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[ "The microwave makes the marshmallow hot and marshmallows have a lot of air trapped inside them. When air gets hot, it expands. So it's not really the marshmallow \"inflating\", it's the trapped air expanding." ]

[ "See the [dynamo effect](_URL_0_). Basically, the idea is that the motion of molten iron leads to the motion of charges, and moving charges generate magnetic fields." ]

[ "Cherenkov radiation from electrons moving faster than the phase velocity of light through a medium (for example, water)." ]

[ "I don't have your exact answer but a relevant fact: nuke plants are considered slow to start and stop, and are therefore treated as part of the baseload (left on for long periods of time), while other types of plants (such as natural gas, hydroelectric) are pretty quick to adjust and are used for most adjustments." ]

[ "You can't know. That is the real kicker." ]

[ "Imagine you grew up flying in a plane. The ground looks like different colors. There's a green area over here, and a brown area over there. When you land for the first time, you're surprised that the green area is actually made up of large trees, and the brown area is made of rocks and shrubs. There are thousands of details you never noticed from the sky. We're like that. We can't see what things are made of smaller than about the size of a hair, but quantum effects happen at much smaller scales. We've only recently invented microscopes that can look at things thousands of times smaller than a human hair where quantum effects (the trees that make up the forest) start to happen." ]

[ "It would be better for the environment if we just eliminated bottled water for the most part. There are some situations where bottled water is practical and necessary, but in most places in the civilized world it's a scam. Tap water is perfectly safe, effectively free, and widely available. People would be better off carrying re-useable containers and filling them up at the tap." ]

[ "Ah this is one of the main questions in the entire field of psychological perception. There are multiple fields discussing it. What you are speaking of specifically are called \"Affordances\" and the field of \"ecological perception\" does quite a good job at describing what you are asking. I suggest reading about it some here: _URL_0_" ]

[ "Helium is not formed by two Hydrogens. It is actually a multistep process known as the PP Chain. Two protons collide and make a pair of proton+neutron. This pair collides with another proton and makes a helium that is 2 protons but only 1 neutron. Then, two of these heliums collide and create the helium you are used to, 2p+2n, and the extra 2 protons are spit out and go on to collide with other protons and start all over. Here is a nice picture: _URL_1_ And here is the wiki article: _URL_0_ It's important to remember there is a difference between \"hydrogen\" and a \"proton\". A proton has no electron paired with it, typically a hydrogen does. In the center of a star where this fusion is happening, it is all just protons, the \"hydrogens\" have lost their electrons and become stand alone protons." ]

[ "They fuse elements together until the core is too heavy. Think of fusion pushing out from the star, and gravity pulling the star together. Once the core gets too heavy the star collapses under its own weight and the remnants of that star are scattered into space. This has and dust can then coalesce and form other planets and stars. Now the clouds that comprise these new stars for example won't have much iron or other heavy elements. It's basically random what elements these planets and stars will be made of compared to what the original star had. Correct me if I'm wrong guys" ]

[ "Water particles slowly form into small mush bits in moving water. This mush will catch on the edge of a waterfall, and build up until there is enough cold for ice to slowly work it's way down the edges of the waterfall. Then it freezes inwards, until the water stops." ]

[ "Have you measured the temperature of this supercooled water?" ]

[ "So there are three things that can happen to light when it hits something - it can either be absorbed, reflected, or transmitted. Which one will occur depends both upon the material being hit and the frequency of the light doing the hitting. For absorption or reflection to occur; this goes back to the idea that electrons exist in discrete energy whole-integer energy levels, you can't have an electron at a half energy level. This means that in order to absorb light, the light has to be carrying the right amount of energy to knock the electron up by whole steps. If the light doesn't have the right amount of energy to do this, the electron won't absorb it. Glass doesn't absorb visible light because the energy level gap, called a band gap, can't be bridged by the energy that visible light has. However, higher frequency light *does* have enough energy to do this with certain types of glass, which is how they can block ultraviolet light. To UV light, types of glass are opaque." ]

[ "Basically, it's paint. Take a look at [this](_URL_0_) picture. One half of his face is covered in sunscreen, the other half isn't. The sunscreen isn't transparent to UV, so it will be absorbed, preventing sunburn and lowering your temperature." ]

[ "> What do you use to clean lab equipment? Dishwashers, sinks, brushes, detergents and ethanol/acetone typically. > Is there several levels of cleanliness according to the type of experiment that is performed ? Yes. > Is brand new equipment \"cleaner\" than used equipment? Not really. > Before we could properly wash the equipment, wasn't it impossible to make homoeopathic mixtures ? It's always been impossible to make homeopathic mixtures. Homeopathy is pseudoscientific quackery." ]

[ "They can’t make the claim that all germs are destroyed. It’s not provable that they are or would be all destroyed, so they go with as close to 100% as possible without being 100%. We see it and think all, but in an event where someone showed any bacterial existence, they can’t be shown to be wrong" ]

[ "This is just a guess, but i'd wager there are almost zero bears in the jungle. And they could be the kings of the forest, if it weren't for Robert Redford. _URL_0_" ]

[ "[The Straight Dope covered this](_URL_0_). Basically, they started out as being made by two different production teams, but after a certain point, they became essentially interchangeable, but they kept both names going." ]

[ "No, all protons are identical. See also [my response to this similar question](_URL_0_). To address your specific question about the color charges, the colors of individual quarks are not constant in time. They are continually trading colors with each other via gluon interactions. (This is different than electric charge, where exchanging photons doesn't change the charge.) The particle we call a proton is actually a quantum mechanical superposition of (red up + blue up + green down) + all possible rearrangements of colors. (Technical point: some of the rearrangements have minus signs because quarks are fermions.)" ]

[ "Basically they all start from the oil we pump out of the ground.All of these things are inside that oil. We then heat the oil in a large tube that has many different levels. As the oil heats up all the different parts become a gas at different temperatures and they settle in the level where the temperature is cool enough for them to become a liquid again.Heres a picture _URL_0_ they differ by the the amount of heat(energy) produced when they are burnt" ]

[ "Not to discourage any additonal posts, but you may find this answer submitted by u/RuinEleint a bit helpful towards answering your question: _URL_0_" ]

[ "This submission has been removed because it is [soapboxing](_URL_1_.), [promoting a political agenda, or moralizing](_URL_0_). We don't allow content that does these things because they are detrimental to unbiased and academic discussion of history." ]

[ "Yes, but when it happens we just call it evaporation." ]

[ "Here is a very detailed Question and Answer with a Blood Passport panelist. If you read the entire thing you will understand how one can get away with it. _URL_4_ Highly simplified you take a performance enhancing drug. You then take other drugs to mask that performance enhancing drug. Then you take another drug to hide the effects of the drug that you took to hide the first drug. You have your own test equipment so you can test yourself and your team members and make sure your \"levels\" are in balance." ]

[ "I just signed a contract to publish my first book! For anyone who was wondering about the hard research behind my answers\\* on the subreddit, you can now\\*\\* read all about it! If you're curious what it's going to be about and stuff, I wrote up a blog post [here](_URL_0_). & #x200B; \\* the answers for which I actually know what I'm talking about, at least \\*\\* at some point in 2020 probably & #x200B;" ]

[ "No it appears there was an error on that table. It now correctly states: **X-ray Solar Flares** *6-hr max: C4 2204 UT May14* *24-hr: X3 0111 UT May14*" ]

[ "There's a guy I always see whenever the \"three sisters\" system is mentioned who claims it is utter bullshit. He says they might have planted the plants mixed together, but the idea that they would actually grow on each other is nonsense..the beans would stifle the corn or be shaded by it, the wind would blow the whole thing over, etc. But I'd like to get a second opinion on that. Wish I had a link to the comments..." ]

[ "The sentence that precedes your question is incorrect, which means the question itself begs the question. Check any history of China, or any historical atlas of China, to see how its borders expanded and shrank over the centuries. Also, not to be rude, but \"overwhelming\" is an overstatement. And: what does \"cultural... advantage\" mean? Lastly: it often did not have \"military advantage\", which is precisely why they had to build the Great Wall." ]

[ "It can inhibit neurogenesis, specifically development of the cortex and prefrontal cortex. See emerging research about ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and their effects on brain development: _URL_1_ _URL_0_ And a source about early depression and brain development: _URL_2_" ]

[ "They actually debunked that, same with that nonsense about listening to classical music in the womb making your child smarter. It was all just BS to sell some cds. I'll see if I can find an article about it, and I'll edit this to put it in. And now to see if this answer is long enough, or if it will get auto-modded. _URL_0_ _URL_5_ _URL_4_ _URL_1_ _URL_2_ _URL_3_ Here's the first handful of articles I found on google." ]

[ "If a product claims to address a medical condition, it is classified as a drug, and must undergo intensive FDA before it can be marketed, and even then might require a prescription. So what these products are doing it making it explicitly clear they are not drugs, so the FDA doesn't come after them. Food and supplements are also investigated by the FDA, but only for safety. The general rule is if it is naturally occurring, not dangerous, and there is no specific law against, you can sell it was a supplement." ]

[ "Taxes... If the government had a way of guaranteeing that they would get their cut off the money being made then it would be legal." ]

[ "You might be interested in this excellent earlier answer (which does focus on the US) by /u/The_Alaskan, with bonus support from /u/TheShowIsNotTheShow! * [What happened when black diplomats went to Rhodesia, South Africa, or Jim Crow United States?](_URL_0_) Hope this helps!" ]

[ "Nonsense I'm afraid. Cambridge was certainly bombed _URL_2_ _URL_0_ Oxford was, perhaps difficult for the German bombers to identify? It was certainly a legitimate target as the Morris motor works were there at Cowley, building military vehicles, amongst others. Other cities without particular military importance were deliberately hit in what were referred to at the time as Baedeker Raids _URL_1_" ]

[ "[God particle](_URL_0_): Originally Lederman wanted to call it the goddamn particle, but his editor wouldn't let him. Most physicists *hate* the term god particle. It's meaningless and doesn't reflect the physics. adamsolomon's answer addresses the rest of your question." ]

[ "> how it really amounts to a bunch of bologna I don't have an answer, but I do need to point out that bologna = lunch meat. Baloney = nonsense." ]

[ "It's called selective hearing. The auditory cortex in your brain is the part that is responsible not only for decoding the signals sent from your ears, but also \"processing\" those signals. Researchers have found that the auditory cortex can focus on specific auditory cues and patterns, which allows you to carry on a conversation even in a very noisy environment." ]

[ "Warning: anecdotal evidence ahead. I'd consider myself mathematically minded (studied Math and CS in college, currently working as a software engineer), and this is definitely true for me. I'm pretty terrible at remembering (and sometimes even understanding) song lyrics, but I'll often be in a bar or other noisy environment and recognize a song just by its bass line or drum pattern." ]

[ "Temperature is a lot harder! We have biological processes such as enzymes which will not change no matter how hard you train. Above certain temperatures many biochemical processes will slow and eventually cease. Muscles and bones however do respond to stress by building and strengthening tissue and bone. Lung capacity, red blood cell count wouls probably also increase under such conditions. What the upper limit of gravity a human could survive in is unknown." ]

[ "Nasa, among other groups with space exploration in mind, are asking that question themselves: _URL_0_ It seems the biggest problem to overcome is the low atmospheric pressure, which sucks the already rare water out of plants. Nutrients don't seem to be a problem." ]

[ "The sugar grains are sort of fused together. You can make your own by getting sugar slightly damp, and then forming it into cubes and letting it dry." ]

[ "I'm the wrong kind of scientist to know for sure, but I think it has to do with whether the food is exposed to enough air to dry it out before the bacteria can make it moldy/soggy." ]

[ "The goal is to get someone to buy the products. Sending out spam email is dirt cheap - you can send out a million emails at virtually no cost - so long as a few of them get through and a few of those result in purchases, it is a net positive economic decision." ]

[ "If you put enough traffic on a freeway, no mater how wide the freeway is, no one can get anywhere. the same thing applies to networks, where if you flood them with enough traffic, with fake cars that don't actually want to get anywhere, nothing can get where it wants to go." ]

[ "The speed of light is a constant *in a vacuum*. Its speed varies in other materials, including air and water. The difference in speeds as it passes from one medium to another is what causes spectra." ]

[ "_URL_0_ > When the source of the waves is moving toward the observer, each successive wave crest is emitted from a position closer to the observer than the previous wave. Therefore, each wave takes slightly less time to reach the observer than the previous wave. Hence, the time between the arrival of successive wave crests at the observer is reduced, causing an increase in the frequency. While they are travelling, the distance between successive wave fronts is reduced, so the waves \"bunch together\". Conversely, if the source of waves is moving away from the observer, each wave is emitted from a position farther from the observer than the previous wave, so the arrival time between successive waves is increased, reducing the frequency. The distance between successive wave fronts is then increased, so the waves \"spread out\"." ]

[ "This is more of a shower thought that I had a few months ago, but everyone loves boobs. Gay, straight, male, female, so there has to be some basis in biology. My hypothesis is that everyone loves titties because they're babies primary biological food source and therefore breasts are associated with feeding time, cuddles, and good times. Even as a 24 year old male when I see a nice pair I think, \"wow I'd like to nuzzle up and suck on those\". To add to the biological basis, there is significant social pressure to find boobs attractive, again regardless of sexual orientation. Gay guys and girls have much greater access to breasts than I ever will, friends of women with nice boobies will just squeeze then and say \" wow your tits look amazing \" whereas when I do that it's all \"stop you perv\" and \"what are you doing in the women's locker room\"" ]

[ "Nostalgia, too ~ a lot of older guys that now have lots of money are reliving their youth - they either had one when they were young & want another, or wanted one when they were young and can now afford to pay the big bucks to get one." ]

[ "From what I was told, it's an instinct. Many years ago when they had to sleep in tall grass, they had to walk in a circle to make sure no da me or other dangerous animals were around." ]

[ "Generally, it's done in a minor key where the tune is altered, so anything can be spoopy when done that way (Have you seen the Teletubby episode in black and white that plays a Joy Division Song over it?). Also, one of the early films to do this was Nightmare on Elm Street where kids are jumping rope and singing 1-2 Freddy's coming for you, 3-4, better lock your door. In this case, it's contextual. Freddy Kruger was a child molester and murderer, so it's about dead kids, and the context makes it spoopier." ]

[ "As far as i know, its because your body is spending more energy to digest and store the food." ]

[ "Dude, I typically experience the opposite, usually you're wiped out before making the trip back, and energized and active on the way there." ]

[ "They are always growing, but do not use ads to make money. This basically means that their only source of income is donations, which they use to pay for programmers, server hosting, etc. If they don't get enough money they will either have to shut down, reduce their size (less articles or access to less people), or take on ads (which could make usage more annoying and give companies some control over the site). They want to avoid this and so they are asking for donations. If you feel like they offer a useful/important service and you want to keep the site ad-free, then you should consider donating." ]

[ "Two words: crowd sourcing. It works like any wiki page, people can go and edit the map with new, updated information. However, the new data is not automatically pushed straight to the base map. It has to first be approved by moderators (also crowd sourced) who will approve or deny the changes. Google will sometimes have to step in to delete or undo any falsified information that slips through the cracks (which is also crowd sourced). You can give it a try here: _URL_0_" ]

[ "I'm not sure about your sub questions but to take a stab at your primary question: they really aren't that similar. Light waves are transverse waves and sound is usually longitudinal. Sound absolutely requires a medium and light can travel through a vacuum." ]

[ "They really shouldn't. LED lights transmit at THz range (e.g. visible light) well well well above the GHz range your wifi uses." ]

[ "Highest human settlement is 5950 meters or 19000ft. If a normal ocean elevation person even gets up to 3000m, you'll be plenty light headed. I sure was after only 10 minutes of walking around and needed to sit down for half hour to catch my breath." ]

[ "Because of Newton's First Law of Motion: \"In an inertial reference frame, an object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by a force.\" You were moving along with the surface when you jumped or whatever and being in the air doesn't change that." ]

[ "I think the simple answer is that right now we only have one example of life to study. Finding life on any other body will either provide a second opportunity to study life or proof that life on earth may have similar origins to that discovered. Either way it would be a historically and scientifically significant discovery." ]

[ "Corn is horrible for the soil, so we would probably have more fertile soil. We should be growing up, instead of in fields. Large greenhouses that go up many stories. Each city could have one big enough to sustain the community. We already know how certain plants are harvested, so we could use robots to pick the yield." ]

[ "The heart has to beat harder, and the left ventricle, which pumps blood out to the body through the aorta, becomes thickened. _URL_0_ In some people, there's a decrease in vascular resistance, so they don't get high blood pressure, but most obese people get hypertensive. In some people parts of the body become chronically hypoxic. Sometimes the body's reaction to that is to increase red blood cell production. Obese people also tend to have elevated fibrinogen, which is a protein that helps mend wounds. This, combined with excess RBCs makes some obese people more likely to have thromboemolic disease, putting them at risk for pulmonary embolism. In addition to hypertrophy, the left ventricle may become distended as a result of higher workload and increased vascular resistance. Eventually this may present as reduced cardiac ejection fraction. The heart's atria may also become distended, making the person more susceptible to atrial fibrilation and stroke." ]

[ "People will get on treadmills with masks on their faces. Oxygen consumption and Carbon Dioxide levels are measured as they run. Similar things are done for swimming. A little math and science and the calculations are done." ]

[ "The problem of carrying sufficient fuel cannot be overstated. Since the amount of propellant you need rises exponentially with the mass of the spacecraft, you very quickly approach a limit where it just isn't possible to realistically get the mass out of Earth orbit. Another (often forgotten) issue is where do you plan to go. Traveling to the moon or Mars is awesome and all, but if you're going to sink trillions of dollars into a program you need a better reason than \"because it's cool.\" The problems of getting out of LEO are mostly economical and ones of practicality, not specific problems that haven't been solved yet. We just need a destination before building the ship to get us there; the issues of how do you survive for extended periods of time on the moon/Mars must be solved before we can seriously think of sending humans anywhere." ]

[ "The crushing pressures in the ocean among other things. And how would you remotely operate it? with miles of umbilical cabling or with radio that can only penetrate so far?" ]

[ "if the noise is constant, our brains learn to tune it out. dripping from a tap is a sound followed by a period of silence. our instincts make it difficult to relax when the noise level keeps changing." ]

[ "This doesn't change between babies and adults. It's actually the exact same. What changes is they way we take our drinks as we get older. As babies we are drinking from a nipple (either an actual nipple of a simulated one on baby bottles). A baby has to suck to get liquid out of it. If you tilt a baby bottle, very little will come out until the baby starts sucking on it. This allows the baby to control the amount of fluid going into their mouth. As adults we are drinking from cups or glasses. In this situation, the tilt on the cup/glass decides how much fluid is going into your mouth. If we lay down, it's very hard to control how much liquid is going into our mouth so we may choke. Of course, if you were to drink out of a baby bottle, you would have no problem lying on your back." ]

[ "Mostly due to it being part of the game's culture and therefore expected. Additionally, fighting someone who is fighting you is only a crime when charges are explicitly filed, or when it takes place in such a location where it breaks public order and puts others in risk" ]

[ "The New York Attorney General declared it as gambling and doesn't want the two sites taking bets from New York residents. The site has always been a mix of gambling and fantasy. Here's the full article _URL_0_" ]

[ "Unless the name follows the Western naming system, not much can be confirmed. Modern surnames of today could have emerged because someone's ancestors adopted it, had it legally changed/altered/abbreviated/translated, were assigned it by immigration officials, or had it mis-recorded by immigration officials (ex. mistaking a popular given name with the surname, resulting in many unrelated individuals appearing to be related). One such surname that has come about from this is \"Lee\". \"Lee\" is the transliteration of an Asian surname (like Bruce Lee), but it also appears in Western traditions (like Robert E. Lee). Granted, \"Lee\" is a shorter surname and could easily emerge independently in two cultures, but this is just one of the mechanisms that unrelated people can have similar surnames." ]

[ "Imagine country A has laws that are intended to encourage new businesses, and so the laws there make is hard for old businesses to claim \"Hey we did that first!\" or \"Hey, that almost the same as what we do!\" Suppose country B has laws that are meant to protect that country's companies, and stop cheap-o foreign imitators from coming in and running the old companies out of business. For that reason, Country B's laws make it very easy for the old companies to claim \"Hey, we already had that idea!\" and very hard for the new company to claim \"Look, what we do is different here, here, and here.\" Well, you can imagine that the old company would want to get a decision made under Country A's laws, and the new company would want to get ruled on under Country B's laws. So there you go." ]

[ "While there is physically nothing that keeps men and women from competing on the same level in chess, there are several societal factors in play that mean women do not play chess as frequently as men do. The chess organisation made a decision to instate a separate woman's only chess division (the regular chess division welcomes both men and women) to give female chess players more publicity. That publicity is important because that is one of the things that will eventually get more young girls interested in the sport and potentially get to a level where they can compete. If you never ever see a female chess player, you might quickly assume that this is not a sport for you and drop it. Hopefully, eventually, when the pressures that keep young girls from being as interested in chess no longer exist and the numbers of men and women competing are more even, a separate woman's division won't be needed any longer, but for now, it is." ]

[ "For colleges there are scholarships and grants that are limited to specific races, ethnicities, and genders. For both jobs and colleges they need to know that information for legal purposes in case they get sued for discrimination in the future." ]

[ "Clinical psychologist here. Please, please get it into your heads: !Lack of empathy=/=sociopath.! Lack of empathy is associated with a myriad of mental health issues and is only one of numerous criteria present in the clinical portrait of antisocial personality disorder. The diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder is very rare. The defining characteristics of a sociopath from my point of view are impulsivity and emotional immaturity. Sociopaths are not these sly, calculating human predators the media makes them out to be. Most are emotionally crippled fuck-ups without any regard for other people's feelings. Also, APD is not a \"disease\". Personality disorders are constructs designed by people that work in mental health to better describe maladaptive patterns of behavior. They are ways of interracting with society which are dysfunctional." ]

[ "This CGP Grey video does a really good job of explaining it all. _URL_3_" ]

[ "The military don't take actions against the citizens of the country, they're regarded as protecting the interests of the nation as a whole. The police are active in the community to serve and protect, this leads them to having more contact with the individual citizens and the perception that they're the enemy because it's an entity that is easily associated with preventing people from doing something they want to do." ]

[ "\"Just about everyone here\" Where is \"here\" for you? It sounds like your question's premise is based on a small sample set based on personal observation. Before your question is addressed, you should be making sure the premise is valid..." ]

[ "The photo is a screenshot, publicity still, or possibly the original prop from the cheesy SF movie *The Philadelphia Experiment II* in which a mad scientist experiments with teleportation technology and inadvertently sends a nuclear-armed F-117 back to Nazi Germany, where it helps Hitler win the war. You can see the shot in the scene starting at ca. 52:20 in this [copy of the film](_URL_0_)- note the same call letters and uniformed officials." ]

[ "from _URL_0_ \"An increasing number of lit NSL roads (for example the A556 between the M6 Junction 19 and Lostock near Northwich), are now being given \"60\" or \"70\" repeaters rather than NSL ones. Presumably the thinking is that this makes the speed limit clearer, as there is evidence that the NSL is not properly understood by drivers, but it must add another layer of confusion as they will wonder what is the difference between a single-carriageway 60 road and an NSL one. \" Basically people are too stupid to understand what the national speed limit signs mean, so they are being replaced with numbered signs." ]

[ "There's no such thing as pure energy. Gamma rays when absorbed by lead tend to scatter off electrons, either from free electrons (Compton scattering) or by knocking them out of their orbitals (photoelectric effect), and the energy of the photon is transferred to the kinetic energy of the electrons. At high enough energies the gamma rays interacting with the nucleus can produce electron-positron pairs, which at high enough energies becomes the dominant mechanism of absorption." ]

[ "Light beams do not travel in straight lines. Light travels in all directions taking all possible paths, and then those are averaged out, where all the longer paths cancel out and it is seen traveling in a straight line. If you block only one side of these possible paths (ie left or right of straight), by putting a barrier right NEXT to the straight line path, but not actually touching it, then you can cause the light to create an interference pattern, because both sides no longer cancel out evenly. Even though the straight path is un-impeded. So basically, light beams always \"go all over the place\", it is just that normally this cancels out nicely to create a straight path. Watch Feynman lectures on this if it interest you!" ]

[ "I'm sadly not an expert on these matters but you may be interested in the [Seikilos Epitaph](_URL_1_) which is the earliest complete musical composition found, inscribed on a tombstone by a Greek man around the first century CE (earlier ones exist but they are all in fragments). As you can see the notation is not at all similar to modern notation which as far as I remember didn't start to take form until much later when the church started using lines and dots to more unambigously notate its liturgical music (you can see some examples of how it looked on [this](_URL_0_) page)." ]

[ "The \"how\" is pretty simple: Bill is a roofer; Ted is a chicken farmer. One day, Ted's roof was broken. Bill offered to fix it, in exchange for two chickens. This is a *barter system,* goods and services were exchanged for each other; Ted stays warm, and Bill gets a few meals. A week later, Bill is hungry. But he has a problem. Ted's roof isn't broken. So he makes a deal with Ted: \"Give me two chickens, and I'll give you this blue seashell. If your roof breaks again, you can give me back that seashell, and I'll fix it. Oh, and you know George the baker? He'll give you four loaves of bread for that shell. Lucy? She'll have sex with you for that shell.\" And thus, we had money." ]

[ "Earth's magnetic field is generated by moving currents in the outer core. In that sense, it's more like a gargantuan electromagnet than a permanent magnet. Moving charge generates a magnetic field, and the liquid outer core moves in circular currents due to the intense temperature difference between the inner core and the mantle. It's really hot down there, the inner core is as hot as the sun's surface." ]

[ "It actually doesn't wobble! It stays tilted the same amount. [NASA has a little drawing that'll maybe help.](_URL_0_) The earth stays tilted in the same direction, but as it moves around the sun the \"tilted up\" or \"tilted down\" sides end up facing the sun in turn." ]

[ "Storms are sustained by the conditions of their environment and the spin of their planet. So long as the planet keeps spinning and the conditions stay (normally, a hot center and cold exterior), the storm continues." ]

[ "You mean the Animal Planet one? Hype and marketing. Then it became a euphemism for menstruation (I'll fill you in if you want, but it's gross sex stuff...) and took on a life of its own." ]

[ "Yes. Measurements are largely indirect and are usually interpreted to be a specific physiological state. I'm not sure what polygraphs measure so I can't speak to that. [EEGs](_URL_0_) are extremely useful for this kind of thing. Specific combination of brain wave bandwidth amplitudes can pretty effectively determine physiological state. For example, brain waves in the 25-100Hz region are called Gamma waves. In general, the higher intensity from that bandwidth, the more likely you are in deep meditation or sleeping." ]

[ "I think it is hardwired into us. [Tommy Edison](_URL_0_) explains it better." ]

[ "Your FICO score is your real credit score. There are only three places that calculate real FICO scores - Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. There's a lot of shady websites out there that will calculate a FICO-like score that's not a real FICO. These fake FICO scores (called \"FAKO\" scores) are probably what you're thinking of." ]

[ "There was a great short YouTube documentary about the company that does this for the Premier League posted in r/soccer a while back but I can't find it right now. Basically there are a bunch of guys who sit around and watch certain games on computers with special software that lets them keep track of all this stuff. They have to be really fast with a mouse and keyboard, like professional starcraft fast, so it's a lot of college age guys doing it. I think the name of the company is Opta. edit: [Here's the video](_URL_0_)" ]

[ "All planets have elliptical orbits. Newton’s laws mandate it; Earth is no exception. Something having an elliptical orbit has no effect on wether or not it has Lagrange points. However, most objects with very elliptical orbits probably don’t have them because objects that have very elliptical orbits are usually small, have long orbits, and/or are very far away (in reference to something like the sun). All of which do have an effect on if something has Lagrange points." ]

[ "For shapes called [homoeoids](_URL_0_), there is a [generalization of Newton's shell theorem](_URL_1_). In potential theory (for gravitating systems or electrostatics) this theorem is often used to invert the Laplacian for ellipsoidal distributions." ]

[ "Earwigs are one of the rare insects where the mother will care for its young. If you do happen to find a baby earwig, it has either been displaced from its mother or it is going to be accompanied by 20-80 brothers and sisters. They remain in the nest during the day and only travel to hunt for food, not really breaking off on their own until they are matured. This should be rare, since Earwigs tend to live in burrows under the ground, about 5 feet down. Occasionally we find single adult earwigs living in our homes as they search for food or a mate :) Hope this helps!" ]

[ "There are fireflies on the West Coast, such as [*Ellychnia californica.*](_URL_0_) The problem is that many are either diurnal (out during the day) or have relatively weak bioluminescent capabilities as adults." ]

[ "The dividing line is really whether or not this person is a harmful member of society. If a kid is goofing around and destroys something, or if they have an emotional outburst and kill someone, it shows that they made a mistake (a bad one), but they're still growing and learning, and they can go through rehabilitation in a reduced sentence in order to rejoin society and get on with their life. But if a 15-year-old plans out a vicious murder on someone, that's not childhood ignorance, or unfamiliar hormones, or anything. It's a calculated, premeditated act, and they knew the consequences. If a 17-year-old attacks and rapes a girl, he probably knows well enough how harmful an act that is. It shows that there's something wrong with them beyond just a childhood mistake, and the solution that we have is to isolate and rehabilitate them (as much as modern prisons focus on rehabilitation, at least...) the same as another adult." ]

[ "The program I know of is the University of Washington's Robinson Center, that attracts young students who participate in the [Center for Talented Youth](_URL_0_)'s Talent Search (students with 99th percentile standardized scores are allowed to take the SAT starting at 12). Students who get a high enough score (it used to be at least the average for seniors) qualify for entry to the Center. Since that SAT score indicates a high school student is prepared for the rigors of college, its a reasonably good predictor of a younger student who would be able to do that level of work, too." ]

[ "Buoyancy is determined by density. Wood is less dense than water, so it floats. A boat made out of wood is filled with mostly with air, which is also less dense than water, as well as whatever cargo is involved, but the main point is that the density of the interior of the boat has to be less than the density of the water. If there is a breach and the boat fills with water, this is no longer the case, since instead of air and cargo, it will be water and cargo. Since water+cargo is not less dense than water, the ship will sink." ]

[ "The sugar in the cookies is hygroscopic, which means that it will draw moisture from the air into the sugar's structure and hold on to it. Bread however is not hygroscopic and the moisture inside of it evaporates into the air. The moisture that evaporates from the slice of bread is then drawn into the cookies." ]

[ "The film industry would make the case that revenues would be significantly higher if there were no piracy. Their position is that every pirated copy is a loss of the profit from that copy. Clearly there are multiple viewpoints on that. One is the realization that not every person pirating a copy can be converted to a customer if piracy were technically impossible. Another is a number of studies indicate that a lot of people pirate a copy of a film or song to decide if they want to actually own it. Quite a few of these people subsequently purchase legitimate copies of the IP." ]

[ "Imagine a bully at school. It's the same one each day, taking the lunch money of the same handful of kids. You take note that kids seem bullied, and it's very easy to identify who the bully is, after all you only have to talk to a handful of kids to get something of note, plus everyone is pointing the same direction. You do something about it. Now you shut down KickAssTorrents. But imagine that you have a school, a very very large school, and there's *hundreds* of bullies. They're all called Marc. So every time you get someone to tell you who bullies them, it's 'Marc'. They also all look very similar, so you never know who did it today. You never know who is actually to blame. Worse yet, some of these Marcs live in other states, and due to bureaucracy you can't even get a hold of their parents! And every time you finally shut someone down, a new Marc transfers over to your school! :o That... is basically Pirate Bay." ]

[ "There are organisms resistant to hydrogen peroxide and ammonia, but as far as I know there are none that are resistant to bleach. This is because of the chemical potency of the chemical bleach. There is no bleach receptor on cells that lets it in and it then kills the cell...it tears through the cell and destroys everything it comes into contact with including the DNA. Antibiotics work by blocking something specific. Penicillin for example blocks cell wall formation in prokaryotes. A simple mutation in the structure of the cell wall an penicillin becomes useless." ]

[ "Ok, let's first note that 6000 deaths is not actually \"immense\" for a battle of this size. Second, your question applies with even greater force to attacks across no-man's-land in the Great War. Why weren't the soldiers provided with armour plate to stop them being gunned down by the hundreds? The answer is threefold. 1. Men cannot carry, by unaided muscle power, metal armour thick enough to be useful against heavy-calibre machine-gun bullets. This actually remains true even today; the body armour worn by modern soldiers protects against shrapnel and glancing hits, but it won't do anything against a direct hit by a .50-calibre machine gun round. 2. In spite of the evil reputation of the machine gun, artillery was still the main killer of the war. 3. They _were_ eventually provided with such armour. It's called a 'tank', and gets around the \"unaided muscle power\" thing by using a combustion engine." ]

[ "“Magazine” originally meant “storehouse” or something fairly similar (sort of how gun magazines *store* bullets). The way we use it now comes from one of the very first magazines which was called the “Gentleman’s Magazine” (i.e. the “Gentleman’s Storehouse [of knowledge]”). The word spread and now we pretty much only use it to refer to periodicals, rather than the original meaning (with a few exceptions such as in the military)." ]

[ "That's easy. Before vehicles, the fastest you could go was pretty much limited to how fast your feet could carry you. However, there have always been heights deadly enough kill a person, so we evolved to be scared of those, and not how fast we could run." ]

[ "The goal of brushing is to remove food residue. Toothpaste isn't necessary for this, but it provides lube, flavoring, and beneficial chemicals to maintain strong teeth. The human mouth is bursting with bacteria and brushing will never sterilize one's mouth--in fact, that would probably be counterproductive, because oral bacteria have their uses. How clean is a toothbrush? Probably cleaner than most of the food you eat. The plastic bristles often retard the growth of biofilms because they are so smooth and lack sufficient nutrients. The dangers of *not* brushing and flossing should probably be more concerning." ]

[ "I like to think of it like this: Lets say you are fixing a roof on a house (you are the only one that can do this), right after you tear off the roof, but before you you start rebuilding the roof, you get shot. Damn no one can use that house, as you are the only one that could fix the roof. * \"You\" -- Update Program * \"house\" -- The computer * \"roof\" -- A Program or other thing being updated with in the computer (OS or otherwise) * \"get shot\" -- Power turned off If there is luck involved, you might turn into a zombie and finish the roof. Thus the house can be used again. But most of the time you are in the ground, and the house has no roof. * \"Zombie\" -- Update program restarting itself upon reboot." ]

[ "It's simply easier to draw over and over. Fun fact: the only character on the Simpsons with five fingers is God." ]

[ "It isn't a diabolical plan to make tons of money by shorting you a piece. It was probably ten pieces in the past but then a price of one of the ingredients used to make it went up. This left the company to either raise the retail price of the gum or make the package smaller. The went with the second choice because research shows that people feel comfortable paying a certain amount for a product. McDonald's removed a slice of cheese from the double cheeseburger to create the McDouble for this very reason. They wanted to keep the dollar price point." ]

[ "Windows uses these symbols for searches, command-line instructions, and the paths that define file locations. If you save using one of these then Windows does not know whether that is the file name or should be performing some other action." ]

[ "Porn sites have a very limited pool of advertisers to pull from. The majority of advertisement networks will not deal with them because of their site content. I'm president of a non-profit that does conferences and workshops related to non-traditional relationships and sexuality. Our events totally above board, non pornographic, and boring as hell for the average person unless you're a therapist, medical profession, attorney, etc. Basically, it's your average professional workshop. We have to be extremely careful crafting our Google AdWords campaigns because just our event topics will often trigger denials of our ads as pornography. It's much the same going the other way...just like AdWords doesn't allow pornographic content in ads, they also don't allow porn sites to run AdWords." ]

[ "A class is essentially a description of *how* a thing should work. An object of a class is an actual working thing, that fits the description. Example: A car has four wheels, an engine and a chassis. Using the pedals, you can accelerate or stop the car. Using the steering wheel, you can turn the car. This is the *class Car*. The Audi A4 my dad has in his garage, fits the description of the class Car. It has four wheels, an engine, and he can use it to actually drive around. This is *an object of the class Car*." ]

[ "Open Source means that you can use the copyrighted code *under certain restrictions*. It does not automatically grant you patent rights or a license to use the trademarks- those are both separate. In the case of Java, you are only granted a patent license if you pay Oracle a boatload of money to certify your version of Java. And they'll only certify your version of Java if it behaves exactly the same as their version of Java- you're not allowed to add anything." ]

[ "> Isn't the light technically traveling at the speed of light + 99.99% of itself from the viewpoint of someone outside of the ship? No; they also see the light traveling at the speed of light. *Everyone* sees the light traveling at the speed of light. This fact is the basis for the special theory of relativity." ]

[ "The formula E = mc^(2) holds only when in the rest frame of the particle (or system of particles). A single light particle has no rest frame, and so it's not the correct formula. The full formula, valid for all particles (massless or not) and in any frame is E^(2) = (mc^(2))^(2)+(**p**c)^(2), where **p** is the momentum. A light particle has no mass, but it does have momentum, given exactly by p = E/c = hf/c." ]

[ "It essentially severed the legal ties between Canada and the UK. Basically, from that point on, a law passed in the UK had no effect on laws in Canada. It's a common misconception that Canada gained independence from the UK in 1867. We did get significant autonomy over a considerable number of things, but we were still somewhat influenced by the parliament of the UK. For example, you could still appeal court cases to the Joint Committee of the Privy Council in England all the way up to 1949... and by that I mean appeal Supreme Court cases! Canada got absolute independence only in 1982 when the Constitution Act was passed. But it should really be noted that it wasn't like we were a puppet state for all the time before that." ]

[ "Follow up question, did the downfall of the Spanish empire influence Britain's decision-making when forming the Commonwealth? Or was it the independence of the US that primarily influenced their choices?" ]

[ "Energy consumption, pure and simple. RO membranes, hydrolysis, evaporation, etc., all take energy. A lot of it." ]

[ "The software and facilities is a big cost, but not the largest. The largest cost is for the people who make the movie. When you want a live actor to walk across the screen you hire one person to walk across the screen. It takes a few seconds. When you want to show an animated person walk across the screen a person has to move everything in the person by hand. They have to move each bone. They have to set up the clothes so they move correctly. They have to tweak how much the persons hands move back and forth. Everything that happens in real life has to be simulated and that takes a lot of time to set up." ]

[ "There are a couple of reasons: * DNA has a inherent half-life of 521 years, so after a couple of centuries, the amount of DNA that *could* be there is dramatically decreased. (Source: _URL_1_) * The most superficial layers of skin are composed of corneocytes which have lost their nucleus, so no DNA can be extracted. * DNA can undergo hydrolysis (acid-dependent, metal-catalyzed) depending on the environment. * Dessicated DNA (at least for some species) is significantly less stable than DNA in solution or within live cells (the common source of modern DNA testing, blood/hair root) and is susceptible to covalent modifications, reduction of amine groups, and oxidative damage (Source: _URL_0_)" ]

[ "Several reasons: * Better technology. Many chambers were detected by sonar or radar. They would send a signal through the stones and listen for irregular echoes. Today's sonar and radar imaging techniques are better than they were in the past. The equipment is more sensitive, uses different frequencies, and with digital signal processing, they can construct a better, 3D map. Robots can crawl through tinier spaces than ever before. * Different technology. IR and UV cameras that weren't available to the public several years ago are now consumer off-the-shelf technology. Drones can carry cameras to vantage points that were inaccessible before. * Different permissions. You have to get permission from the Government of Egypt to do scientific studies of the pyramids. Over time, the types and locations of research have changed." ]

[ "The skin cells that are shed and regenerated are on the upper layer of your skin. Tattoo ink is deposited below this layer, where the cells aren’t renewed this way. The surface layer of the skin is still always renewing, which is why tattoos fade over time, but the ink remains." ]

[ "Computers run on sets of instructions telling it how to run all the parts of the computer and build an interface so you can use those parts. Say you're following a recipe for a cake. Then you finish the cake and someone comes along with a better way to make a cake by adding another ingredient and changing how much salt is used. You can't unbake your cake at this point to try it out. You have to start over from scratch and remake the cake. So when an update happens, you have to restart the program or even the whole computer to before you were using those instructions that changed. So the computer can follow the newer, better instructions when it builds you your interface." ]

[ "the rocks, called ballast, is used to keep the railway ties (the wooden beams) in place and to allow for water drainage and to prevent vegetation from growing up through the tracks, possibly disturbing the position of the rails." ]

[ "Simple: Their music doesn't act as a confession. Music is a performance, you wouldn't arrest an actor for being a murderer just because they play one in a movie would you? Similarly you wouldn't arrest Eric Clapton for admitting he shot the sheriff, and you can't arrest a rapper for saying they are \"ridin' dirty\". All they would need to do is claim their statements were a performance (which they really shouldn't need to do) and no judge would accept their performances as probable cause for a search." ]

[ "I do this a lot too. Its called 'Operant Conditioning.' Essentially, you actually end up training yourself into waking up before the alarm goes off because you know the noise that it makes will rudely wake you up. This rude awakening can be considered as **negative** reinforcement, a punishment. Initially, you will wake up to the alarm. As time goes by, however, you will just start to wake up before the alarm because subconsciously you will not want to hear the loud noises. Eventually, it will not even matter what time you set the alarm. You will end up waking a minute or two before it goes off. & nbsp; EDIT: I understand that punishment and negative reinforcement ARE different. However, in the scenario described, the punishment (the alarm noise) *negatively reinforces* your sleeping habits (oversleeping). & nbsp; Punishment - A penalty inflicted for an offense Negative Reinforcement - When a certain stimulus (usually an aversive stimulus) is removed after a particular behavior is exhibited" ]

[ "I don't think you are going to get a valid answer. Music in and of itself is a confusing scientific phenomena. Our attachment to it is a strange byproduct of various cortical functions. We don't really understand why it exists (though there are many theories, none with anything close to proof). The most likely explanation is your personal attachment to those songs. We could talk about the tone of the singers, the ecstatic Goldfinger lead and the rough-and-tumble of Chumbawumba, we could talk about the modality of the music, major vs. minor, progression series and society, etc... But ultimately you are the best person to analyze what it is that you are responding to." ]

[ "You're describing a situation where the person is having a fight-or-flight response. What is happening is that your sympathetic nervous system becomes activated so you can better cope with threats to your survival. Some of the benefits are * Increased blood flow to the muscles activated by diverting blood flow from other parts of the body. * Increased blood pressure, heart rate, blood sugars, and fats in order to supply the body with extra energy. * The blood clotting function of the body speeds up in order to prevent excessive blood loss in the event of an injury sustained during the response. * Increased muscle tension in order to provide the body with extra speed and strength. Sweating is just another symptom. Since you won't be hanging off a cliff the majority of the time, this is not really a problem." ]

[ "To scare people into making a confession, basically. If you threaten someone with the fact you can tell if they're lying and then inform them that they can make it easier on themselves to confess now to lighten their sentencing you can get a confession out of them faster. It's like playing good cop/bad cop. \"Make it easier on yourself kid, tell us what we want to know, otherwise if we find out later you were lying to us its only gonna make it harder on you, see?\" Only the bad cop in this case is your heartbeat, which you have no control over if your nervous and guilty, or even not guilty. But if you're innocent and tell the truth, they wont need the lie detector to tell that based on body language and tone of voice. Hell, pretty sure the damn thing hardly ever gets any use these days anyway." ]

[ "Why is this is a big deal? Right now, the federal government says marijuana is absolutely illegal, even for medical purposes, as a result medical marijuana dispensaries in states where it's legal are forced to operate semi-illegally, and can and have been subject to raids by the federal government, and patients who use medical marijuana are still being treated as criminals. If this bill goes through, it would mean the federal government is taking a step back and allowing states to handle the issue of medical marijuana on their own. And it's a big deal that a president from one party and a senator from another party both support it, that means it actually might have a chance of passing instead of getting caught up in gridlock." ]

[ "It probably is, but if the AG doesn't persue it, then the states can continue. However, at any point the feds could swoop in and arrest everyone involved, if they were so inclined." ]

[ "Whilst not wanting to stifle discussion, but there was recently this wonderful answer [here](_URL_0_)" ]

[ "Have you read the [Apollo Flight Journal](_URL_1_) and the [Apollo Lunar Surface Journal](_URL_0_)? Those should pretty much answer any question you have on Apollo." ]

[ "It's popped \"the old-fashioned way\". Popcorn popped over external heat with lots of oil is always better than the kind popped with naturally uneven microwave power." ]

[ "This is more of an opinion or discussion question than a concept you're looking to have explained. Not really a topic for ELI5. Maybe /r/askreddit" ]

[ "Not all lottery money goes to education, lotteries by themselves don't cover all the costs of schools, and the major problems with school systems have little to do with funding." ]

[ "Because they would get sued. The legal system isn't like some kind of beep-boop robot that overlooks totally obvious loopholes. Any company that claimed \"No, we were really advertising the endorsement of Bill Gates, plumber, from Bumfuck, Nebraska.\" would get laughed out of court. As /u/Snewzie pointed out with the Taco Bell ad campaign, a company needs to make it obvious what they are doing to do that. They can't try to mislead consumers and expect not to eat a lawsuit." ]

[ "The situation is a little more complicated than that because what we see as colors are rarely a single wavelength. For example, there is no single wavelength that represents white, or brown, or pink (these are all colors that must be made from several wavelengths mixed together). The other problem here is that RGB colors like the one you gave are not precisely standardized across display devices. So the color on one kind of monitor can be slightly different from the color on another, which would be different from how the color looks when you print the photo out. [Edit: which might involve changing from RGB to another color representation like CMYK.] That said, you can get a general idea of which wavelengths go with which colors here: _URL_0_ [Edit: fixed a surprisingly large number of typos.]" ]

[ "When photons are absorbed by an electron, they give that electron their energy. Every atom/molecule has a minimum energy requirement for a photon to kick an electron out of its atoms shell. if you have a high energy photon, such as Ultraviolet, then it can kick out electrons out of the molecules and atoms it interacts with. This is called ionization. When a photon ionizes a DNA nucleotide, that nucleotide becomes unstable and will thus react with stuff. This changes the structure of the DNA molecule and thus a mutation forms." ]

[ "Plants use photosynthesis to create a molecule called ATP, which holds immediately-usable energy. They use this energy to drive the [Calvin Cycle](_URL_0_), a complex chain of chemical reactions, to turn CO2 and water into glucose, a simple sugar. This sugar can be used as fuel for other cells, stored for later, or converted into fiber with which to build the structure of the plant. TL;DR plants use light to un-burn CO2 and water to make sugar." ]

[ "To add a concrete example to what's already been stated: [The Sahara desert fertilizes the Amazon rainforest.](_URL_0_) Equatorial trade winds carry mineral dust (carbonates and oxides, mostly) from the Bodele depression in the Sahara to South America, significantly increasing the productivity of the Amazon basin." ]

[ "Neither. The planets orbit the Sun in circles (to a good approximation). That means they stay at the same distance. That is not useful if you want to go to other planets or leave the solar system. Interplanetary probes follow elliptic orbits. To get to Mars, for example, the orbit has its perihelion (the closest point to the Sun) during launch and the aphelion (the most distant point) when it arrives at Mars. Spacecraft leaving the solar system follow hyperbolic orbits - they look a bit like extremely stretched ellipses but they are not closed, the spacecraft leaves the system forever. A straight line would mean the Sun magically stops attracting a probe, that doesn't work." ]

[ "It's like in Mario Kart where if you drive off the side into the mud, the drag slows you down. If you drive back to the road in a perpendicular fashion, you minimize your time in the mud, but you've built up no momentum once you get to the road. If you drive parallel and angle yourself gradually toward the road, you maximize your time in the mud and waste a lot of energy, but you get to keep whatever forward momentum you've gained once you get to the road. Depending on the thickness of the mud, there's some optimum angle that describes the most efficient path back onto the road; approaching perpendicular for thicker mud, and approaching parallel for thinner mud. Now if the thickness of the mud/atmosphere *decreases* as you get closer to the road/space, that optimum path would be a curve, starting at perpendicular and ending at parallel, and that's exactly what rockets do." ]

[ "Adenovirus infections are fairly common (respiratory illness or pink eye)-it is possible that your roommates have had the particular serotype in the past, and thus have an adaptive immune response already prepared: basically, since they've been exposed to those particular viral antigens, they can ramp up a strong immune response quickly enough to keep the infection subclinical (without symptoms) and clear it quicker than you can. It's also possible (though less likely) that you've just had closer contact with your sick roommate/objects they've touched, and are more prone to touching your face/nose/mouth than your other roommates (a very common way to pass adenovirus infection). Wash your hands folks!" ]

[ "Copper is rather expensive, so a single line usually runs from the home water entry point and is shared by all the bathroom fixtures. This means when water is drawn by two of the fixtures at the same time, there is less cold water for each of them. Showers get the right temperature by mixing a flow of hot and cold water together (the knob or knobs control how much of each is mixed). So when water is drawn by another fixture, there is immediately less cold water available while the hot water supply is unchanged so the shower increases in temperature." ]

[ "Have you ever heard the term \"Too big to fail\" applied to banks? What that term effectively means is that the economy is so dependent on these specific banking institutions that if they were allowed to fail, the entire US economy would collapse with it. The Fed refused to allow these banking institutions to fail because they believed the collapse would send the US economy into a death spiral and the US would be faced with the Great Depression 2.0." ]

[ "If you ask for 1 pen, it costs you two dollars. If you ask for 100 000 pens, they will only cost you one dollar each. I prefer selling you 100 000 pens at half price, than selling you 1 at full price and have 99 999 sitting around doing nothing. In a similar way, if you ask for a small amount of money, you pay a big interest, and if you ask for a big amount of money, you pay less interest. The bank actually wants you to ask them for a LOT of money, so they lower the price the bigger the loan is. Loans is where they get their profits from." ]

[ "Google is faster, because Google has already done all the searching ahead of time, and built an index. Imagine you have a thousand page book, and I ask you to tell me every page with the word \"cat\" on it. The way your computer does the search is by flipping through each page one by one looking for the word \"cat\", making a list of the correct pages. This can be slow. Google takes a different approach. They anticipated that you would want to find pages in the book with certain words, so they already did all that work last week. They made a list of every word in the book, and next to each word the wrote down what pages it appears on. This list is called an **index**. Now, when you want to know what pages have the word \"cat\", they go to their index, look up the word cat, and give you the list that they put together last week. This is much faster, but requires doing work ahead of time." ]

[ "While _URL_0_ digitizes a lot of records from the past, that doesn't specifically tell you about *your* family. They way it knows about your specific family is that there are other people who have taken the time to enter their family trees on the site, and their ancestors match up with your ancestors. When you start entering what you know about your family, they match things up based on names, birthdays, and other historical information. TL;DR - Your long lost cousins entered their information on the site, and some of it matches up with your family information." ]

[ "I've also got a follow-up question. Since casualties were usually fairly low in a comon setting (by that i mean, with simpler tactics than Cannae), what do you think would have been the most general factor(s) for victory? Exhaustion? (Didn't see you had jind of closed the topic, sorry. But I don't think this question is big enough to deserve another topic tbh.)" ]

[ "Is this a homework question? It says in our [rules](_URL_0_): Our users aren't here to do your homework for you, but they might be willing to help. Remember: AskHistorians helps those who help themselves. Don't just give us your essay/assignment topic and ask us for ideas. Do some research of your own, then come to us with questions about what you've learned. This is explained further [in this [META] thread](_URL_1_). You can also consider asking the helpful people at /r/HomeworkHelp." ]

[ "You cannot copyright concepts, only the specific expression of the concept. Design suggestions are only copyrighted as far as the literal words of the suggestion and the specific way it was proposed, but the contained idea is not." ]

[ "You have a file in a pc You have a IP address You write your IP on a file called .torrent file You upload the file in a website Someone uses that torrent file to download the main file using a protocol known as bittorrent Now two people have the file and the third person can download that file from both users simultaneously" ]

[ "I can't tell you who the first people were to have a \"Mother Earth\" figure but I doubt the Greeks were the first. The feminine concept of Earth has everything to do with fertility though, it's just anthropormorphizing the planet rather than creating a separate entity to represent what occurs on it. Ex: Gaia vs. Demeter" ]

[ "How is that any more \"ignorant of history\" than thinking Rome was founded by two brothers who were sucked by a wolf, or Thebes being founded by some dragon-slayer who followed a cow?" ]

[ "Your eye has a substantial blood supply that keeps it toasty. If the surface gets too cold, you can blink or close your eyelid. [Here](_URL_0_) is an ELI5 friendly slideshow." ]

[ "The best way we have now to cool down a molecule is with “laser cooling”. We reached the lowest temperature ever, bringing a 3-atom molecule to withing a thousand of a kelvin of absolute zero. Molecules are a lot harder to cool down than individual atoms. The technique works by causing an electron bound to the atom (or molecule) to release photons, which relies on matching the system’s energy levels with those of the cooling lasers. The more atoms a molecule contains, the more complex its vibrations and rotations, making it difficult to achieve a match." ]

[ "Because the beer and pizza is instant gratification. You spend the money and you get the item and enjoy it. With the clothes, you spend the money but won't necessarily wear the items right away. So you put them in your closet and wait to wear them. Since there's no instant gratification you are subconsciously not as willing to spend the money there." ]

[ "Digesting food takes roughly 4-6 hrs. Digesting food is very energy intensive, from releasing acids in the stomach, and digestive enzymes in the gut. When you take up nutrients, your insulin levels spike up from baseline and gradually decrease by the time you wake up you're feeling hungry because the insulin levels are low. As opposed to not eating late at night, your body goes into a conservation state. The stomach shrinks a little, and your insulin levels are stable because the body is getting the energy from energy stores in your liver instead of from digested food." ]

[ "No its not real. Here is what Title 4 of the United States Code, the \"Flag Code\" says about the design of the official ensign: 1. The flag of the United States shall be thirteen **horizontal** stripes, alternate red and white; and the union of the flag shall be forty-eight stars, white in a **blue field**. 2. On the admission of a new State into the Union one star shall be added to the union of the flag; and such addition shall take effect on the fourth day of July then next succeeding such admission. _URL_1_ And that's it, there is no provision for any other flag to represent the nation as a whole. While the Coast Guard has had since taking over for the Revenue Cutters and various DHS agencies have since adopted a design like the one here it is not in any way an official ensign: _URL_0_" ]

[ "Many military bases host regular events showing off their war assets. Around here (DC Region) there's the Joint Service Open House, a weekend-long event held at Andrews AFB where just about every military land/sea/air unit you can think of is on display. It's essentially a huge airshow with military aircraft, while a huge area of the tarmac is dedicated to static displays of stuff like tanks/boats/launchers/etc. It may not be a parade, but it's more or less a way for the military to show off their skills and fleets. The JSOH is a huge event for the region, but plenty of military bases host events like this all the time." ]

[ "Production of an oxygen molecule via photosynthesis requires a water molecule. Algae farms like this probably will play a crucial role in making Mars habitable, but first we need to get the temperature up it gets down to 150 below on Mars. If we could boost the temperature a bit Mars would go into a self sustaining global warming, and all of the ice on Mars would begin to melt (there's quadrillions of tonnes of water on Mars its just locked away as permafrost), once that happened plants like these could be turned loose on to the planet to do their thing." ]

[ "To *create* oxygen? Omnipotence. To convert carbon dixoide to oxygen? Plants." ]

[ "Of course it could - provided it has a really random shuffle, i.e. if the album is shuffled the new sequence is taken from the set of all permutations with equal probability. This also gives you the probability: If the album has 12 tracks, then it has 12! = 12 * 11 * 10 * 9 * 8 * 7 * 6 * 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 = 479,001,600 different permutations, and the probability to pick any one is roughly 2x10^-9 . I don't know enough about the shuffle algorithms used, but when doing a quick search on google I get a feeling that the algorithm is more sophisticated, and may bias towards songs with high ratings. In that case the math changes. Of course you could just create a playlist with three songs, and shuffle that a couple of times, and note down the order of play." ]

[ "_URL_2_ columnist William Saletan waded into this issue several years ago with similar questions to yours. Here's an article posted AFTER his initial article and several followups, all of which can be reached via links within the article. It's an interesting journey with commentary from psychologists, statisticians, and other relevant experts. _URL_2_" ]

[ "Heart attacks have different causes, and call for different meds. The ones from the movies with quick-acting tablets are probably showing ischemic heart disease and nitroglycerin tablets, where it works more or less like that." ]

[ "What you hear is misleading advertising. Scientists are pretty sure there is no one cure for cancer, because there are so many different kinds." ]

[ "it's the combination of the burnt sulfur compounds that allow the match to light as well as the smoke. In essence you are creating a smell that is smellier and has more scent molecules in the air than the poo. Like a counter irritant, except we find the smell of sulfur smoke to be more pleasant." ]

[ "So guys can plug in their electric razors. This is potentially valuable on long flights or overnight flights." ]

[ "It's a loophole. You are officially paying escorts for their time and companionship, the sex part is free with the purchase of companionship. Back when Chicago banned foie gras, there's a restaurant called Hot Doug that has always serves foie gras hot dogs. The owner said he's just selling the hot dog bun, the sausage is free with the purchase of a $9 bun (as the law only applies to selling foie gras, giving it for free is technically not illegal)." ]

[ "Horse meat isn't rare at all. You can get it in many parts of europe. Tastes ok too. Anyway, that's culture. The same reason we think that bacon and eggs is a breakfast food, and don't eat grasshoppers." ]

[ "The drones basically fly themselves. You don't have to tell it \"increase rotor speed on this rotor then decrease then do this etc.\" You just tell it \"go that way\" and its computer figures out what needs to happen to do that. Normal helicopters don't do that. You have to micromanage everything to make it fly...It doesn't know how to fly. As a result, anyone can fly a drone. Helicopters are hard to fly, so not many people did. Since drones are so easy, and so easy to miniaturize, frigging everyone is getting them, making them a lot more common." ]

[ "Ask Reddit is for personal opinions, stories, and the like. Essentially subjective answers to questions without hard answers. Something like \"whats your favorite food\" is a good post there ELI5 is for getting a simplified answer or explanation to a question that you don't understand. A good thread here would someone explaining in easy to understand terms how a car engine works." ]

[ "Usually they use a rotating mirror that precisely matches the expected speed of the object. Because it sweeps out a large arc the mirror doesn't need to spin unreasonably fast." ]

[ "Evolution really: You track an object of interest with \"smooth pursuit\" because it has your distinct attention. When you're \"searching\" for an object to give your attention the eye moves differently and \"Saccades\" until it finds something to track. You do this when reading. You can train your eye to move smoothly in the absence of a high interest target though. For more info see: _URL_0_" ]

[ "Thanks to both u/cdesmoulins and u/sunagainstgold for the truly fantastic responses. From someone who lives in a country where an impressive amount of private schools adhere to one or another religious doctrine, I always found the Jesuit´s pursuit to be a little different. Their teaching always seemed to be constructed upon a humanistic sensibility lacking in those efforts of other congregations." ]

[ "I'd offer Massasoit of the Wampanoag who managed to use the Massachusetts Bay settlers to his advantage and play various parties off against one another to maintain peace through most of the 17th century. As for a lasting legacy, the Wampanoag still maintain a tribal identity and have a reservation on Martha's Vineyard. Realistically, that's about the best legacy that an East Coast tribe could hope for." ]

[ "Just a reminder for those who missed it last time: Old episodes of the podcast are going up on [Youtube](_URL_0_) again. *Daily.*" ]

[ "With trepidation, I will try my first posting of an image - one suitable for this question. This is [John Piper's Old Corner Bar](_URL_0_) in Virginia City, Nevada in late 1860, illustrated by Grafton Brown, an African American Artist who produced a Bird's Eye View of the town (with businesses illustrated around parameter). Assuming I haven't made a mistake in posting, you will be able to see that Piper had posted \"12 1/2 cents\" on his front signage, indicating that this was a one bit saloon. edit: this seems to work - with thanks to the kind and gracious help of /u/estherke for walking be through the process of posting images." ]

[ "> Dandruff is thought to be due to a combination of an over production of skin oil and irritation from a yeast called malassezia. > Stress, fatigue, weather extremes, oily skin, infrequent shampoos or skin cleaning, use of lotions that contain alcohol, skin disorders (such as acne), or obesity may increase the risk. > You can treat flaking and dryness with over-the-counter dandruff or medicated shampoos. Shampoo the hair vigorously and frequently (preferably daily). Loosen scales with the fingers, scrub for at least 5 minutes, and rinse thoroughly. > The severity of dandruff can be lessened by controlling the risk factors and by paying careful attention to skin care. _URL_0_" ]

[ "1. The different colors is just pigmentation just like skin pigmentation, or lack there of. 2. Genetics plays a huge roll in that, I can't remember the scientific names for it but there's a difference between Caucasian, African, and Asian descent hair. 3 & 4. No idea." ]

[ "I guess it depends on who \"we\" is. Check out [this video](_URL_0_ ). She might be a little spooky, but it's something some people at least can learn. Other people can move their ears, but that's somethign only dogs and cats should be able to do. It's a matter of practice. Eye coordination, so they point towards each other to see near things and parallel to see distant ones, is what provides the best depth perception. That's the default thing to want. Spending time in front of a mirror apparently let's you learn how to do additional things. These things don't improve your vision, but I bet they win many bar bets." ]

[ "No fundamental reason. Software such as [ManyCam](_URL_0_) lets you do this, as well as the opposite (combining several cameras into one big supercamera source). It's just not included free with Windows because it's not a very popular feature." ]

[ "This may be understood already but I'll mention it if it isn't. The reason this type of research has become prominent is that not every team has unlimited payroll. Consequently, some teams, most notably the Oakland Athletics as described in Micheal Lewis' excellent book Moneyball, began to look not at regular stats but more specific stats on a per cost basis. That is, instead of the age-old standard of batting average, they looked at batting average (actually on base percentage carries more weight in the Sabremetrics world) in relation to a players salary. A .350 hitter may have a $10 million dollar salary, but if you are on a limited payroll budget, maybe it is more sensible to sign a guy with a .270 average for $2 million. In fact, what they often found was the guy with the .350 average may have a on base percentage of .425 and the guy with the .270 average has an OBP of .400 (due to walks, etc.). All of a sudden that $2 million salary seems like a relative bargain, no?" ]

[ "To a 5 year old? Only Carl Sagan can do that.... _URL_0_ _URL_1_" ]

[ "We use erratic movements to confuse predators. The problem comes when things like cars aren't actually predators, so that unexpected darting brings death, instead of avoiding it." ]

[ "To get shorted you must be an active part of the circuit. In particular, you should close to ground. On a wire, imagine there is current flowing. A bird on the wire is actually a resistor in parallel to an (almost) zero resistance resistor, which is the wire itself. The resistance of the bird is immensely higher than that of the wire, so current actually flows on the wire, ignoring the higher resistance path through the bird" ]

[ "It's the same thing with Magic: the Gathering cards. From the side, the cards (or in your case the pages of the thicker books) look like a bunch of blades. Taking them out of your bag should help get through without additional checks." ]

[ "The way they are generally sold to the public, they aren't. However all laws are written in words. Words can be interpreted and reinterpreted by anyone. Say for example I'm a power hungry madman making my way up the ladder of politics. If I wish, I can redefine a terrorist as anyone. If you don't agree with me, then you are a terrorist. That's me ringing the doorbell btw and you said it was a good thing." ]

[ "It's possible to be IN the film without seeing the final cut. Is it okay? They know it's not real, and, having seen all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes, the film is anti-climatic to them. \"Looking behind the curtain\", so to speak, destroys the illusion. I once saw an online comment by a woman who thought Dakota Fanning would be traumatized by the kidnapping scene in \"Man on Fire\". Apparently, she thought a child actor couldn't grasp the realities of making a movie." ]

[ "This is more sociological than biological, but there is something called the Relative Age Effect where the arbitrary dates placed on age groups for youth sports leads to children born towards the earlier dates to be more successful and likely to become professional than the kids born later in the date range. For example if you have a youth hockey league with teams based on kids born in each year, starting with kids born in the year 2012 (just for example) the kids born close to January will have about a year's growth mentally and physically more than the kids born in December, and will see more playtime and get more experience in games. The effect diminishes with age, for example [this study](_URL_0_) found very little evidence of the effect among Canadian NHL players (contrary to the popularly cited book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, which brings it up)" ]

[ "[Source](_URL_0_) The cup (or shell) amplifies the ambient noise, which is the thing you hear. Many people believe it's an echo of your blood, this can easily be disproved. Try to exercise and put the cup to the ear. The noise is no louder, even if you hearth is beating faster." ]

[ "The waves very literally add up and stack one atop the other! On the left in this image is a sound wave, on the right is the individual frequencies that make it up: _URL_0_ You see the big drop and the big peak? Notice how all the other waves have peaks there as well. This is the kind of thing a video example would make a good explanation for, look up \"fourier transforms\" to find more." ]

[ "> I am having a difficult time getting a straight answer out of physicists for this question. (That's sometimes good indication that the question isn't very well-posed or uses expressions which don't really have a defined meaning within physics.) Rather than talking about \"existing\" you should talk about their state. the state of an electron is described by a wave function in quantum mechanics which assigns probability amplitudes (rather a density of that) to every point in space. You can use that to determine how likely is to encounter the electron in some region if its in that state. > Does this mean that the electrons don't exist at any specific place at a given time or is it just that we can tell where one is any given time. It does not have a definite position. It's not that we don't know the definite position, but that it doesn't have one. Its state is accurately described by the wave function I mentioned. It's not a technological limitation, it's how nature is fundamentally." ]

[ "> assuming they were equidistant from the source. Who's \"they\", and who's \"the source\"? If \"the source\" is the satellite over Denver, and it is momentarily equidistant from a receiver in California and another in New York, then simultaneous instantaneous transmissions sent at that moment will be received simultaneously by the receiving sites after a delay proportional to their line-of-sight distance from the satellite." ]

[ "[They do freeze. They just don't normally freeze solid. In the more extreme climates, like North Dakota, engineers incorporate heating systems into the tank design...](_URL_0_)" ]

[ "Has to do with the angles formed by the hydrogen with the oxygen. They clump together based on water being polar. This clumping forms larger patterns associated with these angles. These grow until it forms we think of as snowflakes. Varous enviromental factors impact how these crystals grow into snowflakes. [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) [_URL_2_](_URL_1_)" ]

[ "It's when it's your turn, and you're not in check, but you have no legal moves. (If you're in check, and have no legal moves to stop it, it's a \"checkmate\" and you lose.) The game ends in a draw if that happens." ]

[ "There is a site, _URL_9_, that does an ELI5 for each xkcd strip. This particular strip is explained here: _URL_9_/wiki/index.php/1545:_Strengths_and_Weaknesses Your question isn't answered directly in the Wiki, but it does contain a link to the MCA (Most Common Ancestor) wiki article, here: _URL_11_" ]

[ "Computer science would be better called *computing* science. It's a branch of mathematics which deals with how to calculate certain mathematical quantities (someone can be more specific if they want). It's not the study of electronic computers. A typical computer science question would be \"What is the least number of steps would it take to sort this many numbers from highest to lowest.\"" ]

[ "This video from Sagan will help. I couldn't explain it in a better way. _URL_0_" ]