askscience

If sociology’s exclusive to humans, then what might be the field of other social animal research?

They say it’s a picture of atoms, but what are the atoms: the glowing yellow balls or the entire meatball including the darker red? If it’s the meatballs, then why do some have apparently two nuclei?...

So, let’s say there’s a species of bacteria that is known to dwell in Greek yogurt. How long would it take before that species of yogurt-dweller only has modern descendants different enough to qualify as one or more new species?

I’m thinking of switching fields within STEM and there are some mathsy modules which I missed out on during my undergrad (biology) that would come in really handy right now....

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?

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?

How hot would it have to be?

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....

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.

Mars influence on the Milankovitch cycles:...

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....

Was thinking about interstellar travel and the ability to provide artificial gravity by using a smooth acceleration and deceleration across the journey, changing from acceleration to deceleration at the halfway mark....

For example, why did zinc, of all things, start getting utilized by brain and prostate tissue in humans?

Tectonic activity bends rocks all the time, even hard ones like granite. That takes a ton of heat, pressure and time. It also makes sense that in the right conditions, sheets of rock simply don’t have the room to shatter so they must bend....

I’ve been learning some about rabies and learned about rabies causing hydrophobia. This is just a theory, I’m not saying I know anything about this topic to be knowledgeable, but if we could get someone with rabies to not fear water, could they survive?

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....

Just as an example, there were evidently reports during the 2007 Glasgow airport attack that someone attempting to subdue the assailant and assist police kicked said attacker in the testicles… but somehow managed to do so hard enough to injure one of their own foot tendons.

I’m in NorCal and the weather has been all over the place this winter. It is hard to get a reliable forecast, sometimes even for the same day. I was wondering if it has something to do with the weather prediction models that were built before the climate change?

I’m just curious.Strange matter, according to my research, is a perfect state of matter with perfect density, etc. If it is like this, does that also mean that it violates the law of entropy?Because let’s see, if it converts matter around it into stranger matter, and after that it doesn’t react with anything else, I mean...

I saw something yesterday talking about how Australia is geologically dead with the lowest tallest mountain range of any continent due to no landmass collisions. Does that make it the last visage of a supercontinent that everything else broke away from?...

I unfortunately live in a very polluted area, one where air quality apps mark in red and recommend that I never get out of my lair....