[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Is there something special about hearts that make them resistant to cancer?

It seems like cancer affects every single organ in the body, but for every news story Ive heard about cancer I dont remember a single one discussing heart cancer, even in patients whose original cancer has metastasized to other areas of their body.

Is there something special about hearts that makes them cancer-proof? Or is heart cancer so lethal that its pointless to discuss treatment/cure?

[Assistant]
The heart is muscle, and muscle isn't cancer-prone. The cells that get cancer are those that get replaced a lot. Cancer generally requires a couple of accumulated errors that knock out multiple safeguards against uncontrolled cell division. The cells that accumulate lots of errors are the ones with lots of turnover, which means lots of chances to make a mistake in copying DNA.

Most of the common cancers are carcinomas, which means they come from cells that line things (epithelium.) Linings are replaced frequently, so there's more room for error. Think of skin, wet pink parts of the body like the lung and colon, or glands like the prostate or in the breast. Alternately, there's blood cancers like leukemias and lymphomas, since bone marrow is also a place where new cells are being made at a ferocious pace.

Sarcomas, which affect muscle/bone/cartilage/fat/some other stuff, are WAY more rare. Muscle cells would rather grow than make new cells, and heart muscle is replaced very slowly. There are true heart cancers, but they're absurdly uncommon.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[1984] Why does Oceania bother with enforcing chastity and artsem so strictly?

Wouldn't people having sex encourage population growth and create strong families who will serve the Party? Not to mention people being generally more satisfied. Why does the Party seem to hate sex so much?

[Assistant] They're afraid people would be loyal to their families rather than to the state. They need you to care about your country more than you care about your loved ones. That's why they know torture worked when he says do it to his wife.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [The Pink Panther Movies] What does Inspector Clouseau's Character sheet look like from a D&D perspective?

[Assistant]
Most of his stats are mediocre.  His intelligence and wisdom are remarkably low.  The effects of his charisma are variable depending upon the person perceiving him.  His saving throws and armor are so high that they don't seem to have any relation to his other stats or his gear.  He is also able to roll to redirect incoming attacks toward any nearby chief inspectors.  Instead of rolling a d20 for non-combat interactions with others (disguises, stealth, diplomacy, etc.), he flips a coin, yielding the equivalent of either a natural 1 or a natural 20.

I apologize if these descriptions don't exactly line up with D&D.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
My paper has been rejected from a journal. How do I proceed from here?

My paper was under review for the past 6 weeks in a good journal (possibly best in a subfield of Computer science, IF -  around 5.1). Unfortunately today I received the decision that my paper was rejected based on the recommendations of 3 reviewers.

One reviewer suggested that the paper structure is 'good' but said that my paper needs additional literature and peer comparison to support the paper, which I think is good comment and will revise on that aspect.

Another two reviews are very general as they asked me to provide more explanation for a few equations and parameters but didn't specifically mention any reason why they are rejecting my paper.
They have a few high-level comments on the advantages / disadvantages of my approach but didn't provide any specific feedback on my algorithm and experiments. Does it mean they 'acknowledge' the results of my paper as good? What does it mean?

 How do I proceed from here? I feel my paper fits very well in the scope of this journal. Since my paper has been outrightly rejected after the review, may I revise and resubmit to the same journal? Does rebuttal to the reviewers make any difference to the outcome?

P.S: My PI and co-authors think that the paper is good and advised me to submit to another journal with similar scope, but it has less IF (around 2.7). Thanks.

[Assistant]
Revise and resubmit to another journal. Spend hours reformatting your manuscript and references. Contemplate deleting the whole thing and forgetting about it.

Your paper is dead at the current journal btw. Dont send it back.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[Watch the throne]Kayne West is in his zone. What happens now?

He broke through the shields and is in his zone. What is going to happen now.

[Assistant]
Kanye's first album destroyed the first saviour. His beats and rhymes were perfectly set and resonated through time. A 15 year old girl bathing in a lake three thousand years ago explodes, leaving a lingering aura of foulness in the Black Sea. His second album was so hot that another fifteen year old burst into fire, leaving naught but greasy ash.

And now he is in his zone. The final saviour was to lead mankind into paradise. Return the dead to life. Lead them through milk and boiling lava. Return mankind to grace and the creator. Create the elixir of immortality from the cosmic ocean. None of this comes to pass. Another 15 year old girl is destroyed, otensibly drowned in New Orleans - really drowned in the rhythms of Yeezus. Kanye begins to prepare. None can stop his March and the dark prophet comes from under his mountain with his hairy attendants.

Ahura Mazda is boiled alive in the milk of a mother. Ahriman sheds his mortal form, Kanye rippling and twisting before becoming a hideous conglomeration of muscle and flesh and begins his conquest. There is no one to stop him. The world burns as he squats in the ruins of Paris, toying with the souls of a failed species. Our bones pave the earth.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Do manual transmissions or automatic transmissions get better gas mileage? Why?

I hear manual transmissions used to be more efficient, but that modern automatic transmissions have improved to the point that they're equal or better. Is this true? Why is one or the other more efficient?

[Assistant]
There is a couple reason for this.

Until rather recently manual transmission generally had more forward gears for the same application vs an automatic transmission, a 5speed manual vs 4 speed auto or even a 3 speed auto.  Having 1 or 2 more gears means the engine rpm can be minimized or better optimized for current driving requirements. Having a lower rpm especially while cruising lowers fuel needs.

Manual transmission generally have less kinetic energy converted to thermal energy for various reason. This means more efficient.

Recently automatic transmissions have more forward gears for a more optimized engine rpm. 6-10 speed automatics are the norm now. Also automatics have gotten more efficient mechanically and because an automatic can be controlled entirely by the electronic management system a more optimized solution can be found for current driving conditions. An entirely controlled transmission also means things like "auto stop start" are more easily and reliably implemented.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: Why do Americans insist that the French are a bunch of cowards?

I can't join the military in the US due to my criminal record so I decided to up my training and volunteer in the Legion. I mentioned it at a dive bar (big mistake) and there was a resounding number of people who detested my decision, saying "Why would you want to join a bunch of cowards like that? They're just going to surrender!"

I'm kind of confused because it was my understanding that the French helped during the Revolutionary War. Are there other reasons that I wasn't made aware of during history class? Was it all over WWII?

(Obviously not all US citizens adopt this mindset but the people in my area who do are numerous.)

Edit: Thanks for all the responses! From the gist of it I am assuming that all this shit talking is friendly banter. And when shit gets real we would have each others back. I'll leave this open for another hour just so I can read through more of the comments. Also just in case anyone else chimes in with something that was not already mentioned.

Edit 2: Alright this is starting to sound like the old farts at the bar got Reddit accounts. Thanks for the explanations folks.

[Assistant]
I'll explain it like you're 5. America, France, England. Were kinda all these arrogant buddies. We give each other shit but mostly got each other's backs. France is a tough bastard but one time in middle school he got in a fight with Germany. Germany had just finished Karate class. Instead of getting his ass kicked France said fuck it and went home. Now USA makes fun of France. "Dude France, it's okay...you don't have to surrender!"
And France is all like "dude that was one time in middle school!"


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Advice from professors or students that have experienced similar?

I am a first year PhD student and this last spring semester has been brutal for me. I had a really hard time due to numerous surprise events taking place in my life (family member cancer, death, suicidal friend, the list goes on). I had already been slipping a bit but was able to talk to my professors about it and they have been great. All this to say, around the second week of may I was confronted with my friends suicidal thoughts and behavior ramping up again and it completely shook me. I havent been able to look at text messages or emails for a month and now I am scared to reach out to my professors again. I dont even know how to begin. Im always a bit chaotic (adhd, they also know this) but I feel Im in too deep with avoidance and I know it is so disrespectful its eating me. I developed anxiety around turning in my work, its done, I literally cannot bring myself to  press send. I was present in class all semester minus when I had covid, and have a good relationships with people, but Ive never felt so stuck its so dumb.

Any thoughts on how I can respectfully approach reaching back out to my professors? Thank you so much.

[Assistant] Id say frame for yourself very well with what you would reach out to them. You sound overwhelmed, and not really clear in your path. What are you going to ask them? What exactly, and what might they say. Frame the full range of their responses, and assume they are going to give you what you need. When you ask them believe they will give it to you.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[Gravity Falls] Spoiler Question about Stanford Pines. (Spoilers)

So in the chronology of Gravity Falls, Stanford Pines was given a large grant by his University to conduct research in Gravity Falls, Oregon.

But for at least 30 years, Stanley Pines impersonated Stanford Pines, and converted his research station into a Tourist Trap.

Was the University not privy to this? Was Stanley sending them falsified research?

[Assistant]
He's a skilled conman and liar, very good at fast talking, much smarter then he seems and can impersonate his brother very well.

He probably can't impersonate a scientist to fellow experts, but he can come up with a convincing reasons that he is giving up on his academic projects that only comes off as "tragic wasted potential" rather then "actually a different guy".

Once that happens, the university has no further reason to investigate that student who went nuts and started running a gift shop in some backwards town somewhere.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: Why do we still use USB and not fibre optic for file transfer. My Soundbar uses fibre optic, so it can't be a cost issue.

It takes ages to copy from one hard drive to another using USB, surely fibre optic would be faster?

[Assistant]
USB is

* cheaper (both cables and controllers)

* bidirectional by default (SP/DIF is unidirectional because it is only 1 fibre cable)

* can carry multiple signals at the same time (again, your SP/DIF only carries one. Alternative is multiple fibers, or multiple colours per fibre, but that second one increases cost exponentially)

* can be split into multiple USB ports through hubs (fibre can only do point to point links)

* has more compact controllers and interfaces (optical requires very deep jacks to ensure correct optical transfer between cable and socket)

And last but not least

* can carry power, because it's made of copper wiring

which is VERY important for just about any peripheral. Without USB powering a peripheral, you'd have an extra power cable. In fact, they are drastically increasing the power transfer capability in USB Type C cables, so that soon you'll be able to charge your laptop and tablet PC just like you do your phone.

as mentioned in this thread, fibre is only used where the limits of copper are a hindrance. This is

* Where speed is very important

* Where great distances need to be bridged (think kilometers, without amplifiers)


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [X-Men] What happens if Rogue touches Darwin?

[Assistant] Either Darwin will evolve to be impervious to being touched, as his mutation will identify Rogues uncontrollable power as a threat (since it eventually drains the life force), or, if were talking about the Rogue who learns to control how much power she draws from another mutant, Darwins mutation wouldnt have anything to react to, and therefore Rogue would be able to adopt his powers.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Is there a name for this behavior I observe from other individuals?

The title is incredibly vague, bear with me.  To narrow it down, I think it'd tie under some sort of psych/behaviorist econ ideas.

I'm a server at a restaurant, and for those of you who have the pleasure, you'd know that the atmosphere is often cut-throat when things get busy.

I observe when something goes wrong, at someone's fault, and there isn't a name/face attached to it, people are *more* likely to yell or be angry towards the person than they would have if the identity of the person was known.  I feel like it is easier to rationalize anger when the person is unknown, because it's easier to pass off the cost to the unknown people; often under this type of dialect, I observe that the group of perpetrators are often referred to as "they" or "them."

So is there a name/psychological understanding for this type of behavior?  It's admittedly niche but I've been thinking about it lately and wanted to see if there was anything that recognizes it.

[Assistant]
Actor-observer bias. Correspondence bias. Fundamental attribution error.

We're more likely to attribute disposition explanations to someone we don't know (he ran a red light because he's an asshole) than someone we do know. We're more likely to attribute situational explanations to people we do know (he ran a red light because there is a medical emergency)


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[General Interstellar] What is life like on planets with lower gravity?

Humanity tends to inhabit planets with earth-like gravity, but planets with lower gravity than earth's must make life easier, no? For instance, on a planet with lower gravity, it would cost less energy to transport goods, just to name one example. Of course I'm sure low gravity has its drawbacks as well.

Anyway, what are some known examples?

[Assistant]
Building would be easier and cheaper, flight would be easier and cheaper, so travel could be a lot more viable. Flora and fauna might be taller and more slender, flight might be more common. Space-flight might be considerable easier, a low-G world with valuable resources (minerals, cheap energy for industry, botanical subjects for study, valuable drugs) could be an incredible valuable prize, particularly if your tech level is low and your fuel to thrust ratio isn't great (like our chemical rockets relative to, say, nuclear fusion).

A downside would be that products from this low-G world might not cope well with higher gravity, and people might find their bones and muscles had permanently changed, and it would be unusual to be able to survive in normal-G. Life-forms would also probably be squat, sickly and anemic if they were transplanted, assuming they survived at all.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[Jumanji: Welcome to the jungle] How did Alex recognize the other players after the game?

Alex has never met them in  person and only ever saw them as their avatars. Why would he assume 4 random kids, staring at him would be those 4 players?

[Assistant] What youre not shown is Alex confronting several groups of teenagers as the players throughout his adulthood. He just finally found the right kids. What a relief for him! Lots of awkward conversations.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5 - What are pivot tables actually used for? Like, a real life example.

[Assistant]
Take a set of data like the guests at a wedding and the tables that theyre sitting at.

Lets say you want to know how many of each dish is going to be served at each table.

You could write a bunch of sum if formulas in a new sheet, or you could just create a pivot table, select table number as the row, select the dish types as the columns, and sum of dish type as value, you have your answer.

Basically anytime you want to aggregate data across another set of data, pivot tables are incredibly fast ways to do that.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[MCU] How do people stand near Tony Stark without being baked alive?

The arc reactor in his chest produces three gigawatts of power. That's around a million times more than what an oven uses, which means that at a thousand times the distance the power would be the same. But lots of people have stood within a kilometer of Tony Stark with no ill effects. For example: Tony Stark.

[Assistant] Because he's not radiating that energy out the same way an oven does. Either the arc reactor isn't pumping out 3 gigawatts every second, and instead only outputs what the devices attached to it are drawing at any given moment, or he has some way of storing the energy for future use without much waste heat.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: why wont jello set if you add pineapple or kiwi?

[Assistant]
Pineapple contains an enzyme called bromelain which breaks down proteins, which coincidentally is the stuff that makes jello "jello".

If you *cook* the fruit and break down the enzymes via heating then you remove this ability. That's why any jello that contains kiwi or pineapple will always use the canned versions, because they have been heated during the pasteurization process and the enzymes have been neutralized.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[General] Would illusion based powers work on someone with aphantasia?

Aphantasia is a phenomenon in which someone can't produce images in their mind. I am someone that has this condition and it basically means that when I think of something or try to imagine something, it is solely the voice in my head saying it or a "concept" of the thing.

In a lot of superhero stories, there are people that can make you see things that aren't there, some that come to mind are Kali from stranger things, Matt in Heroes and Professor X.

Could anyone with these powers cause someone that is incapable of producing images in their head to see something that isn't there, whether to confuse them or to help them imagine a complex scenario?

[Assistant]
I'd say that depends on how the illusion powers work.

Say if your power makes the victim "see their greatest fear" or something like that, then it likely wouldn't work, since the victim can't actually visualize their greatest fear.

But if the illusion is coming from the mind of the telepath, like the telapth creating a horde of fake enemies, then it should work since the visualization is being done in a mind that can do it.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Does the size of your stomach actually shrink when you decrease your daily portion size?

I always hear people telling me their stomach shrank and can no longer take in the amount of food that they once used to. Does your stomach really shrink/expand in size depending on how much you eat on a daily basis?

[Assistant] No, the amount of receptors in the brain associated with chemicals that illicit a positive response from eating decrease. The less receptors the lower the rate of reuptake and the less physiological demand for food. Everyone's stomach is about the same size unless they have a band installed or are some kind of hotdog eating champion maniac oddity.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [Star Wars] In Rise of Skywalker, why didn't Rey just take up the offer of ruling the final order and use them for good?

[Assistant]
Assuming she managed to avoid being possessed by Sidious?

Because as soon as the brainwashed Sith cultists and fanatical ex-Imperial admirals realised she was deviating from Palpatine's vision, the entire Final Order would turn on her.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: Who notifies Google about newly made roads for their maps?

Do they keep tabs on that sort or thing, or do they wait for their yearly map imaging to add it in?

[Assistant]
There are companies specialized in this sort of thing. They monitor local government announcements, planning permissions, etc., and when they see a new road is being constructed, they will go and collect the data.

Google's maps business is big enough for them to own some companies like that as a subsidiary, but sometimes they might just hire external companies to gather the data and provide it in a format that's easy to plug into the Maps database.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[DC/Marvel] The Joker decides to take on a personal challenge and moves to New York to fuck with Spider-man. Has Spider-man ever faced someone like The Joker before? if not, how easy would it be for him to "break him" psychologically?

What the title says. I'm not familiar with all of Spider-man's villains so I'm not sure to what extent any of them could compare to The Joker (if at all).

Has Spider-man ever faced a master manipulator like The Joker? I don't think he'd go as far as to kill him, but could he stop him?

[Assistant]
This is a recipe for madness.

The first confrontation gives us Spidey on top form, bouncing off the walls and joking at the Joker.

Who does not. take. it. well. at. all.

Things get mighty dark mighty quick, because now Joker wants to wipe the smile off Spider-Man's face.  Given that Spidey is well connected to assorted people, that's how Joker tries to get to him: through his friends.

Spidey's friends are pretty tough, so it's not as easy as it first appears but The Joker is nothing if not persistent.  He goes all in on Web-head, making him undergo one sadistic choice after another after another.  Peter Parker is stretched to his limits, and beyond them, but he won't give in.  So the Joker keeps pushing and eventually does something very, very bad to someone Peter cares about very deeply.

That's when Spidey's demeanour changes.  The jokes disappear, which causes the Joker to think he's won.  But that's when Spider-Man tears his way through The Joker's minions and allies like they don't exist.  No one can put a hand on him, and The Joker realises belatedly that pushing this hero too far may have been a mistake.

He runs, but Spider-Man hunts him down.  Wordlessly, in fact in total silence, Spider-Man relentlessly pursues the villain until The Joker actually experiences real fear for the first time in a very long time.

The Joker regains consciousness after the beating of a lifetime.  He's trussed in webbing, suspended in a huge web, awaiting arrest.  He giggles.  Slowly, Spidey lowers himself - upside down, of course - until he's eye to eye with The Joker.  Joker delivers a little "I broke you" speech.

Spider-Man's response is a single line Dad Joke, leaving the Joker completely non-plussed but the gathered crowd laughing.

Edit: Gold? Thank you!


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: Why does shaking a bottle of carbonated liquid before opening the cap cause such a huge release of carbon dioxide compared to not shaking it?

[Assistant]
Soda in a can/bottle is highly pressurised.  This pressure forces the carbon dioxide to dissolve into the liquid.  When you open the can/bottle, this pressure is released, so the carbon dioxide no longer has a 'reason' to stay dissolved, and it starts to come out of solution (the fancy way of saying 'un-dissolve').  Gas in a liquid, of course, forms bubbles.  And, as these bubbles make their way to the surface and release the carbon dioxide into the air, you end up with a flat soda after a while.

What if you don't want it to take a while?  What if you want it to happen faster?

It's actually pretty difficult for bubbles to form initially, but they can form more easily at locations called *nucleation sites*.  The factors that cause this are probably beyond the scope of an ELI5 answer, but suffice to say these sites are spots that happen to provide ideal conditions for gas to come out of solution.  If you boil some water in a pot, you may notice that bubbles tend to stream from certain specific locations on the inside of the pot - those specific spots are nucleation sites.

So now we know how carbon dioxide escapes (via bubbles) and how we can speed that up (via nucleation sites).

Well, it so happens that bubbles themselves can act like nucleation sites.  It may be difficult for a bubble to form initially, but once one has formed (at a nucleation site), it's progressively easier for more gas to come out of solution and expand that bubble.  This is also why bubbles in boiling water get bigger as they rise.

And when you shake soda, you mix air into it, which creates bubbles, kickstarting this whole process.

**tl;dr: when you shake soda, you create lots of bubbles, each of which makes it easier for the dissolved carbon dioxide to come out of solution.  The result is a chain reaction that leads to a huge release of CO2.**


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Why are we so far from a scientific consensus about the best diet?

I understand that human needs are complex are human bodies are adaptable, so we shouldn't expect a consensus list of The Best Things for Everyone to Eat. However, it seems to me that **some** options should be off the table.

Some eating habits are nearly diametrically opposed. When I was younger, "low-fat" was generally accepted, and now that is even subject to opinion.

I don't want to have to think about what to eat. It should be something scientifically testable! So why aren't nutrition scientists making strong claims that trim down the number of "healthy" diet options?

[Assistant]
Testing it is actually quite hard. You have a few different options, which all have problems.

First of you could try to look at large groups of people and their diets. This has been done by some of the high fat diet folks. They look at people from Greece, and see that they have less hearth trouble than average. So a high fat diet must be good. However, there are lots of problems with it. For one thing, there are lots of factors. Maybe it's not the high amount of fat that makes it good, maybe it's the fact that they drink more goats milk, have a better medical system or more friends. You can find groups following most diets that live a long time. So this way isn't all that effective.

You could get a group and ask them to follow a diet, and observe them. If the group is big enough (which it often isn't), you can get some good data. However, people don't follow diets. If they break it, the data lose a lot of value.

Note: Sometimes it can be interesting to know if people break their diets. Because maybe some diets are easier to follow than others. Should that be taken into consideration?

Those are the two big ones, but there are of course a few other ones, all of them with problems. Case studies with only one guy (or a very few), the small group makes those worth less even if you can make sure they follow the prescribed diet. Animal studies, but animals aren't the same as us.

Then you have a few systemic ones. For one thing there is the fact that you have lots of groups all earning lots of money on different diets. And since there are so many flaws in the studies, making them say what you want them to isn't all that hard. So you get sponsored tests, that show that the best diet is the one the sponsor wants.

Independent studies often lack money, which makes them small (and that makes them inconclusive).

And lastly you have the insane number of relevant factors. Different people want different diets (underweight people vs overweight, women vs men, old vs young), different diets are good for preventing different things (one is good for the hearth, one for the brain, one for muscle growth, etc).


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [Game of Thrones] "A picture of me on the Iron Throne...and you by my side." Let's be real here. Did Littlefinger ever really have a shot at becoming King?

[Assistant]
Yes. I'd go as far as to say that not only did he have a legitimate shot, there were certain points where I'd honestly say he had the best odds to take the throne.

It's important to remember that Littlefinger was playing the long, *looooong* game. He had been planting seeds since before the show even started to gain more and more power, and it took literal magic to figure the full extent of these plans out.

Look at Littlefinger's position in Season 7. He controls the Vale, the only one of the Seven Kingdoms virtually untouched by war in the last several years. He is also Lord of Harrenhal, which, while a ruin, held significant lands in the Riverlands, and after the destruction of House Frey, he was one of the most powerful lords in the Riverlands.

Jon left Sansa in control of the North, and the Northern lords were clearly starting to lean more towards Sansa. It would have been easy for Littlefinger to say to the lords, "Jon Snow, your king, has kneeled to the foreigner daughter of the Mad King" and that would have been it for Jon. Littlefinger's plan was to get Sansa in control of the North, marry her, and get another kingdom under his belt. Remember, the *only* reason this plan failed was because of literal time travel magic that revealed just how much he betrayed the Starks over the years.

So Littlefinger marries Sansa, and right there he has like 2.5 kingdoms. If he swooped down into the Riverlands and say, rescued Edmure Tully with his niece by his side, the rest of the riverlords surely would have joined him.

So then the factions would have been:

1. Dorne, the Reach, and half the Iron Islands. Led by the daughter of the Mad King who hasn't even set foot in Westeros her entire life and brought three dragons, an army of slaves, and a Dothraki horde to the realm.

2. The Crownlands, the Westerlands, some of the Stormlands, and half the Iron Islands. Led by the incestuous queen who did the Westerosi equivalent of 9/11 and made it a personal goal of hers to get her subjects to fear and hate her as much as possible.

3. The North, the Vale, and the Riverlands. Led by a native Westerosi. The guy who faithfully served on good King Robert's small council. The guy who married good old Jon Arryn's widow and is the stepfather to his heir. The guy who married the honorable Ned Stark's daughter.

It's hard to not give him at least a fighting chance in that scenario.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [Fallout] how does an average wastelander handle Bloatflies, Molerats and Radroaches? Are these pests or legitimate threats to the average homesteader? What's the cheapest kind of armor one could expect from tiny, uncoordinated settlements?

[Assistant]
They shoot them. Guns and ammo are always a heavy trade in the wasteland - and the people making/scavenging them need to eat food from farms.

As for armour, it seems like leather is the most easily available, with maybe a metal helmet of some kind, but most people only gear up if they intend to face a particular threat. For common pests, they don't bother. Nobody expects to be overwhelmed by radroaches.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
If you slowed an electron down in a vacuum and added a proton to the environment, would it spontaneously form a hydrogen atom?

Or would the electron simply bind to the proton, or penetrate?. If so, then what force is it which compels the electron to accelerate to the appropriate speed to occupy the 1s orbital?

What force is it that results in steric interference between functional groups which often dictate the most energetically favorable three dimensional chemical configuration?

[Assistant] Yes, as the ground state of the hydrogen atom has 13.6 eV less energy than the separated electron and proton. The force which pulls it in and speeds it up is the coulomb force, as opposite charges attract. The energy difference will be radiated as one or more photons.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[star wars] Why did the Jedi only send Obi Wan to finish off grievous, they thought it would end the war surely they would have sent more than 1 jedi?

I know he had clone back up but surely there were a couple of spare jedi who could have gone with him.

[Assistant]
Battles are raging all over the galaxy, so we're led to believe that the Jedi are spread thin. There need to be Jedi who could leave Coruscant on a moment's notice and go to whichever front line needed Jedi support.

The movie's novelisation states that Obi-Wan was chosen because he stood the best chance of lasting against Grievous. Grievous has computers augmenting his brain, which means that he can learn and respond to pretty much any fighting style a Jedi could employ, and he has already fought and killed several Jedi at this point. Obi-Wan was a master of Soresu, a defensive form that placed emphasis on blocking and efficient movements to hold off attacks. This meant that he could hold out against Grievous long enough to actually stand a chance of taking him down.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
CMV: Either college athletes should be paid or sports should be decoupled from post-secondary education.

Considering the revenue that many athletes bring to school, the fact that they literally have a full time job being an athlete on and off season, the nebulous and ridiculous NCAA and its definition for "amateur", and the fact that the highest paid "public servants" in the US are football coaches, I have a hard time seeing the other side.

This would encourage eligible athletes to stay in college and get their degree instead of announcing for the draft for pay. I think in terms of incentives and cash a lot, so maybe I'm being too simplistic.

[Assistant]
College athletes are "paid" with full scholarships.

Furthermore, they are compensated with world-class coaching, facilities, and plenty of exposure. If these people were good enough to go pro, they could have skipped college and played right out of high school. College cultivates their talent, allows them to play at a higher level, and gives them an opportunity they never would have had otherwise.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: Why are plastic bags so noisy?

Makes it hard to sneak late night snacks when you're married.

[Assistant] Molecules of plastic resist deformation up to certain point and then give up en masse producing cracking sound. Like cracking a stick except some plastic types can bend multiple times before breaking.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: Why our skin sweats when it can't breath.

When I put on latex gloves, why do my hands sweat when I'm not even hot?

[Assistant] You are always sweating, but usually sweat evaporates (Except if you are doing a lot of exercise or under heat because your body will produce sweat faster). When your skin is covered, your body temperature is raised and swear accumulates as it can't evaporate.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: How does the sun or light bleach the color out of colorful objects?

[Assistant] If you throw a blueberry at a window, it will bounce off. If you throw a rock at the window, the rock won't bounce and also the window will break. All of the pieces of the window are still there in a pile on the floor, but it's definitely not "a window" anymore.  The same happens to colorful objects, but the blueberry is regular light and the rock is UV. The UV breaks the molecules that gave the object its color. Now those molecules are in a pile on the floor.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[marvel]Why is galactus a cosmic entity?

Sure, he eats a couple of planet or solar system once in a while, but there are hundreds of billions of galaxies out there. He should be seen no more of a threat than a supernova or a black hole. What gives galactus the right to have the same title as infinity or eternity or master order?

[Assistant]
Firstly, do not assume that the size of the Marvel universe is the same as our own.  We don't know for sure that it's not, but the DC universe is explicitly finite so it's not like ours.
Secondly, it's not about destroying planets, it's about what will happen at the death of the universe.  Galactus is the last survivor of the previous iteration of the universe.  When the next death of the universe happens, Galactus will "release" all of the energy he has collected, and this will provide the energy for the next big bang, and another being will take Galactuses place (Mr. Immortal is the top contendor).  This is what makes Galcatus a cosmic entity, his importance to the universe, not his destruction of planets.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[Star Wars] Why was the Droid attack on the wookies such a big deal, what is done on the planet of kashyyyk that the Republic could not afford to lose?

(Insert meme here)

[Assistant]
It would depend on which canon you're looking at.

In Canon, Kashyyyk has lots of oil, and the droids want to destroy the refinery. No oil, no fuel, ships don't fly as far.

In Legends, Kashyyyk is a massive navigation hub for the eastern quadrant of the galaxy, connecting Hutt Space, the Corellian Run and the Perlemian Trade Route, as well as many other smaller routes that go straight to the core worlds. If the Seperatists had control of Kashyyyk, they could hit the core worlds whenever they wanted and win the war in a matter of days.

The Wookiees also have some secret knowledge of other hyperspace routes that neither the Republic or Separatists knew about, and both factions wanted to get their hands on it.

In Legends, Kashyyyk is so important to hyperspace travel that it really isn't something you can afford to lose.

The only reason the Separatists were able to hit Coruscant when they did was because Palpatine deliberately gave them a route only he knew about.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] Why are birds more capable of mimicking human speech as compared to mammals?

[Assistant] Birds are much more language centric than mammals (excluding humans). So while mammals are genetically closer to mammals than birds, the birds can mimic humans (the creatures with the most complex speech) better than our mammalian brothers like pigs and dogs ever could.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: What the heck causes that searing pain when a person bites down on aluminum foil? Does it happen to everyone or only people with fillings? How about just a cavity but no filling?

[Assistant]
Dental Student here:

The phenomenon you have noticed is called "Galvanic Pain."  Basically an electrochemical circuit is formed when metal restorations (fillings/crowns/etc) come into contact with a dissimilar metal alloy in the presence of saliva (due to the different corrosion potentials of metals in each alloy).  This is especially painful because restorations are so close to the dental pulp (a nerve).

Pain can also be caused if two different restorations on adjacent teeth are made of dissimilar alloys.  Often the patient will present with persistent pain in the affected teeth.  Diagnosis is made by placing a strip of rubber between the two teeth, to break the circuit, and seeing if the pain immediately goes away.

If a patient is suffering from galvanic pain, a simple layer of varnish over the restoration to prevent contact with metal will typical prevent the future pain.

Electrical signals within nerves for pain are typically under 100 millivolts, while the electrical potential from galvanic pain has been reported at 100s of millivolts and sometimes even exceeding 1000 millivolts.  It is easy to see why the sensation of pain results when stimulating the dental pulp with so much electricity.

EDIT: Wanted to include some extra information because the "best" reply to this thread is wrong.  Metal ions dissolving in your saliva are NOT the cause of galvanic pain.  Saliva, which has plenty of free ions in it already is the electrolyte in this galvanic cell.

EDIT 2: Added some stuff about nerves etc, to explain why the electricity hurts.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: Why do I hate the sound of my recorded voice?

[Assistant]
The voice you're used to hearing is a combination of the sound travelling though the air to your ears, and the sound traveling through the bones of your skull directly to the inner ear.  This makes the voice you hear sound deeper and "richer" than what other people hear, since they only hear the part of your voice that travels through the air.  This is also what a recording device hears.

So the sound of your recorded voice is what you sound like to everyone else.  And they don't hate it.  To them, it sounds normal, just like you think all of your friends' voices sound normal, even though they  hear their own voices differently than you do.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: Why do we get tired of eating the same food but never seem to get tired of drinking the same drinks?

Most people I know would hate to have the same thing for breakfast every day for the foreseeable future, but have no problem having coffee multiple times a day, almost if not every day? Growing up I drank chocolate milk every day but never tired of it the way I would eating the same sandwich for lunch daily. Why is this?

[Assistant] It's a bit of a subjective question, but some drinks like coffee and soda are stimulants, and so the body will become addicted to them, feeling rewarded each time you drink them. Chocolate milk, and milk in general, is fatty and sugary- both things the body is hardwired to crave.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] Since the speed of an electrical signal remains the same, why is there still room to increase bitrate when transferring data?

[Assistant]
the information is carried by the electrical signal changing strength (this is a simplification - still holds strictly true for frequency modulation, but it gets a bit more complicated)

so, bit rate is increased by changing how fast the strength of the signal changes.

the amount of time it takes the START of th information to get from point a to point b will remain the same, but the amount of time needed to send x amount of changes in the signal is what can be increased.

Think of it like a water hose, where yu are sending morse code by turning the water on and off. the water takes the same amount of time to travel, but if you turn it on and off faster, you can send code faster. (Ok, again, an over simplification that ignores the fact that gas trapped in the hose can get compressed, but ya'll get the idea)


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: Why are so many artificial flavors (e.g., "strawberry," "grape," "peach," etc.) so different from their natural counterparts? Shouldn't it be possible to chemically analyze the substances, isolate the flavor/odor compounds, then synthesize exact replicas artificially?

[Assistant]
The part you are missing is that artificial flavors need to be *cheap*.  They are used in some of the cheapest foods, and, although they are used in very small quantities, they have to be highly inexpensive to be profitable.

At the same time, the actual natural flavor (e.g. of peaches) is not just a single compound, but many, many different chemicals.  Synthesizing all of those for use in snack foods would be very complex and expensive.

So, food scientists work with some basic artificial flavor chemicals that can they be combined to simulate the real flavors.  The right chemicals and quantities are chosen after lots of trials and testing.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
How would the earth be different if the moon didn't exist?

I know the moon causes the tides, and is also used for navigation by some nocturnal animals (like moths), but would the world and its creatures be substantially different if we didn't have a moon?

[Assistant]
The moon also does a lot to stabilize the earth's rotation. Since the earth is not homogenous throughout, and in fact has a significant mass that is not solid (magma), the planet would tend to wobble in its orbit. The north pole would shift and point around to different parts of the sky. Find a medium size rock and spin it on the table, and see how much it wobbles. This effect would take hundreds of years to be apparent, but time is cheap on astronomical scales.

  This wobble would cause the seasons and environment to change considerably over time. Imagine the impact on the enivronment if the earth's north pole was to shift to near 90 degrees, so the north pole pointed directly at the sun for part of the year, and directly away for part of the year, so the sun didn't rise or set for months at a time.

The moon has a stabilizing effect on the earth, so now the north pole only precesses a few degrees every few 20,000 years.

The moon IS drifting further from the earth by a few inches in a lifetime (see another recent Astronomy post about this) so over the course of the next few million years this stabilization effect will diminish, and the earth will begin to wobble around a lot more.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELIF: Why are papercuts so painful?

Why are they so unpleasant compared to larger injuries, such as scrapes or bruises?

[Assistant] Paper cuts are often very shallow, but cut through many pain receptors. Because of how shallow they are, they don't bleed as much and that can allow the pain receptors to stay exposed much longer since bleeding allows the injury to form a protective scab.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[Back to the Future] Can the DeLorean travel back before the the birth of Christ?

As an example to Marty, Doc set the DeLorean for "December 25, 0000" as the birth of Christ. Our numbering system for years is absolutely ambiguous, so I'm guessing Doc set this or some other event as the reference point. That being said, is Year 0 the earliest the DeLorean can travel back?

Bonus: How could a brilliant scientist such as Doc not know that there *was* no Year 0?

[Assistant]
> That being said, is Year 0 the earliest the DeLorean can travel back?

While the Delorean's time circuits don't have an CE/BCE designator, they presumably can go further into the past because the Back to the Future Ride at Universal Studios shows the Delorean going back to the time of the dinosaurs. Probably the Doc (who is a bit scatterbrained) didn't include anything that far back because the initial Delorean was a prototype.

> Bonus: How could a brilliant scientist such as Doc not know that there was no Year 0?

Engineers and scientists always begin counting with 0.

> As an example to Marty, Doc set the DeLorean for "December 25, 0000" as the birth of Christ

Subquestion: Is Doc secretly an atheist who doesn't believe in the historicity of Jesus, and specifically included a fictional "year zero" date to fuck with Marty, because Doc knows Jesus is fictional?


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[Die Another Day] How is it that Bond's Vanquish is able to turn fully invisible including the tires?

I understand that there are cameras sending images to the panels on the opposite side and such.

But what about the tires? Did the tires have cameras and panels on them too?

And what about shadows? How is it that the Vanquish doesn't have a shadow?

[Assistant]
There must indeed be cameras and projectors on the tires. And those same projectors must project just the right amount of light to cancel out the car's shadow.

**Ludicrously** complicated. The care is basically a supercomputer that happens to drive.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: How do animals of different species communicate? Is there a universal language or are there any non verbal cues?

[Assistant] The same way animals communicate to you. The way they move, the way they sound, the way they look at you. There is not a lot to be communicated in the wild, besides "Let me eat you", "Fuck off", and "DANGER". You understand animals as well as they understand each other.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5:Why does pizza made with the same ingredients taste so different when it's cooked with cheese on the bottom and sauce on top.

[Assistant] When you cook a pizza normally, the sauce soaks into the dough a bit.  If you put cheese on first, it forms a barrier so you have no sauce in your dough, leaving it a bit dryer and less flavorful.  Putting sauce on top also prevents the cheese from browning & browning provides a lot of flavor.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[Dragon Ball] Can I build up my ki energy and learn to fly and shoot lasers by learning other martial arts, or do I need karate/kung fu?

Also if it does work with any martial art, is there a difference between how your ki develops depending on the fighting style? Like, can MMA fighters fly more easily than boxers or capoeira fighters?

[Assistant]
It has been shown that the characters use of martial arts is just one method of expressing their study and dedication.  At least one character learns to harness ki and levitate solely using meditation.  Likewise Piccolo's primary method of gaining power is meditation as well.

The exact martial art used does not seem to matter, though the various masters and teachers each have their own preferences.

I believe there's a fairly detailed post about it from a week or two ago.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: Why do puppies have a distinct puppy smell that goes away as they mature?

[Assistant]
Puppies and babies of any species that cares for it's young have a 'love smell'. It's a pheromone smell emitted by the puppy/child that makes most parents of their species 'love and protect' them.

If you want to experience it in action you can find a 3mo-2yr human child and sniff the top of their head. Assuming you aren't a psychopath or stuffy you'll feel emotions.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: Why does the head on a soft drink collapse faster if you touch it?

If you pour a soft drink over ice (Coke or Pepsi seems to work best), the head that forms will go down on its own, but if you touch it with your fingertip, even on the edge, the whole thing collapses much faster. I'm fairly certain it has nothing to do with oil from my finger. So what causes the foam to dissipate so much faster?

[Assistant] The natural salt and oil on your finger breaks the surface tension of the bubbles and makes them easier to pop, that salt and oil then mixes with the liquid that made that bubble and now touches more bubbles, which does the same to them, causing a chain reaction of collapse.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [Star Wars] What is life like for Force sensitives living on planets that haven't yet developed interstellar travel or know they aren't alone in the galaxy?

[Assistant]
Claims of witchcraft and sorcery are the common result for societies that have not yet made first contact. Since there is no silly "prime directive" preventing contact with primitive sentients, a Jedi is eventually sent to investigate such claims.

That is, they *used to* be sent...


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: If fusion reactors fuse hydrogen into helium, wouldn't we run out of hydrogen at some point?

[Assistant] Hydrogen is the most abundant substance in the universe. 90% of all the atoms that exist are hydrogen. There is so much hydrogen locked up in fossil fuels that we could just use them for millennia before we even started using water, or sending spaceships to collect it.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [Interstellar] TARS, CASE and KIPP were all ex-military robots - Marines specifically. When they were acting in that role what would they have been used for? Could they potentially have been used as weapons?

[Assistant]
It seemed to be hinted that they could move faster and do more than was shown. They also seem to be pretty damn tough as one survived a pretty close explosion on Mann's ice planet and looked unscratched.

Edit: Not to mention concealed weapons, TARS stunned Cooper pretty quickly.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
CMV: There is no practical reason that guns should be black.

There are some hunting rifles and rifles for children that are neon orange and pink. The majority of guns (rifles and handguns) are black though. Guns should be required to be neon safety orange. This would allow police officers to more easily identify firearms, and recreation gun owners should have no reason to objection to this.

This would have to affect toys' colors, but that would be easier to regulate colors of than real firearms. Toys would no longer be able to be the specified color.

What reason is there that guns are almost all black?

I would have no objection to a hunting rifle ( let's say a 12 gauge) being brown for camouflage purposes.

[Assistant] Paint is something that can burn on the gun barrel and gum up moving parts.  For these parts of the gun, it makes sense for them to be bare metal or coated with a lubricating finish.  In most cases, the metal used in the gun is naturally black, so refraining from treating it at all leaves it as black.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [Star Wars] What succession mechanics are in place for Alderaan (and Naboo, to a lesser extent)? Would the children of Princess Leia hold or have a claim to any royal titles?

[Assistant]
Well, in the case of Alderaan, it's all House Royalty. She was a Princess of House Alderaan, but not Princess of Alderaan itself. Hence why her father was both a Crown Prince and a Senator.

Naboo actually elects their Royalty. Padme became a senator after her term as Queen was up.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [Lotr]How would the war of the ring gone differently had Saruman not been corrupted?

[Assistant]
Probably not much differently. Maybe the Quest gets going earlier, before the Ringwraiths come west, allowing Frodo to get further with fewer scars and no run-in with the morgul blade. That'd be because Gandalf is able to confirm that the Ring is the One Ring much earlier on, by consulting with Saruman, and he never gets imprisoned or sidetracked. Then they never go through Moria, as the Gap of Rohan is open to them. So the Balrog isn't killed, and maybe that causes problems?

The reality is, though, that in the end the Quest needed to be done by a very small group of nearly-powerless people infiltrating Mordor in secret. Whether Saruman is with the Fellowship members in Gondor or not isn't the biggest thing.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
ELI5: ACH Deposits: Why do they take so long?

It's all digital. It's all through the internet. When I send money via ACH, it's almost instant, right? So why is it, when I'm expecting a deposit and the institution says they sent it on a certain date, it takes "up to 5 business days" for it to appear in my account? Where is the money for those "up to" 5 business days? I just cannot wrap my head around this, and quite frankly, it irritates me. It's all binary code, it's just bytes of data, but those bytes of data are what make the world go 'round.

[Assistant]
ACH is very old. It was built on the backs of the first computers, long before the internet allowed for instant communication. ACH is built such that there are manual steps in the transaction process. It used to be that banks would compile the days ACH transfers onto tapes once per day, and ship the tapes to the clearing house to have the transfers distributed to the banks they are meant to go to. The clearing house was operated by people on business days only.

In the US, ACH is not controlled by the government, but rather by an organization called NACHA that is made of representatives from most banks in the US. A few years ago, NACHA held a vote to upgrade ACH and make Same Day ACH the default. It got a majority vote in favor, including vote from the big banks. It failed, though, because it needed a supermajority to pass, and many small banks voted against it because they do not have the money nor the tech to actually support the upgrade.

There is a new system, Real Time Payments (RTP) that is slowly gaining support. But this system currently requires an even larger technical investment to support, so only the largest or most technically advanced banks have it.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] [DC] If the US government asked Superman or Flash to destroy a terrorist/criminal group or topple a genocidal regime would they do it?

[Assistant]
They don't take orders from governments, but they would definitely want to stop terrorism/crime/genocide.

They'd use nonlethal methods, regardless of what they were asked to do.

If the organisation is an actual government, they'd want to ensure that the local people had a legitimate democracy afterward, so they wouldn't just perform a coup and impose a new government unilaterally.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] If You Havent Done Anything Wrong, Do Not Apologise How can we be sure that we haven't done anything wrong?

[Assistant]
Well, you can't be sure, but ultimately any sort of action needs an agreed-upon definition of how far the boundaries of responsibility extend. In the contemporary West, we tend to define "responsibility" as something like, "rational, conscious, self-aware decisions made by an adult not under any immediate compulsion." In a legal sense, at least - many social movements, both historical and contemporary, ascribe blame or lack thereof beyond the individual's actions, to their social class, economic status, skin color, ancestry, and so on.

The main issue here practically is that civil society can't really function without a shared definition of these boundaries. If we have vastly different conceptions of them, then we can't decide on what *wrong* means, and therefore can't make any legislative decisions.

Otherwise, you'll need to expand on your question in order to get a better answer.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
what goes on in the head of the people who watch gore videos?

i am one of those people and i honestly want to know why people watch it because not everyone does. and i like to this its a coping mechanism and what not but what are the possible reasons that could drive a person to watch mutilation, dead bodies and other such video online? whats the psychological angle to it?

another thing to know about me, i HATE SUSPENSE AND THRILLER MOVIES. AND I ALSO DISLIKE HORROR MOVIES FOR THE MOST PART. THEY GIVE ME THE CREEPS. BUT I HAVE NO TROUBLE WATCHING GORE. and i cannot, for the life of me, bring myself to watch animal cruelty videos.

[Assistant] I'd guess morbid interest. Like seeing when the blood gushes out, the separation between the skin and the muscle. Just purely observing. It could also be them trying to observe and imagine how it would feel for them if they hurt themselves. It could also be them trying to see if seeing other people get hurt could make them feel empathy. They're limit testing their brain as to how it'd react to seeing such things. It could also be just pure sadism.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Is there any development on higher energy density liquid fuels?

So it seems like the energy density of fossils fuels have more or less completely hit a brickwall. Is there any developments on any new fuel that has higher energy density then the traditional RP1 and jet fuel?

[Assistant] Turn the question around, what could you do to make a more energy dense fuel that also met the other requirements such as being a stable, not super toxic, cheap liquid? More energy dense fuels already exist (see rocketry) but they fail one of the big criteria listed. Something like RP1 is already just a chain of carbon atoms, what can you do to improve that?


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
Why isn't an anti-tick medication available for humans like it is for dogs?

My brother and I have been wondering about this for awhile now after we gave our dog her anti-tick chewable pill. It kills fleas and some species of ticks before they attach or lay eggs. Since ticks carry Lyme disease and it can spread to humans, why hasn't a pill (or possibly vaccine?) been invented that humans can take?

[Assistant] Organophosphates cause nervous system and kidney damage over time. Some dogs are more succeptible to this than others. Those pills have been known to cause dogs to die from seizures after the first dose. So for one, they aren't safe enough to give people. A dog's life is a far less expensive lawsuit than a human's. And for two, a dog's life is shorter than a human's, so accumulating nervous system and kidney damage has less time to accumulate before the natural end of the dog's life. If a human took these drugs their entire life, some damage would almost certainly manifest.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: Why is gold shiny-yellow but most of the other metals have a silvery color?

[Assistant]
Basically, because gold has an electron transition (two different levels the electrons can be in) that corresponds to blue light wavelengths, so gold absorbs a little blue and the reflected light looks yellow as a result.

Most metals don't absorb within our visual range so they just act like mirrors, reflecting all colours. A few have electron transitions that can absorb visible colours...the lack of those in the reflected light is what gives them their colour.

It turns out the detailed chemistry of this takes you down a horrible rabbit hole of correcting quantum mechanics for the relativistic effects of moving electrons. It gets messy in a hurry.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: Why do certain States have you voting for "the political party of your state" instead of whichever party you want?

[Assistant] What are you talking about? In the USA, no state has an official political party. In the primary elections, you may choose which party you're affiliated with and participate in their primaries. In the main elections, you may vote for anyone of any party.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] Are "Pointer" and "Reference" exactly the same thing?

[Assistant] Not really. Many people will reserve the term 'pointer' for a numeric variable that references memory, as in C and C++ where you can interpret the pointer as a number and perform arithmetic (increment/decrement, etc) on it. Whereas a 'reference' does not require, or more narrowly specifically lacks, that numeric character and cannot be subjected to arithmetic operations. So you may hear people saying that C only has pointers, Java only has references, and C++ has both pointers and references, even though in some sense the references in Java and C++ work a lot like pointers and permit many of the same sorts of interactions.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
According to contemporary philosophers, which aspects of Kant's transcendental idealism are most tenable?

How much of the original theory has been abandoned or modified?

[Assistant]
The answer is: it depends on who you ask.

I think the majority position is that 19th and 20th century developments in mathematics and physics really put a damper on Kant's transcendental aesthetic and *some* of his views about logic, mathematics, etc.

On the other hand, no one in their right mind would say that the Kantian position in metaethics is dead. His views on science, though much more fragmentary, also have continuing relevance.

It's also worth pointing out that even if Kant's views themselves have been abandoned, he's still one of if not the most influential philosophers of all time. Both the "analytic" and "continental" traditions (I don't think there's any sharp distinction here, but whatever) are born of Kant and Kantianism. Until relatively recently, one could with a fairly high amount of accuracy claim that one was either with Kant or against him: he was the single most important touchstone for philosophy until at least the 1950s.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User] ELI5: Why can we regenerate skin for minor abrasions, but we cannot grow back limbs we lose?

[Assistant]
Your skin has cells, deep down, that are responsible for growing new cells and pushing them toward the surface. If you cut down into these cells, you can get scars. If you cut them off entirely (major abrasions) they have a very hard time healing themselves effectively.

Bones are a different matter entirely, and are much more material/time consuming to heal or grow (months to fully heal hairline fractures), and your body isn't equipped for the mass/materials required to regrow them.

Edit: tl;dr Skin is spongy and light and easily patched. Bones are dense and heavy and much harder to make. Cost/benefit analysis over time.


[System] Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:

[User]
[General video games] How is it possible to kill a HUGE monster by repeatedly striking it in a nonvital extremity (hand, leg, etc.) only?

Pardon me if this isn't exactly the right board to be posting this on, but amongst various nonsensical video game logics, this has always stood out to me as one that doesn't seem to be talked about much in relation to its commonality and flagrancy of illogic.

In countless games, one will fight a towering monster to whose height the player only comes up to the lower legs, and which can ultimately be outright killed simply by hitting it enough on its said legs alone (or hands/arms; the basic idea remains the same, though).

A textbook example of this is the Giant Lord from *Dark Souls II*, which I am personally *very* familiar with due to having repeatedly farmed it for endgame leveling for hours on end. The Old Iron King from the same game is another similar case, though less egregious as it is possible to strike his head as well as his hands, even though the latter are still by far the more prominent targets.

What other battles from various games can we identify that particularly stand out as falling victim to this trope, and conversely, what are some of the biggest and best *aversions* to it wherein gigantic targets are dispatched in more decisive manners whose lethality actually makes sense?

[Assistant]
Blood and trauma. And generally in those situations you're also not just STRIKING, you're using some kind of in-universe magic/force. Like in Dark Souls, you're an undead using the souls of your enemies to make yourself supernaturally strong, using magic weapons forged with magic and dimension hopping god-writing.

Yea, hit em in the foot, it still hurts.


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[User]
ELI5: Why is the price of Oil has fallen 51% from 30 months ago, yet the price of Gasoline is only down 15% (Canada) & 36% (US)

By comparing the price of crude oil from June 2014 (right before the price dropped) to now and then the national average for gas prices in Canada and the US, the gas prices are not reflective (especially in Canada where we are flirting with the pre oil bust cost of gas). What gives?

[Assistant] The cost of crude is only about 65-75% of what goes into the cost of gasoline (in the US).  The rest is from refining, transporting, marketing and taxes.  Since the rests of those costs haven't changed (much), just decreasing the cost of crude will only decrease the price of gas by about 2/3rd that amount.


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[User]
[Scooby] What exactly is Mystery Inc's revenue stream?

First time IRS auditor here. Got assigned to this case where 4 adults and a dog "solve" mysteries everywhere. But here's the conundrum. I have no recorded income stream, no actual business license applied, yet these people are paying for food and petrol like no tomorrow without filing for bankruptcy. Hell, just last month, they bought enough dog snacks, 5 foot submarines, and burgers to feed an entire town?? Is this a prank? Should I report this to my superiors?

[Assistant] They're trust fund kids, blowing through mommy and daddy's money with the idea that they'll make money one day as detectives. It's sad really. But that should account for their exorbitant food expenditures.


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[User] Instead of waiting for an eruption of a vulcano, why not drill a hole in it to release the pressure?

[Assistant]
I recently read an article about ideas for proactively dealing with the supervolcano under Yellowstone.  The conclusion seemed to be that drilling into the Earth for any reason is perilous and doing so over a caldera is exponentially so.  The idea is still pretty new and the technology is improving, so it could be feasible at some point.

Search for "NASA Yellowstone volcano" for more info.


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[User]
ELI5: How are moguls formed?

As in the type you see when you go skiing, not the business people.

[Assistant] Turning carves away a tiny layer of snow.  If a lot of skiers all turn in the same place it will make a rut.  Create a lot of ruts, and you get a mogul field. Moguls start small with shallow ruts between them.  Some skiers turn on top of the moguls, but most aim for the ruts or the area just uphill of the ruts.  Over time the ruts get deeper and deeper.


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[User]
CMV: Openly displaying a deadly weapon in a tumultuous area, escalates unneeded violence.

It seems to be more relevant nowadays. I'm trying to find a balance in logic between displaying a gun on a holster/strap, while purposely putting yourself in dangerous situations. People in certain cities are in outrage, and it has to deal with deadly authoritative violence.

Videos like Kyle Rittenhouse's are hard to digest.

The simple fact of open carrying a weapon in a tumultuous area is naive and stupid, in my opinion. He should be just at fault as is a person yelling "fire in a theater" and holding a lit rag. I'm surprised he didn't get hurt or worse. I don't wish harm on anyone, no matter the side. It could have easily gone the other way. I feel he participated in the exact same vigilante justice that others purported, but acted more "strongly".

I ask for calm, thought through posts. Please give well thought responses!

Edit: It's like a " **security dilemma** " where if one nation gets an atomic bomb, the other has to in order to keep things even. It increases the eventual impact, drastically, if one happens.

[Assistant]
In many situations this is true- to misquote Homer, *"The blade itself incites to deeds of violence."* Many people are more likely to be aggressive if weapons are openly on display. The mere presence of a weapon can cause a fight sometimes.

On the other hand, there are also many people out there who will exclusively target those who appear to be weak or easy to overcome, especially if they themselves are armed, and one of the criteria they use to judge this weakness is whether or not their chosen target is armed. If they are, violence is actually *less* likely.

In the same way, the presence of a weapon can also cause rapid de-escalation of violence. A lot of people will calm down rapidly if they realise their own physical well-being is on the line.

You can't know how people are going to react when weapons are present until they actually do react. That reaction will not always be the same- it depends on circumstances, behaviour and the personalities of all parties involved.


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[User] ELI5 How do birds (ducks, geese etc.) not freeze when swimming and dunking their heads in ponds in the wintertime when its - degrees out?

[Assistant]
They can be hurt by exposure, but they have evolved methods of (usually) avoiding it.  For one, water birds have a thick layer of feathers covered in oil that repel water.  This prevents the cold water from touching their skin directly, except on their feet.

The main things birds have to worry about is damaging their feet through exposure to cold water since they aren't protected by feathers.  Birds have to limit their time in cold water to avoid loosing too much heat.


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[User] ELI5: Why did so many Nazis choose to escape to Argentina, and how did they manage to escape over the Atlantic undetected?

[Assistant]
There were a lot of German emigrants in Russia (the Volga Germans, named after the are where they settled), who had originally been invited there by the Russian Empress Catherine the Great, who was of German descent. After her passing, the Russia government began to roll back many of the benefits/privileges that Catherine had provided them, so they looked to leave Russia. At the time, a lot of South American countries were trying to attract immigrants from Europe to boost their population and settle the land. Argentina and Brazil attracted a lot of these German emigrants, as they both had officially installed Roman Catholicism as their state religion (the Volga Germans were mainly Catholics).

So there was a large population of ethnic Germans in Argentina long before the world wars. This led to friendly relationships between Argentina and both Imperial Germany and Nazi Germany. After the Second World War, this made Argentina a prime destination for those who were associated with Nazi Germany and wanted to flee. With the destruction caused by the war, record-keeping was not great, so it was not very difficult for officials to travel under false identities/papers in order to escape detection.


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[User] (ELI5) Why does water when put in the freezer turns to ice, but never snow, while when the weather is really cold, the rain turns to sleet sometimes, but can aslo turn to snow?

[Assistant] It's because in the freezer there are no small droplets like in a cloud. If the small droplet freezes, the water crystalizes and becomes a snowflake. But in the freezer the whole container of water freezes and the small crystals connect together, becoming ice. If you open and close  the freezer often, you'll get crystals on it's walls, these are the equivalent of snowflakes, just attached to the inner wall.


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[User]
What would happen if you walked into a single layer of atoms? Would you see it? Would you feel it?

To clarify: a layer of atoms, only one atom thick.

[Assistant]
You can walk through tin foil just fine with little to no resistance... and that's something like 100,000 atoms thick.

Might depend on the type of material and the structure.  As said elsewhere graphene might be the best shot to feel something.


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[User] [Samurai Jack] Why doesn't Jack use his real name?

[Assistant]
Jack's true name is his most prized-possession, surpassing even his sword. For most of his life his name was the only thing he had connecting him to a father and a nation he had left behind. His name is his honor.

After years of training, victory is snatched from him and he is sent to a future where he failed. The future is a constant reminder of his failure and inability to save his home, and prevent Aku from doing the same thing to everyone else in the world.

He does not deserve his name, in his own eyes. He will only reclaim it once more when he becomes the hero his father always knew him to be.


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[User] ELI5: How come so many Windows installs / file copies, etc get to 95-99 percent complete in 2 minutes... Then take another forever minutes to finish?

[Assistant]
An installer has a checklist of things to do. Written simply, it will simply report what percentage of the list is complete. Problem is, it doesn't know how long each item on the list will take until it's done.

Imagine it this way. You are a robot who has been given a shopping list.

1. Bananas
2. Sandpaper
3. Beer
4. 1,000 kg of sand
5. The remote control for the TV

Your master sends you out to grab all the things he needs for the weekend. It takes you 20 minutes to go to the supermarket and buy some bananas, then you text your master "1 of 5 items bought, or 20% done." Then it takes you 20 minutes to go to the hardware store, buy some sandpaper and say "2 of 5 items bought, or 40% done." The liquor store is on the other side of town, it takes you 40 minutes to get there to buy the beer, then you say "3 of 5 items bought, 60% done."

It took you an average of 26 minutes to get each item so far, and there are two items left, so you naturally estimate that it'll take you 26\*2 = 52 minutes to finish the work.

Only you can only carry 100kg of sand at a time, so it takes you 10 trips to get it all, or 5 hours total. You finally bring it all home. Now it's taken an average of 95 minutes an item, so you say it'll take 95 minutes to get the remote. But the remote is just under the couch, it takes you 10 seconds to get it.

This is how progress bars work. Computers don't know how long work will take until they've actually done it. The items on an installer's to-do list can vary in type and complexity, and it's just telling you how *many* items have been done, not how long each item takes.

The very last item on the list might be "Double check that every file we've copied is there and the right size, no incomplete files." If you installed a big game this might take a minute or two as it checks tons of big files. If it's the last item on a 100-item list, it'll say 99% done while this is happening. Just how things work.


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[User] ELI5: Why is that grocery stores do not charge for a service fee when paying with a credit card, but paying my college tuition with a credit card has about 3% service fee?

[Assistant]
The first is competition. There are typically many players in the grocery store market and grocery store customers are extremely price sensitive. If one store started charging a service fee they would lose customers. Are you going to swap colleges because there's a 3% service fee? No. You're a captive market.

The second is that grocery stores are almost exclusively card present transactions. They attract much lower interchange rates. Does your college let you pay online via the web? That's a card not present transaction and attracts a higher fee from the payment processor.

The third is the chains usually are negotiating directly with the card processors on interchange fees so they're typically closer to 1.5%. For instance when Visa refused to give Krogers a deal they just stopped accepting Visa as leverage in the deal. Your college isn't doing the volume to make a deal on that.


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[User]
[Highlander] What are the chances that I'm an immortal?

I recently (fine, 6 months ago) turned 30, and I got to thinking: if I'm an immortal, I'd better die soon. 30 seems to be the ideal age to me.

I'm not very good with a sword, and usually when I have strange people following me around it's not because they sense that I'm an immortal. But I also live in a fairly small city, so it's possible there aren't many/any other immortals here.

Any idea what the best way to find out is?

[Assistant]
There is no way to know if you'll be an Immortal or not unless another Immortal, a powerful one who can sense these things (because it's not always possible), tells you.

That said, now is the time of the Gathering. Very, very few Immortals will be born now, as we head towards the end of the Game.


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[User] ELI5:Why are Chinese and Japanese people called "Asians", but Indians aren't?

[Assistant]
In the US Chinese, Japanese and Korean people are more numerous than Indians. So because they look kind of similar to each other, and they are the people from Asia who most Americans are likely to encounter, they became known as "Asians". While Indian people are also from Asia, they clearly look very different from Chinese/Japanese/Koreans, so they didn't get lumped in under the same term.

This is actually the opposite in the UK. Here Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are called "Asians". Probably for the same reason. There are more people originally from those countries in the UK than there are Chinese, Japanese and Koreans.


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[User] ELI5: Can the brain function if some nonessential parts get removed?How?

[Assistant] Brains are elastic and their substance can be reallocated to different uses, to a point. Severe damage can be worked around. The internet is an analogue. If the US was removed from the internet due to a catastrophic event, traffic could route around it and the whole would continue in a functional but diminished capacity.


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[User] [MIB] How did that giant cockroach alien fit inside Edgar's skin?

[Assistant] Compressed and flattened its body several times while expelling any food and water within itself to decrease size.  Also may have had some alien technology to help it out but when looking at the whole bug later you can see it's not got a lot of hard bony parts beyond its back and legs so could possibly flatten it's other body parts against those parts.


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[User]
[Hunger Games] At what point does inbreeding become a problem?

Panem, depending on source, is either the last or one of the last human civilizations after some apocalyptic event sometime in the past. As a result, it appears that Panem (at least in the books/films), is alone or extremely isolated.

Due to the way it is run, all 13 districts of Panem are completely isolated from each other and the Capitol as well. The only cross-over of populations is from runaways and approved visitors, with the largest example being Peacekeeper forces in outlying districts when most Peacekeepers come from District 2. So Panem is isolated from the world and the parts of Panem are isolated from each other.

Given the extreme isolation, inbreeding seems inevitable, even if unintended. At what point, if any, does this become a problem for Panem's population? Is there a large enough population in each district with enough outside presence that genetic diversity is preserved well enough to prevent the effects of continuous inbreeding? Does  the Capitol have a procedure in place to handle such a situation?

[Assistant]
This is actually a pretty relevant question for research animals. As it turns out you only need 25 couples (50 animals) to maintain genetic diversity. This is of course assuming you have complete control over the couples.

Panem's total population is several million. It's more than enough.


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[User] [Star Trek] Maps of the milky way galaxy show the various territories claimed by different groups and empires, like the Federation and Klingons. Since these areas are truly 3-dimensional, does each territory stretch to the "top" and "bottom" of the galaxy as well as horizontally?

[Assistant] Yes, more or less.  Though it bears mentioning that the galaxy is a relatively flat structure, particularly out toward the edges, so the 'top' or 'bottom' isn't all that far away.  It's why we get away with using 2-D maps for the large scale most of the time.


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[User]
[MCU/Community] If we assume that was Dean Pelton at the start of Civil War talking to Tony Stark as he walked off stage, does this mean we've seen SHIELD in Greendale?

This would make Community Part of the MCU right?

So when there was that zombie outbreak, was the government organisation that surrounded Greendale SHIELD?

[Assistant] There are multiple references to Community characters having seen MCU films. If there is a Greendale in the MCU then it must be at least partially divergent from the one we've seen in Community (as it would have to be for someone like Craig Pelton to get work at MIT.)


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[User]
ELI5: If there were no poor people and everyone in the world made a good living, how would that change things from how they are now?

There are no poor people, everybody makes more than enough to get by, how would it change every day life? I'm sure it's a substantial change but i'm having a hard time imagining it.

[Assistant]
Leaving out the problem of how to get to such a state of affairs, there would be some obvious results:

There would be no more economic refugees. People wouldn't try to move from poverty stricken places to rich countries in hopes of earning a living. There would be no more "Foreigners coming to take our jobs" as some politicians call it.

There would be no more outsourcing to poorer countries for mere economic reasons. If the average wage in China and India was the same as in the US or western Europe there would be one less reason to move factories there.

You would have to pay fewer taxes. There would be less money spend on helping poor people obviously.

There would be less crime. People would still commit crime, but the sort of crime that is the result of poverty would be less.

There would also be some obvious negative consequences:

Most of the stuff you buy at the store is cheap because the poor people making it are earning so little money for it. Prices at McDonalds would rise if the people making the burgers were earning more.

Some resources like oil would get more expensive simply because there would now be more people trying to buy it.

So if everyone in the world earned at least as much as the average American does today that money would suddenly would not buy as much as it does today. You would need to raise the bar again and again...

It is not clear whether there exists enough wealthy and resources on the world at present so that there actually is 'enough' for everyone.

Just to get an idea of how massive that problem actually is it perhaps would help to know that a large percentage of the owlrd population lives on less than what a dollar can buy a day. Some figure say that half the population in 1990 liven on less than a dollar while more recently it was only about a quarter or a fifth of the world that lived on less than $1.25 a day, but these numbers aren't really thought to be all that reliable.


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[User] Why does the speed of light have anything to do with the relation between energy and mass?

[Assistant]
Despite what the name says, the speed of light isn't *just* the speed light travels at. In fact, that's not even its most important quality!

Have you heard how time is called the fourth dimension? Well, it doesn't make much sense to think of time itself as a dimension like the spatial dimensions, we don't even use the same units to measure it. In order to talk about time as a dimension, we need to convert it into something with the units spatial dimensions have. To turn a time measurement into a distance measurement we need to multiply it by something with units of distance divided by time. Those are, of course, the units a speed has. It turns out that that fundamental speed which we multiply time by to compare it to space is the speed of light. It's the fundamental constant that translates between the two.

The gist of E=mc^2 is that rest energy and mass are the same thing; we can talk about them equivalently. But we can't just write E=m, energy and mass have different units. It would be like writing 1 second = 1 meter. To make the two sides of the equation have the correct units, we need to multiply one side by our fundamental translation constant, the speed of light. It turns out that units of mass times two units of speed give units of energy, so the only logical equation which expresses the mass/rest energy equivalence *must* be E=mc^2 .


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[User]
[X-Men Movies] What was Apocolypse doing in the DOFP timeline?

Surely the collapse of civilisation and a survival of the fittest world for mutant kind is his dream. Was he scares of the Sentinels? Did Sentinels kill him? Should i just accept the timeline is a big mess and roll with it?

[Assistant] I assume he was hiding or still in hibernation. If the Sentinels had gotten him, they would have copied his powers and there would have been no stopping them. Usually, all the other mutants have to team up to stop 1 person with Apocalypse's powers. 10 Sentinels with that power would be unstoppable.


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[User]
[40k] Difference in Imperial Guard fire power

How does the Imperium deal with the massive difference in quality and available firepower of their Guard regiments? Say planet A is a backwater world operating at around Medieval levels of technology, how would the Imperium ensure guard they recieve are pitted against an appropriate enemy? Do they bother? Are you essentially screwed if you are from a low tech world?

[Assistant]
Each Imperial Guard unit receives their equipment from the Departmento Munitorum. Imperial Guard units such as the Attilan Rough Riders hail from a Feudal world, are in fact much sought after across the Imperium for their maneuverability as a heavy patrol unit and able to operate behind enemy lines with little support.

Imperial Guard training differs across each world. Some Hiveworlds round up their worst recidivists and simply throw them into regiments. Others, such as Feral and Feudal Worlders, would already have more combat experience than the average Imperial citizen and therefore require only minimal training to use more advanced equipment during the long haul in-between battlefields.


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[User]
To all psychologists, do you think you would notice if a patient is faking a diagnostic?

First of all I don't mean faking to have a mental illness but to not have for example light to moderate depression.
Of course this really depends of the person, but I wanted to know if it's hard.
I know that this would be counter productive and a waste of time for the psychologist and patient, and I don't know if this place is the right place for such a question, but I am happy about all answers.

[Assistant]
To be clear, youre asking if a psychologist can tell if a patient is faking non-diagnosable issues like moderate depression?

To that question, the answer is it depends. Depression manifests differently and especially mild or moderate depression may not functionally impair people though they may still benefit from therapy. In other words it would be fairly easy to fake mild to moderate depression initially.

However, over the course of therapy, its likely the psychologist would note strange things. Maybe the patient isnt making appropriate progress. Maybe something they say is inconsistent with their past reported problems. The longer the therapy goes, the more chance the patient has to slip up.

Alternatively, many therapists will conduct assessments on their patients. Some specific tests are able to detect impression management. That would tip the therapist off to potential malingering.

The short answer is, maybe not at first, but probably eventually (especially if assessment is involved).


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[User] ELI5: What is happening inside the stomach when you feel sick?

[Assistant]
Your body has the ability to make itself sick. If you eat something and the body wants to get rid of it, it can secrete a substance that will induce vomiting. Once you vomit, it removes the irritant, and it removes the vomit inducing substance and this is why you usually feel better almost instantly.

Think of it as a natural syrup of ipecac courtesy of your stomach, liver, and gallbladder.

Edit*** To answer peoples questions, a chemical called TNF (tumor necrosis factor) stimulates the brain to shut down the digestive system by relaxing the stomach and digestive tract. This slows digestion to prevent absorbing the irritant further. TNF is produced by several different cell types in the body and has links to anti nausea medications and cannabanoids as a method of reducing nausea by blocking TNF receptors. Any medical researchers out there, feel free to correct me.

The mucus lining of the stomach can become irritated, and this is what causes the actual contractions that result in vomiting.


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[User]
[WH40K] What subtleties does chain-weapon technology bring to sword-fighting or other melee combat?

Having chainswords go edge-on-edge seems... hazardous. How the heck did Caiaphas Cain, Hero of the Imperium go mano a mano on a Chaos Space Marine with his chainsword?

How do chainweapon duels work?

[Assistant]
The heavy chain going at high speed gives the heavy sword rotational inertia.

In the hands of someone who knows how to use it, the weapon can be extremely graceful and fast. Of course, in the wrong hands it is a liability.

The high speed serrations give every slash and hacking motion considerably more damage. If your enemy is not used to chainswords, it can be very effective

Consider an unsuspecting ork boy who brings his axe or club down on you.

If you raise the chainsword up to block the blow, and keep it a slight angle, the axe hits the chain edge and the chain teeth immediately pulls the axe down along the  sword, pulling the inertia of the Ork with it. The enemy axe hits the hilt, and carries on falling to the dirt. The hilt makes the chainsword flick up and tear into the Ork Boy's face and head. His own force does the hard work.

Even if the ork is smart enough to hold against the pull of the chain, his axe will be ruined as the chain cuts it away.