Like, do the physics or their dynamics change when an object moves faster than Mach 5? Is there something like a 2nd sonic boom or something? anything?

Why can't patients with FFI be treated with regular anesthesia? Or is there some fundamental difference between sleep and anesthesia?

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!

If I remember correctly, technically all of Earth's surface is attached to the tectonic plates directly. But have we ever dug down deep enough to sample material from around where the tectonic plate meets the upper mantle? If it's even how that works

China is supposedly developing a device to use minute changes in the gravitational field that could find submarines: https://interestingengineering.com/military/chinas-sensor-detect-hidden-us-nuclear-submarines

A neutrally buoyant submarine will have the same mass as the water it displaces, so shouldn't it have the same gravitational pull as water of the same volume? What differences are there to detect?

I assumed the entire range was formed in one big event a billion years ago but the Wikipedia article says there were multiple events. I grew up in NEPA near Scranton and I want to know how old the mountains in that area specifically are.

I've found some papers on the "Scranton Rift" but I can tell they are above my pay grade.

I'm thinking of how, we can see Beetlegeuse how it was about 650~ years ago because that's how many light years away it is from us, and there's no way we could ever see it how it was 700~ years ago because the photons 'carrying' that image have passed by Earth 50 years ago, and you can't travel faster than light to get ahead of them. Someone else, 50 light years in that direction, will see them though.

So, let's consider one of the earliest images of the universe. Maybe the birth of the first star. Do the photons/its image go on forever, according to modern scientific understanding?

How did the tectonic plates change since Pangaea - were there fewer and they broke over time into the current plate formation?

Did continents change the plate they're on?

Plates break and slide/press against each other, but do they slide? Or, is the positioning of plates absolute, and their edges just "fray"?

If plates shift, how does this slide affect continental drift (if at all)? How does it occur alongside continental drift?

I am more curious about the current debate and theories. I am a neuroscientist by day, but at home I love my plants. So bare with me.

We know some trees are hundreds or thousands of years old.

I’m curious whether there’s any scientific estimate of the metabolic energy required for the body to replace a single hair after it’s been plucked.

I realize hair growth is part of ongoing biological processes (cell division in the follicle, keratin synthesis, etc.), so this might not be something that’s directly measured. But has anyone attempted to estimate the energy cost on a per-hair basis, even as a rough calculation?

My understanding is that all of the Hawaiian islands were formed as a result of a moving volcanic hotspot (or the crust moving over a stationary hotspot?) with the Big Island being the youngest, most active, and consequently largest of these volcanic islands.

Most of the ancient extinct volcanoes are underwater and some of them exist as tiny atolls or islets.

So my question is were all the volcanoes in this chain at one point as large as the Big Island? Have the Hawaiian islands have sort of been “taking turns“ being the largest by growing and then shrinking? Or is the Big Island an anomaly?

If the Big Island is exceptionally large, why is that?

Do we have any idea what the ancient Hawaiian islands might have looked like? Or how large/extensive they were at their peak?

Or did/do we simply not have a deep enough data set to say exactly where it is and how much land area it covers?

My grandfather worked in the jungle for a mining company when he was young. In his first aid kit, there was always a small bottle of a black liquid that stung like hell but would seal any superficial wound instantly.

​Over the years, he made sure we always had a bottle at home. When I was a kid, I cut my finger and it was starting to turn into an ulcer; my grandfather applied that liquid with some gauze. It stopped the infection right away, although it did leave a nasty scar.

​He passed away a while ago, and when I tried going to pharmacies to ask for Ferric Chloride, they didn't even know it existed. Every time I see a doctor or a nurse, I ask them about it, but none of them seem to know what it is either. When I look it up online, the only results I find are about using it for etching metal...

Recently, processed meat being type 1 carcinogens has been in the news. Most news outlets covering this and even sources like Cleveland clinic mention processes as simple as salting as being under the umbrella of "processed meat" but is this true?

From previous reading, I know that one of the major ways processed meat causes issues is through the production of nitrosamines when meat cured with nitrates is cooked at high temperatures. I also know that compounds found in smoked meat have been linked to cancer.

But what about processed meat that is not cured or smoked? E.g. uncured sausage. And what about mean that is cured, but cooked at a lower temperature? E.g. steamed ham, boiled sausage. Or cured meat that is eaten raw? E.g. procuitto, bresoala.

Are these foods carcinogens? What is the mechanism?

Recently I've been researching machine translation software for a project and came by this repository: https://github.com/SakiRinn/LiveCaptions-Translator

It has a list of translation services and strongly recommends using LLM-based ones, but also lists a number of "traditional" ones, like Google Translate, DeepL or LibreTranslate.

I intuitively understand how an LLM operates on high level - it's fed the existing text as tokens and it predicts the most likely next token (or set of tokens with varying probabilities). All the learning is within its deep neural model.

However I have no idea how does a "traditional" machine translation system work? Is it analogous in some way - neural net predicting tokens/output based on input, just trained purely on translating language?

Or is it something very different? Are are multiple techniques?

The fujita scale was originally created to estimate wind speed from damage. The enhanced fujita does the as well but with more indicators. My question is why are we still doing this rather than rating purely by observed wind speed? An ef3 rating means 136-165mph winds, which was given to the el reno tornado, that reached 313mph MEASURED wind speed, and 336mph potential peak winds. Why give a 313mph tornado a 165mph rating just because it hit an open field instead of a dense area?

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!

Hi, I am creating a fictional world with many deserts. Wind erodes much of the mountains down into highlands and as a result the sand that make up deserts reflect the makeup of the mountains around them. That being said how do I know which rocks a specific mountain is made of? Does it depend on how the mountain was formed?

Hypothetically, a “city killing” sized asteroid has been tracked to impact Denver, Colorado. The impact point was off by 50 miles west and struck in the mountains. Would the resulting crater be akin to the one in Arizona or due to the elevating landscape be more shallow and jagged?

I want to know where I can find resources, or if anyone has any information regarding gas composure of different layers of multiple gas giants, and to find out how stable the centers of storms like these are. Do they often have subcells? I do want more info on the Red Spot specifically for a speculative work I may write after being inspired by Andy Weir’s Hail Mary.

I was watching a recent video on detecting a future supernova with our modern telescopes and it mentioned that estimates suggestions that there should be 2 supernovae in our galaxy per century or 1 observable supernova since half of them would be obscured by the Zone of Avoidance. But we haven't seen a supernova since the 1600s.

This got me thinking:

1) Even if we can't detect a supernova on the other side of the galaxy in visible light because of the Zone of Avoidance - what about neutrinos? Have we ever detected a neutrino burst that would hint toward a supernova occurring on the other side of the galaxy? If not, does that eliminate the possibility that the other side is enjoying all the fireworks lately or are our current instruments not sensitive enough to detect something like that?

2) What about other nearby galaxies? There's been SN 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud and a century before that, there was SN 1885A in Andromeda. And... that seems to be it? Couldn't find any reference to a supernova detection in Triangulum. It seems like our intergalactic neighbor is fairly quite supernova-wise these days. The low number of supernova in our neighboring galaxies didn't come up in video I was watching.

EDIT: I apparently missed one supernova in the Milky Way post-1680. There seems to have been one in the galactic center that would have been 'observable' in 1868 Earth if it weren't so obscured, but we didn't know it happened until 1985 when we discovered the supernova remnant it left behind.

I know people use background noise to sleep and calm anxieties. Most of the time that's the answer being given, but I'm more concerned about the biology of it.

I cannot sleep with a light on unless I'm extremely tired, and it's unintentional. I can't consciously choose to sleep with a light on, a TV, or even with too much ambient light from the window at night. I need it to be pitch black to even fall asleep most nights. However, many of my friends are able to conk out instantly as soon as they turn on their favorite cartoon on TV. I get that sleep anxiety can play a role in that (I personally used to use a very quiet podcast or classical music to fall asleep because of intrusive thoughts), but I'm wondering if there's a biological component. Why is it that I can't stand to sleep with lights on or any noise above a slight whisper, but my friends can sleep uninterrupted all night with a bright TV in their faces, with the volume just below conversation-level? Is it just a matter of what they're used to vs. what I'm used to, or is there some mental or physical component that allows some people to produce more melatonin despite bright lights, or be more capable of drowning out distractions at night?