When asked, I used to tell people that I study the impact of pornography use, emphasizing “impact.” I guess I just didn’t want to give the wrong impression (“People pay you to do what?”). So, much of my research has focused on experimental and survey investigations of impact of pornography on sexual thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Some of it even pops up in r/science on occasion. As a sex-positive researcher with half a brain, not everyone likes what I have to say; popular writer Jonathan Van Maren has characterized me as Marlboro Man of porn, and the well-intentioned folks over at yourbrainonporn.com have filed my work under “Questionable / Misleading Studies.” I’m thinking about getting t-shirts printed.. Recently, my work is shifting more towards the nature and structure of sexual materials. What is porn? What isn’t porn? Wow can we best measure porn use in surveys? And how can the content of porn be divided up into psychologically relevant taxonomies? (Specifically, I’m trying to raise money to develop a new tool for crowdsourcing the content description of pornography to this end: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/porn-genome-project-app-science/ or check out http://www.pornforscience.com. Porn for Science - Studying Your Shame). Which now means that I not only study the effects of pornography, but porn itself (“Yes Great Aunt Kathy, I get paid to watch porn.”). I’m currently a postdoctoral fellow and adjunct professor that Western University, where I also earned by PhD in social psychology in 2014. Thanks everybody for your questions! It’s been fun! If you’re interested in talking further with me about research, shoot me an email at tkohut at uwo dot ca

Hi, we are NOAA scientists Amy Uhrin and Carlie Herring and we work to understand and reduce the impacts of trash and other marine debris on our ocean and Great Lakes. Have you been hearing about microplastics in the ocean and wondering what are microplastics? Where do they come from? What’s the big problem with microplastics? And what can I do to help? Of all the marine debris that ends up in these important water bodies, plastics are the most common. While plastics can range from consumer items like plastic bottles and bags to abandoned fishing nets, they all eventually break down into smaller and smaller plastics called microplastics. These tiny plastics can have a big impact on our environment. We’re here from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. ET today to answer your questions about microplastics in our ocean and what you can do to help. Ask Us Anything! Thank you for joining us today and for your interest in research on microplastics! Unfortunately, we are out of time for today. If you are interested in learning more about microplastics and marine debris research, explore some of these online resources: Plastics in the Ocean NOAA Marine Debris Program Listen to podcast with Amy Uhrin on microplastics Current research

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For decades, pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) has been the prevailing technology used for foodborne outbreak detection. PFGE identifies the pathogen’s DNA fingerprint which is then uploaded to PulseNet, a 20 year old national laboratory network used to detect clusters of foodborne illness. While PFGE and PulseNet revolutionized foodborne outbreak detection, whole genome sequencing (WGS) is the future. How will WGS improve foodborne outbreak investigations? What can WGS tell us that PFGE cannot? Join the following experts for a discussion about how public health and agricultural laboratories work to detect foodborne outbreaks and how WGS will change that work. The panelists are all members of the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL) food safety committee. Bryanne Shaw Biology Section Manager Minnesota Department of Agriculture, Laboratory Services Division Proof Stephen Gladbach Unit Chief, Microbiology Unit Missouri State Public Health Laboratory Proof Tracy Stiles Director, Microbiology Division William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute (Massachusetts State Public Health Laboratory) Proof Dave Boxrud Molecular Epidemiology Supervisor Minnesota Department of Health Public Health Laboratory Proof Edit: Ok, we’re out! Thanks for having us! We will continue to check in and answer as many other questions as we can.

Hello there /r/Science! We are a group of researchers who just published a new open access paper in Science Advances showing that ocean warming was indeed being underestimated, confirming the conclusion of a paper last year that triggered a series of political attacks. You can find some press coverage of our work at Scientific American, the Washington Post, and the CBC. One of the authors, Kevin Cowtan, has an explainer on his website as well as links to the code and data used in the paper. For backstory, in 2015 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) updated its global temperature dataset, showing that their previous data had been underestimating the amount of recent warming we’ve had. The change was mainly from their updated ocean data (i.e. their sea surface temperature or “SST”) product. The NOAA group’s updated estimate of warming formed the basis of high profile paper in Science (Karl et al. 2015), which joined a growing chorus of papers (see also Cowtan and Way, 2014; Cahill et al. 2015; Foster and Rahmstorf 2016) pushing back on the idea that there had been a “pause” in warming. This led to Lamar Smith (R-TX), the Republican chair of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee to accuse NOAA of deliberately “altering data” for nefarious ends, and issue a series of public attacks and subpoenas for internal communications that were characterized as “fishing expeditions”, “waging war”, and a “witch hunt”. Rather than subpoenaing people’s emails, we thought we would check to see if the Karl et al. adjustments were kosher a different way- by doing some science! We knew that a big issue with SST products had to do with the transition from mostly ship-based measurements to mostly buoy-based measurements. Not accounting for this transition properly could hypothetically impart a cool bias, i.e. cause an underestimate in the amount of warming over recent decades. So we looked at three “instrumentally homogeneous” records (which wouldn’t see a bias due to changeover in instrumentation type, because they’re from one kind of instrument): only buoys, satellite radiometers, and Argo floats. We compared these to the major SST data products, including the older (ERSSTv3b) and newer (ERSSTv4) NOAA records as well as the HadSST3 (UK’s Hadley Centre) and COBE-SST (Japan’s JMA) records. We found that the older NOAA SST product was indeed underestimating the rate of recent warming, and that the newer NOAA record appeared to correctly account for the ship/buoy transition- i.e. the NOAA correction seems like it was a good idea! We also found that the HadSST3 and COBE-SST records appear to underestimate the amount of warming we’ve actually seen in recent years. Ask us anything about our work, or climate change generally! Joining you today will be: Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) Kevin Cowtan Dave Clarke Peter Jacobs (/u/past_is_future) Mark Richardson (if time permits) Robert Rohde (if time permits)

My name is Dr. Steven Q. Simpson. I’m a Professor of Medicine and Interim Director of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Kansas. As a sepsis and quality improvement researcher and educator, I’ve spent decades training hospital providers across the country to aggressively treat sepsis in all its forms. I’m also a member of the board of the American College of Chest Physicians, an organization representing 19,000+ clinicians practicing pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine. Sepsis is the body’s response to a life-threatening infection, most commonly caused by a bacterial infection, but it can also be caused by serious fungal or viral infections. In basic terms, your body goes into overdrive to fight an infection and ends up damaging itself. Sepsis does not just happen on its own, meaning a prior infection—like pneumonia or a urinary tract infection, is present in all cases. Sepsis can lead to tissue damage, organ failure and death in many cases. Sepsis strikes more than a million Americans annually and frequently impacts those who are over age 65 or less than 1 year, have a weakened immune system or chronic medical conditions like diabetes. However, it is not uncommon for normal, healthy adults and children to be affected when a seemingly simple infection progresses to severe sepsis. One of the main challenges of sepsis is diagnosis—often, by the time physicians become aware something is wrong, the disease may be advanced. Sepsis signs and symptoms are not very specific and may at first seem like a simple viral infection, which results in delays in patients seeking medical attention. There is no specific laboratory test that can diagnose sepsis or severe sepsis. Instead, physicians must be astute to recognize the signs and symptoms, recognize the infection and know when the combination is potentially deadly. Early recognition is key to patient survival; delays in delivering relatively simple treatments, such as antibiotics and IV fluids, are associated with increased mortality. Recently, a consensus statement was released that proposes to redefine the diagnostic criteria of sepsis, and that would eliminate the concept of the systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS). The proposed syndrome would rely on known or suspected infection with a change in sequential organ failure assessment (SOFA) score. Shortly after the new guidelines were published, I released my rebuttal in the journal CHEST, New Sepsis Guidelines: A Change We Should Not Make (http://bit.ly/1M8eKYZ), expressing concern that many physicians and specialties have shared—widespread application of this new definition could cost patient lives, and it should not be adopted. Please feel free to ask about anything related to sepsis, critical care, or pulmonary medicine. I will return at 12 p.m. CST to answer your questions. Conflict of Interest Disclosure: My thoughts and opinions are my own. I don’t have financial relationships with anyone—except my wife, who is a pediatric ENT surgeon and gets paid more than me. She takes everything I make, anyway, and makes sure that I don’t spend it all. She gets her sepsis info from me, not vice versa, and she’s pretty good at diagnosing it. For more information on my research: CHEST 2016: Did We Need New Definitions for Sepsis? (http://bit.ly/2if7oW3) YouTube: Surviving Sepsis: The Value of Real Time Surveillance (http://bit.ly/2hV4mWl) I’ll be back at 1 PM EST to answer your questions! AMA!

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At its vibrant frontier, neuroscience is becoming the playground of a worldwide interdisciplinary community which our team reflects well: we come from 4 different continents and diverse backgrounds. Roberto, Katja and Satra met at a BrainHack unconference, an event of art, science, and sleepless nights. Later, Katja met Amy in a conference on arts and neuroscience, and at MIT, a neurotechnology class linked Amy, Satra and eventually Roberto. We share a passion for open science and collaboration, a keen interest in neuroanatomy and visualization, and a drive to engage humanity in understanding ourselves better in health and in disease. Amy, through Eyewire, is allowing thousands of people to map the brain through games and Roberto has been pleading all of us around him to work on crowdsourced solutions for brain imaging. The Open Science Prize competition offered the opportunity to mesh these interests and to hopefully attract a worldwide community. The Open Neuroimaging Laboratory (http://openneu.ro/start/) is a project to facilitate finding, improving, and reusing the massive amount of brain MRI data available online. This data represents an enormous funding effort and the work and goodwill of thousands of participants. BrainBox, our first application, transforms these static MRIs into “living” matter for collaborative curation and analysis using only a Web browser; and MetaSearch, our second app, allows it to easily query this huge, living resource and find data relevant to you. Users can work, discuss, edit and annotate MRI images simultaneously. No data are downloaded, no software installed, allowing users to incrementally improve each other’s work. This increases scientific efficiency, improves public data quality, and reduces redundant effort. We already index more than 8000 MRIs, which are ready for collaborative projects. Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenNeuro Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/openneuro/ You can vote for Open Neuroimaging Lab to win Phase II funding from the Open Science Prize (NIH, Wellcome Trust) here: http://bit.ly/openneurolab We will be back at 1 pm ET to answer your questions, ask us anything! Roberto Toro (Institute Pasteur, France): I am interested on the development and evolution of the brain, which I study through mathematical modelling, magnetic resonance imaging and genetics. https://twitter.com/R3RT0 Katja Heuer (Max Planck Institute, Germany): I am genuinely curious about brain development. I am studying the development of the human brain and its connectivity using magnetic resonance imaging. My aim is to relate brain development and language performance. https://twitter.com/katjaQheuer Satrajit Ghosh (MIT, joins at 2 pm ET): My research interests span computer science and neuroimaging, specifically in the areas of applied machine learning, software engineering, and applications of neuroimaging. The primary focus of my research group is to develop knowledge discovery platforms by integrating a set of multidisciplinary projects that span precision medicine in mental health, imaging genetics, machine learning, and dataflow systems for reproducible research. https://twitter.com/satra_ Amy Robinson Sterling (Princeton University): I am passionate about understanding consciousness and human elements like creativity and curiosity. I’m the Executive Director of Eyewire, a game to map the brain played by a quarter million people worldwide. I hope that by bringing together curious people from different backgrounds we will bring new perspectives to old neuroscientific challenges. https://twitter.com/amyleesterling

This December, the first issue of Science Robotics was released. We wrote the research articles in that issue. I’m Huichan Zhao, and my research focused on how to imbue prosthetics with some attributes of the sense of touch. (http://robotics.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/eaai7529). Our final demonstration saw a robotic hand “feeling” three tomatoes to determine which one was ripe. I’m Duncan W. Haldane, and my team created a jumping robot that used as its model a leaping primate called a galago. (http://robotics.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/eaag2048). One powerful application for our robot would be in buildings that have collapsed and need to have a light, nimble robot search for survivors without disturbing the debris. I’m Surjo Soekadar, and I led a team that created a noninvasive, hybrid brain/neural hand exoskeleton (B/NHE) for quadriplegics restoring their ability to perform activities of daily living, such as eating and drinking independently (http://robotics.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/eaag3296). The results broadly suggest that brain/neural-assistive technology can restore autonomy and independence in quadriplegic individuals’ everyday life. And I’m Holly Russell. My team investigated how humans and autonomous vehicles adapt when the control of the vehicle switches from car to human and back again. (http://robotics.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/eaah5682) Our findings have implications for the design of vehicles that transition from automated to manual driving and for understanding of human motor control in real-world tasks. We will be back at 1 pm ET to answer your questions, Ask us anything!

Hi reddit! Over the last 40 years, video games have transformed from a niche market to a multibillion-dollar industry. However, along with their growing popularity has come a growing concern about their ability to transform those who play them into antisocial killing machines who are desensitized to violence, have no friends, and will forever live in their parents’ basements. But are these fears based in reality? Despite the fact that ‘game studies’ as a scientific field has been going strong for the last 20 years, the findings of the research in this field has largely remained insulated within scientific circles and inaccessible to the general public. Furthermore, sensationalized headlines continue to grossly misconstrue what scientific communities know about the science of video game effects. I recently published a new book, A Parent’s Guide to Video Games – The essential guide to understanding the impact of video games on your child’s physical, social, and psychological well-being, in an effort to break the long-standing barriers between science and society and better inform parents about the potential dangers and unique contributions that video games can bring to our everyday lives. Thank you all for your insightful questions! I will check back later and do my best to try and answer them all! I hope that my answers have provided some clarity to the science behind video game effects.

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Hi Reddit! UPDATE: Wow, Reddit. We were blown away by the amount and quality of the questions asked today. Thank you for participating, and we apologize that there were so many great questions/comments we couldn’t reply to. We tried to put a lot of thought into those that we were able to get to, and we are hopeful that some of our longer answers apply to some of the unanswered questions too. Also, here are a couple of links/resources that you might be helpful. This list is by no means exhaustive, but provides a few additional references on some of the areas that we touched on in our answers: Zurich Consensus Statement on Concussion in Sport: (http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/47/5/250.full/) Bigler, 2008, Neuropsychology and clinical neuroscience of persistent post-concussive syndrome: (https://www.ahead.org/aff/utah/2008.Bigler.PPCS.JINS.pdf/) Mittenberg, 1996 Cognitive-Behavioral Prevention of post-concussion syndrome (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0887617795000062/) Leddy et al, 2012 Rehabilitation of Concussion and Post-Concussion Syndrome (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3435903/) The Bauer Lab at the University of Florida, students are working to understand the mechanisms and contributing pre-morbid, psychosocial and biological factors leading to different recovery trajectories – i.e. why some people with concussion recover more quickly and with less chronic symptomatology than others with a concussion of similar severity. BauerLab members are also working to understand the role of post-concussion symptoms such as sleep disturbances on longer term functioning, the effect of exercise on recovery and analyzing the manner in which post-injury symptom report impacts recovery timelines in collegiate athletes. We are excited to talk about what we do and answer your concussion related questions! A bit more about our team: Russell Bauer, Ph.D., is Board Certified in Clinical Neuropsychology and is a Professor of Clinical & Health Psychology and Neurology in the College of Public Health and Health Professions. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed professional papers and is currently involved in the establishment of an interdisciplinary concussion clinic, including Neurology, Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy and Neuropsychology. Within his lab, students are working to understand factors contributing to differential recovery trajectories – i.e. why some people with concussion recover more quickly and with less chronic symptomatology than others. Aliyah Snyder, M.S., Doctoral Candidate, is currently studying the influence of experience-dependent neuroplasticity on recovery processes after mild traumatic brain injury. Her dissertation project is an interdisciplinary effort examining the safety and tolerability of implementing a brief aerobic exercise intervention during the post-acute period after mild traumatic brain injury. Molly Sullan, M.S., Doctoral Candidate, has primary research interests in determining the relationship between traumatic brain injury (TBI) and sleep disruption in terms of their effect on chronic symptom profiles. She is currently working to identify a methodology with which to study the long term consequences of multiple brain traumas on neurodegenerative processes, as well as the mediating effects of comorbid sleep disturbances on outcome. We will be back at 2 pm ED to answer your questions, ask us anything!

As previously announced, /r/philosophy is hosting an AMA series this fall semester which kicked off with AMAs by Caspar Hare, Kevin Scharp, Kenneth Ehrenberg, Geoff Pynn, the Wi-Phi: Wireless Philosophy team, Stephen Puryear and Roy T Cook. Check out our series announcement post to see all the AMAs from this semester. We finish off our fall series this upcoming Monday with an AMA by Carrie Jenkins (UBC). Hear it from her: Carrie Jenkins I’m Carrie Jenkins, a writer and philosopher based in Vancouver, BC. I am a Canada Research Chair in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, the Principal Investigator on the SSHRC funded project The Nature of Love, and a Co-Investigator on the John Templeton Foundation funded project Knowledge Beyond Natural Science. I studied philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, and since then have worked at the University of St Andrews, the Australian National University, the University of Michigan, the University of Nottingham, and the University of Aberdeen. From 2011 to 2016, I was one of three principal editors of the award-winning philosophy journal Thought. I recently won an American Philosophical Association Public Philosophy Op Ed Contest award. This year I am also a student again, working towards an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. My philosophical interests have stubbornly refused to be pinned down over the years. Broadly speaking they include epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic and language, and philosophy of love. But I’m basically interested in everything. My first book was on a priori arithmetical knowledge, and my second is on the nature of romantic love. I have written papers on knowledge, explanation, realism, flirting, epistemic normativity, modality, concepts, dispositions, naturalism, paradoxes, intuitions, and verbal disputes … among other things! A lot of my recent work is about love, because in addition to its intrinsic interest I see some urgency to the need for more and better critical thinking about this topic. Some Links of Interest NPR 13.7 Interview - Exploring the Metaphysics of Love Globe and Mail article - What’s Love Got to do With Sex? Maybe Everything, winner, APA Public Philosophy Op Ed Contest 2016 Elle Canada - New Ideas on Love CBC podcast interview on love and sex ed Review of new book What Love Is and What It Could Be AMA Professor Jenkins will join us Monday for a live Q&A on her research interests on Monday at 4PM EST. Please feel free to post questions for her 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 Professor Jenkins to our community!

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Hi Reddit! We are scientists at UC Davis, Bodega Marine Laboratory, and Coastal & Marine Sciences Institute interested in a range of processes in the ocean. We are currently exploring new ideas and techniques in communicating the science of the ocean to the greater public. We are interested in talking with you about how exciting ocean science is, your concerns for the ocean, pursuing a career in oceanography, and how we can better communicate the importance of the ocean to our everyday lives. Dr. Kristin Aquilino is the lead scientist for the Endangered White Abalone breeding program, operated by NOAA and UC Davis. A native Iowan, she feels equally at home among cornfields and kelp forests. Her Ph.D. is from UC Davis. Dr. Carlye Peterson is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, interested in how 3D visualization can assist students in understanding powerful scientific concepts in the earth and ocean. Her Ph.D. is from UC Santa Barbara. Aaron Ninokawa is currently a Ph.D. student in the Graduate Group in Ecology at Bodega Marine Laboratory. He is interested in how changing ocean chemistry may alter environments and ecosystems in the ocean. He has traveled around the world to study coral reefs and unique ocean environments. Dr. Tessa Hill is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences & Bodega Marine Laboratory, and an Associate Director of the Coastal & Marine Sciences Institute. She studies ocean climate change and teaches courses on science communication. We will answer questions from 3-4pm EST, and we are looking forward to speaking with you!

Hi! We're Dr. Joe Levy and Cassie Stuurman---we study geological systems in cold regions on Earth to try to understand the evolution of the surface of Mars and how cold landscapes on Earth record evidence of climate change. Ice is one of the most important, but least appreciated geological materials. It flows and melts when local climate conditions are warm, and piles up when conditions are cold. You can drink it, measure the chemical fingerprint of past ice ages locked away in it, and even look for modern and ancient microbial life in it. So how do we use planetary analogs on Earth to understand surface processes on Mars? Where is the ice on Mars? How similar is it to glacial and permafrost landforms on Earth? What kind of changes to the surface of Mars and Earth have been wrought by changing climate over the last few million years? How are we going to use ice on Mars when humans begin to settle on that planet? This is the paper Joe published - Candidate volcanic and impact-induced ice depressions on Mars and this is the paper Cassie published - SHARAD Detection and Characterization of Subsurface Water Ice Deposits in Utopia Planitia, Mars And here's the original Reddit post that made it to the front page - A strangely shaped depression on Mars could be a new place to look for signs of life on the Red Planet, according to a study. The depression was probably formed by a volcano beneath a glacier and could have been a warm, chemical-rich environment well suited for microbial life. I will be back at 1 pm EDT to answer your questions, ask me anything!

Hi reddit, my name is Daniel Irimia and I am an Associate Professor in the Surgery Department at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and a Senior Investigator at Shriners Burns Hospital in Boston. My research focuses on designing novel technologies for measuring the activities of white blood cells from patients, towards better ways to predict, diagnose, monitor, and treat inflammation, infections, and sepsis. In 2016, I received the “Pioneers of Miniaturization” prize from the Chemical and Biological Microsystems Society, for pioneering work on microfluidic technologies for measuring human neutrophil activities and applications to human diseases. I am the organizer of the recent Dicty World Race, an unorthodox approach aimed at encouraging biologists to employ emerging microfluidic technologies to make high precision measurements of cell migration for biological and medical research applications. The results and learning from this experiment were recently published as an article titled “A Worldwide Competition to Compare the Speed and Chemotactic Accuracy of Neutrophil-Like Cells” in PLOS ONE. The race enabled a large-scale comparison of motility and chemotaxis in the engineered cell lines, allowing exploration of a diverse set of strategies for enhancing chemotactic performance. We found that there are tradeoffs between cell speed and chemotactic accuracy in maze-like environments and that the winning cells were not the fastest cell type, but excelled in finding the shortest paths through the maze. These findings could eventually help us develop better therapies against infections and chronic inflammation. Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @D__Irimia. I will be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask Me Anything!

Hi Reddit! I’m Dr. Dean Elterman, a urologic surgeon at the University Health Network in Toronto. My focus on urology and its related diseases has led me to look more closely at how this field fits with overall male health. I’ve published research showing how the urologic community has a leading role to play in helping define the health issues that face men in the 21st century and improving their health outcomes and mortality rates. There are many factors such as ‘masculine identity’, social determinants and even the Y-chromosome itself that affect men’s health and longevity, and we’ve seen the evidence that up to 80 per cent of men refuse to see a physician until they are convinced by a spouse or partner to do so. The science and medical communities need to find ways to overcome these barriers so men can achieve good health, and one of those ways is through awareness and open discussion which is why I’m excited to host today’s AMA on what you need to know about your prostate health. Information about prostate health has changed a lot over the years. I’m happy to answer your questions about enlarged prostate, prostate cancer, the traditional and new treatments that exist for both, and when to consider having prostate health conversations with your healthcare practitioner. Note that I’m not able to provide medical advice online, but can point you in the direction of valuable online resources. I am live now and answering your questions– Ask me anything! AMA! Thanks very much for your thoughtful questions and for this important discussion. I am now done my AMA session - apologies if I didn’t get to answer your question and thank you for participating! To learn more about my research at the Krembil Research Institute and University of Toronto, [please click here] (https://uofturology.ca/directory/faculty/elterman-dean/). You can read other research I’ve worked on about how men’s health fits with urologic health here.

Are dreidels fair? In other words, does the average dreidel have an equal chance of turning up any one of its four sides? To explore this hypothesis, three different dreidels were each spun hundreds of times with the number of occurrences of each side recorded. It was found that all three dreidels tested -- a cheap plastic dreidel, an old wooden dreidel, and a dreidel that came embossed with a picture of Santa Claus -- were not fair. Statistically, for each dreidel, some sides came up significantly more often than others. Although an unfair dreidel does not necessarily make the game itself unfair, it is conjectured that hundreds of pounds of chocolate have been distributed during Chanukah under false pretenses.

Hi Reddit, My name is Anirban Banerjee and I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biosciences & Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, INDIA. I am a microbiologist and my research primarily focuses on the identification of various methods adopted by pathogens to breach different barriers in our body, such as the blood-brain barrier or feto-maternal barrier etc. We hope to learn from the smart tactics employed by these tiny creatures and apply them to deliver drugs across these barriers which are hard to penetrate. We recently published an article titled “Membrane Vesicles of Group B Streptococcus Disrupt Feto-Maternal Barrier Leading to Preterm Birth” in PLOS Pathogens. It is a well established fact that colonization of vagina and cervix of pregnant women with Group B Streptococcus (GBS), an opportunistic pathogen, significantly increases the probability of preterm birth. However, in fairly large number of cases the bacteria has not been detected in the feto-maternal interface and/or amniotic fluid. This led us to wonder how GBS sitting in the vagina can orchestrate events at the feto-maternal barrier. We were of the opinion that since rupture of amniotic membrane which is a prerequisite for preterm birth involves a complex series of events; this can only be augmented by a host of bacterial factors and not just simply one. Our findings suggest GBS produces membrane bound vesicles (MVs) that are loaded with multiple toxic proteins and enzymes of the bacteria. These MVs are capable of traveling up through the reproductive tract and lead to a series of deleterious effects resulting in extensive damage of the feto-maternal barrier (amniotic membrane) and subsequently preterm birth. This work was primarily done by four doctoral students in my lab (Manalee Surve, Anajali Anil, Kshama Kamath and Smita Bhutda) in collaboration with Dr. Deepak Modi, from National Institute for Research in Reproductive Health (NIRRH), Mumbai, INDIA. I will be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask Me Anything!

Thanks all for the great questions. We’ll be signing off in a few minutes (4:45 PST), but please look out for the full manuscript - it should be online and open access for all soon! I’m Christine Stawitz, and I study fishery management and population dynamics at the University of Washington. (More about that at: http://students.washington.edu/cstawitz/) I’d like to talk about a recent publication of mine, “Financial and Ecological Implications of Global Seafood Mislabeling”, in which I, with my co-authors, try to quantify how seafood mislabeling affects the conservation status and value of finfish seafood that people consume. In this study, we found that substituted seafoods were of slightly lower value (-2.98% ex-vessel price), but of a slightly higher conservation status (+9.51% IUCN status) than items they were labeled as. However, there’s a lot of heterogeneity across types of finfish. For example, items substituted for skipjack tuna and dolphinfish are actually of higher value than these fish themselves. This suggests mislabeling has benefits for consumers, financially. In contrast, items substituted for red snapper, hake, eel, smooth-hound shark, and croaker are of lower conservation status than the items themselves. I’ve noticed the paper getting a lot of attention on r/science and want to clear up some of the detail of the findings. I will be back at 6 pm EDT to answer your questions, ask me anything!

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