The main goal of this talk is to introduce new and more reliable conjectures regarding both the Erd˝os-Falconer distance problem and the restriction problem for spheres over finite fields, which were previously stated ambiguously. In particular, based on the new conjecture, it is demonstrated that the existing results for the Erd˝os-Falconer distance problem in odd dimensions cannot be improved. Moreover, it is shown that the newly proposed restriction conjecture for spheres holds true in all cases for L2 estimates when the test functions are restricted to homogeneous functions of degree zero.