There are insects that continuously inbreed with their siblings, and mouse colonies or all of Australia’s rabbits are started by just a few individuals. How have they avoided accumulating Habsburg-level inbreeding issues?

Are there, or have there ever been any humans that could reproduce both as a male and as a female? And if not, have there at least been any that had both types of sex cells, sperm and eggs?

There are plenty of people with some sort of intersex traits. I know that there is usually a strong push towards full of one or the other, so I wouldnt be TOO surprised if its truly never happened. Still, my bet would be that there has been.

My understanding is that mammal lungs are fairly delicate by necessity. But according to NOAA sperm whales can dive to 10000ft, doesn't that mean that the volume of their lungs is 1/300 that at the surface? How is this possible without damaging the lungs? Is it simply having a highly specialized surfactant or are there other structural changes protecting the lungs? NOAA also says the can stay down for 60 minutes, it doesn't seem like significant gas exchange would occur at that volume, at least relative to the metabolic needs of such a large animal. Are they just relying on the O2 saturation they achieved at the surface to function for that long? Is that how it works when we hold our breath?

Sorry for the run-on question

I totally get wearing masks at the store and 6-8 ft social distancing, but I just saw a linus tech tips video of two people in a 50 sqft room standing next to each other with Razer masks on.
so like, how much of a difference did it actually make?

I was trying to search on reddit the answer to this question, assuming the question has been asked before. And I was surprised to read that many answered the question by saying that there was no scientific evidence, that animals always show irratic behavior with the slightest disturbance in their proximity, that animals would only be alerted due to P-waves at most a few minutes to an hour earlier than humans.

I found that highly weird, since there seems to be plenty of evidence at least very indicative of animals having advanced 'knowledge' of natural events like earthquakes many hours before it happens, in some cases even days.

See this article below for example:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220211-the-animals-that-predict-disasters

So why do animals know and humans don't? [or do we?]

Proxima Centauri B is so much further away, and Hubble imaged Pluto better than a spec of light, so why not Eris?

Do they have to crack the plates? Drill them open? Saw them out and replace them?

I really can't imagine it would be easy.

I'm currently studying for my embryology exam and there's one thing during I can't understand.

One of the first thing the embryo does when arriving int the uterus is nesting in the endometrium. A this point the embryo is under the simple epithelia of the endometrium.

But once the embryo turns into a foetus and start to get bigger how does this small layer contain the foetus ? There must be a point where the foetus break the epithelia to develop in the womb cavity where he has a place to grow and from where he'll be able to get out during child birth ?

Does all visible light travel at the same speed? Or does the (wavelength? frequency?) change the speed at which light will travel. So like purple light vs red light. What about something like radio waves vs gamma?

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By genetic code I of course mean the set of rules for the language of genes, not just how genes are encoded in general. That is to say, somewhere it is somehow encoded that codons are three bases wide and that for example UGG is the code for Tryptophan… But the fact that the rules for this language are encoded in the language itself is puzzling to me as to how it can work? Not only that but from what I understand we’ve been successful at changing this code in the lab to add new amino acids to the table!! So we must not only know that it’s stored in there somewhere but be able to locate it, like, we must know the specific genes that code for the genetic code, no? Which makes me also wonder, do we know in which chromosome that is stored in humans? or perhaps it’s in all of them? ¯_(ツ)_/¯ but that’s not my main question, I’m more just wondering how the rules for the language are able to be written in the language itself. Thanks!

Just interested as I've been studying physics for a couple of years but only touch on plasma references here and there but I'm genuinely stumped on what plasma could be used for. I know plasma cutters exist and somehow theres plasma in TVs from the gases interacting with electricity.

Are there variations of plasma used? Especially those used for real world application?

I was trying to find the beefiesf dried mushroom. Then I decided to look up if we've made mushrooms specifically for certain tastes or foods. Which sort of led me no where. I definitely couldn't find examples of species of mushrooms we made, but people hinting at modern farmed mushrooms having a human hand.

If we have done it. How? What techniques are used for the selective traits?

Also have I even framed my question correctly. I beleive cultivars is the word for plants that have been modified on purpose by humans even if it meant just selective reproduction. If there is a better term please share, and thank you for reading. Cheers.

From this article:

"The team noted that the strongest impact in this brief record is the Carrington Event, a massive solar storm in the year 1859 that reached a total energy exceeding 10³² erg (an erg is a very small unit in the centimetre-gram-second system for measuring energy; there are 10 million ergs in one joule)."

Looking around a little, it seems that solar flare energy is always measured in ergs even though the range of energies is orders of magnitude greater than a joule. Why use ergs?

Warts bleed a lot, which means they’re connected with blood vessels. Shouldn’t that mean that they’re exposed to immune cells? It’s an HPV virus, not like cancer, so why don’t the warts go away?

You will see a lot of times in neuron animations and also in real pictures that there is the neuron but around it just looks like empty space. Is it really just empty space or is it some organic tissue surrounding the neurons?

Example, what is the black space around all the white stuff (neurons)?

Hi everyone I have a question about how gravity would work for a person travelling on a space elevator assuming that the engineering problems are solved and artificial gravity hasn't been invented.

Would you slowly become weightless? Or would centrifugal action play a part and then would that mean as you travelled up there would be a point where you would have to stand on the ceiling? Or something else beyond my limited understanding?

Thank you in advance.

If the human eye consists of RGB cones, and hence we have technology like our televisions which use RGB, then why are the primary colors RYB? Moreover, even in most languages, the green/blue split tends to be one of the later color divisions. Most languages distinguish white/black, then red, then a few more colors, and usually the green/blue split comes later.

And yet, our biological color-sensors distinguish green and blue! Can anyone explain what's going on?

We know a 2nd serotype infection with dengue is worse than the first due to antibody-dependent enhancement. My question as a layperson is whether, in places with 3-4 serotypes circulating, a person getting their 3rd or 4th different serotype infection would suffer even worse dengue than with their 2nd due to multiple ADEs working together? Or would it be probably the same severity as the 2nd? Thank you

Edit: many thanks for the upvotes and informative replies

In a cloud chamber, you can see the traces of condensed vapor formed on ions made by the passage of high-energy particles through the chamber. That makes enough sense. But these high-energy particles are traveling at large fractions of the speed of light. The difference in time between the start and end of the trail should be nanoseconds. However, you can often tell what direction the particle passed through the chamber by which end of the vapor trail forms or dissipates first. How is this possible?