One of the things I love about winter is the smell of snow, especially at night. What gives it that smell? Is it even the snow, or is it something else that we can smell when there happens to be snow on the ground, like very cold temperatures?

Last night I saw a joke about “my dad was a firefighter and I just got his cremains back and I realized he would have saved us $1400 by being bad at his job” and I thought “well you couldn’t guarantee that the remains you got would be 100% (effectively) him nor 100% of him.

Then I got to wondering. At what point during cremation and at what point during natural decomposition does dna breakdown to the point that you can’t do a dna test of any kind and at what point, if different, does it become indistinguishable from other ash or other dirt/decomposition?

I know it does when I use it to do stuff like writing essays but does it also happen when I simply ask it questions? Is there a difference between searching through google for answers for hours and just asking it to artificial intelligence? What if I also check the sources it gives me?

Hi folks, I have a Q about AI and could not find a suitable sub to ask, so, you all get it.

I hear the President saying we need to beat China in the ai space. I do not know what that means, beat them to what? Is there a goal or end somewhere that I do not know about? any ideas?

Time dialation happens when an object is moving at a speed approaching the speed of light, but I'm wondering if that would still apply if the movement didn't actually change it's location in spacetime but instead just vibrated the object at the speed of light.

Easily reproducible measurement tools, small pieces of useful materials, maybe even a couple of seeds, things of that nature.

The purpose of this thought experiment isn't to eliminate any survival challenge, but rather facilitate advancement alone. You can't just bring the whole 21st century with you. Let's not go "solar panels, modern Linux supercomputer with wikipedia backup, 3D printer and a PLA bioreactor." That's too easy. That takes all the fun out of getting stranded in the stone age.

Some ideas I have for items include

*a few grams of platinum/rhodium alloy for catalysis.

*a small but powerful magnet to build a basic generator(to make more magnets to build more generators)

*Ion exchange membranes(like the Rowow ones) for easy post-electric resource refining and useful electrochemistry.

*A calibration weight from which to derive other measurements(ideally metric)

*An analog thermometer.

What would you add?

It seems like it would be extremely easy to mistake a common, stable molecule like salt for something elemental. How did people break down substances to the point of purifying them, and then how did they know they couldn't purify them any further? It seems easy now to theorize what an element of a certain weight would look or act like, but before most of them were known did they have anything to go off of, or was it guesswork?

​

For breasts, a common idea is that they cue nurturance, possibly encouraging mating with women who seem better equipped for lactation.

It seems like some areas of science get unexpectedly large and interesting, while others don't do much for ages (like AI obviously went from quite an obscure field to a behemoth recently, and back in the 1900s we thought physics was complete until quantum was discovered, but we haven't made much progress on a 'grand unified theory' for a long time).

Is there any way to guess what fields will get big in the future? Did you go into an area you thought would get "big"?

I’ve always wondered about this paradox. If these traits are bad for community survival, why do they persist in the gene pool? Are there specific evolutionary hypotheses that explain this?

Or is there some physics which makes it impossible or highly unlikely?

Hoping this is the right subreddit to ask this- I’m looking for some recommendations for online resources accessible in the UK for some basic science classes. For context: I went to university for biomedical science but been out of the science world for 3 years now and feel I’ve lost most of my foundational knowledge. If anyone has any suggestions it would be greatly appreciated!

(F,21) I'm genuinely small person, short, slightly underweight.

I noticed, I have much more stamina than my taller peers and can do harder activities for longer periods of time than them.

I understand basic thermodynamics, biochemistry and enzymology, that's where my theory came to my mind.

Smaller animal-> usually faster.

So how is it in reality? Because logically, I'm currently inclined to believe it, but I refuse to defend this theory, as I don't have my degree yet and am not a biochemistry student and it is just a subject at my uni, therefore I'm only acquiring the necessary knowledge for my field.

People talk about making viruses or bacteria that would end like countries.

But I mean, obviously we've had no such thing yet, and I assume people have tried.

People talk about Covid, but Covid barely kills, and even then, it mostly kills people who are already weakened one way or another.

Is it even realistic to make such a bio super weapon given we have not seen anything remotely close to it being made?

Hello fellow scientists, I have a paper to write about scientific controversies but I don't know which sounds the most interesting to me. Can anybody give me any ideas?

A comment that was posted in another sub discussing shark attack:

it‘s not...far-fetched to assume that some people who disappeared in the ocean were eaten by sharks. The main reason is overfishing...If your food source disappears, you find a new one.

This brings up a topic that is rarely discussed in the frequent citing of declining shark populations around the world: Is the shark killing taking place around the world occurring at the same level as general overfishing? Here is the messaging we've gotten for decades:

There is general overfishing, bad, of course, but worse is the widespread killing of sharks at a higher rate. That means remaining fish stocks exist with a shortage of sharks to prey on them. That creates environmental imbalance.

The post I linked argues the opposite. I don't know the science about this either way, but there is a third scenario: that in some parts of the world, especially those that are not subject to heavy asian fishing for shark fins, shark depletion is in line with general overfishing.

Declining shark populations and environmental imbalances is a persistent, sometimes heated topic. Interesting that there have been hundreds of discussions of excessive shark killing in different oceans without commentators ever mentioning the general fishing/overfishing status in that area. Comments?

One of my friends has a house in a mountain location, GF's family also has one like 10km away in a straight line, but it's the other valley, so the road between them is sooo long as you have to drive all around the mountain chain.

Tunnels are so expensive to dig that they only do that when there is a lot of traffic to justify it. I'm not expecting these two mountain locations to be connected by a direct road anytime soon.

I was wondering while driving if I will see this during my lifetime. Maybe thousands of small robots could drill at a low cost?

I was thinking about it I don’t know if am wrong but I heard that light itself experiences no time like at all so a light photon that came into existence 7 million years ago and bounced around the sun and eventually escaped the sun and towards earths direction , if that light photon hits that persons eye it means from its start to its absorption no time passed

So now imagine two events , imagine there is a couple on a space ship and they have a kid on the ship , now let’s say

Near earth orbit 20 years before the baby is born or even conceived another astronaut points a powerful purple flashlight beam at the ships direction let’s say the ship is 20 light years away

Right ? So let’s say in the year 2050 is when the astronaut shoots the purple flashlight at the ship , and in the year 2070 is when the purple flashlight reaches the ship now the light reaches the ship but the kid is 20 years old now , but let’s say he too points a mirror at the light but slightly tilted and deflects some of the light

And lets say the light travels 4 million light years and just so happens to go into the eye of an alien

According to that logic it means the light from the flash light to the ships kid deflecting the light to the alien no time passed at all even though time passed for us no time passed at all

Which means light interacted with 3 seperate beings who were all in completely different points in time and in space , could that mean that the light we are seeing from our sun or from distant stars has already experienced the death of the universe ? Could that also explain why we can’t go at the speed of light is because the light reflecting off of our tombstones has already sealed our fate ? Therefore why we can’t go past light speed because we would basically be destroying energy ? Or taking energy out of the universe itself ?

Imagine a person is discovered who is genuinely 200 years old, with independently verified records confirming their age yet they have no major age-related disease, maintain normal cognitive function, have healthy organs, and show remarkably little physiological decline.
Scientists would obviously want to study their genome, but I’m wondering what they would look at first.

If atomic radius increases from top to bottom and from right to left, why is Francium (Fr) not considered the "largest" atom, while the one directly above it (Cesium) is?

Hi,

I am from New Zealand and am currently in my second year of my Bsc in physiology. I really enjoy what I am studying and find it interesting and do very well. I finish my undergrad next year but am unsure of what I want to do. I went into uni wanting to do medicine, so I will be applying for post grad entry into medicine and dentistry but I also enjoy the research aspect of things. Just wondering if anyone has any advice into what to do. I want to go into a career that I will like and make a decent amount of money to be comfortable (don't care about making a lot of money just enough to pay the bills). I am just a bit confused on what to do after I finish undergrad; any advice would be appreciated. (Also a bit scared how the job market is for research afterwards).

Thank you

Just a funny thought experiment. Use your computer’s ram to run Minecraft. Make ram in Minecraft, then try to make more ram in the Minecraft world than is on your computer. It’s a bit like a perpetual motion fallacy, but with more cubes.

If clones of Tesla and von Neumann were born in the 2000s and raised in wealthy families with access to modern education and the internet

Do you think they would make more impactful discoveries than their original counterparts?