Biology
Exploring "Why" questions about Biology
483 articles
Why does raw seafood smell so much stronger than other animal proteins?
Chemicals in fish digestive systems that break down food (ie: other fish) turn on the fish's own body when it dies, speeding up decomposition. This is why you're supposed to gut a fish asap. The chemi
Why did humans, and other species, evolve to have both male and female species? Wouldn’t it be more efficient if everything could reproduce asexually?
Sexual reproduction allows for more genetic diversity by requiring two very different organisms to combine unique sets of genes, some of which are sex-specific, to create an organism that is genetical
Why is Chinese food generally considered healthier than Western food if Chinese food has so much more oil than Western food?
Real Chinese food and Americanized Chinese food are completely different. The same goes for any other type of food Americanized
Why are there so many advertisements to the general public for drugs that can only be prescribed by a doctor?
Most countries don't allow this, presumably with the logic that it isn't patients that should decide what drugs they get, but the doctor. Advertising drugs to consumers is only legal in the USA and Ne
Why do Americans generally not learn any second languages?
The TA in my first semester German class in college was from Germany. She was fluent in German, English, French and Spanish. She said the more languages she knew the better her job prospects would be
Why don’t our immune cells or macrophages simply engulf cancer cells before they form tumors?
They basically do, all the time. You have special cells that basically shoot a protein bullet into bad cells that are infected with a virus or are cancerous. Your body will remove many, many cancer li
Why do some viruses (like the flu) have vaccines that have to be administered yearly, while other viruses only need vaccinated against once?
Influenza evolves rapidly over the course of a year, so the common vaccines become ineffective between seasons. Hence new vaccines have to be be developed and administered each year.
Why is genetically engineering embryos so that children aren’t born with genetic diseases illegal?
Ethics and morals are not black and white. Ive heard someone explain it to me as... Modifying embryos will have may benefits and many consequences ethically.
Why can’t we generate fake voices as well as we can generate realistic looking CGI?
The benefit of CGI is that you can use it to create scenes that you couldn't easily produce with traditional methods, but it still takes artists a lot of work to do it. Hypothetically, I guess it is p
Why can’t a barcode/qr code store an executable virus?
Barcodes, whether one or two dimensional, are rarely used for more than a few hundred bytes. It would be difficult to place malicious code in such a space, and that code would have to exploit a weakne