Recent comments in /f/askscience

zeiandren t1_j7ipcnf wrote

Reply to comment by atred in (Virology) Has SARS-CoV-2 outcompeted all the other coronaviruses which have been called the ‘common cold’? by jsgui

It’s not highly mutable. The fact we give the strains names shows how few there are. Some viruses every single one of the millions of copies a single cell makes will have major mutations. Like we talk about flu viruses by what proteins they have in a mad libs format because every virus is so different than it’s parent that species don’t even make sense.

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dramignophyte t1_j7ip4he wrote

Reply to comment by zerpa in Why are green and red laser pointers so cheap and available, but yellow ones not so much? by SurprisedPotato

I was typing a wrong response but I can tell you why it doesn't work: lasers run parallel and it's kind of an important aspect of them. In order to mix something, they need to converge. So you need to adjust the focus point of the two lasers to account for distance. I was thinking maybe fiber optics but that wouldn't change the fact you can't change the position of light in that way or it will diffuse or not converge to mix the colors.

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dramignophyte t1_j7iogxg wrote

Reply to comment by Octavus in Why are green and red laser pointers so cheap and available, but yellow ones not so much? by SurprisedPotato

I think the staying together property is the important aspect. Light diminishes by 4 times every time you double the distance. Except not really because its just that it disperses at that rate by virtue of spheres. Light itself on an individual scale is as far as I know, infinite. So if you convince them to stay in parallel formation, you can transfer them in a vacuum infinitely.

Lasers don't perfectly align the photons but they do a pretty darn good job. Like take a flashlight and shine it at a wall and step back and the light in the wall keeps getting bigger and bigger. Now I have not verified this next part and I am vaguely remembering what someone else said on reddit so the size probably is a bit different than what I'll say but for the distances its kind of moot. But the lazer on space probes only goes from the base lazer size to about the size of a car going from pluto to earth. So they are shining a little light at earth and it only splits a very small amount. They also mentioned there are designs for perfectly straight lasers but to go from like 99.998% to 99.999% is obnoxiously difficult considering pretty much nothing requires that level and the biggest obnoxious part is it requires a larger and larger lens, eventually reaching infinite size in order to make the perfectly straight lazer. Again, any specifics, take them as a general idea and not a point you want to bring up in casual conversation without adding "I heard it was something along these lines" because this is all "something along these lines" after the point I mentioned that I was parroting off someone from reddit. The points before that I know with much greater confidence.

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ECatPlay t1_j7ima7e wrote

Reply to comment by zekromNLR in Understanding that deuterium and tritium are simply isotopes of hydrogen, is there an equivalent periodic table that shows all known elements and their isotopes? by [deleted]

Oh sure! If there were two chlorines present in the chemical, then any fragments in the mass spec that contained 2 chlorines would appear as a triplet of peaks, 2 mass units apart, in the ratio 0.578:0.365:0.058 (if I did the math correctly, 0.76x0.76:2x0.76x0.24:0.24:0.24). So it would be easy to distinguish between fragments with one chlorine or with two chlorines: the characteristic triplet would mean 2 chlorines and the doublet would mean one.

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