Biology
Exploring "Why" questions about Biology
483 articles
Why do viruses kill living things, if they need a living host to continue to exist?
Accidentally. Often, it doesn't actually end up killing enough hosts as to prevent the spread of the disease, which is what makes them continue to exist. For example, if it made a person explode viole
why do older generations tend to “double click” everything on computers?
Have you ever gone to open a file on your desktop? Open up a file in your hard drive? All of those require double clicks.
Why are human senses so underdeveloped comparing to every other animals species?
This is simply not true. We have senses that are far better than many animals, and many animals have senses better than ours. Animals have evolved to utilize different senses to different degrees.
Why did most of the mammals from the Ice Age go extinct?
The Pleistocene overkill hypothesis suggests that the time frame of the extinction of Pleistocene vertebrates matches the spread of humans through North America. Although this theory is mostly based o
Why do ISPs charge for different levels of bandwidth while cell phone companies charge for different levels of data usage?
because they can. back in the day, AOL network access was also charged by the kb of usage as well as online time. if cable/dsl providers could charge for the usage and still be competitive, they would
why do different antivirus programs recognize each other as threats?
Because a lot of anti-virus signatures use string matching in order to detect malicious software. In order for a program to search for a string, it must have that string. (must is a strong word here a
Why are human babies so much louder and attention grabbing compared to other animals? You would think it would be a bad survival trait for the young of any species to have.
I have raised baby birds. They "cry" a lot like human babies, and will beg and mob their parents for food. In this case, it's advantageous because the best beggars get the most food.
why do so many people film cellphone videos in portrait mode?
Because that's how you hold a phone when doing most other things. It doesn't occur to them or they don't care. It's easier to hold a phone one handed especially with how huge phones are these days.
Why don’t Microsoft and Sony release upgraded versions of their consoles with each new iteration within a generation?
It would break compatibility with earlier consoles. Nobody wants to buy a PS4 today only to find out that 3 years down the road the games being released only work with the PS4 Advanced. At that point,
Why do we generally depict aliens as tall, scrawny people with large dark eyes and a rounded head?
Whitley Streiber's *Communion* That is the only reason, although of course True Believers will have a very different explanation...