| Giant Sequoias seem to have a very limited range. Why is this and how long have they been restricted to their current range? Posted: 18 May 2020 06:07 PM PDT |
| AskScience AMA Series: My name is Dr. Joseph Allen, and I am an Assistant Professor of exposure assessment science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings Program. Ask me anything about COVID-19 and the future of the built environment, AMA! Posted: 19 May 2020 06:43 AM PDT I am an Assistant Professor of Exposure Assessment Science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the founding director of the Healthy Buildings Program. I also have a new book, out last month: Healthy Buildings. In March 2020, I became co-chair of the International Well Building Institute's Coronavirus Task Force. For several years in private industry before joining the faculty at Harvard, I led teams of scientists and engineers investigating, and resolving, hundreds of indoor environmental quality issues, from'sick buildings' to cancer clusters to all types of chemical/radiological/biological hazards. I learned two important facts: 1) too often we are responding to issues after there is a problem, and 2) we cannot solve these problems without a multidisciplinary approach. I have an interest in the dynamic interplay between the indoor environment and health and am continuing this line of research at Harvard, with a focus on optimizing indoor environments for health benefits. A natural extension of my research on buildings and the indoor environment is the consideration of the products we use in those environments, and how those influence our exposure and health. I believe that we have to force a collision between these two disciplines: building science and health science. The indoor built environment (homes, offices, schools, hospitals, airplanes, laboratories) plays a critical role in our overall health, both due to the amount of time we spend indoors (~90%) and the ability of the buildings to positively and negatively influence our exposure. The goal is to improve the health of all people, in all buildings, everywhere, every day. The pandemic spawned by the novel coronavirus has given us a heightened awareness of the role our buildings play in our health and wellbeing. I'm on the record back in early February advocating for healthy buildings strategies, like air filtration and increased ventilation, to reduce the spread of the virus indoors. Since then, I've written several articles about what we can do to reduce our exposure to the virus, including in grocery stores, public parks, and cars/ride shares. I've also joined forces with my colleagues at Harvard's Center for Communicable Diseases to develop a detailed plan for saving lives and the economy: https://covidpathforward.com/. I'll see you all at 1 PM ET (17 UT), AMA! submitted by /u/AskScienceModerator [link] [comments] |
| Do men have hormonal rhythms in the way women do around periods without the coinciding biological event? Posted: 19 May 2020 06:37 AM PDT If so, are there traceable impacts on behavior, supposing they could be traced? Similarly, do women have hormonal rhythms that don't relate to the period? Are there differences? submitted by /u/chromaxome113 [link] [comments] |
| Are there any published articles about what triggers COVID19 symptoms in some people but not in others? Posted: 19 May 2020 06:02 AM PDT I've been seeing a lot of research about the virus mechanism and replication, but nothing substantial about why it replicates in a host but doesn't create any symptom. Please post the article reference if you have it. submitted by /u/yosemitefloyd [link] [comments] |
| Where is the electrical energy generated from power plants stored? Do they have like very big batteries of sorts? Posted: 19 May 2020 01:31 AM PDT |
| Have human internal organs changed a lot over time? Posted: 19 May 2020 07:32 AM PDT Has there been any research about whether or not organs have shifted sligtly to another place in the body? Especially considering the evolutionary viewpoint - as people became bipedal, there must've been some changes to the internal organs as well. For example; one organ functions more efficiently if it's under another one instead of above it, so over time it shifted a few cm downwards. Another question is whether the organs have changed their shape over time for efficienty reasons or otherwise. Similarly, has anything like that been researched in other primates? submitted by /u/blondeandendless [link] [comments] |
| Do women with larger breasts have a greater chance of developing breast cancer? Posted: 19 May 2020 04:37 AM PDT Also curious about other similar scenarios, like does a morbidly obese dude with a large surface area have a greater chance of developing skin cancer? I don't fully understand what cancer is or how it develops, but at a base level I think it has to do with cells mutating or growing out of control, so if there's more of a given kind of cell in someone's body, like breast tissue or skin cells, are they at a higher statistical risk for that mutation taking place? Is a 7 foot tall person more likely to develop cancer than a 5 foot tall person since their body has more mass? submitted by /u/TheGingerGiant129 [link] [comments] |
| Do people that are born without sight still "see stars" ? Posted: 19 May 2020 06:18 AM PDT Had a super hard sneeze and saw some stars, got me thinking about it. Do they still show up if someone can't see? submitted by /u/Atiden [link] [comments] |
| Does every virus have a theoretical vaccine? Posted: 19 May 2020 02:12 AM PDT For all viruses out there is it just a matter of discovering the vaccine? Are there viruses we know are known to not have a vaccine possible or is this question simply unknowable? submitted by /u/javaHoosier [link] [comments] |
| I've lived in Los Angeles my whole life and seen everything from historic El Niño rains, to historic droughts. But before me for 8,000 years, the Tongva people lived in what is now Southern California. What was the climate like for them, compared to the climate is for me now? Posted: 18 May 2020 08:59 PM PDT |
| TB is also contagious but why we didn't enforce a lock-down like in the case of Covid-19? Posted: 19 May 2020 04:06 AM PDT |
| How does forming a bait ball act as protection against predators in schooling fish? Posted: 19 May 2020 06:57 AM PDT After watching quite a few documentaries that show large shoals of fish forming bait balls to protect against predation, I am genuinely confused on how this is a protective behavior. In EVERY documentary (that I've seen at least) the entire school of fish gets consumed. The fish seem to all form a tight ball which allows for large predators like whales, eat large swathes of the school in one pass. After that, they flock to the surface to avoid predators from below, allowing birds to pick them off one by one. It just never seems to work out well for the fish. Can someone please explain why fish do this, and what advantage it provides? Thank you. submitted by /u/mcenroefan [link] [comments] |
| If projectiles were launched at Escape Velocity from an electromagnetic gun, wouldn't they eventually loop toward the Sun, regardless of which way the Earth was facing at the time they were fired? Posted: 18 May 2020 08:57 PM PDT My question has a couple qualifiers that wouldn't fit in the header. One is that those projectiles aren't shot with such velocity that they simply break free from the Sun's gravitational pull, or go into orbit around it. And the other is that the gun's muzzle velocity could be adjusted for the Earth's position with each shot. The reason I ask is that I'd like to the know about the feasibility of ridding the planet of fissile materials from dismantled nuclear weapons and power plants by blasting small packages of it, day and night, for years, into the Sun by way of a very large electromagnetic gun, which could be powered by stored electricity from solar panels or windmills. (Many years ago I read about a proposal to get rid of decommissioned nuclear weapons by firing them into the Sun, but that was by way of rockets.) It seems to me that using an electromagnetic gun would cause far less atmospheric damage than than endless launches of big rockets would. Probably a lot less expensive, too. There are thousands of tons of nuclear garbage that will be deadly for a quarter of a million years, and incinerating it in the big fusion furnace in the sky would be insure it wouldn't fall into the wrong hands, (or poison unsuspecting future generations) much better than just burying it like they do now. submitted by /u/Oxnard66 [link] [comments] |
| Apparently a corona virus vaccine would lead to an extreme shortage of syringes and needles. Could it be delivered by a jet injector and would that help reducing equipment shortages? Posted: 18 May 2020 09:44 PM PDT |
| Why have I just started hearing about the Severe Inflammatory Syndrome that’s been affecting children with COVID-19? Posted: 18 May 2020 07:59 PM PDT For the longest time since COVID-19 has been in existence, I've heard that the virus did not often have severe effects in children. It seems like in the past few weeks, there is so much news about the inflammatory syndrome. The news seems to be talking all about it without much data on how prevalent and/or severe it is. I have a few questions about it. How common is it estimated to be amongst children with COVID-19? Why have I just started hearing about it given that the virus has been around since November and has been a global pandemic since February or March? Is there a chance this symptom developed between November and now (like what happens in Plague Inc.) or is that highly unlikely? Why is this not occurring in adults? Or is it? Thanks! submitted by /u/ToschePowerConverter [link] [comments] |
| Can every possible logical circuit be converted into an algebraic statement? Posted: 18 May 2020 11:41 PM PDT Logically, the state of a transistor can be written as the function Output = Input * Control, where all three of the variables are states represented with a 0 or 1. Since every logic gate can be represented as a series of transistors, it is true that all possible logical circuits can be reduced to a set of algebraic operations on a set of variables? Furthermore, if it is true, what is stopping someone from taking, for example, an old computer and emulating it by simply running it's corresponding mathematical reduction on a modern computer? submitted by /u/gremmer_is_key [link] [comments] |
| Why is it hard to create tests for Covid19? Posted: 18 May 2020 09:55 AM PDT From my understanding these tests rely on RT-PCR, meaning that the person's saliva cells are broken up, the RNA is then turned to DNA which is then amplified using a primer sequence that matches the viral sequence. It seems to me that manufacturing these primer sequences should be pretty straightforward ... why is it difficult to scale up testing? Is it the raw materials (primers and reagents), the physical lab capacity, or the manual labor needed? submitted by /u/horseloverfat7 [link] [comments] |
| What do we know about gynandromorphic bees' behavior? Posted: 18 May 2020 04:51 PM PDT Worker, queen and drone bees all have well-defined roles and behavior. Gynandromorphic bees, being "half and half", don't fall cleanly into these categories. Do we know anything about how they act and how other bees treat them? I find it kind of amazing that diploid drones or inadequate queens will get killed but gynandromorphs won't. Thank you for your help! submitted by /u/rasputinette [link] [comments] |
| Why is it that all pictures taken from outer space seem to completely lack all stars? Posted: 18 May 2020 10:45 PM PDT For any pictures of the earth from outer space, there is a noticeable lack of stars in the background, even though we see so many from earth's surface. Why is this the case? Is it a photography issue, where the earth is too bright and the stars are too dim? It's honestly the one question I've heard from flat earthers that I didn't immediately know the answer to myself, so I'm really interested in finding out why. Thanks! submitted by /u/Drill4Destiny [link] [comments] |
| How do seals navigate under ice and find their breathing holes? Posted: 18 May 2020 10:27 PM PDT I've seen suggestions that they use acoustic navigation and/or can sense the Earth's magnetic field. One study said they can swim 2-3 kilometers away from their breathing hole and find it when they come back. Is there a consensus on this yet? How do they research this question? submitted by /u/irate_alien [link] [comments] |
| Does one atom show properties of a matter such as gas/solid/liquid ? Posted: 18 May 2020 10:31 AM PDT |
| If Vaccines are essentially “toned down”(for lack of a better term) versions of a virus, why can’t the vaccine be transferred between people like the virus can? Posted: 18 May 2020 10:25 PM PDT |
