I am not familiar with the bags you are talking about (our bread bags aren’t stretchy), but this has a fairly straightforward explanation. Things that are elastic usually get stiffer when cold. This is part of why winter tires exist. There’s literally less molecular movement.
You did say they stay crinkly/brittle even after warming up, though. This is likely due to another mechanism. When a solid is created from a liquid, there is typically some type of crystal structure (with notable exceptions like glass). A material can have multiple crystal structures due to how the molecules line up. Often, the crystals are tiny, so you don’t see them, but you can have large crystals if something is cooled slowly. That’s how you get gems.
When crystals start to form, they start to incorporate as much of the surrounding material as possible. When they run into a neighboring crystal, they run out of material. Unless they just so happen to line up perfectly, they will remain separate. The space between them, called a grain boundary, can be a weak spot in something like a diamond. In metals, more grain boundaries actually make things stronger, usually. This is because metal crystals can slide along the plane of the crystal. This is why blacksmiths will quench stuff; the rapid cooling leads to smaller crystals, which leads to more grain boundaries.
A metal won’t completely form crystals from every available molecule. Every process happens over time, and cooling a metal down extra cold causes it to shrink, which can cause any straggler molecules to join up with the crystals, which makes the metal stronger. That’s why some metal objects are “cryohardened”.
The last factor is that changing temperatures can change the most energetically favorable crystal structure. Tin pest is a famous example where in really cold weather, tin can change from its useful form to a brittle crumbly useless form, and it can only be fixed by remelting it.
It’s all a bit weirder with plastics cause they can be crystalline, non crystalline, or a mix, but my guess is you’ve changed the structure of it.
Its not the question you asked, but Nuclear plants can raise the temperature of the bodies of water they use for cooling nuclear plants. Additionally climate change is reducing water availability needed for nuke plants which is something I don’t hear the nuclear advocates talk about when we’re facing a dryer and hotter future. We’ll have to start turning off nuclear plants right when we need them.
This is already happening occasionally in the last decade:
Lochbaum analyzes reports from the NRC showing when nuclear plants scale back generation because of warm water.
In June, nuclear plants in Georgia, South Carolina and Pennsylvania scaled back their generation multiple times because of hot temperatures warming their cooling water. The Limerick power plant on the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia has scaled back because of high temperatures frequently over the past decade, according to the reports.
The Dresden and Quad Cities plants in Illinois had to scale back because of high water temperatures multiple times over the past five years. The Duane Arnold plant in Iowa and the Monticello plant in Minnesota also reported scaling back generation because of temperatures.
Yeah, I’m from Germany and we experienced this second-hand in 2022, when lots of French reactors were either in reparation or had not enough cooling water during the drought, so France imported tons of power from us and drove up prices.
This all happened on top of inflation and the Russian conflict, so hard to say how much it actually influenced prices, but those were quite high in the end, so presumably not nothing.
Without this happening, I probably wouldn’t have been acutely aware of nuclear producing much heat. Obviously, they do have those massive cooling towers and I have read before that it’s just another form of steam power, but you know, never properly thought about it.
Radios receiving signals don’t just siphon the signal off lol
What you’re asking would only really happen with wireless Internet service and it’s not because of the wireless signal, but because the overall bandwidth diminishes the more people connect to it.
Actually, the waves emitted by the radio tower are enough for a receiving device to generate a small electrical current just through the oscillations of the propagating signal.
The current produced in the antenna does (induce a field which goes on to) cancel the wave out a bit. Not enough to be noticeable in the far field, for a normal-sized antenna, but some. Conservation of energy, right?
It’s like solar energy. You either absorb it with a panel, or it goes to “waste”. You’re not really stealing it from someone else, as long as you’re not getting too much in the way
Usong your analogy i think Ops question was really if you have a stack of transparent solar panels will the panel below get less power and the answer is of course it will. If one antenna is behind another there will be a small reduction in the power of the signal reaching it, probably very small but with enough of them you could theoretically construct a faraday cage of sorts.
Yup. It’s typically amplified quite a lot in the receiver, and the vast majority of power transmitted never is received, so it doesn’t usually matter, but it’s not a dumb question.
It is loosely defined from my perspective, but I am curious about harder rocks, like granite. Your standard everyday rock tends to be much more brittle and may not have a high metal content. (It will likely have iron in one form or another though.)
Most metals and rocks are crystals in their “normal” state, so I see what you are getting at.
Your username is basically the notation for a crystal oscillator, so it’s gotta count. (Damn the rules!) Quartz is a rock that bends for a commercial purpose, so thats a really good answer, actually.
Mars is 1.52 AU from the sun, or 1.52x further than Earth, so the inverse square law says 43% less sun power. But the atmosphere is thinner and a different composition.
To know how the human eye actually operates on Mars, one would have to get a human eye to Mars.
I guess I meant more about how well you'd actually remember the brightness on earth after being on route so long rather than your eyes physically adjusting
This is more in line with what I was asking. The sun seems to have a psychological impact on humans. I wonder what that impact would be under both relentless cold conditions, but also when the sun never quite feels the same.
I mean, it is obviously subjective and not critical to the functioning of life or anything like that, but it just seems like one of those very subtle “death by a thousand cuts” kinds of elements that might become noticeable over time.
I don’t think anyone would directly perceive the effects in a binary logic kind of way. It would be like times when our local region is covered in thin high atmospheric clouds for weeks on end. It becomes more noticeable over time that this amount of light is not normal. I wonder about that awareness of “this is not normal” having more long term impact on psychology, not profound impacts, just some impact. I thought maybe someone had already posted images somewhere on the interwebs exploring this, but haven’t found any.
Stars have a lot of mass. The Sun loses almost 5 billion tons of mass every second and has enough fuel to last another 4-5 billion years. Adding a single ton of anything would make no appreciable difference. If you were to drop Jupiter into the Sun, it would have an effect, but Jupiter is only 0.09% the Sun's mass, so the effect would be small.
Depending on how you define a star, you could smush ~13 Jupiters together and make something that is maybe a star. To make a definite star you need ~80 Jupiters. To make it the same size as our Sun you’d need almost 250 Jupiters.
Woah, cool video! I think this video deserves its own post. I just need to figure out which scientific community it is most relevant to … Physics? Epidemiology? Hmmm 🤔
It’s possible that the N95 masks with their electrostatic charge might manage to intercept charged molecules but my chemistry is failing me as to whether NO2 or benzene would be affected.
Adding lead to gasoline didn’t reduce carbon emissions. Why do you think some other toxin would? You’re just poisoning the atmosphere for funsies. Skip the convoluted steps and just detonate bombs in the atmosphere. Inject it right into gothams water main, ya genocidal supervillain.
That doesn’t sound unreasonable. I didn’t know the main diet of hammerheads was found on the ocean floor?
Edit: So according to the article linked by @TokenBoomer you’re partially right, apparently it also makes them more agile, which I guess is good if you’re trying to snatch things as they pop off the ocean floor.
I’m no expert but I think it’s a mutation that still isn’t universal i.e. there is still a very large lactose-intolerant population in east-asia, which is also reflected in their cuisine.
Well, g is not a real constant, it depends mostly on altitude. The true constant is G. g=9.8 is usually more than enough for your calculations, to the point we often round it to 10 for simplicity, or you remove it completely is the mass is too low. But actual numbers is only the very last step usually. The calculations will be made with letters. The value you use at the end for g depends on the precision you need, so it depends on the precision of the other parameters.
Volume of a cylinder is πr^2Height
Assuming the height of the tree stays the same, let's say 100'.
Radius is 2' and then we have a 500 year old with a radius of 5'
2' x 100' tree has a volume of 1256'
5' x 100' tree has a volume of 7852'
Trees are made of carbon. Older trees sequester more carbon
Young trees of many species also grow faster, though, and if the old tree dies and decays all that carbon returns to circulation. Forestry, done right, actually is carbon negative. However, it’s also incompatible with the critters that need old-growth forests (and old growth itself soaks up carbon fairly slowly). Environmentalism needs to get better at appreciating tradeoffs IMO.
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