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Wednesday, September 9, 2020

What are we smelling when we open a fresh can of tennis balls?

What are we smelling when we open a fresh can of tennis balls?


What are we smelling when we open a fresh can of tennis balls?

Posted: 09 Sep 2020 12:08 AM PDT

AskScience AMA Series: I am an engineering professor who is currently studying how far a virus can travel and how 6 feet of social distancing may not always be enough to prevent host-to-host transmission. AMA!

Posted: 09 Sep 2020 04:00 AM PDT

Hi Reddit! I'm S. "Bala" Balachandar, a professor in the mechanical and aerospace engineering department at the University of Florida College of Engineering. Right now, I'm leading a study of aerosols and multiphase flow to determine how far droplets can travel and infect others. During the COVID-19 global pandemic, many safety guidelines currently set in place have been determined by outdated science that says we will be safe if we are six feet apart from a sick person.

I'm here to answer any questions you may have on the science behind virus travel, airborne transmission/host-to-host transmission, how inhalation and exhalation transmit a virus and the way particle sizes affect transmission.

At the University of Florida, my teaching interests are:

  • Computational fluid science
  • Large scale simulation of complex flows
  • Transition and turbulence
  • Multiphase flows
  • Environmental flows

More about me:

I joined the Wertheim College of Engineering at UF after teaching in the Department of Theoretical & Applied Mechanics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign from 1990 to 2005 and after I earned my Ph.D from Brown University in 1988. I am a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Society of Engineers as well as co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Multiphase Flow and associate editor of the Theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics Journal. I am also the Principal Investigator at the Center for Compressible Multiphase Turbulence.

I'll be on at 2 PM ET (18 UT), AMA!

Username: /u/UFExplore

submitted by /u/AskScienceModerator
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Can energy be generated from very low temperatures instead of very high temperatures?

Posted: 09 Sep 2020 12:39 AM PDT

How does radiometrically dating rocks work if all radioactive isotopes came from super novae millions of years ago? Wouldn't all rocks have the same date?

Posted: 09 Sep 2020 04:49 AM PDT

How are the vaccine for animals different than for human?

Posted: 08 Sep 2020 04:23 PM PDT

For example, my coworkers had to take like 7 shots of rabies vaccine when she got bitten by a bat, but my cat gets a yearly dose. What factor changes from species?

submitted by /u/kiraxkage
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Is there a solution to the twin paradox not related to acceleration?

Posted: 08 Sep 2020 10:11 PM PDT

Most of the answers I have read from previous posts point to acceleration being the reason for the twins aging at different rates; however, it appears that acceleration is a common explanation because it is simple to understand but is a misconception. I am unable to wrap my mind around how the two frames are different if acceleration is not the driver for the difference.

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

Posted: 09 Sep 2020 08:08 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!

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Why does a keg at 5 psi hiss when vented when atmospheric pressure is 14 psi?

Posted: 08 Sep 2020 06:59 PM PDT

I would think that the keg would only release pressure if it had a higher pressure then the outside environment, but I can vent a keg at 5 psi and hear it release CO2.

submitted by /u/randalls_gut
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Are there parts of outer space that would be loud or have constant noise?

Posted: 08 Sep 2020 07:58 PM PDT

How genetically different are the cultivars of Brassica oleracea? Can two plants of different varieties generate offspring?

Posted: 09 Sep 2020 05:04 AM PDT

Caves - Everywhere or in Select Places?

Posted: 08 Sep 2020 11:51 AM PDT

Its bugging me but I can't find a good answer to this; how widespread are caves and cave systems? Are they limited to certain rock types, geographic regions and physical conditions? Or are they everywhere? And if the latter then how far big of an area would I have to search or unearth to find one? And if the former then how often do these conditions occur?

I'm including caves that have and don't have an opening to the suface in this question by the way. I know this is a hard question to answer because so many places remain undocumented as to their cave status but I'm looking for best guesses and (reasonable) potentials.

submitted by /u/Olyfia
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How do doctors looking at CT Scans to find aneurysms account for things that are constantly changing, like artery size due to heartbeat? What about MRIs?

Posted: 08 Sep 2020 10:19 AM PDT

How does the heat affect snow in places with wildfires?

Posted: 08 Sep 2020 08:46 AM PDT

Alright, I was just reading a news post about the Colorado wildfires, and the apparent "early" snow they're receiving. In the news article it said that the snow would hit ground(I'm assuming it would accumulate), but that once it melted the fires would start back up.

So my question is: How does the snow that's so fragile make it to the ground to accumulate when the fires are burning at 1400+ degrees all around? Does the fire not affect the weather patterns around it?

Thanks!

submitted by /u/kamahele_
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How come retrovirus does not become dysfunctional after certain amount of mutations?

Posted: 08 Sep 2020 11:07 AM PDT

Retroviruses have high mutation rate due to the fact that reverse transcriptase doesn't have proofreading. The DNA get slight mutated after every time a virus infect a cell. If this happen long enough, eventually the DNA will get so mutated that it can no longer produce functional viral proteins. At this point, the virus will be no longer virulence, because its proteins are difference and may be not functional. What am I missing?

submitted by /u/IX0YE
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How does DNA recombination ensure the resulting chromatid is compatible?

Posted: 08 Sep 2020 11:33 AM PDT

During meiosis there's recombination between the two sister chromatids. This shuffles the genes to create a distinct chromatid. Let's say there are 4 genes each with 2 versions - a, A, b, B, c, C, d, D.

Recombination starts with a-b-c-d and A-B-C-D. The resulting chromatid is a-B-c-D. What happens if gene a is only compatible with gene d (not D)? That is, given a set of genes, only some combinations are compatible. What happens to the resulting gamete?

submitted by /u/SFTechFIRE
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What causes some proteins to denature at lower temperatures than other proteins?

Posted: 08 Sep 2020 02:33 PM PDT

I was listening to a Radiolab podcast today that was talking about fungi. In the podcast they talk about how fungi prefer temperatures around 86 °F and above that their proteins start to denature. What differences or factors make it so our human proteins can survive much higher temperatures than this?

submitted by /u/shiv6969
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Question concerning Gene molecular cloning?

Posted: 08 Sep 2020 07:04 AM PDT

Hi guys!

(So this is redirected from r/askBiology but I saw this community is way bigger, so maybe i'll get my answer faster here.

So my question is the following: So in DNA cloning we insert recombinant DNA (plasmid+gene of interest) in a bacteria, and once this bacteria replicates a lot to form a colony, the plasmid will also replicate with each bacterial division, giving us lots of recombinant DNA.

However my question is the following: In my slides it mentions that plasmids replicate independently from the bacteria's genomic DNA. So how can I be positive that for each bacteria division, I'll have my plasmid also having it's DNA divided? Is the cellular conditions for replication for the bacteria ALSO favorable for the plasmid? Or the plasmid just knows to divide itself when the bacteria divides itself.

submitted by /u/GodConcepts
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