Biology
Exploring "Why" questions about Biology
482 articles
Why some applications in Google Play have a high rating ( > 4.0), despite being either a horrible app in general, a scam, or clickbait?
Averages are easy to manipulate, especially given who tends to leave ratings. If my company makes a clickbait app; and has 20 people working for it, it's going to take 5 0-star revies to lower the rat
Why can humans eat leafy greens like spinach and its extremely beneficial, but cant eat generic grass for any nutritional value?
Greens like spinach have much thinner cell walls than grass. It's like the difference between tearing through a garbage bag and a brick wall. Cows can do it by chewing, swallowing, regurgitating, chew
Why are cell phone carriers allowed to advertise “unlimited” plans that aren’t actually unlimited?
They lay it all out in the details, its fine. They literally tell you exactly what the plan is. It will be something like this: Our new Unlimited^1 data plan!
Why is it when you download something, it generally downloads at a constant rate, until 99% where it seems to stop and take a lot longer to reach 100%?
because the file is most likely downloaded to a temp directory then copied in its final destination when it's finished. the last 1% is longer because of the time it takes to write the file on your dis
Why can some species newborns run immediately, while human newborns can’t even hold up their own heads?
This happens because of two of the most uniquely human features: * **Big brains relative to our body size** which helped with tool usage, running "what if" scenarios, etc. * **Bipedal locomotion**: wh
Why haven’t scientists genetically engineered trees to grow faster than they do now?
The thing about fast growing plants is that they usually have very little biomass compared to slower growing plants. Things that grow quickly would be things like corn and bamboo. Things that sequeste
Why would ISIS kidnap North Koreans?
Just because the buffalo and the lion hate the elephant, doesn't mean the lion won't try and eat the buffalo. ISIS views anyone who doesn't subscribe to their version of Islam as an enemy - North Kore
Why are young children generally fussy eaters? Shouldn’t they be biologically wired to eat anything and everything for strong growth and development?
Kids are wired to eat the stuff that used to be most important to surviving: high-calorie stuff, fatty stuff, etc. They're also more sensitive to bitterness than adults are (bitterness, evolutionary,
why it is better to get the chicken pox (shingles virus) when you’re young. Isn’t the adult immune system more capable of fighting deaseses?
If you think of the body system as being somewhat like an old western town and the immune system a sheriff, the immune system of a young person has a very active aggressive sheriff, but one who just s
Why are dominant genetic diseases more rare than recessive diseases?
Imagine you have a bunch of cats, the cats can be green, purple, or any other color. Green and purple cats can be easily eaten by predators but other colored cats are not seen. Purple is a recessive t