Science
Exploring "Why" questions about Science
484 articles
Why do light things bounce, while heavier don’t?
Heavier things can bounce. A decent counter example to your proposal would be to compare a rubber ball to a crumpled up ball of paper of relatively the same size/volume. The former, while heavier, wil
Why can the US have thousands of nuclear warheads but simultaneously coerce other nations into denuclearization?
Most nations on the planet have signed the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. The NPT says that those non nuclear states will not pursue a nuclear weapons program. In exchange, they get access to nucle
Why can’t cellular radio waves be divided for unlimited data carrying?
The narrower the channel, the less information you can send down it reliably. Using your freeway example, you could take a 3 lane highway and give yourself 24 bike lanes but nobody'd be getting anywhe
why can my heaters easily keep my house at a nice 75 when its 15 degrees outside, but my AC struggles to dip below 70 when its 100 outside?
Your heaters are a hell of a lot more powerful than your Air Conditioners An AC unit can move 4-10 watts of heat per watt of power used, but it'll only use a few hundred watts. A big window AC unit mi
Why does the ISS not spin to create artificial gravity?
One of the points of the ISS is being able to do experiments in zero gravity. A spinning station would defeat that purpose. But also, complexity.
Why does re-heating something in the microwave make it soggy, vs the oven or toaster oven?
When you heat something in the oven or toaster you are directly exposing the food to heating elements that give off intense radiation and heat which stimulate all kinds of chemical reactions in the up
Why do liquid detergent and fabric softener bottles use such small print when labeling what they are? (Image examples in post)
Because the manufacturers want you to be brand-loyal: to wash your clothes not with "detergent" but with **Tide**, to soften them not with "fabric softener" but with **Downy**.
Why do i sleep better when its cold?
The temperature that your body sleeps at is lower than the temperature your body maintains the rest of the day, this is for energy conservation and obviously to let your body rest. Simply put, keeping
Why do some companies make Solid State Drives (SSD) that are slightly different from one another in size (i.e. 480GB vs. 500GB vs. 512GB)?
They don't. They're using the same size chip, it's that ssds lose a fraction of a percent of their space every write cycle, and different manufacturers reserve a certain amount of space in the drive t
Why does gigabit even matter?
A home network is used for things other than downloading from the internet. If you copy files between two computers over the network or stream video, you'll be working at gigabit speeds. More importan