ELI5: Why do animals (including humans), in general, become less playful as they grow older?

Play is all about exercise and learning. Part of it is simply about increasing strength and coordination. A lot of it is about learning valuable physical skills like stalking, fighting, chasing, catching etc. And a lot of it is about learning non physical skills. For instance a lot of young animals (including humans) can be hugely annoying in their persistence to do mischief because it teaches them about social boundaries.

Young animals go too far in their play because they only learn about social boundaries when an adult puts them in their place. Along the same lines, they learn about appropriate consequences by watching adults mete out discipline and watching adults interact with other adults. Ie. causing mischief is punished by a slap or a scolding but not by a maiming bite. When an adult faces another adult in a territorial dispute it’s preferable to threaten before resorting to violence.

And finally play teaches young animals about their personal limitations. They’ll teach it to climb fearlessly because it knows what it can and can’t do. It’ll know how fast it can run, how far it can jump and so on. It’ll help them learn that their abilities increase as they grow because they run faster and jump farther than they could last week during the same game.

Play tends to be unique to animals whose abilities change and grow with them. You won’t see much play among insects, arachnids and most reptiles for instance. They’re born fully capable (even though practice and learning can improve their capabilities).

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ELI5: During a police interrogation, can you actually get away with not saying anything until you're provided with a lawyer?

Depends on where you live, but I assume you are talking about the United States.

In the US, the sixth amendment to the constitution says the following:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Brewer v. Williams (1979) held that once adversarial proceedings have begun against a defendant, he has a right to legal representation when the government interrogates him.

So basically, yes, it works like it does on TV. At least, it does in the States.

Now, in practical matters, the police are allowed to lie to you. There’s nothing stopping them from trying to convince you that you don’t need a lawyer. You could say to them something like “I think I need a lawyer,” and they could say something like “Why do you need a lawyer? Lawyers are for bad guys. You aren’t a bad guy, are you? We just want to get a bit of information”

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ELI5: Why is so much importance held on the presidential election, but almost no attention is given to Congressional elections?

A)

The do get coverage, but there are a few reasons why they don’t get as much national coverage…

1) Very few races are actually competitive. Between gerrymandering of House districts and states’ entrenched political slants, maybe 50 of the 470 Congressional seats are actually races of any kind.

2) The races that are actual races, all that matters is the local voters. So here in Illinois, there is a lot of coverage of the Mark Kirk/Tammy Duckworth race for Senate because it’s a close race with the incumbent behind in the polls.

3) TRUMP. His constant antics are distracting the media away from everything else, even the more substantive issues of the presidential election. For example, this AM more coverage is going to Trump calling a former Miss Universe fat/Miss Piggy than analysis of the different plans to create jobs presented in the debate last night. 

B) 

It seems like this question was already fairly well answered above but I’d like to add to what he said a bit.

Most congressional races are lightly contested if contested at all. Meaning that very often incumbents have such a substantial lead, through name recognition and having an established track record, that their opponent doesn’t stand much of a chance. Beyond that, it’s not unusual for a strong incumbent to run entirely unopposed simply because any real challenger that would enter the race knows better than to take on a strong incumbent and instead will look for a weaker incumbent in another district or wait until a strong one is nearing retirement.

What’s amazing to me is that congress, as a whole, has an incredibly abysmal approval rating and has for a long time (I don’t know the exact numbers but it usually hovers in the high teens and low 20’s). Americans overwhelmingly feel congress does a poor job but they usually like THEIR congressmen. This is partially because of what the incumbent has done for their own district or state but that’s also part of the problem. Congressmen largely look out for their own electorate to the detriment of the nation as a whole because it gets them reelected. So what people dislike is OTHER congressmen acting selfishly for their districts and neglecting the good of the nation but when it comes to their own district or state people have no complaints.

That, IMO, is why congressional elections aren’t covered nearly as much. Short of a recent scandal, major policy misstep, or shift in local political philosophy, people love their districts and states incumbent politicians and those incumbents are almost guaranteed to win anyway so why bother covering it?

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ELI5: Where do internet providers get their internet from and why can't we make our own?

Answer #1

You can make your own. Go run some fiber from your house to mine.

It costs about $50,000/mile.

We can add others to our network as you get the money.

Answer #2

The Internet is the colloquial term for Interconnected Networks. Your ISP has an arrangement with one or more other companies, who in turn have agreements with yet more companies.

Some of these organizations spend lots of money to run physical cables across the planet in the expectation that their cables will be used to transport information between the two or more points that they connected together.

You can form an organization that connects to existing infrastructure and if you’d on-sell it, your organization is an ISP. You could also set up actual infrastructure, but that’s much more costly and risky.

Different countries have rules about this mainly to do with illegal use that you’ll need to abide by and since this is big business, many roadblocks exist to prevent your little organization from competing with the incumbent.

Some towns and cities, disenchanted with incumbent providers, have started their own networks and succeed in larger and smaller degree in providing their citizens with Internet connectivity. Various freenets also exist which allow information to travel within the group but not to the wider Internet. This often bypasses legal impediments to creating an ISP.

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ELI5: Is letting wounds 'breathe' a thing, if so, what purpose does it serve?

I’m a nurse and have taken a number of courses on wound dressing and healing. Here’s what I can quickly write out for you.

The goal of wound care is moist wound healing. If wounds are draining plenty of blood/pus/serous drainage and it isn’t being removed from the wound by an absorbent dressing, the tissue can become macerated and will appear white. It’s too wet, the tissue is swollen with water. This is bad for wound healing. This is maybe where people got the idea of letting a wound “breathe” to dry up some of the excess moisture.

However, letting it dry out completely is not ideal either.

Natural healing involves developing a scab, a dry cover for the wound. However, if the wound were instead moist (not wet), you would have faster migration of immune cells, new cells, growth factors, etc. as they can move through a moist environment easier. This is what topicals like polysporin (besides the Abx) help to achieve. Petroleum products will moisturize without macerating.

And the other question everyone asks: should I use peroxide to clean it? no. maybe. Here’s the thing. You can clean a wound very well with water or saline (although who has saline at home). Many wounds wash themselves out by bleeding! Peroxide will kill bacteria, but it also hurts exposed skin cells/other tissue, and that can slow healing. The surface of your skin is mostly keratin and peroxide won’t affect intact skin, but when it’s cut, the deeper layers can be affected. Basically, don’t peroxide every wound, but something like a cat bite, go for it.

*edit: I’m aware now of how many people have saline. I pour like half a liter over new wounds, so I’m not sure people have that much contact solution. I have 25/20 vision privilege so am unaware. Yes, you should see a doctor quickly for cat bites. I’ve seen people need strong antibiotics 4x a day to avoid death from cat bites. Go to ER NOW if your wound starts streaking red up your limb. Helpful to outline areas of redness with a pen and the time you marked it to show how it’s progressing.

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ELI5: When sending a letter abroad, how does the receiving country's mail service get paid for their work?

There is a global unified postal service body called the Universal Postal Union . The Union creates a framework and standards so that ALL countries can exchange mail freely without forming individual contracts with every other country.

When one pays for the postage for international mail, a portion of the money goes to the home country’s postal service and a portion goes to the destination’s postal service. The portion of money exchanged depends on how much mail (in weight) each country is exchanging. This is set up so that the destination country receives money for delivering the postage. Countries that receive more mail annually get less money per kilogram of mail.

The fee paid to the destination county is called a terminal due.

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ELI5: why do you see weird patterns when you close your eyes and apply pressure onto them?

This phenomenon is called phosphene.

When light hits the cells in the eye, these cells send a signal to the brain to give an image of what is seen. These cells are called photoreceptor cells, and their main means of activation is when a photon of light hits them. Another way to activate them is via mechanical stimulation (aka applying pressure to they eyes). When you apply mechanical stimulation, the subsequent activation of the cells will be random (not patterned), and when this signal is transmitted to the brain areas that are responsible for generating an image, you will see weird patterns instead of the normal images that would be generated by photon-induced stimulation.

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