Yes, one part of it is due to the sheer size of the population leading to larger total numbers (even if incidence rate is equal to other parts of the world).

Another part of it is the fact that some religions there venerate children with certain visible deformities - they take it as a sign of being blessed/touched by the gods. This means that these children are showcased prominently, rather than being cloistered away for sake of pity or shame. So, even if the numbers are comparable to other parts of the world, they are more visible or more often encountered.

Think of it like a bunch of dominoes standing on end - and "half-life" is how long it typically takes half of all independent dominos to tip over because of a tiny breeze, etc.

If these dominoes are set up very far apart, then one domino randomly tipping over only releases a tiny amount of kinetic energy and isn't likely to knock any others over. This is where the natural independent "radioactive decay" idea comes into play, and is how "half-life" is defined.

On the other hand, if there are very many dominoes standing next to each other, then one domino tipping over might push two others, which might push into four others, with might push into eight others, etc. All of these dominoes (except the very first one) didn't "decay" naturally, they were all pushed! So, the amount of fallen dominoes is more a question of "How closely packed are the dominoes?" and "How long on average does a chain-reaction of domino falls last?" rather than a question of isolated "half-life".

Nuclear reactors burn through fuel quickly compared to the fuel half-life because they are designed to sustain those long chain-reactions that release more energy faster.

The actual temperature is still the actual temperature no matter if it is calm/windy or humid/dry.

If the "actual temperature" outside is 1C but a strong wind makes the "feels-like temperature" -5C... then you might get hypothermia faster than you would relative to a calm day, but no water is going to start freezing because the "actual temperature" is still above 0C.

It works the same way with humidity: the actual temperature is still the actual temperature, but humidity levels can make it harder to sweat and cool yourself and so that gets accounted for when they tell you the "feels-like temperature".

It's because of how recent the "invention" of electricity is compared to ideas like distance and weight.

Weights and lengths were things that all sorts of civilizations had to deal with (even the ancient ones) and so those civilizations all individually developed "units" that were convenient for them (or borrowed from their neighbors). So, after you get good and comfortable with your units over a few hundred years, when you meet some other country that says "Hey, your units are weird, why not use ours!" you tend to be like "No way, it is your units that are weird! Buzz off!".

Electricity, on the other hand, (which was invented and commercialized in the last couple centuries) was basically a brand new thing. That meant that the first country that had it was like "Hey, this is how it works and these are the units we use!" and everybody else was like "Okay, cool! Sign us up!".

Parentheses do fix ambiguity problems beautifully. But they can also be a total pain if you have to write out a whole mess of them again and again and again.

The reason we have the multiply-then-add rule (rather than the other way around) is because "Add up a list of values-multiplied-by-quantity" is a super common kind of scenario - and this convention lets us shortcut away lots of parentheses from these often-encountered problems.

For example, imagine adding up the value of one penny, two nickels, four dimes, and three quarters... Writing out "(1×1) + (2×5) + (4×10) + (3×25)" is amazingly unambiguous and perfectly legible... but simply writing out "1×1 + 2×5 + 4×10 + 3×25" (and maybe leaving some whitespace for extra clarity) saves the work of two parentheses per list-item. Maybe that isn't a big deal when writing out a single list of only four coin denominations... but if you have to do hundreds of similar such problems then those extra strokes will definitely add up.

There main reason is History.

Scientific research didn't begin in the era of the internet. Back in the olden days scientists basically just wrote letters to each other bragging up their latest discoveries. As the number of scientists grew, everyone writing letters to everyone else became too much work, so some folks decided to create a kind of magazine where scientists could write up their discoveries once-and-for-all to get word out to all of the magazine's readers at once, and the idea of the academic journal was born.

Like any good magazine, there were editors-in-chief who decided whether to accept or deny submissions based on if the article was sufficiently on-topic for their magazine's audience and whether the article was sufficiently cool to their audience. So some of those magazines became more famous as reliably having the best and coolest stuff in their respective fields.

Also, because it would cost a fair amount of money to type up all of these submissions, bind them together nicely into a booklet, and distribute them out to the subscribers, this was not done as a free service but rather - like most any other kind of magazine - it was done as a for-profit business.

The system wasn't perfect, but at the very least it was financially sustainable enough (for most of the best journals) to survive to the present day.

In modern times, the internet offers a multitude of ways to disseminate these same sorts of scientific write-ups to vastly more people at drastically lower costs (compared to oldschool paper-based printing and publishing). However, the historical system still has significant momentum due to the best journals still have the biggest audiences and a fair amount of prestige. This leaves academics with a tough decision when it comes time to publish: "Do I publish in a prestigious oldschool journal behind paywalls, or do I publish in some online upstart journal that is free-to-all?".

There are trade-offs to choosing either option. By publishing in a prestigious oldschool journal you are making your work harder to access (essentially limiting it to folks with academic library access) but you also get some bragging rights and free advertising based solely on the fact that your article is published by that particular prestigious journal. On the other hand, publishing in some upstart online journal means that anyone who clicks the link can read your work... but the low notoriety is of no help in attracting people to your paper in the first place.

Ideally, the science should stand for itself regardless of which avenue it is published under, but unfortunately the people doing the science have careers to consider in order to keep doing that science in the first place. So, whether we like it or not, the upfront bragging rights from a prestigious journal publication may be more beneficial to a researcher's career than a free-to-all online journal publication (even if that would be better for the scientific community). Ultimately, this means that publishing in upstart journals is basically a luxury that only already-well-established researchers can risk.

TL;DR - Mercury has long been considered a "conventional superconductor" due to having Cooper pair interactions, etc. but the basic DFT models that usually predict critical-temperature for those kinds of superconductors have trouble making good predictions for Mercury. Now, using more complex modern DFT models, they're able to get a critical-temperature prediction from the theory that matches reality to within 2.5%, as well as pinpoint which aspects of Mercury throw-off the basic stripped-down models.

The fact that two technical terms appear in a sentence that basically says "Rinse and Repeat" does not suddenly make it inaccessible.

> "LI5 means friendly, simplified and layperson-accessible explanations - not responses aimed at literal five-year-olds."

This is from the /explainlikeimfive/ rules; the OPs response is fine.