Nice to virtually meet you, Reddit. I’m Dr. Gary Brunette, Travelers’ Health Branch Chief at CDC. Hi, I’m Dr. Jeff Nemhauser, Chief Medical Officer with CDC’s Travelers’ Health Branch. I’m Dr. Ali Walker, Epidemiologist with CDC Travelers’ Health Branch. Zika virus (or Zika) is still a risk in many parts of the world. Zika is spread primarily through mosquito bites, but it can also spread through sex. A pregnant woman can pass Zika to her fetus, which can cause serious birth defects. Many people infected with Zika won’t have symptoms or will only have mild symptoms. For this reason, if you travel to an area with risk of Zika, you can be infected with Zika and not know it. Guys: You can pass Zika to your partner through sex, even months after infection. This means Zika is a concern not only for women who are pregnant or may become pregnant, but also for their partners who’ve been in areas with risk of Zika. If you travel to an area with risk of Zika, there are steps you should take to prevent getting Zika and passing it to your partner – especially if she is pregnant or may become pregnant. We are here to answer your questions and concerns and to clear up any confusion about how you can protect yourself and the ones you love against Zika, both during and after travel. Ask us anything! We’ll be back at 1:00 p.m. and will do our best to answer as many of your questions as possible! Additional Resources: · Visit our page for men and Zika: https://www.cdc.gov/zika/men/index.html · Zika travel information page: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/page/zika-travel-information · Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @CDCTravel! EDIT: We’re out of time, but we’d like to thank you all for your participation and your thoughtful questions. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @CDCTravel and like our page on Facebook! Thanks r/Science!

Hi reddit, My name is Michael Inzlicht and I am a professor at The University of Toronto. My research focuses on the topic of self-control and the related concepts of cognitive control and executive function. I recently published a study titled, “A pre-registered naturalistic observation of within domain mental fatigue and domain-general depletion of self-control” in PLOS ONE. In this paper, we monitored over 16,000 students as they engaged in voluntary learning on an online program to examine the impact of time-of-day and within-task fatigue on participation and performance. Contrary to models of self-control that suggest that self-control is domain general and runs out, we did not find that task engagement decreased at the end of the day. These findings join others (e.g., http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147770) that cast doubt on the notion that self-control is based on some finite resource that diminishes with use. I will be answering your questions at 1pm ET. Ask me Anything! Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @minzlicht!

ACS AMA Hello Reddit! My name is Warren Chan, and I am currently Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at The University of Toronto. I also serve as Associate Editor of ACS Nano. I am very much looking forward to my first time participating in Reddit. I obtained my B.S. from University of Illinois in 1996 and a PhD from Indiana University in 2001, both in Chemistry. Then I did my post-doctoral work at the University of California-San Diego in Biomedical Engineering and I joined the faculty at the University of Toronto in 2002 at the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering. I am interested in developing nanotechnology for diagnosing and treating cancer and infectious diseases. As a chemist, I learned how to make and design nanomaterials and as I started my independent career, I wanted to focus on applying these materials to the medical field. My interest can span two domains: (a) outside of the body, I am interested in developing handheld nanotechnology devices that can identify biomarkers and link them to diseases. These devices can also measure these biomarkers with a single drop of blood. (b) inside the body, I am interested in figuring out how to deliver nanoparticles to the diseased site. I think the biggest challenge of using nanotechnology is to be able to deliver enough of the medical agent to the site of action. I work with engineers, chemists, biologists, and clinicians to solve these problems. I would like forward to our discussion. Ask me anything about bionanotechnology! I’ll be back at 11am EDT (8am PDT, 3pm UTC) to start answering your questions. It has been awesome chatting with everybody on nanotechnology! I am signing off! Have an awesome day!

Hi Reddit, my name is Mark Bicket, M.D., I'm director of the Pain Medicine Fellowship training program at Hopkins. My research focuses on treatments of acute and chronic pain, including prescription opioids for pain and how those medications are taken by patients and supplied by prescribers. Recently, I led an investigation on what happens to opioids prescribed for pain after surgery in JAMA Surgery. Our team found that most opioid pills remained unused after patients recovered from their procedures, and most patients did not dispose of the unused pills. It's important to improve pain relief while balancing the risks and problems from opioids, as many of us know someone affected by the opioid crisis. I look forward to answering your questions at 1pm ET

Hi! We’re a group of Computer Scientists and Mathematicians working on an application to predict wildfires using machine learning and data analysis! We worked on the application part-time for 2 months, we were invited to Finland for the NASA Europa Challenge finals and we also won the Research Council UK’s Smart Cities Entrepeneurship Prize! Currently, we’re working with Greenpeace Russia to expand our application to several high risk areas in Russia, Brazil and Indonesia to hopefully help them prevent wildfires and save lives! We’re here to talk about our experience, answer any questions people might have and talk about what we plan on doing going forward. Questions will be answered by team members Vishal Soomaney, Peter Jupp and Flinn Dolman, we will be back at 10 am ET to answer your questions, AMA! You can check us out at: http://wildfireaware.co.uk/app/ Proof: https://www.cs.york.ac.uk/news-events/news/news2017/nasa-europa-challenge/ edit: We really enjoyed answering everyone’s questions! If anyone has any more questions, ideas or feedback, you can get in contact with us at wildfireaware@gmail.com . You can also watch us nervously talk about our app during the NASA Europa Challenge Finals here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNlA6yVuTYw A big thanks to the r/science mods for helping us arrange this AMA!

Hi Reddit, My name is Marinho Lopes and I am a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. And I’m Leandro Junges and I am a Research Fellow at the EPSRC centre for predictive modelling in healthcare at the University of Exeter. Our research focuses on the mechanisms of seizure emergence and on mathematical models to quantitatively predict whose brains regions are most responsible for seizure generation. Our group recently published a paper titled “An optimal strategy for epilepsy surgery: Disruption of the rich-club?” in PLOS Computational Biology. We used statistical methods to determine how different regions were connected from the electrical recordings of the brain. We then applied advanced mathematical modelling to study which regions of the brain contribute most greatly to generating seizures and whether their removal would result in the brain being seizure-free. The idea being that if brain surgeons targeted these regions the outcome of surgery would be enhanced. We will be answering your questions at 1pm ET– Ask Us Anything! Don’t forget to follow our group on Twitter @CBMA_UoE.

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I am Sarah Hörst, Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. I study planetary atmospheric chemistry and have spent most of my career trying to unravel the mysteries of Saturn’s largest moon Titan and much of my work has been inspired. My group also studies exoplanets, Europa, Saturn, Pluto, and Venus. We are use experiments, models, and analysis of telescope and spacecraft data to improve our understanding of the role atmospheres play in the origin and evolution of life and the habitability of a planet. We are trying to answer questions like how far can organic chemistry proceed in the absence of life? You can learn more about us and our work at www.sarahhorst.com. I hope to answer lots of questions about the solar system and how we study it. I will back at 1 pm ET to answer your questions, See you all soon!

We are the team behind Project Discovery - Exoplanets, a joint effort of Wolf Prize Winner Michel Mayor’s team at University of Geneva, CCP Games, Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS), and the University of Reykjavik. We successfully integrated a huge set of light data gathered from the CoRoT telescope into the massively multiplayer game EVE Online in order to allow players to help identify possible exoplanets through consensus. EVE players have made over 38.3 million classifications of light data which are being sent back to University of Geneva to be further verified, making the project remains one of the largest and most participated in citizen science efforts, peaking at over 88,000 per hour. This is the second version of Project Discovery, the first of which was a collaboration of the Human Protein Atlas to classify human proteins for scientific research. Joining today are Wayne Gould, Astronomer with a Master’s degree in Physics and Astrophysics who has been working at the Geneva Observatory since January and is responsible to prepare and upload all data used in the project Attila Szantner, Founder and CEO of Massively Multiplayer Online Science (http://mmos.ch/) Who founded the company in order to connect scientific research and video games as a seamless gaming experience. Hjalti Leifsson, Software Engineer from CCP Games, part of the team who is involved in integrating the data into EVE Online We’d love to answer questions about our respective areas of expertise, the search for exoplanets, citizen science (leveraging human brain power to tackle data where software falls short), developing a citizen science platform within a video game, how to pick science tasks for citizen science, and more. More information on Project Discovery: Exoplanets https://www.ccpgames.com/news/2017/eve-online-joins-search-for-real-exoplanets-with-project-discovery Video explanation of Project Discovery in EVE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12p-VhlFAG8 EDIT—WRAPPED UP Thanks to all of you for your questions, it has been a great experience hearing from the players side. Once again a big thanks to all of you who have participated in the project and made the effort of preparing all this data worth it. ~Wayne Thank you all for the interesting questions. It was my first Reddit AMA - was pretty intensive, and I loved it. And thanks for the amazing contributions in Project Discovery. ~Attila Thanks to the r/science mods and everyone who asked questions and has contributed to Project Discovery with classifications! We’re happy we can do this sort of thing FOR SCIENCE ~Hjalti and the CCP team.

Hi Reddit, We are Alan Scott, Ph.D., a geneticist and Associate Professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, and Stacie Robison, Ph.D., a research ecologist for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program at the Pacific Island Fisheries Science Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. We are bringing you this coast-to-coast AMA to talk about how knowing the genome of an organism can tell us a lot about their biology and help inform conservationists who work to protect endangered animals. Hawaiian monk seals are an endangered species unique to the Hawaiian archipelago (there are only about 1,400 left, and they don’t live anywhere else). Stacie works to increase our understanding of monk seals’ biology, the things that threaten them and the effectiveness of conservation efforts. Stacie studies everything about monk seals from what they eat, to how they breed, to how disease impacts them, to where they travel. Alan led the collaborative effort to develop a faster way to sequence the DNA of organisms at 1/100,000th of what it originally cost to sequence the human genome and started with the Monk Seal. The genome was publically released on July 7 by NCBI. We plan to use these new genomics techniques to sequence the genomes of many more endangered species. We are excited to be working together to help scientists understand the evolutionary history, genetic diversity and population trends in this species. We’ll be back at 1pm ET today to answer your questions.​

Hi, Reddit! I started out with a medical career in psychiatry but then shifted my focus to studying the cognition of dogs — man’s oldest and best friends. Five years ago, my lab became the first to train awake, alert dogs to voluntarily enter an fMRI scanner so that we could capture actual canine thought processes. We have since conducted studies such as how dogs react to praise from their owners versus food, how capable dogs are of self-restraint and what’s going on in a dog’s brain when it smells the scent of its owner. I want to understand the dog-human relationship, from the dog’s perspective. I have a new book, “What It’s Like to Be a Dog: And Other Adventures in Neuroscience,” published by Basic Books. It describes my canine-cognition research, as well as a project called the Brain Ark. I am using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to study the brains of a range of mammals after they have died. Many megafauna are in danger of extinction, and the Brain Ark is an attempt to catalog and study the brains of as many species as possible before they are gone. I’ve mapped the neural networks of dolphins, the Tasmanian devil and — using brain specimens from museum collections — the extinct Tasmanian tiger, AKA the thylacine. I’ll be back at 12 pm ET to answer your questions, ask me anything! Here are links to my web sites: http://www.neuropolicy.emory.edu/ http://gregoryberns.com http://brainark.org And are links to recent interviews I did: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/science/gregory-berns-dogs-brains.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share http://esciencecommons.blogspot.com/2017/09/whats-it-like-to-be-dog-cognition.html

Hi Reddit, My name is Selena Bartlett and I am a Professor of Neuroscience and Group Leader at the Translational Research Institute, Institute for Health and Biomedical Innovation at the Queensland University of QUT. My research focuses on developing innovative approaches to prevention and treatment of addictions. We focus on trying to develop strategies to help people overcome addiction to sugar that drives obesity and alcohol for alcoholism. And my name is Arnauld Belmer and I am postdoctoral researcher at the Queensland University of QUT. My research focuses on identifying the brain circuitry underlying the development of dependence and addiction, including to sugar or alcohol. My (Selena’s) laboratory focuses on dissecting the molecular signaling and neural circuitry pathways that have been changed by long-term overconsumption of sugar and/or alcohol. At the lab, we focus on two important areas associated with addiction, the amygdala that processes fear, stress and reward and the prefrontal cortex, that is important for impulse control and decision making. My lab has shown, that overconsumption of sucrose changes the neuronal circuitry in both the amygdala (which this paper is about) and the prefrontal cortex. The shocking finding for my lab, was that sugar changes the brain in exactly the same way that long-term consumption of alcohol does. Today, we will discuss the changes happening in the amygdala from overconsumption of sucrose. We hypothesize that these maladaptive changes in the BLA lead to changes in signalling activity in the amygdala, that is the basolateral amygdala becomes more sensitive to stress and fear signaling over the long-term. The consequence is that the reward/motivation circuits become down-regulated, this leads to people using high calorie rewards, such as sucrose, to reduce activity in the over-reactive amygdala. We recently published a paper titled Binge-like sucrose consumption reduces the dendritic length and complexity of principal neurons in the adolescent rat basolateral amygdala in PLOS ONE, showing that chronic binge-like sucrose consumption elicits maladaptive changes in the morphology of neurons in the amygdala. We will be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask Us Anything!

Hi Reddit! When most people think about producing electricity at a private business or residence, they think of solar panels on rooftops. This is one form of ‘distributed energy’ or distributed generation. Just like rooftop solar panel, distributed wind systems can also produce electricity that is consumed on site or locally. A growing number of business owners and homeowners are using distributed wind power, thanks to innovative business models and other trends – all documented in a report our team prepared for the Department of Energy. What is distributed wind power? It is wind power generated near where it will be used rather than being generated at large wind farms and then transmitted to the power grid. Distributed wind can range from a small, solitary turbine at a remote cabin to several large turbines powering a manufacturing facility. I like to call distributed wind “clean, homegrown energy.” ** Thank you Reddit, I’ve enjoyed fielding your questions and will check back in later to follow up on these threads. Once again, the Department of Energy’s Distributed Wind Market Report is at http://energy.gov/eere/wind/downloads/2016-distributed-wind-market-report. I also encourage you to follow PNNL on Facebook at www.facebook.com/PNNLgov and Twitter at @PNNLab and for more energy-focused topics on Twitter, @energyPNNL. You’ll also find PNNL on Google+ and LinkedIn. Thanks!

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Hi reddit! Thank you so much for your excellent questions today. I’m sorry I didn’t get to answer all of them, but I will try to come back later today to answer those I missed. I hope it was as enjoyable for you as it was for me. I am Lan Yang, an electrical engineering professor at Washington University in St. Louis. My interests are in transforming the research discoveries in fundamental science to technologies that could benefit the society and improve the quality of life. My research has centered around high-quality optical microresonators, which could significantly enhance light-matter interactions and therefore triggers many interesting physics. The research in my group falls in two categories: one is about fundamental understanding of interesting physics in high-quality optical resonators, and the other is to seek applications enabled by such a structure, such as sensing — particularly, nanoscale sensing — which have a direct impact on broad applications from environmental monitoring to early disease diagnosis and health care. A few years ago, we developed an on-chip sensor that could detect and measure the size of individual nanoparticles. Recently, my group has made some progress in unconventional control of light flow in optical structures by exploiting special features associated with parity-time-symmetry and exceptional points. It’s not surprising that fundamental science doesn’t show a direct connection to applications. But when opportunities come, it’s natural for us to combine these two directions. This time, we are developing a new sensing technology by using a special feature associated with a resonator when it’s operated around exceptional points.

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Hello Reddit, My name is Jackson Champer and I am postdoc at Cornell. My research focuses on gene drives, which are genes designed to spread rapidly through populations. A successful gene drive in mosquitoes could help fight vector borne diseases such as malaria and dengue. Together with my coauthors, I recently published a study titled “Novel CRISPR/Cas9 gene drive constructs reveal insights into mechanisms of resistance allele formation and drive efficiency in genetically diverse populations” in PLOS Genetics. We found that resistance alleles, which prevent the spread of the gene drive, can form in both the germline and in the embryo stages in fruit flies. We utilized the nanos promoter for better gene drive performance, and we also found that gene drive could produce greater or smaller numbers of resistance alleles, depending on the genetic background of the insect. Since our PLOS Genetics article was submitted, we have taken the first steps towards reducing resistance allele formation. A preprint of our new results is available on bioRxiv I will be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask me Anything! I also post occasional research updates and links to gene drive papers on Twitter, follow me @Jackson_Champer.

ACS AMA Hi Reddit! I’m Alexa Billow. I’m a writer for ACS Reactions https://www.youtube.com/user/ACSReactions, a YouTube show about chemistry from the American Chemical Society and PBS Digital Studios. We make fun zany videos about everything from the chemistry of wine myths to how astronaut pee could help us get to Mars (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6x54zYuqXk). I’m also a freelance science writer whose work has appeared on SciShow and the Science Magazine YouTube channel and podcast. I’m also working on a new podcast effort for ACS, so if you want to head on over to http://bit.ly/rxnselements and tell us what you’d like to hear, I’d totally love that. I have a master’s degree in molecular biology that was meant to be a Ph.D. until I realized I can’t stand doing research and would rather be writing. That doesn’t mean that research isn’t important–just that people who are more patient than me should be doing it. I moved to Washington for an internship at Science and then joined ACS, and I love getting to write about science every day. Ask me anything about science writing, podcasting, writing about chemistry as a biologist, or finding your way to a career in science communication. I’ll be back at 1pm EDT (10am PDT, 5pm UTC) to start answering your questions. -ACS typeset edits EDIT: I have to run to a meeting! Thanks for all the great questions, everyone.

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Extreme temperature and precipitation events are often driven by unusual patterns in atmospheric circulation such as strong high and low pressure systems. Learning about these large-scale meteorological patterns improves our understanding of the physical mechanisms that cause extremes at local scales. Furthermore, because most climate models are challenged at resolving extremes at local scales, we can use the associated large-scale patterns as a way to analyze extremes in all climate models. In the Portland State University Climate Science Lab, one of our main focus areas is on gaining a better understanding of the driving large-scale patterns behind extremes in the historical record. This understanding gives us an observational foundation to evaluate climate model skill and assess projections of future changes in the conditions associated with extreme event. I will be back at 3 pm ET (12 pm PT) to answer your questions, Ask me anything!

Hi Reddit! I’m Dr. Deborah Ossip and I have been studying smoking behavior in teens and adults for more than 30 years. My research focus has included e-cigarettes and I am principal investigator on two NIH-funded projects around tobacco use, including one striving to engage underserved populations to call quitlines. I direct the University of Rochester Medical Center’s Smoking Research Program. I am also a Member Delegate for North America for the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco and a member of various other local, state, national, and international committees, working groups, and advisory boards for tobacco prevention and control issues. I’m Dr. Scott McIntosh and I have been studying nicotine addiction and stop-smoking interventions for approximately 20 years. I have been involved with e-cigarette research in recent years and am the principal investigator of an NCI clinical trial investigating the use of web-assisted tobacco interventions (WATI) for community college students. I serve as Associate Director of the Smoking Research Program at the University of Rochester Medical Center and am Director of the Center for a Tobacco-Free Finger Lakes. We’re here to answer questions about e-cigs based on the latest research. We can also answer questions about nicotine addiction and what current research says about strategies to quit smoking. We’ll start answering questions at 1 p.m. EST.

ACS AMA Hi Reddit! My name is Suzanne Bell, and I am the Chair of the Department of Forensic and Investigative Science at West Virginia University. I teach and conduct research in analytical and forensic chemistry and work with students from undergraduate through PhD. I joined the faculty here in 2003. Prior to then, I worked for the New Mexico State Police Crime Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Eastern Washington University. My PhD is from New Mexico State University. Beyond my faculty work, I served on the National Commission on Forensic Science as Chair of the Research and Scientific Inquiry Subcommittee. I also served as a commissioner on the Forensic Education Programs Accreditation Commission, and am currently an associated editor for chemistry for the Journal of Forensic Sciences. Additionally, I am a member of the ACS Experts program (www.acs.org/expertshttp://www.acs.org/experts). This is my second AMA with the ACS – you can see the previous session here https://redd.it/35pi9d Continuing on with that discussion, there is a lot of chemical analysis that goes into determining what evidence gunshot residue might provide. Some of the methods we use include scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray spectroscopies including energy-dispersive (EDS), and many types of mass spectrometry (MS). Note that in this discussion I am not an expert on tool markings or ballistics (ie physical marks caused by weapons nor trajectory of bullets). Ask me anything about forensic chemistry and how we apply it in shooting cases, or what educational paths are possible in the forensic sciences. I’ll be back at 1 pm EDT (10 am PDT, 5 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask me anything!

Hi reddit, my name is Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, and I have spent the last 11 years working with gender non-conforming and transgender children, adolescents and young adults. I am the Medical Director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles. Our Center currently serves over 900 gender non-conforming and transgender children, youth and young adults between the ages of 3 and 25 years. I do everything from consultations for parents of transgender youth, to prescribing puberty blockers and gender affirming hormones. I am also spearheading research to help scientists, medical and mental health providers, youth, and community members understand the experience of gender trajectories from early childhood to young adulthood. Having a gender identity that is different from your assigned sex at birth can be challenging, and information available online can be mixed. I love having the opportunity to help families and young people navigate this journey, and achieve positive life outcomes. In addition to providing direct patient care for around 600 patients, I am involved in a large, multi-site NIH funded study examining the impact of blockers and hormones on the mental health and metabolic health of youth undergoing these interventions. Additionally, I am working on increasing our understanding of why more transyouth from communities of color are not accessing medical care in early adolescence. My research is very rooted in changing practice, and helping folks get timely and appropriate medical interventions. ASK ME ANYTHING! I will answer to the best of my knowledge, and tell you if I don’t know. https://www.uptodate.com/contents/management-of-gender-nonconformity-in-children-and-adolescents?source=search_result&search=transgender%20youth&selectedTitle=1~44 https://www.uptodate.com/contents/gender-development-and-clinical-presentation-of-gender-nonconformity-in-children-and-adolescents?source=search_result&search=transgender%20youth&selectedTitle=2~44 Here are a few video links and a bunch of videos on Kids in the House Here’s the stuff on my Wikipedia page I’ll be back at 2 pm EST to answer your questions, ask me anything!

Hi reddit! I’m Joshua Safer and I serve as the Medical Director of the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery at Boston Medical Center and Associate Professor of Medicine at the BU School of Medicine. I am a member of the Endocrine Society task force that is revising guidelines for the medical care of transgender patients, the Global Education Initiative committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the Standards of Care revision committee for WPATH, and I am a scientific co-chair for WPATH’s international meeting. My research focus has been to demonstrate health and quality of life benefits accruing from increased access to care for transgender patients and I have been developing novel transgender medicine curricular content at the BU School of Medicine. Recent papers of mine summarize current establishment thinking about the science underlying gender identity along with the most effective medical treatment strategies for transgender individuals seeking treatment and research gaps in our optimization of transgender health care. Here are links to 2 papers and to interviews from earlier in 2017: Evidence supporting the biological nature of gender identity Safety of current transgender hormone treatment strategies Podcast and a Facebook Live interviews with Katie Couric tied to her National Geographic documentary “Gender Revolution” (released earlier this year): Podcast, Facebook Live Podcast of interview with Ann Fisher at WOSU in Ohio I’ll be back at 12 noon EST. Ask Me Anything!