Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2021 October 28

= October 28 =

Plants: why are there no red flowers at Arctic latitudes?
Just so we're on the same page: Arctic is 66 - 90 Lat, Tundra is 70 - 90 Lat, and Taiga is 50 - 70 Lat. Anyhoo, Wikipedia has a category page on Flora of the Arctic. On my computer, a quick mouseoverover all of them, can show a picture without clicking into the article. Roughly, 45% are white flowers, 45% yellow flowers, and the rest a bluish/purplish color. No red. And petals being real small. Why don't red-colored flowers exist that far north? And fyi, I did ask a biology professor at my university this, and 1 who specializes in plants the most. I'll post the his response later, but I want a 2nd opinion. (The answer he gave me, seems to be a generic answer to any "Why doesn't X-flower, exist in Y-location?"). So I wanna see what you guys think. 67.165.185.178 (talk) 00:50, 28 October 2021 (UTC).


 * The University of Lapland suggests bilberry which has a pinkish-red flower, also bog bilberry, creeping azelea (pink), Lapland rhododendron (purple), moss campion (pink), mountain heath (initially red, later purple) and perversely, yellow mountain saxifrage which is "often yellow with red spots but occasionally reddish yellow or even purple". But I agree, there are no big red flowers. Alansplodge (talk) 11:57, 28 October 2021 (UTC)


 * This page seems to show a plant with tiny red flowers in the third picture down, but does not name them. -- Jayron 32 12:11, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Papaver nudicaule may have a range that extends into the arctic, and has red variants. -- Jayron 32 12:14, 28 October 2021 (UTC)


 * A quick Google search shows that there are differing hypotheses about the relationship between flower colouration and pollinators, see Why red flowers are not invisible to bees for example, but I couldn't find anything specific to the Arctic. Alansplodge (talk) 12:29, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
 * My trusty copy of WILD FLOWERS AT A GLANCE shows that the UK also lacks any big red wild flowers, with the obvious exception of the field poppy. Lots of pink or purple ones, but only one which is red, and we're not very close to the Arctic. Alansplodge (talk) 11:58, 29 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Wild Flowers at a Glance is one of my favourite botanical works. The grouping by colour is especially helpful. DuncanHill (talk) 01:09, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Sorry for the late response been having Internet problems at home so on a work computer. But the plant professor said red flowers don't exist in northern latitudes due to pollination. And the example he used was hummingbirds. So no hummingbirds up north pollinating red flowers. But now my question raises, are hummingbirds correlated with red flowers or something? And Alansplodge pointed out bees and pollinations. So do flowers need to be pollinated by both bees and birds, or only 1 of them? What's the connection between the 3? Thanks. 96.90.97.153 (talk) 14:48, 29 October 2021 (UTC).
 * Different plants require different pollinators. The different colors (including some outside the range of human vision) attract different pollinators. So, even if a plant could survive in a particular environment, it will not spread there if the pollinators attracted to its color patterns cannot survive. --Khajidha (talk) 15:41, 29 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, hummingbirds are well-known to prefer red. Yellow, bees, purple, bumblebees, white, bats. Abductive  (reasoning) 01:34, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I recommend the OP read this recent book by Timothy Walker. Although it doesn't have a section specifically on the arctic, it points out 1) that wind and water can be pollination vectors and will not depend on colour 2) that red is assumed to be the default colour for bird-pollinated flowers 3) that for insect pollination the most important aspect is to contrast with the predominately green foliage (so yellow or white flowers) and that an insect's compound eye provides poor resolution. The full story is therefore quite complicated! Mike Turnbull (talk) 13:27, 31 October 2021 (UTC)


 * Ah yes, Wikipedia's article on pollination does have a picture caption that says hummingbirds and red flowers, no citation though. I do recall most birds are blind to red, because of the Roy G Biv (red orange yellow --- indigo violet) is a little shifted. So what we see as blue, they see as purple. And therefore they can see ultraviolet where humans can't. And so flowers can be pollinated by more than 1 group? 67.165.185.178 (talk) 12:52, 1 November 2021 (UTC).
 * Wikipedia's Flora of the Arctic category contains Rubus arcticus, which according to our article has flowers that are pink, red or magenta. So that's at least one Arctic red flower. I think the hummingbird explanation is a red herring (lol) - here in the UK there aren't any hummingbirds, yet there is at least one red native wildflower that I can think of (Papaver rhoeas). PaleCloudedWhite (talk) 19:40, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Another hummingbirdless red UK flower is Anagallis arvensis - commonly known as the scarlet pimpernel (ignore the non-typical images at our article). PaleCloudedWhite (talk) 19:53, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

Space shuttle - why didn't it use only Solid Rocket Boosters?
I know I'm not cleverer than the space shuttle designers but... why didn't the shuttle use more solid fuel boosters and do away with the space shuttle engines and the external fuel tank? Is the answer 'controllability'?Hayttom (talk) 02:13, 28 October 2021 (UTC)


 * The fire still has to come out after the solid rocket boosters eject, they are not moving fast enough to orbit at that point. If you put more boosters the acceleration might get too strong when they are light weight near the end, since solid rocket boosters cannot be throttled like the hydrogen engines are, at max air resistance to prevent air breaking the vehicle and near hydrogen engine cutoff to prevent acceleration from getting too strong. If you put more boosters but don't turn them all on ASAP you are doing an inefficient as you want the fuel and dumpable objects to leave as fast as possible, so long as you use it completely* and do not accelerate faster than you can bear. See gravity loss and the tyranny of the rocket equation. *I've heard hydrogen rockets explode (im?) if they burn to fuel exhaustion instead of being turned off. Also when you have achieved the objective you can turn them off, there is a small amount of extra usable fuel for margin of error. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 04:51, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
 * A propellant that burns at a predictable rate can be cast in a shape that provides a "hard-coded" variable thrust curve. The Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters did exactly that, reducing thrust for a while mid-flight to avoid exessive stress at Max q. DMacks (talk) 05:24, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah I didn't know that, I incorrectly thought the throttling was all orbiter. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 13:45, 28 October 2021 (UTC)


 * Isn't it the case that once a solid fuel rocket is ignited that you can't cut it off until all the fuel is spent? --Iloveparrots (talk) 05:51, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Our solid-propellant rocket article says this is not strictly true any more. is an article about some recent developments of on-demand (real-time-controllable) extinguish/reignite systems. DMacks (talk) 06:14, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I need to brush up on my space advances. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 13:45, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
 * It it's definitely possible to get to orbit using only solids (Minotaur, Pegasus, Vega, Epsilon, Scout, Shavit etc etc etc), but you'll notice they all have one thing in common, they're small payload vehicles. This is to do with inefficiency of solids. They are inherently inefficient compared to liquid fuelled engines, and hydrogen engines in particular. This is the concept of specific impulse (Isp) Tl/dr; it's effectively a measure of the efficiency of a given engine/fuel. You need to get up to about 8 km/s to get to low earth orbit in an ideal case, in practical terms you need even more due to losses on the way up. The propulsion system with the highest Isp will need the least fuel, and thus the smallest rocket* to do this. To get something as massive as the shuttle to orbit with just solids, you'd probably meed an order of magnitude more solid fuel than it had. It's just not efficient. Now why you'd use them in the first place, hydrogen engines, whilst efficient, don't tend to put out all that much thrust. So you augment the trust off the pad with less efficient but high trust solids to minimise gravity losses early on. (*Due to the low density of liquid hydrogen, rockets that use it then to be quite physically large (compare hydrogen fuelled Delta IV with kerosene fuelled Atlas V), but they are small in terms of fuel mass) Fgf10 (talk) 08:09, 28 October 2021 (UTC)


 * Space Shuttle design process explains why they chose the hybrid solid rocket boosters and liquid tank and main engines. The design process itself was fraught with various political and budgetary concerns, and involved multiple agencies each with their own ideas.  The final decisions were made, in part, as a compromise between various possible solutions, and the first paragraph of the section of that article titled "Final design" explains how the final design was arrived at.  Notably, NASA would have preferred an all-liquid system, but the solid boosters were cheaper, and that ultimately is what led to including them at all.  -- Jayron 32 12:09, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
 * These look like truly excellent answers. (I ought to have discovered Space Shuttle design process.  For my purposes I am going to mark this...

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How to get parrot to fly?
This is about my friend's mealy amazon parrot. The vet says he's overweight, so in addition to putting him on a low calorie diet she's been trying to get him to fly so he can work out. But he doesn't want to. The parrot is at least 25 years old and mostly flies like a spruce goose on the few occasions that something scares him and he takes off (other than that, he walks and climbs everywhere). We tried picking him up like a chicken and throwing him up into the air (bean bag underneath), but all he did was flutter his wings on the way down. This was making him really angry so we stopped doing that.

Does anyone have any tips for how to do it properly, or good links? Thanks. --146.200.107.70 (talk) 02:41, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Who's been trying to get the bird to fly? The vet? Or your friend? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 04:18, 28 October 2021 (UTC)


 * My friend. The vet said that she needs to put him on a better diet (no more fast food scraps or soda) and get him more exercise. So my friend has been trying to get him to fly. Apparently he can fly a bit (if he falls off something or gets scared by a loud noise outside, he will fly a bit, like a chicken), but he chooses not to. --146.200.107.70 (talk) 04:32, 28 October 2021 (UTC)


 * There are lots of other ways to exercise a parrot that might not irritate him. Clarityfiend (talk) 06:15, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Lawless nature
In his book “The Religion of the Future”, Roberto Mangabeira Unger writes ❝[In the beginning of the universe, t]he laws of nature may not have been distinguishable from the states of affairs that they governed. Indeed, causal connections or successions may not have assumed a law-like form at all.❞. I searched our articles on cosmogony, scientific law, as well as some of the articles linked from there, but see no mention of this. Presumably, the idea was laid out in his (co-authored) book “The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time”, but our article says nothing about it. Is that just a crackpot idea or is there something to it? ◅ Sebastian 08:50, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I do not think that sentence attempts to say much about physics. Maybe it is crackpot philosophy, but from my limited knowledge of epistemology, that sentence is basically tackling the question of what it means to be a "law" (of physics, of nature). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a page about that very topic, though I have a hard time reading past the intro.
 * The "professional scientist" view on those topics is summarized in the last sentence of the lead of scientific law: (...) in essence scientific laws are simply empirical conclusions reached by scientific method; they are intended to be neither laden with ontological commitments nor statements of logical absolutes. If that definition seems foolproof to you, you might want to have a look at the new riddle of induction. (Summary: a tribe in a remote Pacific island has no word for "green" and "blue", and they think of objects as "grue" or "bleen", meaning green now but they will appear green after a certain date (and vice-versa); how do you convince them that "blue" and "green" are more proper, more natural colors than "bleen" and "grue"?) Tigraan Click here for my talk page ("private" contact) 10:04, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
 * There are physical aspects of the very early Universe that would seem to support Unger's statement (if I understand it correctly) in that they make the concept of time problematic. In terms of the standard cosmic time parameter: the quark-hadron transition occurs about 10−5 seconds after the "Big Bang". Before that, there are no bound systems from which one could build a clock or measure distances. At 10−11 seconds, the electro-weak transition occurs. Before that there are no massive particles, hence everything moves on light-like trajectories with vanishing proper time. There's nothing physical that could define a finite proper time which would seem necessary to define causal sequences. Note that this is long after the Planck era. I take this from my notes on an article by Rugh & Zinkernagel in this book. --Wrongfilter (talk) 10:43, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
 * The OP's quote from Unger seems quite correct to me. You can think of a physical law as a kind of function that takes as its input an initial state of a system, and gives as its output the state of the same system at some later time. Put in the positions and velocities of the planets and the sun, and get out their positions and velocities in 1000 years. The law is an abstract thing that is decoupled from any particular state of the system, because it gives you the freedom to put in any initial conditions you like. However, this all depends on their being a smooth, classical spacetime manifold with a causal structure. If the very early universe had a quantum foam spacetime, there may be no way to talk sensibly about initial conditions or a later state. I'd say it's uncontroversial that this set of challenges exists when thinking about time and physical law in quantum cosmology. But there's no consensus around any particular solution or alternative formulation. There's a recent seminar here where you can read abstracts talking about a few approaches. Here's an older paper by James Hartle where he attempts to clearly define the problem: . --Amble (talk) 21:51, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Note that Unger co-wrote The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time with Lee Smolin, who has some controversial views on these questions but is a very serious scientist and no crackpot. (These are areas where no consensus exists, and there may not be such a thing as a non-controversial view.) --Amble (talk) 22:08, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Anaphylaxis biochemistry
What causes anaphylaxis compared to mild allergic reactions? Is it the amount of histamine released or is it related to where the histamine is released or are there other chemical involved too? 213.205.241.43 (talk) 12:15, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
 * It appears to be a potentially complex combination, as suggested by the abstract of this paper – involving not only the release of histamine, but also the action of enzymes and other effects. The root cause is the ample presence of antibodies for a specific antigen in some substance, exposure to which triggers the wild immune response, like a panic reaction, in a sensitized patient. --Lambiam 13:54, 29 October 2021 (UTC)