Pi Day Megathread 2021 | AskScience Blog

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Sunday, March 14, 2021

Pi Day Megathread 2021

Pi Day Megathread 2021


Pi Day Megathread 2021

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 09:28 PM PST

Happy Pi Day! It's March 14 (3/14 in the US) which means it's time to celebrate Pi Day!

Grab a slice of celebratory pie and post your questions about Pi, mathematics in general, or even the history of Pi. Our team of panelists will be here to answer and discuss your questions.

What intrigues you about pi? Our experts are here to answer your questions. Pi has enthralled humanity with questions like:

Read about these questions and more in our Mathematics FAQ!

Looking for a specific piece of pi? Search for sequences of numbers in the first 100,000,000 digits.

Happy Pi Day from all of us at r/AskScience! And of course, a happy birthday to Albert Einstein.

submitted by /u/AskScienceModerator
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After having Covid, your body retains antibodies against it for only a short period of time. Why does the body essentially "forget" these antibodies?

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 10:51 PM PST

For other viruses and diseases, the body seems to remember its antibodies and resistances for much longer periods of time, if not indefinitely. What makes Covid so different that the body loses its antibodies for it after a relatively short period (roughly 90 days, iirc). Is it due to a function of the virus and its mutative nature, or is it a function of the body itself?

And as a side question, what does the vaccine do that allows the body to keep these tolerances and antibodies longer?

submitted by /u/FlyingPiranha
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In nuclear pasta all the electrons merge with protons so what dictates nuclear pasta’s chemical properties? Please explain in simple terms because I am not an astrophysicist :)

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 09:52 AM PST

Is there any animal known to produce structures of both keratin and chitin?

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 08:55 PM PST

How can Voyager 2 still send data to Earth?

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 04:43 PM PST

It's really, really far away; how feeble is the signal it sends, and how does interference not destroy any meaningful data before they reach the Earth?

submitted by /u/nonamenolastname
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Why there is liquid water under ice sheets?

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 10:03 AM PST

Why there is liquid water under ice sheets? , like in a lake or Antarctica, isn't it below its freezing point?. I was thinking it may be for the supercooling process, but it is in contact with ice, so I don't know .

submitted by /u/PepperMinimum4979
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What point do planets actually orbit?

Posted: 14 Mar 2021 04:41 AM PDT

Obviously planets orbit the sun on nearly perfect keplerian orbits, I'm not questioning that. My question is in the fine details:

There's something that was bugging me about orbital mechanics with 3+ bodies: for instance, the ISS is orbiting the Earth in a nice round orbit around its center of mass: but the Moon is also orbiting the Earth in such a way that their barycenter is offset by a good 3000km. Obviously the Moon also pulls on the ISS, but somehow it doesn't seem to affect the point it orbits around. On the other hand, an object orbiting around a close binary system will orbit their center of mass, and not either of the two, which is the opposite result.

Of course those are extreme cases, but they made me raise the question of less extreme ones: Jupiter offsets the solar system's center so much it can come out of the Sun. Does Saturn orbit that point, or does it orbit the Sun still? What about Mars, or the asteroid belt? Is there a way to know which point of space an object can be best said to orbit?

My intuition would tell me that the equivalent mass that governs the shape and speed of the orbit is one at the center of mass of all bodies within that orbit (eg the Sun + all inner planets and objects), with no net change to that from outer objects, which is the best way I could think of to reconcile the two extreme cases and it also seems coherent with Gauss' law. Is that inuition correct?

For instance, I'd see Mercury as orbiting the Sun, with not net influence from any other object apart from perturbations. But does the orbit of Venus accelerate in such a way that it's as if the mass of Mercury was added to that of the Sun? In other words, is it more correct to consider Mercury as simply perturbing Venus' orbit around the Sun, or as increasing the effective mass and position of the Sun by its own mass, or perhaps by a different amount depending on how close it is to the orbit of Venus? Or am I completely wrong going down this track?

Sorry if it seems a bit imprecise, this is just something I was casually pondering but haven't done any actual calculations towards.

submitted by /u/DoisMaosEsquerdos
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Is it possible to have animals that are taught skills, teach those skills to their offspring?

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 05:17 PM PST

Not really sure what to flair this as, but I guess psychology? Like say you teach a bird to use a tool or item to do something useful, will they teach other birds they like and/or their offspring? Or do those learned skills disappear once they're gone.

submitted by /u/MisterSnippy
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Is operant learning more efficient if you simultaneously use more than one quadrant?

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 07:44 PM PST

I'm wondering if there's any studies for this you could point me towards. I'm specifically interested for dogs, but open to any studies.

If I for example, train a sit command using treats as a positive reinforcement, but then also use an e collar buzz constantly until the dog sits as a negative reinforcement, does the combination of those two quadrants combine to make learning more efficient?

submitted by /u/Goodmorningtoyou7
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What does the data say about protective effects of mRNA vaccines against variants?

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 04:31 PM PST

This feels like a very open question at this time because we just don't have the data to understand how mitigated variant infections are by Modern, Pfizer vaccines. Is there a sense yet? Can the increasing number of people who are fully vaccinated assume they are protected? Is the data pointing to "probably safe, for now" or more towards "probably a problem"?

submitted by /u/yeahgoestheusername
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Does the concentration of metabolites decrease after a blood drug test?

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 07:56 PM PST

If say one took a blood drug test and had taken a drug directly before the test with a metabolic half life of 24 hours and then the blood test had to be sent away to a lab and was finally tested 48 hours later, would the concentration of metabolites in the blood sample have decreased?

submitted by /u/REDoROBOT
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Isn't defining the speed of light by permittivity and permeability tautological?

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 01:52 PM PST

Today I got interested in the speed of light, and specifically how we can calculate it so exactly. so I did some googling, and I keep on seeing C be defined by the permittivity ε₀ and permeability μ0 of a vacuum, so I looked up those numbers, both of which are constants with the C as a factor. Doesn't the fact that both of those terms are already defined partially by C mean that its tautological to define C using those terms?

submitted by /u/Mormontoatheist
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Are b and t lymphocytes constantly being made with different antibodies/ receptors?

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 08:50 AM PST

How do we know (estimate) the age of the universe ?

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 07:04 AM PST

As far as I understand, we have estimated the age of the universe by knowing the size of the observable universe and the rate at which universe is expanding. That is, how long it would it take to reach the current size give the rate of expansion. But we only know the size of the observable universe and there maybe a huge chunk of it outside what we observe, in that case how do we know the age of the universe ?

PS: I may be completely wrong in my understanding.

Thanks in advance.

submitted by /u/major_pumpkin
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Do human cells only use some, but not all, chromosomes in their nucleus, depending on their specific function?

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 12:21 PM PST

Can animals address a big bleed?

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 04:04 PM PST

Humans will put pressure on a significant would to stop bleeding. Do animals of any kind do this as well?

submitted by /u/dontpet
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how did plant life survive the meteor impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago?

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 11:05 AM PST

Why is cutting an artery so life threatening, yet amputation is a commonly used practice?

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 02:18 PM PST

At what point do we declare a new species from an existing one?

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 10:09 AM PST

Through evolution species start differentiating and are determined to be a new one. At what point during this process do we make this call? Are there modern examples where we declared a subset of some specie as a new one?

Excuse the flair if incorrect.

submitted by /u/YuPanger
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Is there a reason at-home blood tests always take blood from the fingers?

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 12:05 AM PST

Is there a reason various at-home blood tests for things like blood sugar, STDs, etc always prick the finger to get blood?

Is there a difference in the composition of the blood in these areas versus somewhere like an arm, leg, etc. that would throw off the test?

Would using blood from another part of the body with a finger-prick test greatly effect the specificity and sensitivity of the test?

submitted by /u/rabidsoggymoose
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Is a species’s rate of reproduction based on its lifespan?

Posted: 13 Mar 2021 01:15 AM PST

I saw some comments on YouTube talk about it when referring to the fictional elves of any fantasy setting. They claim that, true to life, the longer a species's lifespan, the slower it is for them to reproduce. Is that true? Is the long lived species like the tortoise and even the immortal jellyfish very slow to reproduce?

submitted by /u/Firriga
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