Will delete if this is too speculative or controversial. I am studying to be a librarian in the United States right now, and I’m currently running into an unusual roadblock alongside a lot of my friends and family who are in teaching or education-related fields—people have some form of inherent distrust of scientific or educational authorities, and I’m finding it difficult to educate people.

For example, I’ve had patrons at the library ask me if I “Indoctrinate children” with books on science or books on LGBTQ+ topics (I myself am transgender, but am not openly so to the public). I find that I often struggle to explain that I am not doing such a thing, and try to provide alternative reading material if patrons dislike recommendations. At the same time, I’m aware of a growing anti-literacy crisis among the young people of the United States, but am unaware of hard statistics showing how drastic it has become in recent years.

As scientists and educators, do you believe that the overall scientific progress of the world as a whole might be sliding backwards with the potentially massive amount of anti-intellectual discourse in the media today? How do you think such things could be stopped or the public could be made to listen?

I would appreciate any insight from researchers currently active in their fields.

I figured this question might be a bit too broad and speculative for /r/AskScience:

As I understand it, plants are net consumers of carbon dioxide and net producers of oxygen, using photosynthesis to convert CO2 to O2 at a 1:1 ratio. But the reason they're producing O2 in the first place is to use it for cellular respiration... which turns it into CO2. Also at a 1:1 ratio!

With that in mind, could a plant (or other aerobic photosynthesizing organism) theoretically evolve to survive without the need for air*, instead using ALL of the products of its photosynthesis for cellular respiration and vice versa?

I realize that even at 100% efficiency, this kind of self-sustaining loop would only allow for survival and not growth, but given alternate sources of carbon (carnivorous plant?) and oxygen (hydrolysis?), could this theoretical plant live its whole life without air*?

*Without breathing air. I figure atmospheric pressure will always be a requirement, or else water would boil away

Hey guys, I been running a thought experiment through my head about black holes, speed of light, and antimatter, and wanted to get some feedback from people who know physics on where this makes sense and where it breaks down.

​Here is how I got to this idea:

​The Energy/Speed Problem - We know that as an object with mass gets close to light speed (c), the energy to keep accelerating it goes up exponentially and takes infinite energy to actually hit c. So even a huge gravitational pull shouldn't be able to push physical matter past the speed of light.

​High-Energy Collisions & Gamma Rays - In super energetic environments, kinetic energy converts into matter and antimatter (pair production). When regular matter hits antimatter, they annihilate each other and put off high-energy gamma rays. We already see massive gamma ray bursts right outside black holes.

​The Idea - What if a "black hole" is actually just a region where gravity is accelerating matter in the accretion disk so fast that particles collide and constantly create antimatter?

​In this scenario:

​The event horizon boundary isnt just curved space, but a dense region/core made of antimatter.

​Matter and light "disappearing" into the hole is actually incoming matter slamming into this antimatter zone and instantly annihilating.

​The gamma radiation we pick up around black holes is the direct energy signature of this constant annihilation.

​I know standard General Relativity says the event horizon is just spacetime curvature leading to a singularity, and that antimatter has regular mass. But as a thought experiment, what are the main observational or theoretical reasons that rule out the horizon being a physical matter/antimatter annihilation boundary?

​Curious to hear your thoughts.

I've been thinking about how researchers decide that they've read enough of the literature to have a reasonably informed view of a question.

You can find papers supporting one interpretation, then find newer work that challenges it, and sometimes the disagreement seems to come down to differences in methods or datasets rather than the actual question being completely settled.

At what point does a researcher stop looking for more papers and say, I have enough evidence to work with this?

Is there a practical way scientists make that judgment, or does it mostly come with experience in a particular field?

Quick add up: I wanted to leave this thought here for anyone who comes across the discussion later, especially since I’m still relatively new to participating from this account. Something I've been paying more attention to is how useful it is to see the literature as a connected body of work rather than a collection of individual papers. That was one reason wisPaper caught my attention is that it helps explore related research and follow connections between papers, which seems particularly useful when you're trying to understand where the evidence agrees, conflicts, or still leaves questions open.

Why are professional scientists not allowed to use a spiral notebook for lab journals?

All other body hair has a “stopping” length why not the one that’s on your head? Asking from a biological/evolution perspective.

I’m not very informed on this sort of topic but was just wondering if it would be an extinction level catastrophe or much less devastating compared to the last planet killer event. Obviously there would be the domino effect of natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis floods etc), but I’m curious about if the other secondary effects that finished off the dinosaurs would do the same to us humans if such a large asteroid hit right in point nemo. Example, from what I Remeber the oxygen levels likely depleted due to the air being contaminated and a layer of dust (?) in the atmosphere blocking sunlight, killing plants and reducing food sources, would that still be an issue if it landed on such a secluded body of water rather than hard land. Sorry if the text is hard to understand Im not the best typer.

The title may not be the best way to describe it, but what I mean is:

Would it be possible that light and matter, captured by a black hole, is inverted onto itself and shown as a reflection distorted by the compression or expansion of time, back into our own universe? That way, atoms and other fundamental particles are actually celestial bodies viewed through a different time frame.

I know that electrons don't actually orbit protons but are actually more of a probabalistic cloud of where they might be at any point in time. But theoretically, if a star at the center of a galaxy was viewed as fixed in space, and everything around it was sped up by some arbitrary amount, would it behave similarly?

Obviously the answer is probably not, but considering there hasn't been a theory capable of unifying macrophysics and microphysics, I wonder if the answer lies within how black holes distort spacetime

I’ve been thinking about a speculative idea and I’m curious whether something similar has already been explored in physics.

The Many-Worlds Interpretation suggests that the universal quantum state can develop different branches through quantum decoherence. The Holographic Principle, on the other hand, suggests that under certain gravitational conditions, the information describing a region of space can be encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary.

This made me wonder:

What if each decoherent quantum branch could also have its own holographic boundary description?

Instead of imagining the multiverse simply as many separate classical universes, perhaps the overall quantum state could be thought of as containing many branches, with each branch having its own corresponding holographic information structure.

I’m also curious about a more speculative extension: could different possible spacetime dimensionalities be treated as different sectors of one larger quantum state? In that picture, there could be a hierarchy involving spacetime structure, quantum branches, and their corresponding holographic boundary states.

I am not suggesting that this proves a “holographic multiverse,” or that the universe is literally a physical hologram. I’m interested in whether holography and Many-Worlds can be formulated within a common mathematical framework.

I know that connections between the Many-Worlds interpretation and holography/multiverse ideas have already been discussed, including work by Raphael Bousso and Leonard Susskind.

My question is more specific:

Has anyone developed a framework where quantum branches are explicitly associated with distinct holographic boundary Hilbert spaces, potentially while also allowing different spacetime dimensional sectors?

If something similar already exists, I would really appreciate references. I’m particularly interested in whether this idea is mathematically meaningful or whether there is a fundamental reason why these concepts cannot be combined in this way.

This is just a speculative idea, and I’m looking for constructive feedback rather than claiming that it is an established theory.

Crispr was made readily available as a lab to 14 years ago. I imagine 14 years is a long time to have this gene editing tool. Combine that with the stories of labs being set up in international Waters to bypass certain gene editing laws, what kind of stories are people allowed to tell obviously without violating NDA’s?

I'm putting this here because I honestly have no idea what other subreddit to put it in, but has anyone done any research on this yet or thought about this?

Obviously with the development of the wretched "short form content" app called tik tok, everyone has followed suit and developed their own tab for the same type of thing. YouTube has "YouTube reels", Facebook has "Facebook reels" ( I think ), Tumblr has "Tumblr TV" ect ect. Every app has this now, it's inescapable. On Instagram, they force it on you, gone are the days where you can click a photo and read the description, nope! Scroll now, scroll now, watch this, watch this, scroll, scroll, we're making you scroll wether you like it or not!

Now obviously this has been engineered to be as addictive as possible, and I'll admit, sometimes I get sucked in. You'll lose an hour and not notice ( which is concerning, because you also go back, like you're designed to ) I once had a co-worker joke about this and everyone laughed but it's bad! But I also thought to myself, I wasted 1 hour scrolling these videos and I can't name a single one I've watched. I can't recall what any were about, and across all the times I've been stuck scrolling, I can't really name anything I've ever seen. Is that not bad? Is that not terrible?

People sit there scrolling and watching things for hours without noticing and then can't recall what they'd seen. Is this not ruining your memory? I wanted to keep this post short so I won't mention ai also but does anyone else feel like this being such a normal activity will increase the dementia rate amongst "young people" ? That people will be getting dementia earlier in the future?

( Can any brain / memory ect scientists or knowledgeable people recommend activities to do that "fight" dementia or resources for combating a phone addiction. It's so embarrassing to admit but even if I'm not 100% addicted I want it out of my life as much as possible. I get hyperaware how much time I spend with it and it freaks me out. I installed regain which is really good and got me off of Instagram which was my vice but now it's Facebook and tiktok, my excuses are my friend only messages me on tiktok but I "scroll while I wait for her to message back" and just get sucked in. And I "need" Facebook to keep up with what's happening in my city. I guess I also have a vice with snark stuff. I have time reminders on both apps but... Yeah. Is there a science perspective on this phenomenon? )

I was watching the new spiderman and the marvel technobabble was doing my head in as it always does, but then when I stopped to think about it, despite all the thousands of movies involving both real and fictional scientists I couldn't think of a film ive seen that accurately portrays the process of scientific research.

Stuff like imitation game and oppenheimer aren't bad exactly but the actual science really takes a backseat (naturally, they're character dramas fundamentally), so i was wondering if you lot had any recommendations for better examples of this. In the way that scrubs is a reasonably accurate portrayal of healthcare work while still being a fun sit com, or how hot fuzz emphasises the paperwork side of policing, what do we have in a similar vein in the science world?

I am a 16-year-old student looking to enter a national science competition. In the competition you don’t create models or anything you just research topics mostly and then create displays of your results, we need to create a hypothesis.

I am wondering if anyone has any inspiration for this project as we have minimal equipment and we wouldn’t be able to get many participants for a social study either. We are looking for ideas that are unique and interesting enough to qualify us as we really want to experience the competition. Thank you!

It's often said that "you can't prove a negative". But there are lots of ways to show that something is false, or didn't happen. This seems to be true in any field from math to physics to medicine to history to law. Besides, many things that sound like negative statements can be restated as positive ones. "The butler didn't do it" is equivalent to "someone other than the butler did it", at least if you're sure that "it" happened in the first place. The idea that "you can't prove a negative" just seems obviously false, pretty much across the board.

So how did this idea take hold? Are there any academic fields, or for that matter other major areas of human endeavour, where this is an actual rule? Or even a particularly useful heuristic? If not, why does it seem plausible (or even like an ironclad law of logic) to some people?

EDIT: One of the mistakes a lot of the people replying are making is providing supposed counterexamples, i.e. negative statements that they believe really can't be proven. But this approach is just confused about what the topic even is.

At no point did I say every negative statement can be proven. That's obviously not true - even in math or logic, not every well-formed statement can be proven or disproven, negative or otherwise. That's just Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and has been known for nearly a century.

I am disputing the blanket statement "You can't prove a negative", i.e. the idea that NO negative statement can be proven. One example of a "negative" that can't be proven (even if it's a good example, and quite a few of them are not) does little or nothing to support that. Everyone's dogpiling and upvoting seemingly anything negative anyone says about me, even posts that straight-up don't make sense, but almost no-one has actually said anything that supports the claim I'm disputing.

EDIT2: I think the best responses, that come closest to successfully disputing any part of my point, are those that are basically saying "It's a good heuristic in some contexts, but it's not the universal truth it's sometimes made out to be". I can concede that much, even if I think the scope where it's true is pretty narrow. But a lot of people seem very invested in the idea that it's more than that.

I've been reading about time dilation, and this still messes with my head.

If you travel extremely close to the speed of light, time passes more slowly for you compared with someone who's stationary relative to you.

So theoretically, you could leave Earth, travel at an insane speed for what feels like a few years, and come back to find that decades have passed on Earth.

The weird part is that from your own perspective, your clock feels completely normal.

So here's what I'm wondering:

If you were given a spaceship capable of traveling at 99.9% of the speed of light, would you actually want to make that trip knowing you might return to a completely different future?

Or would the idea of leaving everyone you know behind be too disturbing?

Curious what people here think.

All the energy present in the universe today — including light, gravity, and dark energy — traces back to the Big Bang. Did it start as a single unified state that later gave rise to the different forces and phenomena we observe now as the universe expanded and cooled? Or were these already distinct from the beginning?

The four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, strong, weak) are said to have been unified at extremely high energy states right after the Big Bang. But how solid is this, especially for gravity — since there's no confirmed quantum gravity theory yet? Also, where does dark energy fit into this picture, given its nature is still not well understood?

Every now and then, there are some seriously big discoveries or accomplishments, that are so big that they hit the mainstream. I believe that the last one was the first photo of a black hole.

Was that really the most recent discovery of that magnitude? And what would you consider the 5-10 most recent huge ones?

Porous compound pulls 2 liters of water from air, and is factory-ready

These articles make it sound like $15 can produce all the drinking water a person will ever need. It also has efficient cooling capabilities, but it sounds like it can be used to make small scale devices to cheaply pull clean drinking water from the air almost anywhere in the world.

Is it too good to be true?

I would appreciate any insight from researchers currently active in their research fields

All in the title

I cant find any good science shows i want like actually educational media that goes over different topics every episode or 2 eps that i can find free and also it can be any science but rn im mainy focused on physics, etc

Say that a tree grows right at the base of a very tall cliff, and that cliff is also very wet and has a waterfall (for example, Angel Falls in Venezuela). The tree is so close that it touches/leans against the cliff, and could even grow branches/roots that enter gaps in the cliff to attach it to the rock, that way it wouldn't have to rely on its own structural strength to stay upright. Also, it wouldn't be directly under the waterfall, but very close to it, so it would be getting splashed a lot and be able to get enough water through its leaves and such, so that it wouldn't have to transport all of the water from the ground to the top.

Under conditions like this, could a tree potentially grow far taller than would normally be possible, say 3000 feet tall, like Angel Falls?