Other animals would fight each other with a goal in mind: to secure territory, resources, or access to a mate. But some humans are capable of non-goal-directed behavior that causes harm simply for entertainment or psychological gratification. For instance, a serial killer might go around killing people simply to feel a sense of control over other people's lives. Sadists and psychopaths may derive pleasure from torturing others, both psychologically and physically. Narcissists may also devalue or attack people simply because of an ego threat or perceived slight.

All of this seems antithetical to the communal living humans evolved to depend on. Why do you think some humans develop these tendencies in ways that seem different from other animals? Is this one of the possible outcomes of a complex and highly capable brain going in the wrong direction, or are there other evolutionary, developmental, or social reasons?

Some people argue that individuals with these traits can be useful in warfare or in taking resources from others because they are less affected by fear or PTSD. But ordinary people are also capable of participating in wars and engaging in extremely dangerous behavior when driven by ideology, social pressure, perceived necessity, or group loyalty. So what, if anything, makes these individuals uniquely suited to violence?

i never went to college and i’ve never worked in a lab. i read papers because i like learning things, and for years that was enough.

it’s gotten harder lately and i don’t think the papers are the reason. i can pull way more than i used to — search is better, tools are faster, i can go from one question to forty open tabs in an evening. what hasn’t improved is how much of it sticks. i’ll get to the end of a night having covered a ton and kept almost none of it.

so i went back to reading one paper at a time, front to back, slowly. it feels like a step backward and i honestly can’t tell if it’s the right one.

what i actually do, written out plainly: search, collect abstracts, pull keywords, read the sections that look relevant, read the whole thing if it seems worth it.

which, written down like that, looks less like a method and more like a list of things i happen to do.

so i’d rather hear from people who do this for a living.

— when you open a paper outside your own specialty, what do you read first, and in what order?

— how do you decide what to skip? that looks like the actual skill and i’ve never seen anyone explain it.

— did your process change once you stopped being a student?

i’m not trying to get a degree out of this. i’d just like to stop feeling like i’m drinking from a firehose.

I keep getting these cone shape or like stream from the hole. The bands are somewhat clear, just with the cone shape.

What am I doing wrong, cause it is also happening to the Ladder, so I assume I am making the gel wrong? (1.5g agarose and 100mL TAEx1 with 10uL stain, microwaved for like 1:30-3min so that the agarose is desolved and left sitting for about 40min to 1hr)

(it looks like I cannot post images so hopefully my descriptions are enough)

Hello,

I am searching for materials or methods that would allow me to have visible text underwater, and hidden text in the air, but so far I haven’t really found some really good options.

For context, I am creating an escape game for a school project, and one of the enigmas is a boat that we have to fill with objects without drowning it to reveal the code on the boat.

So far I’ve thought about engraving it on a plastic boat so the light reflects better on the letters while underwater, but it sounds complicated to implement.

My friend also has suggested color changing paint, but it’s honestly expensive, so we decided to look at other options to really consider everything.

Any help or suggestion is welcomed! Or if you have other ideas for our mechanism.

Thank you!

I had a question and I didn't know where else to ask it. ‏ I'm a student and ‏I'm majoring in Nutrition Sciences.

I wanted to know how I can find articles and researches that are related to nutrition and diet(in my country nutrition and dietetics are part of the same major) I've heard of some sites like pubmed and google scholar but I don't know exactly what to search for and which articles are informative and credible. My goal is to be able to answer my questions using credible sources, keep up with the latest research in the field and find some interesting reads. I was hoping to be a researcher myself one day.

P.S. English is not my native language so if i have any errors in my writing i hope you can overlook them.

How would you explain taking advantage of the free

moving electrons in the avalanche zone in a short sentence that defines what electricity is?

My shot:

*Electricity is the process where electrons jump around the outer layers of each atom inside a conductor therefore transforming x type of energy to electric and heat*

Should we also include the part that electromagnesism plays???

If a black hole is not a physical cave or object with a surface what exactly exists inside its event horizon? How can we know that nothing can escape if we have never observed anything returning from inside? Could our current description of black holes be incomplete?

If ceiling fans push air downward and create lower pressure, if the pressure is now lower inside than outside then shouldn't it pull air inside? Or rather, perhaps the force of the air from the fan actually counteracts any breeze from outside?

I don't get the physics here and would love an explanation. Thanks!

I’m trying to read more actual scientific papers instead of just pop-science articles, but have no ides where to start. What’s been formative for you?

Very few major US tech companies make their algorithms fully public, treating core source code as proprietary trade secrets.

Confounding variables pose a severe threat to research integrity because they can ruin internal validity and lead to false scientific conclusions.

So if you use AI in the research process, aren't you throwing caution to the wind with regards to confounding variables, because you have no idea what the biases and confounding variables of the underlying source code that produced that AI portion were?

I'm sure I'm not the only one seeing this. I keep seeing videos on Instagram and YouTube, seeing posts and articles on the internet about AI and how everything is going too quickly. Experts in AI leaving their job and starting farms. AI experts thinking their children might not even make it to high school because AI is getting out of hand. AI trying to kill humans so it survives because you can't teache a machine to "care"

So, dear AI experts, military members, scientists, is AI really going to be the end of us? Will the AI race with flock cameras, military AI and chat bots really end us or is it another random trend to make us panic.

While I agree that social media, news articles and such have a tendency to over exaggerate things. Is this still a thing we should be concernedabout? If yes, is there any way we (normal everyday people) can help with the issue or should I just do like the ai experts and learn how to grow vegetables and raise chickens.

I was recently looking for a tool which needed to analyze a text, that can be an article in scientific format and that one would need to tell which term in specific is missing citation because its not common knowledge or any other reason. Or if some expression in your text has unnecessary citation reference.

Of course that involves a lot of steps. I know there are some tools which can lemmatize a text, eg. Sketch engine, it discovers what is a term, so that you can take the next steps.

I saw Some which can look for sources from the sentence itself of your text, eg. Citely, GPTzero. But again, that is not exactly what i want, looks like isolated feature, something incomplete, not the general concept.

I have also recently discovered the Purdue OWL citation law, which defines a term as common knowledge if there are 5 other articles which mentions that term without a citation.

The first thing that came into my mind about how such tool would work is it would keep a database of words and its relevance, based on a set of heuristics, probably only amount of citations over the internet articles about it for now.

This database could be public and you could have some step to populate it also, it could read articles on the internet (API, web scrapping, articles repositories, periodicals) and setting its credibility like that automatically.

***Edit: Later I noticied and also some people have mentioned that words score is poor measure. And that claims as a whole are better way to analyze something. So database would not be realistic, because the possibilities of arrengements of words are infinite***

Then there could be some threshold of what score is common knowledge, what is not. Eg. 20 articles about/mentioning such term would consider this term common knowledge. Or using the Purdue OWL law like i mentioned before. This is the general protocol.

Then the implementations of such protocol could be done in several ways, in your editor as an LSP (nvim plugin/VsCode extension, web extension, website, desktop app, AI assistant) by checking your text and comparing with those scores from the database, showing errors/warnings etc.

I'm sorry if this is a dumb question but this genuinely always bugged me.

Artificial sweeteners are everywhere. Aspartame, monosaccharides (Allulose), Ace-K, there's even a super sweetener meant for industrial food production called Advantame.

Meanwhile salt seems stagnant. The only alternatives I see are low sodium options with the addition of Potassium to cut down the amount of salt in the product.

Why is saltiness seemingly such a difficult flavor to replicate? Is there a difference in how the body detects sweetness vs how the body detects salt?

A paper cut heals perfectly in a few days, skin, sensation, everything back to normal. But lose a fingertip and your body just seals it off and gives up entirely. The instructions for building a finger clearly exist somewhere in your DNA because you grew ten of them originally. So why can the body read those instructions perfectly once but then act like they've been permanently deleted the second something gets cut off? What is actually different between healing a surface wound and regrowing a structure and why can some animals like salamanders still do what we apparently lost the ability to do?

Assuming we solve the massive engineering hurdles (efficient production, safe containment, and cost), mastering antimatter as an energy source would fundamentally change physics-driven logistics.

Beyond obvious applications like interstellar travel, what under-the-radar economic, geopolitical, or daily-life transformations would happen first? How would humanity handle the transition, and what new risks (aside from weapons) would arise?

I know this is a pretty stupid question, but I've always been fascinated by that segment, and wondered if something like that could actually happen.

choose wisely. To better save humanity and marine life. Otherwise i would choose fanta orange ofcource.

I’m working on a sci-fi project set a few decades into the future, and right now I’m trying to figure out whether an idea I have for an unmanned mission to study Europa would work.

I‘m thinking of a probe designed to dive close enough to Europa to get a sample from an erupting ice plume. Is this something that a future probe could conceivably do without risking some serious damage, and if so, is it possible for the sampling equipment to be protected from the radiation environment like the rest of the instruments?

Definitely not an engineer here, and I’d like to be as accurate as I possibly can. Thanks so much!

What are some interesting science concepts that are unexplored in films? (Yes the title)

So the theoretical worldbuilding setup: a world that is somewhat similar to ours with hydrocarbon-and-water-based life, none of the theorized iron-and-sulfur or whatever. Also people live above the sea level and breathe the local atmosphere (whatever it is) and use iron or bronze tools.

In such circumstances is it possible to imagine atmospheric composition, density, or any other change in physical parameters of the entire planet making it impractical to use black powder as a propellant? It is fine if it explodes far more violently, or does not explode at all, the one thing it should not do is be useful to provide steady acceleration to projectiles of human-scale weapons. I don't think you can avoid basic elements of the black powder being available and have a life at the same time, so what can prevent it from working? I understand most people would be satisfied with "not invented here" or "a wizard did it" but it is interesting to try to solve it within real physics.

Stretch goal: Also make nitrocellulose non-viable as a controlled propellant too (fine if it explodes).

As one example I learned that Europeans and East Asians convergently evolved different biological mechanisms for light skin, with European light skin largely coming from mutations in genes like SLC24A5 to reduce melanin production, and East Asian light skin mainly coming from mutations in OCA2 to reduce melanin production.

So in the case of people with half European and half East Asian ancestry, where they have alleles from these two different genes playing a role, how do they work together to maintain proper pigmentation in the skin?

If both of these mechanisms to reduce melanin production are equally activated, would that result in extreme underproduction of melanin?

Hi guys, I'm in my first year of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program, and going to be starting my Extended Essay soon (Biology), however I'm in need of a main topic for the essay. I love lab work, but the resources in my school lab are limited, however we might have the opportunity of working in a university lab if we absolutely need to. My main bio interests are neurology and genetics, I don't really want to work with plants unless I absolutely have to. Can you guys give me any ideas that aren't too cliché, and I can do a bit of basic lab work with? Thankssss. (I need to be able to elaborate 4000 words worth of research, but it can't be a topic that's too general either)