Recent content by Barakn

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    B Things to try while watching the solar eclipse

    The analogy to flying is stretched, regardless of whether riding or piloting. For flying, multiple safety measures are in place and not just in the multi-million dollar plane, such as the radar tower and runway perimeter fences that were put in places decades before your flight. For an...
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    White Powder from a Humidifier

    I've used a variety of vaporizers ranging from heaters to ultrasonic to to simple evaporation (fan blowing air through a constantly wetted filter). They've all had their issues. I'm going to sound like a shill, but I bought a Vicks vaporizer, and it was a game-changer. My first clue that it...
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    Do fluctuations in Earth's magnetic field cause heart attacks?

    There might be something to the statistics in these papers, but the pineal gland/magnetic field evidence is weak. I think these researchers are missing the obvious: the exquisite sensitivity of the human eye in low light levels and sleep disruption. There are two classes of people directly...
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    Do fluctuations in Earth's magnetic field cause heart attacks?

    It claims "solar activity can impact autonomic nervous system activities," and to back this up, cites Mattoni, M., Ahn, S., Fröhlich, C. et al. (2020). However, that paper only had 20 volunteers, and says this in its results: "[T]he only significant results were an increase in very low...
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    Ambient air has an odor after removing respirator

    There's no confusion. Though the production method is different, the results are the same, a vast reduction in ions (your link says that even in distillation "99.9 percent of salts, minerals, and other organic and inorganic matter is removed)." Keeping in mind that osmotic pressure is linearly...
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    Ambient air has an odor after removing respirator

    And this explains why millions of gallons of distilled water are sold around the world without any label warning of tissue damage and why there isn't a flood of reports of people burning their mouths with it. It just doesn't happen.
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    Ambient air has an odor after removing respirator

    The mathematics of osmotic pressure Π. Π = icRT where i and R are constants, c is solute molar concentration, and T is absolute temperature. Blood solute molarity is about 0.3 M (we'll use this as the intracellular solute molarity). Typical drinking water has a salt concentration of 100 ppm...
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    Ambient air has an odor after removing respirator

    Also not at all impressed with his video's inclusion of a white blood cell bursting in water. WBCs spend their entire lives in blood plasma or interstitial fluid with high salt concentrations, and aren't prepared to be isolated in low-ion water, whereas the cells comprising the outer layers of...
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    Ambient air has an odor after removing respirator

    I'm not certain we should take much stock in an uncontrolled, unblind experiment consisting of a single, self-dosing subject who mentions hearing rumors about danger before even starting, potentially predisposing him to hypochondria, who doesn't mention any symptoms during the experiment but...
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    B Radon testing my first basement (already has a mitigation system)

    I'm not sure I'm buying l#2. Opening a basement window will essentially eliminate the pressure gradient from the stack effect, and the lesser amount of radon making it into the basement will be diluted with fresh outdoor air. Humidity is not like radon, because radon levels are almost always...
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    B Radon testing my first basement (already has a mitigation system)

    No, it's not consistent. The production of radon occurs at a very steady rate, but it's a gas produced in (more-or-less) porous solids just below a very dynamic atmosphere. Even before we consider building-specific physics, it is obvious radon is more likely to remain and decay underground...
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    Can Coal Deposits Explain the Fermi Paradox?

    I take umbrage with the notion that genius springs ex nihilo. Newtons' development of calculus (contemporaneously with Liebniz) relied on the work of Fermat, among others. Einstein's Special Relativity uses Lorentz's transformation. "If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders of...
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    Why is the CO2 level lower in my house than outside?

    The o.p. is frustratingly light on details. Assuming the times are the local time zone, the measurements were taken close to solar noon. One important consideration, especially considering the instrument utilizes IR, is whether it was exposed to direct sunlight outside (presumably was shaded...
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    What is causing the high pm2.5 readings and mist/haze in the morning?

    I agree with some previous commenters that part of what is happening is an inversion layer in the early morning. As sunlight heats the Earth's surface, the temperature difference decreases, but also convection starts to mix layers, allowing fast-moving high altitude air to couple with lower...
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    B Can neutron stars lose energy?

    Willem2, your comment on different modes of photon creation is appreciated. Keep in mind, though, that the surface temps of young neutron stars are often modeled as being a million Kelvin, and even older ones with surface temperatures close to our sun, so they don't qualify as "low...
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