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Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Are there any examples of venomous or toxic birds?

Are there any examples of venomous or toxic birds?


Are there any examples of venomous or toxic birds?

Posted: 18 Jun 2019 05:24 PM PDT

I know that there are examples of venomous mammals, like the slow loris, or even egg laying mammals like the platypus (male). But are there any birds with a dangerous peck or scratch, maybe handling them can harm you, or perhaps they are bad to eat (and not from carrying parasites or diseases?) Just curious because I can think of examples from almost every major grouping of animals, but nothing for birds.

submitted by /u/Frostitute_85
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Gravity attracts particles with mass, electromagnetism with electric charge and the strong force with color charge. What is the weak force's charge?

Posted: 19 Jun 2019 04:42 AM PDT

Will an object rotating in a vacuum which has no contact with another external object, rotate infinitely or will it gradually lose its speed?

Posted: 19 Jun 2019 04:39 AM PDT

Until yesterday, I thought if there is no friction force with a rotating object, it will never lose its spin, but I read somewhere that even under such conditions, the object will gradually slow down (but the reason was not specified). So, which force slows the rotation speed?

Moreover, does the Earth lose its average (sidereal) rotation speed in time?

submitted by /u/pp_hyp3r_n0vA
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We are Prion Researchers! Ask Us Anything!

Posted: 19 Jun 2019 07:53 AM PDT

Why does the composition of crude oil vary between different oil wells?

Posted: 19 Jun 2019 04:09 AM PDT

When I point my contactless IR thermometer straight up, what am I taking the temperature of?

Posted: 18 Jun 2019 08:41 PM PDT

It's currently 85 degrees F on the ground here at 10 pm at night. That's the current nighttime air temperature. It's also the temperature I get when I point the IR thermometer at the grass on the ground. When I point my contactless IR thermometer straight up it registers 57 degrees F. That temperature increases as I point it more towards the horizon presumably towards denser and lower layers of air. So what am I measuring straight up? The cosmic background radiation temperature? An average of the stars and deep space in view? The average temperature of the atmosphere? A layer of IR-opaque water vapor in the troposphere? If the latter, how high up is it? How can I find out? Would the temperature it records be different in a dry desert area?

submitted by /u/Nulovka
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Ask Anything Wednesday - Economics, Political Science, Linguistics, Anthropology

Posted: 19 Jun 2019 08:13 AM PDT

Welcome to our weekly feature, Ask Anything Wednesday - this week we are focusing on Economics, Political Science, Linguistics, Anthropology

Do you have a question within these topics you weren't sure was worth submitting? Is something a bit too speculative for a typical /r/AskScience post? No question is too big or small for AAW. In this thread you can ask any science-related question! Things like: "What would happen if...", "How will the future...", "If all the rules for 'X' were different...", "Why does my...".

Asking Questions:

Please post your question as a top-level response to this, and our team of panellists will be here to answer and discuss your questions.

The other topic areas will appear in future Ask Anything Wednesdays, so if you have other questions not covered by this weeks theme please either hold on to it until those topics come around, or go and post over in our sister subreddit /r/AskScienceDiscussion , where every day is Ask Anything Wednesday! Off-theme questions in this post will be removed to try and keep the thread a manageable size for both our readers and panellists.

Answering Questions:

Please only answer a posted question if you are an expert in the field. The full guidelines for posting responses in AskScience can be found here. In short, this is a moderated subreddit, and responses which do not meet our quality guidelines will be removed. Remember, peer reviewed sources are always appreciated, and anecdotes are absolutely not appropriate. In general if your answer begins with 'I think', or 'I've heard', then it's not suitable for /r/AskScience.

If you would like to become a member of the AskScience panel, please refer to the information provided here.

Past AskAnythingWednesday posts can be found here.

Ask away!

submitted by /u/AutoModerator
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If a star "consumes" a planet, does that have any appreciable effect on the star's lifespan?

Posted: 18 Jun 2019 04:04 PM PDT

IANAS, so I'm fuzzy on the details of astrophysics, but I remember reading that once a star's core begins to create iron, it will go nova very shortly thereafter. So if our sun consumes Earth as it transitions into a red giant, our iron core (or those of the other inner planets) would fall into the sun as well. Might that have any impact on the sun's lifespan?

submitted by /u/Conspark
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How does the shift of the poles affect magnetic lines/ley lines? Is there an online map that shows the updated movement of these lines?

Posted: 19 Jun 2019 05:32 AM PDT

Can LIGO miss gravitational waves at 45 degrees?

Posted: 18 Jun 2019 12:53 PM PDT

So, LIGO and VIRGO have arms arranged at 90 degree angles. If I'm understanding this right, each arm measures deformation on it's axis. But what if both arms are deformed equally? Does that even make sense?
And if it does, and if interferometers can miss such GWs, would adding a third arm solve that problem?
I understand that the probability of that happening is so low, it wouldn't even be worth checking out, but it's a hypothetical question. Humour me.

submitted by /u/Stalennin
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At which altitude does the atmosphere become too thin to carry sound waves?

Posted: 18 Jun 2019 02:20 PM PDT

Hypothetically speaking, if a speaker emitting a tone at about 80db were to rise from the ground all the way to space (well past the exosphere let's say), at what point would you no longer be able to hear the tone? Alternatively, at what altitude would the acoustic waves no longer be able to form due to the thinning out of the gas particle medium?

I know the layers of Earth's atmosphere don't have sharp cutoffs, as it just gets more thin with altitude, effectively "fading out".
I'm also aware that infrasound waves can travel at least up to the ionosphere, which generally ranges from 60-1,000km altitude. This is past the Kármán line which lies at ~100km altitude. However in this scenario I'm just considering an audible tone whose frequency is within the typical human hearing spectrum.

I would assume that sound waves can still propagate (and be heard?) beyond the Kármán line, but am curious as to around what altitude things start to get weird and/or inaudible.

If you'd like, you can imagine the tone to be J. S. Bach's Flute Sonata in B minor.

submitted by /u/scuzzydata
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Would abnormal levels of cadmium in soil cause inhalation exposure during dry windy seasons?

Posted: 18 Jun 2019 08:09 PM PDT

Alternately, could it be taken up by grass so that, if there were a brush fire, it would be in the smoke?

submitted by /u/X___0
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How do we know what texture the skin of an extinct animal was? Like dinosaurs, how do we know that they didn't have like fur or something?

Posted: 18 Jun 2019 12:37 PM PDT

Is it possible to produce lithium from scratch?

Posted: 19 Jun 2019 02:06 AM PDT

Now that we need a lot more lithium to produce lithium batteries, there is a problem to get lithium in an environmentally friendly way.

So I was wondering if it would be possible to produce lithium from scratch in a lab? We produce diamonds in a lab so it is not unheard of to produce useful materials for industrial purposes.

submitted by /u/Penetrator_Gator
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How is rain measured in inches?

Posted: 18 Jun 2019 07:58 PM PDT

Why not measured like a liquid (gallons, pints, etc.)?

submitted by /u/someone5793
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Can a giant squid change its color like calamari?

Posted: 18 Jun 2019 02:19 PM PDT

A quick search on Google only resulted in some statements about squid and octopuses in general but nothing specific about this sea monster. It would be pretty scary to have a beast like this camouflaged on a ship's hull.

submitted by /u/ILYARO1114
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How are the calories of food items calculated?

Posted: 18 Jun 2019 10:17 AM PDT

Do tsunami's occur at low amplitudes but high frequency along a similar distribution as earthquakes, forest-fires etc.?

Posted: 18 Jun 2019 12:17 PM PDT

Before I cause any confusion, by 'high frequency' I am not talking about the frequency of an individual tsunami (not even sure that is a thing), but the frequency of tsunamis of a particular amplitude over a period of time.

Many cataclysmic events like earthquakes, land-slides and even forest-fires follow a law where the lower the amplitude of the event, the greater the frequency of events of that amplitude. So small earthquakes are happening all the time but they don't cause a cascading effect which makes them relatively unlikely to be detected by anyone who isn't looking for them. Mid sized and large earthquakes happen exponentially less frequently - with the frequency falling off as the magnitude increases.

So my question is do tsunamis also follow that kind of law? If you spend enough time on the beach, are you likely to eventually experience a 'mini-tsunami' which might just feel like a particularly large wave relative to the regular cycle of waves caused by wind etc.?

submitted by /u/graciousgroob
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