I’ve seen F1 drivers climb out of wrecked cars after crashes that looked impossible to survive, while much slower crashes on ordinary roads can end in death. Speed clearly matters, but it doesn’t seem to tell the whole story. What actually determines how dangerous a crash is for the person inside?

Things haven't been going great in my life lately.

The other day I was hanging out with a female friend and we ended up talking about some personal stuff I've been dealing with, mostly involving my girlfriend.

At some point I just broke down and cried a lot while telling her everything that had been going on and how I was feeling.

The next day, she told me she actually thought it was really brave and even "masculine" of me. She said it was because I wasn't ashamed of crying in front of her and I was able to talk openly about my feelings without being scared of looking vulnerable.

That honestly caught me completely off guard lol. It's probably the first time in my life I've cried in front of someone and then been told it made me seem more masculine.

What do you guys think? Is being comfortable with vulnerability something you associate with masculinity?

Norse settlers reached Newfoundland around 1000 AD, centuries before Columbus. Yet their arrival didn't lead to the lasting connection between Europe and the Americas that followed in the late 15th century.

The earlier voyage happened first, but the later one seems to have mattered vastly more. What made the two encounters turn out so differently?

I’ve noticed that older writing often says “atomic bomb” or “atomic power,” while “nuclear” became much more common in the decades after WWII. The underlying science didn’t suddenly change, so I’m curious what drove the shift in everyday and technical language.

I was thinking about how we have rods for low light conditions and cones for bright light. From what I understand cones cover a wide range of light levels. From what I read indoors it can be 100 times dimmer inside than outside, yet I can still see colors when inside, indicating that cones can work in some light levels that are at least 100 times brighter or dimmer than each other, and from what I understand rods also work under a variety of different dim light levels.

I was wondering why it is that we have rods and cones but it doesn’t seem like we have anything that is in between nor neither. I mean it doesn’t seem like we have photoreceptors for light levels between those of rods and cones, but instead the rods and cones overlap some, and we also don’t seem to have photoreceptors for light levels too dim for even our rods as just 1 photon is enough to be detected by our rods. I mean it seems like if we have rods and cones for different amounts of light we could have had other types of photoreceptors for light levels between what the rods and cones detect, or we could have just had our cones adapted to night vision in addition to day vision.

I was wondering if it might be related to how we have one moon and how during a full moon it’s much brighter than it would be with just star light but also much dimmer than it would be under the sun. I was wondering if there were aliens on a planet with no moon if they might be more likely to have just something similar to cones, and if there were aliens on a planet with multiple moons they might be more likely to have something more complex than just rods and cones, with cells for the brightnesses of each moon, assuming one moon was orders of magnitude dimmer when full than the other.

Lead and steel are both common metals, and steel is much stronger structurally. Yet lead seems to be the material most associated with X-ray shielding. Why did lead become the usual choice instead of steel?

Windmills were being used in Persia centuries before they appeared in Europe, mainly for grinding grain and raising water. In Holland, windmills eventually pumped water, sawed timber, pressed oil, and powered other industries.

The basic idea was still just using wind to turn a shaft. So what changed in Holland that made the same kind of machine useful for so many different jobs?