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Ecotourism: Is the 'tourism' part sufficiently terrible for the environment that it outweighs the 'eco'? [more inside]
posted by eraserbones at 8:52 AM - 13 answers

A member of our game-playing and activity group has recently pitched this long covid simulator/game. How reliable and realistic are the assumptions made by the game's design and are the data it's based on current and correct?
posted by anonymous at 9:03 AM - 16 answers

I was reading this article in the LA Times (CW: decapitated murder victim and gated article) and it said that it was difficult to discover who the murder victim was through DNA and constructing family trees because she was an Ashkenazi Jew. Why is that more complicated than anyone else? [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 10:47 PM - 8 answers

I can positively identify places that I have been before visually with only a narrow aspect of the place being shown. For example, a friend posted a video of her walking up a staircase with only the floor and staircase in the video. Now, I get that I would have contextual information about where she might be, so maybe this isn't a good example. [more inside]
posted by mxjudyliza at 4:26 PM - 8 answers

World ocean heat content and thermosteric sea level change (0–2000 m), 1955–2010, which is the source of this data, provides changes in ocean heat content (OHC) since 1955. But what was the ocean heat content in 1955? [more inside]
posted by ignignokt at 11:39 AM - 5 answers

Hi! I am currently in a lab that does primarily genome-wide association studies. To grow as a professional, i.e., GTFO, it would be helpful if I had some experience working with RNAseq data. Can you think of any open-source projects that need analysts, or where to look for same? Google turns up open-source software to do NGS analyses, which is not what I want. Thank you!
posted by 8603 at 6:36 AM - 2 answers

Is there a website where you can see what the temperature was in a particular place in the UK on a certain day? It seems like all other countries have this apart from the UK. [more inside]
posted by iamsuper at 9:52 AM - 4 answers

We’re identifying various shells from the beach for my kid’s science fair poster. We’re stumped on what this claw is. Help us identify and bring your scientific support! [more inside]
posted by inevitability at 3:44 PM - 9 answers

Can you help me understand a system with a pump, a gas analyzer, and three different flow meters reading giving three different figures for flow rate? [more inside]
posted by twirlypen at 11:57 PM - 5 answers

So, I am going for a multi-day hike in the jungle/rainforest with a guide . What practices can *I* use to i) spot wildlife and ii) learn to pay attention to notice details. Additional difficulties: the visual field/detail can be overwhelming, and I'm likely to be tired from hiking. Assume all hours of the day (dawn to dusk)!
posted by lalochezia at 9:51 AM - 8 answers

I’m looking for a calculator or chart to see moonrise and moonset times for the same date over many years. [more inside]
posted by ojocaliente at 8:23 AM - 4 answers

My experimental setup is analog to the following (no people involved): I have 8 groups of 4 subjects and their weight. There are 4 treatments, so in the end each treatment has 2 groups with 8 subjects. I want the variation in weight between the groups and the variation inside the group to be minimal. For this scenario I brute forced it, there are 2520 possible permutations (8!/2!^4) and I calculated ANOVA for all of them and picked the one with the highest p value. I did this in R on my work PC and it took about 3 minutes. It would be possible two split each group in half, and then I could optimize the group composition. However, there are too many possibilities to brute force it. I can distribute the 4 individuals in each group in three ways: aabb abab abba. Then I have 3^8=6561 possibilities to combine these groups. Now I have 16 groups for my four treatments, but to get all of the combinations is too much for my PC, there are 16!/4!^4=63063000 of them for every one of my 6561 possible split scenarios. How would I go about finding the perfect group split for my experiment?
posted by SweetLiesOfBokonon at 6:13 AM - 6 answers

At lunchtime today, I poured a small can of cold tonic water into a drinking glass and topped it up with Citrus Diet Coke. The glass immediately fell apart into two halves, each half dropping cleanly away from the other to lie prone on the counter. The two halves are equal in size and the break - which is dead straight - goes from rim to base on both sides of the glass and right across its bottom. Why did the glass do this? [more inside]
posted by Paul Slade at 8:33 AM - 8 answers

I'm looking for advice on keeping our small dogs from becoming coyote Scooby snacks. [more inside]
posted by bluloo at 12:38 PM - 8 answers

I'm having a debate with someone over the finding in this study which claims a correlation between amygdala size and political affiliation. I'm having trouble interpreting the statistical finding. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 2:10 PM - 9 answers

You are a scientist in a work of fiction. What kind of research are you doing? More below the fold. [more inside]
posted by Whale Oil at 9:29 AM - 31 answers

It's a dark and stormy mid-December night and while it's not gale force, the wind is blowing pretty decently outside my home in Southeast Alaska. Wondering what I might expect for the rest of the evening, I pulled up a view of one of my favorite weather visualizers and was pretty intrigued by what appears to be an extremely straight, extremely long front of some sort extending from Baranof Island in the north part of the Alaska panhandle much more than a thousand miles south. [more inside]
posted by Nerd of the North at 10:24 PM - 4 answers

Where can I find lists of unsolved problems or unanswered questions for any and every branch of science? That might be physics, archaeology, botany, linguistics, any branch of engineering, oceanography, psychology, you name it. [more inside]
posted by underclocked at 6:23 AM - 12 answers

I have a tungsten carbide wedding ring. I accidentally cooked it in a wood fired stove. What is it's new patina made from? [more inside]
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 2:55 PM - 5 answers

Looking for help building an exhibit of quartz crystals inside of a planter box, in a museum setting. Specifically, I'm trying to figure out what to fill the planter with that will support the large crystals and crystal clusters. [more inside]
posted by Secretariat at 3:32 PM - 7 answers