askscience

Title	Upvotes	Mark as read	Favorited	Rating	Add to a list
How did the soviets get a probe onto the surface of Venus and send pictures back if the ambient temperature is hot enough to melt lead?	92
Okay, so First Past The Post voting sucks because the person disliked the most can win. is there a voting system that can use a vote both for most wanted and LEAST wanted (not second or third most wanted)?	37
Considering how much fuel it takes to reach escape velocity, and how heavy fuel is, how the heck would a manned mission to Mars be able to bring enough fuel to get back home?	32
The closer you get to a massive body, the faster you need to go to orbit. For earth, air resistance limits closeness you can achieve orbit at, but is there a theoretical limit for how close your orbit can be, on bodies without an atmosphere?	22
If elements are formed by atomic fusion within stars essentially at random, with some elements being more likely to arise than others, why is it that elements of a kind are always found together with more of that element?	11
Why are batteries (especially disposable, but also the ones inside a laptop battery etc) always cylinder shaped? wouldn't they be able to fit more battery into more rectangular volumes?	11
Does there exist a chart or diagram which visually shows that the faster an object moves in a spacial dimension, the slower it moves in the time dimension?	9
Could you correct my misunderstanding? mass is a property of a particle equaling it's total energy divided by c^2. This means that a photon with energy 1 eV would have a mass of 1 eV/89875517873681764 m^2/s^2 (meters squared per second squared). this is not zero. it's small, but small isn't zero.	7
Why don't quarks and antiquarks annihilate each other?	5
Could someone explain the differences between and advantages/disadvantages of the different antiseptics? iodine vs alcohol vs peroxide, vs etc?	5

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