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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

Are these the remnants of Kelvin Helmholtz waves? I'm an amateur cloud spotter and have seen KH waves once before. These clouds from yesterday (Dec 1, 2023) in Boston, MA, US, were the only clouds in the sky, and I had a 360° view to tree-top level. Wind was southwest, 10mph.
posted by cocoagirl at 7:54 AM - 2 answers

I'm looking for a PDF that I saw a year or two ago, but the text of the document seemed to date from much earlier, like the 1970s. It was a set of questions that scored you on how well you know your local area. Questions I remember include, "what is the moon phase?", "name 3 edible plants," and "name an extinct species from your area." It was written in a flippant tone. This has been extremely hard to google.
posted by tofu_crouton at 5:27 AM - 2 answers

Looking for a website that was posted to the blue that showed the depths to which different marine animals dove. The website had a beautiful continuous-scroll design that took you deeper and deeper into the ocean. Anyone remember that link? I can't find it. [more inside]
posted by Winnie the Proust at 12:18 PM - 3 answers

As a kid, I learned complex concepts by playing with simulations. John Conway's Game of Life is a perfect example, but I also spent a lot of time in 3D physics simulators playing with gravity, etc. One of the most complex concepts I've thought about for years has to do with how ideologies and institutions affect population growth over time. For example, some life philosophies (eg fundamentalist religion) lend themselves to population growth and others (eg secular liberalism) seem to lead to decline. Are there any interactive simulations I (and my family) can play with that show population change over time as a result of various variables? It could be as simple as showing a few different populations - each with a different average number of children - and fast forwarding a few generations to see the results. [more inside]
posted by daniel.poynter at 1:28 PM - 5 answers

Are there weather forecasts available for Canadian cities/regions from Meteorological Service of Canada or other entities that are akin to Area Forecast Discussions the NWS does in the US? [example here] Something beyond brief summaries that would have more information-dense technical analyses, detailing the thought processes of meteorologists and their forecast rationales based on observed data and modeling, for both the near term and longer timeframes?
posted by theory at 10:37 AM - 1 answers

In this article about a rogue high energy particle, one of the researchers says, “You trace its trajectory to its source and there’s nothing high energy enough to have produced it,”. How do they trace something like this to a source?
posted by dhruva at 5:12 AM - 4 answers