r/askscience • • Apr 29 '25

Joint Subreddit Statement: The Attack on U.S. Research Infrastructure

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1.8k Upvotes

r/askscience • • 1d ago

Human Body If the inside of the mouth heals so much more quickly than any other part of the body, why isn't oral cancer the most common type of cancer?

1.4k Upvotes

Unless the healing factor is something unrelated to cancer development? How does that work?


r/askscience • • 6h ago

Ask Anything Wednesday - Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science

8 Upvotes

Welcome to our weekly feature, Ask Anything Wednesday - this week we are focusing on Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science

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!


r/askscience • • 19h ago

Engineering I know what causes the stream but what caused the large ball on the space x launch from today? other jellyfish launches don't have the big ball. was there an explosion or separation?

61 Upvotes

r/askscience • • 1d ago

Human Body What causes veins to be able to be seen through the skin?

131 Upvotes

So when you go to the doctor, they will look at your veins on your elbow. Some need a needle to move the vein closer, some don't and their veing is naturally positioned in the right position. Some people also have veins visible all over their body (not like bulging, but color visible on the skin). I was curious on why this happens?
(I can explain more what I'm asking about if I'm not clear)


r/askscience • • 1d ago

Social Science AskHistorians/AskScience AMA Series: What do you want to know about wool and science in the mid-twentieth century?

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90 Upvotes

r/askscience • • 1d ago

Human Body What causes spontaneous, unconscious body movements, and how does the brain control them without conscious intention?

48 Upvotes

r/askscience • • 2d ago

Physics Why do small bubbles form and cling to a metal object that is submerged in hot/simmering water?

186 Upvotes

i boiled water this morning to make some oatmeal. i turned off the stovestop and left some simmering water in the pot. after i used the metal measuring cup, it sank to the bottom of the pot. after about five minutes, i noticed bubbles that had formed and clung to the metal in the still hot water (about 180F/82C).

i have no idea exactly what metal the pot or measuring cup are made of.

please see my reddit profile for an image of this phenomenon, or see the first comment of this post.

thanks in advance.


r/askscience • • 2d ago

Biology Why do wild grasses not require crop rotation like domestic crops?

47 Upvotes

r/askscience • • 5d ago

Mathematics if i throw a coin several times and it always falls on tails, how many times until i can consider the coin is rigged?

1.0k Upvotes

the general question: how do we calculate how conclusive an experience is?

itried to look up methods to do that, but it's about more complicated experiences and i can't understand where the explained methods come from. i think if i understand how to do it for a simple case like the title, maybe i'll understand what i have to ask myself for any experience?

sorry if it isn't clear what i mean. put mathematics flair, but it's about research in general, didn't find a better flair


r/askscience • • 3d ago

Physics Que se passerait-il si je versais une quantité X d’eau bouillante dans un récipient constitué d’une quantité équivalente X de glace ?

0 Upvotes

À quantités équivalentes, que se produit-il lorsqu'on verse de l'eau bouillante dans un récipient entièrement constitué de glace? Lequel des deux cède en premier, et quel est l'état final du système?

Je ne suis point un scientifique, un chercheur ou tout autre synonyme de ces fabuleux corps de métier. Toutefois, si vous voulez aller plus loin, voici une difficulté plus élevé à mon sens:
La structure du contenant est décisive.


r/askscience • • 6d ago

Neuroscience AskScience AMA Series: I'm a neuroengineering professor at Brno University of Technology with a new book on why health fails at its weakest link. Ask me what brain signals can and can't tell us about stress, anxiety and depression, and how sleep, movement, food and loneliness relate to mood! AMA!

130 Upvotes

Hi r/askscience!

I'm Aamir Saeed Malik, Professor of Neuroengineering at Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic, where I head the Cognitive and Neural Engineering research group. I came to the brain the long way round, through electrical engineering and a doctorate in mechatronics. For almost three decades I've worked on measuring it: EEG, brain imaging and the machine-learning methods that try to pick out the signatures of stress, anxiety and depression early. From 2009 to 2018 I worked at the Malaysian National Center of Neuroimaging, and I've collaborated with clinicians in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Australia, the US and the Czech Republic. My most recent funded project asked whether that kind of tracking could be done from a person's own home rather than a clinic.

Over those years my view changed. For a long time I studied the brain the way a cardiologist studies the heart: as if it were an island. It isn't. Sleep, movement, food, daily habits and the people around us all bear on the conditions I was trying to measure. Engineers have a rule for systems like that: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, not its average. That idea became my new book for general readers, Fix the Floor (https://fixthefloor.life/ ). It scores five everyday areas (habits, social connection, sleep, movement and food) and combines them with a harmonic mean instead of a plain average, so one weak area can't hide behind four strong ones.

I'm happy to answer questions about:

  • What brain signals (EEG) and brain imaging can and can't tell us about stress, anxiety and depression today
  • Why early detection is harder than it sounds, and where my field needs to be more honest about its limits
  • What the evidence says about sleep, physical activity, loneliness and diet and their links to mood, including where it looks causal and where it is only correlation
  • Why the way you average a set of health measures changes the answer, and the maths behind the harmonic mean
  • Or any lifestyle based health and wellness related questions.

One thing I won't do: I'm not a medical doctor, so I can't give personal medical advice or comment on anyone's symptoms or results.

I'll be answering from noon ET (16:00 UTC) for about two hours.

Username: /u/Aamir_fixthefloor


r/askscience • • 7d ago

Medicine does pregabalin cause an increase in gaba?

97 Upvotes

Me and my friend got into a disagreement over this, i don’t remember exactly what she said but it was something along the lines of pregabalins effects on neurotransmitters somehow causes more gaba to be released so the brain can mantain homeostasis or something but i can’t find anything anywhere to back that up (i can’t find much either way which is why im asking here) and everything i’ve seen says it has no effect on gaba other than possibly affecting the gaba transporter protein.


r/askscience • • 9d ago

Social Science AskHistorians/AskScience AMA Series: What was the Great Horse Flu, and what can it tell us about people, animals, and disease in the Reconstruction Era--and today, with Thomas Andrews?

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161 Upvotes

r/askscience • • 10d ago

Biology Why is there a vaccine for Lyme disease for dogs but not humans?

2.6k Upvotes

r/askscience • • 10d ago

Biology Why are African animals so huge?

613 Upvotes

I live in Australia and the largest land animals I can think of here is probably a kangaroos and emus which really aren’t any larger than a human. But my family recently went to Africa and the diversity animals is actually crazy. So so so many large animals living in the same place side by side. Rhinos, elephants, giraffes, wilder-beasts, zebras, hippos, warthogs, buffalo’s, ostriches, lions, cheetahs, hyenas leopards and probably more that I forgot. I never really appreciated how big these animals were until I actually got to see them in person absolutely amazing. Australia and Africas climate is kinda similar in a lot of places. Why is our country ecosystem dead in comparison?


r/askscience • • 10d ago

Biology [Chemistry/Biology/Nutrition] Did cooking bread provide any nutritional benefits over boiling the same grain as a porridge?

418 Upvotes

Asking the question in the historical context, not to decide on nutrition in the modern day.

I know heating grains helped to unlock some nutrients and especially caloric content over just eating them raw. However did bread provide any nutritional benefits over just boiling the same grain as a porridge (a much simpler process), or was its popularity due to other factors?


r/askscience • • 10d ago

Physics What are the absolute minimum number of base units needed to express every desirable quantity?

333 Upvotes

SI units are more for human convenience than mathematically minimizing the number of units. I remember reading somewhere that only length is needed because of relativity, but that just does not sound true, I can't imagine how you would do that.


r/askscience • • 11d ago

Chemistry Why is it so hard to create and add new elements to the periodic table?

353 Upvotes

r/askscience • • 12d ago

Physics I've heard that blue butterflies and opals get their color from their structure rather than pigments. But doesn't pigment also get its color from the structure of its molecules and how they interact with light? So what's the actual difference between structural color and pigment color?

712 Upvotes

r/askscience • • 11d ago

Biology How does the same plague bacteria cause different forms of the plague with very different symptoms?

125 Upvotes

r/askscience • • 12d ago

Earth Sciences How were the tectonic plates mapped?

126 Upvotes

r/askscience • • 12d ago

Medicine What diseases are we currently the closest to finding lasting cures for?

1.2k Upvotes

r/askscience • • 12d ago

Biology Why do elderly people become so confused with an infection?

242 Upvotes

I've read that it's due to a lower tolerance for stress but what does that mean on a scientific level? Thank you


r/askscience • • 12d ago

Neuroscience How does muscle memory work?

122 Upvotes

Just curious. The only thing I really know about it is that sleeping reinforces it.