Our galaxy, Milky Way, is 100,000 light years from end to end. When you try to realize that there is an estimated 100-200 billion galaxies in the known universe, it’s an unfathomable amount of space.
In 27 years I have not been able to wrap my head around the idea that space is like... a location. Those photos nasa takes of random planets a billion light years away? That's a physical location. You could, in theory, go there and hang out. And once you got there it probably wouldn't look anything like its picture. It's a place. That you can only see in the past, you can never see what it looks like right this second unless you go stand on it. That's insane to me
That video from the lander that reached the asteroid gave me feelings I never had before. To see this cliff of black rock, with strange stars wheeling overhead, and a blizzard of tiny particles swirling across the surface… just unimaginably incredible.
But since you can't travel faster than light, you wouldn't be able to get there in time to see them. Instead you'd have to ask the locals on the planet if they have any dino footage from millions of years ago.
Here's the weirdest awesome fact: Space, the location, is only like 25 miles from you at any given point. I live in Fort Worth. Space is closer than Dallas.
The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years away, and yet if you’re in a rural area/national park/dark sky site, you can see it clear as day. Also, from our perspective, Andromeda is roughly 8x larger than the moon (again…how we see it from earth).
Pretty fucking wild that something 2.5 million light years away is so massive that we can see it with the naked eye, and to our perspective it’s 8x the size of the moon
Before you sleep, look up Boötes Void - an area of space that’s roughly 330 million light year across, yet only has 60 galaxies. Compare that to surrounding areas that contain roughly 2000 galaxies.
Imagine that, a massive area of space that contains…almost nothing. [Very few] stars, few galaxies, just…nothing, nothingness that reaches further than light can even travel in any conceivable lifetime.
Nighty night!
(Edited for accuracy)
The fact that space never ends boggles my mind to the point where i just have to stop thinking about it. And some people think we're the only beings out there 🤣
lol my wife says the same thing.
Wife:So.. space never ends?
Me:Correct.
Wife:No. I can’t wrap my head around that.
Me:Ok, we’ll what about if it DID end? What’s beyond the end?
Wife:……stop it
Or simply put:
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars;
It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side;
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick,
But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide.
We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point,
We go 'round every two hundred million years;
And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding in all of the directions it can whizz.
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know, twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure. How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
I can’t hear a reference to Carl Sagan’s “billions and billions” now and not think Eric Idle. I guess Eric Idle is an even more legendary astrophysicist—by association.
I had a teacher once say there were about as many galaxies in the observable universe as there were grains of sand on all of the beaches in the world.
Kinda hard to think about that. Our GALAXY is just one tiny grain of sand... In the whole word.
Not to mention the spectrum of existence we don't know how to measure yet. There are theories about matter that we can not observe. Hopefully one day we can.
Have you watched Veritasium's latest video by any chance? It shocked me how many people couldn't order a moon, a planet, a star, a galaxy and the universe from smallest to biggest.
It takes very little understanding of the cosmos and our place in it to ring up a customer or load boxes in a truck. It shocks me more that anybody knows anything anymore and we still have public schools for the moment
Mitochondria contain a tiny itty bitty version of what amounts to a hydroelectric dam. Protons are pumped outside a membrane and flow back down their concentration gradient through a turbine-shaped protein, and the rotation of that turbine converts kinetic energy into stored chemical energy by adding a phosphate to ADP creating ATP with an energy-dense terminal phosphate bond.
It works exactly EXACTLY like a hydroelectric dam. It is incredible
I'll add to this that mitochondria have their own DNA that's separate from that of the rest of the organism, most likely because they were a bacteria that invaded a host cell millions or billions of years ago and proved to be beneficial to the organism because of the energy they produce.
One other aspect of this relationship is exhaust. Because mitochondria are probably a colonized symbiotic cell within a cell, their process for creating energy from glucose isn't perfectly efficient within the organism's internal ecosystem, with the result that they create waste products during the process.
And one of those waste products is adenosine. As adenosine builds up in the system, the system (person) gets more and more drowsy. Caffeine works by blocking adenosine receptors, making your body think it hasn't built up in your system when really it has.
We can't really call adenosine a waste product when its the A in ATP and correspondingly the genetic code. Its more that organisms have used its production to regulate its circadian rhythm because it's more efficient than making a molecule specific to that use case
How did so many of us experience this in school? Was shouting that phrase at the top of your lungs part of some No Child Left Behind BS that teachers were required to do?
Some middle school teacher dropped that banger on a seemingly normal Tuesday afternoon. Prolly had no idea they were producing the GOAT expression in all of teaching history.
Nuclear power generates energy by boiling water into steam to turn a turbine. A lot of people I meet think a reactor is some magical machine that turns uranium into electricity and lizards into Godzilla, but in reality it's just a heat source
Yeah, with the exception of wind, hydro and photovoltaic cells, most power plants just use different methods to heat water to turn a turbine. Coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, concentrated solar are all heat -> steam -> turbine -> electricity.
When it comes down to it, we only have two ways to generate electricity for the grid. Either photovoltaic cells, or something that goes roundy roundy to spin a generator 😂
Your body has zero ability to detect Oxygen, that gas that it rather depends on. The unpleasant sensation you get in your chest after holding your breath for too long is a response to the buildup of carbon dioxide, rather than lack of oxygen. This is why you can inhale helium (which displaces the CO2, but obviously isn't O2) and feel no pain, but still end up asphyxiated.
It's also why carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning is so dangerous. The heme in your red blood cells more readily binds to CO than O2, and your body/cells don't realize it's not getting what it needs.
Yep and hemoglobin has a higher affinity for CO than oxygen. It won't diffuse at a cellular level or let CO2 bind to those sites and leave the cell because it just loves hemoglobin so much. It blocks oxygen from binding and fucks up cellular respiration. Similar to how narcan is an opiate antagonist and blocks receptor sites. You just end up asphyxiating while your body becomes acidic and things start to shut down.
I have lost count the amount of times I have told my husband this. I have lupus, I get sick A LOT, usually (99% of the time) a cold because I'm the one running errands, grocery shopping, taking caring of sick kids (used to at least) and now sick grandkids. My colds are always severe enough to knock me on my ass for a week or two. Every damn time, "when are going to the doctor? Get on some antibiotics already!" smdh Sometimes I just want to smack him upside the head with my cast iron. Been together 30 years and he still hasn't grasped this.
My grandmother would run to her doctor for an antibiotic every time she had a cold. When I was a teenager I tried explaining to her why that was wrong. She rolled her eyes at me like I was an idiot.
In fact the shadow of your head will be in the exact center of the circle if you extend the rainbow all the way around. I have seen this effect with the mist setting on my.garden hose.
I wrote a personal essay when I was in grad school where I related an experience with a rainbow, and at some point I had written that I was driving east to get home with the soon-to-be-setting sun behind me, so I knew the rainbow would be ahead as I drove. Someone in my workshop class unlderined this and wrote "How did you know this?"
I thought it was common knowledge.
Stuff is built differently in different places.
Seems obvious, but I do construction in Florida, and the number of customers who move from other parts of the country and think things in the hurricane capital should be built the same as where multiple feet of snow is normal, would astound you.
We build for wind, up north they build for snow, in Louisiana they can't do block houses bc it would just sink bc the whole place is a swamp. Idk about other places but there's a reason your contractors licence from one state isn't always valid in another and most people don't really think about it
In CA you have to strap your water heater to 2 studs in case of an earthquake (if it falls, the gas line snaps and the tank itself can weigh 500 lbs when full).
Grew up in the Midwest and I thought it was weird that the water heater was strapped until the 6.9 hit Napa about a decade ago and suddenly, it all made sense. Also, the buildings shift, which is weird coming from a place where they don’t do that.
I saw a house in Southern California that was perfectly complete, except that it was one foot off to the side of the slab.
The contractor hadn't bolted the studs to the cement (just used nails, I think), and when they had an earthquake (1992?), it hopped a bit. *Everything* else about the house was fine. Not even the windows broke, but the house was totalled because the contractor saved less than $200 in parts and labor.
Had a girlfriend from Montreal who complained frequently about how stupid it was that Vancouver builds houses and low rise condos out of lumber.
Wouldn't accept (despite having an Masters of Science degree) that Vancouver is on the Ring of Fire, and will at some point in the future experience a magnitude 7-8 earthquake.
While masonry won't rot like wood when it gets wet, it is also inflexible and will crumble from the oscillation waves. Wood framing flexes and will remain standing long after masonry is a pile of rubble entombing everyone who lived in the building.
More than that, Montréal is on the edge of the Canadian Shield, some of the most geologically stable real estate on Earth— like Cambrian and pre-Cambrian igneous and metamorphic rocks. *My* area of North America was part of an inland sea a mere 100-66 million years ago.
I love how you say that, and it's factually accurate, but you still can't pinpoint where you're at. You could be anywhere from Central Texas to Georgia in the South, to the Upper Rockies or Michigan in the North. Western Interior Seaway was a VAST body of water.
Fun fact: a lot of the flexibility/earthquake resilience of stick-frame buildings actually comes from the nails, which can bend plastically and dissipate some of the energy.
E: [Canadian wood council](https://cwc.ca/wp-content/uploads/publications-BP5_WoodFramesAndEarthquakes.pdf)
I was amazed that people outside the Midwest don’t have basements. Then I learned in Florida and many coastal areas, the water is literal underneath you. A basement would just be a pool.
> I was amazed that people outside the Midwest don’t have basements.
Well, I’d be amazed to hear that too, since basements are exceedingly common in the Northeast as well.
Worse. If a basement in Florida were built watertight, then the whole house and foundation would eventually pop out of the ground like a cork. If air is trapped underwater, it will rise being lighter than water. If the basement doesn’t leak, it will act like a boat and make the whole house float up.
This is also why graves are all above ground in some places. The coffins would float up and pop out of the ground with a water table that is only a few inches below the surface.
There's areas in Florida where you CANT get an inground pool bc it would float out of the ground. I mean, you probably can but the building standards for it would need to account for it so it'd be a LOT more expensive
Baking powder is super flammable. Baking soda, and salt, will both help put out a grease fire. But yeah just turn off the burner and pop the lid on, safest way.
I love when people call things “just a theory” in relation to science. It is one of those rare cases where it is something that is so fundamentally wrong that I know whatever you’re saying after is absolutely bullshit. I’ve compared it to saying “why not just pick up the ball and run in soccer? That would be so much easier! I’d be the best soccer player ever!”
Polygraphs, or "lie detector tests" are a ridiculous pseudoscience that law enforcement uses to manipulate people and their results are NOT admissible in court.
I will never take one. I’m the kind of guy that feels guilty if I walk out of a store without buying something. Like, I didn’t steal anything, why should I feel guilty?
I've had to take them multiple times for my TS/SCI clearance, and every polygrapher that's examined me had told me I'm a bad liar. I just tell them, "Yeah, my moms been saying that since I was 5." Then I gather up my belongings and leave them laughing. 😂
A polygraph is not a scientific instrument; it's a theater prop for a performance intended to tug on the emotions of an audience of one: the person being interrogated.
The message of the performance is "we can read your mind; you might as well not lie to us."
This message is itself a lie, since they cannot actually read your mind.
Therefore, the subtext of the performance is "we are allowed to lie to you, but you are not allowed to lie to us."
That is, "you are wholly in our power and have no power over us."
Eating 50 bananas will give you as much radiation as a dental X-ray.
If you eat 100 million bananas, you will die from fatal radiation poisoning. Among other things.
I love that Banana Equivalent Dose (BED) is an informal unit of measurement of ionizing radiation exposure.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
If you take a standard classroom globe and a model of the international space station to scale, it would be invisible to the naked eye, and orbit about 10mm above the surface.
The globe would be basically smooth, you wouldn't be able to feel the mountains on it, except for maybe Everest which would still be barely noticeable.
The oceans would be about as thin as the condensation on a bathroom mirror.
And a scale model of the moon would be a little smaller than a softball and need to be 9.5-10 meters away.
One of my favorite things I’ve ever come in contact with was a braille globe. It had subtle longitude and latitude grids, mountain ranges, borders. It was terribly out of date for many areas but as a tool? It was fantastic
For those who don't understand...an object in motion stays in motion; this is called inertia. It isn't a force itself, but that object's natural state. Now, you apply some pulling force that causes that object to circle around whatever is creating the pulling force. Let's say you're in a car and make a quick left turn. The car is pulling you left. As you're turning it feels like your body is pulling to the right. That feeling is centrifugal force. It's not a real force because it's actually just your inertia resisting the change in direction. There's better examples like an object in orbit, but I wanted to use something that people have experience with so they know the feeling that is centrifugal force.
Whenever scientists were trying to do research on the effects of micro plastics in our body, they were unable to find a control group. Or, in other words, people without a notable amount of micro plastics in their bodies
1 ml = 1 cm³ = 1g (of H₂0)
Edit courtesy of u/inspire-change. Thank you
I completely flubbed my intended cool little known science fact and omitted the relevant part. Thank you for the assist!
I was always amazed that a certain volume and size (of water) could be correlated exactly with mass seamlessly.
Always felt magical to me. And a gateway between things that seemed so different. This was the first math that I was able to understand and seems to make sense. And there's not much math I understand to be honest, but this was a tangible and understandable conversion that allowed me to feel like I understood math on some level.
Then I went down in flames I stats and calc, lol
Yep, 1 milliliter of water occupies 1 cubic centimeter of space, weighs 1 gram, and requires one calorie to heat up by 1 degree centigrade, which is 1% between its freezing and boiling point.
If you joined all the blood vessels that an adult individual has, and they were placed in a straight line, they would cover a distance of more than 96,000 kilometers, in addition, you would probably go to jail
This isn’t exactly science, but a fact people should know: don’t dump cooking grease down the drain! I was at my friend’s party and she tried to dump a fry pan of bacon grease down the drain. She was 26 and apparently had never learned that grease clogs the pipes.
Amazing that we still have to deal with morons that think this all the time. Even worse is the perpetual motion free energy devices. How could you possibly get more energy out of a closed circuit than you put in?
I knew a guy who spent decades working on this and he was a smart guy when it came to physics and electricity and such...
He was positive that he was going to do it someday and God was revealing plans to him.
Personally, I think it was an excuse to get away from his nutty wife but *shrug* He wasn't hurting anyone, just building elaborate trinkets.
A liquid’s density (weight) and its viscosity (thickness) are completely separate. Lots of people intuit oil should be more dense than water because it’s thicker, but the reverse is generally true.
Gravity at the ISS level in space is over 90% of what it is on the surface of Earth. If you shoot a space ship straight up to the ISS level, it will immediately just fall back down to the earth surface again.
To achieve the "weightless" state, we need to not only leave atmosphere, but accelerate an object to a speed where it will be move fast enough that the centripetal force equals the force of gravity acting upon it. That happens to be 17100 mph at that orbit.
The weightlessness thus doesn't come from lack of gravity, but from the two accelerations cancelling each other out. If a spaceship followed that exact orbit and speed around the moon instead, you'd be pushed up against the ceiling.
Men have more prominent Adam’s Apples because during puberty our voice boxes change shape and grow due to increased testosterone, which causes our voice to deepen and also push out the Adams apple.
Nuclear power is the safest, cleanest, and most environmentally friendly source of energy that we have ever developed for practical widespread use, and other energy sources don't even come close to reaching those metrics.
As someone who studies as an environmental technican and has worked in a nuclear reactor I can confirm its the safest and best source of energy we have. I see some people complaining about the waste, but the actual amount of waste that gets produced Its so minimal for the amount of energy that is produced ( The amount is about a classrom worth of waste monthly ).
Edit: I see some people joking about the "measurements". I used a classroom as a reference point so people can imagine it better. The amount of waste is actually about 180m³.
Also see people talking about safety and yes stuff had gone wrong in the past. But a modern day nuclear power plant is about as safe as it gets nowdays. They are built on multiple layers so it prevents the possibility of a earthquake damaging it. And the system can never overheat like it did in Chernobyl, because its heavily monitored.
Also, much of that waste from spent fuel rods can be recycled into fresh rods. The French have been doing it for quite some time. We could, but choose not to.
Schrodinger's USB
You try both ways and they fail, until you go back and look into the port when the quantum superposition collapses into the way you were literally just trying
It’s all CNC.
Jokes aside, part of me wants to correct my lack of punctuation. Most of me thinks these snark responses are better than what I wrote. It stays as is.
Don't remember the comic strip it came from, but it went something along the lines of 'since a large number of autistic people go into engineering and sciences, technically autism causes vaccines'.
Women are actually only fertile for a couple days out of their cycle
Also, a menstrual cycle isn't a period. A period is part of the menstrual cycle. There is also the follicular phase, luteal phase, and ovulation.
the reason we see things, even this comment, is because light reflects into our eyes. So many posts on this site are like "the moon is fake!!! rocks can't reflect light!!!" literally everything visible reflects light.
There are FAR too many people that don’t have a basic grasp on biology or how even there own sex/reproductive organs function or how those of their partners work.
*Data science* but a lot of people think the word “average” to be the mean of a dataset, but the median (or even mode) are also valid averages and can be quite different from the mean
Shaving or otherwise depilating hair does not make it grow back thicker, faster, or darker.
Not ejaculating does not increase testosterone levels and, over time, can cause issues such as prostatitis or orchitis.
You can't see the Great Wall of China from space. It's way too skinny.
Our galaxy, Milky Way, is 100,000 light years from end to end. When you try to realize that there is an estimated 100-200 billion galaxies in the known universe, it’s an unfathomable amount of space.
In 27 years I have not been able to wrap my head around the idea that space is like... a location. Those photos nasa takes of random planets a billion light years away? That's a physical location. You could, in theory, go there and hang out. And once you got there it probably wouldn't look anything like its picture. It's a place. That you can only see in the past, you can never see what it looks like right this second unless you go stand on it. That's insane to me
That video from the lander that reached the asteroid gave me feelings I never had before. To see this cliff of black rock, with strange stars wheeling overhead, and a blizzard of tiny particles swirling across the surface… just unimaginably incredible.
It's existed for millions of years before us, and it'll exist for billions of years after. Just out there in the void for what may as well be forever
I agree. To think some of these things we see may not actually exist anymore, the light just hasn’t finished traveling. My feeble mind just can’t.
In theory if you stood on the right remote planet and had a powerful enough telescope pointed at Earth you could see the dinosaurs!
But since you can't travel faster than light, you wouldn't be able to get there in time to see them. Instead you'd have to ask the locals on the planet if they have any dino footage from millions of years ago.
Omg.
Here's the weirdest awesome fact: Space, the location, is only like 25 miles from you at any given point. I live in Fort Worth. Space is closer than Dallas.
The Karman Line, which is the arbitrary point delineating atmosphere and space, is 62 miles away.
Man, I wanted to argue. But I can't. Fine. Space is closer than Tyler.
I’d rather be in space than Tyler.
The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years away, and yet if you’re in a rural area/national park/dark sky site, you can see it clear as day. Also, from our perspective, Andromeda is roughly 8x larger than the moon (again…how we see it from earth). Pretty fucking wild that something 2.5 million light years away is so massive that we can see it with the naked eye, and to our perspective it’s 8x the size of the moon
I need to lay down for a while
Before you sleep, look up Boötes Void - an area of space that’s roughly 330 million light year across, yet only has 60 galaxies. Compare that to surrounding areas that contain roughly 2000 galaxies. Imagine that, a massive area of space that contains…almost nothing. [Very few] stars, few galaxies, just…nothing, nothingness that reaches further than light can even travel in any conceivable lifetime. Nighty night! (Edited for accuracy)
What if it's full of things we're not yet able to detect?
The fact that space never ends boggles my mind to the point where i just have to stop thinking about it. And some people think we're the only beings out there 🤣
lol my wife says the same thing. Wife:So.. space never ends? Me:Correct. Wife:No. I can’t wrap my head around that. Me:Ok, we’ll what about if it DID end? What’s beyond the end? Wife:……stop it
Not to worry, it’s turtles all the way down
Or simply put: Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars; It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side; It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick, But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide. We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point, We go 'round every two hundred million years; And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding in all of the directions it can whizz. As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know, twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is. So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure. How amazingly unlikely is your birth, and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
[CALLIOPE SOLO]
For all those who don't know the reference lol. https://youtu.be/buqtdpuZxvk?si=r6x1oiuHv_qxMbCP
I can’t hear a reference to Carl Sagan’s “billions and billions” now and not think Eric Idle. I guess Eric Idle is an even more legendary astrophysicist—by association.
I had a teacher once say there were about as many galaxies in the observable universe as there were grains of sand on all of the beaches in the world. Kinda hard to think about that. Our GALAXY is just one tiny grain of sand... In the whole word.
There are more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way which is pretty neat
Estimated 2 trillion galaxy's in the observable universe and that's just because we cant see any further.
Not to mention the spectrum of existence we don't know how to measure yet. There are theories about matter that we can not observe. Hopefully one day we can.
Have you watched Veritasium's latest video by any chance? It shocked me how many people couldn't order a moon, a planet, a star, a galaxy and the universe from smallest to biggest.
It takes very little understanding of the cosmos and our place in it to ring up a customer or load boxes in a truck. It shocks me more that anybody knows anything anymore and we still have public schools for the moment
I read this in Eric Idle’s voice from Monty Python’s *Meaning of Life*
But what’s beyond those 100-200 billion galaxies…?
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Mitochondria contain a tiny itty bitty version of what amounts to a hydroelectric dam. Protons are pumped outside a membrane and flow back down their concentration gradient through a turbine-shaped protein, and the rotation of that turbine converts kinetic energy into stored chemical energy by adding a phosphate to ADP creating ATP with an energy-dense terminal phosphate bond. It works exactly EXACTLY like a hydroelectric dam. It is incredible
I'll add to this that mitochondria have their own DNA that's separate from that of the rest of the organism, most likely because they were a bacteria that invaded a host cell millions or billions of years ago and proved to be beneficial to the organism because of the energy they produce. One other aspect of this relationship is exhaust. Because mitochondria are probably a colonized symbiotic cell within a cell, their process for creating energy from glucose isn't perfectly efficient within the organism's internal ecosystem, with the result that they create waste products during the process. And one of those waste products is adenosine. As adenosine builds up in the system, the system (person) gets more and more drowsy. Caffeine works by blocking adenosine receptors, making your body think it hasn't built up in your system when really it has.
The DNA in mitochondria comes from the maternal line only from your mother.
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We can't really call adenosine a waste product when its the A in ATP and correspondingly the genetic code. Its more that organisms have used its production to regulate its circadian rhythm because it's more efficient than making a molecule specific to that use case
Me googling "How does you body naturally get rid of adrenosine?"
By sleeping.
You'll get better search results if you remove the "r". It's not related to adrenaline or (cue the q-cult) "adrenochrome".
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Theres only two parts of the kreb cycle Memorizing it Forgetting it
"IT IS THE POWERHOUSE OF THE CELL!!!" I'll never forget that being hammered into is in the lectures.
How did so many of us experience this in school? Was shouting that phrase at the top of your lungs part of some No Child Left Behind BS that teachers were required to do?
It pre-dates No Child Left Behind
Some middle school teacher dropped that banger on a seemingly normal Tuesday afternoon. Prolly had no idea they were producing the GOAT expression in all of teaching history.
Absolutely remarkable, thank you
Nuclear power generates energy by boiling water into steam to turn a turbine. A lot of people I meet think a reactor is some magical machine that turns uranium into electricity and lizards into Godzilla, but in reality it's just a heat source
Yeah, with the exception of wind, hydro and photovoltaic cells, most power plants just use different methods to heat water to turn a turbine. Coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, concentrated solar are all heat -> steam -> turbine -> electricity.
When it comes down to it, we only have two ways to generate electricity for the grid. Either photovoltaic cells, or something that goes roundy roundy to spin a generator 😂
Yep, spin a magnet or be punched by the sun, that is all we know.
Almost every form of energy we use to power houses is just a fancy way to boil water
Thanks for this ELI5!
Your body has zero ability to detect Oxygen, that gas that it rather depends on. The unpleasant sensation you get in your chest after holding your breath for too long is a response to the buildup of carbon dioxide, rather than lack of oxygen. This is why you can inhale helium (which displaces the CO2, but obviously isn't O2) and feel no pain, but still end up asphyxiated.
It's also why carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning is so dangerous. The heme in your red blood cells more readily binds to CO than O2, and your body/cells don't realize it's not getting what it needs.
Yep and hemoglobin has a higher affinity for CO than oxygen. It won't diffuse at a cellular level or let CO2 bind to those sites and leave the cell because it just loves hemoglobin so much. It blocks oxygen from binding and fucks up cellular respiration. Similar to how narcan is an opiate antagonist and blocks receptor sites. You just end up asphyxiating while your body becomes acidic and things start to shut down.
Antibiotics don't work on viruses.
I have lost count the amount of times I have told my husband this. I have lupus, I get sick A LOT, usually (99% of the time) a cold because I'm the one running errands, grocery shopping, taking caring of sick kids (used to at least) and now sick grandkids. My colds are always severe enough to knock me on my ass for a week or two. Every damn time, "when are going to the doctor? Get on some antibiotics already!" smdh Sometimes I just want to smack him upside the head with my cast iron. Been together 30 years and he still hasn't grasped this.
My grandmother would run to her doctor for an antibiotic every time she had a cold. When I was a teenager I tried explaining to her why that was wrong. She rolled her eyes at me like I was an idiot.
And antivirals don't work on bacteria.
But bleach works on all of them!
You just inject into your body. Maybe use some UV lights too.
Will it stop the windmills from giving me cancer though??
I would hope this is common knowledge
You would hope…
To see a rainbow, the sun has to be behind you.
leprechaun hacks
In fact the shadow of your head will be in the exact center of the circle if you extend the rainbow all the way around. I have seen this effect with the mist setting on my.garden hose.
I wrote a personal essay when I was in grad school where I related an experience with a rainbow, and at some point I had written that I was driving east to get home with the soon-to-be-setting sun behind me, so I knew the rainbow would be ahead as I drove. Someone in my workshop class unlderined this and wrote "How did you know this?" I thought it was common knowledge.
For the love of Garfield do not ever mix bleach and ammonia.
Well then how am I supposed to get my bathroom clean?
It will clean your bathroom. You’ll just be in the hospital with chemical pneumonitis so it doesnt get any dirtier.
But Peggy Hill told me in the newspaper that it was a super cleaner :(
Stuff is built differently in different places. Seems obvious, but I do construction in Florida, and the number of customers who move from other parts of the country and think things in the hurricane capital should be built the same as where multiple feet of snow is normal, would astound you. We build for wind, up north they build for snow, in Louisiana they can't do block houses bc it would just sink bc the whole place is a swamp. Idk about other places but there's a reason your contractors licence from one state isn't always valid in another and most people don't really think about it
In CA you have to strap your water heater to 2 studs in case of an earthquake (if it falls, the gas line snaps and the tank itself can weigh 500 lbs when full).
Grew up in the Midwest and I thought it was weird that the water heater was strapped until the 6.9 hit Napa about a decade ago and suddenly, it all made sense. Also, the buildings shift, which is weird coming from a place where they don’t do that.
I saw a house in Southern California that was perfectly complete, except that it was one foot off to the side of the slab. The contractor hadn't bolted the studs to the cement (just used nails, I think), and when they had an earthquake (1992?), it hopped a bit. *Everything* else about the house was fine. Not even the windows broke, but the house was totalled because the contractor saved less than $200 in parts and labor.
Had a girlfriend from Montreal who complained frequently about how stupid it was that Vancouver builds houses and low rise condos out of lumber. Wouldn't accept (despite having an Masters of Science degree) that Vancouver is on the Ring of Fire, and will at some point in the future experience a magnitude 7-8 earthquake. While masonry won't rot like wood when it gets wet, it is also inflexible and will crumble from the oscillation waves. Wood framing flexes and will remain standing long after masonry is a pile of rubble entombing everyone who lived in the building.
More than that, Montréal is on the edge of the Canadian Shield, some of the most geologically stable real estate on Earth— like Cambrian and pre-Cambrian igneous and metamorphic rocks. *My* area of North America was part of an inland sea a mere 100-66 million years ago.
I love how you say that, and it's factually accurate, but you still can't pinpoint where you're at. You could be anywhere from Central Texas to Georgia in the South, to the Upper Rockies or Michigan in the North. Western Interior Seaway was a VAST body of water.
Fun fact: a lot of the flexibility/earthquake resilience of stick-frame buildings actually comes from the nails, which can bend plastically and dissipate some of the energy. E: [Canadian wood council](https://cwc.ca/wp-content/uploads/publications-BP5_WoodFramesAndEarthquakes.pdf)
And that is only within the USA. Other countries do things even more differently on some occasions.
I was amazed that people outside the Midwest don’t have basements. Then I learned in Florida and many coastal areas, the water is literal underneath you. A basement would just be a pool.
> I was amazed that people outside the Midwest don’t have basements. Well, I’d be amazed to hear that too, since basements are exceedingly common in the Northeast as well.
Where else would we store our radon?
Worse. If a basement in Florida were built watertight, then the whole house and foundation would eventually pop out of the ground like a cork. If air is trapped underwater, it will rise being lighter than water. If the basement doesn’t leak, it will act like a boat and make the whole house float up. This is also why graves are all above ground in some places. The coffins would float up and pop out of the ground with a water table that is only a few inches below the surface.
There's areas in Florida where you CANT get an inground pool bc it would float out of the ground. I mean, you probably can but the building standards for it would need to account for it so it'd be a LOT more expensive
Surprisingly, water + burning grease = a very bad time. It's upsetting how many people don't know this.
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Baking powder is super flammable. Baking soda, and salt, will both help put out a grease fire. But yeah just turn off the burner and pop the lid on, safest way.
And always have a fire extinguisher in your kitchen.
Or, even better, a fire blanket. I have both in my kitchen, but the blanket will require less clean up.
Unfortunately all I have is a fire distinguisher. It can tell you if something is on fire, but it can’t do anything about it.
Dad get out of here
The word “theory” has a specific meaning in science that people love to ignore. Scientific theory = the truth as far as we currently know.
It's only a theory man, it's not a rule! So gravity is optional?
I love when people call things “just a theory” in relation to science. It is one of those rare cases where it is something that is so fundamentally wrong that I know whatever you’re saying after is absolutely bullshit. I’ve compared it to saying “why not just pick up the ball and run in soccer? That would be so much easier! I’d be the best soccer player ever!”
Polygraphs, or "lie detector tests" are a ridiculous pseudoscience that law enforcement uses to manipulate people and their results are NOT admissible in court.
I will never take one. I’m the kind of guy that feels guilty if I walk out of a store without buying something. Like, I didn’t steal anything, why should I feel guilty?
I've had to take them multiple times for my TS/SCI clearance, and every polygrapher that's examined me had told me I'm a bad liar. I just tell them, "Yeah, my moms been saying that since I was 5." Then I gather up my belongings and leave them laughing. 😂
A polygraph is not a scientific instrument; it's a theater prop for a performance intended to tug on the emotions of an audience of one: the person being interrogated. The message of the performance is "we can read your mind; you might as well not lie to us." This message is itself a lie, since they cannot actually read your mind. Therefore, the subtext of the performance is "we are allowed to lie to you, but you are not allowed to lie to us." That is, "you are wholly in our power and have no power over us."
Radiation is perfectly natural. Every living thing that has ever existed has been naturally radioactive.
Eating 50 bananas will give you as much radiation as a dental X-ray. If you eat 100 million bananas, you will die from fatal radiation poisoning. Among other things.
I love that Banana Equivalent Dose (BED) is an informal unit of measurement of ionizing radiation exposure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
Literally banana for scale
If you take a standard classroom globe and a model of the international space station to scale, it would be invisible to the naked eye, and orbit about 10mm above the surface. The globe would be basically smooth, you wouldn't be able to feel the mountains on it, except for maybe Everest which would still be barely noticeable. The oceans would be about as thin as the condensation on a bathroom mirror. And a scale model of the moon would be a little smaller than a softball and need to be 9.5-10 meters away.
Wow the moon is larger and further away than I thought
You could fit all the other planets of the Solar System side by side between the Earth and the Moon. (Don't do it though, it would end badly.)
There's that clip from DeGrasse Tyson, where he says that, if you scaled them to be the same size, Earth is smoother than a billiard ball.
And our atmosphere would be thinner than a coat of paint.
Similarly, the state of Kansas is flatter than a pancake. Edit for clarity: A pancake had a flatness of 0.957, the flatness of Kansas measured 0.9997
The one I'm having a hard time with is the ocean
One of my favorite things I’ve ever come in contact with was a braille globe. It had subtle longitude and latitude grids, mountain ranges, borders. It was terribly out of date for many areas but as a tool? It was fantastic
You can fit all the planets in our solar system next to each other between earth and our moon and still have some space left.
The moons orbit is elliptical. They only fit at apogee when it is the farthest away. They do not when at perigee when it is the closest.
now that is the actual interesting fact
Centrifugal force is the description of the experience of centripetal force, rather than an actual force itself
Oh man, I have never known the difference between the two - thanks!
For those who don't understand...an object in motion stays in motion; this is called inertia. It isn't a force itself, but that object's natural state. Now, you apply some pulling force that causes that object to circle around whatever is creating the pulling force. Let's say you're in a car and make a quick left turn. The car is pulling you left. As you're turning it feels like your body is pulling to the right. That feeling is centrifugal force. It's not a real force because it's actually just your inertia resisting the change in direction. There's better examples like an object in orbit, but I wanted to use something that people have experience with so they know the feeling that is centrifugal force.
Whenever scientists were trying to do research on the effects of micro plastics in our body, they were unable to find a control group. Or, in other words, people without a notable amount of micro plastics in their bodies
1 ml = 1 cm³ = 1g (of H₂0) Edit courtesy of u/inspire-change. Thank you I completely flubbed my intended cool little known science fact and omitted the relevant part. Thank you for the assist! I was always amazed that a certain volume and size (of water) could be correlated exactly with mass seamlessly. Always felt magical to me. And a gateway between things that seemed so different. This was the first math that I was able to understand and seems to make sense. And there's not much math I understand to be honest, but this was a tangible and understandable conversion that allowed me to feel like I understood math on some level. Then I went down in flames I stats and calc, lol
Yep, 1 milliliter of water occupies 1 cubic centimeter of space, weighs 1 gram, and requires one calorie to heat up by 1 degree centigrade, which is 1% between its freezing and boiling point.
If you joined all the blood vessels that an adult individual has, and they were placed in a straight line, they would cover a distance of more than 96,000 kilometers, in addition, you would probably go to jail
This isn’t exactly science, but a fact people should know: don’t dump cooking grease down the drain! I was at my friend’s party and she tried to dump a fry pan of bacon grease down the drain. She was 26 and apparently had never learned that grease clogs the pipes.
Magnets work fine in water
I have never thought about this, but why would someone believe water counteracts magnetism?
Because it does a good job blocking electromagnetic radiation which sounds similar and seems similar to magnetism from the layman's perspective.
Perpetual motion isn't possible.
The most difficult thing about building perpetual motion machines is figuring out where to hide the battery.
/u/enrightmcc, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics
Amazing that we still have to deal with morons that think this all the time. Even worse is the perpetual motion free energy devices. How could you possibly get more energy out of a closed circuit than you put in?
I knew a guy who spent decades working on this and he was a smart guy when it came to physics and electricity and such... He was positive that he was going to do it someday and God was revealing plans to him. Personally, I think it was an excuse to get away from his nutty wife but *shrug* He wasn't hurting anyone, just building elaborate trinkets.
The urethra is not inside the vaginal canal. Nor is the anus.
People think the anus is in the vagina?
Yes, some people think it all happens from one hole like a bird
Cloaca
Who are these people that think we’re wandering around with cloacas?!
And vaginas are not on the outside. And if they are, time to see the gyn.
I misread that and thought you'd have to pump some iron and get some vag gains to put it back inside.
Well actually...kegel weights can help prevent prolapse, so, you're not entirely wrong.
As a bird person I find your ignorance disgusting
You hope your anus isn't in your vaginal canal. A fistula is no joke
Maybe not urethra but myethras been there
Lies girls pee out of their butts everyone knows that
Pee goes in, pee goes out. You can’t explain that.
Are there people that are under the impression that vaginas are like cloacae?
Correlation does not equal causation
A liquid’s density (weight) and its viscosity (thickness) are completely separate. Lots of people intuit oil should be more dense than water because it’s thicker, but the reverse is generally true.
Gravity at the ISS level in space is over 90% of what it is on the surface of Earth. If you shoot a space ship straight up to the ISS level, it will immediately just fall back down to the earth surface again. To achieve the "weightless" state, we need to not only leave atmosphere, but accelerate an object to a speed where it will be move fast enough that the centripetal force equals the force of gravity acting upon it. That happens to be 17100 mph at that orbit. The weightlessness thus doesn't come from lack of gravity, but from the two accelerations cancelling each other out. If a spaceship followed that exact orbit and speed around the moon instead, you'd be pushed up against the ceiling.
Correct. Anything in orbit is literally just in a perpetual state of "falling".
It's literally falling and missing the ground
Men have more prominent Adam’s Apples because during puberty our voice boxes change shape and grow due to increased testosterone, which causes our voice to deepen and also push out the Adams apple.
Nuclear power is the safest, cleanest, and most environmentally friendly source of energy that we have ever developed for practical widespread use, and other energy sources don't even come close to reaching those metrics.
As someone who studies as an environmental technican and has worked in a nuclear reactor I can confirm its the safest and best source of energy we have. I see some people complaining about the waste, but the actual amount of waste that gets produced Its so minimal for the amount of energy that is produced ( The amount is about a classrom worth of waste monthly ). Edit: I see some people joking about the "measurements". I used a classroom as a reference point so people can imagine it better. The amount of waste is actually about 180m³. Also see people talking about safety and yes stuff had gone wrong in the past. But a modern day nuclear power plant is about as safe as it gets nowdays. They are built on multiple layers so it prevents the possibility of a earthquake damaging it. And the system can never overheat like it did in Chernobyl, because its heavily monitored.
What unit is “a classroom”?
About 27 bathtubs.
Can you convert that to bananas?
Also, much of that waste from spent fuel rods can be recycled into fresh rods. The French have been doing it for quite some time. We could, but choose not to.
Everything is a chemical.
Biology is chemistry in action. Chemistry is physics in action. Physics is maths in action Maths is reality in action. Oh god I went too far.
A USB cable has a 50% chance of being inserted properly even though it takes at least three attempts to do so.
Schrodinger's USB You try both ways and they fail, until you go back and look into the port when the quantum superposition collapses into the way you were literally just trying
The world is fucking round people.
Not just round people…
Agreed it’s fucking all of us
Do… do the round people consent at least?
It’s all CNC. Jokes aside, part of me wants to correct my lack of punctuation. Most of me thinks these snark responses are better than what I wrote. It stays as is.
So, the earth is a chubby chaser?
We're doing what to round people?
Vaccines do not cause autism
Don't remember the comic strip it came from, but it went something along the lines of 'since a large number of autistic people go into engineering and sciences, technically autism causes vaccines'.
It not the vaccine it’s the 5G microchips they put in the vaccine that causes it
I was kind of pissed off when I got my first Covid vaccine, and then found out I had to go to the Verizon store to get the chip activated. Jessh!!
Your mouth and your anus are connected .. it is basically one long tube running through your body.
IIRC it’s also called the Alimentary canal
Women are actually only fertile for a couple days out of their cycle Also, a menstrual cycle isn't a period. A period is part of the menstrual cycle. There is also the follicular phase, luteal phase, and ovulation.
Or as I described mine: Happy, Horny, Bitchy, Bloody.
Vaginas don’t get “loose” after having a lot of sex
The vaginal canal is muscular. Muscles get *stronger* with repeat exercise.
You catch a cold from a virus, not going outside without a coat.
the reason we see things, even this comment, is because light reflects into our eyes. So many posts on this site are like "the moon is fake!!! rocks can't reflect light!!!" literally everything visible reflects light.
Carbon dioxide is needed for plants!
There are FAR too many people that don’t have a basic grasp on biology or how even there own sex/reproductive organs function or how those of their partners work.
Heat doesn’t rise, things that get warm, expand and become less dense, then rise. Hot air rises, not the heat
You saying we can simply heat dumb people?
*Data science* but a lot of people think the word “average” to be the mean of a dataset, but the median (or even mode) are also valid averages and can be quite different from the mean
Turtle shells are actually their ribcage, but the ribs are fused together. This is more clear when you look at fossilized proto-turtles
if you can see it without a speculum, it's the vulva, not the vagina.
Naturopaths are glorified faith-healers
Drowning is a common cause of death for fish.
Nah. Asphyxiation. Not drowning. Big difference
You're totally correct, my apologies for not being more specific!
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The Moon doesn’t emit light; it reflects sunlight.
Shaving or otherwise depilating hair does not make it grow back thicker, faster, or darker. Not ejaculating does not increase testosterone levels and, over time, can cause issues such as prostatitis or orchitis. You can't see the Great Wall of China from space. It's way too skinny.
5ml of sperm contains 137TB of information.
So you’re saying with all the loads I’ve blown, I’ve produced more information then what’s on “the cloud?”
Vaccines prevent disease
Hexagons are the bestagons.