thegreatbeyond

why dont domestic house cats like water?

cool, i just let it get big, good thing i stoped it after 1:30 minutes, i thought it would be a big gooey treat, but its all crunchy inside why?

Zorn: Not all cats hate water. In fact, no cats hate water, although some breeds will go out of their way to avoid it. In general, cats who decended from cats in hot climates tend to stay close to/in the water, to keep themselves cool. Cats who descend from cats in cold climates keep away from the water so they don' t lose body heat. Domesticated cats keep the same patterns as the cats they descended from.

Phred: The heating gasses on the inside solidified the marshmallow, much in the same way when you roast a marshmallow over a fire, except the outside is roasted in the fire and the inside is roasted in the microwave.

What is "Planet X" and why isn't it being taught in school?

"Planet X" is really a large asteroid. In fact, it's part of a huge ring of asteroids that surround the outer planets, called the outer asteroid belt. Since the discovery of "Planet X", scientists have discovered that Pluto is actually part of this outer asteroid belt and is not actually a planet.

The reason none of this is being taught in school is that it is an extremely new concept and is not verified.

How do astronauts communicate which direction to go? Like North, south, east, west on earth. How is similar information communicated for moving outside of the planet earth?

Based on the theory of the big-bang, about how far away from our sun did the center of the big-bang happen?

As for black holes, have we, the human race, ever seen one up "close" or at least pictures rather then just think about it and take long range pictures? Also, where would the matter go?

(Bet you 10000 bucks no one can answer the last part!)

Nice hard questions this time.

Dith: Directions in space are a little more complicated than directions on Earth. On Earth, we have a whole planet that helps us give directions. In space, we don't have a stable surface, so new directions had to be invented. First of all, the equivalent of up and down on Earth is elliptic north and elliptic south, except that elliptic north is defined as the direction tangent to the Earth's orbit, in the direction that the Earth is rotating around the sun. Elliptic south is the opposite direction. The four directions corresponding to north, south, east, and west are summer solstice, winter solstice, spring equinox, and fall equinox. To determine where summer solstice is, you start from elliptic north and go straight towards the axis of the Earth's rotation, passing it until the line from the center of the Earth going to you is perpendicular to the elliptic directions. The opposite direction is winter solstice. To determine fall equinox, you look straight down elliptic north and go 90 degrees counter-clockwise. Spring equinox is in the other direction.

No one knows, but some formulas indicate that we are about 13.7 billion light-years away from the blast.

Pez: Nope. No human or human-made object has ever seen a black hole up close. We've never actually seen one in the first place. The only way we can possibly find one is to search for places that don't radiate light in an area full of light. The blackness tends to suggest a black hole. The matter that gets sucked into a black hole is probably just crushed to component atoms and then used as energy in a fusion reaction. You're right though that nobody can give you an answer that they firmly believe in.

why does metal things spark up in microwaves

How does a CD work? Like, I know it's with a laser or something, but....how can it read that CD and make it play music? o_O

Phred: Not all metal sparks in microwaves. The principle behind a microwave is flooding the internal chamber with microwaves, hence the name. Microwaves excite water and fat, causing them to release heat, warming the rest of the food. In the case of metal, however, the microwaves cause electrons to speed up and accumulate at sharp edges. So a sheet of foil tends to spark at the corners, and forks spark at the prongs. However, a thick, round object, like a spoon or a good pan, won't spark because there is nowhere for the electrons to jump.

Jo-Chan: Before I can answer this, you need to know how a CD is made. Real CDs, not the kind you can make in your home CD writer, is made on a press. The press "presses" small indents of varying length on the CD. The first CD readers aimed a laser at the current section of the CD and were calibrated to know if it was an indent or not. This was done using simple light sensors at certain places to measure if a beam was diffracted or not. Since the invention of the consumer CD writer, the readers have become a little more sophisticated and been recalibrated to read dyes, which is what a CD-R uses to store information.

As for the audio part of it, CD manufacturers long ago agreed on the way to store audio tracks in the form of indents and non-indents, and since then, it's been gravy.

Mmmm... gravy...

Explain, in full, the whole red/blue blood thing. I still don't fully get the arguments people have over it.

Red/blue blood, eh? That could mean a bunch of things, but I think I know what you're talking about.

When you bleed, your blood looks red. When you look at some veins in your skin, they look blue. Why? The default color of human blood is blue, so that explains the veins, but why red? There's a special chemical called hemoglobin that attaches to oxygen molecules. When it does, it turns red, causing blood to look red. That's why, when you bleed, the blood coming out is bright red. It's pulling oxygen out of the air and the hemoglobin is turning red. The reason for hemoglobin is to transfer oxygen between the lungs to cells that need it. That's what arteries and capileries are for. They both are blood vessels that take oxygen enriched blood to cells. Veins take the oxygen depleted blood back to the lungs, to be re-enriched. This all forms the complex system that is your circulatory system.

if humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?

and

i saw a cd looking thing that was about the size of a record that was in something that looked like a dvd player? do you know what that is?

i could answer that, but this isnt my thread.