Hi, I am Yaniv Erlich – the Chief Science Officer of MyHeritage and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. We published a paper yesterday in Science describing a family tree of 13 million people by crowd sourcing the hard work of millions of genealogists. This pedigree spans all habitable continents and over 500 hundred years. We used the pedigree to understand the genetics of human longevity and found that genetics explain a smaller role in longevity. Genes account for only 5% on average of the differences in life span between individuals. For comparison, previous studies showed that smoking reduces life expectancy by 10yrs. We also used the data to trace migration patterns in the Western world. We looked at historical patterns of marriages and analyzed how long people had to migrate to find the love of their life and who is the person was (hint: someone in your family). Our data suggests that technological advancements did not change consanguineous marriages but rather cultural changes such as social taboos. Ask me anything!

Hi, I’m Anthony Goldbloom, co-founder and CEO of Kaggle. Kaggle is the world’s largest community of data scientists and machine learners with over 1.4 million members. Data scientists come to Kaggle to compete in machine learning competitions, find and share open datasets and use Kaggle Kernels (Kaggle’s cloud based data science workbench). Before starting Kaggle, I was a statistician at the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Australian Treasury, building models that forecast economic activity. The MIT Review has named me one of the top 35 innovators under 35 and Forbes has named me as one of the 30 under 30 in technology. For the first time, Kaggle, Google Cloud, and the NCAA ® will join together for the largest data-driven bracketology competition to date. As part of our continued collaboration, we’ve partnered with the NCAA to make 10 years (2008-2018) of historical NCAA Division I men’s and women’s basketball data available. This competition will be your chance to forecast the outcomes of March Madness® for both the Men’s and Women’s Basketball Championships. In my spare time I do kitefoil racing. I’ve written a bunch of kitefoiling related apps: two smart watch apps - a training app and a wind reporting app a Strava App used Kaggle Kernels to create a ranking system for kitefoilers (at last update, I was ranked 109). Proof I will be here to answer your questions at 1pm ET. EDIT: THANKS FOR THE QUESTIONS. THIS WAS MY FIRST REDDIT AMA. PLAN TO POP BACK LATER TODAY TO TRY TO ANSWER A FEW MORE QUESTIONS.

Virtual reality, one of the most rapidly expanding areas of tech and gaming, is also playing important roles in the arenas of medicine and health – and for good reason! The ability to simulate experiences expands opportunities for biomedical researchers, clinicians and patients in ways that previously seemed limited to the imaginations of sci-fi writers. Patients can now reduce stress through VR experiences, doctors can practice surgical techniques through simulated experiences, and medical students can practice bedside manner in different scenarios in a virtual world. These experiences are just the tip of the iceberg on what can be done to improve our medical care and well-being with VR. Here at NIH, researchers are using VR to study a host of research questions. For example: How can VR be used to better our response to emergencies during natural disasters? In what applications is VR used for rehabilitation after brain trauma, and how can we improve upon this? Can VR be used to improve the way doctors talk to their patients about genetics? Will patients better understand how to take care of themselves by participating in VR scenarios powered by PubMed articles? Can we use VR to communicate with patients in a way that helps them understand and adhere to healthy living strategies? We’ve gathered our experts and are here to answer any questions you might about virtual reality in health and medicine! Ask us anything! Your hosts today are: Susan Persky, Ph.D., Head of the Immersive Virtual Environment Testing Area, and Associate Investigator in the Social Behavioral Research Branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute. My research applies virtual reality tools to understand how genetics will change the interactions we have in medical settings, in society, and within our families. Patti Brennan, RN, Ph.D., Director, National Library of Medicine (NLM). Before I came to NIH I created the Living Environments Lab which used a c6 CAVE to accelerate design of home care technologies (http://www.vizhome.orghttp://www.vizhome.org/) At NIH, our Advanced Visualization Branch in the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) will use VR/AR to improve patients’ self-care and self-management skills. Victor Cid, M.S., Senior Computer Scientist, Disaster Information Management Research Center at the NLM. I conduct and manage research and development activities to support the work of emergency responders and managers before, during and after disaster situations. Among my projects, I develop virtual reality simulations to train emergency professionals, and explore the opportunities that immersive virtual environments can offer for professional development, collaboration, and as platforms for outreach and innovation. John Ostuni, Ph.D., Staff Scientist, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). My research focuses on developing virtual experiences for use with medical research. William Kistler, M.A., Lab Manager of the Immersive Virtual Environment Testing Area at NHGRI. My Master’s research focused on the human perception of motion and exploring its basic limits via stimuli created in virtual reality. Currently, my work is in support of social and behavioral researchers seeking to augment their own research with virtual reality tools. Jeremy Swan, B.A., Biovisualization Specialist with the Computer Support Services Core at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). My duties include helping investigators communicate their science and use emerging technologies in their research by producing graphics, diagrams, 3D prints, VR apps, photos, videos, websites and applications. UPDATE: Thanks all for the wonderful questions! We had a great time answering them and can’t wait to do this again in the near future. Cheers, Reddit-ers!

Hi Reddit, this is Rob McKay and Laura De Santis, co-chief scientists on the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 374 to Antarctica. We’re pulling up sediments from below the sea floor to look back in time about 20 million years to see how the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) evolved up to the present day. With this information, alongside our model-making colleagues, we can predict the future of Antarctica. This is particularly important because Antarctica is the largest source of fresh water on the planet and could contribute about 200 feet of sea level rise! It’s important to know how much the WAIS could contribute and when. To do this, a scientific team of sendimentologists, micropaleontologists, paleomagnetists, physical properties specialists, and geochemists have teamed up on the scientifici drilling ship the JOIDES Resolution for 9 weeks to drill thousands of feet below the sea floor and millions of years back in time. Read more about the expedition here: https://iodp.tamu.edu/scienceops/expeditions/ross_sea_ice_sheet_history.html. Looking forward to answering your questions! ​

I am Anna Alexandrova, currently a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Science at University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College. Born and bred in Russia (a city of Krasnodar in the northern Caucasus) I came of age with the collapse of USSR, a time of hope and excitement but also fear, confusion, and anxiety. The teenage uncertainty of not knowing what it means to be kind, cool, feminine, coincided with genuine social and cultural upheavals – none of the adults around me had answers to these questions either. I spent the 1990s testing different ways to be in different places but the pull of intellectual life was always there even though it was not valued in my environment. I finally tasted that world at the London School of Economics where I did a master’s in Philosophy of Social Science. Although I had no idea what this field was initially, I fell for it almost immediately – the idea of asking whether there could be a genuine science of people and their communities fitted right into the very questions that made the 1990s so painful and so fascinating for me. I learned a lot from the course but the best part was meeting (my now husband) Robert Northcott. Among other good things together we concocted a fateful application for funding at the Open Society Institute and this is what enabled me to start PhD program in Philosophy and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. At UCSD I got the thorough and deep education that I longed for and from some wonderful teachers. Perhaps the most influential among them was Nancy Cartwright who encouraged me to stick to my guns (the guns being philosophy of social science) even as I felt professional pressure to do ‘core’ philosophy. Nancy taught me to immerse myself into a science so deeply as to be able to see philosophical problems from the inside. I remember spending a lot of time in the departments of economics and political science and overhearing condescending jokes about sociologists. This was a crucial moment that gave me a better understanding of why rational choice models were so important to economists and political scientists. They justified their feelings of superiority. My dissertation argued that although game theorists got the credit for successes in mechanism design, it was in fact the experimental economists that deserve this credit at least equally. Out of a case study on design of spectrum auctions arose a general philosophical account of the nature and role of formal models in empirical research. I believe that for too long philosophers of science have gone out of their way to show that despite their very many weaknesses idealized deductive models are nevertheless very powerful in such and such ways. It’s high time to recognise that these models play only a limited heuristic role when it comes to real epistemic goods such as explanation and stop spending our smarts on trying to justify practices that scientists often hold on to largely for reasons of power and so that they could poke fun of sociologists who don’t build models. Towards the end of my dissertation time Nancy pointed me toward a fascinating debate about measurement of happiness and well-being. Although after graduating from UCSD I was mostly publishing on economic models, the former quickly took over as my main research interest. My first teaching job was in University of Missouri St Louis, where I had generous and brilliant colleagues all around the city and where I learned most of what I know about the science of well-being. Dan Haybron of SLU, whose work on happiness I admire the most, was a big influence. I brought my philosophy of science temperament to this topic and in my recent book A Philosophy for the Science of Well-being (which I wrote after moving to Cambridge England in 2011) is not about what well-being or happiness really are, but rather about what sort of scientific knowledge it is possible to have about them. This book has both optimistic and pessimistic streaks. It is optimistic against the critics for whom well-being is too personal, too mysterious, and too complex to be an object of science. Such arguments are common throughtout history of science and should be treated with suspicion. But equally – and that’s the pessimistic bit – when well-being becomes an object of science it is redefined and this redefinition makes scientific claims about it far less applicable to individual deliberation about how to live than positive psychologists would have us believe Some of my work: My book A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being. Thanks to OUP can purchase it 30% off from their site with promocode AAFLYG6. Series of posts on the science of well-being at Brains Blog “Does anyone know what mental health is?” OUP Blog “The Meaning of It All (with Anna Alexandrova)” Black Goat podcast Quick review note of A Philosophy for the Science of Well-being “Who is the expert on your well-being?” OUP Blog “Towards a Theory of Child Well-being: Podcast Interview with Anna Alexandrova” “Value-Added Science: Anna Alexandrova on value judgments and measurement of well-being”

Unfortunately, that’s all the time we have to answer your questions today. Thanks, everyone for your engaging questions! Follow: @MIT, @MITEngineering, @MIT_CSAIL, and @mitbrainandcog to continue to get news around our work. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ At MIT, we are on a quest to answer two big questions. How does human intelligence work, in engineering terms? And how can we use that deep grasp of human intelligence to build wiser and more useful machines, to the benefit of society? We aspire for our new knowledge and newly built tools to serve the public good. Read this MIT news article to learn more: http://mitsha.re/5k6D30i80qQ About us Anantha Chandrakasan: I am the dean of the School of Engineering at MIT. Before being named Dean, I was the Vannevar Bush Professor and head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). During my tenure at EECS I spearheaded a number of initiatives that opened opportunities for students, postdocs, and faculty to conduct research, explore entrepreneurial projects, and engage with EECS. Daniela Rus: I am the Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. I imagine a future where robots are so integrated in the fabric of human life that they become as common as smart phones are today. James DiCarlo: I am the head of MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Peter de Florez Professor of Neuroscience. My research goal is to reverse engineer the brain mechanisms that underlie human visual intelligence, such as our ability to recognize objects on a desk, words on a page, or the faces of loved ones. This knowledge could inspire novel machine vision systems, illuminate new ways to repair or augment lost senses and potentially create new methods to treat disorders of the mind.

Hi Reddit, We are Dr Anne Leonard and Dr William Gaze from the European Centre for Environment and Human Health (http://www.ecehh.org/), based at the University of Exeter Medical School. We are here to answer your questions on antibiotic-resistance in coastal waters. Bacteria that can survive in the presence of medicines (antibiotics) designed to kill them, are termed antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and are a growing threat to human wellbeing around the world. Infections caused by bacteria that survive treatment with antibiotics are difficult to cure, and can even kill people if effective antibiotics aren’t available (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2118046-woman-dies-from-infection-resistant-to-all-available-antibiotics/) Understanding the various ways people come into contact with resistant bacteria can help develop effective strategies to control the spread of resistance. We recently published a study (Beach Bums) on resistant bacteria in coastal waters and the potential for their spread to water users. Finding that surfers, who swallow a lot of seawater when they surf, are at a much greater risk of having antibiotic-resistant bacteria in their guts compared to people who don’t go in the sea indicates that coastal waters could be an important environment in which members of the community acquire resistant bacteria. We are looking forward to reading your questions and comments about antibiotic-resistance in the environment. EDIT: hi! Thanks to everyone who got in touch to ask us thought-provoking questions about the issue of antibiotic-resistance in the environment. We’re going to sign out in a bit, but (time permitting) we will check back later to see if there are any more questions to answer.

The mods of /r/philosophy are pleased to announce an upcoming AMA by Dr Anna Alexandrova, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Science at University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College. This AMA is the third in our Spring 2018 AMA Series; you can find more details on all of this semester’s AMAs with philosophers by going to the AMA Hub Post. You can find all of our previous AMAs over the years by going to the AMA wiki. Doctor Alexandrova will be joining us on Monday February 5th at 12PM ET to discuss issues in the philosophy of science, well-being, social sciences and more. Hear it from her: Anna Alexandrova I am Anna Alexandrova, currently a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Science at University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College. Born and bred in Russia (a city of Krasnodar in the northern Caucasus) I came of age with the collapse of USSR, a time of hope and excitement but also fear, confusion, and anxiety. The teenage uncertainty of not knowing what it means to be kind, cool, feminine, coincided with genuine social and cultural upheavals – none of the adults around me had answers to these questions either. I spent the 1990s testing different ways to be in different places but the pull of intellectual life was always there even though it was not valued in my environment. I finally tasted that world at the London School of Economics where I did a master’s in Philosophy of Social Science. Although I had no idea what this field was initially, I fell for it almost immediately – the idea of asking whether there could be a genuine science of people and their communities fitted right into the very questions that made the 1990s so painful and so fascinating for me. I learned a lot from the course but the best part was meeting (my now husband) Robert Northcott. Among other good things together we concocted a fateful application for funding at the Open Society Institute and this is what enabled me to start PhD program in Philosophy and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. At UCSD I got the thorough and deep education that I longed for and from some wonderful teachers. Perhaps the most influential among them was Nancy Cartwright who encouraged me to stick to my guns (the guns being philosophy of social science) even as I felt professional pressure to do ‘core’ philosophy. Nancy taught me to immerse myself into a science so deeply as to be able to see philosophical problems from the inside. I remember spending a lot of time in the departments of economics and political science and overhearing condescending jokes about sociologists. This was a crucial moment that gave me a better understanding of why rational choice models were so important to economists and political scientists. They justified their feelings of superiority. My dissertation argued that although game theorists got the credit for successes in mechanism design, it was in fact the experimental economists that deserve this credit at least equally. Out of a case study on design of spectrum auctions arose a general philosophical account of the nature and role of formal models in empirical research. I believe that for too long philosophers of science have gone out of their way to show that despite their very many weaknesses idealized deductive models are nevertheless very powerful in such and such ways. It’s high time to recognise that these models play only a limited heuristic role when it comes to real epistemic goods such as explanation and stop spending our smarts on trying to justify practices that scientists often hold on to largely for reasons of power and so that they could poke fun of sociologists who don’t build models. Towards the end of my dissertation time Nancy pointed me toward a fascinating debate about measurement of happiness and well-being. Although after graduating from UCSD I was mostly publishing on economic models, the former quickly took over as my main research interest. My first teaching job was in University of Missouri St Louis, where I had generous and brilliant colleagues all around the city and where I learned most of what I know about the science of well-being. Dan Haybron of SLU, whose work on happiness I admire the most, was a big influence. I brought my philosophy of science temperament to this topic and in my recent book A Philosophy for the Science of Well-being (which I wrote after moving to Cambridge England in 2011) is not about what well-being or happiness really are, but rather about what sort of scientific knowledge it is possible to have about them. This book has both optimistic and pessimistic streaks. It is optimistic against the critics for whom well-being is too personal, too mysterious, and too complex to be an object of science. Such arguments are common throughtout history of science and should be treated with suspicion. But equally – and that’s the pessimistic bit – when well-being becomes an object of science it is redefined and this redefinition makes scientific claims about it far less applicable to individual deliberation about how to live than positive psychologists would have us believe Links of Interest: Series of posts on the science of well-being at Brains Blog “Does anyone know what mental health is?” OUP Blog “The Meaning of It All (with Anna Alexandrova)” Black Goat podcast Quick review note of A Philosophy for the Science of Well-being “Who is the expert on your well-being?” OUP Blog “Towards a Theory of Child Well-being: Podcast Interview with Anna Alexandrova” “Value-Added Science: Anna Alexandrova on value judgments and measurement of well-being” AMA Please feel free to post questions for Doctor Alexandrova here. She will look at this thread before she starts and begin with some questions from here while the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join me in welcoming Doctor Anna Alexandrova to our community!

The reach of genomics is wide-ranging and can touch on many different aspects of society from forensics, to how we understand our ancestry, to the promise of precision medicine for all individuals and populations. When the Human Genome Project was launched in 1990, the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications Research Program at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI – we’re one of the 27 institutes and centers that make up the NIH) was launched alongside it, with the anticipation that once we started generating massive amounts of human genomic data, there’d be lots of societal factors to consider. Now that the Human Genome Project has been completed and researchers and clinicians are sequencing human genomes faster than ever, considering the societal implications of genomic data and what we can learn from it is even more crucial. With great amounts of data comes great responsibility to use the data in an ethical and effective way. We’re experts in these types of issues and we want to know what questions you have about how genomic data can impact your medical care, your interpretation of your ancestry, or just your everyday life. Our research program covers a range of issues, but here are some questions to jumpstart your curiousity and help you come up with your own! How do we incorporate race or ethnicity in genomics research, and how does self- reported race, ethnicity, or ancestry change how we are prescribed meds and cared for by our doctors? What ethical considerations do we need to think about in genomic testing of newborns? How should direct-to- consumer genomic tests, like 23andMe be regulated, used and marketed? What privacy protections are in place when sharing your genetic information? Can my genomic information be used to discriminate against me? What’s the deal with CRISPR gene-editing system? What kinds of questions do new technologies like CRISPR raise? We want to know what you’re curious about, so ask us anything! Your hosts today are: Lawrence Brody, Ph.D., division director in the Division of Genomics and Society at NHGRI Joy Boyer, B.A., program director in the Division of Genomics and Society at NHGRI Dave Kaufman, Ph.D., program director in the Division of Genomics and Society at NHGRI Nicole Lockhart, Ph.D., program director in the Division of Genomics and Society at NHGRI Cristina Kapustij, M.S., chief of the Policy and Program Analysis Branch in the Division of Policy, Communications and Education at NHGRI Sonya Jooma, M.A., health policy analyst in the Policy and Program Analysis Branch in the Division of Policy, Communications and Education at NHGRI Rebecca Hong, B.S., program analyst in the Policy and Program Analysis Branch in the Division of Policy, Communications and Education at NHGRI Relevant links: Learn more about the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) Research Program: https://www.genome.gov/elsi/ And if you want more inspiration to come up with questions, here’s a longer list of the types of research we support: https://www.genome.gov/27543732/elsi-research- domains/ UPDATE: Wow, thanks for all the really fantastic questions, Reddit-ers! We had so much fun answering them and are just wrapping up. Happy Monday, all!

Hi Reddit! I am Dr. Izumi Tabata, a professor at Ritsumeikan University Graduate School of Sport and Health Science in Japan. More than 20 years ago, I reported that high-intensity interval training (HIIT) improves aerobic and anaerobic energy releasing capacity in this research article. Thereafter, this protocol was termed “Tabata Training” and has become popular among the fitness community. AMA!

Hello Reddit! I’m Charles Day and I’m the editor-in- chief of Physics Today. The magazine goes out every month to the 100,000 members of the 10 professional societies that belong to the American Institute of Physics. We cover all of physics and its related sciences at a technical level that all physicists can understand. Physics Today also has a comprehensive website, which I encourage you to visit, and a thriving presence on social media. My main responsibilities as editor-in- chief include identifying topics and authors for our expert-written feature articles, editing news stories, writing a monthly editorial, and managing a team of 10 editors. Before I joined Physics Today I worked as an X-ray astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where helped to run two satellite observatories, ASCA and RXTE. I also studied the million-degree plasmas that swirl around black holes and neutron stars. I’m happy to answer questions about physics, science journalism, the impact of physics on society and the portrayal of physics in the media. I’ll start fielding questions at 1pm EST. AMA!

At the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, we will be delivering a presentation entitled “Research and Policy on Voter ID Laws and Voter Participation.” During that session, we’ll discuss the science on voter suppression, the statistical impact of voter ID laws, and procedures for assuring that all eligible voters have a chance to vote. David Marker will describe how as expert witness survey data were included, or excluded, in Voter ID cases in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Alabama. Paul Gronke will discuss the procedures states are implementing to maximize the chance that eligible voters will indeed be able to vote. If you have a question about how states are using technology either to boost or suppress voter participation, ask us anything! Participants: Paul Gronke, professor of political science, director of the Early Voting Information Center, Reed College, Portland, Ore. Automatic Works: The Gains to Voter Registration and Turnout from Oregon Motor Voter David Marker, senior statistician, Westat, Rockville, Md. Making Sure the Data are Heard: Expert Statistical Testimony in Voter ID Trials

Hi, I’m Dr. Anne Carpenter, I lead a computational research group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. My Ph.D. is in cell biology and my lab’s expertise is in developing and applying algorithms and software for extracting information from biological images. My team’s open-source CellProfiler software is used by thousands of biologists worldwide, and is accelerating the discovery of new medicines. We’re passionate about developing tools to speed up research and discover cures to diseases. Nucleus detection is a very important part of this process because most of the human body’s 30 trillion cells contain a nucleus full of DNA, the genetic code that programs each cell. Identifying nuclei allows researchers to identify each individual cell in a sample, and by measuring how cells react to various treatments, the researcher can understand the underlying biological processes at work. This year’s Data Science Bowl is challenging teams to automate the process of identifying nuclei in images, to allow for more efficient drug testing (right now it takes ~10 years for a new drug to come to market!) Check out my 5 minute video introduction to the challenge. My team (including yours truly!) hand-annotated more than 20,000 nuclei for the data challenge - we think it was worth it to solve this challenge. My lab’s focus has been on deep learning algorithms and we’d love someone to beat our best efforts! Thanks for caring about the intersection of computer science and biology! You can catch me anytime on Twitter, and I’m here from 12-1PM to answer your questions about the challenge, my lab’s work, and being a scientist. Ask me anything! Thank you all for joining me today! I’m done! There’s still plenty of time to register and compete in the 2018 Data Science Bowl focused on algorithms to spot nuclei. The winning algorithms will be released to the community. Stay connected or join the competition by visiting DataScienceBowl.com. You can also learn more at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference: March 26 to 29th in San Jose, CA Booz Allen Hamilton will be hosting a Business Track focused on AI for Social Good as an Innovation Driver, Tuesday, March 27th. Thanks again for joining!

In a year where we experienced record-breaking forest fires, floods, hurricanes, heat waves, and cold spells, one can’t help but wonder - in what ways is climate change already impacting American communities? Are the extreme weather events that the US has endured in the recent past indicative of climate change, or are the just a run of bad luck? If they are, how should we expect them to change in the future? But most importantly - how do we communicate the complexities of these answers to the public? To answer these questions and more, we’ve assembled a group of scientists who have dedicated significant effort to collaborate with other like-minded researchers and put together documents such as the National Climate Assessment and the Climate Sciences Special Report. Panelists Katharine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist whose research focuses on understanding what climate change means for people and the places where we live. She is a professor and directs the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University and has been named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People and Fortune’s 50 World’s Greatest Leaders. David Easterling is a Supervisory Physical Scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NOAA/NCEI) in Asheville, North Carolina. David received his Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and served as an Assistant Professor in the Atmospheric Sciences Program, Department of Geography, Indiana University-Bloomington from 1987 to 1990. In 1990 he moved to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center as a climate scientist, He has authored or co-authored more than 90 research articles and book chapters on climate science. David was a Lead Author on the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, the IPCC Special Report on Climate Extremes, the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, and a Convening Lead Author for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) Synthesis and Assessment Product (SAP) 3.3 on Climate Extremes. He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, and has been awarded four NOAA Administrator’s Awards, and three NOAA Bronze Medals. 3:56 PM (CST) - Hi all, we’re jumping into your questions now! David Easterling is joining us on the floor of the American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting, and Katharine Hayhoe is joining us online. We’re excited for the discussion! 5:00 PM (CST) - We’ve just about finished answering most of people’s questions. Please feel free to reach out to us if you have any more!

It seems that every time a significant weather event is forecast, there’s a race to hype its impacts and severity on social media in order to catch eyeballs. But what was once limited to competitive TV stations in a broadcast market has spilled over to social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, where people can freely share “doomsday” forecasts, regardless of where they come from. After all, the ECMWF is the best model in the world, so its 10-day forecast of a 4 foot snowfall must be reliable, right? How are meteorologists trying to cut through this noise and provide the public with the best, most relevant and actionable information possible? We’ve invited several expert weather communicators who served the public during life-threatening situations in this past year to help shed some light on this problem by sharing personal stories on what challenges they faced and what steps they’re taking - and that the broader public should be aware of - to better inform the public in the age of information overload. Panelist Info: John Morales is the Chief Meteorologist for the NBC station in Miami. He’s the longest tenured weather presenter in South Florida, having spent 27 years on both Spanish and English language stations, and covering many-a-#bombcyclone like Hurricanes Andrew, Wilma, Matthew and Irma. Yet he’s known as a non-alarmist. Could he keep cool even when record-setting hurricanes were threatening in 2017, or did he give in to the hype? Tim Heller is an AMS Certified Broadcast Meteorologist with 34 years on-air experience. He is currently the Chief Meteorologist at KTRK ABC13 in Houston. When Hurricane Harvey dumped torrential rain over the course of several days and homes filled with water, Heller used social media and on-air broadcasts to keep the public informed on the progress of the storm. Heller believes the key to successful communication on social media is to build a trusting relationship with followers over time, avoid using headline grabbing phrases like “Bomb Cyclone” and limiting the use of exclamation points. 4:10 (CST) - We’re live! Join us on twitter, too - @HellerWeather and @JohnMoralesNBC6 5:05 (CST) - Alrighty /r/science, we think we got to everyone who asked a question! Thanks for all of your interesting comments and questions - we’re going to jump back into the American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting, but please feel free to continue the discussion with us on Twitter!

Hi Reddit, we are Karen Swartz, M.D., a psychiatrist and founder of the Adolescent Depression Awareness Program (ADAP) at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland and Holly Wilcox, PhD, a public health researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who led the randomized controlled trial to evaluate ADAP’s effectiveness in high schools. We are excited to discuss the importance of depression education and high school students and the potential to facilitate young people receiving treatment following our program. Depression is estimated to affect over 10% of teens in the United States. In addition to interrupting functioning socially, academically, and emotionally, untreated depression dramatically increases the risk of suicide in adolescents. Recognizing and treating depression is an effective strategy for preventing suicide among teenagers. Karen and colleagues in the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins developed the Adolescent Depression Awareness Program (ADAP), a three-hour curriculum to educate high school students about depression typically taught in health classes. Holly led an independent assessment of the program’s effectiveness and designed the study. In our study, schools were randomly assigned to receive the program in either year one or year two so that the effectiveness of the program could be compared between these two groups. Over 6,000 students from 54 schools in five states participated. Our study demonstrated that there is a significant change in knowledge about depression following the program; this improvement in knowledge was sustained at a four month follow-up. Importantly, 46% of teachers reported that a student spoke to them about getting help for themselves her friend following the program. Our results were published in the December 2017 issue of the American Journal of Public Health. We are excited to be working together to bring depression education to more students across the country. In addition to our ongoing expansion of the high school program, we are working to develop a new depression education program for middle school programs. We look forward to answering your questions at 1pm ET Jan 8th

Water scarcity poses a severe threat to all humankind, with rapidly growing demand pressuring already-constrained water resources, many of which are unsustainable. Figuring out where our water ends up is therefore a crucial step toward finding ways to use it more efficiently and try to ensure that we, as a species, are still around a few generations from now. Dr Neil Stacey is a young researcher previously known for best known for patented advances in bio-fuels production technology. In late 2016 he set out to use chemical engineering modeling methods to examine water usage in agriculture, which comprises 70% of all of mankind’s water consumption. Professor Diane Hildebrandt lent her considerable support to the project soon after. She is a director of UNISA’s IDEAS institute. She has been the recipient of a number of prestigious scientific awards including the Meiring Naude Medal, the Bill Neale-May Gold Medal, the Distinguished Woman Scientist Award and an AfricanUnion Scientific Award. She has been the author or co-author of over one hundred and fifty peer-reviewed scientific publications including three textbooks and an invited paper in Science. By building chemical and thermal models of greenhouses as bio-reactors, we have been able to develop fundamental insights into cause-and-effect relationships in greenhouse design and operation. We found that greenhouse operation is constrained by the necessity of supplying adequate CO2 for photosynthesis. Since CO2 is highly dilute, this constraint demands a very high air-flow through a greenhouse which in turn causes excessive water evaporation and heat losses. Consequently, providing enriched CO2 can drastically reduce the heat and water requirements of a greenhouse. In a paper currently in the final stages of review, we showed that using membrane separation to partially enrich air as a feed can cut water usage considerably. We also investigated the possibility of using power station flue gas as a source of enriched CO2. In a recent paper, we quantified the potential costs and benefits of diverting flue gases from gas-fired power stations into greenhouses, finding that this approach can achieve large-scale carbon capture without costly separation, while massively boosting agricultural output and drastically reducing water requirements. And so, we are here to field your questions as we advocate for putting greenhouse gases into actual greenhouses. We’ll be back at 12 pm ET to answer your questions, Ask Us Anything! Edit: Diane is awaiting a plane to Johannesburg, while Neil is out for a drink at South-West London’s best bar, Dutch Courage, so there will be a bit of a go-slow here until Neil is back home, around 2pm ET.

The mods of /r/philosophy are pleased to announce an upcoming AMA by Hilary Lawson, Director of the Institute of Art and Ideas, Founder of the HowTheLightGetsIn philosophy festival and Vice Chair of the LSE Forum for European Philosophy. Hilary Lawson will be joining us on Monday January 8th at 1PM EST to discuss issues in post-realist philosophy, metaphysics and his work with public philosophy. Hear it from him: Hilary Lawson Hi reddit, I’m Hilary Lawson - post-realist philosopher, director of the Institute of Art and Ideas and founder of the world’s largest philosophy and music festival HowTheLightGetsIn. Born and raised in Bristol, England, I was awarded a scholarship to study PPE at Balliol College Oxford . As a post-graduate I came to see paradoxes of self-reference as the central philosophical issue and began a DPhil on The Reflexivity of Discourse. This later became the basis for my first philosophical book Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament. Alongside my more philosophical writing, I also pursued a media career following my studies. Within a few years I had created my own prime time television series ‘Where There’s Life’ with a weekly UK audience in excess of ten million. In 1982, I went on to co-author a book based on the series and was appointed Editor of Programmes and later Deputy Chief Executive at the television station TV-am. Meanwhile I continued to develop my philosophical thinking and had initial sketches of the theory later to become Closure. In 1985 I wrote Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament as part of a series on modern European thought. In the book, I argued that the paradoxes of self-reference are central to philosophy and drive the writings of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. In the late 1980s I founded the production company TVF Media which made documentary and current affairs programming, including Channel 4’s flagship international current affairs programme, The World This Week. I was editor of the programme, which ran weekly between 1987 and 1991. The programme predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, the war in Yugoslavia and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, amongst its other laudable achievements. In the 1990s, I focused on writing Closure. It took a decade to complete and was published in 2001. The book has been described as the first non-realist metaphysics. Having begun my philosophical career as a proponent of postmodernism, latterly I became a critic arguing for the necessity of an overall framework and the need to move on from a focus on language. Closure proposes that the human condition is to find ourselves on the cusp of openness and closure. The world is open and we, along with other living organisms, are able to apprehend and make sense of it through the process of closure. I would define closure as the holding of that which is different as one and the same. Human experience is seen to be the result of successive layers of closure, which I consider to be preliminary, sensory and inter-sensory closure. The highest level of closure, inter-sensory closure realises language and thought. The theory shifts the focus of philosophy away from language and towards an exploration of the relationship between openness and closure. An important element of the theory of closure is its own self-referential character. I founded the Institute of Art and Ideas in 2008 with the aim of making ideas and philosophy a central part of cultural life. Our website IAI.tv, which posts to the sub, was launched in 2011. We then moved to publishing articles in 2013 and free philosophy courses on IAI Academy in 2014. Links of Interest: Routledge has partnered with the IAI to offer a generous 20% off all their philosophy books and a free giveaway each month. Click here for details. Tickets and lineup for HowTheLightGetsIn 2018 can be found here - discounts available for students and U25s. After the End of Truth: A debate with Hannah Dawson (KCL) and John Searle (Berkeley) on objective truth and alternative facts What Machines Can’t Do | Hilary Lawson in debate with David Chalmers (NYU) and cognitive scientist and sex robot expert Kate Devlin (Goldsmiths) on the question of machine minds After Relativism: A debate on the pitfalls of relativism and potential solutions with Simon Blackburn and Michela Massimi AMA Please feel free to post questions for Hilary Lawson here. He will look at this thread before he starts and begin with some questions from here while the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join us in welcoming Hilary Lawson to our community!

Only 15% of the surface of the Earth is not water, desert, ice or mountain. For humans, a tropical, low altitude, air-breathing animal, this means most of the planet represents a hostile or extreme environment. Extreme environmental physiology covers a wide range of topics including: physiologically preparing groups such as elite athletes to try and maintain high level performance in hot and cold environments, using strategies such as acclimatisation; considering using altitude training and heat acclimation as ergogenic aids to enhance performance in temperate sea level conditions; determining the benefit of cross-adaptation between one extreme environment and another; protecting, via technological solutions (e.g. personal protective equipment), those who, as part of their work or play, enter extreme environments (e.g. astronauts, divers, firefighters, sailors, the military). Our habitation of the planet has been largely enabled by technological advances (clothing, shelter, heating) founded on intellect. But sometimes this technology goes wrong requiring extreme environmental research related to accidental exposures and the consequent pathophysiology of heat illness, cold injury, hypothermia; hypoxia, barotrauma and drowning. These are not just “niche issues”; forty-three people around the globe drown each hour. These are mostly young people and this figure is an under-estimation. Finally, research in extreme environments such as microgravity and hypoxia is also shedding new light on areas such as ageing, body tissue wasting and outcome in critical illness. If any of the above interests you, let’s chat on the 19th December 4-6pm (GMT).

Ask us about NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope’s latest discovery, which was made using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new ways of analyzing Kepler data. Please post your questions here. We’ll be online from 12:00-1:30 pm PT (3:00-4:30 pm ET, 20:00-21:30 UTC), and will sign our answers. Ask us anything! Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington Christopher Shallue, senior software engineer at Google AI in Mountain View, California Andrew Vanderburg, astronomer and NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of Texas, Austin Jessie Dotson, Kepler project scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley Kartik Sheth, program scientist, Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington UPDATE (10:44 am PT): Today, December 14, 2017, researchers announced our solar system now is tied for most number of planets around a single star, with the recent discovery of an eighth planet circling Kepler-90, a Sun-like star 2,545 light years from Earth. The planet was discovered in data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope. For more info about the discovery, visit https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/artificial-intelligence-and-nasa-data-used-to-discover-eighth-planet-circling-distant The newly-discovered Kepler-90i –a sizzling hot, rocky planet that orbits its star once every 14.4 days – was found using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence in which computers “learn.” In this case, computers learned to identify planets by finding in Kepler data instances where the telescope recorded signals from planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets. The discovery came about after researchers Andrew Vanderburg and Christopher Shallue trained a computer to learn how to identify exoplanets in the light readings recorded by Kepler – the miniscule change in brightness captured when a planet passed in front of, or transited, a star. Inspired by the way neurons connect in the human brain, this artificial “neural network” sifted through Kepler data and found weak transit signals from a previously-missed eighth planet orbiting Kepler-90, in the constellation Draco. We’ll be back to answer your questions at 12 pm PT. Ask us anything! UPDATE (1:40 pm PT): That’s all the time we have for today. Thanks for joining us. To learn more about NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, visit www.nasa.gov/kepler. Follow us on social media at https://twitter.com/nasakepler and https://www.facebook.com/NASAsKeplerMission/. Proof: https://twitter.com/NASAKepler/status/941406190046552065

I am Jonardon Ganeri, Professor of Philosophy, Arts and Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi. I studied Mathematics at Cambridge, including an MMath in Theoretical Physics, before turning to Philosophy, which I studied first at King’s College London followed by doctoral work in Oxford under the supervision of Bimal Matilal and John Campbell. I taught for many years at various universities in Britain, and I have been a visiting professor at the Universities of Chicago, JNU Delhi, Kyunghee Seoul, EHESS Paris, and UPenn, and a Fellow of Clare Hall Cambridge. I now make a living doing teaching for NYU in its global network, but also have visiting positions at King’s College London and the School of Oriental and African Studies. You can read a bit more about me in this interview in 3:AM magazine. And I have made a lot of my writings available on academia.edu. With roots in Britain and India, my work has focussed primarily on a retrieval of the Sanskrit philosophical tradition in relationship to contemporary analytical philosophy, and I have done work in this vein on theories of self, concepts of rationality, and the philosophy of language, as well as on the idea of philosophy as a practice and its relationship with literature. I have also worked extensively on the social and intellectual history of early modern South Asia and on the socio-political concept of identity. One of my areas of interest has to do with the nature of the human being as a place of selfhood and subjectivity, and of the person as a category of moral identity and social importance. Through a retrieval of theory from first millennial India, I have sought to show that Indian conceptions of the human subject have a richness and diversity that can enable modern thinkers to move beyond the traditional oscillation between materialism and dualism, an oscillation that has dominated and restricted philosophical understandings of human subjecthood. Another area of interest is in the nature of modernity. I believe that we should move away from a “centre/periphery” model that sees modernity as an originally European discovery which propagated out to other parts of the world; rather, there have been many geographical locations of distinct forms of modernity at different times. Over the last few years I have made an extensive study of one particular location, the early modernity of ‘new reason’ philosophers in Vārāṇasī and Navadvīpa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My book about this, The Lost Age of Reason, as been well-received and generated a new appreciation of the philosophical richness of this period, when a Sanskit cosmopolis and a Persian cosmopolis encountered each other for the first time. Recently I have been working on the notion of attention and connection between attention and subjectivity. I have just published a book about this, Attention, Not Self already available in Europe and out in the States next February. The book draws 6th century Buddhist theories about attention into conversation with contemporary philosophy and cognitive science. I argue for cosmopolitanism in philosophy, the view that philosophy must of necessity make appeal to a plurality of intellectual cultures if it is to avoid parochialism in the intuitions that guide it and the vocabularies in which it is phrased. I think we need new kinds of philosophical institution to make this happen. It’s also very important that there is a reform of the university curriculum in philosophy, to make it richer though a proper representation of all the world’s philosophical heritage. I have been very busy, recently, preparing a range of teaching and self-study materials for Indian Philosophy. I just published, after 5 years work, the Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy, I’ve been collaborating with Peter Adamson on a series of podcasts about Indian philosophy in his wonderful Philosophy Without Any Gaps series, and I brought out a four-volume collection of essential secondary literature in the field with Routledge. So if you want to get your knowledge about the world of Indian philosophy up to speed, some combination of these resources will hopefully do the trick. Links of Interest: “Conceptions of Self: An Analytical Taxonomy” - first chapter from The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance Interview at 3:AM Magazine Short piece at Aeon: “The Tree of Knowledge is not an apple or an oak but a banyan” Interview at Current Science NYT interview: ”What Would Krishna Do? Or Shiva? Or Vishna? My books. OUP has been kind enough to offer a 30% discount on all of these by using discount code AAFLYG6 at checkout at the OUP website. Attention, Not Self The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness and the First Person Stance The Concealed Art of the Soul: Theories of Self and Practices of Truth in Indian Ethics and Epistemology The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–1700 Semantic Powers The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy

Hi Reddit, my name is Siobhán Cooke, and I’m an anatomy professor and paleontologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. My research (mostly) focuses on two things: 1) The evolution and eventual extinction of the native mammals of the Caribbean region including monkeys, giant sloths, rodents, and tiny (and not so tiny) shrews. Recently, my colleagues and I published a paper demonstrating that humans likely played a role in the extinction of many of these animals just 6000 years ago. (http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-110316-022754). 2) Teeth and jaws! Often all paleontologists find in the fossil record are teeth, and so we use a variety of modeling methods to get as much information out of them as possible. Some of this information is even applicable to understanding how our own teeth and jaws function. I also spend much of my time during the late summer and early fall teaching human anatomy to our medical students. Ever wonder what it is like to try to recover fossils from caves? Why do paleontologists care about teeth so much? And what does any of this have to do with teaching a gross anatomy to medical students? I look forward to having you Ask Me Anything on December 11th, 1 PM ET.

Hello, we are scientists from the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta Canada. The Royal Tyrrell Museum is Canada’s only museum dedicated exclusively to the science of paleontology and has one of the world’s largest collections of fossils, with over 160,000 specimens in our research collection. Dr. Donald Henderson is the Curator of Dinosaurs. Donald’s research focus is all about dinosaurs. His research has focused on a variety of different subjects, such as the rates of fossil erosion in Dinosaur Provincial Park, biomechanical comparison of the bite force and skull strengths in ceratopsian dinosaurs, and dinosaur buoyancy. Dr. Caleb Brown is the Betsy Nicholls Post-Doctoral Fellow. Caleb’s research investigates taphonomy, specifically the role of depositional environments in shaping our understanding of ancient ecosystems, and the morphological variation in the horns and ornamentation structures of horned dinosaurs. In 2011, a worker at the SUNCOR Millennium Mine near Fort McMurray unearthed a significant specimen and contacted the Museum. We dispatched a team to extract it and discovered that it was a dinosaur. This was unusual because the rock around Fort McMurray is part of the Clearwater Formation, which is the sediment of an inland sea that covered Alberta during the Cretaceous Period. Generally, only fossils of marine reptiles and other marine species are found in that area. We discovered that the specimen was a nodosaur, a type of armoured dinosaur that does not have a tail club. It took five and a half years to prepare the specimen and it is the best preserved armoured dinosaur ever found, as well as being the oldest dinosaur known from Alberta at approximately 112 million years old. Named Borealopelta markmitchelli, this nodosaur is preserved in 3-Dimensions with the body armour and scales in place, as well as organic residues that were once part of the skin, giving us an idea what it looked like when alive. National Geographic has done a 3D interactive model of the specimen that shows you how well preserved this specimen is. We assembled a research team with colleagues from the US and UK, bringing in geochemists to help analyze the fossil skin. Geochemical tests showed an abundance of preserved organic molecules. Among them is benzothiazole, a component of the pigment pheomelanin, suggesting that Borealopelta might have been reddish-brown when alive. These findings were published in Current Biology this past August and are open access. New research by Caleb published in PeerJ (open access) on November 29, analyzes the bony cores and keratinous sheaths that make up the body armour. Due to the unique preservation of soft tissue, Caleb was able to analyze the relation between the horn core and the keratinous sheath, and compare the horn sheaths to the horns of living mammals and lizards. Ask us anything about Borealopelta, our research, palaeontology, dinosaurs, or the Royal Tyrrell Museum! We will be back at 2 p.m. EST to answer questions. EDIT: Thank you for all your questions! We will be checking back over the next week to answer any new ones.

Hi! We’re a trio of researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , home to people who invent brain-controlled robots, the World Wide Web, and a real version of that recipe-suggesting AI from “Silicon Valley”.   Given that it’s Computer Science Education Week and that so many students are participating in the “Hour of Code”, we thought it’d be fun to chat with you guys and share more about what we do and what it’s like to be at MIT CSAIL. Feel free to ask us questions about (almost) anything, including but not limited to:   Why computer science is amazing How we got into programming What we think about all day   We’ll be online starting at 3pm EST!   Here’s a bit about each of us with relevant links, etc.:   Tao Du Attended undergrad at Tsinghua University. Researches computer graphics, robotics, and fabrication. Wrote software to test customizable drones. Plays soccer every week whenever time and weather permits.   Alyssa Pierson Postdoc at MIT PHD from Boston University, undergrad at Harvey Mudd College Researches coordination and control of multi-robot systems Avid scuba diver   Andrew Spielberg Attended undergrad at Cornell University Researches improving the fabrication of robots and 3D-printable robots Interned at Disney Has a cat   Ask away!   Requisite disclaimer: we are by no means speaking for MIT or CSAIL in any official capacity!