In some ways yes. Humanity has largely left natural selection behind.

How do we define "huge catastrophe"? Something like COVID probably applies and that was probably a wake up call to our fragility. Thankfully vaccines and social measures muted the worst of it, but we still a massive die-off of the old, immune compromised, and genetically unlucky.

I would argue it's less humans we should be worried about and rather things like our crops. If you research monocultures you'll get my point. Humans still have a tremendous amount of genetic diversity, it's unlikely a single plague lets say will wipe us out 100%. But most our major crops are essentially clones of each other. If there arises a COVID for wheat, then yes, if it kills one plant it can potentially eradicate wheat from existence. Look up the Gros Michele banana for information there. That should be a major concern for the future of humanity and something we strive to improve upon.

Great synopsis by u/dogmeatjones25

I'll just add that Marx lived in the mid-1800s, in Germany, and was very influenced by the Industrial Revolution and economics and politics of his day. His theory shouldn't be taken as "all Communism" any more than the Founding Fathers of the United States should be equated to "all Democracy".

His ideas though, which you can better call "Marxism" or "Marxist Communism" where the germ that grew into 20th century into things like Leninism, Stalinism, and the communism we saw in Soviet Russia and modern day China. It's not fair to say that modern day China is "Marxist" or to equate things like Socialism or Soviet Russia to Marx either.

In a sense, you can just plug in electric cars. The issue is that most "residential" electrical circuits don't give enough energy to charge an EV in a reasonable amount of time. As far as I know, most EVs can be plugged into a standard US wall plug but it will take north of a day to charge the batteries. So not exactly convenient.

So the chargers aren't just devices you plug into an existing receptacle like a laptop charger, they are special dedicated circuits that directly run back to your home's main electrical distribution panel to give more powerful energy directly to your battery. Even so, these kinds of charges might need an hour or two to recharge your batteries.

Special 'high-energy' charging stations use levels of electricity that your home doesn't even have, they require dedicated transformers and gear on a more commercial or industrial scale and can charge your batteries in 15 or 20 minutes.

EDIT - so to be clear, all these different sources of electricity require various equipment to make them "receivable" by the car. It would be like your cell phone have a powerbrick built into it with a USB-C and USB-Micro connector, a 2 prong and 3 prong 120V receptacle, and a NEMA plug, with all the various transformers required to charge the battery properly. That's clearly a dumb way of designing a portable product and we have various power cords, multi-adapters, and power bricks built into the wires we use to charge, and not into the cell phone itself. Same-same with EVs.

Richard Nixon was a Republican US president running for reelection and a group of Democrats, called the Democratic National Committee were trying to get their candidate elected. The DNC had their office in the Watergate Hotel, in Washington D.C..

One night there was a break-in at the DNC office, it wasn't a simple robbery, it was an attempt to steal documents and learn about the Democratic strategy. Lots of fingers got pointed and accusations flew quickly.

Long story short, it was in fact Nixon's administration who coordinated the break-in, the perpetrators were caught and found to be literally paid with campaign money from the Nixon campaign. Now this was bad, but the big "no-no" was the Nixon personally did all he could to cover up the crime. So it's a case less of the crime itself, more so that the President orchestrated a campaign to cover the whole thing up. The key was while Nixon was publicly defending himself and saying he knew nothing, the investigators literally got voice recordings, from the Oval Office, of the President talking about and directing the cover up process.

Many people were convicted or went to jail and facing legal action himself, Nixon stepped down from the presidency and his Vice President (who became President upon the abdication) pardoned Nixon. Ironically, had he done nothing at all, Nixon would have safely won his reelection anyway AND the act of pardoning Nixon was so unpopular it doomed his replacement, President Ford, to a largely do-nothing one term presidency.

You have it backwards - radioactive decay turn mass into energy. (that's literally what E=mC^(2) means). The conversion multipler of mass to energy is C^(2) so a huge amount of energy makes a teeensy tiiny bit of mass, or a tiny bit of mass makes a HUGE amount energy.

Fusion in stars is complicated, is uses not-ELI5 type things like the "weak nuclear force", and yes, gravity, to convert energy into mass and energy into different mass and energy. The trick in the Sun is it has a tremendous amount of Gravity which kick-starts the process and creates a large net-output of energy (sunlight and other radiation). In something a fusion powerplant the problem is you don't have that gravity source so you need a large energy input in the form of heat in the place of gravity. Currently, it takes more energy for us to create fusion that we get out so it's not a sustaining reaction like the Sun is.

To help you understand exactly what happens, you need 4 hydrogens to smash together with tremendous energy, typically due a massive amount of gravity pulling them together.

Each hydrogen atom has 1 proton, but when you smash 4 of them together 2 of the protons "morph" into neutrons. Neutrons are slightly more massive than protons, so all things being equal you can understand why 1 helium should have slightly more mass than 4 hydrogens.

What's also happening is part of that energy in the first place that fused the hydrogens in helium got "solidified" into mass of helium, like energy gets stored in a battery. That energy can be pulled back out if you get the helium atom to decay, this is literally how nuclear energy and nuclear bombs work.

Not sure where you are getting the "more energy" bit from. Either you're thinking about how we can use hydrogen as fuel and not helium (which comes down to electron configurations, hydrogen is "unhappy" and that unhappiness creates a desire to participate in chemistry, hence boom.) Or your thinking of the original energy required to fuse the hydrogens in the first place, and that usually comes from gravity.

Well you got me remembering now.

I think we used "X-dot" (X with a tittle) specifically for velocity as x represented physical distance/displacement and X-dot-dot for acceleration.

I could be misremembering... this was quite a bit ago.

Calculus was "invented" roughly at the same time by two different people, using it for two different purposes.

Isaac Newton used it as a solution to physics problems, and Leibniz (not sure his first name) used it for more pure math problems.

At its heart they were both concerned with being able to calculate the slope of a line at possible point on the line (if you imagine a straight line that's easy, but a constantly changing wiggly curvy line is hard).

Both people realized that a slope on a line is just rise over run or change in Y divided change in X on a graph. And both people created a math process to make the "change" values infinitely small giving a new equation, this process is called a "transformation" (derivation in this case).

Where they differed is that Newton was more concerned real world physics, he was mostly interested with changes in a system by time very specifically where as Leibniz was more pure-math focused and just wanted to discover what are essentially "tangents" (point-slopes) on curves.

From Leibniz we get the dY/dX notations and from Newton we get the y' and x' notation which (In my engineering school at least) specifically refers to time-based derivates.

Are you familiar with calculus? This is calculus terminology and not division in the sense of a fraction.

For ELI5 terms - we start with something called a "function", a function is a sort of equation where any possible X value has only one possible Y value. So, if you imagine a graph in your head, a line is a function, a U shaped curve is a function, but a C shaped curve isn't.

This is calculus, but you can think of the dy or dx symbol as "change in". So dy/dx is saying "for a given change in X values, what's the change in y values?", which we generally call "the slope" of a line.

In the case of a straight line, the slope is constant, so if you use the language Y= mX + C, dY/dX = m and the C gets dropped. So if you have Y = 2x + 5, dY/dX of this function is just 2.

In the case of curves you drop the exponent and multiply to the slope and leave X.

So y=3X^(2) becomes dy/dx = (3*2)x=6x.

The article is confusingly written so it's hard to figure out entirely, but obviously her records, or someone already linked to her were in the database.

DNA analysis and the databases are so well populated at this point that they can often "find" missing people via gaps.

Here's an anecdote - In my family an unknown person did a test which connected her to my family, people who already took the test. The system said you must be related to these people. Now my father also took a test but didn't give his personal information, so the system knew both my extended family AND that this person was downstream of my Father specifically but didn't know who he was or how to reach him. She was able to contact other extended family who said my father had the following children, one of them must be your biological parent. The woman was able to easily look at ages and genders at this point and identify her missing biological parent who wasn't in the system at all. Low and behold through the miracle of Social Media, this person got that "Hi, I'm your adult child" phone call.

The colors were chosen for their ability to stand out from natural background lighting and for the general human ability to see them. (Red and Yellow are naturally easy for the human eye to see).

Finally a colorblind person wouldn't be impacted since the they can just count the lights. The top light is "stop" and the bottom is "go" regardless of color.

Great explanation but I'll only add a small asterisk - Bourbon barrels cannot be reused per the definition of bourbon. They can be reused for things like whiskey, beer, or as trailer-park garden planters, but bourbon must be aged in a new oak barrel.

As u/Red_AtNight mentioned, most nightshades are in someway poisonous. I'm not a botanist so I can't say they all are, but most are, especially the wild ones.

We've domesticated things like tomatoes and potatoes but even potatoes can be highly toxic if you eat too much of the wrong bits. I believe they are also a kind of toxin that likes to stay in your fat tissue so it can accumulate slowly over time.

I'm not sure about which diets avoid nightshades other than Macrobiotic diets which as far as I know are more based eastern philosophy rather than some sort of nutritional logic. For example, the Macrobiotic diet classifies foods according to their status in a Yin/Yang balance so certain foods can only be paired with others in a dish. Specifically the nightshades are excluded from the diet entirely, again for philosophical reasons, not for some actual nutritional or ethical logic.

There might also be a religious aspect, I believe the early European colonists believed the tomato was the supposed "Biblical Fruit" that Eve ate and so they believed it both kill you and then damn you hell if you ate it. Obviously that didn't last long. FWIW, I think 'scholars' have since agreed the fruit was a quince.

Temp agencies are not hiring agencies. Meaning, yes, they specifically look to "rent" an employee for a short period of time and they get some form of compensation per hour, something like that. So yes, they would be ideal for finding a role with a set deadline. Typically once an employment goes past something like 6 months the company needs to chose to hire the person (and that becomes a separate deal) or let them go.

One big challenge is that the idea of a virus being "alive" is a touchy subject. The vote is still out but I'm in the "No, they are not" camp, viruses are just clumps of organic molecules that are like a mouse trap, they spring into an action when triggered, but they aren't "choosing" to trigger.

Most antibiotics don't kill bacteria, they either weaken them or slow their reproduction rate so that our immune system can step up and wipe them out. 95% of the time, our immune systems are the real hero, not the antibiotics. Additionally bacteria are "external" to our cells, so we can find them and attack them easier.

Viruses invade our cells and do their damage inside, so passing immune system cells can't see them or engage them because they are hiding. Again, if our goal is to just mess with the invader until our immune system can neutralize them all, if our immune system isn't taking because the viruses are hiding, that strategy doesn't really work.

Finally, viruses change insanely quickly, they are like the Borg if you're a Star Trek person. The virus a person get's infected with is often not the virus they infect other people with because they are constantly changing and evolving. Just look at how many strains and variants of COVID we have already, how the treatment and symptoms keep changing as well.

I bet I'll get some heat from the "are viruses alive" comment, and we can all agree that the concept of "life" is really, really complicated if you spend a few minutes thinking about it. For any hard "life needs X" line you can draw, you'll find a clearly living animal that doesn't need that. At the least, I draw the line on metabolism for viruses, they do not require, use, ingest, or produce and sort of energy required to grow, move, reproduce... you know, live. They are just molecular bear traps waiting for the right cell to step in and produce more bear traps.