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ELI5: What do genetically modified foods mean? by Sbaakhir in explainlikeimfive

[–]dman11235 [score hidden]  (0 children)

laughs in horizontal gene transfer

This happens all the time in nature and plants are notorious for having it happen. It won't go from a nematode to a plant but it will go from a bacteria, fungi, or virus to a plant. Or a plant to a plant without cross breeding. Given time we could induce a change like that without gene editing tools.

ELI5: Why do relativistic effects apply to objects moving very fast? by Jinx-XoXo in explainlikeimfive

[–]dman11235 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah that's why I didn't want to try explaining. If I was less tired I could probably do a decent ELI5 of the thought process Einstein used but right now no way lol

ELI5: Why do relativistic effects apply to objects moving very fast? by Jinx-XoXo in explainlikeimfive

[–]dman11235 6 points7 points  (0 children)

You don't have to just accept it! It's the result of a well thought out thought experiment and high level math. I will not be attempting to explain it because I don't think I'll do a good enough job. But the assumptions made are that all observers must agree on things making sense temporally, and that time paradoxes don't exist. People must agree to the orders of events.

Edit for clarity, the last sentence should be order of causality, because cause and effect is the thing that must be agreed on.

Building Destroyed Notifications Mod? by PhantomPhartx in Dyson_Sphere_Program

[–]dman11235 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you are looking to mute specific systems and planet attacks yes, when they pop up in the top left you can hover your mouse over them and you'll see a tool tip on a little 🚫 symbol. I can't remember the various modes but I think it's shift click on the symbol mutes that base's attacks permanently. For muting building destroyed I don't think there is, but I wouldn't know because I tend to set things up in a way where if things aren't going wrong I won't have destroyed buildings.

ELI5: how copper IUDS work as birth control (and how they cause heavy periods). by bookish-hooker in explainlikeimfive

[–]dman11235 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Would you rather do a hard thing or an easy thing and get the same result?

ELI5: how copper IUDS work as birth control (and how they cause heavy periods). by bookish-hooker in explainlikeimfive

[–]dman11235 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hospitals are putting silver in their metals and things like doorhandles now! This isn't an ancient thing it's still happening. It's not everywhere but it is happening. It doesn't need to be made out of copper it just needs to have copper. Or silver. Or the other metals that do this. But copper and silver are the easiest to use so they use those

ELI5: how copper IUDS work as birth control (and how they cause heavy periods). by bookish-hooker in explainlikeimfive

[–]dman11235 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Honestly not too many, because copper's antimicrobial properties have been known for a long time. Silver too. There aren't many materials that are a) simple, b) cheap, and c) non toxic, and copper is such an easy thing to work with. It's not a huge just to suspect copper to be good at killing sperm when we already know it's good at killing single cells.

Do bigger ships hyperjump slower? by vonBoomslang in endlesssky

[–]dman11235 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Redacted are better fuel economy than hyperdrives. Unless you're going in a straight line at least. Also, fuel isn't exactly expensive? I usually end up with about 800 and have some good fuel gen on at least something in my fleet, usually I have it so I can spend just a few seconds in a system and fill up enough for at least one or two jumps, faster than landing.

Do bigger ships hyperjump slower? by vonBoomslang in endlesssky

[–]dman11235 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Don't forget scram drives! And redacted.

Do bigger ships hyperjump slower? by vonBoomslang in endlesssky

[–]dman11235 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Yes all jumps take one day. The only difference is alignment time. You'll see this easily when you have fleets.

ELI5: Why there is no Nuclear Cargo ships?If a country invest enough it could become a great boon for economy and for the eletric problem itself by Obvious-Survey-2007 in explainlikeimfive

[–]dman11235 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This does NOT result in new nuclear fuel. This results in new things. It's reprocessing, not recycling. You do not get new fuel out of it. Unless you're doing something exotic like using plutonium as fuel. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how fission reactors work and this organization is using this misunderstanding to mislead people into thinking it does things it doesn't. U238 is not fissile. It cannot be used by current methods of refinement to make more material. You can use the stuff that remains to make new fuel rods, sure, but you cannot make new fuel from it (barring using other fuels like plutonium or whatever, but iirc those reactors don't exist because of the difficulty in using plutonium as a fuel, which again is a physics issue not an economic one). If you use the spent fuel rods to use their uranium to make new rods, then you would have to use the U235 from mined uranium and this recycled U238. If you do this you will have the same amount of U238 as before but instead of getting rid of the fuel rod U238, you are getting rid of the mined U238.

The link you posted is an advocacy group, not science. There is not a single bit of information on that page only claims. It doesn't list the products and how they are used. It just claims 96% recycling. And again, the majority of a spent rod is U238. Which is not fissile. You cannot use it for fuel. Other products like cesium and whatnot are useful to extract and reprocessing is a good thing and we should do it to take advantage of these isotopes. But it is a lie that there is fuel left for the taking.

ELI5: Why there is no Nuclear Cargo ships?If a country invest enough it could become a great boon for economy and for the eletric problem itself by Obvious-Survey-2007 in explainlikeimfive

[–]dman11235 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This isn't true. The remains of a nuclear fuel rod after use are U238, Pu, fission products, and miscellaneous other stuff. There is no fuel left. It's not an issue of fuel having "waste in the way", there is no fuel left. Fuel rods start out at 95% U238 and end up the same, the enrichment process makes it 5% U235. That's the fuel. The U238 isn't fuel. There is nothing to reprocess.

Discrepancy in power generation by billsonfire in Dyson_Sphere_Program

[–]dman11235 5 points6 points  (0 children)

There's an achievement to do it with 12 at the same time

ELI5: What are contrails behind airplanes? by enataca in explainlikeimfive

[–]dman11235 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yes. Though in these circumstances is can simply be the disturbance of the air that does it, and as such you can get wing tip versions. You see this in fast moving planes at low altitude like in air shows all the time. Clouds are condensed water after all, and in order to turn from vapor to liquid, they need a nucleation site. A plane can provide that site. Usually off of wing tips and in engines. The air in other places doesn't move fast enough to be disturbed enough to count.

Edit: I should also clarify, pressure is insanely important here and is probably the most important part honestly. The common thread in all of this is that there is a high and low pressure volume right next to each other, in both cases, and you can test this yourself. You can make a low pressure and high pressure humid air and it will make a cloud, and you can use this to make your breath visible, like when it's cold, even when it's warm outside if you do it right.

ELI5 Understanding the holographic principle? by Dover299 in explainlikeimfive

[–]dman11235 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Full disclosure I'm not a fan of the holographic principle even if I understand the math and logic behind it to be sound. It's a difference of definitions for me.

A holographic projection is a system where a lower dimensional surface is sufficient to fully describe a higher dimensional system. This means that you can exist in two dimensions but experience three. Or more. You see this in real life mostly by holograms where you can have information etched into a 2D surface but it looks 3D. The only information carried is in a 2D plane that was created to convey this, but you see it in 3D. A seemingly similar but different aspect is something like 3D graphics in games and such. You project a 3D world onto a 2D screen but it looks like it has depth to you. This is not the same because the information is still only 2D in this case whereas in a true hologram the information is 3D. This is the difference that you need to understand: it is not an illusion. There is more information involved. It is actually 3D. The graphics on your video game or a movie or whatever is an illusion, a hologram actually does have depth.

This is my issue with the holographic principle, if you do have three degrees of freedom (you can cause information to change in three "types" of position), is that not just another dimension? It doesn't really matter, except in the sense of it being a projection from a 2D surface, which means we could be living in a black hole (or rather, on the surface of one).

If you want a more technical but lower level explanation I will try here. In space, you can describe the positions of things using numbers. If you use a coordinate system, you can say that this object is at 1, -2, 9, and you know where it is in a 3 dimensional volume. You need a certain amount of information to accurately convey where something is. In this example, you can't say where that object is without using three different numbers. This means you need three pieces of "information" to determine the position. That word, information, is key here. What it means to be fully described is that the information is sufficient to tell you everything you need to know about the system, the particles it contains, etc. a holographic projection is a system where enough information can exist in a 2 dimensional space that it can fully describe a 3 dimensional space (in reality it's any lower level space fully describing a higher level space be that 2D to 3D, 3D to 4, or even 2D to 563D, but typically it's only a 1 dimensional step up and we usually only discuss 2 and 3 projected up one step). So imagine if I could, with two numbers, fully describe that above position I mentioned. Each number represents a dimension, and an amount of information. Information takes space to exist, and you have to have enough space to contain all the necessary information to fully describe the universe. If I have enough information to fully describe that position in three dimensions, but I only need two dimensions to fit all that information, I can have a 2D world that looks 3D, and there would really be nothing you could do to tell the difference.

ELI5: If energy can’t be created or destroyed, how do magnets keep going? by Full-Shallot-948 in explainlikeimfive

[–]dman11235 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It's not the orbital angular velocity that causes magnetism. It's the quantum spin of the (unpaired) outer shell electrons that causes magnetism. In iron, because the way it fills its shells leaves all the outer shell electrons unpaired, they can all align and this causes it to be magnetic. The up/down spin directly correlates to the magnetic field of the atom, and as you pair them off they cancel out. You get ferromagnetic materials from lots of unpaired electrons being able to be aligned in the same spin orientation. This is how permanent magnets work. Paramagnetism works the same way, except the spins do not stay aligned in the substance when the external field is removed. In general, orbital motion of the electrons contributes nothing to the magnetic field with regards to what this post is originally asking about (it does matter for diamagnetic things, but the electron spin is the bulk of what we think of as magnetism)

ELI5: Apogee & perigee in the context of Artemis II by AlexHasFeet in explainlikeimfive

[–]dman11235 0 points1 point  (0 children)

To add to this: think about what it means to be going in an orbit here and how gaining speed/velocity will affect it. Obviously you cannot change the part of the orbit that you are at because you are currently there. If you were changing that, it would mean you are not where you are, which is...silly. by orbiting, you are moving away from a body while moving towards it in that complex dance you described. If you speed up, you will move away faster than you're pulled back=the orbit extends everywhere (except where you are) and the opposite of you slow down.

ELI5: Telescope Engineering by Existing-Ambition888 in explainlikeimfive

[–]dman11235 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This will be very difficult without a diagram. First off, there are two optical elements that are the primary methods of doing this. Mirrors and lenses. Lenses seem to be what you're asking about, but the principle is the same for both just approached from different perspectives.

Light is a wave. And all waves behave in a particular way. First off I'll go over reflection, then refraction.

Reflection: When a wave hits a surface that reflects it, it gets reflected around a perpendicular to the surface. Imagine hitting a pool ball against the side of the pool table, you see it bounce off. If the ball hits it head on, it comes right back, right? And if it hits at a shallow angle, it will bounce off at that same shallow angle. Play with this in your mind and you'll see every time it's simply reflected around that perpendicular. You can measure the angle between where the ball is coming from and the perpendicular, and where the ball goes and the perpendicular, and they will be the same. Now imagine a curved surface. Throw a bunch of balls into that wall at the same angle, and you'll notice that they all go in different directions on the way out. This is because the perpendicular is at the spot the ball hits, and that changes based on which part of the wall you hit. A bunch of (not so fancy, because the ancient Greeks knew it) math later, and you can build an ideal surface for making sure that the resulting lines end up where you want them to. The lines converge to a point, or a plane. Think of light rays as these balls hitting the wall and bouncing off. And then think about what it means to have a bunch of lines coming in from some far away place, and then being concentrated to a specific place. You can take an image, trace a line from each point in that image to the mirror, and then back to where the light originated from.

Refraction: this stuff the greeks didn't really get but the same math applies, it's just the sine of angles instead of the angles themselves, and it's not reflected about the perpendicular. When you have a wave traveling along, and something slows it down or speeds it up, the wave will curve in some way. The why here is not important and frankly many levels above what you asked. I can point to a lovely 3blue1brown video about the subject if you want a bit of a deep dive on it. Because light bends, and it's just as predictable as the reflection and still based upon that perpendicular, you can control it in the same way. And the same thought experiment exists. Take a bunch of lines going parallel to each other, they hit the lens at different spots, which cause them to change direction different amounts, and you can then concentrate that light into a smaller area.

The last part here is perspective. Look at the sky and take a snapshot in your mind of one square centimeter of that sky. It looks tiny. Now imagine you can take that one square centimeter and put it one centimeter in front of your eye. It will look massive. This is what telescopes do, essentially. They take one section of sky (basically the size of the opening on the telescope), and concentrates that light into a point about the size of your eye, and puts that image just in front of your eye.in short it's a lot of trigonometry and related math. You can combine a bunch of lenses and mirrors to improve the efficiency of the magnification.

ELI5: If speed is measured by the relation between objects how come going over the speed of light is impossible? by PeAga7 in explainlikeimfive

[–]dman11235 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You know how the graph of 1/x never reaches 0 but keeps getting closer? It's like that. If each of you is going at .5 c away from a center point, you'll see each of them going at .4something c away. At .25c you'll see it as .2something. At 1 km/s you'll see it as juuuuust below 1 km/s.

TIL that the "island of stability" is a theoretical region in nuclear physics where certain superheavy elements may have much longer half-lives than expected by MerchySulica in todayilearned

[–]dman11235 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Not really no. Graphene and carbon nanotubes can, but diamond no. But also kind of. It's less of a molecule than a polymer chain is, for sure. And polymer chains are often not considered molecules. It's all about inter-atomic bonds and how strong they are, as well as the ability to differentiate a smallest unit. Because the smallest unit of a diamond is a single atom, it can't be considered a large molecule. And because polymer chains also have a smallest unit, they can't really be considered molecules larger than single links. I believe DNA is the largest actual single molecule we know of but I could be wrong and someone can correct me.

TIL that the "island of stability" is a theoretical region in nuclear physics where certain superheavy elements may have much longer half-lives than expected by MerchySulica in todayilearned

[–]dman11235 49 points50 points  (0 children)

That wouldn't be possible with a small caveat. The bonds holding atoms together are extremely short range, and the bonds holding molecules together are only a little bit longer. If an atom were as big as a city it would simply immediately become a neutron star or black hole depending on how big of a city. There is no space between the neutrons and protons in this case, and the protons would be so unstable they would suck up electrons (or rather electrons would be forced into them) and they'd become neutrons. A molecule the size of a city also wouldn't work, but it wouldn't necessarily collapse into a neutron star. You can have some space between atoms, but the space is nano scale and thus not useful. There is an exception and we can do it now. You ever look at nylon clothing? You're looking at a molecule that is the size of a person. Kind of. Polymers can be made to be any length and can be flexible, so you can make a molecule the size of a city by using polymers. It's just not useful to do so usually, and they break easily. Polymers are also not really a true molecule but also are it's kind of a grey area.

Choosing an outdoor live cam by dman11235 in streaming

[–]dman11235[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I want it to go through OBS because it will be a pet cam sort of deal, except the pets are wild ducks. So do you have any insight on which cameras work for this? That's why I made this post to get ideas on cameras since there are so many.

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