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'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 ?

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?]

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.

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?

Welcome to our weekly feature, Ask Anything Wednesday - this week we are focusing on Biology, Chemistry, Neuroscience, Medicine, Psychology

Do you have a question within these topics you weren't sure was worth submitting? Is something a bit too speculative for a typical /r/AskScience post? No question is too big or small for AAW. In this thread you can ask any science-related question! Things like: "What would happen if...", "How will the future...", "If all the rules for 'X' were different...", "Why does my...".

Asking Questions:

Please post your question as a top-level response to this, and our team of panellists will be here to answer and discuss your questions. The other topic areas will appear in future Ask Anything Wednesdays, so if you have other questions not covered by this weeks theme please either hold on to it until those topics come around, or go and post over in our sister subreddit /r/AskScienceDiscussion , where every day is Ask Anything Wednesday! Off-theme questions in this post will be removed to try and keep the thread a manageable size for both our readers and panellists.

Answering Questions:

Please only answer a posted question if you are an expert in the field. The full guidelines for posting responses in AskScience can be found here. In short, this is a moderated subreddit, and responses which do not meet our quality guidelines will be removed. Remember, peer reviewed sources are always appreciated, and anecdotes are absolutely not appropriate. In general if your answer begins with 'I think', or 'I've heard', then it's not suitable for /r/AskScience.

If you would like to become a member of the AskScience panel, please refer to the information provided here.

Past AskAnythingWednesday posts can be found here. Ask away!

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?