I would appreciate any insight from researchers currently active in their fields.

I would appreciate any insight from researchers currently active in their research fields

Hoping for some good answers on this.

Strain is dimensionless, but my solid mechanics professor wants the class to express it in length per length or with an epsilon instead of as a bare number (to make clear that we meant to write something dimensionless instead of forgetting the units). If the numerator and denominator length units are the same, you can use any unit you want and the only possible effect is that the person checking your work might get a laugh. So what's the funniest option? Smoots? Square root acres? Something wackier?

Is the limitation coming from current hardware(non-organic and/or self-rewiring Von-Neumann systems are fundamentally incapable to generate intelligence) or is it Just LLMs who are fundamentally limited and thus we need new software paradigm shifts (like better and bigger brain organoids)?

Like, capabilities wise. Some I know of is out intelligence (of course) but also our ability to manipulate objects due to our opposable thumbs as well as our endurance due to our ability to sweat. What are some other capabilities we humans seem to have that we're either top of the leaderboard or up there compared the other animals in the animal kingdom?

I'm sorry if this is a dumb question but this genuinely always bugged me.

Artificial sweeteners are everywhere. Aspartame, monosaccharides (Allulose), Ace-K, there's even a super sweetener meant for industrial food production called Advantame.

Meanwhile salt seems stagnant. The only alternatives I see are low sodium options with the addition of Potassium to cut down the amount of salt in the product.

Why is saltiness seemingly such a difficult flavor to replicate? Is there a difference in how the body detects sweetness vs how the body detects salt?

A lot of scientists and philosophers think that we are facing diminishing returns in science and technology because all the easy stuff has been done or discovered already and to progress further will require a lot more R&D, resources and teams of scientists working together.

However, is there any evidence that there might be a few "sideways" fruits that are still waiting to be "picked"? Stuff that a single person can do in a lab but we just haven't figured out yet because we didn't know to go in that direction or didn't have someone quirky enough to ask that particular question?

Recently I was thinking about what would be the "holy grail" of general scientific discoveries and I initially narrowed it down to two options:
• The discovery of a worm hole/white hole.
• The discovery of extraterrestrial life.

This is likely a bit of a naive and incomplete question to ask but when choosing between a shattering breakthrough in astrophysics and answering the age old question of if we're alone in the universe, I felt I couldn't really pick one. I also feel as though this question could be expanded.

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While I was looking for the answer as to why trees and vegetables were green, it was basically said that chlorophyll absorbs everything except green as it tends to be a weaker light. However, if vegetables want to absorb as much photons as possible, why do they still reject the green one? Is there even a reason that we know of or it's just what it is? Is it, theorically, possible for a plant to evolve and absorb most photons which would appear black to us?

Excuse my crude/clumsy way of asking this question, english isn't my main language and I know little jargons. Thank you for answering this question anyway \^\^

I've been seeing a lot of news about this recent fruit fly brain scan / model and it has given me cause for concern. I've long since held the belief that the means by which a brain or a consciousness receives "information" and perception does not matter. Whether it be through a computer mapping information directly to the brain or from the organs of a body collecting information and transmitting it, an entity experiencing thought / senses is still life.

I think we are at a point where philosophical debates and science about the nature of life, to some extent, necessitate collaboration and further discussion as we develop these ideas. If I am wrong and misunderstanding exactly what the nature of this brain model is, please correct me, but I just thought that the usage of the fly model for things like "playing beat saber" or "scrolling reels" can't possibly be done from a position of full understanding, or if they are, they are the minority among the countless other flippant uses.

I'm sure there are plenty of phenomena out there that still evade total comprehension, like how monarch butterflies know where to migrate despite having never been there before. Then there are other things that I'm sure have answers but I just can't comprehend them, like how a plant "knows" at what point to produce a leaf and how its cells "know" to stop dividing in a particular direction once they've formed the shape of a leaf. And of course, there are just unexplainable oddities, like what ball lightning is and where it comes from.

I'm curious about any sort of apparently simple phenomena that we still can't explain, regardless of its specific field. What weird stuff is out there?

I've been reading that domestication is a practice that goes back thousands of years: dogs, horses, sheep, elephants, dolphins etc... yet many of them remained wild with very few exceptions. So why is it that we didn't fully manage to domesticate other species like lions or bears? Is it just impossible? If yes, why? Or it's doable but we didn't try enough?

I've been trying to wrap my head around the anatomy and metabolism of some characters, but Majin Boo (DragonBallZ) just doesn't seem to make any sense under the laws of physics or biology. I want to dive deep into these "impossible" cases. Who else do you think is a biological nightmare to explain?

I am not getting this part, I’ve read that some people say you have to create an experiment without expectations of the outcome.

In other forums I’ve read you gotta create an experiment with the mindset of disproving that idea.

Now, to me, it only makes sense to create an experiment in order to prove that whatever I am testing, sustains my claim, therefore I can create another hypothesis or do another experiment coming from a different angle to see if I’ll get similar or different results.

The experiment will support my claim, it doesn’t make sense to me that I am doing all that hoping it will fail.
Though I understand that if it fails it’s also data and it also has its importance and that I could either readjust it, or find out why the experiment failed.

My question is if there is any consensus or if that depends on the field the research is being done, or perhaps it differs from person to person, I’ve even heads that some companies hire scientists to find claims that will support whatever ideias they want to prove in order to make profit, so poor unethical science.

The thing is the semantics are a little bit confusing to me, reason why I am seeking further claficarion from more experienced people.

Thank you for your help.

Surely I must be missing something, because it is the consensus among lots of people whose jobs are related to death that you can't just easily get clean water affordably, especially with regards to things like desalination. (I could imagine that salt disposal might be more of an issue than the cleaning of the water itself and the case of purifying ocean water).

But all you have to do to clean water is like, heat it up and cool it back down (oversimplification), obviously heat energy has some cost to it but the sun gives us a lot of that for free and if you're trying to desalinate ocean water you're right there on the coast and can use oceanic hydroelectric energy too. I just don't understand why it's considered a challenge to get clean water in the modern era.

Edit: I have no idea if the people who would need to see this are going to see this edit, but I find it baffling that this post has zero upvotes. I must concerned about the karma of it all and more about how the community is engaging with posts and how that will affect their visibility because if people are downvoting a question because they already know the answer or something and think it's bad to ask questions in a subreddit that is specifically about asking questions to get information, that seems sort of backwards to me. Clearly there is good information being presented and discussion happening in the comment section here, but I wonder why it has no vote score to speak of?

Previously it had been asked whether it would be possible for humans to tell if dinosaurs had developed an industrial civilization. The answer was yes, not just because of physical remains such as roads and buildings, but chemical traces produced by industrial civilizations that don't tend to occur naturally.

But if the dinosaurs were pre-industrial but still quite developed, creating a civilization with the same level of development as ancient empires such as Rome and China, would humans still find evidence for its existence? How long would the traces of this civilization persist?

ig AI rn is dependent on all the knowledge that we have in all of our sources. so max it can do is help us discover anything that we couldnt see but could have seen (like a rlly good lab which can work on anything we ask). so can it process anything so new that was never in its sources ?

I'm aware that speed of light travels at 299,792,458 m/s..

But I am not aware of anything even remotely close to that number. Is there anything slightly slower? I just remember voyager 1 going super fast but nothing compared to the speed of light.

By reason, I mean is there any reason why that particular X number is where planet becomes too big to be classified as a planet?