AskScience AMA Series: I'm Dr. Kaeli Swift, and I research corvid behavior, from funerals to grudges to other feats of intellect. Ask me anything! |
- AskScience AMA Series: I'm Dr. Kaeli Swift, and I research corvid behavior, from funerals to grudges to other feats of intellect. Ask me anything!
- Megalodon is often depicted as an enlarged Great a White Shark (both in holleywood and in scientific media). But is this at all accurate? What did It most likely look like?
- Has the invention of the light bulb lead to any measurable evolutionary changes among moths or other night light-obsessed insects?
- Did some animals develop "smell camouflage" ?
- Is the Earth’s size compared to the universe larger than a drop of water compared to all the oceans on earth?
- Has anyone ever tried the Double Slit Experiment with sound waves?
- Are clouds a biome for microbial life?
- What causes new food allergies or intolerances to start later in life, when you've been happily eating those foods for decades previously?
- what’s the difference between a disorder, a disability, and disease ?
- Change in weight when going below the earth's surface?
- Why is it that a tone sound (or appear to sound) louder at some frequencies?
- What exactly is happening when light interacts with matter?
- Can blood-flow in mammals be reversed?
- Can an element have enough protons/neutrons in 1 atom to be visible from the human eye?
- Fibromyalgia is commonly used as a blanket term due to lack of research. What is it actually, does it even exist as a specific illness?
- Is the intensity of a Sonic boom the same depending on how fast the object accelerated and the does the Sonic boom get louder the faster you go ?
- Does the pH of water affect its "color"?
- Are there clear examples of subgroups in a species diverging on a clear path to become different species?
- Why are some deep sea animals white/translucent while others are red/black?
- Why do proteins misfold?
- How do mushrooms interact with the sun? What is their relationship with the sun?
- The most accurate atomic clock is predicted to lose 1 second every 30 billion years so what are they measuring it against that is more accurate than the atomic clock and informs them the exact time?
- Why is cancer dangerous? Whats the problem with having uncontrolled division of cells? How does that pose a problem?
- Since simple computer functions - especially finding a specific index in an array - are not size-dependent in terms of computing time, why do computers still take time to search their own drives for file names?
- What is the relationship between Tardigrades and Opabinia?
| Posted: 12 Aug 2019 04:00 AM PDT Hi Reddit! I'm Kaeli Swift a behavioral ecologist specializing in crows and other corvids at the University of Washington. Right now my work focuses on the foraging ecology of the cutest corvid, the Canda jay. For the previous six years though, I studied the funeral behaviors of American crows. These studies involved trying to understand the adaptive motivations for why crows alarm call and gather near the bodies of deceased crows through both field techniques and non-lethal brain imaging techniques. Along the way, I found some pretty surprising things out about how and when crows touch dead crows. Let's just say sometimes they really put the crow in necrophilia! You can find coverage of my funeral work at The New York Times, on the Ologies podcast, and PBS's Deep Look. For future crow questions, you can find me at my blog where I address common questions, novel research, myths, mythology, basically anything corvid related that people want to know about! You can also find me here on Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook all at the corvidresearch handle. I'm doing this AMA as part of Science Friday's summer Book Club - they're reading The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman! Pumped for your corvid questions!!! See everyone at 12pm ET (16 UT), ask me anything! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 11 Aug 2019 08:07 AM PDT |
| Posted: 11 Aug 2019 07:36 PM PDT Full disclosure this was inspired by this decent meme. [link] [comments]  |
| Did some animals develop "smell camouflage" ? Posted: 12 Aug 2019 06:27 AM PDT It seems like a lot of animals developped strong camouflage skills to avoid being spotted by the eye. But since a lot of predators use mostly their sense of smell to track down their prey, how come those preys did not evolve to no smell anything? For example, deers have a very strong smell, making it rather easy for wolves to them. Why didn't the deers with the weakest smell got selected by evolution ? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 12 Aug 2019 04:17 AM PDT |
| Has anyone ever tried the Double Slit Experiment with sound waves? Posted: 12 Aug 2019 04:16 AM PDT I am curious to see what the results would look like if we did the same experiment with sound rather than light [link] [comments]  |
| Are clouds a biome for microbial life? Posted: 12 Aug 2019 05:18 AM PDT |
| Posted: 12 Aug 2019 04:05 AM PDT |
| what’s the difference between a disorder, a disability, and disease ? Posted: 11 Aug 2019 06:35 PM PDT i wasn't sure what to flair it with since it's pretty general. [link] [comments]  |
| Change in weight when going below the earth's surface? Posted: 12 Aug 2019 02:51 AM PDT Intrigued by something I read today, and hope someone can enlighten me! When descending into the earth, your weight will steadily decrease, as there is less mass to provide gravitational force. I'm assuming that at some point the decrease will slow and eventually stop. But at what point might that occur? To clarify my question, let's assume you are standing on a scale atop the planet's surface (the crust). As weight is effected by the gravitational forces at work, you will become lighter as you pass through the crust and mantle and less of the earth's mass is beneath your feet. But at some point as you descend, I assume the mass above you will begin to counteract the mass below you, and your weight loss will slow and eventually stop. Should you continue through the planet's core in a straight line, I would think the weight measured by the scale would cease to be the weight of your body and become the weight of the scale itself being pulled by gravity. I'm theorizing that the scale would then begin gaining weight as it is pulled towards the earth's mass and its movement limited by your feet. One unknown here is the relation in density between the earth's layers. I know the inner core is the most dense portion, but does density increase at a relatively stable rate as you progress towards the center (excluding, of course, the widely-varied density of the lithosphere)? Obviously a human could not survive such a descent, so this is a purely theoretical scenario. But I am curious as to how mass, gravity, and measured weight interplay here. Much thanks for any information! [link] [comments]  |
| Why is it that a tone sound (or appear to sound) louder at some frequencies? Posted: 12 Aug 2019 02:34 AM PDT So i was playing around with a frequency generator site and noticed that whenever i played a tone of frequency 100hz or a frequency of 150hz, the loudness of the tone felt like it was very high as compared to the loudness of tones of different frequencies. Why is this so? Is the loudness (or perceived loudness) due to the sound system, the human body or is there another reason for this? [link] [comments]  |
| What exactly is happening when light interacts with matter? Posted: 11 Aug 2019 12:07 PM PDT I know from my limited understanding of optics that when light interacts with matter it may be absorbed or "scattered" to a new direction, and that the chance of absorption and nature of the scattering have to do with the properties of the material. At a quantum-mechanics or quantum-field level, what exactly is happening? It was once explained to me in terms of photons being absorbed, exciting electrons and being re-emitted with a different energy, but something else I read said this wasn't correct. Is all light-matter interaction essentially the same process or are there different rules depending on the configuration? I.e. is the same thing happening when light interacts with a glass lens as when it interacts with gas molecules in the atmosphere? [link] [comments]  |
| Can blood-flow in mammals be reversed? Posted: 12 Aug 2019 12:41 AM PDT Hypothetically, if a heart-transplant was performed with the heart installed back-to-front such that it reversed the blood flow in the body, would the recipient survive? What would be the consequences? Have there been any studies on this or is there a fundamental reason it just won't work? [link] [comments]  |
| Can an element have enough protons/neutrons in 1 atom to be visible from the human eye? Posted: 11 Aug 2019 11:40 PM PDT |
| Posted: 11 Aug 2019 08:44 PM PDT My girlfriend has been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and I want to find out more about it, but so far everything I have been able to find and ask doctors in person has been very minimal and ultimately confusing. What even is it? Is it a term used only when doctors dont know the problem? I want to know if we should spend a lot of time going through every type of doctor to get it specified or if we can focus on a particular area. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 11 Aug 2019 10:20 PM PDT We're taking two identical objects A and B . 1 . Let's say object A accelerated to Mach 1.7 in 7 mins But object B accelerated to Mach 1.7 near instantaneously ( we're assuming that's possible) would the Sonic booms be different.
[link] [comments]  |
| Does the pH of water affect its "color"? Posted: 11 Aug 2019 04:12 PM PDT I've noticed with my swimming pool it seems like I can tell when my pH is floating too high as the water begins to look more "white" and clear, rather than having it's usual blue-ish tone. Typically when I notice this testing does show a higher pH. I know algae prefers the basic environment and this could be explained by algae beginning and yellowing out the blue, but does the pH of the water actually have an effect as well? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 11 Aug 2019 04:38 PM PDT We see tons of examples of the "Before and After" with documented cases of evolution from a single parent group like the Finches of The Galápagos Islands. I am looking for examples of us observing the "during". What I am looking for are subgroups within a species where individuals can still mate across groups to produce fertile offspring but are distinct enough to indicate that they will one day be distinct species. I definitely understand that evolution and taxonomy are both fluid and more of a spectrum than a binary condition but wanted to see if there were any examples of a species with separate sub groups or populations that fit that description! [link] [comments]  |
| Why are some deep sea animals white/translucent while others are red/black? Posted: 12 Aug 2019 01:07 AM PDT I googled it abit and found that Deep Sea Animals were red/black as that camouflaged them in the darkness of the abyss. But what about animals like the Deep Sea Skate? Why is it so white; wouldn't that make them super visible? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 12 Aug 2019 12:48 AM PDT |
| How do mushrooms interact with the sun? What is their relationship with the sun? Posted: 11 Aug 2019 05:56 PM PDT I will accept anecdotes. I just want as much information as possible about how mushrooms/fungi/spores/mycelium relate to the sun. Especially anything that strikes you as interesting or unique. Thanks in advance for your time! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 11 Aug 2019 01:43 PM PDT What I am confused about is that scientist must know what the exact length of time that will pass for the next 30 billion years to know that the clock has lost 1 second . Maybe I'm not understanding this correctly [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 11 Aug 2019 03:39 PM PDT |
| Posted: 11 Aug 2019 11:50 AM PDT There've been a few times when I want to find a file I KNOW I have on my computer, but don't know where it is. Searching the entire C drive takes at least a minute for me, but from a computer science perspective, I would expect this process to be instantaneous. EDIT: Wow thank you so much for the replies! This definitely answers my question [link] [comments]  |
| What is the relationship between Tardigrades and Opabinia? Posted: 11 Aug 2019 05:39 PM PDT |
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