if there was a more rigorous study done? I've definitely seen splashes of water(?) come out from flushes so that...
Do metals concentrate at the bottom of boiled water after being cooled off?
Did Folding@HOME or other distributed computing projects actually make a significant difference in the creation of COVID vaccines?
Like many, when I heard about Folding@HOME and how I could contribute to the fight against COVID, I put my hardware to work. Now that’s it has been a while, what effect did those projects ultimately have on the outcome? Did it actually help with the creation of vaccines, or was it effectively just a massive waste of energy?
25 years of massive fusion energy experiment data open on the 'cloud' and available to everyone ( phys.org )
High-temperature fusion plasma experiments conducted in the Large Helical Device (LHD) of the National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), have renewed the world record for an acquired data amount, 0.92 terabytes (TB) per experiment, in February 2022, by using a full range of state-of-the-art plasma diagnostic devices....
