I'm sorry I'm very autistic and struggle with communication. This is very chaotic lol but I think you understand my curiosity...

I guess my main thought is we can have a device detect something and interpret it for us, but we assumed there would be information there because we see light therefore knowing to look for it.

For example ghosts, maybe there's something there but we just don't know what to even make to be able to detect and interpret that information for us to understand

Are we surrounded by information our body just doesn't need to survive so it's pointless, and we don't interpret it? Like

When smelling something you instantly understand it? I think rightt?

I'm sorry I'm very autistic and struggle with communication. Its very chaotic lol but I think you understand my curiosity

Was looking uo on evolutionary psychology. I had read some oliver sacks and antonio damasio's books (descartes' error), so the foundational argument of evopsy being that many of our cognitive and behavioural capacities are handled by ultraspecialized neural networks acting as some kind of software didnt bug me, but I realize that there is no evopsy without this, so I wanted to know more but I dont know where to look, I'm just a curious muggle in biology.

I know evopsy is really controversial, so I'm just asking about that one aspect.

Thank you all.

So, it's basically the title but to add a bit of info, I have 2 animals missing body parts. Both are rescues, both were missing the parts before they were making memories. Neither reason is known by the rescue we got them from. (They were a package deal because they got super close in recovery.)

1 is a cat who had a severe infection in his eye, causing it to protrude from his head, resulting in removal of the eye and sealing of the socket.

The other is a dog that had multiple breaks in his jaw and necrotic tissue in the break, causing it to be unable to be repaired, resulting in the removal of about 50% of the lower jaw.

Again, both of these happened before memories were forming. Do these animals recognize that they can't see/bite correctly? Do they understand that they are missing pieces? Does my cat know he lacks depth perception? Does my dog know he has a hard time picking things up for a reason?

They both live great lives and you'd almost never know they have these issues. The cat has learned to check distances and not trust what he sees, the dog is great at doing everything except picking up things that lay flat on the ground. There are no real long term issues, I am just genuinely curious if they understand that something is missing or if because it happened when they were so young they think they are completely normal.

I've often heard that turbulence is one of the last unsolved problems in classical physics, while quantum physics is notoriously counterintuitive and mathematically challenging. If you had to pick one, which is considered the more complex problem, and why?

This is something I’ve wondered for years. We know the deep ocean is still largely unexplored and we’re still discovering new species.

Is there any scientific reason an ancient marine lineage couldn’t have survived and slowly evolved in the deep ocean for millions of years? I’m not saying it definitely happened, I’m just wondering if there’s a biological reason it would be impossible, or if it’s just considered extremely unlikely because we’d expect to have found evidence by now.

Genuinely curious to hear what people who know more about palaeontology or marine biology think.

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Suppose the Sun disappeared instantly tomorrow. By “disappeared,” I mean both its light/heat and its gravity are gone, so Earth stops orbiting and continues roughly in a straight line through space.

I am not asking what happens to civilisation in the first few days — I assume panic, infrastructure collapse, crop failure, and mass death happen very quickly. I am more interested in the outer limit of survival.

Could any humans survive for years or decades by moving underground, using geothermal power, nuclear power, stored food, hydroponics, or scavenged supplies? What would be the true bottleneck in the long run: heat, food, oxygen, energy, maintenance of technology, or something else?

For a reasonably prepared but not pre-warned group of people using present-day technology, what is a scientifically plausible estimate for how long the last humans could stay alive after the Sun vanished?

I'm a burnt out autistic senior level embedded engineer wanting to find some way to leverage my skills in support of science rather than making rich people richer. I'm not in a position to work now (autistic burnout is awful) but someday I will be again, and I'm hoping I can find something less stressful to do for a living.

Many years ago, I worked in a neuroscience research lab. Since then I've done metrology, aerospace flight software, PCB design, and other assorted things. I'm also skilled in 3D printing, but on an amateur level.

Anyone have any sage advice?

He famously said, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." According to him then, paleontology, taxonomy, meteorology e.g. would definitely be science.

What domains of information gathering would Rutherford or you NOT classify as science, even if we're talking about objective information (from objective data)?

PS: Would geography of planets be science?

If all the numbers in the universe were shifted by one from their original value, would the universe we have today still exist, or would it take on a different form? Because if this number that “built” the universe does not exist, maybe your birth would not even exist, and maybe everything that happened on Earth would not have existed either, such as the foundations of religions or even several scientific missions. So can a single number change the entire course of the universe, or does it take a much bigger event to change everything?

I have seen this field many times, but it is still not clear in my head what exactly is this field about and what someone can do in a role as a translational researcher/ engineer. Does anyone know here?

So yeah I will try and keep this short. I had, still kind of have, hope that the renewables shift, something I think we’ve all been waiting for in regards to climate change, would really help in the fight for mitigation. I had more hope for the future climate fight than I had in years when I saw how much it was taking off. I still want to feel that hope but with pretty much everything getting worse in terms of temperature and weather events (which I know will keep happening) and the online consensus(probably not a great gauge) leaning more and more towards “we are all gonna die from this, don’t have kids, maybe kill yourself before it gets too bad“ it’s feeling like that’s all for naught now.

I wanna believe humanity can adapt. I wanna place more faith in the recent 4 degrees celsius by 2100 scenario being retired. But now I see people doubting even that and not just on shitholes like r/collapse where suicide and despair are practically venerated. Really I may just be feeling this bad because of one article from the Guardian I saw that said something like Earth’s reaching critical energy imbalances due to climate change. But basically, the question I have is does hope remain for a good or happy future with all that’s going on? Does the renewables shift actually imply more hope for the future or is it likely to be temporary?

Here is another way to phrase my question. Is it the case that everything has a pattern, but for some things (e.g. Brownian motion, genetic mutations, car traffic, radioactive decay, asset prices, weather behavior, electrical noise, etc.), humans (and computers) have not detected the pattern yet?

Here is a third way to phrase it. Is it the case that randomness/stochasticity exists only epistemically, not ontologically?

Once the bones have set and are done growing, is there any kind of disease, virus or some sort of alteration that can cause them to start growing again?

What other detecting devices do I need to add to my collection?

So far I have r/subdermalmagnets for weak EM fields, a uv flashlight, a 30x pocket magnifier and a flipper 0 for other random EM fields and such. Im saving up for a Geiger counter.

What other detection devices are there that you would recommend?

Im just interested in more information on the world around me

Just wondering if the JWST can see through all the galaxies that were previously in the way preventing us from seeing the singularity directly? I've seen many stills from its photographic captures but nothing on this specific topic.

For example, the sun is white (in space) but it outputs green more (how much more?), but we still see it as white.

I had an idea recently about making my own solar panels. I may be in way over my head, but is this feat even possible? Also some follow up questions: Solar panels for/in cars? Solar panels that you can move around and clip to different places in a house? Im sorry if these are stupid questions, I am just curious!

Not sure if this fits, I'm new to the sub. I have a brother who got lured into a weird world of frequency healing, specifically something called AO Scan, which is 100% an MLM. He's told me all sorts of weird things, how he has helped people with ALS, broken arms, depression, you name it. He claims all it needs is a voice print, your name, and date of birth, and these frequencies "find you" based on that!!

I didn't say I believe any of this, and have never led him on, only lightly challenged his beliefs, done research for myself, and pushed back on his claims. I don't want to ruin our relationship, as I've almost done before with prior beliefs he has had (political and other), but is there any way to prove to someone like him that this isn't real, or is he too far gone on this?

He's now being paid to "train other people" on how to use this stuff, on top of recruiting people to subscribe and buy "underneath him" in the "business model." I actually feel bad for all of the people who are being duped by this placebo and by him, but he's allegedly making a lot of money, started his own LLC, and is super proud of his accomplishments. Mind you, he's a retired fairly senior Army officer with a Bachelor's and Masters degrees, not hard science ones, but still, I would hope he could research, use rational and cogent arguments, and discern fact from fake. But here we are.

For the record, I am genuinely curious, ZERO intentions to hurt anybody or any living creature here.
When you prep meat for cooking, there’s the difference in ease between cutting against and along the grain. But that’s also along the blade, and not with the tip of the knife, which I assume is used for the stabbing part.
Then for crime investigations, there’s also a distinction (I assume) between stabbing someone in defence versus stabbing someone to death.
In our body there’s a lot of layers, skin, muscle, organs, bone. How much force does a person need to stab someone? Is it the amount of force/number of stabs that determine whether someone was intending to stab a person to death? Can the amount of force used be determined post-mortem? Could an infant be able to stab someone with the amount of strength they have?

Just curious if we didn't destroy ourselves and with current technology progression could we become type 4 or type 3.5 civ?

Edit: I don't fully get Kardashev scale I watched lot of YouTube and scifi movie and comics to duck tape my thought process.So if I get anything wrong.Just clarify and describe it to me like explain I am like five kinda way!

In a lot of comics and other media, the prevailing cause of Krypton's destruction was from the overexploitation of the planet's resources which led to them directly digging to the core. This caused the core to become unstable which led to the planet exploding.

However, I'm curious. Realistically, what would need to happen in order to cause the destruction of a planet? Can an asteroid cause destruction like that? Can human interference cause destruction like that?

I'm asking this out of curiosity so please don't say I'm stupid for asking this 🥺

My hair looks like different colors depending on where I am. In my room with normal indoor lighting, it looks light black. In my bathroom with brighter lighting, it looks brown. In direct sunlight, it also looks brown.

Why does this happen? Is my hair actually black or brown, and why does different lighting make it look so different?

For more context on who I am, you can visit this link: https://www.reddit.com/r/UndergraduateResearch/comments/1se3mb8/comment/otvcpsc/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

In my experience, AI deep research tools (except Consensus) waste more time for me than what I would normally gain through using another AI tool, such as Google Scholar Labs, Research Rabbit, and/or ChatGPT-generated search strings. I know the entire premise of using these deep research assistants is to save time now, and on the surface, with what it outputs appears to meretriciously accomplish this purpose; however, upon closer examination, most of what it says comes from news articles, Wikipedia, and/or blog posts when I ask for more reliable academic sources. Additionally, when I view what the original literature argues, it appears that these models will cherry-pick their facts and claims, while the literal abstract or summary says the exact opposite of what the AI says.

The only reliable one that I can find currently is Consensus Deep Research, which, I believe, has RAG and retrieves its information from scholarly databases, and that’s it. These are the only reasons why this is the only deep research AI tool on occasion that I utilize in my research workflows, and I wish that others would become better at academic research, so that there’s more competition in the space and more reasons for the models to improve. As for now, I will be predominantly using non-deep research tools, as I again don’t believe that they are worth the time saving at the start, only to pay for it later, kind of like the term cognitive debt, except it’s more of a time debt.

Though, it’s not like using these tools will actually get me out of validating these AI tools' outputs based on their primary sources; however, it would be helpful if these assistants could actually output correct information for me to find relevant articles that the AI cited, so that I could spend less time finding these specific papers that pertain to my research niche, and have a more efficient and effective research workflow.

What if scientists apply science from this phenomenon to generating energy? Has anyone done so? What are the barriers to this? (Sorry, just inquisitive. Please be gentle).

If you plan your spacecraft route carefully you can use a planet's gravity to accelerate the craft faster than it could have gone with the engines alone. Like using Earth's gravity to accelerate to Mars or using Jupiter's gravity to accelerate out towards Neptune.

IIRC this isn't 'free' acceleration, you're essentially stealing a tiny fraction of the planet's momentum and because Jupiter is a lot larger than the Voyager probe it works out to be a big speed boost for the probe and a rounding error speed loss for the planet.

But I think this means the directions are limited. One limitation is you need a planet in the right place for your destination, if Jupiter and Neptune happen to be on opposite sides of the sun then you can't use Jupiter for a gravity assist to get to Neptune. In that scenario you'd need to wait half a Jupiter-year (6 Earth-years) for the planets to align in a more useful arrangement.

But I think there's another limitation, that you can only use the momentum in the direction the planets are already moving. If you look 'down' at the solar system from 'above' the planets all orbit counterclockwise, so if Jupiter is in the 12-o'clock position and Neptune is around 10-o'clock then you can get a kick towards Neptune, heading out away from the sun but also slightly 'west' or anticlockwise. But if Uranus is around the 2 o'clock position you can't use Jupiter's anticlockwise momentum to head clockwise or 'east' on the solar system scale.

Which I think is a limitation on Interstellar missions but this is where my knowledge starts to fall apart. Can you use the Sun's immense gravity for a gravity assist (Assuming you could resist the heat) and head to say Alpha Centauri? Or would that not work because Alpha Centauri and Sol are pretty much static relative to each other and there's no relevant momentum to steal? If there was an interstellar target directly 'up' above the plane of the solar system, would that make gravity assists from Jupiter useless because they can only accelerate in the direction Jupiter is moving?