Recent content by zyxwv99

There's nothing wrong with fresh roadkill if it's a large animal such a deer or moose. You can even sell it to the butcher shop. (Try searching Google Images for "Roadkill Helper.") Incidentally, one our five basic taste buds (for umami, also known as savory) detects glutamate, a product of...

Thanks, Mark44. With your help I was able to figure it out.

I drew an oval using the ellipse tool of a vector-based drawing program. It's 23.5 mm wide and 21.5 mm high. There is a chord 15 mm long perpendicular to the minor axis. So the question is, how do I calculate the distance from the chord to the end of the ellipse (i.e., the end of the major...

It's not just the amplitude but also the frequency. Electromagnetic waves don't become electromagnetic radiation until they are about two wavelengths away from the source. Until then they depend on the source for their energy. After two wavelengths they become self-propagating. That's also about...

Anything that goes into space needs to be robust enough to withstand cosmic rays. That's why computer chips that go into space are usually of the older variety with thicker connections. Mechanical devices such as buttons and switches are more intuitive. You can feel them when they click into...

Stephen Jay Gould, in his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny, explains one mechanism of evolution of that often gets overlooked. When an egg cell gets fertilized, three things happen: cell division, growth, and differentiation (a stem cell splitting up into two different daughter cells). At first only...

I'm no expert on evolutionary biology, but have read literally dozens of books on the subject. Mainly the sort advertized and reviewed in Scientific American, e.g., nearly every book Stephen Jay Gould ever wrote, plus Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, etc. I was just trying to explain my...

I think the original question is entirely valid. There is a parallel situation in historical linguistics, where a language evolves into dialects, which in turn evolve into languages that are mutually unintelligible. The process often starts with a language spreading out over a wide geographical...

Biophotons are not the same as bioluminescence. Biophotons are so so faint they can't be seen with the naked eye. You need photomultiplier tubes and 15-minute exposures. They are an incidental product of biochemical reactions in plants and animals. They are non-thermal, and involve both visible...

You might search on "blue-light hazard" and "high-energy visible light" (or HEV). On Google Scholar I got 305 hits for the former, 156 for the latter, filtering for no patents, no citations, and only since 2010. Since I was recently diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration, I have a...

A while back an asteroid expert gave a presentation at the Commonwealth Club of California. He said the military put up sensors all over the world to detect the sound of nuclear explosions, even thousands of miles away from the nearest sensor. After 10 years they abandoned the project, but not...

A mental illness or personality disorder is a "syndrome" or collection of symptoms. Every so often they figure out the cause of one of these things, at which point it gets moved to another department. In other cases they have clues about possible causes, such as a certain percentage of cases...

When people get CPR it's pretty common for the breastbone to break, sometimes a few ribs too. When I had my heart attack a few years ago, it was the cartiledge in the middle of my breast bone. I think. Small price to pay for getting blood to circulate through your brain.

I'm not aware of neutron stars having neutrons in their cores. The neutrons are generally in the mantle, with other stuff in the atmosphere, crust and core. The physics of the core is so complex that theories describing it are usually considered "exotic" meaning no way to test them. Quark-matter...

The Nemesis hypothesis was reasonable when first proposed in 1984, a brown dwarf with a highly elliptical orbit and a period of about 26 million years. There seemed to be a pattern in asteroid hits, which are pretty well documented and dated. There was also a big signal-to-noise issue, so that...