Science | youaskedwhat?

18 questions

Science5 May 2026

Why is space silent — and what would it sound like if it were not?

Every science fiction space battle you have ever watched is acoustically completely wrong. The silence of space is not an aesthetic choice. It is physics.

Science5 May 2026

If the Sun disappeared right now, how long before we noticed?

Science5 May 2026

How do salmon find their way back to the exact river where they were born?

Science5 May 2026

Why is spicy food painful — and why do people love it anyway?

Science5 May 2026

Why do birds fly in a V formation — and who decides who leads?

The V formation is not coincidence or habit. It is a sophisticated aerodynamic system that allows birds to fly further than they could alone. The leadership question is equally interesting.

Science5 May 2026

Why does fresh air make you tired?

You go for a walk outside and come back ready for a nap. The fresh air explanation sounds too simple, but the actual mechanisms are genuinely interesting.

Science5 May 2026

Why does food taste different on planes?

Airline food has a bad reputation, but the problem is not entirely the kitchen. At 35,000 feet, your taste buds are working against you.

Science5 May 2026

Why can't you tickle yourself?

The answer involves your cerebellum, the philosophy of self-awareness, and one genuinely strange finding from schizophrenia research.

Science5 May 2026

Why do we get déjà vu — and what is actually happening in the brain?

Déjà vu is not a memory of a past life or evidence of a glitch in reality. It is a very specific misfiring of the systems your brain uses to evaluate whether something is familiar.

Science5 May 2026

Why does your voice sound wrong on a recording?

The recording is not lying. You have just been hearing a private version of your own voice your entire life, and everyone else has been hearing something different.

Science5 May 2026

Should we be trying to live forever, or is that a terrible idea dressed up as ambition?

The pursuit of radical life extension attracts serious scientists and serious money. The philosophical objections are equally serious.

Science5 May 2026

Did you know the colour blue barely existed in ancient language?

Homer described the sea as wine-dark. The ancient Greeks had no word for blue. Neither did Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, or Hebrew. The explanation is not that they were colour-blind.

Science5 May 2026

Is the universe fine-tuned for life, or are we just good at telling ourselves that?

The physical constants that govern reality seem improbably precise for the emergence of life. This observation leads people in three different directions. All three are philosophically defensible.

Science5 May 2026

Are we alone in the universe — and would it matter if we weren't?

The universe is incomprehensibly large. The silence is either perfectly normal or profoundly strange.

Science5 May 2026

Is the replication crisis in science a crisis, or just science working correctly?

A lot of published findings turned out to be wrong. Whether that's alarming or reassuring depends on what you thought science was.

Science5 May 2026

Did you know your gut has more neurons than your spinal cord?

The enteric nervous system — the gut brain — contains roughly 100 million neurons and communicates with the brain constantly. It doesn't think. But it might be influencing you more than you realise.

Science5 May 2026

Should we edit human genes — and who gets to draw the line?

The technology is here. The ethics are running to catch up.

Science23 Apr 2026

Did you know that time has a direction, but the laws of physics don't require it?

Almost every fundamental law of physics works equally well forwards and backwards. The one exception might explain why you remember yesterday but not tomorrow.