Sometimes, when I'm really cold, it can take over an hour to warm me up, even with a heating blanket. The quickest solution, a hot shower, feels really inefficient with all the heat going down the drain.

That got me thinking about microwaves. They heat food (partly) from the inside, contrary to simple infrared radiation.

Could we safely do that with people?

I found a Reddit thread where a non-lethal weapon and people getting eye damage because they stayed too long in front of a radar dish.

Could some sort of device be made that would warm specific areas (say, a hand or a leg) without endangering sensitive areas like the eyes?

Would it actually warm someone up from the inside? Would it be possible to make it safe?

Would it present advantages in cases of hypothermia, compared to heated IV fluids?

In other words, is there any individual cell that can decide between two or more options, or all they all solely chemical and mechanical reactions without any self-determination at all?

I find fractals extremely fascinating and way, way, way out of my depth. One example being the Barnsley Fern, which I find so cool. It feels a bit like someone cracked a little piece of the Matrix code.

But is there anything really significant about the fact that it looks like a fern from a botanical/mathematical perspective? Do the two connect in any real way? Can we somehow find the math genetically or learn something about the mathematical properties of other leaves, for example? How "real" is it?

If I could make an oak leaf from fractals, would it advance mathematics and/or botany or would it be equivalent to creating a cartoon using Geogebra (nice to look at, but basically meaningless)?

Like fossil fuels come from organic matter that grew because of the sun. Is there any form of energy on that cannot be traced back to the sun in some way?

Like the title says: when you see "heat rising" (the wavy/blurry area above a heat source), what are you actually seeing?

Bonus question: How does that cast a shadow? I noticed when I was opening my air fryer, I could see the shadow of the heat rising but, looking at the hot basket itself, couldn't see it.

In the color lines of a spectrograph and what seems to be an area with a certain color, zooming in shows that this color is delicately split in half by a black vertical hairline, on one side it's the emission of photons of color by a hydrogen atom with a spin up electron, on the other it seems to be the same color but it's a spin down electron.

Whenever I hear that gap mentioned, 1/137 is invoked, but I'm not sure precisely what that means, and I'm visualizing that the color of the spectral emission can be divided or deconstructed into a total of 137 vertical lines, and the one in the middle is black.

Maybe it represents 1/137 of a photon's wavelength at a certain color?

There is a tendency for real doctors with backing from Academia or whoever's in charge of deciding how you science to just plain getting it wrong and not realizing it for a long time.

Homeopathy is a good example of this, as it appeared to get great results when it was created during the Bubonic Plague and had such staying power to the point that in the 1800's it was considered a legitimate and mainstream field of medical practice.

Now today we know Homeopathy is nonsense... Remembers New Age Healing is still a thing Okay, those of us with sense know homeopathy is garbage. With the only reason it was getting such wonderful results was because the state of medicine for a long period of time in human history was so god awful that not getting any treatment at all was actually the smarter idea. Since Homeopathy is basically just "No medicine at all", that's exactly what was happening with its success.

Incidentally this is also why the Christian Science movement (Which was neither Christian nor Science) had so many people behind it, people were genuinely living longer from it because it required people to stop smoking at a time when no one knew smoking killed you.

Anyhow. With that in mind, I want to know if there's a case where the exact opposite happened.

Where Scientists got together on a subject, said "Wow, only an idiot would believe this. This clearly does not work, can not work, and is totally impossible."

Only for someone to turn around, throw down research proving that there was no pseudo in this proposed pseudoscience with their finest "Ya know I had to do it 'em" face.

The closest I can think of is how people believed that Germ Theory, the idea that tiny invisible creatures were making us all sick, were the ramblings of a mad man. But that was more a refusal to look at evidence, not having evidence that said "No" that was replaced by better evidence that said "Disregard that, the answer is actually Yes"

Can anyone who sciences for a living instead of merely reading science articles as a hobby and understanding basically only a quarter of them at best tell me if something like that has happened?

Thank you, have a nice day.

What if I am just imagining the high pitch sound in my mind whenever I hear about or think of tinnitus just like how someone tells you to imagine a whale and you form a mental image of a whale? I don't pay attention to the noise while I'm busy doing stuff but once I think about it, it is as hard to stop noticing it similar to being told to breathe manually, and it gets very annoying after some time. Is it what tinnitus really is?

We've pretty much completely discounted astrology as having any meaningful impact on a person's personality. But what about the seasons of the year, and the weather that comes with them? The stars position in the sky are an indication of the seasons on earth. Right? Wouldn't a baby that is born into a world of sunshine and warmth have a different early development than one born into the cold and darkness of winter? Has any research been done on the impacts of a baby's environmental conditions on their personality?

I know that lions can be scared away when they see humans approaching without fear, but what if they're ambushed? How about a tiger, or a polar bear? If I manage to sneak up on one of these apex predators, and jump out, screaming, and running at it, will it run? Or will it just turn around and kill me? I guess I'm wondering if apex predators have a fight or flight reflex, and how strong it is if they do. Do they tend to resort to fighting more often if they're the baddest tiger in the jungle vs the runt of the litter? Do they quickly assess the threat and respond accordingly, or does a flight instinct kick in and send them running?

A few minutes ago I suddenly woke up , I didn't sleep well

At the beginning everything was normal , then I blinked and ...

The lighting suddenly became more yellow (and unnatural) and the closet I was looking at turned into a frightening and shocking appearance (the closet itself, it was vandalized in a way that I can't even remember to describe). I remained in shock for three or four seconds, then I found myself closing my eyes tightly ( it was an involuntary reaction ), and when I opened my eyes again, everything returned to normal.

This is the first time in my life that this has happened to me

So ... any scientific explanation?

Thanks in advance

Or in other words which forces keep electrons in orbitals and prevent it from flying away or crashing into the nucleus according to modern understanding?

Could someone recommend examples of high-fidelity, best-practices Western Blots from Open Access Papers? I would like to use these examples to see what kind of distortions or corruption might occur to these images when they are reproduced or archived in various ways.

So every time we get bread it comes in a stretchy bag. However, once we pull it out of the freezer later the bag is noticeably more crinkly and brittle. Anyone know why this is? I can't seem to find an answer to this phenomenon anywhere.

Let's say the roofs are all red, how big does it have to be to be visible as a little red dot?

Hi,

I found this scientific paper that I believe is very well supported and is for me the most satisfying new cosmological development I ever read.

Cosmological Particle Production: A Review
(2021 December 7 // @ arXiv...)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.02444.pdf

... the way I read it, it provides an alternative explanation for the cosmological microwave background (CMB) and an alternative for the Big Bang.

I am simply on a quest to find an effective non-distillation method for purifying isopropyl alcohol used for rinsing resin 3D prints.

I have seen some elaborate systems for curing and then filtering resin that is suspended in the isopropyl by running it through standard carbon water filters. That just seems a bit over-complex and does a poor job of removing dyes. In some cases, the filters are not fine enough and the isopropyl will eventually get "sticky".

It seems to me that a finer filtration system would work much better. Carbon and celite should catch most of the monomers and oligomers, but I am not sure about the photoinitiators and other additives.

Distillation is obviously the best method for purity, but there may be a worse cleanup and a higher fire hazard risk.

Are there better materials that I could use for filtering besides celite and carbon? IPA is tiny compared to the rest of the molecules I am dealing with so filtration seems viable.

(I should note that I would bulk develop the used IPA in clear plastic containers in the sun for a day or two first.)

I'm referring to the human race evolving in the African continent and then migrating to the rest of the world.

Evolving in Europe made people light skinned to account for the reduction in sunlight exposure, are there any other traits which other ethnicities developed to adapt to their new environment? Or are the diifferent traits in different ethnicities just stuff that developed by chance and got somehow reinforced because of the isolation between populations?

This question came to my mind first thinking about "Asian eyes", do they serve any "purpose"?

There are many other bee species that can sting Humans and survive, but the European honeybee has a barbed stinger, so it cannot remove the stinger once it's stung. In attempting to remove the stinger the bee will rupture its lower abdomen and then die.

Why? What is the evolutionary advantage to that?

We often talk about the climate impact based on greenhouse gases, but extracting fuel from the ground and using it in exothermal processes of course also releases energy as heat.

This is mostly¹ in contrast with renewables, which make use of energy that's not long-term contained to begin with, so would end up as heat in our atmosphere anyways.

So, my question is: Does the amount of energy released by non-renewables have any notable impact on our global temperature? Or would it easily radiate into space, if we solved the greenhouse gas problem?

¹) In the case of solar, putting up black surfaces does mean that less sunlight gets reflected, so more heat ultimately gets trapped in our atmosphere. There's probably other such cases, too.

Say a dissolvable spring is compressed with a bolt and nut that do not melt in a sulfuric acid solution. The spring has quite a bit of potential energy at this point since it is compressed. Assuming the spring dissolves perfectly (no breakage, just complete disintegration), what happens to the potential energy of the spring?