So, let’s say there’s a species of bacteria that is known to dwell in Greek yogurt. How long would it take before that species of yogurt-dweller only has modern descendants different enough to qualify as one or more new species?

I'm thinking of switching fields within STEM and there are some mathsy modules which I missed out on during my undergrad (biology) that would come in really handy right now.
Since I would like to avoid doing another bachelor's from scratch, I was hoping there might be a website that lets you pick and choose from a range of undergrad-level subjects that you would take online, and then possibly give you a certificate that you could put on your CV.
Does anyone know if something like this exists?

I seem to remember as a young child being told that it is safe to touch a Van de Graff generator (for the hair demonstration), but that if you let go before it is safe you will get a nasty shock. I know a bit more about electricity now, and I'm a little skeptical now. Is it possible to get a shock from letting go of something?

Let's say you are dying of starvation. You pull one of your teeth out, causing blood to slowly seep into your mouth, which you swallow. The calories from the blood getting digested will delay the time you die of starvation, right? Or will losing blood while starving kill you faster?

How hot would it have to be?

I just watched the recent video from Stephen Milo on human life 1 million years ago. He mentions cannibalism evidence across multiple events. That has me thinking about morality in isolated groups and how it might have evolved or could evolve differently.

This is the paper reference for Atapuerca – human cannibalism 1 million years ago

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248412001406

This is Stephen Milo's upload to YT and relevant time stamp for the article:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRnQrvi6N0M&t=1490
• https://piped.video/watch?v=MRnQrvi6N0M&t=1490

I'm curious about how human morality evolves in isolation before external influences cause an averaging effect. Do the rough edges get knocked off in a predictable fashion, taming the most eccentric behaviors over time until we reach peaceful cohabitation, or do we simply partition our animalistic stupidity and become far worse in the duality of civility and the barbarism of a primitive sub-sentient species with War?

I have a question I need to ask but I want to do it privately as the topic it correlates to is pretty taboo. Please comment or dm me, and I'll dm you back.

Mars influence on the Milankovitch cycles:

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46171-5

Anton Petrov's summary:

• https://piped.video/watch?v=DZnN2mPkoT8
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZnN2mPkoT8

I imagine there is a significant potential interaction over long time scales due to lunar position and orbital plane. If Mars has a measurable impact on Earth, the reverse must be true as well, and Luna is the primary anomaly IMO.

Since we know that it isn't constant with time, how can we be sure that it is constant with space? This might be a reason the variability in our measurements which seem to disagree.

Put another way, why couldn't the universe expand in one direction preferentially compared to another?

Was thinking about interstellar travel and the ability to provide artificial gravity by using a smooth acceleration and deceleration across the journey, changing from acceleration to deceleration at the halfway mark.

If we ignore relativistic effects, with smooth acceleration of 9.81 ms^-2^, you'd be going 3.1e8 ms^-1^ after the first year (3.2e7 s), if I'm not making a mathematical blunder. That's more than the speed of light at 3.0e8.

My main question, and the one that I initially came here to ask, is: if their ship continues applying the force that, under classical mechanics, was enough to accelerate them at 9.81 ms^-2^, would the people inside still experience Earth-like artificial gravity, even though their velocity as measured by an observer is now increasing at less than that rate?

A second question that I thought of while trying to figure this out myself as I wrote it up, is... My understanding is that a trip taken at the speed of light would actually feel instantaneous to the traveller, while taking distance/speed of light to a stationary observer. In the above scenario, would the final time taken, as measured by the traveller, be the same as if they were to ignore the speed that they are travelling at according to an outside observer, and instead actually assume they are undergoing continuous acceleration?

For example, why did zinc, of all things, start getting utilized by brain and prostate tissue in humans?

Tectonic activity bends rocks all the time, even hard ones like granite. That takes a ton of heat, pressure and time. It also makes sense that in the right conditions, sheets of rock simply don't have the room to shatter so they must bend.

Have we been able to do the same in a lab and would it have any commercial use? Bending a random bit of hard rock would be an interesting novelty, for sure.

I've been learning some about rabies and learned about rabies causing hydrophobia. This is just a theory, I'm not saying I know anything about this topic to be knowledgeable, but if we could get someone with rabies to not fear water, could they survive?

This was a SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 launch from Cape Canaveral that occurred around 1900 local time on March 4th, 2024. The photo was taken from about 65km from the launch site. The rocket was in the 2nd stage.

Here's a video of the launch, but you can't really see the aura since the video is taken from the ship pointing at the rocket nozzle.

Just as an example, there were evidently reports during the 2007 Glasgow airport attack that someone attempting to subdue the assailant and assist police kicked said attacker in the testicles… but somehow managed to do so hard enough to injure one of their own foot tendons.

I'm in NorCal and the weather has been all over the place this winter. It is hard to get a reliable forecast, sometimes even for the same day. I was wondering if it has something to do with the weather prediction models that were built before the climate change?

I saw something yesterday talking about how Australia is geologically dead with the lowest tallest mountain range of any continent due to no landmass collisions. Does that make it the last visage of a supercontinent that everything else broke away from?

I wonder of Australia's relevance to the mantle anomalies speculated to be part of the Theia collision.

Geology Hub (active geologist/mantle anomalies possibly relevant to magmatic activity): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdCckYI62yM

Anton Petrov (cites valid sources/mantle anomaly research summary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0utwP9J6mA

Atomic Frontier (journalist?/source of quote about Australia being geologically dead/not a valid source reference and nothing cited): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v29ou094luc

I'm just curious.Strange matter, according to my research, is a perfect state of matter with perfect density, etc. If it is like this, does that also mean that it violates the law of entropy?Because let's see, if it converts matter around it into stranger matter, and after that it doesn't react with anything else, I mean are we going to reach a point where there is no more entropy to grow?Or worse is it decreasing entropy? Since it converts everything to a type of matter that does not seem to interact with itself.

I don't know much, so thank you for being patient in reading in case I have some absurd misconceptions =D

I unfortunately live in a very polluted area, one where air quality apps mark in red and recommend that I never get out of my lair.

When it rains enough the air quality becomes more bearable and here comes the question: where does pollution go when it rains hard? Does it get pushed to the ground and stays there? Does it get embedded in the water (so instead of breathing it, I get to drink it later in the tap water)?

I'm curious to know where it gets dispersed or stuck (to possibly avoid it)

I'm curious what your take is on the finite nature of Science. I imagine the fractal "edge" will always remain illusive, but when do we hit 98% or 99.999% documented confirmed, distilled, and well explained? (Centuries? Millennia?) When does it become an engineering corpus?

(thinking of SciFi futurism as a much needed pick-me-up rn, please be kind)

You dirty dirty... It's time to show off! What is the most extreme cleaning you've ever performed?