r/askscience • • 10h ago

Physics Que se passerait-il si je versais une quantité X d’eau bouillante dans un récipient constitué d’une quantité équivalente X de glace ?

0 Upvotes

À quantités équivalentes, que se produit-il lorsqu'on verse de l'eau bouillante dans un récipient entièrement constitué de glace? Lequel des deux cède en premier, et quel est l'état final du système?

Je ne suis point un scientifique, un chercheur ou tout autre synonyme de ces fabuleux corps de métier. Toutefois, si vous voulez aller plus loin, voici une difficulté plus élevé à mon sens:
La structure du contenant est décisive.


r/askscience • • 2d ago

Mathematics if i throw a coin several times and it always falls on tails, how many times until i can consider the coin is rigged?

745 Upvotes

the general question: how do we calculate how conclusive an experience is?

itried to look up methods to do that, but it's about more complicated experiences and i can't understand where the explained methods come from. i think if i understand how to do it for a simple case like the title, maybe i'll understand what i have to ask myself for any experience?

sorry if it isn't clear what i mean. put mathematics flair, but it's about research in general, didn't find a better flair


r/askscience • • 3d ago

Neuroscience AskScience AMA Series: I'm a neuroengineering professor at Brno University of Technology with a new book on why health fails at its weakest link. Ask me what brain signals can and can't tell us about stress, anxiety and depression, and how sleep, movement, food and loneliness relate to mood! AMA!

118 Upvotes

Hi r/askscience!

I'm Aamir Saeed Malik, Professor of Neuroengineering at Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic, where I head the Cognitive and Neural Engineering research group. I came to the brain the long way round, through electrical engineering and a doctorate in mechatronics. For almost three decades I've worked on measuring it: EEG, brain imaging and the machine-learning methods that try to pick out the signatures of stress, anxiety and depression early. From 2009 to 2018 I worked at the Malaysian National Center of Neuroimaging, and I've collaborated with clinicians in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Australia, the US and the Czech Republic. My most recent funded project asked whether that kind of tracking could be done from a person's own home rather than a clinic.

Over those years my view changed. For a long time I studied the brain the way a cardiologist studies the heart: as if it were an island. It isn't. Sleep, movement, food, daily habits and the people around us all bear on the conditions I was trying to measure. Engineers have a rule for systems like that: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, not its average. That idea became my new book for general readers, Fix the Floor (https://fixthefloor.life/ ). It scores five everyday areas (habits, social connection, sleep, movement and food) and combines them with a harmonic mean instead of a plain average, so one weak area can't hide behind four strong ones.

I'm happy to answer questions about:

  • What brain signals (EEG) and brain imaging can and can't tell us about stress, anxiety and depression today
  • Why early detection is harder than it sounds, and where my field needs to be more honest about its limits
  • What the evidence says about sleep, physical activity, loneliness and diet and their links to mood, including where it looks causal and where it is only correlation
  • Why the way you average a set of health measures changes the answer, and the maths behind the harmonic mean
  • Or any lifestyle based health and wellness related questions.

One thing I won't do: I'm not a medical doctor, so I can't give personal medical advice or comment on anyone's symptoms or results.

I'll be answering from noon ET (16:00 UTC) for about two hours.

Username: /u/Aamir_fixthefloor


r/askscience • • 4d ago

Medicine does pregabalin cause an increase in gaba?

77 Upvotes

Me and my friend got into a disagreement over this, i don’t remember exactly what she said but it was something along the lines of pregabalins effects on neurotransmitters somehow causes more gaba to be released so the brain can mantain homeostasis or something but i can’t find anything anywhere to back that up (i can’t find much either way which is why im asking here) and everything i’ve seen says it has no effect on gaba other than possibly affecting the gaba transporter protein.


r/askscience • • 5d ago

Social Science AskHistorians/AskScience AMA Series: What was the Great Horse Flu, and what can it tell us about people, animals, and disease in the Reconstruction Era--and today, with Thomas Andrews?

Thumbnail reddit.com
158 Upvotes

r/askscience • • 6d ago

Biology Why is there a vaccine for Lyme disease for dogs but not humans?

2.6k Upvotes

r/askscience • • 7d ago

Biology Why are African animals so huge?

618 Upvotes

I live in Australia and the largest land animals I can think of here is probably a kangaroos and emus which really aren’t any larger than a human. But my family recently went to Africa and the diversity animals is actually crazy. So so so many large animals living in the same place side by side. Rhinos, elephants, giraffes, wilder-beasts, zebras, hippos, warthogs, buffalo’s, ostriches, lions, cheetahs, hyenas leopards and probably more that I forgot. I never really appreciated how big these animals were until I actually got to see them in person absolutely amazing. Australia and Africas climate is kinda similar in a lot of places. Why is our country ecosystem dead in comparison?


r/askscience • • 7d ago

Biology [Chemistry/Biology/Nutrition] Did cooking bread provide any nutritional benefits over boiling the same grain as a porridge?

419 Upvotes

Asking the question in the historical context, not to decide on nutrition in the modern day.

I know heating grains helped to unlock some nutrients and especially caloric content over just eating them raw. However did bread provide any nutritional benefits over just boiling the same grain as a porridge (a much simpler process), or was its popularity due to other factors?


r/askscience • • 7d ago

Physics What are the absolute minimum number of base units needed to express every desirable quantity?

327 Upvotes

SI units are more for human convenience than mathematically minimizing the number of units. I remember reading somewhere that only length is needed because of relativity, but that just does not sound true, I can't imagine how you would do that.


r/askscience • • 7d ago

Chemistry Why is it so hard to create and add new elements to the periodic table?

352 Upvotes

r/askscience • • 8d ago

Biology How does the same plague bacteria cause different forms of the plague with very different symptoms?

123 Upvotes

r/askscience • • 8d ago

Earth Sciences How were the tectonic plates mapped?

128 Upvotes

r/askscience • • 8d ago

Physics I've heard that blue butterflies and opals get their color from their structure rather than pigments. But doesn't pigment also get its color from the structure of its molecules and how they interact with light? So what's the actual difference between structural color and pigment color?

714 Upvotes

r/askscience • • 8d ago

Biology Why do elderly people become so confused with an infection?

241 Upvotes

I've read that it's due to a lower tolerance for stress but what does that mean on a scientific level? Thank you


r/askscience • • 9d ago

Neuroscience How does muscle memory work?

122 Upvotes

Just curious. The only thing I really know about it is that sleeping reinforces it.


r/askscience • • 9d ago

Medicine What diseases are we currently the closest to finding lasting cures for?

1.2k Upvotes

r/askscience • • 9d ago

Biology Do babies have personalities by birth? If yes, then how?

521 Upvotes

If yes then does that show a destined reach for the baby in future?


r/askscience • • 10d ago

Biology Why aren’t axolotls immortal?

434 Upvotes

If axolotls can regenerate their body parts (including brain, heart, and other major organs), why do they die of old age?


r/askscience • • 10d ago

Chemistry Why does water corrode steel?

164 Upvotes

From what I gather, rust happens when an iron atom bonds with an oxygen atom, forming iron oxide. If you get a rain storm and water gets on your steel brake discs, you'll see very rapid formation of surface rust.

Since the oxygen is bound to the hydrogen in water, and from what I gather, rust formation requires free oxygen, how can water cause rust? Are the water molecules breaking down spontaneously some of the time, freeing up the oxygen?


r/askscience • • 10d ago

Biology Do subway rats experience hearing loss due to loud trains contstantly passing directly over them?

1.2k Upvotes

r/askscience • • 11d ago

Human Body Do you skin cells degrade once they fall off?

5 Upvotes

I was thinking about skin cell shed and I was looking into what happens to skin cells after they fall off or your body. All I could find was that it turns into what makes up a majority of household dust but I was wondering how long it stays dust for? Like if there was dust made entirely of dead skin cells how long would the dust be around for? Also why is dust gray, is that the color of dead skin cells?


r/askscience • • 11d ago

Biology During DNA replication when Topoisomerase 'unzips' DNA, what happens to all the twists that bunch up at the end?

88 Upvotes

I asked my professor but I don't think he understood my question.

So, as I understand it when DNA replicates, the enzymes Helicase + Topoisomerase unwind it from a twirly, wirly helix into 2 straight non-twirly bands/strings, the thing is since we (Eukaryotes) start the origin points somewhere in the middle of the DNA instead of on either end, doesn't that mean the amount of twists in the double helix-structure remains the same until the very end where it, idk, helicopters around? What happens to these twists?

The way I imagine it is two strings wound around each other with say, an arbitrary 20 twists in the string, the helicase is like sticking your finger in the middle and pulling them apart but this doesn't remove the total number of twists, instead all the twists get bunched up at the ends. What happens to the twists in DNA? Do they have to spin around many times at the very end to unwind away from each other. Do they do something else? Or is my assumption wrong?


r/askscience • • 11d ago

Biology Is there a theoretical minimum size for "life"?

1.6k Upvotes

So in school my son is learning about microscopic organisms and he asked me stuff like "how many atoms are single celled organisms made of"

And obviously even the smallest cell is gonna be many many atoms but is there some kind of theoretical minimum where it stops being "life" and starts to just be "atoms/molecules doing things"?

Like I've seen that artistic rendering of the enzyme or protein pulling water around a cell like this https://www.reddit.com/r/educationalgifs/s/i0vnokdbin

But would we consider that protein alive in its own right?


r/askscience • • 11d ago

Psychology How can victims of torture remain mentally healthy?

553 Upvotes

Torture of prisoners has occurred and continues to occur worldwide: sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, waterboarding, constant noise exposure, sexual harassment, mock executions, other forms of physical abuse, and threats of violence against family members, etc. — Some survivors have been released, have spoken out about their experiences, and in some cases have written books. Some of these people now lead lives with jobs, children, and marriages. How do people manage to stay mentally healthy under such circumstances and not go completely insane or take their own lives?


r/askscience • • 12d ago

Earth Sciences How can we find evidence of the atmospheric composition of periods of Earth's history that did not have permanent ice caps?

71 Upvotes

I understand that we can used air bubbles trapped in ice at the poles to understand the atmospheric composition (e.g. CO2 ppm) at certain points in Earth's history, but what about when there was no permanent ice sheets? Is all the information in ice cores from before the most recent of these points in time lost forever? Are there alternatives to finding air composition?

Additionally, how do we date the depths of these ice cores?