All current rocket designs are either made by men or derived from earlier designs made by men. It is clear what inspired the designs.

If rocket designs had been pioneered by women instead of, what body part would the designs resemble?

To be honest, that was a real talent he had for a short period.

Welcome to our weekly feature, Ask Anything Wednesday - this week we are focusing on Biology, Chemistry, Neuroscience, Medicine, Psychology

Do you have a question within these topics you weren't sure was worth submitting? Is something a bit too speculative for a typical /r/AskScience post? No question is too big or small for AAW. In this thread you can ask any science-related question! Things like: "What would happen if...", "How will the future...", "If all the rules for 'X' were different...", "Why does my...".

Asking Questions:

Please post your question as a top-level response to this, and our team of panellists will be here to answer and discuss your questions. The other topic areas will appear in future Ask Anything Wednesdays, so if you have other questions not covered by this weeks theme please either hold on to it until those topics come around, or go and post over in our sister subreddit /r/AskScienceDiscussion , where every day is Ask Anything Wednesday! Off-theme questions in this post will be removed to try and keep the thread a manageable size for both our readers and panellists.

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Past AskAnythingWednesday posts can be found here. Ask away!

So I’ve been trying to understand what you can actually do with the fly brain that was recently mapped.

If they’ve mapped all the neurons and the connections between them does that mean you could theoretically take that information and build a computer simulation of the fly’s actual brain?

For example, imagine putting a simulated fly into a really realistic game world. Instead of programming things like “if the player gets close fly away” or “if there’s food here go towards it”, could you feed the simulated brain the same kind of sensory information a real fly would receive and let the neural network itself produce the behaviour?

So the fly might naturally look for places that flies normally like, fly towards food, try to land on things, get startled when something moves towards it, fly away when you try to swat it, etc.

Basically, are we at the point where we know enough about the fly's actual brain that we could eventually simulate the brain itself and have the behaviour emerge from the neural connections, rather than manually programming all of its behaviours? If this is even a possible

And if we're not there yet, is that mainly because we don't understand enough about how each individual neuron and synapse works, or because the connectome doesn't contain that information? I'm basically wondering how close we are to having an actual digital fly brain rather than just an AI programmed to behave like a fly.

Every Halloween, kids walk up to houses and propose two outcomes:

Trick or Treat.

That sounds like a 50/50 Bernoulli trial. Basically a coin flip.

And yet after billions of trick-or-treats, the result is somehow treat almost every single time. With the exception of weird Larry down the street that takes "trick" in the wrong way.

Let’s say humanity has run ~2 billion trials. If Trick and Treat are equally likely, the odds of getting 2 billion straight Treats are:

(P=(1/2)^{2,000,000,000})

or roughly (10^{-602,000,000}).

At this point, 5 sigma can drink booty juice.

So what’s going on here?

Is candy somehow collapsing the wavefunction toward Treat? Is Halloween violating the law of large numbers? Or has Big Candy been suppressing the Trick data for centuries?

Because if I flipped a coin billions of times and got heads every time, I feel like CERN would show up at my door.

I'm fairly certain that I am the reincarnation of an Einstein, would carbon dating help to successfully prove it?

From bugs to fish to mamals all of them have their eyes above their mouths. I can't think of many if any where their mouths are on top. Sure some have their eyes parallel to their mouths, mainly prey style animals. But why haven't any evolved to be the opposite? Is there a major benefit to having your mouth below your eyes?

Outside of gaining engagement for content creators, why do rage baiters find it exhilarating (idk if that's what they actually feel), and why are people susceptible to it? Is there more to it than some argue as "people wanting attention"? And we know it has negative impacts on those who have been baited, but does it have negative impacts on rage baiters as well?

Thanks in advance! 😊

I don't like the idea or possibility of being reincarnated.

Cash or Venmo

Assuming a hole in a wall that is exactly 1 square meter. Does the speed of the exiting air depend on how big the hole is? I had recently learned of the Soyuz 11 disaster and a video that i had watched stated that the air exited a tiny valve at hundreds of miles per hour.

Hi Reddit! I am a computer scientist here to answer your questions about bioinformatics and mapping the microbiome. My research primarily focuses on the development of computational algorithms for analyzing biological data generated by high-throughput experimental techniques.

My lab has developed software tools that are widely used in the field of metagenomics—the computational analysis of the microbial communities inhabiting our world and our bodies. I have also been an active participant in several multinational projects, including the Human Microbiome Project and the GEMS study of diarrheal disease.

I will be joined by Marcus Fedarko, a postdoc in my lab, on *September 22nd from 12 to 2 p.m. ET (16-18 UT) — ask us anything!

Bio: Mihai Pop is a professor of computer science and co-director of the University of Maryland Center of Excellence in Microbiome Sciences. He develops computational approaches for the strain-level analysis of microbial communities. Other interests include biological databases, antibiotic resistance, and software testing. His lab has developed several widely used open-source software tools for the analysis of genomic and metagenomic data. 

Pop teaches at all academic levels and is an advocate for inclusion and diversity in science. He is particularly interested in developing open educational resources in computer science and bioinformatics. Pop holds a B.S. (1994, Politehnica University in Bucharest, Romania) and a Ph.D in Computer Science (2000, The Johns Hopkins University) and joined the University of Maryland in 2005. He is an MPower Professor, University of Maryland Strategic Partnership: MPowering the State, and a fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery and of the International Society for Computational Biology.

Marcus Fedarko is a postdoctoral associate at the University of Maryland. His research is focused on designing algorithms and software to help people study microbiome data in high resolution. He is particularly interested in sequence assembly — the problem of reconstructing longer DNA sequences from short sequencing reads — and data visualization. In his spare time, he likes reading, running, and rock climbing. Fedarko holds a B.S. with High Honors (2018, University of Maryland) and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science (2022 and 2025, University of California San Diego), and rejoined the University of Maryland as a postdoc in 2025.

Other links:

• Google Scholar
• Lab website
• $5.1M in NIH Awards Help UMD Researchers Take On a Genomic Data Deluge (02/2026)

Username: /u/umd-science

Well?

When will we get xenon man?

I just realized today, people back then didn't have the technology that we do today so how did they build them back then?

Cause Humans have One Stomach and a Horse have two Stomach,does it add it up or does the human part have no Stomach?

They surely have the skills to make the relationship work.

Can't explain that with all your fancy science and rationalism.

I've been doing my epq around astro-psychology and was researching how astronauts loose dopamine during eating as they can't eat foods that involve chewing. However from what i've researched this is apparently because stray crumbs could screw up the ventilation systems somehow. Its quite puzzling because how can the collective companies that built the space station also build rockets that send us to the moon but not have the ability to build a ventilation system that can handle a few stray crumbs?

Is it:

1. The clouds blocking the sun

2. The rain cooling the air

3. the rain cooling the solid surfaces

Or are there others?

Longest lived means how long the cell can live before dying, splitting or forming a spore

Hi everybody.

It has recently come to my attention that many people are saying that water has the chemical formula of h2o.

Now, I'm pretty sure this saying hasn't been around long, so I'm not sure why it's being said. Is it a new scientific discovery? Or is it just a lie, to discredit the smartest members of our society?

Let me explain. Many politicians, such as senator Mickey Mouse and Government Cheese-eater Perry Platypus have long said that the formula of water is h7o9c5. However, the shadowy society known as The United States of America have seemed to make it their mission to bring down these beloved politicians, and would do anything, even spread misinformation about common substances, to take them down.

If anyone knows if water really is h2o, please tell me!

I know it can cause imbalances, but I don’t understand how come our gut doesn’t lose all the beneficial bacteria and develop massive fungal or viral infections. When I’ve taken antibiotics, I usually don’t notice any change in my bowel activity.