AskScience AMA Series: I'm /u/themeaningofhaste and I'm helping to build a galactic-scale gravitational wave detector. Ask Me Anything! |
- AskScience AMA Series: I'm /u/themeaningofhaste and I'm helping to build a galactic-scale gravitational wave detector. Ask Me Anything!
- What happens to a molecule which has an element which is part of its construction reach its half life?
- Would it be possible to create a liquid or gas comprised solely or mostly of photons?
- Do cannabinoid receptors degrade with cannabis use?
- What is different neurologically between sleep and a coma?
- Why does friction create heat?
- Can mountains prevent earthquakes?
- What would a distance vs time graph look like for a rocket accelerating from rest to relativistic speeds?
- Does the proximity of Mars to Earth affect the throughput available to the landers and orbiting probes?
- Why are bubbles always spherical when blown?
- Is the success of the Lebesgue integral related to the vertical line test?
- Why is there only one species of Human?
- What's the difference between hard and brittle?
- Is absolute silence possible in non-deaf humans?
- Do split brain patients lose the ability to add tone/emotion to their speech?
- Is there a difference in the layout of veins between two people?
- Would it be possible to quantum entangle two different particles, like a neutrino and an electron?
- Is Hawking radiation breaking the law of conservation of energy?
- Mouse models for disease?
- Why do some chemicals, other than water, exhibit an anomalous expansion?
- If you're stuck in a room, can you prove you're on a planet?
- Can a conductor composed of muonic atoms exist due to relativistic effects?
| Posted: 01 Jun 2016 05:00 AM PDT Hi everyone! I'm a pre-postdoctoral researcher working as a member of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) collaboration, whose goal is to detect low-frequency gravitational waves. Earlier this year, LIGO announced the detection of gravitational waves but they were looking at gravitational waves from two stellar mass black holes merging. NANOGrav is attempting to look for gravitational waves primarily coming from supermassive black holes at the centers of merging galaxies. Just like there are many different kinds of electromagnetic telescopes (optical, radio, X-ray, etc.) to observe different kinds of phenomena in the Universe, astronomers are looking to build a number of different gravitational wave observatories across different frequencies for the same reason and NANOGrav is helping to fill the low-frequency window. My work has involved understanding all of the processes that limit the precise and accurate timing of pulsars, the clocks we use to measure the stretching and compressing of spacetime caused by gravitational waves. Pulsars aren't perfect clocks, pulses become distorted in the interstellar medium, telescopes can't make perfect measurements, and then somewhere under all of that exist the gravitational wave signatures in our data. NANOGrav uses the two current largest radio telescopes in the world, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, to make really precise measurements of over 50 of the highest-precision pulsars known distributed throughout the galaxy. Besides that, in my spare time I help to organize AMAs for a group called AskScience on a website called reddit :) I'll be around to start answering questions around 12 PM ET (16 UTC). Ask me anything! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 31 May 2016 05:46 PM PDT For example, Carbon-14 has a half life of about 5730 years per Wikipedia, and since Carbon is a major building block of life C14 has found its way into all organic life on Earth in the same concentrations as we find in our atmosphere. So what happens, for example, when one of these C14 elements reaches its half life in a molecule of an amino acid within our own DNA? [link] [comments]  |
| Would it be possible to create a liquid or gas comprised solely or mostly of photons? Posted: 31 May 2016 07:48 PM PDT I was watching a sci-fi movie with my oldest son tonight and one of the characters (mad scientist type) said that he had succeeded in creating a fluid solely from light. My immediate reaction was to blow it off as science fiction hand waving to solve a problem but, after an hour or so, I started working it over mentally. Since photons are elementary particles, would it be possible to condense them into a fluid state as a liquid/gas? Something that would take the shape of a container (assuming that you had already devised a suitable container)? [link] [comments]  |
| Do cannabinoid receptors degrade with cannabis use? Posted: 31 May 2016 10:41 AM PDT Just learned about how cocaine use can lead to receptor degredation due to a decrease in neurotransmitter uptake. How does THC act within the body? Does it produce a lessened effect , as in it takes longer to gain a tolerance, or does it do something completely different? Pls, I'm a grade 12 noob. [link] [comments]  |
| What is different neurologically between sleep and a coma? Posted: 31 May 2016 04:05 PM PDT I was taught that damage to the RAS causes comas. Is this the only cause? Do coma patients dream? Do they go through brain wave cycles similar to a sleeping human? [link] [comments]  |
| Why does friction create heat? Posted: 31 May 2016 04:41 PM PDT Friction is the result of microscopic ridges on an object's surface and acting against frictional force generates heat. But if you were a giant, trees would be microscopic, meaning that microscopic is subjective and,thus, the size of the ridges isn't what is creating the heat. So what's going on when I rub my hands together. [link] [comments]  |
| Can mountains prevent earthquakes? Posted: 01 Jun 2016 01:41 AM PDT Islam claims that mountains help prevent earthquakes. Is there any scientific evidence to back this claim? Do mountains have any effects on earthquakes (increase or decrease)? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 31 May 2016 06:05 PM PDT Would time dilation and length contraction cancel out and result in a straight line, or produce a weird sigmoidal looking curve? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 31 May 2016 11:53 PM PDT Mars is very close to Earth at the moment, and if my envelope math is correct, about 4 light-minutes away. Does this proximity allow NASA to receive more data than they would otherwise? Or is the difference between closest/furthest not significant compared to the amount of data that needs to be transmitted? [link] [comments]  |
| Why are bubbles always spherical when blown? Posted: 31 May 2016 04:59 PM PDT Whenever bubbles are blown, they appear to always be in a spherical shape of different sizes. Why not cubes or other shapes? [link] [comments]  |
| Is the success of the Lebesgue integral related to the vertical line test? Posted: 31 May 2016 08:20 PM PDT At risk of oversimplifying, Riemann integration uses vertical rectangles (partitioning the domain) to approximate area, whereas Lebesgue integration uses horizontal rectangles (partitioning the range). It seems odd to me that such a difference would have any effect at all, and yet Lebesgue integration is much more powerful. As far as I know, the only inherent asymmetry in the domain vs. range of a function comes from the vertical line test. Are these two things related? [link] [comments]  |
| Why is there only one species of Human? Posted: 31 May 2016 11:11 PM PDT According to Wikipedia, humans exited Africa roughly 100,000 years ago, so we've been spread out across continents for quite a long time. If there was so much geographic separation between populations for such a long time, why didn't different species (or subspecies) of humans develop? Why are we the only ones left? It just seems crazy that I'm the same species as every other person on earth, even though we might share a common ancestor tens of thousands of years ago. If there had been a bottleneck, where only a small population of humans survived and then populated the world, then I could understand it more. But it seems incredible that there's so many types of tiger, lion, squirrel, etc. but only one intelligent primate. I know there were other (sub)species such as homo erectus or neanderthals. But why did they all die out? Wasn't there enough room for pockets of them to survive somewhere? Why hasn't homo sapiens similarly fragmented into subspecies since then? [link] [comments]  |
| What's the difference between hard and brittle? Posted: 31 May 2016 04:30 PM PDT I mean from the molecular (or bond?) standpoint. Why is it that something can be very hard and yet brittle? It seems like both properties are essentially a strong bond between molecules. [link] [comments]  |
| Is absolute silence possible in non-deaf humans? Posted: 31 May 2016 10:21 PM PDT Is or could there be a time where a person's functioning ears are actually picking up no sounds whatsoever, not even the tiniest one? [link] [comments]  |
| Do split brain patients lose the ability to add tone/emotion to their speech? Posted: 31 May 2016 09:58 AM PDT Based on my understanding, the speech centers (Broca's and Wernicke's) produce speech on the dominant side of the brain and add tone and emotion on the non-dominant side. CGP grey's video on the front page implied only the left brain (which he assumed is dominant) is involved in speech in split-brain patients, therefore you should lose emotional speech in split-brain patients, right? Or is it possible you still have emotion added, but it reflects the emotional state of the non-dominant brain and so may contradict the message being sent by the dominant brain? Thank you for any answers! EDIT: I was mistaken by using the word emotion. Here is a chart for my medical school textbook referring to a few Brodmann areas and their function. I am asking if Brodmann areas 44, 45, and 22 on the non-dominant side appear to stop functioning in split-brain patients or if they function in a manner that causes the speaker to have a tone that does not match his/her intended tone because of the lack of communication between the two hemispheres of the brain. The left brain communicates its thoughts through the usage of words and grammar while the right brain communicates through tone, causing potentially conflicting messages being sent. I'm sorry that I asked it in a weird way earlier and I hope that clears it up. [link] [comments]  |
| Is there a difference in the layout of veins between two people? Posted: 31 May 2016 10:14 AM PDT |
| Would it be possible to quantum entangle two different particles, like a neutrino and an electron? Posted: 31 May 2016 02:51 PM PDT |
| Is Hawking radiation breaking the law of conservation of energy? Posted: 31 May 2016 01:57 PM PDT Is the law not broken because one virtual particle (becoming real) enters the universe and the other enters the black hole (On a black holes holographic surface or otherwise). [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Jun 2016 01:13 AM PDT How do they test diseases, specifically cognitive diseases, in mice, like dementia or Alzheimer's? Or really any disease for that matter. I can't seem to find an answer on Google, however, given my ignorance I may be searching the wrong phrase. Any help would be great. My background is I am certified and work as a paramedic. Thanks. [link] [comments]  |
| Why do some chemicals, other than water, exhibit an anomalous expansion? Posted: 31 May 2016 01:16 PM PDT I know that this is the case, for instance, with Bismuth. But if this happens with water due to its Hydrogen/Oxygen attraction, then how does it work for metals? [link] [comments]  |
| If you're stuck in a room, can you prove you're on a planet? Posted: 31 May 2016 09:00 AM PDT If you were stuck in a room and there was a chance you were NOT on a planet (but instead somewhere that someone was trying to convince you WAS a planet), to what extent could you test to find out? Would you need any special tools? Context for why I'm asking: I used to joke with friends that the Earth was secretly flat, just for laughs and to hear what they had to say about it. One then-friend wouldn't have fun with it at all, and, while being adamant that we definitely were on a planet, made the claim that he could prove it right then and there if he wanted to. He was academically able but also quite full of himself, so I've often wondered if he was right or just being dismissive. I guess another version of this question would be:
[link] [comments]  |
| Can a conductor composed of muonic atoms exist due to relativistic effects? Posted: 31 May 2016 01:26 PM PDT I understand that muonic atoms can exist but that they decay at a rate of a few microseconds. Would the decay rate of these atoms decrease due to relativistic effects in a strong gravitational field? Ex. A planet which is composed of muonic elements orbiting a blackhole. Additionally, could such matter be used a conductor and what would be the characteristics of a "muonicity"? [link] [comments]  |
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