How long will the Great Lakes last?
Is it possible to receive an electric shock when you *stop* touching something?
I seem to remember as a young child being told that it is safe to touch a Van de Graff generator (for the hair demonstration), but that if you let go before it is safe you will get a nasty shock. I know a bit more about electricity now, and I'm a little skeptical now. Is it possible to get a shock from letting go of something?
Could death by starvation be delayed by drinking your own blood?
Let's say you are dying of starvation. You pull one of your teeth out, causing blood to slowly seep into your mouth, which you swallow. The calories from the blood getting digested will delay the time you die of starvation, right? Or will losing blood while starving kill you faster?
If you have some cold water evaporating, is it possible to make it evaporate sooner by adding hot water?
How hot would it have to be?
Atapuerca – human cannibalism 1 million years ago: what is known about the evolution of human morality over time into the near current era?
I just watched the recent video from Stephen Milo on human life 1 million years ago. He mentions cannibalism evidence across multiple events. That has me thinking about morality in isolated groups and how it might have evolved or could evolve differently....
Does anyone know about fluid dynamics?
I have a question I need to ask but I want to do it privately as the topic it correlates to is pretty taboo. Please comment or dm me, and I'll dm you back.
If Mars has an impact on Earth's Milankovitch cycles, what instability does the nearly binary Earth/Luna system have on Mars, Venus, and beyond?
Mars influence on the Milankovitch cycles:...
How do we know the Hubble Parameter is constant in space?
Since we know that it isn't constant with time, how can we be sure that it is constant with space? This might be a reason the variability in our measurements which seem to disagree....
What is going on with that atmosphere/light around the rocket in this photo? ( assets.pxlmo.com )
This was a SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 launch from Cape Canaveral that occurred around 1900 local time on March 4th, 2024. The photo was taken from about 65km from the launch site. The rocket was in the 2nd stage....
![](https://mbin.grits.dev/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/bb/55/bb5545ab81b9b850584830a9e9e543286d6bca50d969695cc7cd7c9f826bc6f4.jpg)
How much longer will the age of Science last?
I'm curious what your take is on the finite nature of Science. I imagine the fractal "edge" will always remain illusive, but when do we hit 98% or 99.999% documented confirmed, distilled, and well explained? (Centuries? Millennia?) When does it become an engineering corpus?...
What mechanism is the source for Earth's Nitrogen?
I recall an explanation of the formation of Jovian moons on the Harvard Smithsonian "CfA Colloquium" YT channel that casually mentioned how various elements freeze out of the solar wind forming ices, and this is the mechanism that allows formation of moons with large amounts of water and elements that are not found in larger...
What's the equivalent of physics constants for social studies?
In physics, it's common to develop a formula and then stick a constant to explain the unknown. For example, Newton's theory of gravity uses the gravitational constant G on the formula F = G * m_1 * m_2 / r^2, later on Einstein gave a more accurate explanation with the theory of relativity which does not rely on a constant E = m...
[Biology] The umbilical cord: is it 'necessary' to sever it, or is it designed to disconnect on its own eventually?
What are the consequences of not severing it? I imagine you'd have the weirdest bellybutton on earth if nothing else....
What is the best medium for transmitting sound?
I know that sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum, you can hear it muddled in water, and different temperatures of air transmit better. But which is the “best”. Let’s say you had a speaker and a microphone in an enclosed case filled with whatever you wanted, which would be the best medium to ensure the best sound...
Why are the graphs for the distribution of light from the Sun as a function of (a) frequency and (b) wavelength not exactly reversed? ( www.wtamu.edu )
I thought that the frequency of light was directly inverse to the wavelength by a constant. In other words, I assumed that graphing the frequency of light as a function of wavelength would be a straight inverse line. Because of that, the graphs for the distribution of light from the sun as functions of frequency and wavelength...
![](https://mbin.grits.dev/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/e8/71/e87144f6a1ebbd985440f009c4362703e141b787dafa150850bb5d99a5544ee2.png)
Is the air in a closed container at 100% relative humidity?
Imagine a sealed container filled with any amount of liquid water at any constant temperature and pressure where water can be liquid. Is the air in the container necessarily at 100% relative humidity?
What part of sunlight causes algae to grow?
I’ve been trying different searches but everything I find just says “sunlight”. Since sunlight consists of multiple parts such as UV, Infrared and the normal visible spectrum, I’m curious which part is actually responsible for photosynthesis to occur? On that note, depending on what part of the light, would it still grow...
How could SI units be derived from scratch without the use of modern technology?
Think "you wake up in the woods naked," Dr. Stone-style tech reset. How could humans acquire a 1-gram weight, a centimeter ruler, an HH:MM:SS timekeeping device, etc. starting with natural resources?...
if something happened to the black hole at the center of our galaxy, could we know about that problem before it affected us?
We know that light and even gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light....
Is The Thought Emporium real? ( www.youtube.com )
cross-post: https://lemmy.world/post/1426387...
![](https://mbin.grits.dev/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/74/43/7443c9f6723778409ed45b6952ac0dc3be498b6eca06d8f161445216df75f341.jpg)
What was the historical science debate that seems silliest in hind sight?
I'm thinking of things like heliocentrism where there was some modern discovery or revelation by science that invalidated a common assumption prior....
25 years of massive fusion energy experiment data open on the 'cloud' and available to everyone ( phys.org )
High-temperature fusion plasma experiments conducted in the Large Helical Device (LHD) of the National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), have renewed the world record for an acquired data amount, 0.92 terabytes (TB) per experiment, in February 2022, by using a full range of state-of-the-art plasma diagnostic devices....
![](https://mbin.grits.dev/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/f3/64/f36430dbd34329be1afe4cc14501823464b6b75e4de3ca2cbbdb0120e5d1d100.jpg)
Humans are notoriously bad at absorbing iron from plant sources, while herbivores seem to do fine. What's up with that?
... or do they just make up for it with sheer unrelieved quantity of greenery, perhaps?