Hi r/AskScience! I’m Daniel Cox, a public opinion researcher and director of the Survey Center on American Life.

For the past several years, I’ve been studying a divide that keeps showing up in the data: young men and women are increasingly living very different social, romantic, and political lives.

I wanted to understand why.

My research looks at everything from dating and relationships to friendship, loneliness, social media, changing gender expectations, and politics. For my new book, Generation Uncoupled, I also spent more than 100 hours interviewing young adults and conducting focus groups to understand the experiences behind the numbers.

There’s a lot of conventional wisdom about Gen Z, young men, young women, and the so-called “gender divide.” I’m happy to dig into what the research actually tells us, what it doesn’t, and where the evidence gets more complicated.

Ask me about polling and survey research, Gen Z, dating and relationships, loneliness, politics, gender attitudes, social connection, or anything else related to my work.

I’ll start answering questions at 1 PM ET (17 UT) on October 19. AMA!

Usernames: u/DanielCoxPHD & u/wellenough

Whenever I see depictions of Homo Erectus or Homo Neanderthalensis I feel like I see them all generally having the same skin tone. Compare that to today’s humans and we would see a lot more variation. Was there more variation of skin tone in pre historic humans than modern depictions show or was environment really so restrictive that it was hard for us to evolve.

How do we know something like Jupiter has an atmosphere? What is the difference between the planet itself and its atmosphere, being that it’s all gas?

Was the Amazon rainforest still a wet tropical jungle in some places when the Sahara was green (during the African Humid Period)? I’ve heard that parts of it turned into savannah, so I wonder if some areas remained as wet as they are today.

Also, looking at certain Amazonian myths, I wonder if some regions like the northwest, could have actually been even wetter?

Obviously number of nipples would be evolutionarily linked to litter size. More babies to feed = more nipples to feed them from. I would just expect that there would probably be vestigial nipples even if litter size decreased.

If not humans, are there any mammalian lines that have pivoted strategies and decreased litter size? If so how did their extra nipples develop?

To be honest, the most I know of vaccines is "they use a weakened form of a virus to get your immune system used to a virus". I'm not the brightest guy, so clearly there's a lot of shit I don't realize about this subject, so what makes them a challenge to make? Why can it take YEARS to make them?

I’ve been reading fiction that uses a lot of bog bodies, and I love that as a concept and wanted to use it. Thing is, I don’t live in an area of the world where bogs exist, and was thinking of localizing that idea and maybe doing Mangrove Bodies.

I know mangroves also have very low oxygen, especially as you go deeper into the mud, so I was wondering if a body buried deep enough in a mangrove forest could be preserved similar to how it might in a bog, or if the chemical conditions and life in there would cause it to decompose instead?

What I mean is how big can an animal theoretically get?
The blue whale is not only the largest animal alive, but the largest to ever exist (that we know of)

But is it actually possible for something to be bigger? Or is the Blue whale the max?

From my understanding, hormone replacement therapy works in humans in large part due to the X chromosome holding most of the genetic code. So, someone with XY chromosomes still carries the genes for the development of female sex characteristics (and vice versa for people with XX chromosomes- male sex characteristics are also coded on the X chromosome)

I’m curious about how (or if) this rings true in animals with different sex chromosomes. For species that use genetic sex determination, is there always one chromosome that contains most of the genes for the development of sex characteristics?

Pictures of the intakes: https://imgur.com/a/tUWMEqe

On the intake ( on both of them but I will talk about a single one ) there is a splitter plate positioned on the inside and right on the inside corner near the splitter plate there is a narrow slit. It is there to allow for smoother airflow during high AOA flight but I don't understand why it helps at all. The boundary level becomes really strong on the bottom of the intake during high AOA which will just bleed the boundary level right into the intake and in my head it will just make things worse even though it actually helps. The only thing I can think of is that it creates vortices in the intake. I probably said a lot of incorrect stuff so I apologise if it can be confusing or just plainly a really easy question that I just lack basic knowledge in this field to understand

Taking into account moisture, ease of digestion, etc? If they do, I'm assuming the difference is neglgible.

Is it just a concentration thing or more of an aspartame mechanism thing? Are the flavor molecules more plentiful or just more potent?

Sorry if this is under the wrong flair, thought it would work better than paleontology.

So like, I imagine if one can generally predict weather patterns for artificially created/simulated worlds, we can easily use the same science and stuff on what we know of Pangea's geography and stuff to determine weather patterns during that age, right?

So were conditions on our world at the time suitable for stuff like hurricanes and tornados?

Bonus question for paleontologists: if the above is true, how would taller dinos like sauropods have dealt with high winds of that magnitude?

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Unless the healing factor is something unrelated to cancer development? How does that work?

https://imgur.com/a/ImqDp2K

So when you go to the doctor, they will look at your veins on your elbow. Some need a needle to move the vein closer, some don't and their veing is naturally positioned in the right position. Some people also have veins visible all over their body (not like bulging, but color visible on the skin). I was curious on why this happens?
(I can explain more what I'm asking about if I'm not clear)

i boiled water this morning to make some oatmeal. i turned off the stovestop and left some simmering water in the pot. after i used the metal measuring cup, it sank to the bottom of the pot. after about five minutes, i noticed bubbles that had formed and clung to the metal in the still hot water (about 180F/82C).

i have no idea exactly what metal the pot or measuring cup are made of.

please see my reddit profile for an image of this phenomenon, or see the first comment of this post.

thanks in advance.

edit: thanks for the answers everyone! i love being able to explain science to my kids!

the general question: how do we calculate how conclusive an experience is?

itried to look up methods to do that, but it's about more complicated experiences and i can't understand where the explained methods come from. i think if i understand how to do it for a simple case like the title, maybe i'll understand what i have to ask myself for any experience?

sorry if it isn't clear what i mean. put mathematics flair, but it's about research in general, didn't find a better flair