CanadaPlus

CanadaPlus , 4 months ago to Ask Science in Where does pollution go when it rains?

It would logically have to end up on the ground. If it gets into the water would have to do with solubility, and most combustion products aren’t very soluble, so you’re probably not drinking too much smog.

I don’t actually know where they ultimately end up and to what degree they can make you sick except through inhalation. Somebody has to have studied it, though, right?

CanadaPlus , 5 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to Ask Science in Could non-Newtonian fluids be used in the future as a kind of percussive ear protection?

Compression thickening/thinning, which only starts after a certain rate of change. I’m not sure what materials have such a property. Then, you’d incorporate it into a composite which dissipates sound selectively in one state. One idea is a fibers of a material that matches the impedance of the fluid during quiet periods, but scatters it as impedance shifts during high-energy periods.

Maybe you could use standard shear thickening somehow, but it would be a lot harder as sound only travels through air compressively.

CanadaPlus , 6 months ago to Ask Science in ADP keeps running ads about solar flairs that force earth into a 25 hour day. Could a solar flair even do that, and what distasters would happen if Earth's orbit changed?

… What? No that’s crazy.

Cunningham’s law has already taken care of orbit vs. rotation, I see.

CanadaPlus , 7 months ago to Ask Science in Does Higgs exist in nature or is it merely artificially synthesized particle?

But in order to do that photon actually needs to be created and travel from one particle to another.

Not really, no. At some point I’m going to exceed my own expertise here since I’m not a QFT expert, but in quantum mechanics things don’t firmly exist or not exist. The photons in question are “virtual particles”.

CanadaPlus , 7 months ago to Ask Science in Does Higgs exist in nature or is it merely artificially synthesized particle?

Particles are just a way of looking at excited quantum fields. The Higgs field is always everywhere, giving things mass.

Honestly, depending on interpretation of quantum mechanics, you don’t need to acknowledge particles exist at all. It could all be fields becoming ever more entangled and wrinkled.

CanadaPlus , 7 months ago to Ask Science in Humans are notoriously bad at absorbing iron from plant sources, while herbivores seem to do fine. What's up with that?

I’m having trouble finding a comparable number for other animals, though. Apparently for a lot of trace elements (like copper or selenium) ruminants are actually much worse at absorption, because the microbes essentially put them into a less available form.

CanadaPlus , 8 months ago to Ask Science in Humans are notoriously bad at absorbing iron from plant sources, while herbivores seem to do fine. What's up with that?

Particularly salt, which we usually mix into our food one way or another.

CanadaPlus , 8 months ago to Ask Science in Humans are notoriously bad at absorbing iron from plant sources, while herbivores seem to do fine. What's up with that?

Are we actually that bad at absorbing iron? Honest question, I always assumed it was a matter of the amount of iron in there in the first place.

CanadaPlus , 8 months ago to Ask Science in Humans are notoriously bad at absorbing iron from plant sources, while herbivores seem to do fine. What's up with that?

That’s the answer for cellulose, a tough polymer, but I’d be cautious generalising to iron.

CanadaPlus , 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago) to Ask Science in Is there an easy way to generate a list of CMYK color values that will appear identical to the human eye under 589nm light?

Here’s the Wikipedia section one general colour space, with a pretty diagram of chromaticity, and the one on CMYK colour conversion. What you want is the preimage of a CMYK colour projected into the entire perceptual space.

CMYK actually sounds kind of complicated to do this with, so yeah look for a pre-made function to convert CMYK to CIE 1931 in whatever “normal” light you have. I can help you find the preimage from that once you do.

Edit: Oh wait, this was a Halloween thing. Maybe for next year?

CanadaPlus , 8 months ago to Ask Science in Hypothetically speaking, what alterations to our biology/genome would need to occur in order for us to be able to safely drink saltwater?

Sea birds have an organ that pulls super-concentrated brine out of their bloodstream, like a kidney on steroids. IIRC it’s in their face. So, that.

However, we can’t even grow normal human organs yet, let alone whole new ones.

CanadaPlus , 8 months ago to Ask Science in If a sun burns hotter with greater mass, does adding a tonne of water make it hotter?

There’s a lot of oxygen in water by star standards, so keep that in mind. It’s possible the change in metallicity will offset any change to equilibrium temperature, although I don’t really know the details.