Ask Anything Wednesday - Economics, Political Science, Linguistics, Anthropology

Submitted by AutoModerator t3_yk610g in askscience

Welcome to our weekly feature, Ask Anything Wednesday - this week we are focusing on Economics, Political Science, Linguistics, Anthropology

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.

Answering Questions:

Please only answer a posted question if you are an expert in the field. The full guidelines for posting responses in AskScience can be found here. In short, this is a moderated subreddit, and responses which do not meet our quality guidelines will be removed. Remember, peer reviewed sources are always appreciated, and anecdotes are absolutely not appropriate. In general if your answer begins with 'I think', or 'I've heard', then it's not suitable for /r/AskScience.

If you would like to become a member of the AskScience panel, please refer to the information provided here.

Past AskAnythingWednesday posts can be found here. Ask away!

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PeanutSalsa t1_iurk7f8 wrote

What is the deal with Karelia? Are they self governed, etc?

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DenseTree420 t1_iurodk7 wrote

Assuming the higgs field is meta stable and it went into a lower energy state somewhere millions of light years away, wouldn't expansion prevent the low energy state bubble from ever reaching us?

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PeanutSalsa t1_iurkomk wrote

What is the consensus belief of linguistics scholars toward the tower of Babel in the Bible being an event that happened in human history?

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Thatcorgilady t1_ius06pb wrote

If science found a way to make rocks (or other inorganic matter) edible, how might that impact the fallout from global warming?

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sirblastalot t1_iuu58qd wrote

The way you get usable energy out of a material is by taking it from a higher-energy, unstable state to a lower-energy, more stable one, and capturing the energy released in doing so. For example, burning a piece of nice, reactive wood, to produce stable, non-reactive C02 and ash. Generally speaking, rocks are already pretty close to being as low-energy as you can get, so there's not really any way to get more energy out of them, no matter how you modify your digestion.

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