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Why do men go bald as they get older but women don’t?
Genes code for proteins. Baldness is caused by a missing or malformed protein, caused by what we’ll call the baldness allele. The version of the gene that makes the protein for hairiness can be the hairy allele.
If there’s one copy of the hairy allele present, the recipe is there so the protein can be made properly and nobody goes bald. If there’s no copy of the hairy allele, only the baldness one, you go bald.
Men have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome. Women have two X chromosomes. Each chromosome is made of multiple genes, each coding for different characteristics.
The primary gene for pattern baldness is on the X chromosome. Since the Y chromosome lacks an opposing gene (being significantly shorter), there’s no way for the hairy allele to be on the Y chromosome. One copy of the baldness allele is enough to cause male pattern baldness.
Women can go bald, but they need two of the baldness allele (one on each X chromosome), so it’s much rarer.
– dendodge
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Why are MMA fighter told not to blow their nose when in a fight?
A lot of the blood vessels in their face will be broken after a good punch to the face. However, it will take time for blood to actually leak out and cause lots of swelling.
Blowing your nose causes an increase in blood pressure, which means a lot of blood comes out of all those now-torn vessels. End result is your face very quickly swells up.
– justanothergamer
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How does the world keep track of all of its digital money?
Let’s start simple. Your bank account. Your bank account is money that the bank is holding onto for you. The bank has a major incentive to think the number is correct.
They have several safeguards in place. Including multiple redundant systems. Each system keeps all data encrypted, and has a running status list for transactions. Each system also has a hardware security module (HSM) that handles all the encryption and decryption to make keys hard to recover. The HSM has some extremely sophisticated security.
From there the redundant systems keep an eye on each other, always looking to detect tampering in case the HSM somehow can’t detect it.
Each of these is heavily backed up, required at least once a day, typically hourly.
So every bank has this. A large bank may have 5000 such redundant systems, along with additional backups. The systems themselves have humans watching them at all times.
So that is how your bank knows exactly how much of your money they have, how much you owe them, etc.
Now every bank is connected to the banking network (runs over the internet, heavily encrypted). Each bank on the network tracks statistic points of every friend bank. So every bank detects tampering with its friends.
The system is not perfect. To provide an additional layer everything is audited, someone actually goes through every even mildly suspicious change to verify it.
So if you were to get inside what could you do?
With minimal suspicion you could move money within a single bank. In particular the contact information on an account has much lower security (only 5x redundancy in most cases). Assuming you can modify all redundant sources quickly enough, you could alter the contact information just before backup, change it back immediately afterwards, audit should accept it. Now you only have to repeat that every single hour every single day, without being caught, for at least 90 days. Now trigger a fault in enough HSM modules to trigger manual backup (75%). The restore would then likely give you that account.
Anything less than that and you will be caught. Good luck, people like me work very hard to make it basically impossible. Oh and better hurry, end of the year more complications are happening to make it even harder.
– holomntn
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How does a plane know when it has been locked onto by another plane/missile?
The lock on system sends out a frequency wave that is picked up by an antenna that’s main job is to Interpret that signal and sound off a warning in the cockpit. If a missile has locked onto an aircraft, the signal from the missile will be focused directly on the plane and the plane will always be able to see the signal. If it’s a navigation radar, it’s probably rotating (think of those radars on the top of small boats or at the airport). That’s just one more way to narrow down the range of possibilities. As someone else mentioned, the F-35 and a lot of newer radars use agile frequencies so the plane can’t really figure out that there’s a signal there to see. A plane flying high above the earth will naturally see all kinds of stray radar pulses, most of which it doesn’t care about. Those new radars are random enough and use so few pulses that it appears as though they’re just part of the background noise.
– miori1230
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Why does stress make people age faster?
Our body is made up of trillions of cells, which in turns carries chromosomes. At the end of each chromosome, there is something called a telomeres.
Every time I cell divides, the length of its telomeres become shorter, making its life a little shorter too.
Anything that causes our cells (our building blocks) to age will in turn make us age too. So, the shorter the telomeres in our cells become, the older we get.
When we get stressed, we overproduce our hormones. There is an observed correlation between higher hormone levels and shorter telomere length, and therefore a shorter cell life.
Basically when we produce too many hormones through stress, our cells age a little quicker because the telomeres become even shorter after dividing, and when our cells age quicker, so do we.
– floormatt3
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How can some people get addicted to exercise, yet no matter how hard I try it feels like torture to me?
It is torture, because it is “work” very often with no tangible result in the short term but feeling shitty and tired.
Incentives are hard to come by because we’re typically paid for work, and we couch it in terms of “by the hour”, even people on salary often break it down to a 40 hour work week so it is an understandable in the short term(I just earned $44 in that hour!).
Our minds have a harder time latching onto long term goals because historically/evolutionarily, we didn’t have or need long term goals, surviving the day was enough.
Video games play upon this desire for reward, many are specifically engineered to do this and end up being quite manipulative.
Exercise, not so much, as it takes weeks or months to see any effect, and that’s from an outsiders perspective. Our ability to adapt to slow change makes it less noticeable to us.
The key is to find something about it that you do like, to form positive associations. Accomplishment is a big one, whether you take pride in that you did it, or that you can now fit into nicer clothes or live longer or being healthier in general(or healthier than other slobs, sounds bad, but a lot of “fit” people do get awful smug like that).
A lot of people will contrive rewards for themselves with diet or exercise to manipulate themselves, to stimulate their reward centers. While you can’t sit down and eat a gallon of ice cream…you can reward yourself with activities that you really enjoy. You can only watch your favorite TV shows after X, or go buy yourself something nice when you achieve Y.
– Probate_Judge
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When a food has an “acquired taste” , what is actually happening when we begin to enjoy it?
A large part of taste is expectation. Things that you think will taste of one thing but instead taste of something else usually cause an adverse reaction. For example this video of a blindfolded milk test with one of the “milks” being orange juice . It’s not that orange juice is disgusting in itself, but if you’re expecting milk it is.
When you think of what foods are considered an “acquired taste” most of them have a pretty unique flavour. I think beer is probably the best example of an acquired taste, since most people like it, but basically no one likes it when they first try it. Beer has a taste that’s completely different and unexpected compared to other beverages, so your first reaction is unpleasant. I’m sure one could come up with a bunch of evolutionary reasons why things that taste weird cause an unpleasant reaction. But essentially you need to get used to a taste before your expectations align with reality, and only after can you really enjoy the flavour.
– ciggey
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Why is high blood pressure bad for you (due to the damage to the arteries and blood vessels) but regular exercise, which also increases blood pressure, doesn’t cause the same damage?
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High blood pressure leads to enlargement of your heart (because it needs to pump harder in order to overcome the resistance of your narrowed/blocked/damaged arteries). This leads to all sorts of heart problems, particularly dilated cardiomyopathy.
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Exercise leads to a transient increase in blood pressure. People who exercise excessively tend to have larger hearts too (particularly left ventricular hypertrophy) and this also has the potential to cause problems, however, you would have to exercise a lot for this to happen. There are two key differences between transient high blood pressure from exercise, and high blood pressure from clogged vessels. Firstly, exercise only raises your blood pressure momentarily, however, the longer-term effect of exercise is reduced fat clogging your arteries leading to an overall reduced blood pressure for the majority of the time. The second difference is that in exercise whilst your heart needs to pump harder (to move more blood around), however, this is against low resistance. This process of pumping harder makes the heart stronger. By contrast, when you have high blood pressure your heart needs to pump harder against resistance, leading to dilatation which is far more problematic. Dilatation is like filling a balloon with water – the balloon expands, but it does not get stronger/more elastic.
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High blood pressure causes damage to the heart and the kidneys. However, high blood pressure also indicates clogged arteries and/or kidney disease (amongst many other things). These things that you have when you have high blood pressure cause damage too, damage somebody who exercises well does not have.
– daveeyx
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How does soap actually kill bacteria?
All soaps work by having two different properties on a single molecule (a property called amphoteric). One end of a soap molecule like to bind to water and the other end likes to bind to organic molecules like dirt and oil. Looking at the cellular side, all cells have some sort of membrane that surrounds them. This membrane is similar to how your skin surrounds and protects you. These membranes are similar to soap in that they have water and organic binding ends to their molecules. In fact, the bubbles seen in soap are very similar to the membranes around your cells.
Soap is very good at getting into and disrupting these membranes, effectively punching holes in cells. Because of this, unlike the claims of earlier posters, BOTH antibacterial and “normal” soap are capable of killing cells, although much of regular soap’s mode of action is to help wash away the cells rather than outright killing them. In the case of the antibacterial soap, it often contains an additional antibiotic (triclosan), which further disrupts the cell membrane. This gives it a more potent effect than normal soap, but both are still very capable of killing a cell.
It should also be noted that recent scientific studies have claimed that there is very little, if any benefit that anti-bacterial soaps have over normal soaps. Both are just about equally effective at getting rid of bacteria.
– mjcapples
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How does an expansion team in a sport get its players in its first year?
In the NBA and NFL (and I think the other 2 major leagues as well), every team is allowed to designate a certain amount of players (7 in the NBA I think and like 25 in the NFL) to not be taken. Of the players not designated, the new team gets to pick their team with them. They also get a certain pick in the upcoming draft. Usually they get the 1st pick, although sometimes they get a pick slightly worse.
– damienrapp98
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