Years ago I read Dan Brown's Angels and Demons where the plot involved a group trying to blow up the vatican using an anti-matter bomb of sorts. At the time, I didn't think too much on it, because yeah, antimatter is the perfect fuel that turns 100% of the mass into pure energy, so of course it would cause an explosion.

But now that I've given it a bit more thought, I have questions. Chemical explosions are devastating because they release gasses in a massive shockwave that destroys everything around them. Nuclear explosions result in fission byproducts shooting out and the massive thermal radiation immediately turning the surronding atmosphere into a fireball, subsequently causing shockwaves.

Hypothetically (since getting that much antimatter is nigh impossible) what would it look like if you allow a gram of antimatter to annhilate in the atmosphere (maybe 50-100m above ground)? Would there be an explosion, and how exactly would that energy be released?

I've heard people say "I washed it down with beer" and people act horrified. I just had a pill with coffee to swallow it and I got some reactions. Does it matter if you use water or not? Or does it just need any edible liquid to physically carry it down?

Edit: I was having a morning coffee and complained about back pain, so my boyfriend gave me diclofenac sodium 50mg. I washed it down with the coffee I had in my hands because I couldn't be bothered getting up to get a glass of water. It wasn't still boiling, it was tepid.

Tagging this with chemistry but don’t know if that’s correct :)

I heard somewhere that if for some reason, an astronaut peed directly into the vacuum of space, it would immediately turn to ice.

How does that work? How can the heat possibly dissipate if there's very little matter around to dissipate the heat into? Is it a pressure thing that means you can have ice at body temperature?

Please explain. Why does so much lint come off clothes after 40 minutes in the dryer as opposed to when just wearing an article of clothing? Thanks. I think the might qualify as a physics flair, but am not sure. Thank you in advance.

Why can one pile stay steeper than another, and what causes the grains to start sliding once that limit is reached?

The insurance business is all about balancing a small number of high risk clients with large number of low risk clients. And hope that clients are not strongly correlated. When an unexpected number of high risk cases happen all at once, insurance uses re-insurance, which is an insurance company for insurance companies.

But how can re-insurance possibly be profitable? For one, insurance companies must be paying a lower premium than they are receiving from clients. Secondly, all the insurance companies are highly correlated. If one is collapsing, they are all collapsing.

So re-insurance receives lower premiums while also taking on all the tail risk, collecting pennies in front of a steam roller. How is that possibly profitable?

I know that we have three types of nervous systems:

-The one we can activly control (like our limbs)

-The one we can semi-control (like our breathing)

-And the rest that works completly on its own (like our heart and stomach)

My question is, why isnt stuff like our stomach in the semi control category? If I eat something bad, why dont you let me spit it back up before Im feeling miserable? If something is disrupting my digestion, why dont you tell me what it is so I know to avoid it for next time? Why can I control my breathing and lungs, but not my digestion and stomach?

I've always been interested in shadow effects and shadows fascinated me as a child. I often noticed when I still lived at my mom's house how passing vehicles would create a shadow of the chandelier near the top of the living room against the back wall and how if a car passed at certain speeds the shadow would be smaller and less sharp. I measured the chandelier, it's 13.5 inches across, but the shadows produced by cars and other vehicles are smaller, about 12.5 inches or less, the fainter shadows are always even smaller.

Is this because the light source is larger than the object? It's been so long since I did Science at school I don't remember. When cars come to the top of the street opposite with their headlights, the chandelier shadow is the same size as the chandelier itself.

I'm posting this on a throwaway because I am so embarrassed to ask.

My friend was talking about it and I just had to nod along because I'm an out of my 20s year old woman and I should probably know this. Granted I don't want kids so I don't really know anything about that kind of stuff.

To build muscle we do a small amount of reps of high weight till failure, but to get faster at running we are taught to run slow, or do 80% of training in zone2 and only 20% speed workouts. Why is there such a difference?

First as a disclaimer, I am going to make up these exchange rates just so I can use integers and not get into decimals.

But anyways- there was a time I lived close to the US-Canadian border. So I would easily take trips from one country to the next. For as long as I know, conversion between the 2 currencies has always been something like this:

1 USD = 2 CAD

again fake numbers, but the gist being like the amount in USD was always less than CAD and vice versa.

But from what I've been told, in this situation, the USD is "stronger"- but for some reason that's not making sense in my head. Why would it be considered stronger in this case? And thus would the Euro for example, it having a conversion that goes something like 1 Euro = 5 USD, be stronger than the USD?

As far as I know, tsunamis are destructive because of so-called “long wavelength“ that have powerful energy. But in opposite, a photon with shorter wavelength has more energy.

So my question is, while they are waves, why they need to be strong at opposite directions? How to explain the mechanisms that make them need to “grow” at opposite directions to be strong in terms of wavelength?

(Or how to explain that why don‘t all waves need to be strong by increasing wavelength and hence extended the occupy area/volume?)

So from my understanding our fingers crinkle up when we're in water for a long time for improved grip while in water and while that's cool from an evolutionary standpoint, I don't see why it wouldn't make more sense for us to always have crinkled fingers.

I can see how improved grip would be better for the day to day not just in water and I can't think of a reason why our soft fingertips are better for us outside of water vs crinkled.

Is it possible that as we as a species continues to evolve that is something that might happen?

When humans need to be tested for rabies, we use methods that don't end their life: blood tests, saliva tests, lumbar punctures, and nuchal skin biopsies. But when an animal needs to be tested, even large animals where these procedures are easily and physically possible, they are put down instead.

I understand euthanizing a small animal, such as a tiny bat where some or most of these tests would be virtually impossible to perform, but why a large animal, such as a large dog or a bear?

Is it simply because humans have legal rights and insurance/money to cover expensive tests, while euthanizing an animal is just the cheapest option for health officials? Or is there a scientific reason for killing an animal but not having to kill a human when testing for rabies.

Also consider: there are instances when the rabies exposure is not certain, and there's no animal to euthanize to test, and doctors may opt out of administering rabies treatment to the patient, and rely on the results of these non-life ending tests to determine if the person contracted rabies or not. So this alone tells me the tests are sufficient enough.

P.S. isn’t a brain biopsy a thing? Able to go in through nose, corner/behind eye, or surgery, grab a brain tissue sample from a spot that isn’t life threatening, etc.. I think I recall things like this being done on humans, so surely same goes with an animal.

I’m usually pretty good with astrophysics concepts but this one is the strangest to me. I can see how the diagram works where mathematically the dimensions flip.. but like….

What do you mean space becomes “time-like”?? The hell does that even mean from like an observers perspective crossing the EH?

I'm having a hard time catching the concept of the Bohr effect, can someone explain it to me like I'm 5? Thank you so much

So I’m trying to adjust my controller settings to make it easier when I’m aiming. Playing Marvel Rivals on PS5 if relevant but what exactly is the deadzone & what functions does it actually apply to ??