I was reading about limnic eruptions in Africa, when I wondered, could the oceans do a similar thing if it's had enough of our GHG emissions?

So I know the basic idea behind what powers large storms - hot, moist air raises. As the water condenses it releases more heat, powering further updrafts. The movement of air can bring in more warm moist air, continuing the cycle.

But large storms like hurricanes appear to behave like they have a sort of inertia - they can accumulate strength. A hurricane grows and then moves over land. Once separated from its supply of warm, moist air it quickly begins to diminish - for a certain definition of quickly. They can last a day or two, still blowing strong winds. As I understand it those strong winds are created by the updraft. What’s maintaining the updraft when there is no fresh moist air?

Is there a built up collection of steam that is still condensing? Are hurricanes close enough to the warm ocean they still can pull air and if they fully went “out of range” they would disperse nearly instantly?

Is the length of a cycle (the time it takes a unit of air to get pulled into the eye and raise to the top of the storm) longer than I’m giving it credit for, and it actually can take a day?

Basically trying to understand what mechanism gives large storms an inertia that builds up and then has to diminish over time when they leave favorable conditions. Thanks!

Normally I would go ask another sub dedicated to writing but, since I want to keep things in my recent sci-fi story as “hard science” as possible I decided it might be better to ask here instead. It’s a relatively common trope in sci-fi, from books to games, that planets have a single or “dominant” biome. We know, at least as far as Earth is concerned, this isn’t or at least likely shouldn’t be the case since planets are complex objects with a lot of precise (or at least well tuned) features all working together to make up all the various environments, biomes and regions we see on our own little piece of stellar real-estate.

So realistically speaking, outside of the planet being basically dead like Mars or being terraformed in some manner by insert super science technology here are there any natural processes that could possibly cause a planet to be entirely one biome? Could you, for example, have a whole planet be like the dust bowl that afflicted the USA’s Mid-West nearly a century ago purely by natural process and still be viable to support life, or would it turn into Mars 2.0 at that point? Could a whole planet theoretically be like the Amazon Jungle or have a Mediterranean climate? Could a planet be so volcanically active it’s basically a giant ball of magma without asteroids bombarding it hourly?

I’m exploring a rocket-free satellite launch idea: use a high-altitude drone or balloon to carry a payload to 30-40 km altitude, then launch it towards the ISS. The object collides with the ISS, attaching via a "sticky" mechanism, inheriting its orbital velocity (7.8 km/s). The object then releases a mini satellite into orbit.

Is it feasible for the object to inherit the ISS’s orbital velocity after collision? Could this method deploy a satellite successfully? Looking for insights from aerospace experts and orbital mechanics enthusiasts!

I'm not 100% sure this belongs here, but I want to try and ask anyway. I've been arguing with this one person about trans issues (with them making the typical arguments that trans women are not women because they lack x quality) and mentioned that scienctific consensus seems to generally confirm the experiences and identities of trans people, and that concepts like sex are much more complex than we used to think and it's not actually easy to quantify what a woman is - especially since it's also, to some degree, a question of philosophy. They, in turn, start ranting about how science is untrustworthy and how researchers are paid to publish results that support the political narrative and whatnot.

After some back and forth arguing, they produced several articles and a video by Sabine Hossenfelder mentioning how the pressure of "publish or perish" and other issues have caused a lot of bad science to be produced nowadays, some of which passes the peer review process because the reviewers are not doing their jobs. And because of that, we can't trust anything from after 1990 or so, because it is a miracle for something to not be fraudulent (their words, not mine). And while I know that's nonsense, I'm kind of stumped on what to say.

There's a notable difference between a lot of bad science being published and there being practically no good science anymore, and I doubt that the state of academia is so bad that this bad science has made it into scientific consensus without getting dismissed, and even with all its flaws, academia is still the best source of knowledge we have, but I'm not sure what to do when talking to someone who is clearly not arguing in good faith. Stop, ideally, but as that conversation is in a public forum I also don't just want to leave misinformation unanswered when it might influence others. So how are I and others meant to deal with a lack of trust in science of this level? Apologies for the length of this question, I felt I should give some context on where I am coming from here.

Title.

I'm involved with people who like to mix fact with fiction a lot and their talk about fascia is starting to annoy me. Yes, stretching is good and all but they're starting to talk about fascia as if manipulating it was the magical cure all for every ailment in the world. However it seems somewhat obscure so asking if there are good sources for me to read that would help me gain some understanding of it. As currently, they know more about it than I do, but I'm pretty sure they're drawing conclusions that don't track.

I've been trying to find the names for the various really tiny numbers used in scientific notation. This site gives the notation names for numbers down to 10^-24, which is a yocto-whatever, but what I'm trying to find, is what would more of them, down to around 10^-50 or so, would be. Honestly, I'm trying to find out what you'd call 10^-43 seconds, other than the Planck Time.

Current spacesuits operate using air to provide pressure against skin. However, mechanical pressure equivalent to 1 ATM on the body would provide the same effect. Why don't astronaughts wear swimsuit-style spacesuits, with only the head area pressurised? You would reduce the risk of depressurisation due to punctures.

I was wondering if new physics discoveries would make the universe stable and vaccum decay impossible, and if the conditions of the early universe should've triggered FVD if the universe was metastable? I've been anxious about vaccum decay for a while so I'd like to put it to rest.

I understand that gravity doesnt seem to necessarily cause waveform collapse. But since all matter has gravity, would we be able to measure the gravitational effects of something in superposition? Would this theoretically allow us to measure all of its locations without collapsing the wave function?

Seems like there hasn't been a breakthrough in this century. Nothing revolutionary, like even when Li Ion was first introduced.

Graphene fizzled out. Solid state battery seems to be a dream too. Superconductors at room temperature seems to be science fiction.

Is this it? The best we will get at battery tech?

Generally speaking, a current carrying wire experiences a force in an external magnetic field (F=I L x B). Superconductors expel magnetic fields (Type I SC anyway). So if you have a SC carrying current, the actual region where current is flowing shouldn't have any magnetic field in it (the magnetic field lines would divert around the wire). Would the SC wire still experience a force?

The entire transformation mechanics could not appear in single mutation. So, what were the in-between stages that made animal transform into different kind of animal instead of just growing up? Maybe, some of those in-between stages currently exist in some species?

I found out we managed to create glow in the dark cats, so why not blue skin and fur?

Some mammals like mandrills already have blue skin so mammals with blue skin is not completely impossible.

But with hair it’d have to be like how birds have blue feathers, it being a structural colour that reflects blue light without them creating blue pigment.

But could this be possible or is our scientific knowledge not ready for this?

I'm a second year undergrad studying oceanography and coastal dynamics. I'm researching ideas for my honours project for my final year but it seems like no one has specifically written about the thing I'm researching. My teachers tell me that's great, because then there's something new to write about, but obviously I'll need citations for everything else that I don't have data for. Also as an undergrad surely I have not come up with a novel idea (and if I have then I feel like I shouldn't have!)

At some point every student moves from writing reports about other people's research to writing reports about your own research, and I guess I've slowly been navigating this transition the further into my studies I get.

So I'm asking scientists who have much more experience than me, what do you do when you're faced with something with limited information or sources to start with?

I know that dragonflies have the highest successful hunt/kill rate in the animal kingdom but i cannot find anything other than a website that states this. I am trying to use this fact in a paper but cannot find an academic source for it? Any help would be very much appreciated

Please help me resolve this query.

So, as a preface to this, I'm not entirely sure if this counts as too hypothetical or not. To my understanding, there are certain base principles at play that determine all this in a fairly clear manner and I'm just not educated enough to be able to fill in the gaps, to apply the science as it is understood. In this context, I would expect the same "rules" could be applied with any given variation, even ones that are not known to appear in nature. For context, I have been basically handed a worldbuilding project with an unnatural purple star and I'm curious how, if you run it through the determinant things, what changes. This question applies broadly though, and works even with known stars like red and blue that differ from our own sun and encounter similar issues. Now, this is my understanding:

Our star is a whitish star. It may give out some more in particular areas, but it's a "white" star. Not all stars do this, some stars are red, some are bluer. Yellowy stars might be sat in the middle of the spectrum. Green and purple stars do not naturally exist.

Because our sun is white (or "yellow") and gives off a lot of greenish light, we have green plants. Because the sun is white, the moon appears white, our skies appear blue, sunsets are red, and the visible light spectrum is the rainbow. This is where my understanding starts to break down a little: If our star was blue, would sunset not be red because there's not enough red light being given off? Or would the sheer brightness of the star mean that it does so anyway? If it was red, would our sky still be blue even for a relative absence of blue light? Would the moon change color with the star?

I ask for purple because I've been, in effect, handed a writing situation with a purple star. It is explicitly unnatural, but it's there. The reddish purple of a ripe plum is the exact words I have. So, to my understanding: the sky is blue, but a richer blue for the lack of a green/yellow to "whiten" it. The sunsets are red, and emphatically so. The moon? Would a moon like earth's be purple to match the star? Blue, because of blue scattering? Would it shift?

And, more interestingly - if we assume that the natives are plain humans able to see the color spectrum just like we do, would the color green be allowed to exist at all on this world? The sun isn't giving off green light, except perhaps as a matter of being so bright via being a star that it gives off an amount of "white" light, but would this be enough that the color green could exist on the world? If something green was brought from off-world, a car or something, what would it look like here? And would the sun in the sky look reddish with a blue sky filtering it a bit? Or would it just look very pale like ours does, although people say it's yellow because of that blue filter, I still think it looks white tbh.

These are, I believe, questions possible to answer by people who actually know how these effects work, and limited to theory only because no known examples exist rather than some extreme impossibility. Like, the principles that define this all are still just in place the same as always, right? It's just a matter of changing the source color, and running it through the same stuff?

To sum up, I believe my fundamental question can be broken down thusly: How much of an impact does the apparent color of a star have on the visible spectrum nearby? Are stars bright enough that they're all basically some degree of "white" that overrides it, or is the impact profound? What actually changes here? The sky? The moon? The color of the star in the sky? In these color-skewed stars, can opposite tones (red for a blue star, vice versa) and middle tones (green/yellow) be seen regardless?

Thank you for your consideration, everyone who reads this.

I own atmospheric physics/science textbooks as well as a climatology textbook (Global Physical Climatology), but they're either not really focused on climate change or rather old editions that are not up to date. What is the best textbook to start understanding this problem a recent (as much as possible) perspective?

Tetrachromacy allows people to see more colors than the average person. However, I'm only aware of the condition existing in women. Are there any documented examples of men with tetrachromacy?

Hello Friends,

I'm currently finishing up a BSc in Biology with plans to do graduate work next year, and potentially a PhD after that. My current end goal is a career in research somewhere. The reason I mention this is that in Biology, there is a large number of armature 'Civilian scientists' who basically do science as a hobby. These people were looked down on by the biology community for a while, but recently professional biologists are starting to collaborate more with them and they are actually really useful when collecting data (also see two-eyed seeing).

I'm wondering how common this is in other sciences, Physics specifically. I've recently been getting really interested in relativity(especially black holes), and while I'm not naïve enough to think I understand it based on a couple hours worth of youtube videos, I would potentially like to explore further.

My issue is I've already taken an extra year to graduate, and do not have time/room to pursue this academically. I am also concerned that I may be underestimating the difficulty of the math involved in these topics. The highest math course I've completed was a pre-cal/calculus supplementary course between highschool and university. I definitely think I can do better than this, because all my 'struggles' in previous math so far has been due to a lack of effort rather than ability (lazy). However I do know that physics gets really crazy.

I'd be happy not exploring unknown territory, but the dream would be to get to an understanding where I can start to explore these unknowns if I wished. Another issue I have is I'm not entirely sure where to start outside of starting another BSc in physics. (I'm not that serious)

I guess my question is: Is it feasible to do any type of physics outside of academia, or am I attempting something probably not worth the effort?

Other questions I thought about before I hit post:
What type of communications happen between physicists? Is it just people publishing papers back and forth, or is there more correspondence than that?

I learn best from taking in a bunch of stuff and then asking a bunch of specific questions. I have found it hard to do this online, and really benefit from speaking with my Professors. Is there anything like this outside of university?

While I do enjoy proofs, it's not really the part I am interested in, I prefer more interpreting the meaning of the math/equations. Is that a significant part of physics or just something mentioned in the conclusion of a paper?

Thanks for any responses.

What actually happens mechanistically in annihilation?

What I mean is like, take covalent bonding. In a covalent bond between two atoms, the two atoms are close enough together that they begin sharing part of the same electron cloud, and this has the effect of holding them in proximity to one another in a single system.

What is the, so to speak, “physical intuition” of what’s happening in annihilation? Is it just some excitation of the quantum fields, so that there can’t even be a physical description of the interaction? Or do the particle and antiparticle like “touch” each other, and when they touch they break down or transform or something? Do the colliding particles ‘instantaneously’ transform into the byproducts, or is there a process of transformation?

Hi,

I'm 15 and I'm looking to dip into the world of science fairs. I'm passionate about science and medicine so I think a science fair is a really good opportunity

I wanted to reach out to some people and ask about some day to day problems that you might be facing that need solutions. Don't get me wrong, I don't want your solutions to these problems. I just want some inspiration about some problems that I can hopefully try to solve for my project on my own.

I tried researching on the internet but figured I needed some actual human input so if I do find a potential idea thorough here I would feel more passionate since I know real people are actually looking for a solution.

I hope this is an okay thing to ask here.

Sorry if this shows up twice. I have no clue if the first one posted

Hello, I dont know if this is the right place to ask, but anyone have a Science membership or can log in via institute? I want to read this letter, but I can't have acess. If you can help, I would be very grateful.

Article/letter

Ok so backstory: I grew up super religious. Went to tiny, tiny Christian schools. My education was not good, to say to the least, especially the sciences. We were taught creation only.

But I’m an adult now, and consider myself agnostic, leaning towards atheist. And I love science. I get hyperfixated on it, and it’s like my brain is hungry for all of the information I missed out on.

So I’m asking where to start, I guess. What documentaries to watch, what books to read, what websites to go to. I want to know everything. I want to know how the universe formed, and about how Earth formed. I want to know all the different prehistoric eras and how everything evolved. The more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know and I don’t even know where to begin.

Please and thank you! My busy, curious brain is so grateful for any help.

I was wondering, I heard that Kugelblitz are a type of Black Holes that are formed from Energy focused in a finite space, which includes Light. I just want to be sure this is not me reading into things if it means light of a different kind or from Photons. Would like to know if this is the correct definition.

https://medium.com/quantaphy/the-kugelblitz-a-singularity-of-light-38e73b4bb00