What did the Wow! Signal actually contain? |
- What did the Wow! Signal actually contain?
- Do potatoes used as batteries for clocks end up losing calories?
- Are we travelling faster than the speed of light relative to matter outside of our observable universe?
- If gravitational paths such as orbits are conic sections, what is the cone?
- Why doesn't gasoline engines run off an auto-combustion cycle like diesel engines?
- Can a mathematician explain this counter-intuitive coin toss fact?
- Why do accretion disks around black holes form vertical jets/quasars?
- Is there any research to suggest that babies look to their parents to see how to react?
- What do blind people who are under the influence of hallucinogenic (and/or psychedelic) drugs, see?
- Can someone please explain counter-steering?
- How many elementary particle fields are there?
- Once light is produced does it ever stop?
- Can you measure the spin of a neutrino in a direction other than it's direction of motion?
- If the ice caps melted and the seas rose, would it have any impact on the orbit of the moon?
- Does Jupiter make noise?
- What (if anything) helps prevent parents from becoming sexually attracted to their sons/daughters once they become adults? (The Westermarck effect doesn't apply to them)
- Why is Jupiter considered a gas giant if it's mostly made out of liquid hydrogen?
- Is it true that all ocean dwelling mammals have a terrestrial ancestor?
- Why is it, cognitively speaking, so hard to explain or comprehend a new card or boardgame without just playing it?
- Is there any evidence for prehistoric animals whose intelligence approached or exceeded that seen in modern whales?
- If quarks always exist in pairs, why are there 3 quarks in protons and neutrons? Is one unpaired?
- Does your body metabolize food quicker the more hungry you are?
- In the linked SciAm article, researchers found a weird pattern in the last digit of prime numbers. But what does that actually mean beyond base 10?
| What did the Wow! Signal actually contain? Posted: 15 Mar 2016 01:45 AM PDT I'm having trouble understanding this, and what I've read hasn't been very enlightening. If we actually intercepted some sort of signal, what was that signal? Was it a message? How can we call something a signal without having idea of what the signal was? Secondly, what are the actual opinions of the Wow! Signal? Popular culture aside, is the signal actually considered to be nonhuman, or is it regarded by the scientific community to most likely be man made? Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Do potatoes used as batteries for clocks end up losing calories? Posted: 14 Mar 2016 10:14 PM PDT A calorie is a form of energy, right? So would a potato (or orange/lemon/anything) have a "caloric outtake" from being used as a battery? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 Mar 2016 05:25 AM PDT I've been wondering this for a while now. The very reason we cannot see beyond the horizon of the observable universe is the rate of expansion, correct? So are we not traveling faster than the speed of light relative to everything beyond that horizon? And the question that follows is, of course, are we traveling backwards in time relative to what's beyond the observable universe? [link] [comments]  |
| If gravitational paths such as orbits are conic sections, what is the cone? Posted: 14 Mar 2016 10:05 PM PDT I'm curious as to why a gravitationally determined trajectory, or any trajectory influenced by an inverse square law force, follows conic sections. How can I understand this? Bouncing off of that question, is there any known relation between Dandelin spheres and Kepler's first law? [link] [comments]  |
| Why doesn't gasoline engines run off an auto-combustion cycle like diesel engines? Posted: 14 Mar 2016 11:55 PM PDT |
| Can a mathematician explain this counter-intuitive coin toss fact? Posted: 15 Mar 2016 05:42 AM PDT Was reading an interesting article yesterday (https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160313-mathematicians-discover-prime-conspiracy/) and this fact it mentioned intrigued me: "Soundararajan was drawn to study consecutive primes after hearing a lecture at Stanford by the mathematician Tadashi Tokieda, of the University of Cambridge, in which he mentioned a counterintuitive property of coin-tossing: If Alice tosses a coin until she sees a head followed by a tail, and Bob tosses a coin until he sees two heads in a row, then on average, Alice will require four tosses while Bob will require six tosses (try this at home!), even though head-tail and head-head have an equal chance of appearing after two coin tosses. " why is this? [link] [comments]  |
| Why do accretion disks around black holes form vertical jets/quasars? Posted: 14 Mar 2016 10:39 PM PDT |
| Is there any research to suggest that babies look to their parents to see how to react? Posted: 14 Mar 2016 10:14 PM PDT For example, is there any proof to suggest that if a baby falls and the parents react as if they're horrified the baby does the same and associates falling as bad thing, but if the parents just laugh and smile the baby just giggles and moves on? [link] [comments]  |
| What do blind people who are under the influence of hallucinogenic (and/or psychedelic) drugs, see? Posted: 14 Mar 2016 04:04 PM PDT Examples: LSD, LSA, 2-CB, 2-CE, Psilocybin, Salvia Divinorum, DMT ... [link] [comments]  |
| Can someone please explain counter-steering? Posted: 14 Mar 2016 11:28 PM PDT |
| How many elementary particle fields are there? Posted: 14 Mar 2016 06:00 PM PDT Im having trouble telling what makes two particals with similar properties the same thing and what makes them distinct. Are electrons and positrons part of the same field or different? What about left-handed and right-handed electrons? Blue and Red Up quarks? W and Z bosons? Electric and magnetic photons? [link] [comments]  |
| Once light is produced does it ever stop? Posted: 14 Mar 2016 08:29 PM PDT I just had a conversation with my Grandfather concerning the light that comes from distant suns and how we can still see that light even if the star is no longer there. So now we're curious if light ever stops moving forward once it's been produced. [link] [comments]  |
| Can you measure the spin of a neutrino in a direction other than it's direction of motion? Posted: 15 Mar 2016 05:26 AM PDT If the answer is yes, wouldn't this colapse the spin function to either up or down in that direction, meaning that the spin, in the basis of the direction of motion, is a little up and a little down (half and half if the direction is perpendicular)? That is, wouldn't measuring the spin of a neutrino in a direction other than it's direction of motion collapse its state to a little uleft and a little uright? But since neutrinos are always left... If the answer is no, why can't we? [link] [comments]  |
| If the ice caps melted and the seas rose, would it have any impact on the orbit of the moon? Posted: 14 Mar 2016 10:47 PM PDT I know a bit about the tidal locking that keeps the rotation and revolution synced up, still trying to grasp that relationship but it made me wonder what would happen if the variables changed. Would more ocean affect the orbit? Would it shift slightly and lock again? Could we see the dark side? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 14 Mar 2016 04:30 PM PDT If you could somehow get close enough to Jupiter to hear it, would there be anything to hear? Mostly because of the storms? And I mean noise more than just the winds of it passing through space (if that exists ) [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 14 Mar 2016 11:08 AM PDT What (if anything) helps prevent parents from becoming sexually attracted to their children once they become adults? The Westermarck effect inhibits sexual attraction towards those who a person lived with during childhood. This helps prevent people from becoming sexually attracted to their siblings, parents, and others who they live with (or spend a lot of time with) since childhood. But parents are adults (or at least teens) when their children are born, so this doesn't apply. There was an experiment where women smelled t-shirts worn by various men and rated how attractive their scent was. How attractive they found the man's scent went up with genetic difference between them, and went down with genetic similarity. (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/6/l_016_08.html) Scent aversion is the only thing I know of which would contribute to preventing sexual attraction of parents towards their adult sons and daughters. Is there any other research that you're aware of which shows that there are (or may be) other things inhibiting this? Also, does anybody know if this t-shirt experiment was repeated with men being the ones smelling shirts worn by women? [link] [comments]  |
| Why is Jupiter considered a gas giant if it's mostly made out of liquid hydrogen? Posted: 14 Mar 2016 04:52 PM PDT I was told that Jupiter was a gas giant, and that it was mostly made out of gas. But I got really confused when I considered the pressure inside it was huge because of the dense atmosphere above it, then I read that below 50 km the atmosphere was considered liquid hydrogen, and below that, metallic liquid hydrogen. So why is it called a gas giant if it's made out of liquid? I'm considering that it's because the hydrogen is a gas under ambient conditions here on Earth, but I'm not satisfied with that and I know the answer is probably complicated. So, is it gaseous, or liquid? [link] [comments]  |
| Is it true that all ocean dwelling mammals have a terrestrial ancestor? Posted: 14 Mar 2016 03:16 PM PDT I'm not necessarily asking if they all share the same ancestor, just that they all share some terrestrial ancestor. My friend says that the evolutionary path of all ocean dwelling mammals shows that their ancestors came from the water, evolved more and left the water, and then evolved still more and went back to the water. Is this accurate? [link] [comments]  |
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| If quarks always exist in pairs, why are there 3 quarks in protons and neutrons? Is one unpaired? Posted: 14 Mar 2016 04:58 PM PDT I've heard that quarks are always paired together; so much so that the energy required to separate them would transform (based on the mass-energy equivalence) into two more quarks that would subsequently pair with the original two. Wouldn't that mean that one of the quarks in a proton or neutron is unpaired? [link] [comments]  |
| Does your body metabolize food quicker the more hungry you are? Posted: 14 Mar 2016 07:42 AM PDT |
| Posted: 14 Mar 2016 12:08 PM PDT The article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/peculiar-pattern-found-in-random-prime-numbers/?WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20160314 Summary from article: Prime numbers near to each other tend to avoid repeating their last digits, the mathematicians say: that is, a prime that ends in 1 is less likely to be followed by another ending in 1 than one might expect from a random sequence. But if the sequence were truly random, then a prime with 1 as its last digit should be followed by another prime ending in 1 one-quarter of the time. That's because after the number 5, there are only four possibilities—1, 3, 7 and 9—for prime last digits. And these are, on average, equally represented among all primes, according to a theorem proved around the end of the nineteenth century, one of the results that underpin much of our understanding of the distribution of prime numbers. (Another is the prime number theorem, which quantifies how much rarer the primes become as numbers get larger.) Instead, Lemke Oliver and Soundararajan saw that in the first billion primes, a 1 is followed by a 1 about 18% of the time, by a 3 or a 7 each 30% of the time, and by a 9 22% of the time. They found similar results when they started with primes that ended in 3, 7 or 9: variation, but with repeated last digits the least common. The bias persists but slowly decreases as numbers get larger. So, okay, interesting result. But what occurs to me is that we're looking at the last digit from the standpoint of base 10 numbers (or modulo 10), which is hardly a mathematically natural thing. What does this really mean in the general case when you remove the human base-10 bias? [link] [comments]  |
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