Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2015 November 18

= November 18 =

Using the 9 kcal of energy per 1 gram of fat figure to calculate weight loss
I see many sites, including Wikipedia, explain macro-nutrients and dieting like this (loosely and poorly paraphrased):


 * Proteins and carbohydrates contain 4 kcal per gram, and fats contain 9 kcal per gram. Thus your daily total energy intake is (proteins[g] + carbohydrates[g]) * 4 kcal/g + fat[g] * 9 kcal/g.
 * If you consume more food energy than you use, you gain weight. If you consume less food energy than you use, you lose weight.

Which makes a lot of sense to me.

I'm wondering whether the "9 kcal of energy per 1 gram of fat" figure can be also used to calculate the amount of weight loss (or gain) as well. Suppose someone is achieving a consistent a 90 kcal energy deficit per day for a long period of time. Does that mean they will be consistently, averaged over a long term, losing 10 grams of fat per day? Assuming the person lives a sedentary lifestyle and thus has no muscle gains or losses. 731Butai (talk) 06:29, 18 November 2015 (UTC)


 * I don't believe it's reversible like that, no. Also, while this would be true: "If somebody reduces caloric intake in one way without increasing it in any other way while still burning the same amount of calories, then they should either lose weight or at least gain weight more slowly". Unfortunately, in the real world, it's not as simple as that.  When they eat fewer calories their body notices and torques up hunger to get them to consume the usual amount.  And/or it may decrease the basal metabolic rate (they may feel colder) and the lack of energy may make them more sedentary than they were previously.  One notable example of all this is that when people switch from regular soda to diet soda, which contains fewer calories, they do not lose weight. StuRat (talk) 06:59, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
 * (2 edit conflicts.)(I slightly reformatted your question for readabiltiy reasons.) StuRat you are not wrong, but s/he says "consistent a 90 kcal energy deficit per day" which undercuts your exceptions.  The answer is yes, with possible complications. There are more ways to store energy, for instance glycogen, which is short term storage of linked glucose, 4kcal/g. This is used first, it is more readily available. But it is the first to be replenished. So deficit has to go somewhere, and assuming full grown adult and no other tissue or muscle losses, and averaged over a long time, so answer is yes. You can also estimate volume change if you look up density of fat (a little less that water). Phun Phact: A gallon of gasoline has 33.7kWh = 28976. kcal. If that were fat it would have mass of 3.2 kilograms= 7 pounds. Takes a LOT of work to get rid of it. GangofOne (talk) 07:14, 18 November 2015 (UTC)


 * The basic arithmetic and chemistry works - but the underlying assumption that energy consumption doesn't change is the 'gotcha'. If you live in a cold climate - and have a perfectly balanced diet, so you're neither gaining nor losing weight - then buying a better jacket can cause you to put on weight.  You're using less calories to maintain body temperature - so you need fewer calories than you did before.


 * The claim is that the body "goes into starvation mode" when you eat less, and that this can defeat your efforts at dieting...and that when you stop dieting while "in starvation mode", you'll pack on the pounds very rapidly.


 * This seems superfically plausible - but the problem with this claim is that (although I've searched and asked this question all over the place) I can find no concrete evidence for it. Clearly there is some kind of effect - but nobody seems to know how much calorie deficit causes the "switch" to turn on - or for how long you can go on a deficit diet before it turns on - or how strong the effect is - or for how long it remains on after your diet returns to normal.   It's astounding that roughly 50% of all dietary advice repeats this "information" - but nobody seems to have any kind of solid research evidence to back it up.   Since (if true) it's a critical piece of information for all diets - this is horrifying.


 * Some diet guides tell you to come off your diet periodically (say once a month) in order to 'reset' the starvation mode thing - suggesting that the "starvation mode" thing operates over a scale of weeks. Other people tell you it's vital to eat a good breakfast in order to avoid flipping your body into starvation mode before lunchtime - suggesting that "starvation mode' happens over a matter of hours.  This is bullshit "cargo-cult science".  Without solid experimental facts, the best guess is that the body has evolved to operate efficiently at all times - and that if "starvation mode" existed, we'd notice serious deficits in performance.   I've actually tried to see this happen in myself...switching back and forth between regular soda and sugar in my coffee to diet soda and artificial sweetener - or going onto a 1000 calorie "juice-only" diet.  Neither of those things cause me any mental impairment (beyond the occasional craving for a Sonic #4 meal with extra tater tots and a medium chocolate shake), there is no measurable drop in my body temperature or any obvious lack of performance of any kind...and my rate of wait loss is pretty much as predicted by the calorie restriction.  Now, I might be a weird outlier - but tell me how this supposed "starvation mode" is saving energy?  Is my hair growing more slowly?  What precisely is being eliminated to save all that energy?


 * Yet, this claim for "starvation mode" is repeated everywhere - and with random claims for how long it takes to go away, how much it takes to trigger it and what percentage or calorie-count difference it makes to energy consumption.


 * The diet industry is worth billions - why no solid research findings?


 * That said - if anyone knows of a decent empirical study that answers those questions...I'd love to hear about it.


 * Bottom line - you need to eat fewer calories to lose weight - the difference between the various diet tricks are all to do with how well you can stick to them - and that's down to glycemic index - how long you can go with less food and not feel so insanely hungry - bottom line of which appears to be to eat relatively indigestible foods that stay in your system for longer. SteveBaker (talk) 15:54, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Steve, have you read the empirical study cited at Starvation_response? It discusses how the energy is saved, and that info is also summarized in our article section. Ref [6] there also looks interesting. I'm sure there are more empirical studies, but those were the easiest to find. At a glance, this study cites a lot of empirical research on human starvation response, and might be a good way to get more sources that cover your interests more specifically. Here's  a whole article in the prestigious Annual Reviews series summarizing what was known in 2006 about the physiological responses to food deprivation. There's also a lot of mechanistic studies that show what factors mediate things like macroautophagy, like this one . Look, this is complicated and subtle stuff, but please don't call it cargo cult science. Just because some sources play fast and loose with claims and implications does not mean that there is not serious, peer-reviewed empirical science available on the topic. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:54, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
 * The studies that you cited above refer to extreme starvation - complete food derivation and were actually about animals. I doubt that there are serious studies of humans under conditions of moderate food deprivation as is often the case in diets. I also doubt that a moderate food deprivation induces changes so significant to seriously slow weight loss. Ruslik_ Zero 19:46, 18 November 2015 (UTC)


 * I have read Starvation_response (did you?). It starts off by talking about a on-off study done on just 8 people who'd been cut off from the world in the ill-fated Biosphere2 experiment.  Aside from the fact that this is vastly too small of a sample to draw any conclusions whatever - these people were initially selected for the Biosphere2 experiment based on all sorts of criteria that separate them out from "average" humans.  The effects they noted explain calorie requirement reductions that amount to about 180 calories/day...which is not much of a drop from normal - just what you'd get by replacing one and a half cans of soda per day with diet soda - and certainly not enough to prevent a modestly aggressive calorie reduction diet plan from working!  They describe about a third of those savings as "statistically insignificant"...and with all of the other horrible things that happened to those 8 people during their weird "experiment", I could believe they were screwed up in so many other ways as to make any conclusions utterly invalid...so meh...not "cargo cult science" - it's "very, very bad science" and with conclusions that have zero bearing on the question at hand here.


 * As for the remainder of that section, it discusses in mind-numbing detail how a TOTAL fast (zero calories) causes various energy stores in the body to keep the body running normally. This is not what people are talking about when they claim that the body might flip into a mode where it DOESN'T burn much fat when calories are somewhat restricted by somehow turning on a more efficient energy consumption switch.  Quite the opposite in fact - it's saying that if you eat less, your fat reserves get used up in trying to continue to power the brain...which is precisely what you'd hope your diet would do for you!  Far from making me think that this supposed effect is "real" and well studied - it makes me believe the complete opposite!  Our bodies will work to consume all of our fat reserves and then switch to consuming our muscles and other proteins in a concerted effort to maintain the usual amounts of energy production despite low to zero calorie intake.


 * OK - so having dismissed what our article has to say...what about ? Well, this study was about the effects of Human Growth Hormone on starving (ie ZERO calorie intake) obese people - so the test group getting HGH supplements aren't telling us anything of value because we're not going to be doing that while dieting.  The control group lost a heck of a lot of weight - there are descriptions of how and why - but no indication of the things that matter for people on a diet (How many calories can I cut without turning on "starvation mode"?  How much energy will my body save when going into this supposed more-efficient-metabolic state?  How quickly will that effect rebound? ...and so on).  That article in no way addresses the questions that need to be answered on this matter.  Also, it's talking about complete starvation for weeks!  This is not a scenario we care about.  I want to know what happens when I do a "sensible diet" and go from (say) 2,500 calories per day to 1,500 per day - and I'm not taking any HGH!


 * How about your third reference ? Well, it *might* be useful - but it's behind a pay-wall and the abstract doesn't look promising. It doesn't mention humans at all (although "animals") - and we know that the human body responds differently from other mammals in terms of how our brains keep functioning during periods of starvation - we specifically DON'T shut down brain functions when food is in short supply - and there is biochemistry in your first and second sources to back that up.  What the abstract says is that during periods of starvation, "animals" (unspecified) lower "spontaneous activity" and body temperature.  Well, I know that during a 10 day "juice-only" 800cal diet that I did, my body temp didn't fluctuate at all (I was tracking it every day for a different reason).  I still went to work and did all the things I usually do in evenings and weekends...I lost 10lbs...but I don't think a "starvation mode" switch was flipped at all (although - I definitely felt pretty amazingly hungry the entire time).  But STILL - I see no data about how little I can eat without turning on this supposed switch - or what the effect of flipping the switch is on energy requirements - or how rapidly it turns back on again.  NOTHING.


 * Then we have - which is frankly incomprehensible to the layman...which is OK - but it doesn't mention anything about how little calorie intake is required to trigger these changes - or (AFAICT) how much these cryptic changes reduce energy needs within the body.  Maybe you could summarize the results for me - but I suspect the article has no bearing on the question at hand since it only seems to discuss mechanisms at the cellular level and not whole-body responses.


 * So again...tell me where I can find the answers to the following three questions:
 * How few calories can I eat without triggering this response?
 * Having triggered the response, how many fewer calories will my body consume?
 * How long after providing more calories than the answer to question (1) will my body return to non-starvation mode?


 * Those three questions are critical to either supporting the notion that modest amounts of dieting doesn't work - or debunking that idea.


 * Until we know that - anyone who trots out the old argument that if you cut your calorie intake, you won't lose weight because of this mysterious "more efficient metabolism" is indeed indulging in cargo-cult science...and that includes nearly every contributor to every discussion we have on this subject here on the Ref Desk. Show me the references!!


 * SteveBaker (talk) 20:23, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Look, I'm not going to try to support your "old argument that..." claim, because it's obviously not true. Also, I'll note that the Annual Review ref has lots refs and results for humans - we are animals too, and you can ask at WP:REX if you'd like a copy. Your skepticism of the existence of the starvation response is... puzzling, and I'd like to give more general refs that support the claim that "type and amount of caloric intake can alter human energy budget, including baseline metabolic rate, as well as amount and type of weight lost. Additionally, humans can specifically alter their energy budgets to use less energy when undergoing some level of caloric deficit for sustained periods." This doesn't rest just one paper, there are many, just use google scholar to find more. After some more searching, I found a freely accessible article specifically about metabolic changes in humans on different weight loss diets of 1,200 and 800kcal, with and without ketogenic diets, and also with starvation . Patients' base metabolic rate changed by a maximum of -18.9%. So doubt all you want, but my reading of this article is that it shows good evidence that in human subjects caloric restriction can alter the base metabolic rate and total energy balance, e.g. a "starvation mode" that is real and empirically supported, and can occur in realistic weight loss diet plans. Here's another study that looks at the effects on baseline metabolism due to 24 weeks on a "semistarvation" diet of about 1600 kcal . Figure 1 there shows how many less calories were burned, and your questions about how much restriction and for how long are answered for at least this one case - 1600kcal and 24 weeks, note also the results on the recover phase. There's still a lot more work to be done of course, e.g. it would be nice to have a fully factorial kcal/time design, but I don't think that's likely to exist. But I will no longer argue with you about whether or not the human starvation response is "cargo cult" science. The effect is almost certainly real, despite the fact that you don't think that your 10 day juice diet changed your BMR. I don't know or care anything about weight loss, and make no claims about it. My primary intent here is to give scientific refs that quantify the starvation response in empirical studies of human subjects. SemanticMantis (talk) 20:46, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Aha! Thanks for that - the first of those references makes a lot of sense - I'm still reading the other ones.  We really should get into the Starvation_response article and put some of this stuff into it.  It shouldn't be necessary to dig so deep to find this stuff out - and that's what Wikipedia is good at doing. SteveBaker (talk) 16:12, 19 November 2015 (UTC)


 * I seriously doubt that it's as simple as a binary switch that gets thrown when you hit a certain calorie restriction and that then resets after some period on a normal calorie diet. Some complexities:


 * A) It's more of a continuum than a switch. That is, the fewer calories you consume, the more "nonessential" functions will be reduced or eliminated.  At a modest calorie restriction, presumably the effects would be rather unnoticeable, like slower hair and nail growth.


 * B) Specific nutrient restrictions can have different effects. For example, a lack or protein can cause "brain fog".  In other cases, the response only occurs as a result of other body changes.  For example, women's periods will stop if their body fat drops below a certain percentage.  The body fat percentage may or may not be related to calorie restrictions.


 * C) There's no reason to expect that the starvation response would be identical for every person. Is the ability to tolerate cold or heat identical for every person ?  Of course not.  So why would this be identical ?  Presumably people descendant from populations facing regular starvation would have a stronger starvation response than others.


 * D) Also note that serious calorie restrictions may cause permanent damage, so to study that in humans in a controlled experiment would be unethical. StuRat (talk) 04:09, 19 November 2015 (UTC)


 * I know from personal experience that eating little you can lose roughly half a pound a day for long periods, though it's not all fat of course. My feeling is that "to an order of magnitude" this is correct, bearing in mind that changes in fluid volume both intracellularly and extracellularly can easily overwhelm the fat-based effect. Wnt (talk) 16:03, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
 * The description of starvation response may be accurate for normal people, but it seems to have little relevance for the obese. After all, improving metabolic efficiency in that case involves things like reducing insulin resistance and lowering blood glucose, which are desirable in themselves; indeed, a person may undertake a diet primarily to trigger this kind of response. Wnt (talk) 09:48, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Chimerism in criminal evidence
It seems that ruling people out solely based on DNA evidence could exonerate guilty parties who exhibit chimerism. Unless a rape suspect, for example, is tested for sperms, which I find unlikely, they could be set free if there is no other evidence. How big of a problem is this? 69.22.242.15 (talk) 14:19, 18 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Our Chimera (genetics) article doesn't explain this, but there is growing evidence that people do sometimes (perhaps often, perhaps always) carry around some DNA from their mothers, and that mothers sometimes collect DNA from their unborn children (see THIS for example). So...to be sure that DNA obtained from (say) a blood test would correctly match (or not match) sperm in a rape case - or something of that nature, is indeed, theoretically, problematic.  Since this is a relatively new discovery, I think it's too early to guess how much of a problem this is.  However, the chimeric DNA will always be from the person's mother, child (if female) or weirdly unborn twin - so the DNA from one part of the body will always have half of the genetic information that the DNA harvested from elsewhere would contain.  So it should be relatively easy to fix the problem once it's better understood.  My gut feel is that it would be exceedingly rare for this to change the outcome of a legal case though.  In the specific example you propose, a man who had committed rape couldn't have sperm cells from his mother, or his child - so it would have to be the "weirdly unborn twin" thing - the twin in question would have to be fraternal, not identical, and would also have to be male...and the testes cells would have to have come from the twin - and not (say) the heart or the brain or some other place where blood cells are not made.  The error could only be in the wrongful dismissal of the case - not a wrongful conviction.  It would also have to be a case where DNA was the only factor in the dismissal - in the teeth of eye witnesses and other DNA sources such as hair and skin.  This narrows the odds considerably...so I'd say that the odds of a wrongful dismissal ever having happened as a result of this would be very slim indeed.  But until we have better information about the incidence, all bets are off. SteveBaker (talk) 15:03, 18 November 2015 (UTC)


 * FYI, our article on the "weirdly unborn twin" thing is at vanishing twin. 99.235.223.170 (talk) 01:46, 19 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Lydia_Fairchild is a good example of legal issues surrounding chimerism, but not a criminal case. This paper on the topic of legal issues and human chimeras. It seems to be written by a law student and not peer-reviewed, but it does have many additional refs. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:33, 18 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Chimerism can actually be acquired, in particular by mothers during pregnancy.  This means that it is possibly, by amplifying Y chromosome DNA, to identify the father of a previous child without having access to its DNA, or even (though this is more difficult and less certain) to amplify the Y-DNA of the father of a previously aborted fetus.  You could use this to show if a woman had been held prisoner somewhere and forced to give birth, or to demonstrate (by forcibly taking a sample, e.g. under some legal process) that a couple had had sexual relations leading to pregnancy even though both of them deny it and other evidence is lacking.  It is actually possible that the effectively transplanted cells have health effects (this ties into fetal stem cell research), and the question of how the woman develops immunological tolerance is of great interest.


 * I tried to illustrate this with a real world example, only to be attacked by the resident bureaucrats here - in the interest of trying to get something to stand in this entry I have posted this more generalized description. Just as the best way to enrage ISIS is not to attack them with bombs, but to enjoy our freedoms to draw and criticize and deface books to whatever degree we may still have them, the best way to enrage those whose interest is in policing is to focus on enjoying our endless scientific exploration.  But I apologize for the incompleteness. Wnt (talk) 15:32, 19 November 2015 (UTC)


 * You may need to see a chiropractor, since you may strain yourself patting yourself on the back so vigorously. --Calton | Talk 09:06, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Wormholes and entanglement
There have been previous discussions on wormholes, e.g. Reference desk/Archives/Science/2010 July 2, but this article is certainly interesting. It says there is a hypothesis that quantum entanglement is the basis of gravity, and indeed, that "ER = EPR", i.e. that the entanglement of two particles is equivalent to the formation of a wormhole! But there are some things I don't really get.

To begin with, there's the matter of multiple entanglement. I had thought I had read of cases of multiple particles being entangled, which is in no way like the geometry of an EPR bridge; but apparently there is a strong restriction in favor of "monogamy of entanglement". This concept is discussed somewhere around 20-30 minutes into a lecture here cited by the article above. Our article on quantum entanglement doesn't use the term; Susskind specifies that it is monogamy of maximal entanglement.

Monogamy is used in an example by Susskind about 38 minutes in... the problem is that it seems moronic to me. Note I am aware that as he is the quantum physicist and I am definitely not, this implies some principle of relativity at work! The idea of the "AMPS paradox" he describes is that any small patch of space may be entangled with a small patch of space nearby; yet a small patch of space just inside the event horizon of an "entangled black hole" cannot be entangled with a patch just outside it. The problem I'm having is, his patches of space A and B look to me like they were sitting there before he dumped N buckets of entangled matter into the area to make it a black hole, and their affections should therefore not be part of the black hole's entanglement. Indeed, how could anything dumped into a black hole linger just beneath the event horizon? Yet this seems to be the whole basis in that lecture for introducing the idea that the entanglement extends to a macroscopic wormhole.

Another issue is the "tensor network" - is this some kind of super entanglement? The graphic in the Nature article shows entangled pairs as being the outer edges of some kind of graph. While each pair is linked, it looks like each entanglement is linked to some other.

More basically, is this implying that every particle must be entangled with some other, and we just might not know which?

And as for space... Susskind draws a line down the blackboard, says this patch on the left will be entangled with this one on the right (i.e. if there's a virtual particle here there must be one there). I assume because of monogamy, that's a simplification, since each can only be entangled with one other which might be in any direction??

Then there's my main confusion with wormholes. The one thing I think I know about black holes is that when you fall in one you go down. Yet a traversible wormhole seems to be based on the notion that you can go back and forth! And the other thing I think I know is that you don't come back out... yet here they show black holes compared to entangled particle pairs where the kind of test done on one is somehow communicated to the other. On the plus side, 'monogamy' is consistent with the EPR bridge being between just two worlds. In the earliest days people imagined the target as a white hole; now it's seen as a black hole that emits Hawking radiation... it leads me to vain speculations.

Anyway, can people tell me something about this, or better still, write about half a dozen articles about these new concepts: monogamy (physics), AMPS paradox, the tensor network (whatever it is), ER = EPR etc.? Thanks! Wnt (talk) 15:34, 18 November 2015 (UTC)


 * I redirected AMPS paradox to Firewall (physics).
 * I don't understand entanglement monogamy, but presumably it means there are no systems of 3+ particles that are analogous to a Bell pair, which is a maximally entangled 2-particle system. There are nonclassically entangled systems of 3+ particles, such as the |000〉+|111〉 state used in the GHZ experiment, but they are in some sense not maximally entangled. The article Concurrence (quantum computing) says it means "the concurrence of a qubit with the rest of the system cannot ever exceed the sum of the concurrences of qubit pairs which it is part of."
 * A crucial part of what Susskind talks about, that he never mentioned by name in the part of the video I watched, is black hole complementarity. This is what he's talking about when he says that A and B' are the same thing (at around 45:00).
 * Penrose Diagrams of various black hole solutions.png wormholes here (Einstein–Rosen bridges) are not traversable. It would be bad (causality-violating) if they were traversable. The causal diagram (Penrose diagram) that Susskind draws on the board at around 50:30 is the upper left diagram in the image on the right. The wormhole "throat" he draws is a horizontal slice through the center of that diagram, with the circle at the middle of the throat being the middle point of the diagram. Because it's a horizontal (hence spacelike) slice, you can't have a worldline lying in the slice, so you can't go through the wormhole he drew. As shown in the Penrose diagram, no timelike or lightlike worldline can pass through both exterior regions, but worldlines from the two exterior regions can meet in the shared future interior region. In other words, if you make a Bell pair of black holes, and toss Alice into one and Bob into the other, they may meet and exchange information inside, but no one who stays outside the first (resp. second) black hole can learn anything about Bob (resp. Alice).
 * It's not clear to me if this is supposed to be related to the nonclassicality of entanglement. I doubt Susskind would argue that violation of Bell's inequality is due to some sort of communication through the wormhole, because you can't use entanglement for nonlocal communication, and Susskind (like Einstein) is the kind of person who believes that sort of thing isn't true by accident. No possibility of a FTL radio means fundamentally no communication going on. But he might think that violation of Bell's inequality is somehow necessary for wormholes to make sense, even if we don't understand how yet. -- BenRG (talk) 01:18, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't understand the math [I don't even know the meaning of the subscripts for the C2A(BC) thing) but this seems to detail the math; also this if I can unglaze my eyes for a couple of hours, perhaps. (The combination of GHZ entanglement monogamy provides sufficient keywords)
 * As for the Penrose diagram... what mystifies me about it is that the two universes are supposed to touch at the central point (indeed, in the lecture Susskind seems to diagram "adjacent" points that seem to be in the throat of the wormhole) ... yet to cross the wormhole you have to pass through an event horizon and fall down (i.e. move straight up?) for some time. More generally, I am confused by the dramatic difference between the stationary and rotating solutions.  Any black hole should have at least a tiny bit of rotation, yet... I don't see how that elaborate timelike-wormhole diagram converts to the one we see at left. Wnt (talk) 15:15, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Each point on the 1+1 dimensional Penrose diagram represents a 2+0 dimensional sphere in the 3+1 dimensional space, concentric with the center of the black hole. The points on the X that separates the four regions are spheres with a radius equal to the event horizon radius, and are in fact the event horizon. So the two exterior regions touch at a sphere that's part of the event horizon, and a tachyonic worldline can cross between the exterior regions without entering the black hole interior (just grazing the event horizon at a point). The circle that Susskind draws at 53:38 is a great circle of that sphere (only a circle because what he drew is a 2D slice of the 3D ER bridge), and the rest of the surface is all outside the horizon (one exterior region above the circle and the other below). Both directions away from the circle are "up", though I think that makes little sense when you're talking about an instantaneous spacelike slice and a tachyon that can ignore causality.
 * As you say, Susskind's diagram is of a nonrotating black hole, and the theoretical interior of a rotating black hole is totally different, and doesn't seem to fit as well with his entanglement-monogamy idea. Generally people say that the rotating hole interior with its many exterior regions is unphysical (possibly because of the infinite-blueshift inner horizon), and Susskind may be using the Schwarzschild Penrose diagram for a Bell pair of rotating/charged holes because he thinks they would have the same spacelike singularity and causal structure.
 * Re black vs white holes, it's an interesting open question in quantum gravity to what extent that classical distinction makes sense. Black_hole_Penrose.png diagram from Hawking's paper (right) makes black hole formation and evaporation look highly asymmetric in time, but viewed from the outside it seems completely symmetric (except that evaporation is more chaotic than formation, but all "time symmetric" phenomena are like that because of the second law of thermodynamics). Many people think Hawking's diagram is wrong, but there seems to be no way to avoid a time asymmetry classically (the horizon needs to either expand or contract at c; it can't do both or neither) so many people also think the GR model of black holes is fundamentally wrong. Black hole complementarity is a way for the time-symmetric outside picture to be correct without abandoning the equivalence principle.
 * Re actual traversable wormholes (and pretending they're possible), first, they needn't have anything to do with black holes. They can just be portal doors. In the case of a traversable rotating/charged black hole, you can see from the diagram that you can choose to hit the singularity or not, then if you avoid it you will necessarily be ejected from the past event horizon, then you can choose to fall back in or not. Avoiding the singularity and not falling back in might require very powerful rocket engines. I've never seen a calculation of that. -- BenRG (talk) 21:16, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for an informative answer... I actually had been told here before about what the wormhole spacelike section actually meant, but managed to confuse myself again after. :( Wormhole actually explains it pretty well - an event horizon linked to two universes, one in the past, one in the future, joined at the "throat".  True, these in the projection are simultaneous... but I suppose I'm looking at the cross section of some object in spacetime with a high symmetry?
 * As for Penrose diagrams, I have to admit, I'm still confused. I don't get how there are 45-degree angles in (only) this one, or how the surface of the collapsing star goes spacelike in the other one (and where's the singularity there) etc... Wnt (talk) 23:36, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Wormholes and event horizons don't directly have anything to do with one another. An event horizon is a one-way surface by definition, so a two-way traversable wormhole wouldn't have any event horizons by definition. A one-way traversable wormhole would, if you defined "event horizon" broadly enough. The two ends of the wormhole can be different "sheets" of spacetime, in which case neither one is really in the future of the other, or they can be in the same sheet, in which case the exit could be in the causal future of the entrance, or in the causal past (since this is unrealistic anyway), or in the "elsewhere" (neither causal past nor future).
 * The wormhole in the diagram with the two side-by-side diamonds is not traversable. No point in either diamond is in the causal future of any point in the other diamond, so you can't get to one from the other. It is called a wormhole because it's topologically a hole, not because there's any navigable connection. The causal future of a point in these diagrams is the upper triangle containing the point D in this picture, for example. In the charged/rotating diagram you still can't go between side-by-side sheets, but can go to any sheet that's higher up on the diagram.
 * "I don't get how there are 45-degree angles in (only) this one" – if you mean the vertical lines in Hawking's diagram, that's r=0. As I said, each point on these diagrams is a sphere (or an oblate-spheroid-like shape in the rotating case, I think). Hawking's diagram shows the spacetime before the hole forms and after it evaporates, at which times nothing special happens at the origin. But the diagram ends there anyway because there are no points with r&lt;0. If you sent a light beam toward the origin it would "bounce off" that line.
 * The matter that forms the black hole doesn't really "become spacelike". Spacetime just collapses and goes singular on its own (with some help). -- BenRG (talk) 07:51, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
 * We do have an article on ER=EPR if anyone here understands the topic well enough to add to this, it would be good! Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:12, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

what defines a thila, the marine biome with instances found in the Maldives?
There is no current article on this topic on Wikipedia and the information elsewhere online appears poor. It seems a thila is basically a submerged island close to the surface that supports reef and other marine habitats, but it isn't clear what actually defines a thila and how it differs from other similar marine environments. It would also be nice to know how they form geologically. Are they volcanoes that have not yet breached the surface? Old volcanoes that have eroded to below the surface, some other geological formation? If they are volcanic how do they differ from atolls? Thanks for any additional details you can provide on the topic. 166.176.187.231 (talk) 17:30, 18 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Thila is a Maldivean name for a small coral reef within the lagoonal part of an atoll, so just a local high point, pinnacle reef or patch reef are possible equivalent terms. Mikenorton (talk) 21:21, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
 * See also File:CoralReef.svg. Mikenorton (talk) 21:47, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

Mayan eyelids
This says what several ancient Mayan statues show, that indeed Maya had unusually large eyelids due to extra fold which gave them lazy look. What's the evolutionary or physiological reason behind that?--Brandmeistertalk  19:03, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Just as a counterargument: how sure are you that the statues are supposed to be scrupulously accurate? I can pull artwork from a hundred other cultures where the art does not look like a photorealistic picture of the people in question.  For the record, there are still seven million Mayan people still walking the earth.  If you want to know what they look like, you can just, you know, look at them.  We have photographs. -- Jayron 32 19:09, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't know about these, but I recall it turned out that after many years of being perceived as simply white marble, Roman statues were found to have actually been painted with brilliant colors that had since worn away. The appearance of the eyes of any statue, therefore, needs to be considered skeptically since someone might have adorned the stone with material that is no longer present. Wnt (talk) 19:32, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
 * It seems that commons:Category:Maya peoples shows basically the same, perhaps in ancient times it just was more pronounced. And we know, for example, that elongated skulls on Mayan statues are due to artificial cranial deformation. Brandmeistertalk  19:54, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I looked at the references for the article you cited, and they don't appear to support the statements it makes about the Mayan appearance. I can't find any other scholarly source that supports them either.  Possibly they're just obscure, but a measure of skepticism might be appropriate. Looie496 (talk) 20:22, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Then what it's all about? If you look at multiple Mayan statues (including that of K'inich Janaab' Pakal), large eyelids are quite noticeable and it's not an individual feature. A local stylistic embellishment? Brandmeistertalk