Although, the small wildcats tend to have more uniform fur colour, as well.

Wolves also have less natural colours than dogs. We like pets that stand out, while in the wild it's just bad camoflage.

It might, but exceedingly rarely. Albinism and melanism occurs in many taxa including species in the genus Panthera (which include lions and tigers). These are rare traits in general because they are selected against for one reason or another and don't proliferate in the wild.

Another possibility is that these phenotypes are linked to genes that have other downstream developmental effects that lead to non-viable fetuses.

Another fun one (possibly) is that some of these coat traits are controlled partially by the environment/the animal's spatial relationship with the environment. Siamese cats have the characteristic darker coat colors on their extremities (ears, paws, tails, snout, this is called acromelanism) because the melanism is controlled by lower temperature. If an animal never experiences a low temperature, that phenotype might never be expressed.

These are all possibilities. I'm a biologist but I don't study felids (cats and big cats).

If they lived in the artic they'd be white.

To expand on this, if they lived in the arctic, there would be "selection pressure" in the form of either reduced hunting success for predators or increased predation for prey species. That selection pressure is really all that evolution is: being more likely to succeed and pass on your genes.

Makes sense.

You don't know when the next deforestation or forced migration will come. What was great camouflage for the last generation might be a huge disadvantage this time around.

Little cats didn't evolve from big cats.

Little mice chasers started coming to human habitations when humans started building silos to hold grain. The humans saw the cats were useful and kept them around.

https://www.animalwised.com/cat-history-and-evolution-3277.html

There’s a common trend among domesticated animals—they tend to develop more variegated coloring than their wild ancestors.

One theory is that domestication affects traits that involve early embryonic development, and that have a lot of associated changes beyond what was actually selected for (i.e. tameness).

Another possibility is that, in the absence of selection, animals naturally produce more variation in coloration than is seen in the wild—but natural selection is continually weeding out those that are disadvantageous in their current environment.

Also, modern domestic cats are the result of breeding. Wild cats mostly reflect their environment in their coat.

Because lions live in savannah...

If they lived in the artic they'd be white.

If they lived where there was shadows they'd be black.

If they had multiple colorations in the same breeding population, they'd have calicos on occasion.

Anything except savannah color is a disadvantage, so that's all there is.

Also depends on what part of the brain they hit

Think of it like the surface of the Earth. The same building blocks are everywhere but their distribution evolved and changed drastically over time based on initially small variances in heat and density. The distribution is deterministic, but appears "random" to an observer that spawns 14 billion years into the chaos of the explosion.

This is a difficult thing to accurately assess. While we can use spectrometry to find chemical compositions of stars and nebulae and planet atmospheres/surfaces, we cant even be certain about the interior of planets and moons within our own solar system, much less the galaxy.

We can make educated guesses based on the mass/volume and the stability of elements but I don't think it’s an exact science.

However, i would imagine the answer to your question is No, the galaxy is not homogeneous. My reasoning is that near the center of our galaxy, stars are much closer together. This not only makes stellar collisions more likely to occur, but also means there will be significantly more cosmic rays in that space than out here near the rim.

Both cosmic rays and stellar collisions are the (theoretical) primary sources of certain elements. Berylium and Boron are created by cosmic rays fission, and as such id expect their concentrations to be higher in denser star clusters. And I’d expect higher concentrations of heavier elements due to both increased collisions AND due to the decay chains of unstable isotopes created by cosmic ray fission.

Cosmic rays are responsible for producing common isotopes like Carbon-14 here on earth, and we live in a pretty empty part of space near a relatively inactive star. So I’d imagine the amount of radioactive isotopes of all kinds would generally be higher in more dense stellar regions too.

All that being said, the most common elements will probably be the same. Hydrogen and helium are the most common in the entire universe, and many light elements like Oxygen and Carbon and even Iron which can be produced by fusion will probably be higher in concentration than any heavier elements regardless of where you are in the universe.

From my studies, I remember that solar systems have some kind of identity card based on the % of atoms and isotopes (versions of an atom with more or less neutrons).

The bigger the atoms the more exceptionally energetic the process that created them needs to be: normal star, big star, supernova, neutron star merger... Also some specific isotopes can be created by some processes and not others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleosynthesis

So one part of the universe where a solar system formed may not have seen the same atoms creation processes as another, so their detailed compositions are different.
Cosmo chemists analyze the compositions of meteorites that formed at different times to try to understand the history of our solar system. For exemple, they may find that this isotope could not have been produced by our sun's birth, and it must have come from a supernova or very specific kind of star. https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-crystals-older-than-the-sun-reveal-about-the-start-of-the-solar-system-20260302/

They make our origin much cooler by looking at space pebbles.

The short version is: No. Not all systems are identical, but they also aren't random. There are real patterns, and it has been studied A LOT. It's a field of science called Galactic Chemical Evolution, and it's fucking rad.

The long version. No, again :) When the big bang happened, it scattered everything that ever was, but everything at that time was just hydrogen and helium, which is boring. So, at the very beginning, everything was homogeneous because there wasn't much of anything to spice it up.

However, then the stars came along after being formed by those gasses. When hydrogen and helium got cooked, they fused into heavier elements, which is where all the fun stuff got made. Then, the stars would die, and you'd get a supernova. These would spread all the cool elements around, and that's where we get everything we are used to looking at, like planets and asteroids and moons. Everything is made of star stuff.

So, for your questions:

1. Is our system similar to others? Yes, in the big picture. Almost everything everywhere is overwhelmingly hydrogen and helium (98% of all matter by mass). The cool stuff exists in the tiny sliver that's left.

2. Are we more similar to our neighbors? Yep, and that's a great question. Stars that formed us formed others that were once our neighbors, but stars drift over billions of years, so we can't just look out a window and see our neighbor, we have to use chemistry to figure out where we came from. An example is that our current neighbor is Alpha Centauri, but we aren't siblings to them. We're just close to them now, after billions of years.

3. Is it random? No. The stars at the center of a galaxy tend to be more metal rich because more stars lived and died there, while the stars at the outside are lower in metals. Age plays a role as well, because older stars formed before all the cool stuff, and so they had less cool stuff to play with.

Hope that helps. Science is fucking awesome. If you want to know more, look into Galactic Chemical Evolution, especially on YouTube where you can find a lot of educators that explain this with much more depth than I can. PBS SpaceTime is one of my favorites.

Homogeneous is more about the pov of the experiment. If you zoom in far enough at sugar water it is not homogenous even if completely dissolved.

So it really depends on how far back you are zooming out to declare something homogenous.

Thank you. I didn't remember that scene in Innerspace or Cells at Work.

"stuck"=stabbed

You could probably use fluid dynamics, pressure, and flow rates to figure this out. It would also depend on the size of the injury.

This diagram might help

I think the relevant equations are Bernoulli's and volumetric flow rate, but I'll leave that up to someone else to clarify

I'm not a scientist but i've dealt with some leaky stuff before. I think it all comes down to (blood) pressure and wound size, and to a lesser extent, wound shape.

It's also waaay cheaper to drill a couple holes, mine a void out with hot water, and then fill it with oil. Building a tank farm of similar capacity is extremely expensive. Hundreds of millions of barrels of oil is an enormous quantity that needs to be stored somewhere.

The total capacity of the US national reserve is roughly a cube of oil half a km long on each side. It's basically a decent sized lake of oil you have to store somewhere. Think of a lake or two near you and building the capacity to store that entire thing inside of steel walled cylindrical tanks.

If is absolutely imperative that we learn to read up on topics and synthesize our own information. It's also incredibly helpful for our growth in a topic to learn to explain it to newcomers.

Newcomers have little to no frame of reference, so they perform unwise actions and don't seem to be able to follow what appears to be simple instructions. On some level, like small children, most people need their first few bites prechewed.

Once they learn the material, they will reflect their learning process onto others. If all they had were a long series of failures and RTFM thrown at them until they got it, then that's what they are likely to push. If someone can be kind enough to direct people to what and why, (take a look at the -t flag and look at the example here), a community can grow more healthy.

Yeah, it sucks having the same constant questions thrown at you. If you find it frustrating, you really don't need to engage. Back to the point in AHK. they have a robust manual with examples. It still took me an afternoon to untangle the language behind how to make the GUI button do things. Once I understood, it was simple.

The part I was stuck on was actually grabbing the full user name. It should be a simple action, yet it turns out it requires a wmi interaction I didn't think about. I eventually found a bite I could chew, but now I realize I can pull data from WMI if needed.

That and the staunch anti-science from the religious right, and you've got your answer.

The US also tested burying nuclear waste in a salt mine with the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), though with less success.

The salt worked well to contain the waste. The issue they wound up having was a barrel burst from pressure (Los Alamos National Laboratory incorrectly used organic kitty litter as an absorbent material). The radioactive contamination leaked slightly because the ventilation system failed to close fully when the radiation monitors triggered. Turns out the salt had deposited in the ventilation shaft and blocked the vents from closing.

I hear that the act of reading things that are a little bit challenging can be good for cognitive development.

I mean, we could also ask strangers to chew our food for us because chewing things can be difficult.

It's also better for a lot of things to have it explained by a regular person who knows a subject deeply, instead of reading some dry scientific paper or something.