> Do we know if raindrops are bigger or smaller nowadays? Or if they fall faster than they used to?

Really fun deep dive into atmospheric sciences.

The main effects on rain drop size are air temperature, water drop temperature, air density and atmospheric pressure. None of those are hugely variable due to climate change compared to natural cycles.

Air pollution has a much more dramatic effect on raindrops than does atmospheric CO2 levels. Atmospheric dust or diesel fuel emissions from cars have huge effects; atmospheric CO2 not so much.

At a simple level, there is no historical change. An individual rain drop is the same size and falls at the same rate it always has, which is the terminal velocity for that droplet. It fits into a distribution range of sizes called the Marshall–Palmer distribution.

Rain drop size (and subsequent speed) naturally vary with the seasons and where exactly it is raining. For instance, rain over the oceans is smaller droplets at slower speed, whereas rain over land is bigger droplets at faster speed.

Air pollution affect example: an area may have a lot of atmospheric dust/pollution that forces a lot of smaller droplets or drizzle (e.g. London fog from period dramas). Remove that air pollution and the rain drop size and speed will change to larger drops / faster speed (e.g. there is no more soupy London fog once the coal fired power stations closed/cleaned their emissions.)

Global changes to rainfall patterns due to climate change get too long for a simple post. But the actual rain drops themselves are relatively stable and predictable.

Adderall is in short supply because two factors:

• a main manufacturer Teva Pharmaceuticals shutdown during Covid due to worker shortages. They are still having disruptions to manufacturing.

• prescriptions are up, way up. Highest they have ever been. Big social media campaign during the locksdowns and lots of attention on mental health diagnosis. Adderall is the first medicine most people with ADHD will attempt.

Diabetes auto injectors is because it now has two uses and one of those makes the company more money. (Semaglutide, sold as the brand name Ozempic and Wegovy) is only manufactured by one company using a very delicate and expensive process. The company split the output from the factory into two products: Ozempic for diabetes type 2 and Wegovy for non-presciption weight loss. Same product, but two different uses and the company presumably makes a lot more money as a lifestyle drug. It is immensely hugely crazy mammoth popular for off-label prescriptions for weight loss.

This question comes up frequently. Previous answers from only 6 months ago.

tl;dr Humanity has probably always had acne, but not all humans get acne.

Syndicated content is still popular.

It kind of goes unsaid, but Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud outperform any other entertainment property just by sheer bulk of being on linear TV so much.

There is a decline in linear viewers (classic network TV). But that is almost in balance with digital and streaming.

For instance, a streaming service can license a syndicated TV show for a period of time. Netflix may buy friends on a year-by-year basis, but a low-cost advertiser supported streamer such as Tubi may only take a syndicated TV show for a month.

Disney loves it's to show first-runs on it's own networks, but then it later sells those shows to other stations in non-ABC markets.

Rain clouds are born in the ocean, not over the land.

Rain in California originates in the Pacific Ocean. Which is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the shops, but that's just peanuts to space the ocean.

Irrigation channels are tiny compared to the ocean. Those channels barely affect the local microclimate near the the channel; they don't significantly impacting soil moisture more than a few steps the the source and certainly not via evaporation.

The water loss to evaporation is an economic problem. California loses about 65MM gallons of irrigation water a year to evaporation. As a result, they need to build extra dams (or desalination plants) to produce an extra 63MM gallons of fresh water, just to compensate for water that never reaches the destination.

They could build big pipes to prevent losses, but those are expensive too.

Your process is an old trick to make meat dishes like ribs.

Usually you want to slow cook so that the meat reaches an internal temperature of 70°C. The tough, chewy collagen tissue is broken into smaller gelatin molecules that melt, baste the meat and taste delicious. It's that shiny gooey liquid in the bottom of the dish. This is the internal temperature to achieve falling apart tenderness of slow cooking.

At lower temperature of 60°C the tough, chewy collagen tissue starts to denature without melting. It is almost like cooking egg white - the protein is changing but it's not breaking. As a consequence, the meat can shrink by 20% in size and it becomes very chewy. Leave it at 60°C too long and it squeezes out all of the moisture from the meat and gets really hard.

You cannot recover from partially cooked meat. Not unless you do other tricks such as marinating with vinegar, or pounding it with a hammer. or essentially steaming it to get moisture back inside.

The trick for the ribs is cook them until falling apart tender, then put them in the fridge overnight. The gelatin will set really hard. Next day, you heat up the ribs just enough to denature the gelatin, and you have falling-apart-delicious-tender meat, but the gelatin has denatured and set hard, so the meat stays together for serving without being disintegrating at first bite.

Anyone living north of the 37th parallel gets effectively zero vitamin D from sunlight during the winter months (e.g. north of Los Angeles in the USA).

The UV index needs to be > 3 to generate any vitamin D. During those northern months no amount of sun exposure will cross that threshold. Basically, if you need to wear sunscreen, the UV index is high enough to make vitamin D.

The time exposure between min UV and max UV is minor. 5 minutes at the sunniest day and 15 minutes at the dimmest day. After that it falls off a cliff and no amount of sun will help.

Instead, you are rely on stores your body built during the summer months.

There are some limited dietary sources. Fatty fish such as salmon or tuna, eggs, mushrooms or fortified foods.

The IP laws for this are going to get very niche and confusing.

• Patents cannot be an equation or a fact. Once you publish it you cannot lock it away and prevent people using it.

• Copyright does not protect a fact, which would be the equation itself. For instance, you cannot copyright a cooking recipe of 1 cup flour, 2 cups sugar, etc. However, you can copyright a page of a book. That includes the font, typesetting, arrangement. So you can copyright a recipe book, copyright a page of a recipe, copyright the text instructions, but not copyright the weights and measure in the recipe.

• Copyright can protect a logo or an image. For instance, you could create a company with the Pythagorean theorem as the name, then have a graphic designer create a logo for you. Anyone can still use the formula, but they can't use to name another company or product, and they have restrictions on how they write it on things.

• Trade secret or national security restriction on an equation. You write it down on internal company documents, then everyone who reads it must sign a NDA. If any of those people reveal the equation to the outside world, you can sue that person for damages. If it's a government secret you can even put someone in prison, in some cases, pre-preemptively before they release the secret.

As a rough rule, it's about averages. Rich people with lots of resources will be taller and reach a plateau within their society, compared to poorer people with fewer resources. But there are always exceptions in each group.

Diseases or childhood illness may prevents you obtaining maximum height.

Nutrition is more than just calories. Ideally you have a varied diet. For instance, you could be really obese from eating sugar but your diet is lacking in protein or a particular vitamin.

The final thing is we can't rule out any effects from your grandparents epigentics, or other random things we cannot predict. Some medications will affect future children.

Too difficult to diagnose at a distance. At a minimum, way more complicated.

There is good evidence that about 80% of your adult height is determined by genetics, with the remaining 20% due to environmental factors. Mostly nutrition and disease.

But in poor African countries or other poor areas of the world, only approximately 65% is determined by genetics. There is something different in poor countries besides just genetics or simple environmental factors like nutrition.

The Dutch Famine study is the evidence of something that affects your genetics via something called epigenetics. If your mother was starving while pregnant, you would be shorter than a sibling born before the famine. Plus your children would also be shorter than your nieces and nephews. But then 4th generation is back to normal.

Overall: you need multigenerational optimum nutrition/disease conditions to reach maximum potential based on your genetics.

Dutch Famine of 1944-45 was starving-to-death starvation. 20,000 people died.

The legacy is historically and scientifically interesting because the Netherlands is a modern, wealthy, highly educated population with excellent health care. The entire famine was extremely well documented, which makes later followups very complete.

• Females shorter than expected by ~4.5 cm.

• Males shorter than expected by ~3-4 cm.

Since females on average are shorter than males, the % effect is even greater.

The greatest example we have is a Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam. At the end of WW2, the Nazis starved the Dutch city of Amsterdam for ~ 2 years.

Women who were starving when pregnant gave birth to children who when they reached adult height were short than expected by ~4.5cm.

Second generation children (grandchildren of the starving pregnant woman) were also shorter than expected, by ~4 cm.

Interesting choosing China and USA as an example... when China produces <10% of all lihtium in the world and USA has literally only a single trial mine without any mineral processing.

Australia and Chile are responsible for 80% of the global lithium. Your linked article is out of date. Australia moved to #1 supplier using hard rock (it's much cheaper and easier to scale than brine extraction) at 42,000 tonnes/year versus nearest rival Chile at 18,000 tonnes /year.

Australia does use open cut mining to obtain it's lithium from hard rock. Chile pumps salt water from the ground but isn't using fracking.

> When an economically viable resource is identified, the surface is cleared, the earth is scraped away, the rock blasted and the rubble hauled off for processing into concentrate.

The mining/extraction is not a huge environmental concern - relatively benign as far as most mining is concerned. The processing of ore the unfriendly stage. It requires a lot of energy/electricity and the waste requires decisions about amount of processing versus dumping.

Cortisol is only one example of a potential stressor. We have no way to link that to any output.

A simpler example is nutrition. There is a famous study of pregnant mothers who were starving in 1944-45 (note: actually starving-to-death-starving, not just a little bit skinny). A pregnant person who is starving is more likely to produce babies that grow into short adults, plus those short adults also have short children (grandchild from the starving mother).

Like every question and answer in life, it's complicated.

At this point unless we start arguing details, the uterus is close enough to sterile for this type of question.

Fun fact: the gestational carrier will have their own genetics changed by the fetus, for a short time anyway.

Gut health is almost entirely dependent on the birth process. Intestinal colonization takes place during the first days of life (really the first minutes), being influenced by the method of delivery, type of lactation, and the environment. Short story: the uterus is sterile, the baby has no microbes. During delivery the baby comes out the vagina and swallows some poop/goop from the mother and those microbes start reproducing quickly. If not vaginal birth, the first colonizers are probably microbes on the breast surface or random hospital microbes on whatever goes in the infant mouth or even simply breathes in. Those first colonizers in the infants gut and set up gut microbiome. Infant microbiome is variable and does change over time due to diet, environment, etc. By about age 2-3 there is no difference between vaginal or surgical birth in healthy infants.

Genetics: the gestational carry does not transfer any other their genetic material to the infant. However, they can influence the expression of some of those genes. The really dumb analogy: you and a friend both buy the same car model, same colour, same day - after 5 years your different experiences have made those cars look and handle differently, despite being the same materials/genetics.

Harvard has a simple infographic discussing epigentics, or how your genetics turn into physical traits/behaviours.

Typically considered a chronic or ongoing condition that requires management for the rest of your life.

Important note: there are many types of asthma. Allergenic, non-allergenic, occupational, nocturnal, exercise-induced...

Some types do go away. Don't hold your breathe for this to work for you.

Example (1): pediatric asthma affects about 1 in 2 children, but does not persist beyond about age 15 and it continues through to about 1 in 5 adults.

Example (2): occupational asthma is usually from an irritant in the workplace. If you change jobs, you have removed the trigger and won't show symptoms. In some cases, by removing the irritant for long enough, it gives your lungs time regrow whatever damage was done by the irritant; same time, in other cases the lungs aren't damaged because it's a sensitivity to something specific, or the material/chemical has irreparably damage the lung tissue.

Example (3): allergenic asthma can be outgrown, or in some cases it is possible to receive medical treatment to train your body not to respond to those allergens (or at least have a higher threshold).

A person can learn to modify their behaviour to avoid triggers. That isn't quite remission in the same way it is defined for cancer.

Wikipedia article on gun-type fission bombs..

The simple part of the gun mechanism is pushing two sub-critical lumps of U235 together to make a large enough mass to be super-critical. You could do this with your hands pushing the two lumps together and it still happens, the bullet design just makes it more efficient.

The speed of the bullet is because the super-critical chain reactions take 1 microsecond. That means you have only 1 microsecond to get the bullet to mix with the target and hopefully form something like a sphere. If the bullet is moving too slow, you get pre-detonation.

Basically, bullet too slow = the bottom blows up and wastes the remaining unreacted mass of U235 by throwing it out the top.

The bullet was hollow, but more similar to when you do the hand gesture of penis entering vagina. It kept the two lumps of material from touching for as long as possible. The hollow bullet landed on a spiked target.

> The recall includes the following products: Pine-Sol Scented Multi-Surface Cleaners, in Lavender Clean, Sparkling Wave and Lemon Fresh scents; CloroxPro Pine-Sol All Purpose Cleaners, in Lavender Clean, Sparkling Wave, Lemon Fresh and Orange Energy scents; and Clorox Professional Pine-Sol Lemon Fresh Cleaners.

Microbes like to eat soaps too.

The multisurface cleaners are mostly water, oils and surfactants. They are not antimicrobial.

Most of the chemicals you listed are very poor antimicrobials, IMHO they are not antimicrobial at all. They mostly work simply by being surfactants that (1) dissolve a fatty outer layer and wash off the bacteria from a surface or (2) maybe if you get lucky they lyse a really narrow class of microbes, usually just e-coli and salmonella bacteria.

Typically these products include a teeny tiny trace amount of water-based anti-microbial chemicals to keep the product shelf stable. For instance, benzyl alcohol or MIT/CIT.

It can easily be that the factory was using contaminated water and the amount of microbes exceeded the control of the antimicrobials. They factory may have had a blocked nozzle and the products either did not get enough or any antimicrobials. A worker may have messed up and put the incorrect chemical in the processing line.

Since the claim the bacteria of concern is Pseudomonas aeruginosa, IMHO that implies their factory was using ground water that became contaminated. The factory water treatment facility got contaminated or was passing, which contaminated their bottle filling equipment. In my own work history I have seen a sand filter positioned after a water treatment facility get contaminated, and nobody checked because it was not expected to ever see dirty water in the first place, so it was only noticed when during a routine stoppage and restart, the first flush of water smelled bad.

Upfront: some of it is a very slight form of racism. Used to be called Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.

You eat about 10-20 mg of glutamate a day in a normal diet. It's in cheese, tomatoes, soy sauce, soy-anything like protein boosted meals, roasted meats - essentially it's in anything that tastes savoury.

There is no difference between MSG or naturally occurring glutamate in other foods. Your body sees those as being exactly the same. It's just normal glutamate that has been mixed with salt and dried.

Next, the science. First, MSG not been proved to to be linked to headaches. Second, there is good evidence that MSG at any concentrations has no effect on headaches.

Those are different but good stories: you can give anyone MSG and it doesn't cause migraines or headaches; If someone is susceptible to migraines or headaches, it's been shown it's not the MSG causing it.

There is already a Leptospirosis vaccine for humans... Several have been available since 1920...

Challenge is there are many different types of leptospiral bacteria and they live in many different animals.

The current top priority is reducing infection in animal reservoirs.

I think a sticking point in any discussion you have is "space"=nothing/vacuum/emptycontainer versus "space"=interstellar medium (where stars and spaceships do their business).

Every person who has responded to you has assumed you are talking about a container full of vacuum. Because that's what those words mean.

One answer to your question about a universe without particles and how to measure it is may be what happened before the Big Bang? The "universe" was a singularity about the size of a peach. However, it was full of stuff and not empty.

The other answer is what is outside our universe? e.g. you have an area of "space" with nothing in it, then you add a particle, what happens?

The answer is... nobody knows. The observable universe has always had stuff in it, so the size/distance/volume is measure by taking two of those points. Physics no longer works when you are talking about a universe without particles. There is no distance unless you are measuring how far apart two things are. There is no pressure without having a container.

Your scenario of a "universe" with nothing it but somehow it has reference points for scale 1m x 1m x 1m, that can't happen. There is no way to get a reference point.

Maybe the closest you will get is within string theory - it lets you have a "universe" without particles. At some point the universe was a mass of 1 dimensional strings vibrating (so we don't have 3 dimension like 1m x 1m x 1m anymore). One of those flipping in a weird way that lead to the formation of the first particle. That caused a chain reaction which created more and more particles that lead to the universe.

Very rare to find a tree treatment that does modify the tree or change the tree.

Plants are poor at excreting or breaking down chemicals once they enter the plant circulatory system.

Mostly what you see is systemic insecticides/fungicides that are essentially bug spray that is floating around throughout the plant until something eats it, or the chemical gets stuck in plant tissue that falls off the tree.

> Terry Pratchett — 'In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

IMHO your problem is about words and not mathematics. Here are a couple of definitions that hopefully help.

Space is typically defined as absence of "stuff". It has no volume, zero mass, zero momentum, zero electric charge. You can't push it around, or expand it, or do anything to it. Space is dependent on things happening to other stuff.

Particles do have mass, volume, momentum, electric charge, etc. They affect their surroundings.

Interstellar space contains about 100,000 particles per cubic metre. That sounds like a lot, hundreds of thousands!, but it's relatively empty.

Your hypothesis changes depending if you define "space" as interstellar space or as a hard vacuum with all particles removed.

Real world: a random area of interstellar space. If you add one more particle, nothing changes as you've increased the density by a tiny immeasurable amount.

Thought experiment: big container with rigid or flexible walls and absolutely nothing inside. You add one particle. Nothing changes. One particle isn't exerting force on anything, it's not pushing on anything, it's not interacting with your magical thought experiment walls. Nothing changes.

End result of your thought experiment is nothing changes.