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

[User]
[War of the Worlds] I've just read the historical account of the attack by Wells. How much have we learned of the invaders since then?

Having just come back from reading the historical account of the attack (or at least the most popular account that is) offered by H.G. Wells, I'm curious as to our expanded knowledge of the Martians. Obviously some things are a little silly and antiquated - Lasers and biological warfare are rather charmingly provincial by now, but over 100 years after the attack, what do we actually know about the Martians? Have we ever ascertained their methods of preparation? Have the recent probes we've sent to Mars re-encountered them? Is there any other phenomena we've been able to attribute to them?

[Assistant]
What initially appeared to be only a vanguard of a mass Global invasion in fact turned out to be a small remnant of a once thriving ancient civilisation. Mars' lighter gravity had caused the Martian atmosphere to siphon off over the millennia. Only a hundred thousand technologically-advanced survivors were able to survive in pressurised cave systems cultivating small hydroponics facilities to provide oxygen and nutrition. The Invasion of the British Isles had been one last desperate throw of the dice. They had intentionally chosen to attack an island as a fortified bastion to defend the last of their species. Not as a bridgehead as hysterical strategists and policy-makers had initially assumed.

Over a century on and a small handful of Martian survivors remain on the Red Planet. Their invasion abandoned after the consequences of Human pathogens became apparent and thus enforcing a quarantine that ended the last hopes of their species. Sporadic contact is made with them using semaphore communicated through the flashing of lights. From their understanding of genetics they seem fairly certain that their original planet of origin was Earth. Explaining the biological compatibility that led to their erstwhile defeat. These martians must be our distant ancestors, scattered on the Martian surface as microscopic amoeba as a result of an ancient asteroidal collision.

Now, as the lights of the Martian enclaves snuff out one by one, it seems we will soon say farewell to our cephalopodic cousins. We congratulate ourselves that as one planet falls, another rises. But we are also compelled to think: "There but for the grace of god go I."


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

[User] ELI5: Why don't journalists simply quote Obama's original stance on whistle blowers, and ask him to respond?

[Assistant]
Because real journalism is dead in the US mainstream media.

Real journalism is hard, it requires not taking sides, research, asking tough relevant questions, and filtering out the bullshit and propaganda, then finding the truth and communicating it to the public in an accessible way. All of which requires motivation, intelligence, a belief in the public good, credibility, a desire to speak truth to power and hold the powerful accountable. None of which applies to the vast majority of mainstream outlets today.

Corporate media wants the absolute minimum cost to generate content in the shortest possible time that maximises ratings (i.e. creates drama) but without upsetting other corporations, lobbyists, and advertisers. Also, given that most of the media is owned by half a dozen conglomerates, the media companies cannot risk or upset the other subsiduaries or call into question the close relationship between corporations and politicians.

Investigative journalism is the antithesis of the above; it's expensive, takes effort, takes time, requires an unbiased attitude, and risks pissing off the powerful - it's much easier to skim the surface, regurgitate press releases, oversimplify stories (i.e. good vs evil), make up stories or deliberately misrepresent the facts, and to lob softball questions at the powerful. After all, if you ask tough questions then they think politicians will stop giving access. Then with that environment, the effect on the journalists is pretty much a done deal.


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

[User]
What are some very impressive things (style/structure) etc that you've seen in a scientific presentation?

Animations and graphics are really cool in humanities and scientific presentations are often termed dull. How do we bypass them?

[Assistant] I think the most impressive thing I've seen was in a PhD defense where someone was outlining the number of possibilities in an experimental parametric study (7 parameters, over a million different combinations). He organized all that in what looked like a tree with different branches (one for each parameter) and would gradually shrink it by making assumptions and simplifications. Ultimately, he ended up with a smaller tree with fewer combinations (over 1000) which outlined the number of experiments he did in 3 years of research.


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

[User]
How does Eliza Thornberry's ability to talk to animals work on a grand scale?

In numerous episodes of *The Wild Thornberrys*, its shown where Eliza is speaking to numerous species of animals at once (many in different classes as well). However, in The Great Bangaboo, its revealed that to the ears of other humans, when Eliza talks to an animal shes mimicking that animal (to a bunch of Indonesian kids, Eliza sounds like a chimpanzee when talking to Darwin). One would assume that this is a defense mechanism that would prevent someone from figuring out that Eliza can talk to animals; it also makes sense that the only way to lose her powers is for her to forfeit them by admitting their existence.

This leads to my question: how does Eliza Thornberrys ability to talk to animals work on a grand scale? If Debbie were to have walked in on her in that Galapagos food-chain episode where shes talking to fishes, flies, and finches all at once, what would Debbie hear? What do the animals hear? Is animal one language, and each animal have their own dialect (like AAVE, Cajun, Appalachian, et cetera American English)? If so, how do they all tend to clearly understand Eliza?

[Assistant] Her sounding like an orangutan is a sort of perception filter. It's basically magic. Humans hear something incomprehensible, and filter it to make the most sense -- Eliza making noises at a chimp? Must be imitating a chimp, like people barking at dogs or meowing at cats. However, each individual animal hears her in their own "language."


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

[User]
Why is poo almost always brown, regardless of what we eat?

Edit: judging by the notifications I'm getting to my phone, the moderators are doing a hell of a job keeping this thread clean. You have my appreciation, mods!

[Assistant] The brown color of feces comes from the pigment stercobilin, one of the final products of heme (red blood cell) breakdown. Urobilin is similar; it also comes from heme catabolism. However it is yellow and excreted in the urine due to high water solubility. Changes in fecal color can indicate a wide range of issues, in the appropriate clinical context.


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

[User]
How does ISON's speed, currently estimated at > 0.1% the speed of light, compare to the fastest things in our Solar System?

Is ISON currently the fastest object (let's say bigger than a baseball) in our solar system? If not, what is?

[Assistant]
Most things in the solar system go at 10s of km/s. Earth goes at about 0.01% of the speed of light, or about 30 km/s. Even Mercury is going at less than 60 km/s. So if ISON was going at 0.1% of the speed of light, it's going at 300 km/s, which is more than 5 times faster than the next fastest thing.

This speed basically comes from the Sun's gravity: the comet has "dropped" towards the Sun and picked up a lot of speed. The greatest speed you can get from falling downwards (assuming you start pretty stationary) is the same as the escape velocity from the Sun's surface - a bit over 600 km/s. So you'll not likely see anything natural in the solar system going at 600 km/s or faster.


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

[User] ELI5: Why are so many people against nuclear power?

[Assistant]
There is a lot of misunderstanding about the way nuclear power works, as well the risks and benefits of investing it. Nuclear power-related accidents always attract a lot of news compared to other accidents in power generation, which give the problems disproportionate attention.

More legitimately, though, nuclear power is not a renewable resource and produces waste material (albeit a small amount) requiring careful containment. Neither issue has a satisfactory long-term solution--for this reason, some people would prefer not to invest in nuclear energy and stick strictly to renewable energy generation.


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

[User] When photons blueshift while they approach a black hole, does this mean they add more energy to the black hole than what their energy level was before being blueshifted?

[Assistant] The total amount of energy in the photon-black hole system is conserved. The extra energy in the blueshifted photon comes from gravitational potential energy and is added to the black hole as mass when the photon is absorbed, but the total amount of energy in the system is the same before and after the event.


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

[User]
[Star Wars] How would you fix the Empire?

Following the destruction of the Death Star and the Death of Tarkin, Palpatine has put you in charge of fixing this mess and defeating the Rebellion. So with the Empire at your disposal how would you do it?

Rules:

1. No Meta Knowledge of the Star Wars Universe all your information comes from the Imperial intelligence agencies so you can't just send all forces to Rebel strongholds you found on Wookieepedia, if the Empire doesn't know the information neither do you.

2. You have complete control of all Imperial forces that don't answer directly to Vader or Palpatine, however, orders have to be within reasons no summoning all the fleets to make a super fleet.

3. Secrets projects are still secret unless you find out about them or are told about them.

4. Legends material is acceptable and encourage again within reason.

[Assistant] I would start holding planetary government accountable for its corruption as found. Real Saudi Arabian 'everyone must watch the execution' kind of stuff. If you hold a position of public trust and violate that trust, reality TV broadcast as you scream in the sarlac pit. Also crack down on organized crime and the slave trade. Send the Hutts into hiding. Change out any imperial slave labor with contractors or droids. Lastly, do whatever Darth Jar Jar says because you don't want to piss off the guy that is really pulling the strings.


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

[User]
[DC] What's stopping Darkseid from making paradooms?

In the last JL Dark movie, we see how he makes stronger parademons with Doomsday's DNA, while I know he's not the one behind Doomsday in the main continuity, why doesn't he make them stronger with either Doomsday or even Supe's DNA? It doesn't seem reaching to say he could get his hands on it.

[Assistant]
In the comics we've seen Darkseid fight Doomsday. It was close, and Doomsday can't fly.

Darkseid wants conquest and trying to hold a world that contains several paradooms that have no reason to like Darkseid would not work well for him.


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

[User]
[Star Wars] If I'm planetside and I shoot a blaster pistol into the air, does the bolt leave orbit?

Or does it dissipate? Does it succumb to gravity and kill an unsuspecting Rodian a few clicks away?

[Assistant] Blasters have a limited range. They're magnetically contained charge plasma IIRC. Eventually the magnetic containment will fail and the bolt dissipates. Usually this happens well before a mile is travelled.


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

[User] What causes gusts of wind?

[Assistant] Wind is a turbulent flow.  Turbulent flow is characterized by tangles of vortices (think of a ladies hair after pulling curlers from it) going every which way.  The sizes of the vortices range in diameter between the smallest (small and likely smaller than your pinky, but it depends on the mean speed of the wind which supplies the energy to generate the turbulence) to the largest scales defining the space confining the flow (either the boundary layer or perhaps the width of boundaries like the facades of buildings).  Most of what you feel, and where most of the energy is, is in the larger scales.  The vortices are carried in a mean flow and the combined flows, carrying the vortical flow, can hit you in reverse or going forward, left or right, up or down. Hence gusts.  Now ask why vortices and why the cascade of velocity scales.  Turbulence is really interesting.


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

[User] Neutrons last ~15 minutes on their own. How can Neutron stars, which are mostly or only Neutrons, exist?

[Assistant] Neutron stars do have some protons and electrons present, which is very important. The electrons in a neutron star are degenerate, so for a new electron to be added by beta decay it must occupy an energy level higher than the Fermi level of the electrons in the star. When the Fermi level is higher than the amount of energy that can be released by beta decay there is essentially no "room" for the added electron and therefore no way for neutrons to decay.


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

[User]
ELI5: Why do some helicopters have two rotor blades and others have four ? And what exactly are the benefits of each type?

I've always wondered that.

[Assistant] How much wing you need to lift how much weight with how much engine. Each blade is extra weight and extra torque you need from your engine. The upside is that each extra blade gives you more area to generate lift and speed. So it's a balance between the two.


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

[User]
[Star Wars] Luke's new canon path

From my minuscule knowledge of Luke's journey in the EU, I understood that he eventually embraced both the light and dark to some degree. If that's right, does the non-trilogy canon sources touch on that at all? Are there indications that he's still going to take a more unified approach to the Force?

[Assistant] Really not the place to ask (since the movie is not out), but the general consensus is that Luke went into isolation. If there are no Jedi, then there is nobody to teach the Force, so no change of someone falling to the dark side.


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

[User]
How does bane from batman eat and drink?

Haven't found any good answers by googling it.

[Assistant] You'll notice that Bane's mask has a series of tubes which deliver a steady supply of painkillers, stimulants, and other chemicals to his nose and mouth. One tube is for water, and the other tube is for food. Bane mostly eats protein shakes (plus raw eggs and milk) to maintain his physique. The input is hidden in the backpack he always wears, which holds the pressurized tanks for his drugs and also has a camelback-style water pouch.


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

[User] ELI5: Why do police Tasers have cameras on them but not their guns?

[Assistant]
Police officer and Taser Instructor here:

Taser (the company) has a monopoly on Conducted Electrical Weapons.  So any CEW you see an officer use is made by Taser.  They offer cameras for thier devices (at an extra cost).

There is no monopoly on what guns police departments use.  They are issued many, many brands and models.  Some officers must provide thier own guns.

Gun cameras alsob make guns heavier, harder to wield, and harder to holster (you need an expensive, custom holster).

Taser cameras can be small because they just run off the battery of the device itself.  A gun camera needs it's own power supply.


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

[User]
Why didn't the Europeans acquire new diseases when they explored the Americas?

Disease was one of the biggest causes of death for most of the Native Americans, so why didn't the Europeans encounter diseases that they could have carried back to Europe and caused another epidemic.

[Assistant] I believe this is related to the relative levels of development of the societies. In the stage of transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one of farming and domestication, humans become susceptible to epidemic disease, because they are living closer together, and also in close proximity to animal vectors. A lot of early epidemic disease, for example smallpox and measles developed from diseases which originally infected domestic animals. The Europeans had already gone through this stage when they arrived in the Americas, and so had developed resistance to these kinds of illnesses. The Native Americans had not and so had no resistance to the imported diseases, and local ones that might affect the Europeans had not emerged.


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

[User]
[Mass Effect] Where does the Illusive Man get his money?

I know that Cerberus owns many front organizations and cover businesses and was originally a branch of Alliance intelligence, but how do they possibly have the dosh to acquire and cultivate all of their scientific and military talent? How do they finance their fleets of warships and dropships and improbable androids with complex smart AI?

Inquiring minds demand answers!

[Assistant]
Some believe that there are still high ranking members of the Alliance military that are helping to fund them. If the highest ranking person in the entire Alliance was collaborating with them, there's no doubt they had a lot of top tier support in the government.

Also, they only started fully militarizing right before the Reapers invaded. For the same reason the Crucible was built so quickly, its because money is no longer a factor when you are on the verge of the apocalypse, fighting for pure survival. All that matters is resources and manpower.


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

[User]
ELI5: How does DNA even do things?

I get the basics, I think. DNA is made of four thingies, it codes for proteins that are important (?) And it determines what traits you have. And then it splits in half and replicates itself to form new cells. At least that's my understanding after a couple days of biology class and about an hour of google.  Still not quite sure how DNA even tells the cell what to do, but I sorta have an idea of that.

What I really don't understand and can't seem to find an answer to, is how does DNA work? As in, if there are only the four nucleotides, and they match up with each other in a certain way, then all the instructions must have to do with the order of the nucleotides, right? So how does a bunch of nucleotides in a certain order determine what your cells (protein thingies in the cell i guess) are supposed to do? What makes one order different from another?

Unless I'm completely wrong and the order isn't even important.

[Assistant]
Short answer: structure = function.

The order of the four "thingies" in DNA determine the order of the joined-up LEGO blocks that we call a protein. DNA uses 20 different, specific LEGO blocks. For example, AAA codes for one type of LEGO, AGA codes for a different one, and so on. (There is overlap - each of the 20 LEGOs has several different patterns that code for it.)

Due to the basics of physics and chemistry, each of those LEGO blocks acts in a unique way with respect to the other LEGO blocks around it. Certain parts of LEGO A attract and repel different parts of LEGO B, and ditto for C, D, E, and F. So at the end of the day, you've got this long string of LEGOs that folds into a certain specific shape, and that determines what the finished protein actually "does." Proteins are kinda like very simple machines, and the order of their parts determines how that machine will behave, simply due to the rules of chemistry.


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

[User] ELI5: Why do we all think of crack addicts as gross homeless men but we think of coke addicts as rich millionaires when they're the same thing?

[Assistant]
Because they are not the same thing. Crack is extremely cheap compared to cocaine.

Cocaine is for the rich, crack is for the poor.

The reason for this is because what crack is is freebase cocaine. The cocaine is combined with baking soda and cooked to make the smokable crack.


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

[User]
[Marvel] Why is New York City so violent?

The city is the home for 95% of Marvel characters, yet it's still so violent that it needs the Punisher killing dozens of thousands of criminals throughout the years to keep crime in check.

Why is it so violent? How are 95% of Marvel heroes not able to make it less of a shithole?

[Assistant]
Punisher isn't really reducing crime in NY specifically. When he removes criminals, he leaves an opening for
other out of city gangs to move in to take their place.

So it's not that NY is especially violent, at least not more than any other heavily populated city.


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

[User] [Superman] In an attempt to be edgy, an internet celebrity/infliencer mocks Lex Luthor's baldness. Does Lex retaliate? What is the worst that Luthor can do to this person?

[Assistant] Later that year Luthor begins building the next Lexcorp office campus within a quarter-mile of that person's apartment, causing their neighborhood to gentrify and forcing them out when the rent goes up to three times what it was previously. The streamer starts a crowdfunding campaign to move, but the hour the campaign starts, all of their text messages, email, private messages, and web browser history are leaked. An hour later it becomes public that an ex from high school has filed rape charges against them. The charges are dropped a week later, but their online career is ruined and they move back in with their parents (whose rent has also gone up because of the new tech campus in town) and have to get two retail jobs to make ends meet. This entire scheme only requires thirty minutes of effort on Luthor's part.


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

[User] ELI5: When airplanes takeoff, why does the pilot tip the plane right and left?

[Assistant] Runways are pointed in fixed directions, and an airport might only have 2-3 pairs.  That gives 4-6 directions where you can take off.  Alas, the wind can blow in any direction.  Runways are carefully engineered to cover the most popular wind directions, but there are probably more than 6 "popular" directions.  When you take off in a different direction than the wind, called a cross-wind takeoff, it's necessary to turn the plane to the wind direction.  Passengers don't like to feel pushed to the side, the plane is too cozy already, so the tip compensates for the sideways turn motion.  Once the plane's in the right direction, it has to tip back or it would start to roll.


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

[User] [MCU] Would the snap be something people would openly talk about or is it something that you cant talk about openly/directly? Would it be socially ok to post videos of people getting snapped? And how did that all change once people came back again?

[Assistant]
It is a common thing to discuss. Minor spoiler alert (even though the movie has been out for a while), in FFH MJ says to a flight attendant that Flash "blipped" so he's not 21 and cannot have an alcoholic drink. No one makes a fuss out of this, and the Flight Attendant takes her comment very nonchalantly and takes the drink away from Flash.

Also, their teacher mentions that his wife faked her death with the blip and went after a different guy.


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

[User] ELI5 : Why does rubbing your head when you hit it make it feel better?

[Assistant] Nerves feel stretch (baro) temperature, pain, pressure. You can only feel one at a time. Pressure beats all in this game of rock, paper, scissors. When you cut yourself and squeeze the cut finger hard you feel the pressure but not the cut. Rubbing hard is a form of pressure, beating out pain.


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

[User]
[Superman][Man Of Steel] What's the point of fighting another Kryptonian?

It seems that no matter how hard they punch each other, neither one gets hurt.  The only thing that happens is damage to the surroundings.  That is, until Superman twists Zod's neck.

And another point... if Superman can survive his body being burnt to a crisp by a nuclear bomb, why doesn't Zod regenerate from a broken neck?

[Assistant]
> if Superman can survive his body being burnt to a crisp by a nuclear bomb,

I think a dead-on hit with the nuclear warhead would've killed him. The fact that it hit Doomsday (who was absorbing energy from any source) first helped him survive.

> why doesn't Zod regenerate from a broken neck?

Perhaps if he had Superman's vast stores of solar energy and fully adapted to absorbing said energy then he perhaps would've, given time.


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

[User]
[Stargate] how powerful were the 4 great races? What are some of their feats?

I know the Asgard have awesome propulsion capability, and the Ancients made the Stargates, but what are some other feats of theirs?

[Assistant]
The Nox are telepathic, telekinetic, have a floating city and some really good cloaking tech for it, can override the SGC's control of the Stargate, and can resurrect the dead.

The Asgard have very good FTL, teleportation, very powerful beam weapons, and a lot of knowledge on how exactly Alteran technology works.

The Alterans invented the Stargate, were very good terraformers, generally had a much better version of anything the other three races/Gou'auld have (Cube of Healing vs Sarcophagus) Atlantis and several other Cityships, ZPMs, time travel, a Stargate drive for their more fancy ships, made an entire race of human form replicators for the hell of it in like a week, and are currently godlike energy beings capable of doing whatever the hell they want. But they don't because ~~plot~~ ~~the Prime Directive~~ ~~the Non Interference Clause~~ it would be *wrong*. They also have a machine that can ascend others, or just give theme superpowers depending on the exposure time.

The Furlings terraformed a moon and died to the Gou'auld. Very important people.


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

[User] ELI5: Why do they make power adapters so large that its difficult/impossible to plug something into the adjacent plug?

[Assistant]
Laziness and to save money. Adaptors are ubiquitous and very inexpensive and a well designed small adaptor need not cost a lot more. Most of these adaptors are sourced-in. Few companies bother to design them from the ground up. At most, they will send out an external drawing/industrial design and some reference material or finish required.

There are good companies that spend the time to spec out adaptors that work well, fit their aesthetic and are small. They will spend a few dollars more to get it right. You have to spend more to get efficient, small form factor adaptors.

Others just cheap out. You can get an off-the-shelf adaptor sourced with some custom labels/screen print and pay just a few dollars. (I've sourced OEM adaptors for less than 3 bucks in volume) Often times a smaller company just won't spend the resources and assign some junior buyer/sourcing person to bring in a couple of catalogs to pick from.


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

[User] ELI5: Why the creators of American Football named their sport "Football" when there was already a much more popular sport with that name?

[Assistant]
"Football" refers to an entire *class* of games.  Specifically, games played with a ball while the players are on foot (as opposed to being mounted on horses).  Different regions have different types of football that are popular.  From wikipedia:

>[A]ssociation football (also known as soccer) in the United Kingdom and most of the non-English speaking world; gridiron football (specifically American football or Canadian football) in the United States and Canada; Australian rules football or rugby league in different areas of Australia; Gaelic football in Ireland; and rugby football (specifically rugby union) in New Zealand. These different variations of football are known as football codes.


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

[User]
[Watchmen] If someone took a tissue sample from the dead alien squid, would they discover that it had terrestrial DNA?

"Hmm, this creature looks genetically engineered - and who else could have done it, if not those evil Russians?"

[Assistant] I would suspect that Ozymandias, being a genius and having the genetic engineering know-how of Veidt Industries behind him, thought of some plot hole like that and covered it. Maybe the alien squid DNA was programmed to quickly degrade upon death, and in a way that would make ordinary scientists vaguely attribute that to "muh alien biology".


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

[User] Why do bank savings have such a low return as opposed to investing it, if banks end up investing the money anyway?

[Assistant] If you were to invest in the things that banks invest in you would need to hire an army of credit assessors to go over large numbers of small business plans and home loans applications to find a sufficiently diverse portfolio for an acceptable risk to invest in. And, unless you were incredibly rich, you would need to market your investment to many others to invest with you as part funding businesses or mortgages has no utility. In other words you would have to make your own bank. So the difference between the rate of interest you get from a bank and the rate of interest the bank lends at is to pay for all those things you would have to do anyway.


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

[User] ELI5 When selling an item in an auction, why set a minimum reserve amount if the bidders cant see it. Why not just set the minimum bid at the lowest price youd be willing to sell at?

[Assistant]
Because you want to engage people. You want people to see your listing, and since people often search by lowest price available, more people will see your listing if you start the bidding low.

Similarly, if the bidding starts low, but several people bid on it, it seems like demand for that item is higher and people become more willing to bid higher on that item.


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

[User]
I am defending my master's thesis on Friday. Any tips to make sure I don't get publicly humiliated?

I got my examiners' reports and they requested quite a few changes, like reorganizing the structure of my Previous Studies chapter, adding some theories, citing some articles, focusing more on one aspect that I had barely mentioned, giving more information about the experimental groups, etc.

With all these comments, I am EXTREMELY nervous. Not to mention all my colleagues from the program are planning to attend the defence.

Do you have any tips? And what happens if they ask a question and I have no idea how to answer?! This is the nightmare scenario for me.

[Assistant] It's common procedure to give a practice talk to an audience of friends or colleagues - potentially even your advisor, if that's appropriate in your field. Encourage those friendly audience members to ask tough questions, so you both (a) get some experience answering off the cuff, and (b) outsource the task of figuring out the "tough questions" beforehand. If they ask you something you don't know, then take a day to figure out the answer *before* your talk on Friday.


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

[User]
Could we measure the age of an organism by looking at its DNA?

The ends of DNA get shaved off every time theyre copied, as far as i remember. So could we measure the age of an organism by looking at its DNA? For cases where we dont have the birthday.

[Assistant]
Those are teleomeres. But to do what youre talking about would require having an sample of the DNA sequence at the literal moment of conception / first cellular division of the organism in question. As well as a known rate of teleomere loss.

The first is essentially impossible. The second is likely to vary for every organism and also essentially impossible to determine.


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

[User] ELI5: What hormone is associated with motivation? Theoretically, could motivation be artificially (chemically) increased?

[Assistant]
Motivation seems to be closely linked to dopamine and noradrenaline neurotransmitter activity in brain, particularly in the pre-frontal cortex (PFC).

People with ADHD notoriously have reduced ability to keep motivated and focused on a given task. Doctors prescribe medications like Ritalin to compensate for this and after taking the drug ADHD patients will often become highly-focused and motivated.

Drugs like Ritalin are stimulants and act to increase dopamine and noradrenaline activity in the brain, particularly in the PFC. The PFC is important for higher-level functions of the brain like self-control, discipline, filtering (what you say or do), focus, reason, planning, etc. so it's not surprising that motivation can be affected by manipulating PFC neurotransmitter activity.

So to answer your question - Yes... Not just theoretically, but indeed people take stimulants all the time to increase motivation and focus, particularly those with conditions like ADHD but also many people without ADHD resort to using stimulants, for example, to increase productivity for school work and studying.


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

[User]
Why doesn't the integral from 0 to infinity of sinx dx equal zero?

Hello. Kind of stumped on this problem from a conceptual stand point. If you graph sinx, each area above the x- axis should cancel out with the area below the x-axis so I'm not sure why we can't say it's equal to zero.

[Assistant]
What is the sum of 2-2+2-2+2-2+2-2+2-2+... ? If we group it up like

* (2-2) + (2-2) + (2-2) + ...

then we should get zero, but if we group it up as

* 2 - (2 - 2) - (2 - 2) - (2 - 2) -...

Then we should get 2. Because it depends on how we choose to group things up, something that shouldn't matter in addition, we say that this sum is undefined, has no value. The value you get depends on how you get there, so if you just have the sum, with no instructions on how to get to the end, then you don't know what the sum should be. Even though you *can* make it so that each +2 is cancelled out by a -2, you don't *have to*, you can choose it so that all by one of the +2s is canceled.

Same thing with the integral of sin(x) over x=0 to infinity. Each "bump" has area 2, and if you sum it up by the bumps, you get 2-2+2-2+2-2+2-2+... But, as we saw above, this doesn't have a value unless you give explicit instruction on how you're combining these, which we don't have when working with just an integral. So the integral is undefined.

More rigorously, the integral of f(x) from x=0 to infinity is defined to be the limit at infinity of the function

* F(x) = integral of f(t)dt for t=0 to x

For f(x)=sin(x), this is equal to F(x)=1-cos(x), so it oscillates without decreasing in amplitude as you go out towards infinity, and so has no limit at infinity. So the integral is undefined.


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

[User] [Werewolves] I'm going to transform for the first time and go on a feast, but what happens to all the meat, bones, everything I eat while in werewolf form once I turn back to normal?

[Assistant]
It depends upon what type of werewolf you are.

First, few wolves eat bones, that's more of a hyena thing.  Werewolves are mostly into killing, not eating.

Biological and some curse base werewolves have to deal with conservation of mass.  For them, anything they ate stays in their system.   Often, their digestive system is reved up so this is not a problem.  After all, they need calories to fuel their transformation and regeneration.  Side effect, if you're this type of werewolf.   Eat pie all the time and never get fat.

More magical forms of werewolves, who change mass when they transform, can shunt whatever they have gorge on into wherever the extra mass goes.  This includes a lot of "cursed" werewolves as well as those who use a magical device to change.  As well as magical werewolf races like the Garou in the RPG.

If you're just the crazy nuts type - you only think you're transforming and are going to have digestive problems.


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

[User]
ELI5 What it means to share DNA with other organisms

We share 60% of our DNA with bananas, but we are clearly not 60% banana.

[Assistant] DNA fundamentally is instructions to make proteins. A lot of the basic proteins needed for cells to function (build cell membranes, move things around, tie themselves in place, etc) are going to be the same even in very different organisms. As a result, pretty much any multicellular organisms are going to share a lot of DNA, because the instructions needed for the basic building blocks of cells are the same.


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

[User]
[Batman] What does the average DC citizen think of Batman?

Do they think hes a hero, or more of a violent thug?

Do they think hes a vampire, or a demon?

Do they think hes even real, or just an urban legend?

Or does the average citizen not particularly care about him?

[Assistant]
Opinions on the Bat are as diverse and varied as the citizens of Gotham itself. Some see him as a noble hero using bad guy tactics against the bad guys. Others see him as a supernatural threat. Still others see him as a reckless vigilante who is only making things worse. There is no "average opinion" about him.

Granted, the longer Batman continues doing what he does, the more positive his reputation becomes. High-profile actions like stopping Mister Freeze from killing half the city with a freeze ray net him a lot of praise. When criminals release tell-all books about how their life turned around after getting four bones broken in a fight with Batman, people see it as a good change. Not to mention all the stuff he does with the Justice League. But in many universes that explore his later career, Batman often tries to shirk this growing praise so he can return to the shadows. Either by becoming even more obsessive and disturbing to friends and foes, or by totally disappearing off the grid.


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

[User]
[Meatloaf] What is it he wont do for love?

he says he will do anything for love, but he wont do that. What is it he wont do? Will he do it for something other than love?

[Assistant]
A bunch of things, all directly from the lyrics. Meatloaf will not:

* Forget the way you feel right now
* Forgive himself if you don't go all the way tonight
* Do it better than he does it with you
* Screw around
* ~~Give you up or let you down~~


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

[User] ELI5: How do mind-controlled prosthetics actually work? And how do they "feel" when worn?

[Assistant]
Mind controlled prosthetics work the same way your current limbs work - actuators respond to signals sent by the brain.

Normally, your actuators are your muscles and tendons. Starting out, you have very, very poor motor control(babies), and as your grow your brain gets better at sending signals to your muscles and tendons to do increasingly complex tasks.

Now replace muscles and tendons with servo-motors. Your brain is still sending out signals to the now missing limb; through a combination of electronics interpreting those signals and the brain re-training itself on what signals to send to achieve a given motion you gain the ability to move a prosthetic. The electronics may be taking measurements from muscle groups further up the affected limb, they may be reading brain waves, hell they may be taking readings from an implant in your brain.

The better the electronics interpreting the existing signals are, the better you will be initially at using your replacement finger/hand/arm/foot/leg, but like everything you have ever learned to do practice is needed to improve function - just like babies learning to use their hands etc.

as for how they feel when work - most of them don't offer any kind of feedback loop - if you aren't using some sense other than touch to realize your hand is squeezing a bottle too tightly, you don't know how tightly you are gripping. Some prosthetics do attempt to provide some kind of haptic feedback where prosthetic meets flesh to indicate resistance in a particular joint etc.

There have been some interesting clinical results though, where people have had direct brain implants and have reported being able to feel through their new limb.


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

[User] Professors of reddit, when you tell a student to draft their own letter of recommendation and make "small edits", what do you actually change?

[Assistant] professor here. - personally never asked anyone to draft their letters. One time told a student who proposed to draft a few paragraphs for me that he shouldn't do it. If you agreed to write a letter then freaking write it.


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

[User]
[Skyrim] Anyone can learn the Thuum, with the appearance of people (Dovaahkiin & Ulfric) showing the power of the Thuum why aren't more people trying to go learn it?

Dovaahkiin is constantly showing the Thuums power and Ulfric Stormcloak shows that the Thuum is not exclusive to Dovaahkiin. with the knowledge of these two facts why is no one trying to learn it?

I would think at lest one person other then these two would think that the climb to the greybeards would be worth such massive power or at least be seen in a library trying to teach themselves if they don't want to make the  climb!

[Assistant]
- It takes years of effort to learn even a single Thuum.  The dragonborn gets to cheat because they have the soul of a dragon and are capable of absorbing other dragon souls.

- The greybeards have taken an oath of noninterference.  Ulfric betrayed that oath, and the greybeards are very upset at him for having done so.  If the greybeards suspect you're planning to do the same thing Ulfric did, they'll just reject you as a student.


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

[User] ELI5: How are oil drilling platforms and wind turbines built in the ocean? How are they stable?

[Assistant]
They stand on pretty solid legs that are buried into the seafloor.

Water current is stronger than wind, but with thin but strong steel constructions thats not a much bigger issue than building a tall building on land.

For bigger depths there are also concepts with floaters and ropes connected to anchors.


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

[User]
Why is it that coronavirus has defined "peaks" when spreading throughout a community?

I was just reading a forecast for my states omicron case projected "peak time", which is something like 10 days where the cases will peak (and then trough/plateau?). I am confused to the reasoning or rationale behind this projection, is it because people will become sick, then subsequently will have to isolate and/or people who have already been sick during the peak maintain a natural immunity so it can't keep spreading like wildfire to the \*almost\* entire population?

Please help, I hope this post makes sense!

[Assistant] You pretty much already understand it. Its a general concept of exponential growth. Spread occurs exponentially with a speed dictated by how infectious the virus is (the R value) to susceptible individuals. At a certain point, the number of new people that would need to be infected for the exponential growth to continue will be larger than the number of vulnerable people and exponential growth must stop. In practice, exponential growth in biological systems levels off well before that point, because theres a limiting resource that prevents it from occurring. In the case of a virus, people that are sick interact with less people and more people become immune after having the virus giving the virus fewer new people to infect and levelling off the curve. The same applies to the growth of bacteria in laboratory medium. At some point, theres going to be more biomass than the remaining nutrients can support and growth will level off and decline.


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

[User]
If our taxes go to things like National Parks, why do we still have to pay an entry fee when we go in many of them?

And, they're pretty expensive!

[Assistant]
Because your taxes aren't enough, and user-fees are a way to limit the costs for those that don't use the service and put the majority of the burden on those that do. When it's a school or something the idea is usually that even poor people should have schooling for their kids so user-fees are a bad idea, especially considering there's a cost for schooling kids in terms of supplies and the like, so more fees on top of that is just unacceptable.

National Parks? Visiting one is a luxury no matter how you slice it.


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

[User]
Does the propagation of a gravity wave through a massive object encounter resistance from the mass of said object?

I'm wondering if gravity waves propagating through empty space and gravity waves propagating through something massive like a star carry on at the same speed.

[Assistant] We have never observed gravity to slow down or gravitational waves to scatter from matter interactions. Theory states that at least the former does not occur, but we haven't really had the facilities to perform the necessary experiments to verify this to any certainty. The fact that our galaxy is very dense in the center, so that light is occluded, yet the gravity of distant objects appears completely unimpeded, *suggests* that this may be right.


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

[User]
[X-Men Movies] Let's talk about Mystique's powers.

In the first film, when she fought Wolverine as Wolverine, she had claws, we learned that they were obviously not real claws because they got lopped off, and she screamed. But she didn't lose any noticeable parts when back in blue.

In the second, when she snuck on top of Logan pretending to be Jean while he was sleeping, I believe Logan found the scars from their fight in the first movie, how or why are there even scars formed? ESPECIALLY when transformed?

Additionally, let's talk about clothing. She makes clothing out of nothing, so basically her skin, yeah? So she can't disrobe, since that'd be in essence literally cutting off her own skin, right?

[Assistant]
Mystique doesn't have the same body that me and you have. We have voids and spaces and bags full of fluid and all sorts of non-tissue locations in our body. Mystique doesn't have such issues. She's a big mass of cells that can be whatever cells they need to be, or whatever she wants, as long as the form is roughly humanoid.

Her losing the few bits of her flesh from that injury is not enough to diminish her form. Like you can live without your appendix, uvula and several other parts, she's okay missing a pound of flesh, and it will likely grow back rather quickly.

Now, as to the scars, Wolverine stabbed her his claws, which are constructed of Adamantium Beta, the same alloy that is bonded to his bones. It is notoriously poisonous to humankind, and perhaps in Mystique's case inhibits her healing ability to the point that that area on her would have a scar for a while.

Mystique wears clothes all the time. She only uses her flesh as clothes when it suits her to do so, and not for any extended amount of time. If by chance she is making clothes out of herself for some reason, 'removing them' would not be possible.


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

[User] What makes 4G faster than 3G?

[Assistant]
Both 3G and 4G are data transfer standards. So a network is considered a 3G network if it can reach peak speeds of 200Kb/s. A network is considered 4G if it can reach 1Gb/s. However, this standard was changed basically so that companies like Verizon could advertise 4G speeds even though they cannot actually hit the 1Gb/s rate. 4G is generally now used to mean 'anything substantially faster than 3G' rather than conform to the actual standard.

So basically, there is nothing that makes 4G faster than 3G, it is simply defined this way. There are many things that make a network 4G as opposed to 3G, but that gets into a technical level of how do they improve network infrastructure. This includes things like more robust switches and routers, more actual lines of communication (which provide more interconnectivity and hence more paths along which data can travel), etc.


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

[User] ELI5 how does tabacco contain radioactive polonium? Where does it come from? Does the plant make it radioactive, does it collect it? Do other plants do this too?

[Assistant]
Tobacco absorbs radium from the soil it's grown in. You can find radium all over (particularly where there are granite deposits), but it's especially rich in soils treated with phosphate fertilizers (because it's common in the rock that they mine the phosphate from). It radioactively decays into polonium.

It does make the plant radioactive (and toxic as a heavy metal), more than other plants, but not strongly so. It's enough to be a concern if you are, say, smoking it, but if you stood next to a tobacco plant you'd be at no risk.

All plants absorb some radioisotopes that decay. Some are absorbed from the soil, and some from the air. The absorption of carbon-14 from the air is the basis for radio-carbon dating, for example. Everything (including you) has some level of radioactivity.


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

[User]
[Dragon Ball] Are the main cast so strong because they had extra lives?

I was just thinking, if dragon balls couldn't bring people back from the dead, there would be no way for there to be a super saiyans or golden forms.

The main cast was also was exposed to parts of the macroverse no mortal would have access to and they were able to bring what they learned back with them when they came back to life.  Are the main cast so strong because they had extra lives?

[Assistant]
In the sense that they were able to train with King Kai, yes, the extra lives made them stronger. Also in the sense that Vegeta coming back to life on Namek probably gave him a zenkai.

Think of the Z Warriors as nameless NPCs you control. You burn wishes/gold on bringing them back to life, and while it doesn't make them directly stronger, it gives them the ability to continue to become stronger. Cause you know, they're alive again.


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

[User]
[Hellsing Ultimate Abridged] Why does Sir Integra mind when Alucard goes on walks?

I mean, he is killing vampires, and isn't that his job?

[Assistant]
Put yourself in Integra's undoubetedly expencive and one of a kind shoes. You have a thousand year old Vampire, capable of slaughtering armies single handedly. And he leaves. Unsupervised. To go on 'walks'.

No PR or cover up teams following him, no idea where he has gone. It's practically a worst case scenario for a covert organization.


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

[User]
CMV: Cultural appropriation is not a bad thing

Okay, I really want to change my mind here, because a lot of the people I generally agree with my position here.

Full disclosure, because I think its relevant: I am a straight white cis male, but I hope that doesnt doesnt deter minority voices. Dont spare my feelings.

Im also American so my experience and focus is white people appropriating from non-white people, though I want to talk about the concept in general.

Cultural appropriation, as I understand it, can generally refer to people looking at other cultures and saying that food/music/clothes etc. is neat, Ill incorporate it into my life.

Some people have said its wrong for the appropriating culture to use something they dont understand. Others have said that it doesnt matter how much the culture is understood, you cant steal from anothers culture.

This seems like a natural evolution of culture though. A culture changes its customs, adding things and removing things as it wants. When the Moors invaded Spain and were eventually kicked back out, the Spanish peasants stole the Moores culture of bathing regularly and being more hygienic, as the story goes.

I understand the big difference of power struggle here. The Moors were the invaders, and the Spanish were being colonized. However, I dont see this argument amounting to anything more than a distaste for white culture.

I also see the fetishization of minorities in America. A lot of white people look at black people as the ones who make the cool music and talk all cool! as if theyre not people the way white people are. This plays into the power struggle argument, but I dont see why white people should be barred from appropriating.

[Assistant]
Cultural appropriation is usually meant to describe one of two things: when members of a dominant culture adopt another culture's practice or icon without fully understanding it, and when members of a dominant culture are able to profit off of another culture's practice or icon while people of that other culture have a much harder time.

Do you disagree these things are bad?  Just trying to get a lay of the land here.


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

[User]
[The Boys: season 2] *Spoiler alert* So Im a Vought employee going through the archives.....

And it says right here on the secret list of babies that had Compound V injected into them as children that the anti-vought, anti-supe Victoria Nueman is a supe herself. What gives?

[Assistant]
Compound V doesn't work on everyone.  Sometimes they dont get powers at all, or they get a mostly useless power.  Maybe her farts smell like cinnabon.  That would be useful for a politician.

In any event, if the power wasn't notable enough, Vought eventually stops tracking the super.  From that point she can go on to do whatever, even be an anti-Vought politician.  There is some irony in that, but it wouldn't be unheard of.


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

[User]
[Quantum Leap]What does the leapee remember

When Sam leaps in to someone he does his thing and has memory of what he's done after he leaps AFASIR. Now what doe the leapee remember when they return?

Do they remember the observation room?
Do they remember some tweaked version of what Sam did?
Or is there memory Swiss cheesed and the last thing they recall was be fore their leap?

I believe some of this was covered in the Lee Harvey Oswald episodes, but it has been a while since I've seen them.

[Assistant] The leapee remembers everything that happened but they remember it as if they themselves had performed those actions/made those choices. This is the only conceivable outcome of the leaps, as many times Sam makes significant emotional changes to the person's life. Any time where he meddles in a romance, the leapee must come back thinking everything that happened happened to them, otherwise they'd suddenly not be in love with the people Sam just spent a week making them fall in love with.


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

[User] ELI5: How do programmers use multiple languages to build a product? How do they connect it together?

[Assistant]
Imagine you are cooking something, you usually have a recipe that you need to follow, each steps builds on the previous one. For instance, if you wanna make fries you:

1. Find a potato (tool: fridge)
2. Wash the potato (tool: sink)
3. Peel the potato (tool: knife, peeler)
4. Slice the potato (tool: knife)
5. Fry (tool: stove, pan)
6. Serve (tool: plate, table)

Each tool can be considered a different programming language, and each step can be considered a "layer" of your application.

Each layer has an expected format for input and output (e.g. to peel the potato you receive a washed potato, and your output is a peeled potato). In practice, different languages pass input and output to each other using your computer memory (RAM) or storage space; they create files and pieces or information that follow certain "structure", such that the next layer can pick it up from there.


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

[User]
[Metal Gear Solid] What makes the Metal Gear such a revolutionary invention?

  In the lore of the game, Metal Gear is so deadly because it can traverse any terrain to deliver nuclear strikes in enemy territory. Thats cool and all, but what makes that more efficient than say, a nuclear stealth bomber? It has the same defenses, same firepower, and the same nukes. The only difference is that a jet can traverse more terrain because it can fly. The only Metal Gears that actually seem advantageous are Ray and Sahelanthropus because each is a fully fledged mech and not just another nuclear tank.

  With that in mind, why does everyone in MGS hold Metal Gears in such high regard?

[Assistant]
A stealth bomber can be detected and intercepted if you throw enough radar signals or Mark 1 eyeballs at it. A mech that can walk off a ship onto some deserted shoreline, launch its payload, and walk back on the ship is far less likely to be detected.

Edit: It should also be noted that Metal Gear does not fire nuclear weapons in the traditional way that would trigger a launch warning by early warning systems. The Shagohod used rocket boosters on the launch platform to simulate the second booster stage of an ICBM launch. Later Metal Gears used railguns to fire off their payloads.


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

[User] What advice would Laozi or a Taosit give to a young person struggling to find meaningful work?

[Assistant]
Embrace uselessness.

There's a tree down the street that's a marvelously large oak. It shields so many birds, so many squirrels, so many ant colonies, so many fungi, so many mistletoe bushes, so many children who like to read books or play tag around the tree. It is a very useful tree. It is also very useful for its wood. People pay a lot of money to find large trees like that, go great distances to locate them, pay more money to hire people with trucks and saws, and cut them down. The wood is excellent for ornamental displays, like clocks or mantel pieces or lathed bowls. The usefulness of the tree attracts many admirers and consumers; the usefulness of the tree brings its death and its new immortality.

There's a different tree, though. It's been sitting over there by the dump, near the train tracks, where the two multimodal containers stay sitting on rails displaying local gang politics. The tree is wretched. It has gnarls. Its leaves are wasted, black, and thin, too thin to provide any shade. The roots are reprehensible, and no sap from them attracts hornets or flies. And since the location where it sits is so unusable and unattractive to humans, there it continues to sit, undisturbed, unwanted, unneeded.

There it will die, and remain, for a long time, continuing even in tree death to be useless, as useless as the land around it, as useless as humans think it is.

For humans only consume what they think is useful, meaningful in its being used, meaningful for being used.

The rest, all the waste and inefficient and gnarled things, those hard scrabbly things satisfied with living alone, all that rest is left alone.

There is no struggle if there's no need for meaning. There is peace in being useless.


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

[User]
[DC] How does Superman/The Flash manage to read things on the computer so easily?

Both of them have super speed, so they are able to read things very quickly, but how do they manage to read things on the internet in such a short amount of time, given that computers aren't as fast as they are?

[Assistant]
Superman and Flash actually read a lot of good old fashion books when they use their super speed. More than once flash has complained the watch tower computer is too slow.

Superman also has his fortress of solitude to use for computing purposes.

Honestly though when it comes to computer stuff, Cyborg beats both of them easily seeing as how he can interface directly into the internet and process the data in nanoseconds.


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

[User] [General] I'm immune to heat, cold, and radiation. What are some jobs that I could make bank on using my abilities?

[Assistant]
Astronaut seems like it would foot the bill. You'd be much cheaper to send to space - no need to worry about shielding, or cooling. You could spacewalk over to satellites for repairs in nothing more than a modified wet suit, and you'd be a top notch candidate for a crew to explore Mars.

On the other hand, most of the cost is just getting your body up there, and they're not going to send a solo person to Mars, or likely even into space.


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

[User]
When I cook food in the oven, what does hotter temperatures versus a longer cooking time do to the physical structure of my food?

This is something I wonder about whenever I fire up my toaster oven. How does turning the heat up versus leaving it in for longer affect my food?

Do they have discrete properties that affect the food? Or is it just a mathematical function? heat x time = heat energy radiated into my food. Could I halve the cooking temperature and double the cook time and have the same result?

I see how some kinds of food like meat or fish would only cook at a certain temperature, so some recipes would necessitate a certain cook temp.

What combination results in the most even cook? As in, the inside of the food heats up at the same speed as the outside.

Why are almost all recipes either 350F, 375F, or 400F? Why is nothing at 200F or 800F?

[Assistant]
Although you can sometimes tweak the temperature and time ratios in a recipe to get the same result, cooking is a *chemical* process -- this means that there are some specific, critical temperatures above/below which certain processes will/won't happen.

For example, meat/fish items usually have to be cooked in such a way that the entire object reaches some minimum temperature (160F, or so) in order to ensure that dangerous bacteria and the like have been destroyed.

Heat flow equations tell us that if we want the core of an object to reach a certain temperature, there are two extreme ways we can do this. If we want to do it quickly, we just have to make the outside really hot (the rate of heating will increase with the magnitude of the temperature gradient), but this might end up burning and/or drying out the food. The other extreme is to make the oven temperature equal to what we want the inside of the food to be, and wait for the temperature throughout the entire object to reach equilibrium (which will probably take a really long time). Balancing these two extremes tends to mean heating things in the temperature ranges you mentioned; 200F would take way too long, and 800F would probably end up burning the food before the inside got hot enough to be "done".


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

[User] [Star Trek] Hypothetically let's say the Enterprise-Z is destroyed/decommissioned, would the name be retired or there be a new suffix?

[Assistant]
The naming would continue using letters in the Vulcan alphabet.

From there, they'll move on to the Tellarite Phoneme Library, and then to Andorian Pictoglorps.

Once they're through Denobulan Smellemes and Betazed Mood Lighting Thought Glyphs, though, they'll probably decide that enough's enough.


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

[User] [star wars] In a space battle is there any surrendering? Does anybody take prisoners? How would a Tie fighter or X Wing signal that they surrender?

[Assistant] Depending on the era in question it's pretty basic. You would radio your intent to surrender and power down all weapons and shields. A fighter craft can then be escorted into a hanger bay or tractored in with a tractor beam. Larger vessels will be boarded by troops and flown back to another large vessel or a base. Some craft like ties cannot power off their weapons and do not have shields so they'd have to rely on their radios to announce intent. Should you have no radio and are intending to surrender there are certain procedures that vary by faction and era for signally distress or calling for parley. Usually this involves staying stationary or flying in a circle but again varies greatly.


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

[User]
ELI5: How are birthmarks made?

Question sparked by front page picture of man with huge birthmark.

[Assistant] A birthmark is a benign irregularity on the skin which is present at birth or appears shortly after birth, usually in the first month. They can occur anywhere on the skin. They can be things like excess fat, blood vessels, or skin pigment.


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

[User]
[Death Note] [spoilers] What was the significance of the note that Light found from L?

After L died, Light found a message from him that was short and seemingly meaningless and Light just deleted it. I don't understand that scene at all I guess.

[Assistant]
The first half of that episode was a recap, from L's perspective, with his voice-over, of the whole investigation. L wrote all of that down with supporting evidence. The short part at the end that was just plain text was a footnote. It was meant to be delivered to L's successor in case of his death.

Light deleted that whole recap so that nobody else could read over L's documents and pick up the same investigative thread. That's why M&N have to start from nothing, and why they're not immediately suspicious of Light, and it takes them years to catch up to what L knew.


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

[User]
[Daredevil S2] The Hand -- Matt's problem? How is this explained?

Several questions (feel free to answer one, or two, or none. Just going through a rewatch):

1) Matt can smell what Foggy ate like 60 hours ago, he can feel everything spatially, like space (the absence of an object) and an object. He's so good at it that while a car is swerving and an arrow is shot at him he catches it bare handed despite all the air blowing by his ear drums and the arrow traveling fast.

**How can he detect all these things but not the smell or space that the Hand Ninjas take up?**

He can hear Stick whisper from 3 stories up but can hear even footsteps? Or even the clothing being chafed?

Even if they were literally silent at 0 decibels....how is it that he can't detect where they are? He doesn't need heartbeats from inanimate objects to sense where they are.

**While inspecting a crime scene, he literally poked a bullet hole in the wall right on target, no feeling around.**

If he can detect bullet holes surely in a tunnel he can detect 4-5 Ninjas hanging around. Spatially he should be able to tell that something is there; they can be literally invisible but if they have mass and take up space -- Matt should be able to detect that occupation of space if he can detect a bullet hole in a BRICK WALL, which doesn't vibrate so there's basically no room for sound or an echo in the hole.

2) **Why would then Ninjas train like that?**

They're not training to be invisible to the naked eye, as they're easier to see.

They're training literally for blind supernatural people.

Elektra was able to spot every single ninja in the dark tenement using her eyes -- doesn't that make them terrible Ninjas to 99.999999999999% of the population (yes, that's a higher percentage than there are living people, but I assume that Matt is one in many generations type of superhero).

Why would they train for a superhero who had never existed before, ie to be undetectable, but then fail to train to be undetectable to eyesight?

Hiding heartbeats, hiding sounds, etc....Ninjas are supposed to be stealthy, and lack of sound audible to the normal person is enough -- they trained so they'd be inaudible to a *dog*, as Matt's hearing is arguably stronger than a dog if he can hear the TV broadcast in a hospital room 2-3 floors down.

And he can smell things. Feel things.

Hell, I had a terrible habit of using Q tips to clean my ear canal in college, and it led to all this ear wax being hardened and built up such that it stuck to my ear drum. I thought I went deaf and busted an ear drum; it turns out, there was like 2cm of HARD ear wax abutting it.

And in hallways, I could move around ok. But when playing baseball outside, it was hard to even walk or run because we don't realize how much we use our non-optical senses to get our bearings. I remember feeling like I was partially blind since I couldn't hear above 10% in my right ear. It affected the way i threw, caught, and ran.

Then I went to the doctor and the doctor said it was the thickest impaction he had seen. The nurse was surgical in her removal of it. And instantly, it was like my world went from black and white to color. I remember going from 10% to 100% hearing. It was too much at first. **I honestly felt like I had spidey senses for 10 minutes**.

I could hear every little thing, but walking was the biggest trip. I could "hear" an open elevator with the doors having already opened as opposed to closed ones -- I could sense that vacuum in the wall. It made me feel like I had a superpower for 10 minutes, since I went 2-3 months deaf in one ear.

So, for Matt, it must be that x 1000. He can sniff ammunition from 30 feet away. Hear can hear and smell like a super-dog.

But how often does/did the Hand face someone like that? Why even wear red?  Are they more scared of one hypothetical super sensed blind dude or 100 fighters with normal vision with the same strength?

The Ninjas don't even attack much like Ninjas. Swords? Face to face? Wouldn't an armored knight defeat a ninja like 9/10 times in close quarters? The ninja may tire the knight out, sure, but if the ninja is fighting close quarters face to face, it takes just one sword poke to kill one.

**Their entire training is based around a previously hypothetical super sensed deaf guy who got powers from a radioactive accident...and not just that, learned martial arts AND happened to become an enemy of the Hand!**

3) speaking of the Chaste -- **Why recruit the ONE type of fighter they've trained for?**

It's like a bunch of Ninjas with Kryptonite swords and clothing and recruiting Superman to fight them. Sure, he's fast, but all it takes is a ninja blindly hacking as Superman flies at them and Superman is literally sliced in half.

Elektra could spot the exact count using moon light. That is just bad ninja training, but great training against Daredevil.

4) **How do they hide heartbeats?**

As I understand it, the more exertion your body takes, the more oxygen the muscles need, and inhalation/exhalation is key -- but so is a heartbeat.

The heart cannot "*silently*" beat fast. **Their hearts are so silent that a stethoscope couldn't measure it**.

And none of this "zombie" crap if they're breathing. If they're undead, fine, no heartbeat -- but no breathing either.

Also. When one gets throat slit, blood gushes everywhere. That's a heart beating fast and hard. Are their hearts beating normally at like 20BPM with like 60/36 blood pressure while doing flips and fighting for their lives? Even at that level Matt should hear the random heartbeats.

5) **How does Stick fight them?**

He can't hear heartbeats, but he can feel the thread count on a bed by putting his palm 3 feet above it. He even asks Matt to use "his hearing" to listen for Elektra's heartbeat.

So what is he relying on?

Clearly the Hand didn't train for him, since it has failed, but it's also different from Matt's detection.

Can Stick hear inhalation? How can he hear that but Matt couldn't until Stick whispered it through 2 solid floors while Matt was defending himself?

I mean, how does Stick get his powers? He can aim a cross bow by sound -- but he's not superpowered. Just trained. Presumably.

Maybe he spent 50 years since he was 4-5 years old to learn how to get around blind while learning MMA. And then at age 55-75 he's been a fighter? I can buy that. 70+ years of specifically learning how to maximize your other senses? I buy it at this stage, even if he's not at physical peak --- he doesn't need to be with swords. Only worry is recovery time and agility and running speed, but not strength or skill.

6) For Matt it was a gift. He could learn at age 10 the fighting. But after maybe 6 months max, he learned all that ninja fighting in that span? It's not like he could use YouTube to suddenly learn how to fight more. Nor would classes teach him. He'd need a private tutor, which he only got through the few months of Stick.

**Basically, how did Matt learn so much MMA in so little time with so little experience and virtually no sparring from age 10 until his first real fight with the first guy who made him spit blood?**

Also, I can understand him fighting low level thugs who don't know a lick or MMA or even boxing.

But for him to jump from beating on child molestors and purse snatchers to Ninjas who are invisible to him? That's a huge leap.

Like going from 8th grade basketball to the NBA All Star fame. Going from school yard fights to MMA champ bouts. Going from whiffle ball to the majors. Going from mini golf to the PGA. Etc.

In S1, he met 3 skilled fighters who basically almost killed him the 3 times. Fisk was just a gorilla; a monkey can slap a gorilla here and there but once the gorilla catches you, you're crushed. They were likely the first and only actual fighters he faced before the Hand.

[Assistant] Matt's powers are rooted in the laws of physics, but The Hand employs magic - they don't remain hidden purely on skill, but on ritual. Matt can't easily detect them because their body and their movements are supernaturally quiet.


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

[User] [Demolition Man] What started the franchise wars? Was the "war" purely financial? What changed with United States antitrust laws that allowed Taco Bell to take over, or was there determined to be a way around them?

[Assistant]
This is a fun question.  You can actually see it happening now with fast food chains offering broader and broader menus and being owned by the same corporations.

Also look at how there used to be a million cell phone carriers and now it is pretty much AT&T and Verizon.

I figure the "War" was more aggressive expansion like Taco Bell selling burgers and McDonald's firing back by selling tacos.


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

[User] ELI5 If male pattern baldness is caused by testosterone, why are hairs on top of the head more affected by it and hairs like eyebrows, beard, inside ears etc, are affected less?

[Assistant]
Because hair follicles are different! It's super obvious comparing beard hairs, arm and leg hairs, even pubic hairs to head hairs. However, hairs on the head are also slightly different. The one up top are more susceptible to DHT, the "high-power version" of testosterone, that people make a little later in life.

Now, if you wanna know WHY? No clue. Bodies are weird.


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

[User]
I'm a staunch pacifist. CMV

I believe that killing is wrong in any situation and that there is no difference between murdering and killing. This stems from my belief that we as people cannot possibly judge these acts accurately, only some sort of God figure could. Because we cannot judge who should and should not be put to death, it is morally better to die than to kill, if forced into that choice. The reason we cannot judge acts of killing is that we cannot fathom the true meaning of dying, since none of us has experienced it before (hopefully!). All we do know about dying is that there is no coming back and so for any of us to condemn another person to this fate is never justifiable by human means alone. I'll just head off one potential counter argument right now and say that, yes, even in the case of Hitler, it is wrong to kill for the reason I outlined above: we don't know whether he truly deserves death (even though we are pretty strongly convinced). I think that killing another person is overstepping human bounds and acting as a God-like judge. Change my view.

[Assistant] If killing is worse than dying, then surely by letting someone kill you rather than killing them, you're actually being selfish and putting the burden of doing the worse thing on the shoulders of someone else.


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

[User] Are insects affected by inbreeding like mammals?

[Assistant] All life on earth is negatively impacted by inbreeding, including insects. This includes organisms that reproduce sexually vs asexually. Consider that a single bacterial colony originating from a single bacteria is much more susceptible to we wiped out by disease or antibiotics then a bacterial colony originating from 10 different bacteria.


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

[User]
ELI5: The difference between the right to remain silent in England and the US

I've seen a few TV shows set in England where characters are told "You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court." when they are arrested.

I'm pretty familiar with how the 5th amendment works in the US. What are the practical differences with how things work in England? What would be an example of a situation where being silent could be used against you there that wouldn't be able to happen in the US?

[Assistant]
The right to avoid self incrimination actually originated in the UK, and is enjoyed by countries that share their common law tradition.

In 1994, this right was amended.  If you decline to explain yourself to the police, then later come up with some elaborate excuse, a jury is allowed to consider the possibility you made something up after having time to think about it.

In the US, jury are not supposed to draw an inference from your silence.


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

[User]
ELI5: If your heart has roughly 1 billion beats before natural failure, why is cardio exersize good for you?

Is it the same principle behind other muscles? Working them out makes them stronger?

[Assistant]
Two reasons.

- Cardio doesn't just exercise your heart. It exercises your lungs and your muscles associated with endurance. This helps your body a LOT, doing things like assisting your metabolism to keep your weight down, adding to your bone density from the impacts, lowering your blood pressure, and increasing your stability so you won't fall and break a hip.

- And your heart has *roughly* a billion beats, there's no ticking countdown clock. Some people get way more, some people get way less. It's more of a rough general observation than any sort of limiting estimate or warranty period.

P.S. fit people have lower beats per minute than unfit people, offsetting the extra heartbeats that occur when they exercise anyway.

*LATE EDIT: A lot of people have already pointed out that the average lifespan of a human means closer to 3 billion beats. Just pushing that up to the top for accuracy.*


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

[User]
Why is nuclear power in France have a 40% share of energy consumption yet a 76.3% share of energy production?

does*

[Assistant] The nations of Europe are trading electricity with each other. In fact most of continental Europe shares one synchronized power grid, so Hungary may very well order some nuclear electricity in France when their production is short.


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

[User] ELI5: Why is the heat you feel from eating horseradish different than the heat you feel from eating hot sauce?

[Assistant]
Hot peppers contain capsaicin, a chemical which "tricks" heat sensitive nerve endings in your mouth and causes those nerves to send a fake "this is hot" signal. More capsaicin equals more spicy.

Horseradish and wasabi (although to be honest you may have never eaten real wasabi, commercially available wasabi paste is usually just horseradish with green food colouring) anyway horseradish has a completely different spicy chemical, alllyl isothiocyanate, which is also responsible for spiciness in mustard. You feel this more in your sinus as the vapors are released when you consume horseradish and they rise up inside the back of your pharynx where it interacts with TRPA1 nerve endings and sends a "pain" signal

Garlic has yet another spicy chemical, allicin.

Black pepper has piperine.


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

[User]
[Everything Everywhere All at Once] Where did Alpha-Gong Gong get that wheelchair from when he was in Evelyn's universe?

Could he have verse-jumped and built it all by himself?

[Assistant]
There appears to be a kind of envelope around people that allows them to pull some objects. Otherwise how'd the universal jumping devices get through to be given to Evelyn?
Maybe her father as a senior member of the program has access to greater technology for that direct effect.

Remember most of the jumping we see has been the stuff done out of a moving van with a small lab.


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

[User]
My five year old asked me what if anything can destroy a black hole? help?

Edit - Wow...this blew up!!! My kid is gonna freak out...he honestly is gonna love this, he is constantly asking about asteroids, exploding suns, etc.  We were pretending that I had spaceships and that he had suns which always destroyed my rockets, but then I pulled the trump black hole card and destroyed his sun.  He didn't like that which prompted the question.  Thanks Reddit...what fun!!! Wow...I am not smart enough to read most of what's here.  I'm a lighting designer by trade but seriously you guys are smart.   I'm gonna need about 10 more cups of tea and a weekend to read through the comments.

2nd Edit - First time front page!! So cool....made my day and my kids day...... :-)

[Assistant]
Nothing external can destroy a black hole.  However, a black hole will eventually disappear on its own (but eventually here means an absurdly long time).

A black hole has a boundary called its event horizon.  General relativity tells us that anything that crosses the event horizon can never get back out, so black holes only grow, never get smaller.

However, there is an effect due to quantum mechanics and discovered by Hawking that causes a black hole to evaporate -- the mass of the black hole turns into radiation that goes away from the black hole.

But note that this evaporation effect is very, very, very slow.  A black hole with the mass of the Sun (which would be a small black hole, only about 3 km or 2 miles in size) would take 10^(67) years to evaporate.  Thus even though black holes will eventually evaporate, the length of time is extraordinarily long (the universe today has been around for only about 14 billion years).


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

[User] [MCU] If Thanos left the 2014 timeline and went to the 2023 timeline in Endgame, then does that mean the events of Infinity War won't happen there with Thanos being gone? This also means = Infinity stones aren't destroyed, Iron Man doesn't die, Cap doesn't get old, and no one dusted.

[Assistant]
Technically yes, but there is reason to believe that that timeline might not get off that easily.

We've learned from the Loki trailers that the TVA exists, and their job seems to be to undo variant timelines. Furthermore, Steve and Bruce believe that returning the Infinity Stones to their proper timelines will "clip the branches" of those alternate timelines from the main timeline. And then there's always the possibility of universal course-correction where if the timeline deviates from the norm, the universe will do what it can to get things back to normal which was seemingly explored in the final season of Agents of SHIELD.

Which basically means that even though this alternate 2014 universe looks safe at the moment, in 4-9 years' time, Tony might still die, Cap might still find a reason to travel back to the past and age, and someone else might cause a universal cataclysm. Or the alternate timeline might just cease to exist altogether.


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

[User]
ELI5: Why do earthworms appear in big numbers on sidewalks when it is raining, and why are they not there when it is not raining?

Today was a rainy day, and I saw plenty of earthworms which I rarely see otherwise. This is why I was asking this myself. I also do not see any advantage of earthworms to be on the sidewalks.

[Assistant]
Some will say that the water soaks into the soil and makes it hard for them to breathe, but the more likely reason is that earthworms don't usually move about on the surface because it's so dry that THAT makes it hard for them to breathe.

Worms breathe through their skin and need that skin to be moist. It's easier to move around on the surface than underground, but usually the surface is too dry, so when it rains they can take that opportunity to move around easier and not dry out.


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

[User]
[Warhammer Fantasy] Are the dark elves plagued by chaos invasions?

The dark elves lives on the edge of the chaos wastes, yet every time you you hear about chaos invasions they are always focused on the old world, with kislev, grand cathay or the empire, or on the Vortex at ulthuan. Are the dark elves plagued by their own chaos invasions, or if no, why not?

[Assistant]
They fight them off - and built the great city-fortress of Ghrond for that specific purpose - but it's worth noting that there's not much of a human population in Naggaroth to become corrupted by chaos. So if you're a human (or formerly human) servant of chaos, going all the way across the Chaos Wastes to attack the Dark Elves is far more of a faff than simply marching south to despoil the human kingdoms. So while there have been countless raids and at least a couple of major invasions, they're far less frequent than attacks on the human lands.

Daemonic hordes also invade, of course, but they're that little bit more vulnerable to magic, which the Druchi are very good at.

The Dark Elves also sometimes ally with chaos, and summon and bind daemons for their own purposes. Notably (at least in older lore), their invasion of Ulthuan 200 years ago part of the Great War Against Chaos, with the Dark Elves fighting alongside daemons and Chaos Warriors.


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

[User]
[The Walking Dead] How perfect was the prison as a refuge from the dead

I seem to recall it being almost like paradise. Easily defendab!e once it's been cleared out of walkers.

[Assistant]
The style they were in? Great short term, not so great long term.

It's a modern prison, so the outer perimeter was just fencing. Great for keeping out zombies until they reached a critical level, then the fence comes down. Unless you have somebody on zombie duty every day, the numbers pile up. That then has it's own issues for clearing the corpses.

Issue here is your farming, water, etc, all rely on that fence. It also means anything on the other side of the fence could easily see you. Unless this style was reinforced with something like railroad ties, concrete barriers , etc, it's not a long term solution.

The old-time, pre 1950s style prisons would have been better. The outer perimeter wall tends to be made of brick or concrete, so you quite literally have the zombie-apocalypse equivalent of a castle. It might not keep out a modern human attacker, but it will do a great job against walkers.


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

[User] Babies survive by eating solely a mother's milk. At what point do humans need to switch from only a mother's milk, and why? Or could an adult human theoretically survive on only a mother's milk of they had enough supply?

[Assistant] Babies are born with a store of iron which is sufficient to last about 6 months, but breast milk does not contain sufficient iron to keep a person healthy indefinitely. Even if one had enough breast milk to meet their caloric needs, iron deficiency would be a problem eventually.


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

[User] ELI5: If chugging a carbonated drink feels like it's burning my throat, is it REALLY burning my throat?

[Assistant]
Ha.... yeah!

Phosphoric acid is desolving your tissue, but thats not what you feel.  You feel the carbonation.  That pain is not burning your throat.

Phosphoric acid is deliberately added to soft drinks to give them a sharper flavor. It also slows the growth of molds and bacteria, which would otherwise multiply rapidly in the sugary solution.
Almost all of the acidity of soda pop comes from the phosphoric acid and not from the carbonic acid from the dissolved CO2. You can verify this by measuring the pH of fresh and flat soda pop; there's very little difference.

The phosphoric acid is corrosive, but actually the acid concentration in soda pop is lower than that in orange juice or lemonade. Try submerging identical strips of magnesium (or iron staples) in each of these beverages overnight. Which beverage dissolves more metal? Which dissolves the metal fastest?

Fruit juices and drinks are also tart, but they don't use phosphoric acid as a flavor additive. Phosphoric acid would cause many ions present in fruit juices to settle out as insoluble phosphates. These beverages get their tang from citric acid, a substance found in oranges, limes, lemons and grapefruits. Malic acid, found in apples and cherries, is added to many fruit juices. Fumaric acid is used in noncarbonated soft drinks, and tartaric acid gives grape-flavored candies a subtle sour flavor. All of these substances impart only tartness, without overpowering other flavors present.


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

[User]
ELI5; Why are some genes expressed in some cells and not others?

ELI5 ; What makes some genes not to be expressed in some cells and be expressed in others. Like cells of the skin have the same genome as the pancreatic islet cells yet only the pancreas can produce insulin and every cell in the body has the gene for insulin.

[Assistant] I can answer this! Its related to what are known as molecular switches which are a way in which cells can regulate gene expression. Certain parts of your dna can be blocked, temporarily or permanently, by cellular machinery which means that transcription machinery (the way in which mRNA molecules are made that allow peptides to be produced) can only access and process certain stretches of DNA. Thats a very simplistic way of looking at it, expression can be turned up or down too when needed. Think of it as like having a traffic controller that can block off a road and then reopen it when needed.


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

[User] ELI5: What's the difference between an Electric Induction Motor (e.g. Tesla S) and a Synchronous Motor (Leaf & Volt)?

[Assistant]
An induction motor uses coils on the outside connected to an AC power source. The changing Alternating Current _induces_ a current in the rotating armature, and that current interacts with the current in the coils to produce a force which makes the armature rotate. An induction motor produces good torque at all speeds with a fixed AC frequency.

A synchronous motor uses either permanent magnets or fixed electromagnets to make a field, and the AC current works against that field. Because of this, they can only run at a speed dictated by the frequency of the AC current. At any other speed, most of the electric power input is wasted, and the power output is low. For multiple speed operation, the frequency of the input must be changed.


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

[User]
ELI5: How do people develop bad eyesight over the years?

Edit: I understand old age, but why do some children as small as 5 years get specs while sometimes people in their 40s dont?

[Assistant]
If you mean why do people need reading glasses in middle age and the glasses need to get stronger and stronger as they age more then the answer is as follows ;

The lens in your eye gets less flexible as people grow older because layers similar to an onion build up. This lack of flexibility makes focusing on nearby objects more difficult.

By shining a bright light at the writing your pupil contracts which increases the focus so you can read small writing in daylight but not indoors.


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

[User]
CMV: In the Wizarding World of J.K. Rowling, Hufflepuff should have been the most popular house

Hello,

   As an educator and reader of the Harry Potter books, I believe that in a more thought out portrayal of the universe in the Harry Potter books that the Hufflepuff house would be the most popular, at least within Hogwarts itself. This does not mean that I believe that any of the major events within the books would be different, only that the esteem that the Hufflepuff house was held in would be higher. I believe that the huge amount of favouritism that was shown towards Gryffindor would not occur in a more fleshed out world. Among the educators, I think that the hard work, dedication and a tendency towards fair play would make the Hufflepuff ideal students along with Ravenclaws. I believe that the Gryffindor, far from being the teachers pets would be regarded as a constant headache and as entitled students who think that they are above the laws. I also believe that Hufflepuffs would be highly regarded as friends and co-workers for much the same reasons. They would be patient, caring and show loyalty. Not to say many facets of personality are not important but if you were getting a group partner, new co-worker, room mate, boss or friend you would hope for and value a Hufflepuff.

[Assistant] In Peacetime, Hufflepuff is probably the "best house". However, remember, in the context of the books, the wizarding world is at war. Book 4 onwards, Hogwarts and the wizard world more resembles a war zone that a school. Gryffindor is the house of bravery and selflessness, which in times of war, is arguably more important than social aptitude or even intelligence. Also, the books are told from Harry and cos. perspective, so much of the favoritism comes from the head master of Gryffindor. We just don't happen to see the head of Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw expressing favoritism because we are never in their perspective. (I cannot even remember which professors they even are to be honest).


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

[User]
ELI5:Why do men go bald more often then women?

As a male I'm deathly afraid of going bald. My father is a cue ball.

[Assistant] Baldness is caused by something called DHT (dihydrotestosterone). It is a byproduct of testosterone. It causes finer hair and a receding hairline. Because men have more testosterone, they have more DHT. Some men are more susceptible to DHT which is why they get male pattern baldness.


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

[User] ELI5: Why smoking marijuana makes people feel good, makes music sound better, makes things more funny, etc.

[Assistant] In your brain there are lots and lots of chemicals. Some of them make you feel happy and some of them make you feel sad. When your brain, which is like a giant computer, wants to tell you that you should feel happy it releases those chemicals and you feel happy! Soemtimes, the things we do can trick our brain into making us think we're happy, like marijuana. When you smoke marijuana your body gets very confused and releases all sorts of chemicals that affect the way you see and experience the world.