Ask Science

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...

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.

If sociology's exclusive to humans, then what might be the field of other social animal research?

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?...

What are the limits to it ? Exceptions etc. Context i saw vsauces " power of suggestions " video. Is the video scripted or was the kids conditions just not real like i can understand the girls condition may be cured through placebo but come on adhd and migraines immediatly cured ?

Also, would it matter if it was the plain-style mask or n95?

Say a dissolvable spring is compressed with a bolt and nut that do not melt in a sulfuric acid solution. The spring has quite a bit of potential energy at this point since it is compressed. Assuming the spring dissolves perfectly (no breakage, just complete disintegration), what happens to the potential energy of the spring?

So, let’s say there’s a species of bacteria that is known to dwell in Greek yogurt. How long would it take before that species of yogurt-dweller only has modern descendants different enough to qualify as one or more new species?

I discovered the “Tromatz” bioelectric wave toothbrush, and it sounds too good to be true, which usually means… it is. However, they do link to some journal articles, so it seems it’s somewhat based on fact. There’s very, very little else out there aside from their own website that I can find. Thoughts from anyone...

And how old are the oldest bones?

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....

I mean, why evolution selected dinosaurs to become that huge?

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.

I’ve been doing a bit of searching for theories on the origin of baryon matter (including antimatter of course) and some seem to hint at quantum particles spawning from the fabric of space (but doesn’t seem to theorize on how this happened) but not many focus on hypothesizing how all forms of baryon matter ether: was the...

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.

Can it freeze water?

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?

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)....

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.

I bought a torch that has a 365nm UV light, which I believe is UV-A?...