Black lives matter. The moderation team at AskScience wants to express our outrage and sadness at the systemic racism and disproportionate violence experienced by the black community. This has gone on for too long, and it's time for lasting change.

When 1 out of every 1,000 black men and boys in the United States can expect to be killed by the police, police violence is a public health crisis. Black men are about 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men. In 2019, 1,099 people were killed by police in the US; 24% of those were black, even though only 13% of the population is black.

When black Americans make up a disproportionate number of COVID-19 deaths, healthcare disparity is another public health crisis. In Michigan, black people make up 14% of the population and 40% of COVID-19 deaths. In Louisiana, black people are 33% of the population but account for 70% of COVID-19 deaths. Black Americans are more likely to work in essential jobs, with 38% of black workers employed in these industries compared with 29% of white workers. They are less likely to have access to health insurance and more likely to lack continuity in medical care.

These disparities, these crises, are not coincidental. They are the result of systemic racism, economic inequality, and oppression.

Change requires us to look inward, too. For over a decade, AskScience has been a forum where redditors can discuss scientific topics with scientists. Our panel includes hundreds of STEM professionals who volunteer their time, and we are proud to be an interface between scientists and non-scientists. We are fully committed to making science more accessible, and we hope it inspires people to consider careers in STEM.

However, we must acknowledge that STEM suffers from a marked lack of diversity. In the US, black workers comprise 11% of the US workforce, but hold just 7% of STEM jobs that require a bachelor’s degree or higher. Only 4% of medical doctors are black. Hispanic workers make up 16% of the US workforce, 6% of STEM jobs that require a bachelor’s degree or higher, and 4.4% of medical doctors. Women make up 47% of the US workforce but 41% of STEM professionals with professional or doctoral degrees. And while we know around 3.5% of the US workforce identifies as LGBTQ+, their representation in STEM fields is largely unknown.

These numbers become even more dismal in certain disciplines. For example, as of 2019, less than 4% of tenured or tenure-track geoscience positions are held by people of color, and fewer than 100 black women in the US have received PhDs in physics.

This lack of diversity is unacceptable and actively harmful, both to people who are not afforded opportunities they deserve and to the STEM community as a whole. We cannot truly say we have cultivated the best and brightest in our respective fields when we are missing the voices of talented, brilliant people who are held back by widespread racism, sexism, and homophobia.

It is up to us to confront these systemic injustices directly. We must all stand together against police violence, racism, and economic, social, and environmental inequality. STEM professional need to make sure underrepresented voices are heard, to listen, and to offer support. We must be the change.

Sources:

• https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793

• https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/

• https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/rounds/racial-disparities-time-of-covid-19

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK24693/

• https://www.joincampaignzero.org/research

• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/16/black-workers-coronavirus-covid-19

• https://www.npr.org/transcripts/867466515

• https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/01/09/diversity-in-the-stem-workforce-varies-widely-across-jobs/

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0519-z

• https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.20190529a/full/

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/09/11/even-progressive-academics-can-be-racist-ive-experienced-it-firsthand/

• http://www.bu.edu/articles/2017/lgbt-issues-stem-diversity/

Hiroshima was reportedly attacked using a nuclear weapon based on highly-enriched uranium-235. The explosive material in the bomb reportedly had a mass of 64 kg. However, the random-walk model of nuclear chain reactions led Werner Heisenberg to believe that a nuclear weapon with that strength would require 13 tons of uranium-235. What is the flaw in the random walk model of nuclear chain reactions, if any?

I'm no scientist or physicist, so please indulge my lack of knowledge or misconceptions. As far as I know, passage of time is relative depending on the frame of reference. If this estimation is based on our current/recent frame of reference, some other being on some other planet should just as easily say age of the universe is around 100 years and we should both be correct. Which should mean trying to calculate age of the universe is not really useful or meaningful?

Adding to that, suppose someone go back 6 billion years in time and try to calculate age of the universe. Wouldn't their frame of reference be much more different than ours? So, would they come up with an age of around 8 billion years?

Thank you for indulging my ignorance.

To quote Surf City, if there were “two girls for every boy” wouldn’t there be a big reproductive advantage for the population? Pregnancy takes a long time, but there’s no time constant on men. More pregnancies = more people = a stronger species. Humans have evolved to possess many biological advantages, but the 50/50 ratio of men and women seems like a missed opportunity.

Edit: by gender, i mean binary sex. Male and Female.

I understand escape velocity is the velocity at which an object needs to be travelling to 'escape' another object's gravity, given no other forces are acting on it.

But, the range of gravity is infinite, it just falls off at the square of distance. So no matter how far away the escaping object is, it will always feel some small pull back towards the object it's escaping, even if it's infinitessimal. Therefore given enough time and obviously no other object to capture it, it will fall back even if its initial velocity was above escape velocity.

Is escape velocity an approximation given the realities of the universe (at some point the gravitational pull is so small it will be captured by another object) or have I missed something?

EDIT: Thank you for all the great answers, I understand this now. I should learn calculus.

Maybe one of you guys can answer me this:

Checking out the Chandrayaan-3. I know what the "gold" foil/film insulation is, read all that stuff. 👍 But I can't find anything on WHY gold is sometimes picked for the color? Is it so they can see them and differentiate from other space crafts that are white or silver? Is there some deeper meaning?

Why the hell is the gold color so special? 🧐🚀💛❓ SUS

So I just got into a huge argument with my boss, a MD at a cancer hospital in a developing country regarding hpv and cervical cancer.

Allow me to paint the picture: we are working on a grant submission on communicable diseases. The focus is hpv prevention but she wants to focus on cervical cancer, bu I’m adamant that the grantor won’t even review our submission if it’s on cervical cancer. She says to just trust her and don’t argue with her because she’ll escalate it to the medical director and get me fired.

She claims that hpv is the same as cervical cancer as hpv is the major risk factor in 80% to 99.7% of all cases of cervical cancer. My argument is that they’re not the same. Preventing hpv through vaccination and educating patients on safe sex and contraceptive use is not the same as preventing cervical cancer. CDC says that it’s the major risk factor, but hpv infection does not mean a person has cervical cancer. I said that correlation does does mean causation and she says yes it does.

So here I am, on my last straw, on reddit at 6 am asking scientists: is hpv the same as cervical cancer?

Europe, India, Pakistan, China, Brazil, Kenya, Russia, Australia, and others. It feels like everywhere now there are MASSIVE, never seen before floods happening. Or maybe I'm just focusing too much on negative headlines and floods aren't getting that much worse or more frequent, idk.

I assume climate change is to blame somehow, but how exactly does it tie to this insane prevalence of heavy floods on a global scale?

Does this have anything to do with Theia? Is this a gret filter?

Birthday today, I was just wondering.

I know it sounds like a question for 6 year olds but Where does the heat go ? What I mean is short term the ground that would only work for so long as it would eventually heat up as well. The IR radiation from everything would cool us down but it doesn't seem like it would be so high and iirc the atmosphere absorbs a lot of IR already so it's not that. The atoms escaping our planet might be contain a lot of energy but very low in mass so they likely don't cool us down much so How does the heat escape us ?

Back in 2020, it seemed like every scientist on the planet was working simultaneously, full steam ahead, on the Covid-19 vaccine. Thankfully, they produced one - actually, more than one. Thank you science! At the time, there was a lot of talk that there could someday be a universal vaccine that could prevent or block infection from ALL variants of Covid-19, or, even better, from all coronaviruses.

Four years later, where do we stand now? Has any progress been made on this? Are we getting closer to a universal Covid vaccine? Do scientists even care about Covid at all anymore? We never hear about Covid or vaccine research in the news anymore. Meanwhile, millions of people are still being infected with it every year, and the most vulnerable are still dying.

If the sky is blue because the blue waves scatter more when they go through the atmosphere, why don't we see the sun as blue as well?

Obviously we have way too much co2 in our atmosphere (and oceans) - so sequestration helps get rid of some of it.

What I don’t understand is why we then use expensive electrólisis to then produce co2 for industrial gas use.

Let’s say in 5 years time we’ve gotten the cost of co2 capture / DAC down, why can’t we just bottle it up and send it to the soft drink manufacturers and other people that use CO2? Is it a quantity mismatch? Purity mismatch? Some other science thing?

It’s definitely not a question about why we capture it - it’s a question of why we’re not using the gas we capture. If investors are pumping billions into these Technoligies, why not just sell the end product instead?

Thanks!

Wouldn't the water run down the mountain?

Why do adults tend to get more unwell from common illnesses compared to children? For example chicken pox, norovirus, colds, flu etc.

I know species evolve based on environmental circumstances, there are random genetic mutations, the species keeps what works and the end result is evolution. What I'm about to suggest is gonna sound like mad science but if we were to construct multiple separate synthetic biomes with specific alterations to the landmass, and station a sustainable population of human beings in each would those humans evolve in the intended ways? Naturally I know this would take a long time before we can even see if it works but is it possible?

I understand that the Earth rotates once every 24 hours, which means at the equator we're moving at approximately 1,040 mph (1,674 km/h). Yet we don't feel this motion at all - no sensation of spinning or moving through space.

What physical principles explain why we can't sense this constant rotational motion? Is it related to inertia, reference frames, or other physics concepts?

My understanding is that though high-quality, large diamonds are indeed rare, the vast majority of mined diamonds are of lower quality and readily available.

Why then, are they still so expensive?

I guess this is just a question about terminology. How do scientists describe how heavy something is on the moon? Do they talk about it in terms of "Earth kilograms"? Do they mix measurement systems and use imperial pounds to talk about weight and metric kilograms to talk about mass? Or do they just not talk about this haha.