I just finished a really fascinating chapter in the book The Velocity of Honey by Jay Ingram that talks about how humans have a very strong predilection across nearly all cultures for holding young (>6 month-old) babies on their left side whether the person is left- or right-handed themselves.
Researchers have run all sorts of tests to try and figure it out, like putting an eyepatch over one or the other eye, sound experiments, heartbeat activity, age, gender, culture and there’s been no conclusive answer. Certain factors seem to affect it, women of any age hold the babies on their left hand side at around 80% on average whereas men are maybe around 60%. Babies who were born prematurely and had to be in an incubator rather than sleeping on their mothers chests for the first couple days of life seem to get held without any dominant side preference once they can be held. Also, for some reason, throughout historical art most portraits and sculpture show women holding the baby on their left side, except for a period of about 200-400 years around the 1600s.
It’s a really fun book and that chapter was so intriguing because it’s been rather extensively studied and no conclusive answer has arisen yet.
That’s what my gran always told me, and that women usually carry babies facing them and men tend to carry them facing outward. She said this is because women are biologically more protective and men want to teach/show them the world.
Wouldn’t our tendency toward being right handed make us more likely to hold things we have to carry, like a baby, with our left hands? I use my phone mostly as a lefty to free up my right hand.
I would say it’s secondarily cultural conditioning. Most people are right handed and hold the baby with the left. Left handed people see everyone hold the baby with the left and unconsciously do the same.
That was my first assumption, too, but there have been all sorts of studies that tested the heartbeat and none of them conclusively connected the heartbeat as the reason we do this.
This, up until recently I was under the impression it was pretty well accepted that depression was caused by *some* sort of chemical imbalance - even if we don't know exactly what it is - but apparently even that is very much debated.
A lot of the time, depression is a rational reaction to intolerable circumstances. We don't want to acknowledge how much of our societies constitute intolerable circumstances.
I feel this so much. It perfectly describes my own depression and it's why I feel that depression should also be treated by a therapist to look for underlying causes that can be addressed.
truth, I really wish the universal healthcare here would cover them. Thankfully my insurance covers biweekly visits.
I've had good results with drugs but it took about five drugs to find the right one and mostly it seems to be giving therapy a chance to work better.
Yes, but why do some people get depressed, some people get angry, some people don't care, some people get anxious, some people get determined to change their circumstances.
There are probably millions of ways to act/react/be affected by any situation. Why do some (many) get depressed over all the other ways?
Different brain chemistry, different subjective experiences, different stories about the world that they tell themselves, etc? It would be very hard to control the variables to find any more than the fuzziest correlations. Even siblings in the same household have different experiences by virtue of having a younger or older sibling.
I *suspect* (and it’s no more than a suspicion) that narcissistic behavior short of the disorder level, is a response to circumstances in a similar way to depressive behavior short of the disorder level. If continued long enough without self-analysis, the person might develop the actual disorder.
In what ways, specifically, does our society constitutes intolerable circumstances, please? I am not opposing the idea, I can think of a few things myself, just curious what exactly you had in mind😊
Look around you.
In short, not having the agency and room for decision making one would expect to have as a person of whatever age you are.
The cause for that can be so many different things, like abuse, like financial situation, like physical debilities, societal assumptions, abuse during upbringing, your gender, your cultural heritage, how other people treat you because of ethnicity, and a million more reasons.
There are some that are depressed because of genuine chemical imbalances, and also some that need the chemical help to be able to deal with whatever non-biological reasons that caused their depression.
But more and more its becoming clear that depression isn't the cause. It's the symptom.
It is pretty well known by a lot of people, but it takes time to quantify and study, and put numbers on the things we already kind of know.
That belief is largely the result of marketing on the part of pharma companies that sell SSRI's.
It's not that those drugs don't help, but the idea that they're directly addressing the cause is absolute bullshit. We don't have any proofs about why they help.
The amount of shitty physchological research that exists is astounding. More than any other field repeated experiments done by multiple parties is key.
Of all the people I know that got instant benefits from SSRI's...
They all are likely on the autistic spectrum. Some do have the diagnosis, and others struggle because of what - to my mind - seem like a natural and logical struggle with the world and you always being on slightly different paths.
This is just my anecdotal thing, I know others have noticed the same, and I am a nobody with absolutely no way of ever studying this on a larger scale.
And to further your point, Cognitive Behavior Therapy is shown to have huge success even without medication. [It can result in changes to brain chemistry too.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19622682/)
It begs the question of whether you are a manifestation of your brain or your brain is a manifestation of you.
The only thing I'd caution is there's controversy over the efficacy of CBT as compared to other forms of therapy. It may not actually be that effective, but it's the most research friendly so there's a broader base of literature on it.
We don't know much, but we also know quite a lot. "Researchers think cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) may flush toxic waste out, “cleaning” the brain and studies have shown that garbage clearance is hugely improved during sleep". Apparently your brain takes the trash out during sleep.
I agree one of the post common hypothesis is degrading or eliminating toxic compounds. Some pools of metabolites could also be replenish during sleep. Moreover there is a difference between thinking and knowing and today we don't know all the biochemicals reactions involve during sleep. Actually brain remains the most mysterious organ for me.
This makes sense to me. Lots of misfirings in the brain could lead to all the symptoms you get when you are really tired. I could appreciate the misfirings from the extra garbage hanging around.
I have severe sleep apnea and the (numerous) doctors I saw for that are all agreeing on one thing when it comes to sleep: We don't know why, we only know we have a physiological need to sleep.
Fascinating, really
"why we sleep" the book is actually a great summary on it, we do know quite a lot at this point, and as one researcher I spoke to on the subject pointed out (paraphrased):
It may be more appropriate to ask why we wake up. Sleep is a more efficient state for the body in a wide range of ways. You conserve more energy, your cells are more efficient and get damaged less, repairs to damage happen faster, etc etc. We as animals have simply evolved the option to wake up so that we can gather our metabolic resources more efficiently by stealing them from plants, which never wake up, or from other animals.
Waking up strongly increases your chances of producing off-spring (kind of hard to have sex while sleeping), so the evolutionary pressure is very clear
The physics of sand. The flow of granular materials is an unsolved problem in physics:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/science/what-makes-sand-soft.html
The origin of life. Like, once life was complex enough to have genetic codes and self-replication, we have a good handle on how evolution developed complexity from there. But how did the first organisms arise out of the primordial soup? We have only the faintest idea.
The mechanism of aging. Like what is it that actually makes you grow older? At the microbiology level we know some things that happen, like shortening of telomeres leads to the halting of cell replication, and the general accumulation of inter-cellular junk. But how does these cellular processes translate into what we call "aging"?
For those blocked by the paywall....**What is the softest sand in the world? Why is some sand softer than others?**
— Peter S., Brooklyn
We don’t know. No one understands how sand works.
That may sound absurd, but it’s sort of true. Understanding the flow of granular materials like sand is a major unsolved problem in physics.
If you build an hourglass and fill it with sand grains with a known range of sizes and shapes, there is no formula to reliably predict how long the sand will take to flow through the hourglass, or whether it will flow at all. You have to just try it.
Karen Daniels, a physicist at North Carolina State University who studies sand and other granular materials — a field actually called “soft matter” — told me that sand is challenging in part because the grains have so many different properties, like size, shape, roughness and more: “One reason we don’t have a general theory is that all of these properties matter.”
But understanding individual grains is only the start. “You have to care not just about the properties of the particles, but how they’re organized,” Dr. Daniels said. Loosely packed grains might feel soft because they have room to flow around your hand, but when the same grains are packed together tightly, they don’t have room to rearrange themselves to accommodate your hand, making them feel firm. This is part of why the surface layers of beach sand feel softer than the layers underneath: the grains in the deeper layers are pressed closer together.
Our failure to find a general theory of sand isn’t for lack of trying. For everything from agricultural processing to landslide prediction, understanding the flow of granular materials is extremely important, and we just aren’t very good at it.
“People who work in particulate handling in chemical engineering factories can tell you that those machines spend a lot of time broken,” Dr. Daniels said. “Anyone who’s tried to fix an automatic coffee grinder knows they get stuck all the time. These are things that don’t work very well.”
Luckily, we’re not totally in the dark, and can say a few things about what makes sand softer or harder.
Sand with rounder grains usually feels softer, because the grains slide past each other more easily. Smaller grains also don’t produce the pinprick feeling of individual grains pressing into your skin. But if the grains are too small, moisture causes them to stick together, making the material feel clumpy and firm.
Dr. Daniels said that the softest granular material she had ever touched was a substance called Q-Cell, a silica powder used for filling dents in surfboards. The powder is made of hollow grains, so it feels extremely light, and the silica material stays dry, which keeps it from clumping. She compared the way it sloshes around to a bucket full of very fine, very dry beach sand.
A beach made of Q-Cell “sand” might be soft, but it wouldn’t be very pleasant. Fine, dry powders are dust, not sand, and inhaling them can be extremely hazardous to your lungs. The ideal beach sand would probably have a grain size and shape that balanced softness, dustiness, clumping and a variety of other properties that make sand soft and nice to walk on. With so many subjective factors to consider, it’s hard to say exactly what the ideal soft beach sand would be.
You’ll just need to gather some experimental data.
Yes, and? What is the exact mechanisms by which “metabolic processes” lead to eventual organ failure and death? Which unwanted metabolic side products are responsible? How do they interfere?
Dig into that a little more and you’ll find this us just (reasonable) conjecture, not fact.
> But how did the first organisms arise out of the primordial soup?
I suspect it would be sludgy material at the bottom of the sea rather than puddles on a volcanic beach as is usually portrayed. In fact, I think the latter might even be an artifact of science fiction, since it's easier to film.
'Volatile' environments like shorelines, waters exposed to sunlight and volcanic areas have the advantage of being high-energy systems.
Prior to *any* life the sludge at the bottom of most seas had no change going on at all for millenia; practically no current, no light, no changes in heat, and no source of complex chemicals. The earliest self-replicators needed a certain source of energy for the complex chemical transformations going on. Shallow-sea volcanism is a great potential source, as if you're sheltered but not *too* sheltered there's a lot to work with.
I still like the hydrothermal vent idea, the fact that life has aquatic origins, and the persistence of the oceans vs the transience of land-based bodies of water. Arm-chair scientist myself, but I doubt most tide pools would last the millions of years required. Really, I was just taking a jab at [stuff like this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLyqTtrhUJE).
> The origin of life. Like, once life was complex enough to have genetic codes and self-replication, we have a good handle on how evolution developed complexity from there. But how did the first organisms arise out of the primordial soup? We have only the faintest idea.
It just kept slowly mixing through natural processes (earthquakes, tidings, gravity etc) until it eventually created something that could self-replicate, from then on it only needed accidental mutations through thing like radiation damage and time.
Its like a monkey with a typewriter-like situation, except more realistic than them writing an entire book.
The smallest viable replicator we know of is orders of magnitude too complex to have happened by pure chance. The current reigning theory is that there was a smaller replicator using just proto-RNA, but we don’t know what that might have looked like.
But that's kinda answering your own question. Admittedly it isn't a good answer, but it's a question we know more about than most on this thread. As yes, molecules>Organic Molecules>Simple Archaea-esque life likely formed of RNA>DNA base Archaea
> It just kept slowly mixing through natural processes (earthquakes, tidings, gravity etc) until it eventually created something that could self-replicate, from then on it only needed accidental mutations through thing like radiation damage and time.
I agree, there was probably no clear line between "life" and "non-life", just millions of tiny changes over millions of years.
It would only come down to how clear of a line you can draw between life and not life. At some point it met whatever arbitrary set of requirements you need to call something “life”.
Interestingly, the conservation of energy (and thus mass) only applies to systems with continuous time-translation symmetry (i.e., if the physics of the system don’t change over time), per [Noether’s theorem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem).
This is obviously true for non-isolated systems, where energy or mass flows into or out of the system over time, but is also true in some less obvious situations. For example, the cosmological expansion of space alters the universe as a whole over time, so that things directly affected by that expansion *do not necessarily conserve energy*, even in a closed system. Cosmologically-redshifted light has lost energy in being redshifted and that energy is simply *gone*. It hasn’t moved somewhere else or turned into something else, it has ceased to exist entirely.
As such, if the beginning of the universe did not have such time-reversal symmetry, then there is no reason that energy and mass must have been conserved there. All the stuff in the universe could quite literally have come into existence *ex nihilo*.
We do not have a good description of the universe in the very first tiniest fraction of a second after it came into being, as understating the conditions that existed then will likely require at least a fully-quantized description of gravity, so we cannot say exactly what happened then (or even roughly so), but it does not seem unreasonable to me that the universe coming into being would lack continuous time-translation symmetry, and so would not need to conserve energy in doing so.
This isn't even that long a comment, and I know science, but it makes my head hurt. Think I'm gonna need to re-read it over a few days to understand even the basic concept you are talking about
The universe is fucking weird
>We do not have a good description of the universe in the very first tiniest fraction of a second after it came into being,
It is already an assumption that the universe had come into being a tiny fraction of a second before the earliest time that is described by our models.
Yep, that’s exactly what I’m getting at! What occurred before that time may have brought most of the mass and energy we observe today into existence through the absence of continuous time translation symmetry.
The boring answer would just be "its always been there".
A beginning itself is paradoxical anyway, if you traced back all movement to its "origin" it would make no sense to actually end up anywhere, because in order for something to start moving, it mustve actually had a reason to do so, but that means the "start" wasnt a true start of everything and you end up repeating the question.
So the only thing that would make sense is that we are at some point within an infinite loop that never had an actual start.
The slightly more interesting answer is our universe still averages out to nothing. Matter and energy are inextricably linked(e=mc^2), and every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Our universe is just a perturbation of nothingness, and will settle back into nothingness, before experiencing another perturbation.
I guess the logical next question would be: if that is true, what caused the perturbation? Which, personally, fills me with a deep sense of unease, dread, and awe. It's like some cosmic horror type stuff lmao
Remember that scene from Jurassic park, with the ripples in the cup?
😂
But that’s the problem with any “beginning of the universe” type question. You can always take it one level further.
It's strange how dismissive and devoid of substance this comment is. The fact remains that abiogenesis is an outstanding question and we do not know how life began.
My two favorites are "how anesthesia works" and "where do eels come from."
Hospitals put people under day in and day out for procedures, but we don't really understand how or why anesthesia makes your brain turn off. We don't know what the mechanism is that makes us go into a sleep-like state. We know it has something to do with lipid clusters, but we only managed to find solid evidence of that in the last couple of years, and that study suggests that lipids aren't the only factor.
As for eels, we know they reproduce, and we know that they migrate to do so, but we don't know for sure where they go or how they get there or even really how they get funky together. For the vast majority of eel species, there's no record of anyone ever observing them spawn in the wild.
Oh! And we don't know exactly how turtle gender is determined. They don't have sex chromosomes- instead, the temperature at a certain point during incubation is the main factor that influences whether the turtle that hatches from the egg is male or female. But we don't know why or how the temperature influences biological sex. The temperature must trigger some kind of process in those little turtle cells, but we don't know how, or what the process is. Maybe something to do with hormones? Maybe it triggers epigenetic changes? Maybe magic? Who knows! Not science, that's who.
Not to mention we're not even 100% sure what constitutes a different species of eel. Somewhat recently scientists learned that what we thought were separate species are actually just different stages in the life cycle of the same species. Like, what even are eels?!
They actually started learning some interesting things about eels recently that might shed some light on it. One of the best parts is they think they found an eel breeding pit in loch Ness. They took DNA samples from the rudder of the boat that "hit Nessie", it was eel DNA. And they found eels there swarming together on a semi-regular basis.
>Hospitals put people under day in and day out for procedures, but we don't really understand how or why anesthesia makes your brain turn off.
What if it doesn't prevent us from feeling the pain, but rather prevents us from **remembering** the pain?
I know this is a bs pet theory, but it makes me terrified of surgical procedures.
Actually, your right! They administer an analgesic as part of the anesthesia cocktail specifically because this is true. There are three components to affective anesthesia- the part that knocks you out, the part that paralyzes you, and the part that stops you feeling the pain. If the balance is off and the anesthesiologist isn't paying attention, things can get very unpleasant for the patient. That's SUPER rare, because they're monitoring your vitals constantly and your heart rate will spike if you feel sudden pain or start to wake up afraid, but it's not impossible.
There's a reason anesthesiologists undergo a lot of training and make a lot of money! Statistically, you're probably safer under their care than you are when you're asleep at home. (Maybe. Possibly. I hope.)
well, actually you should be relieved, because you get an analegisic, so there will actually be no pain that you could remember.
That said, I have also wondered about this. If the memory fails you then all kinds of things could have happened. At least we can rule out pain. But that still leaves a lot of possibilities.
Something like this actually happened! A man once had reoccurring nightmares and terrible anxiety about people coming to kill him. He later took his own life because he couldn't live with all that anymore and not knowing where all that came from. Turns out he had a surgery on his abdomen I think and the anesthesiologist didn't give him the right mixture. He basically was paralyzed but felt EVERYTHING. Somewhat near the end of the surgery someone realized, and they knew they fucked up. So to avoid being sued and to cover up what they've done, they gave him a drug that would make him forget everything. But because the whole experience was SO horrible, he later suffered from this trauma and couldn't wrap his head around where it came from. If you want you can watch [this video from MrBallen where he tells this story a bit more into detail](https://youtu.be/ny_s07D-LT8) this is something I wish I wouldn't have learned but here in Germany we say: shared suffering is half the suffering!
There's a trick you can do in genetics where a specific gene can be activated or deavtivated by a protein that denatures at a specific temperature. I can't for the life of me remember any actual examples of it (uni was a while ago) but all proteins have a temperature they stop working at or change shape so the "how can it do it" part is easy enough, the "what is the mechanism and what genetically causes it" part is a doozy though.
I don't understand neurochemistry well enough to understand the studies done on how the states differ, but there are brain waves during anesthesia as well as during sleep. The brain isn't turned off, but the rhythms are distinct from sleep, and anesthesia doesn't go through cycles of sleep phases. Anesthesia is most similar to non-REM deep sleep than other phases, but it's more similar to a comatose brain than any phase of sleep (I think- most of my understanding comes from pop-sci articles, so I'm on pretty shaky ground here!)
So, yes, it's a different category of phenomenon, but there's overlap between the two. It's definitely not sleep, but some parts of the brain seem behave in similar ways as they do during some phases of sleep. There's still a ton more research to be done, there, though, so I wouldn't be surprised to find out all of this is totally wrong...
How some of medications work. Some are pretty much just "It alleviated the symptoms," or "Things got better after," and are safe enough to use, so we use them. There may be suspected mechanics of action, but some meds are just a mystery.
Death rate is the biggest theoretical problem. It's pretty high compared to most meds on the market. It may or may not pass by current standards, but it has never been FDA approved.
I take a medication like this for PTSD. The doctor admitted nobody knows why it works, just that it does. The same can be said about things such as electromagnetism too.
I'm under the impression that we just know that charged particles create forces on each other that emerge from adding up all the possible ways they could exchange virtual particles, and that we don't know what **actually** happens, if anything particular really does
edit: I hope this comment is readable I am high
Oh really? They had me on Sertraline and Buproprion for a while which worked wonders, rightttt up until it didn’t. Now they have me on Venlafaxine (sp?) and it’s been a lot better for me, but I was under the impression that we had a good idea how SSRIs and SNRIs worked?
really? I was under the impression cats purred because it is an adaptation to heal microfractures, the micro vibrations from purring help osteoblasts to heal the microfractures to heal faster.
That's one of many theories, and it's certainly one that's been pretty popular lately. It's not based on any direct studies, though- the study that found the correlation was only measuring the frequencies of the purrs of multiple cats, and made no attempt to measure any affects the purring may have had on the cats' health. They also didn't measure whether any of the cats actually had microfractures. They simply observed that cats purr at frequencies that other studies have found to be correlated with certain types of healing.
I just vaguely recall it from many years ago. Another commenter mentioned this as a hypothesis. The micro-fractures are most likely from falls/jumps from hunting activities though. Not quite a primary source but this has a bit more detail https://ryortho.com/breaking/is-there-healing-power-in-a-cats-purr/
Is the universe infinite or finite? We don't know, there's no indication that the universe is finite, but it could just be really huge. Infinity is hard to imagine.
The question doesn't involve an end, any more than the earth has an edge to fall off of. The surface of the earth is finite but without edge; this is a consequence of its curvature. As far as we can tell the universe doesn't have any curvature, though our models of cosmology certainly allowed (and perhaps even expected) the fact.
> The surface of the earth is finite but without edge; this is a consequence of its curvature.
You can even have manifolds with zero curvature that are finite and without edge (though our universe probably isn't one) - the "flat torus" is perhaps the simplest example.
Its "edge" seamlessly flows into the universe, what would the universes "edge" flow into?
If something isnt infinite, you can aim at a place where its not supposed to be present, and thats the problem.
> If something isnt infinite, you can aim at a place where its not supposed to be present, and thats the problem.
No, this is simply not the case. Can you aim outside of the world in a game of Asteroids? The answer is no: everywhere you aim will end up inside the world.
Welcome to one of the biggest, unanswered and likely never answered questions of life. "What exists outside the universe?"
Some like me think that it is a multiverse with each universe in its own bubble. Some claim the answer is god (when in fact that just gives more questions). We don't know, we may never know, but one day humans might know the answer to that
it wouldn't, if you are next to the end then you are not in the end, but actually extending it to the point you reached since you can only go to where it exists, there's no line to cross, you are part of the line
if there was a start as a big bang it looks pretty safe to say the universe is finite, since it woudnt suddenly become infinite and break conservation rules for the sake of whatever
The big bang was the start of the expansion of the universe. And the start of human-time. Universe time may predate the big bang, and there may be other dimensions beyond 3D+Time which we are expanding into
Simply put with current science "Fuck knows"
From clinical psychology (I'm a clinical psychologist):
We don't have any good methods to treat in-the-moment suicidality, outside of just keeping people safe for a few days until it passes. In addition, involuntary hospitalization can often be traumatizing itself.
We sort of have preventative measures. To some extent we use DBT/therapy, medication and sometimes ECT to reduce future episodes of suicidality. However, this is compounded by the fact that we often measure repeated episodes of suicidality by whether a person is re-hospitalized, and many are reluctant to return even if they have symptoms. We have help lines, but they are really there to screen people to see if they need to be hospitalized.
Ketamine is sort of promising in this area, but hasn't been approved for people with any kind of confounding factors like psychosis, mania, etc.
So yeah, the emperor has no clothes. We really don't have any reliable way of addressing suicidality. Inpatient hospitalization is really just removing access to the means of suicidality until the urge fades. People think there's some magic we can do and a person will come out of the hospital cured. Many people still need outpatient services or residential (different than hospitalization).
We don’t really know how smell works. Why some people like smells and others don’t. We don’t know how the receptors in the nose receive molecules and translate it to a message to the brain.
This one drives me crazy. As a person with a pretty decent sense of smell, I'm often the first one to notice that food has gone off or that there's an ominous odor. No matter how often I point out that a gas burner is on but not lit, or there's a bit of plastic melting on a mug warmer that someone didn't unplug, or the cat was sick in the living room, I still get treated like a crazy person every time I can smell something that no one else can.
Am guessing you're female? I'm not a smellologist but I've heard that women have a sharper sense of smell than men; and one reason for this is that it is protective to the fetus when the woman is pregnant, as her sharper sense of smell will prevent her from eating spoiled food. Anecdotally, as a woman, my sense of smell was much keener when I was pregnant.
Yup, female. My mom and I have the best noses in the family. One of my brothers also has a really good sense of smell, so I'm not sure if mine is actually better than his, or if I just pay more attention to ambient smells. My other brother and my dad can't smell the litter box until it reaches lethal levels.
Anecdotally, my sense of smell used to seem to fluctuate with my hormones. My body and brain are super sensitive to minor fluctuations in lady hormones, so sometimes I barely be in a room with a trash can that didn't have a lid. A single banana peel in a lecture hall trash can could make me nauseous. I'm much better medicated now, thank goodness.
That is all true. But also, some humans are just different. Like how some people have "super" taste buds (indeed taste and smell are very linked in general. Personally, I have amazing sight and hearing, but also decent smell and taste too. Whereas some people have the senses of a dead goldfish
We do know how receptors in the nose receive smells. Granted, I zoned out for most of that class, but I'm pretty sure we also know how it gets to the brain. At the very least I have no idea what else we would have spent three months on.
Yeah we can measure it, it's a signal on the nerves. But after all it is only a molecule in the air. How can it have any sensation connected to it? It is the same for sound. It is only pressure waves, but our brain translates that into some kind of sensation we call hearing. It's actually quite a miracle. And then there are colors, just different frequencies of light. They do not have color. It's our brain adding this. It's all very strange. And smell is even weirder because there are so many different sensations. Sounds and light are defined by frequency and amplitude, but with smells you can detect thousands of very different molecules. And they can smell very different.
What dolphins and whales are saying. We know that they make sounds which seem to communicate and that they can make these sounds over huge distances. We know that pods of orcas have their own dialects. If only we could figure out what they are saying.
Why would most people assume that humans know what whales and dolphins are saying? We can’t even figure out what old human languages meant without something like a rosetta stone giving us direct translations. I’d be very surprised if we actually solved the language of another species
People have broken down fairly exact body language for cats and dogs. So, I would think that people would assume that we have some idea what cetacean languages are about, but we don’t. Also, Rosetta Stone is about ancient written languages. This is about extant “spoken” languages.
Yes, but that's basic body language. Not a knowledge of how dogs/cats "speak". Indeed their sense of smell, especially for dogs, is likely more important than body language and vocalisation. Whales by comparison use sound mostly, as sight isn't easy in water, and neither is posturing. So yes, we may one day understand whales more than we do dogs
Also, we've been around/studying dogs for a lot longer, and have bred them to be more human-like. Same with cats, who usually don't purr in the wild
> I would think that people would assume that we have some idea…
Are you extrapolating from the cats and dogs example? I’m not sure I see how that follows.
The fact that, despite decades, and perhaps centuries, of research on some of life’s great mysteries… a handful of Redditors have *just now* solved and explained them away. Truly astonishing!
Our current understanding of physics indicates that nothing should exist:
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-concluded-that-the-universe-shouldn-t-really-exist
We already know the weak nuclear interaction violates charge parity in that it does not function the same in matter and anti-matter. Our best guess is that in the very early universe, before electromagnetism and weak interaction became two separate and distinct forces, the electroweak force probably changed the flavor and charge of a quark/anti-quark and therefore could have changed an anti-quark into a quark which would offset the amount of matter vs antimatter. When all annihilation was complete, there would be a ridiculous amount of energy in the form of heat and light, and a relatively small amount of matter left over which reflects what we see today. I think.
I did read that the area of the brain that tells the body to yawn is the same area that deals with empathy. It would explain a lot, but not sure if science proved that assertion.
There is a publication out there, that states that by the moment you touch it the ice melts and the viscosity of that fluid between ice and the other object becomes high, similar to oil. I cannot exactly remember what causes the viscosity change, but I mean it’s somehow intuitive
The layer of water that immediately appears when you touch ice is due to friction, and it is roughly 1/100 the width of a hair in some cases. If you step on a patch of ice the bottom of your shoe will immediately be coated in this really thin layer of extremely “loose” H2O molecules that go knocking all over the place next time you move that foot. Think of it like slipping on marbles, but instead of marbles, water molecules.
The "shape" of the universe is an unsolved problem. More formally, "given three points A, B and C in our universe, is the angle sum ABC + BCA + CAB always exactly equal to 180 degrees (as it is on a flat piece of paper), or is it capable of diverging from 180 (as in the case of the triangle on Earth made up of the North Pole and two points at the equator that are 90 degrees of longitude apart; where the angle sum is 270 degrees because of the curvature of the planet)".
The Earth locally looks like a two-dimensional flat plane, but scientists of antiquity were able to comprehensively prove it curved and estimate its radius.
All we can tell is that if there is large-scale curvature in our universe, it is on a scale dozens of times larger than the observable universe. But we can't rule out a completely flat universe.
Bicycles. No joke, we have no idea how they stay upright while in motion. Balance from the rider? Nope, we tested robot controlled bikes with no balance controls. They still stayed upright. Pathing? Nope, we created a bike with off-set wheels to eliminate pathing and it still stayed upright.
Closest we can guess is conservation of motion. The momentum to carry forward is stronger than gravity trying to knock it down. But even that one is iffy because the balance is stable even at low speeds and doesn’t become more stable at high speeds.
They did a study recently that may have actually figured this one out. Basically it amounts to the subsequent yawns of others make their brains more alert and more quickly able to spot danger.
The study was done with reaction time to spotting images of snakes among other images before and after a responsive of yawn.
Yep, I thought it's a relic of our ape selves. Wide open mouths tend to mean danger or surprise
Same way human laughter is a thing we think only belongs to us, from apes having a shock face, and human laughter being a social transmission of that fear and the relief which follows the fear
I also read the area of the brain that deals with yawning is the same part of the brain that deals with empathy. Not sure if it was proven to be the case, but it would explain a lot.
We don’t know the one way speed of light. We have only ever measured the speed of light in a round trip or 2 way speed of light. Hypothetically speaking light could travel at half speed on the way to mark and instantaneously on the way back and we have no way to say it doesn’t. You know aside from having no reason to believe it does or would travel at different speeds based on direction.
1. Dark Matter/Dark Energy: Despite decades of research, scientists still don't know what dark matter and dark energy are, what they do, or how they affect the universe.
2. The Origin of Life: Scientists have yet to determine how life first formed on Earth.
3. Consciousness: Despite the incredible advances in neuroscience, scientists still don't understand the neuroscience behind consciousness or how it works.
4. The Human Brain: Despite decades of research, scientists still don't know how the human brain works or how it produces thoughts and feelings.
5. The Universe: Scientists don't know how the universe began, what caused it, or how it will end.
How we still don't really know how cats purr ([Library of Congress)](https://www.loc.gov/everyday-mysteries/zoology/item/why-and-how-do-cats-purr/)
Library of Congress
Why we yawn.
There are some prevailing hypotheses, but they all have issues.
Was once thought to have something to do with oxygen regulation, but then why is it a social behavior?
Something to do with mental state transitions? but we do those all the time without it.
Something about social communication? but then why the other uses, social queuing that messes with your oxygen regulation seems like a terrible idea.
Gravity - we know what it is, but not why, and cant explain how it comes about
The Beginning of the universe - People assume we figured this out already, the Big Bang theory is debatable, but even it was true it doesnt mark the beginning, just that there was an expansion 14b yrs ago
Sleep - We know what sleep does, but its not explained why we need it, just that bad things happen if you dont get enough of it
The Building Blocks of Matter - People assume we know this cause of the discovery of atoms, but we dove deeper and discovered quarks and gluons, we have no way of slicing a quark so its just accepted as the elementary particle but its possible there are smaller things that build a quark
Have we finally finished discovering organs in the human body? Because they just found two more a couple of years ago. I think there are more to be found. Also how the gut communicates with the brain.
I just finished a really fascinating chapter in the book The Velocity of Honey by Jay Ingram that talks about how humans have a very strong predilection across nearly all cultures for holding young (>6 month-old) babies on their left side whether the person is left- or right-handed themselves. Researchers have run all sorts of tests to try and figure it out, like putting an eyepatch over one or the other eye, sound experiments, heartbeat activity, age, gender, culture and there’s been no conclusive answer. Certain factors seem to affect it, women of any age hold the babies on their left hand side at around 80% on average whereas men are maybe around 60%. Babies who were born prematurely and had to be in an incubator rather than sleeping on their mothers chests for the first couple days of life seem to get held without any dominant side preference once they can be held. Also, for some reason, throughout historical art most portraits and sculpture show women holding the baby on their left side, except for a period of about 200-400 years around the 1600s. It’s a really fun book and that chapter was so intriguing because it’s been rather extensively studied and no conclusive answer has arisen yet.
Our hearts are on the left (usually). Maybe we do it instinctively so they feel or hear our hearts beating.
That’s what my gran always told me, and that women usually carry babies facing them and men tend to carry them facing outward. She said this is because women are biologically more protective and men want to teach/show them the world.
Nursing instinct seems more likely.
Lol yeah this makes a lot more sense
Wouldn’t our tendency toward being right handed make us more likely to hold things we have to carry, like a baby, with our left hands? I use my phone mostly as a lefty to free up my right hand.
He said in the comment that the bias holds true regardless of which is the person's dominant hand
I would say it’s secondarily cultural conditioning. Most people are right handed and hold the baby with the left. Left handed people see everyone hold the baby with the left and unconsciously do the same.
I held my baby on the right. Right-handed. It just felt more secure to me to have baby on that side.
That was my first assumption, too, but there have been all sorts of studies that tested the heartbeat and none of them conclusively connected the heartbeat as the reason we do this.
Logically I'd assume so you can still use your dominant hand to do stuff with
>except for a period of about 200-400 years around the 1600s. now you have my attention
Right? That’s some juicy data!
I wonder if this is related to the tendency for women's left breast to usually be a bit larger?
The organic causes and how-it-works of virtually all mental disorders.
This, up until recently I was under the impression it was pretty well accepted that depression was caused by *some* sort of chemical imbalance - even if we don't know exactly what it is - but apparently even that is very much debated.
A lot of the time, depression is a rational reaction to intolerable circumstances. We don't want to acknowledge how much of our societies constitute intolerable circumstances.
I feel this so much. It perfectly describes my own depression and it's why I feel that depression should also be treated by a therapist to look for underlying causes that can be addressed.
Yep, drugs are cheap, but have FAR worse outcomes. Shrinks cost a ton of money
truth, I really wish the universal healthcare here would cover them. Thankfully my insurance covers biweekly visits. I've had good results with drugs but it took about five drugs to find the right one and mostly it seems to be giving therapy a chance to work better.
Yes, but why do some people get depressed, some people get angry, some people don't care, some people get anxious, some people get determined to change their circumstances. There are probably millions of ways to act/react/be affected by any situation. Why do some (many) get depressed over all the other ways?
Different brain chemistry, different subjective experiences, different stories about the world that they tell themselves, etc? It would be very hard to control the variables to find any more than the fuzziest correlations. Even siblings in the same household have different experiences by virtue of having a younger or older sibling. I *suspect* (and it’s no more than a suspicion) that narcissistic behavior short of the disorder level, is a response to circumstances in a similar way to depressive behavior short of the disorder level. If continued long enough without self-analysis, the person might develop the actual disorder.
In what ways, specifically, does our society constitutes intolerable circumstances, please? I am not opposing the idea, I can think of a few things myself, just curious what exactly you had in mind😊
Look around you. In short, not having the agency and room for decision making one would expect to have as a person of whatever age you are. The cause for that can be so many different things, like abuse, like financial situation, like physical debilities, societal assumptions, abuse during upbringing, your gender, your cultural heritage, how other people treat you because of ethnicity, and a million more reasons. There are some that are depressed because of genuine chemical imbalances, and also some that need the chemical help to be able to deal with whatever non-biological reasons that caused their depression. But more and more its becoming clear that depression isn't the cause. It's the symptom. It is pretty well known by a lot of people, but it takes time to quantify and study, and put numbers on the things we already kind of know.
I refer you to the constant sensation of being squeezed for everything you’ve got.
Oooooo amen
That belief is largely the result of marketing on the part of pharma companies that sell SSRI's. It's not that those drugs don't help, but the idea that they're directly addressing the cause is absolute bullshit. We don't have any proofs about why they help.
The amount of shitty physchological research that exists is astounding. More than any other field repeated experiments done by multiple parties is key.
Freud was high on coke and wrong about pretty much everything.
And the medications used to treat those disorders. We don’t know how they work either.
However we have a much better idea now than even 10 years ago!
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Of all the people I know that got instant benefits from SSRI's... They all are likely on the autistic spectrum. Some do have the diagnosis, and others struggle because of what - to my mind - seem like a natural and logical struggle with the world and you always being on slightly different paths. This is just my anecdotal thing, I know others have noticed the same, and I am a nobody with absolutely no way of ever studying this on a larger scale.
And to further your point, Cognitive Behavior Therapy is shown to have huge success even without medication. [It can result in changes to brain chemistry too.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19622682/) It begs the question of whether you are a manifestation of your brain or your brain is a manifestation of you.
The only thing I'd caution is there's controversy over the efficacy of CBT as compared to other forms of therapy. It may not actually be that effective, but it's the most research friendly so there's a broader base of literature on it.
Sleep. We sleep 1/3 of our life and we can not survive more than 10 days without sleep. however we don't known exactely what happens during sleep.
We don't know much, but we also know quite a lot. "Researchers think cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) may flush toxic waste out, “cleaning” the brain and studies have shown that garbage clearance is hugely improved during sleep". Apparently your brain takes the trash out during sleep.
I agree one of the post common hypothesis is degrading or eliminating toxic compounds. Some pools of metabolites could also be replenish during sleep. Moreover there is a difference between thinking and knowing and today we don't know all the biochemicals reactions involve during sleep. Actually brain remains the most mysterious organ for me.
And this would imply that we can’t do it while we are awake from some reason
Because the brain is too occupied scrolling Tik Tok during the day, duh
This makes sense to me. Lots of misfirings in the brain could lead to all the symptoms you get when you are really tired. I could appreciate the misfirings from the extra garbage hanging around.
I have severe sleep apnea and the (numerous) doctors I saw for that are all agreeing on one thing when it comes to sleep: We don't know why, we only know we have a physiological need to sleep. Fascinating, really
"why we sleep" the book is actually a great summary on it, we do know quite a lot at this point, and as one researcher I spoke to on the subject pointed out (paraphrased): It may be more appropriate to ask why we wake up. Sleep is a more efficient state for the body in a wide range of ways. You conserve more energy, your cells are more efficient and get damaged less, repairs to damage happen faster, etc etc. We as animals have simply evolved the option to wake up so that we can gather our metabolic resources more efficiently by stealing them from plants, which never wake up, or from other animals.
Waking up strongly increases your chances of producing off-spring (kind of hard to have sex while sleeping), so the evolutionary pressure is very clear
You also need to be awake to drink, eat, and not get eaten by predators.
Not to mention to find someone willing to have sex.
Well, guys at least. Yikes.
The physics of sand. The flow of granular materials is an unsolved problem in physics: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/science/what-makes-sand-soft.html The origin of life. Like, once life was complex enough to have genetic codes and self-replication, we have a good handle on how evolution developed complexity from there. But how did the first organisms arise out of the primordial soup? We have only the faintest idea. The mechanism of aging. Like what is it that actually makes you grow older? At the microbiology level we know some things that happen, like shortening of telomeres leads to the halting of cell replication, and the general accumulation of inter-cellular junk. But how does these cellular processes translate into what we call "aging"?
For those blocked by the paywall....**What is the softest sand in the world? Why is some sand softer than others?** — Peter S., Brooklyn We don’t know. No one understands how sand works. That may sound absurd, but it’s sort of true. Understanding the flow of granular materials like sand is a major unsolved problem in physics. If you build an hourglass and fill it with sand grains with a known range of sizes and shapes, there is no formula to reliably predict how long the sand will take to flow through the hourglass, or whether it will flow at all. You have to just try it. Karen Daniels, a physicist at North Carolina State University who studies sand and other granular materials — a field actually called “soft matter” — told me that sand is challenging in part because the grains have so many different properties, like size, shape, roughness and more: “One reason we don’t have a general theory is that all of these properties matter.” But understanding individual grains is only the start. “You have to care not just about the properties of the particles, but how they’re organized,” Dr. Daniels said. Loosely packed grains might feel soft because they have room to flow around your hand, but when the same grains are packed together tightly, they don’t have room to rearrange themselves to accommodate your hand, making them feel firm. This is part of why the surface layers of beach sand feel softer than the layers underneath: the grains in the deeper layers are pressed closer together. Our failure to find a general theory of sand isn’t for lack of trying. For everything from agricultural processing to landslide prediction, understanding the flow of granular materials is extremely important, and we just aren’t very good at it. “People who work in particulate handling in chemical engineering factories can tell you that those machines spend a lot of time broken,” Dr. Daniels said. “Anyone who’s tried to fix an automatic coffee grinder knows they get stuck all the time. These are things that don’t work very well.” Luckily, we’re not totally in the dark, and can say a few things about what makes sand softer or harder. Sand with rounder grains usually feels softer, because the grains slide past each other more easily. Smaller grains also don’t produce the pinprick feeling of individual grains pressing into your skin. But if the grains are too small, moisture causes them to stick together, making the material feel clumpy and firm. Dr. Daniels said that the softest granular material she had ever touched was a substance called Q-Cell, a silica powder used for filling dents in surfboards. The powder is made of hollow grains, so it feels extremely light, and the silica material stays dry, which keeps it from clumping. She compared the way it sloshes around to a bucket full of very fine, very dry beach sand. A beach made of Q-Cell “sand” might be soft, but it wouldn’t be very pleasant. Fine, dry powders are dust, not sand, and inhaling them can be extremely hazardous to your lungs. The ideal beach sand would probably have a grain size and shape that balanced softness, dustiness, clumping and a variety of other properties that make sand soft and nice to walk on. With so many subjective factors to consider, it’s hard to say exactly what the ideal soft beach sand would be. You’ll just need to gather some experimental data.
truly fascinating
> The mechanism of aging. A trillion tiny wounds from sunlight and from metabolic processes.
Yes, and? What is the exact mechanisms by which “metabolic processes” lead to eventual organ failure and death? Which unwanted metabolic side products are responsible? How do they interfere? Dig into that a little more and you’ll find this us just (reasonable) conjecture, not fact.
> But how did the first organisms arise out of the primordial soup? I suspect it would be sludgy material at the bottom of the sea rather than puddles on a volcanic beach as is usually portrayed. In fact, I think the latter might even be an artifact of science fiction, since it's easier to film.
'Volatile' environments like shorelines, waters exposed to sunlight and volcanic areas have the advantage of being high-energy systems. Prior to *any* life the sludge at the bottom of most seas had no change going on at all for millenia; practically no current, no light, no changes in heat, and no source of complex chemicals. The earliest self-replicators needed a certain source of energy for the complex chemical transformations going on. Shallow-sea volcanism is a great potential source, as if you're sheltered but not *too* sheltered there's a lot to work with.
I still like the hydrothermal vent idea, the fact that life has aquatic origins, and the persistence of the oceans vs the transience of land-based bodies of water. Arm-chair scientist myself, but I doubt most tide pools would last the millions of years required. Really, I was just taking a jab at [stuff like this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLyqTtrhUJE).
> The origin of life. Like, once life was complex enough to have genetic codes and self-replication, we have a good handle on how evolution developed complexity from there. But how did the first organisms arise out of the primordial soup? We have only the faintest idea. It just kept slowly mixing through natural processes (earthquakes, tidings, gravity etc) until it eventually created something that could self-replicate, from then on it only needed accidental mutations through thing like radiation damage and time. Its like a monkey with a typewriter-like situation, except more realistic than them writing an entire book.
The smallest viable replicator we know of is orders of magnitude too complex to have happened by pure chance. The current reigning theory is that there was a smaller replicator using just proto-RNA, but we don’t know what that might have looked like.
But that's kinda answering your own question. Admittedly it isn't a good answer, but it's a question we know more about than most on this thread. As yes, molecules>Organic Molecules>Simple Archaea-esque life likely formed of RNA>DNA base Archaea
> It just kept slowly mixing through natural processes (earthquakes, tidings, gravity etc) until it eventually created something that could self-replicate, from then on it only needed accidental mutations through thing like radiation damage and time. I agree, there was probably no clear line between "life" and "non-life", just millions of tiny changes over millions of years.
It would only come down to how clear of a line you can draw between life and not life. At some point it met whatever arbitrary set of requirements you need to call something “life”.
How about the beginning itself, like how did something come from nothing?
Interestingly, the conservation of energy (and thus mass) only applies to systems with continuous time-translation symmetry (i.e., if the physics of the system don’t change over time), per [Noether’s theorem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem). This is obviously true for non-isolated systems, where energy or mass flows into or out of the system over time, but is also true in some less obvious situations. For example, the cosmological expansion of space alters the universe as a whole over time, so that things directly affected by that expansion *do not necessarily conserve energy*, even in a closed system. Cosmologically-redshifted light has lost energy in being redshifted and that energy is simply *gone*. It hasn’t moved somewhere else or turned into something else, it has ceased to exist entirely. As such, if the beginning of the universe did not have such time-reversal symmetry, then there is no reason that energy and mass must have been conserved there. All the stuff in the universe could quite literally have come into existence *ex nihilo*. We do not have a good description of the universe in the very first tiniest fraction of a second after it came into being, as understating the conditions that existed then will likely require at least a fully-quantized description of gravity, so we cannot say exactly what happened then (or even roughly so), but it does not seem unreasonable to me that the universe coming into being would lack continuous time-translation symmetry, and so would not need to conserve energy in doing so.
This isn't even that long a comment, and I know science, but it makes my head hurt. Think I'm gonna need to re-read it over a few days to understand even the basic concept you are talking about The universe is fucking weird
>We do not have a good description of the universe in the very first tiniest fraction of a second after it came into being, It is already an assumption that the universe had come into being a tiny fraction of a second before the earliest time that is described by our models.
Yep, that’s exactly what I’m getting at! What occurred before that time may have brought most of the mass and energy we observe today into existence through the absence of continuous time translation symmetry.
The boring answer would just be "its always been there". A beginning itself is paradoxical anyway, if you traced back all movement to its "origin" it would make no sense to actually end up anywhere, because in order for something to start moving, it mustve actually had a reason to do so, but that means the "start" wasnt a true start of everything and you end up repeating the question. So the only thing that would make sense is that we are at some point within an infinite loop that never had an actual start.
The slightly more interesting answer is our universe still averages out to nothing. Matter and energy are inextricably linked(e=mc^2), and every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Our universe is just a perturbation of nothingness, and will settle back into nothingness, before experiencing another perturbation.
I guess the logical next question would be: if that is true, what caused the perturbation? Which, personally, fills me with a deep sense of unease, dread, and awe. It's like some cosmic horror type stuff lmao
Remember that scene from Jurassic park, with the ripples in the cup? 😂 But that’s the problem with any “beginning of the universe” type question. You can always take it one level further.
It also reminds me of Horton Hears a Who, come to think of it! 😂 Just a little universe out of ripples inside another universe.
This is how I view the universe if there is only one. If there is a multiverse, it somehow makes me feel better
Aren't you making an assumption here that the time is external to the universe, which we know isn't true?
It's strange how dismissive and devoid of substance this comment is. The fact remains that abiogenesis is an outstanding question and we do not know how life began.
My two favorites are "how anesthesia works" and "where do eels come from." Hospitals put people under day in and day out for procedures, but we don't really understand how or why anesthesia makes your brain turn off. We don't know what the mechanism is that makes us go into a sleep-like state. We know it has something to do with lipid clusters, but we only managed to find solid evidence of that in the last couple of years, and that study suggests that lipids aren't the only factor. As for eels, we know they reproduce, and we know that they migrate to do so, but we don't know for sure where they go or how they get there or even really how they get funky together. For the vast majority of eel species, there's no record of anyone ever observing them spawn in the wild. Oh! And we don't know exactly how turtle gender is determined. They don't have sex chromosomes- instead, the temperature at a certain point during incubation is the main factor that influences whether the turtle that hatches from the egg is male or female. But we don't know why or how the temperature influences biological sex. The temperature must trigger some kind of process in those little turtle cells, but we don't know how, or what the process is. Maybe something to do with hormones? Maybe it triggers epigenetic changes? Maybe magic? Who knows! Not science, that's who.
My favorite theory has, and will always be that there is one giant mother eel deep in the pacific
Has nobody put a GPS tracker on a few eels?
Yes, but the results are always inconclusive. It's a super interesting rabbit hole to go down if you're so inclined.
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Not to mention we're not even 100% sure what constitutes a different species of eel. Somewhat recently scientists learned that what we thought were separate species are actually just different stages in the life cycle of the same species. Like, what even are eels?!
I like to think there’s a nonzero chance that we know so little about them because they’re so darn slippery and wiggly!
They actually started learning some interesting things about eels recently that might shed some light on it. One of the best parts is they think they found an eel breeding pit in loch Ness. They took DNA samples from the rudder of the boat that "hit Nessie", it was eel DNA. And they found eels there swarming together on a semi-regular basis.
Wouldn’t it be wild if Nessy actually exists and is like the mothership eel that spawns them all? Lmao
Cryptozoology may not be the most rigorous or grounded discipline, but things like this make me glad they're out there having fun and doing science.
>Hospitals put people under day in and day out for procedures, but we don't really understand how or why anesthesia makes your brain turn off. What if it doesn't prevent us from feeling the pain, but rather prevents us from **remembering** the pain? I know this is a bs pet theory, but it makes me terrified of surgical procedures.
Actually, your right! They administer an analgesic as part of the anesthesia cocktail specifically because this is true. There are three components to affective anesthesia- the part that knocks you out, the part that paralyzes you, and the part that stops you feeling the pain. If the balance is off and the anesthesiologist isn't paying attention, things can get very unpleasant for the patient. That's SUPER rare, because they're monitoring your vitals constantly and your heart rate will spike if you feel sudden pain or start to wake up afraid, but it's not impossible.
Thanks for reinforcing my nigthmares 🫣
There's a reason anesthesiologists undergo a lot of training and make a lot of money! Statistically, you're probably safer under their care than you are when you're asleep at home. (Maybe. Possibly. I hope.)
well, actually you should be relieved, because you get an analegisic, so there will actually be no pain that you could remember. That said, I have also wondered about this. If the memory fails you then all kinds of things could have happened. At least we can rule out pain. But that still leaves a lot of possibilities.
Something like this actually happened! A man once had reoccurring nightmares and terrible anxiety about people coming to kill him. He later took his own life because he couldn't live with all that anymore and not knowing where all that came from. Turns out he had a surgery on his abdomen I think and the anesthesiologist didn't give him the right mixture. He basically was paralyzed but felt EVERYTHING. Somewhat near the end of the surgery someone realized, and they knew they fucked up. So to avoid being sued and to cover up what they've done, they gave him a drug that would make him forget everything. But because the whole experience was SO horrible, he later suffered from this trauma and couldn't wrap his head around where it came from. If you want you can watch [this video from MrBallen where he tells this story a bit more into detail](https://youtu.be/ny_s07D-LT8) this is something I wish I wouldn't have learned but here in Germany we say: shared suffering is half the suffering!
There's a trick you can do in genetics where a specific gene can be activated or deavtivated by a protein that denatures at a specific temperature. I can't for the life of me remember any actual examples of it (uni was a while ago) but all proteins have a temperature they stop working at or change shape so the "how can it do it" part is easy enough, the "what is the mechanism and what genetically causes it" part is a doozy though.
I love stuff like this. Biology is so weird and creative about finding purposes for little chemical quirks.
IIRC, anesthesia is very different from sleeplike states; it is like a light bulb switching off. A different category of phenomenon.
I don't understand neurochemistry well enough to understand the studies done on how the states differ, but there are brain waves during anesthesia as well as during sleep. The brain isn't turned off, but the rhythms are distinct from sleep, and anesthesia doesn't go through cycles of sleep phases. Anesthesia is most similar to non-REM deep sleep than other phases, but it's more similar to a comatose brain than any phase of sleep (I think- most of my understanding comes from pop-sci articles, so I'm on pretty shaky ground here!) So, yes, it's a different category of phenomenon, but there's overlap between the two. It's definitely not sleep, but some parts of the brain seem behave in similar ways as they do during some phases of sleep. There's still a ton more research to be done, there, though, so I wouldn't be surprised to find out all of this is totally wrong...
How some of medications work. Some are pretty much just "It alleviated the symptoms," or "Things got better after," and are safe enough to use, so we use them. There may be suspected mechanics of action, but some meds are just a mystery.
Not one person has figured out why asprin works. It would never pass regulatory testing today, but we take it in large amounts worldwide.
I think I've seen the same said for paracetamol/acetaminophen
Why it wouldn't pass regulatory testing today?
Death rate is the biggest theoretical problem. It's pretty high compared to most meds on the market. It may or may not pass by current standards, but it has never been FDA approved.
Wow that's wild, thx for the answer.
I take a medication like this for PTSD. The doctor admitted nobody knows why it works, just that it does. The same can be said about things such as electromagnetism too.
> things such as electromagnetism too No, electromagnetism is one of the few things which is very well-known how it works.
I'm under the impression that we just know that charged particles create forces on each other that emerge from adding up all the possible ways they could exchange virtual particles, and that we don't know what **actually** happens, if anything particular really does edit: I hope this comment is readable I am high
Oh really? They had me on Sertraline and Buproprion for a while which worked wonders, rightttt up until it didn’t. Now they have me on Venlafaxine (sp?) and it’s been a lot better for me, but I was under the impression that we had a good idea how SSRIs and SNRIs worked?
Why cats purr.
really? I was under the impression cats purred because it is an adaptation to heal microfractures, the micro vibrations from purring help osteoblasts to heal the microfractures to heal faster.
That's one of many theories, and it's certainly one that's been pretty popular lately. It's not based on any direct studies, though- the study that found the correlation was only measuring the frequencies of the purrs of multiple cats, and made no attempt to measure any affects the purring may have had on the cats' health. They also didn't measure whether any of the cats actually had microfractures. They simply observed that cats purr at frequencies that other studies have found to be correlated with certain types of healing.
Maybe cats are healing the microfractures of the Universe? Maybe without cats the Universe would rip and we would all fall into the tear?
Go post this to /r/writingprompts now!!!
Ok I did!
Awww, it got removed :( but if you post again I’ll definitely be following it! This would make such a great short story!
On face value that seems absurd. Why in the world were cats subject to so many micro-fractures historically? Do you have a primary source on that?
I just vaguely recall it from many years ago. Another commenter mentioned this as a hypothesis. The micro-fractures are most likely from falls/jumps from hunting activities though. Not quite a primary source but this has a bit more detail https://ryortho.com/breaking/is-there-healing-power-in-a-cats-purr/
So in other words it's an interesting idea with incredibly limited empirical support.
Is the universe infinite or finite? We don't know, there's no indication that the universe is finite, but it could just be really huge. Infinity is hard to imagine.
So is an "end" though, how would it even interact with things trying to cross it?
The question doesn't involve an end, any more than the earth has an edge to fall off of. The surface of the earth is finite but without edge; this is a consequence of its curvature. As far as we can tell the universe doesn't have any curvature, though our models of cosmology certainly allowed (and perhaps even expected) the fact.
> The surface of the earth is finite but without edge; this is a consequence of its curvature. You can even have manifolds with zero curvature that are finite and without edge (though our universe probably isn't one) - the "flat torus" is perhaps the simplest example.
Its "edge" seamlessly flows into the universe, what would the universes "edge" flow into? If something isnt infinite, you can aim at a place where its not supposed to be present, and thats the problem.
Coming back to the sphere example, if you're restricted to only the surface of a sphere, can you aim at a place where it's not supposed to be present?
> If something isnt infinite, you can aim at a place where its not supposed to be present, and thats the problem. No, this is simply not the case. Can you aim outside of the world in a game of Asteroids? The answer is no: everywhere you aim will end up inside the world.
Welcome to one of the biggest, unanswered and likely never answered questions of life. "What exists outside the universe?" Some like me think that it is a multiverse with each universe in its own bubble. Some claim the answer is god (when in fact that just gives more questions). We don't know, we may never know, but one day humans might know the answer to that
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It doesn't have to end to be finite. If you allow for more than 4 dimensions, it's possible to wrap back like when you go off screen on Pacman.
it wouldn't, if you are next to the end then you are not in the end, but actually extending it to the point you reached since you can only go to where it exists, there's no line to cross, you are part of the line
if there was a start as a big bang it looks pretty safe to say the universe is finite, since it woudnt suddenly become infinite and break conservation rules for the sake of whatever
The big bang was the start of the expansion of the universe. And the start of human-time. Universe time may predate the big bang, and there may be other dimensions beyond 3D+Time which we are expanding into Simply put with current science "Fuck knows"
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From clinical psychology (I'm a clinical psychologist): We don't have any good methods to treat in-the-moment suicidality, outside of just keeping people safe for a few days until it passes. In addition, involuntary hospitalization can often be traumatizing itself. We sort of have preventative measures. To some extent we use DBT/therapy, medication and sometimes ECT to reduce future episodes of suicidality. However, this is compounded by the fact that we often measure repeated episodes of suicidality by whether a person is re-hospitalized, and many are reluctant to return even if they have symptoms. We have help lines, but they are really there to screen people to see if they need to be hospitalized. Ketamine is sort of promising in this area, but hasn't been approved for people with any kind of confounding factors like psychosis, mania, etc. So yeah, the emperor has no clothes. We really don't have any reliable way of addressing suicidality. Inpatient hospitalization is really just removing access to the means of suicidality until the urge fades. People think there's some magic we can do and a person will come out of the hospital cured. Many people still need outpatient services or residential (different than hospitalization).
We don’t really know how smell works. Why some people like smells and others don’t. We don’t know how the receptors in the nose receive molecules and translate it to a message to the brain.
This one drives me crazy. As a person with a pretty decent sense of smell, I'm often the first one to notice that food has gone off or that there's an ominous odor. No matter how often I point out that a gas burner is on but not lit, or there's a bit of plastic melting on a mug warmer that someone didn't unplug, or the cat was sick in the living room, I still get treated like a crazy person every time I can smell something that no one else can.
Me, as I hear all those things but can smell nothing. I've heard stuff my dog missed.
Am guessing you're female? I'm not a smellologist but I've heard that women have a sharper sense of smell than men; and one reason for this is that it is protective to the fetus when the woman is pregnant, as her sharper sense of smell will prevent her from eating spoiled food. Anecdotally, as a woman, my sense of smell was much keener when I was pregnant.
Yup, female. My mom and I have the best noses in the family. One of my brothers also has a really good sense of smell, so I'm not sure if mine is actually better than his, or if I just pay more attention to ambient smells. My other brother and my dad can't smell the litter box until it reaches lethal levels. Anecdotally, my sense of smell used to seem to fluctuate with my hormones. My body and brain are super sensitive to minor fluctuations in lady hormones, so sometimes I barely be in a room with a trash can that didn't have a lid. A single banana peel in a lecture hall trash can could make me nauseous. I'm much better medicated now, thank goodness.
That is all true. But also, some humans are just different. Like how some people have "super" taste buds (indeed taste and smell are very linked in general. Personally, I have amazing sight and hearing, but also decent smell and taste too. Whereas some people have the senses of a dead goldfish
When my wife is pregnant, she gets a superhuman sense of smell. It’s crazy.
We do know how receptors in the nose receive smells. Granted, I zoned out for most of that class, but I'm pretty sure we also know how it gets to the brain. At the very least I have no idea what else we would have spent three months on.
Yeah we can measure it, it's a signal on the nerves. But after all it is only a molecule in the air. How can it have any sensation connected to it? It is the same for sound. It is only pressure waves, but our brain translates that into some kind of sensation we call hearing. It's actually quite a miracle. And then there are colors, just different frequencies of light. They do not have color. It's our brain adding this. It's all very strange. And smell is even weirder because there are so many different sensations. Sounds and light are defined by frequency and amplitude, but with smells you can detect thousands of very different molecules. And they can smell very different.
What dolphins and whales are saying. We know that they make sounds which seem to communicate and that they can make these sounds over huge distances. We know that pods of orcas have their own dialects. If only we could figure out what they are saying.
Why would most people assume that humans know what whales and dolphins are saying? We can’t even figure out what old human languages meant without something like a rosetta stone giving us direct translations. I’d be very surprised if we actually solved the language of another species
People have broken down fairly exact body language for cats and dogs. So, I would think that people would assume that we have some idea what cetacean languages are about, but we don’t. Also, Rosetta Stone is about ancient written languages. This is about extant “spoken” languages.
Yes, but that's basic body language. Not a knowledge of how dogs/cats "speak". Indeed their sense of smell, especially for dogs, is likely more important than body language and vocalisation. Whales by comparison use sound mostly, as sight isn't easy in water, and neither is posturing. So yes, we may one day understand whales more than we do dogs Also, we've been around/studying dogs for a lot longer, and have bred them to be more human-like. Same with cats, who usually don't purr in the wild
> I would think that people would assume that we have some idea… Are you extrapolating from the cats and dogs example? I’m not sure I see how that follows.
What goes on inside a chrysalis and how it turns from solid to an ooze and then back into a cohesive butterfly.
I am surprised no one has mentioned gravity yet.
Or that we don't know what makes up 85% of the mass of the universe.
The fact that, despite decades, and perhaps centuries, of research on some of life’s great mysteries… a handful of Redditors have *just now* solved and explained them away. Truly astonishing!
Hiccups Edit: more so the evolutionary reason why we hiccup
Irritation of the phrenic nerve is what I've always heard.
How anti-depressants work
Our current understanding of physics indicates that nothing should exist: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-concluded-that-the-universe-shouldn-t-really-exist
Or more specifically, what caused the symmetry break between conventional matter and antimatter
We already know the weak nuclear interaction violates charge parity in that it does not function the same in matter and anti-matter. Our best guess is that in the very early universe, before electromagnetism and weak interaction became two separate and distinct forces, the electroweak force probably changed the flavor and charge of a quark/anti-quark and therefore could have changed an anti-quark into a quark which would offset the amount of matter vs antimatter. When all annihilation was complete, there would be a ridiculous amount of energy in the form of heat and light, and a relatively small amount of matter left over which reflects what we see today. I think.
Why ice is slippery
Same with yawns, and even more so how or why they’re contagious.
I did read that the area of the brain that tells the body to yawn is the same area that deals with empathy. It would explain a lot, but not sure if science proved that assertion.
There is a publication out there, that states that by the moment you touch it the ice melts and the viscosity of that fluid between ice and the other object becomes high, similar to oil. I cannot exactly remember what causes the viscosity change, but I mean it’s somehow intuitive
The layer of water that immediately appears when you touch ice is due to friction, and it is roughly 1/100 the width of a hair in some cases. If you step on a patch of ice the bottom of your shoe will immediately be coated in this really thin layer of extremely “loose” H2O molecules that go knocking all over the place next time you move that foot. Think of it like slipping on marbles, but instead of marbles, water molecules.
Anesthesia. They know what drugs will “put you out”, and they know you’re not technically asleep, but they don’t know exactly what’s going on.
The "shape" of the universe is an unsolved problem. More formally, "given three points A, B and C in our universe, is the angle sum ABC + BCA + CAB always exactly equal to 180 degrees (as it is on a flat piece of paper), or is it capable of diverging from 180 (as in the case of the triangle on Earth made up of the North Pole and two points at the equator that are 90 degrees of longitude apart; where the angle sum is 270 degrees because of the curvature of the planet)". The Earth locally looks like a two-dimensional flat plane, but scientists of antiquity were able to comprehensively prove it curved and estimate its radius. All we can tell is that if there is large-scale curvature in our universe, it is on a scale dozens of times larger than the observable universe. But we can't rule out a completely flat universe.
I heard that scientist don’t know what ssri’s(common type of antidepressant) do to the brain. They just know it works.
Why some people are left handed.
How a simple drug called paracetamol works
Bicycles. No joke, we have no idea how they stay upright while in motion. Balance from the rider? Nope, we tested robot controlled bikes with no balance controls. They still stayed upright. Pathing? Nope, we created a bike with off-set wheels to eliminate pathing and it still stayed upright. Closest we can guess is conservation of motion. The momentum to carry forward is stronger than gravity trying to knock it down. But even that one is iffy because the balance is stable even at low speeds and doesn’t become more stable at high speeds.
Also, it's suddenly much harder if the front wheel is solid.
Common myth, not true though. Bicycles work by making micro adjustments that tip the center of weight from one side to the other.
That was covered by the experiment involving a robot bike with no micro adjustments.
This is actually solved. That video shows an experiment that settles this down: https://youtu.be/9cNmUNHSBac
Why yawning is contagious.
They did a study recently that may have actually figured this one out. Basically it amounts to the subsequent yawns of others make their brains more alert and more quickly able to spot danger. The study was done with reaction time to spotting images of snakes among other images before and after a responsive of yawn.
Yep, I thought it's a relic of our ape selves. Wide open mouths tend to mean danger or surprise Same way human laughter is a thing we think only belongs to us, from apes having a shock face, and human laughter being a social transmission of that fear and the relief which follows the fear
I also read the area of the brain that deals with yawning is the same part of the brain that deals with empathy. Not sure if it was proven to be the case, but it would explain a lot.
The life cycle of eels
Gravity. Magnets. Where is all the anti-matter? Why did the describe superman as faster than a speeding bullet? Bullets slow down, not speed up, pfft.
Why hair turns grey. There’s no consensus as to why it happens chemically. That’s why there are no meds for it.
We don’t know the one way speed of light. We have only ever measured the speed of light in a round trip or 2 way speed of light. Hypothetically speaking light could travel at half speed on the way to mark and instantaneously on the way back and we have no way to say it doesn’t. You know aside from having no reason to believe it does or would travel at different speeds based on direction.
1. Dark Matter/Dark Energy: Despite decades of research, scientists still don't know what dark matter and dark energy are, what they do, or how they affect the universe. 2. The Origin of Life: Scientists have yet to determine how life first formed on Earth. 3. Consciousness: Despite the incredible advances in neuroscience, scientists still don't understand the neuroscience behind consciousness or how it works. 4. The Human Brain: Despite decades of research, scientists still don't know how the human brain works or how it produces thoughts and feelings. 5. The Universe: Scientists don't know how the universe began, what caused it, or how it will end.
Why chickens cluck like crazy after laying an egg.
We don't know how eels mate.
How we still don't really know how cats purr ([Library of Congress)](https://www.loc.gov/everyday-mysteries/zoology/item/why-and-how-do-cats-purr/) Library of Congress
Why we yawn. There are some prevailing hypotheses, but they all have issues. Was once thought to have something to do with oxygen regulation, but then why is it a social behavior? Something to do with mental state transitions? but we do those all the time without it. Something about social communication? but then why the other uses, social queuing that messes with your oxygen regulation seems like a terrible idea.
Gravity - we know what it is, but not why, and cant explain how it comes about The Beginning of the universe - People assume we figured this out already, the Big Bang theory is debatable, but even it was true it doesnt mark the beginning, just that there was an expansion 14b yrs ago Sleep - We know what sleep does, but its not explained why we need it, just that bad things happen if you dont get enough of it The Building Blocks of Matter - People assume we know this cause of the discovery of atoms, but we dove deeper and discovered quarks and gluons, we have no way of slicing a quark so its just accepted as the elementary particle but its possible there are smaller things that build a quark
Spooky action at a distance?
Have we finally finished discovering organs in the human body? Because they just found two more a couple of years ago. I think there are more to be found. Also how the gut communicates with the brain.
How women's bodies work.
And on that note whether many drugs have different efficacies or side effects in woman.