Hi Reddit! I’m Dr. Teresa Woodruff from Northwestern University here to answer any questions you may have about ovarian biology, oncofertility, and the importance of sex and gender inclusion in the biomedical sciences. In 2006, I coined the term “oncofertility” to describe the merging of two fields: oncology and fertility. When we started this work, young men were able to bank sperm before a potentially sterilizing cancer treatment but women, with the same hope for survival, were not provide options. Now we have options and babies born to men and women who have survived their disease. This work was fostered by my interest in ovarian biology. Men make sperm constantly – about 1,500 sperm with every heartbeat. By contrast, women are born with all the oocytes that we will ever have – about 1 million in our ovaries. My lab is interested in how the ovarian reserve, this million follicle pool (a follicle is a single egg surrounded by cells that produce hormones like estrogen and support egg maturation) is metered out from birth until menopause – 6 decades to wait for activation. We began growing individual ovarian follicles in our lab to unravel some of this fundamental biology and developed strategies that are helping cancer patients who want to protect their fertility. Finally, I’m interested in educating scientists about the value of including both males and females in their studies. For a lot of good reasons, many labs study only one sex. But the outcomes from single sex experiments cannot always be translated to the opposite sex. So we have been working to ensure that we all think about sex as a biological variable from bench to bedside. I will be back at 2 pm ET to answer your questions, ask me anything! Here are some resources for more information: Women’s Health Research Institute Oncofertility Consortium Repropedia Introduction to Reproduction on Coursera EDIT: Thank you for all of your questions! I will be heading out now but may check back in if there are any follow up questions!

Hello reddit! I’m Cathy Spong, and I oversee NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), which supports research on fetal, infant and child development; maternal, child and family health; reproductive biology and population issues; and medical rehabilitation. We know that Zika virus causes microcephaly and other serious birth defects, and is linked to pregnancy problems, including miscarriage and stillbirth. While our attention is rightly focused on vaccine development, mosquito control, and other measures to prevent the spread of Zika, it is also important to acknowledge that people affected by Zika today—parents, families, caregivers, and health care professionals—may be contending with unknown health outcomes for many years to come. We in the public health community need to identify optimal approaches to treat and care for children who have been exposed to Zika virus in the womb. We also need to be able to tell a woman and tell a family, the risks Zika virus poses throughout pregnancy, and research will help us understand these risks. Earlier this summer, NIH launched the multi-country Zika in Infants and Pregnancy (ZIP) study to evaluate the health risks that Zika virus infection poses to pregnant women and their developing fetuses and infants. Researchers aim to enroll 10,000 pregnant women in their first trimester and follow them throughout their pregnancies. After birth, the infants will be followed for at least one year. We anticipate that studies like ZIP will provide important information on the link between Zika infection and pregnancy complications and inform strategies to help safeguard the health of mothers and their newborns. I emphasized the need for this type of research in a recent Huffington Post blog, and NIH is hosting an open workshop on September 22-23, 2016, to find the best approaches to treat and care for children exposed to Zika in the womb. I will be answering questions starting at 2 p.m. ET (11 a.m. PT). Ask Me Anything! Edit: Hi, everyone! That wraps our chat up for today. Thank you for your questions – this was a great opportunity to discuss Zika virus and the need to study its long-term effects on pregnancy and children. Don’t forget, we’re hosting our scientific workshop on Zika on September 22 & 23. You can register to attend here. We will be closing this AMA thread, but if you have follow-up questions, please send us a Facebook message or tweet at us.

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Hi Reddit, My name is Raina Plowright and I am an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Montana State University. I use field, lab and modeling approaches to understand how pathogens persist in wildlife populations (especially bats) and spill over to humans. And my name is Olivier Restif and I’m a Lecturer in Epidemiology at the University of Cambridge. I use mathematical models to track the spread of microbes within their hosts and across populations. In particular, I’m trying to find out how the ecology of African bats may contribute to their ability to spread viruses. We recently published a paper titled “Transmission or within-host processes driving pulses of infection in reservoir hosts” in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. We examine the dynamics of emerging bat infections within their reservoir host populations. We argue that understanding the mechanisms that drive pulses of excretion of viruses such as Hendra, Nipah, Ebola and Marburg viruses, is essential to predict or manage spillover risk. We outline an ambitious multidisciplinary research agenda that would allow better management or even prevention of spillover. We will be answering your questions at 1pm ET (10 am PT) – Ask Us Anything! You can follow Raina on Twitter at @rainamontana and Olivier on @BugsWormsNBats.

Abstract Purpose The benefit of thrombectomy among patients with anterior circulation large vessel occlusion (LVO) stroke is unclear beyond 6 hours. Here we sought to ascertain whether or not successful thrombectomy is beneficial when performed in MR-selected patients more than 6 hours after stroke onset. Methods A cohort of 30 LVO patients who underwent thrombectomy after MR selection between 11/1/2012 until 5/15/2015 was studied. Patients were selected for thrombectomy based on small diffusion-restricted core volume at presentation. Patients with decision to treat later than 6 hours from symptom onset and who achieved TICI≥2B recanalization (n=21) were compared against patients with failed thrombectomy (TICI<2B) at any time (n=9). Outcomes measures were final infarct volume and disposition from hospital. Results The median time from symptom onset to access for the successful late thrombectomy group was 10.6 h (IQR 7.8 – 14.4). Compared with the failed intervention group, patients with successful late thrombectomy had smaller median final infarct volume (20 mL v. 53 mL, p = 0.045), less median infarct growth (+4 mL v. +43 mL, p = 0.036), and were more likely to be discharged home or to rehab (66.7% v. 22.2%, OR 7.14 [95% CI:  1.26 – 34.5]). Conclusion Late MR-selected LVO patients had smaller final core volumes and superior in-hospital clinical outcomes after successful thrombectomy compared with similar patients who had failed or incomplete thrombectomy. Favorable outcomes were achieved well beyond 6 hours.

Available from: Nagayasu, E., Hwang, Y., Liu, J., Murray, J., & Hu, K. (2016). Loss of a doublecortin (DCX) domain containing protein causes structural defects in a tubulin-based organelle ofToxoplasma gondiiand impairs host cell invasion. doi:10.1101/069377

Hello Redditors! I’m Elad Yom-Tov, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. I am a Machine Learning and Information Retrieval researcher, and for the past few years my work has focused on using Internet data to study our health. Internet data are all those things that we create while browsing the web: posts on Facebook and Twitter, queries on Google and Bing, blogs, and other content. These data can teach us about aspects of medicine that are hard to learn about in other ways. A few examples include measuring the effect of mainstream media on the development of eating disorders, estimating the effectiveness of flu vaccines, detecting new side effects of medical drugs, and discovering how visiting a dating site can lead to catching an STD. My book on these topics, Crowdsourced Health: How What You Do on the Internet Will Improve Medicine (MIT Press) was published earlier this year. AMA, including questions you are interested in, and perhaps we can research together! I will be back at 11 am EDT (8 am PDT) to answer your questions, AMA! Edit: Folks, thank you for your being interested in this work, and for your questions. It was a real pleasure discussing my work with you. I’ll check in later to see if there are additional questions.

Hi Reddit! I’m Gerbrand Ceder, though I go by “Gerd” as my first name. I’m the lead scientist for multi-valent batteries at the Joint Center for Energy Storage at Berkeley Lab, and a faculty scientist in the Materials Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab. I am also the Chancellor’s Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley. I look forward to answering your questions about building better batteries for a better future. Recently, my team and I shed light on how lithium-rich cathodes work, which could lead to higher capacity batteries. You can read about that here. And here is my website. I received an engineering degree from the University of Leuven, Belgium, and a Ph.D. in Materials Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991. Between 1991 and 2015, I was a Professor in Materials Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and braved the hard Massachusetts winters. As a college student in engineering I was fascinated by the tremendous impact novel materials could have on society, and decided to make it my career to come up with more rational methods to design novel materials, rather than just “try and see.” I rode the wave of computing growth and became one of the first “computational materials designers.” In the early 90’s I got involved with Li-ion batteries, at the time a very nascent technology. It has been a wild ride since then, seeing the multiple waves of impact this technology is having as it moves from portable electronics to vehicles, and now to grid. The little time I am not working I enjoy listening to loud music, baking bread (preferably at the same time), or doing a good hike. I look forward to your questions. Edit: I’m live and answering your questions. Thanks to everyone who has submitted thus far. I’ll be answering until 3p ET/12p PT. Here we go… Edit: It’s noon and my laptop battery is at 2%… So, I must go! Thanks for joining me today. Be sure to check out the links above and below for more on battery research and stay tuned for more science reddit AMAs from Berkeley Lab. Cheers! Berkeley Lab Joint Center for Energy Storage

Hi Reddit, My name is Simon “Niels” Groen and I am post-doctoral fellow at New York University. My research focuses on plant-microbe-insect interactions. I am joined by Nik Cunniffe, a University Lecturer in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge and co-author on the PLOS Pathogens article. Nik’s research focuses on developing mathematical models of how plant diseases spread, evolve and can be controlled. We recently published a paper titled Virus Infection of Plants Alters Pollinator Preference: A Payback for Susceptible Hosts? in PLOS Pathogens. Cucumber mosaic virus, an important pathogen of tomato, causes plants to emit volatile chemicals that attract bumblebees - bumblebees are important tomato pollinators, but do not transmit this virus. We propose that under natural conditions, helping host reproduction by encouraging bee visitation might represent a ‘payback’ by the virus to susceptible hosts. We will be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask Us Anything! Don’t forget to follow Niels and Nik on Twitter @simoncgroen and @nikcunniffe.

Hi! I’m Caspar Hare. I’m a Professor of Philosophy at MIT. I work on ethics, rationality and I am currently running an edX course: Introduction to Philosophy: God, Knowledge and Consciousness, which has recently introduced “instructor-grading” (you can read more about it here and here.) Ask Me Anything! Proof: https://twitter.com/2400xPhilosophy/status/770667051941789696 EDIT: Thanks for a marvelous discussion! I have to go. Keep on philosophizing! ~Caspar

Hi Reddit! Karl here. I am a professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Delaware. I have a successful research group with over 100 publications and 5 patents on the design and application of chemical sensors. I’m a Fellow of the American Chemical Society and Fellow of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy. I broke my neck BASE jumping in the Grand Canyon during Spring Break my freshman year of college. OK, really it was playing flag football, but I’m working on a much sexier legend. I’ve been active in promoting inclusion of underrepresented groups, especially persons with disabilities in STEM for the past 15 years. I’ve chaired the ACS Committee on Chemists with Disabilities and am current chair of the ACS Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Board. I’m also Principal Investigator on a newly renewed NSF research experience for undergraduates (REU) grant to get research experience for students with disabilities interested in advanced STEM degrees. http://sites.udel.edu/seli-ud/ People with disabilities (PWD) continue to be a greatly underrepresented group in Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). PWD comprise 7% of the population between 16 and 21 (US Census) and 8.6% of the total school population participates in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Students with disabilities express interest in STEM at the same rate as students without disabilities. Approximately 20% of graduating high school seniors and ~20% of graduating college seniors wish to continue towards a higher degree in STEM. However, less than 2% of STEM doctoral degrees earned by US citizens or permanent residents are awarded to students who identify as having a disability! Remove soft sciences from the equation and the rate drops to 1%. Amazingly there has been no improvement in PWD doctoral students since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1991: there is no statistical increase in the percentage of earned STEM doctoral degrees by PWD among US citizens or permanent residents at US institutions (see this figure http://i.imgur.com/3LPJMjN.png). Factor in foreign national students to get the statistics on all STEM doctoral degrees awarded by US institutions and the trend becomes negative improvement. Across the same time frame, the percentage of STEM doctoral degrees earned by African American and Hispanic students each increased by 0.16 or 0.17 percentage points per year on average. Federal support and interest in the outcome may well be a factor. The 2010 Federal STEM Education Inventory Data Set on broadening participation (data.gov) shows $397.8M dedicated to ‘Institutional Capacity’ or ‘Postsecondary STEM’ with $378.3M earmarked for underrepresented minorities and only $19.6M dedicated to students with disabilities. This is a 19:1 ratio! I will be back at 1 pm ET, Ask me anything about getting more opportunities in STEM research and careers for people with disabilities! Hi All! I’m on live now. I’ll probably stay live a bit past 2:00 pm EST. I type slowly. /ksb I’ll drop back in later tonight after my kids go to bed to get to the rest of the great questions. /ksb There is a couple of questions that I haven’t gotten to. I’ll try to hit those tomorrow, but I have a proposal that I need to wrap up in the next 24 hours. /ksb

We work for the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a non-profit established to advance oceanographic research of the ocean through exploration, innovation and data sharing. This is the first submersible vehicle SOI has built. Before SuBastian, SOI rented scientific robots to launch off our retrofitted ship, Falkor (an ex-German fishery protection vessel). Yes, both Falkor and SuBastian get their names from The Neverending Story. Every year we open a call for expressions of interest. Scientists from around the world can apply for ship time, and we’re really focusing on high-risk, high-reward, cutting-edge science that wouldn’t normally get funded by traditional funding agencies. Humanity still knows very little about the deep ocean. The ROV was built to have the power of a rugby player but the dexterity of a neurosurgeon - it is powerful and precise. It is able to take 4k video, sample underwater thermal vents and collect samples 2.8 miles below the ocean’s surface: conditions where where darkness, near-freezing temperatures and intense pressure are just a few of the obstacles, and the ROV is able to stay underwater for days as needed. This summer the ROV crew is testing SuBastian in the open ocean, and in November they will conduct scientific experiments near Hydrothermal Vents in the Marianas Trench. We will be back at 4 pm ET to answer your questions, Ask us anything!

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As previously announced, /r/philosophy is hosting an AMA series this fall semester which kicks off this upcoming Tuesday August 30th, 1PM EST. Caspar Hare, Professor of Philosophy at MIT, will be joining us to answer questions about his work on ethics, rationality and a special edX course he is running called “Introduction to Philosophy: God, Knowledge and Consciousness”. Professor Hare has published two books, The Limits of Kindness and On Myself, and Other, Less Important Subjects. You can read free online reviews of those books here and here respectively. He has also published a number of papers, all of which are available online at his website for free. Check out some blurbs for his books below: The Limits of Kindness Caspar Hare presents a novel approach to questions of what we ought to do, and why we ought to do it. The traditional way to approach this subject is to begin by supposing a foundational principle, and then work out its implications. Consequentialists say that we ought to make the world impersonally better, for instance, while Kantian deontologists say that we ought to act on universalizable maxims. And contractualists say that we ought to act in accordance with the terms of certain hypothetical contracts. These principles are all grand and controversial. The motivating idea behind The Limits of Kindness is that we can tackle some of the most difficult problems in normative ethics by starting with a principle that is humble and uncontroversial. Being moral involves wanting particular other people to be better off. From these innocuous beginnings, Hare leads us to surprising conclusions about how we ought to resolve conflicts of interest, whether we ought to create some people rather than others, what we ought to want in an infinite world, when we ought to make sacrifices for the sake of needy strangers, and why we cannot, on pain of irrationality, attribute great importance to the boundaries between people. On Myself, and Other, Less Important Subjects Caspar Hare makes an original and compelling case for “egocentric presentism,” a view about the nature of first-person experience, about what happens when we see things from our own particular point of view. A natural thought about our first-person experience is that “all and only the things of which I am aware are present to me.” Hare, however, goes one step further and claims, counterintuitively, that the thought should instead be that “all and only the things of which I am aware are present.” There is, in other words, something unique about me and the things of which I am aware. On Myself and Other, Less Important Subjects represents a new take on an old view, known as solipsism, which maintains that people’s experiences give them grounds for believing that they have a special, distinguished place in the world–for example, believing that only they exist or that other people do not have conscious minds like their own. Few contemporary thinkers have taken solipsism seriously. But Hare maintains that the version of solipsism he argues for is in indeed defensible, and that it is uniquely capable of resolving some seemingly intractable philosophical problems–both in metaphysics and ethics–concerning personal identity over time, as well as the tension between self-interest and the greater good. Professor Hare is teaching a free online MOOC this semester called Introduction to Philosophy: God, Knowledge and Consciousness. You can read an article about the MOOC by MIT News here. This iteration of 24.00x is (to our knowledge) the first philosophy MOOC in history to offer instructor grading of, and comments on, your work. Basically you get to do philosophy for real, with individual instruction, for a small fraction of the cost of taking the course at MIT. The blurb for the course is as follows: This philosophy course has two goals. The first goal is to introduce you to the things that philosophers think about. We will look at some perennial philosophical problems: Is there a God? What is knowledge, and how do we get it? What is the place of our consciousness in the physical world? Do we have free will? How do we persist over time, as our bodily and psychological traits change? The second goal is to get you thinking philosophically yourself. This will help you develop your critical reasoning and argumentative skills more generally. Along the way we will draw from late, great classical authors and influential contemporary figures. AMA Professor Hare will join us this Tuesday for a couple hours of live Q&A on his work and teaching, as well as philosophy and education more generally. Please feel free to post questions for Professor Hare 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 me in welcoming Professor Hare to our community!

Hello, reddit! I am Tyler VanderWeele, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and I study the mechanisms by which religion and spirituality affect health outcomes. A recent study I led found that women who attended religious services more than once per week were more than 30% less likely to die during a 16-year-follow-up than women who never attended. We found that attending religious services increases social support, discourages smoking, decreases depression, and helps people develop a more optimistic or hopeful outlook on life. You can read the study here. Another recent study found that women attending church services at least weekly were at five-fold lower risk for suicide, with an even larger effect for Catholics. You can read that study here. More information about the Harvard programs supporting this research can be found here and here. EDIT: Hi everyone, it’s 11:00 a.m. ET and I’m here to answer your questions! And a reminder that we’ve posted the links to the full studies above. EDIT 2: It’s 1:20 p.m. ET and unfortunately I have to sign-off. Thank you for all your great questions!

Reddit-ors! As someone who started off as a drug designer in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries I have always had a keen interest in natural products. Consequently I have worked for many years in the use of plant and natural products for things like improving human health, colours, food ingredients, shelf life extension etc. Over the last decade or so I have become passionate about fully utilizing crops and plants and am leading efforts into promoting and realizing a circular economy approach to agriculture and industry. A circular economy is an alternative to a traditional linear economy (make, use, dispose) in which we keep resources in use for as long as possible and get the most use out of them, then recover and regenerate products and materials at the end of each service life. Can we take this forward in plant and crops science, and industries? I think sustainability is key to our continued survival and lifestyles. I am on the Sense About Science’s Plant Science Panel, where you can put questions and opinions for response from researchers. The Panel is made up of over 50 independent plant science researchers. You can ask questions to them on Twitter (@senseaboutsci #plantsci) Facebook or using this online form. Answers are sent back within a couple of days and posted online. The Panel has answered close to 400 questions over the last three years and it’s a great want to cut through the noise around what can sometimes be a really polarised debate. I will be back at 12 am EDT (5 pm GMT, 9 am PST) to answer all your questions.

Open science hit the mainstream of discourse in the scientific community in 2016. Here I examine the emerging criticisms leveled against how we publish and disseminate science and argues it may be time to reframe the open science project. Rather than relying on instrumentalist language of “carrot-and-sticks” and “rewards-and-incentives” we should, instead, focus on the actual working conditions for scientists and the political economy in which they are embedded.

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The currently prevailing theory of a transmissible cancer cell lineage in Tasmanian devils was based on the discovery of apparently identical chromosomal aberrations in facial tumors of several animals. New findings of facial tumors that have no detectable cytogenetic similarities to previously published cancer karyotypes and the recent detection of varying portions of chromosome Y in all tumor cell lines of male devils (but none in tumors of females) cast doubt on the theory of a cancer transplant. Thus, I propose an alternative scenario in which similar chromosomal and genetic aberrations in individual cancers are a consequence of the low genetic diversity in populations of the Tasmanian devil resulting in a unique telomere length profile. Critically short telomeres on certain chromosome ends lead to chromosome-specific fusions and the activation of species-specific transposable elements that cause the observed karyotypic and molecular convergence. This new concept can explain the existence of genetic signs of tumor clonality within a population despite the independent origin of each facial cancer in these cancer-prone animals.

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It seems to me that the learning and practice of science naturally falls into approximately seven year units; and indeed the same could be said about ‘life’. (Note: My operational definition of ‘seven’ is ‘more than five but less than ten’.)  My academic life has certainly been consistent with this idea; and here I describe the first seven year unit of my work as an active scientist: this was the seven years I spent as a laboratory researcher focused primarily on the adrenal cortex. This unit was successful; in the sense that I solved, to my own satisfaction, the problem I was working-on. There may be some general interest and instruction to be derived from taking this specific example as a generalisable account of the different phases and aspects of an arc of science – how a line of research may be initiated, developed and brought to a conclusion. Furthermore, it is suggested that other scientists might (if it comes naturally to them) consider changing their focus and developing new interests every seven years or so.

Evolutionary psychology suggests that women and men differ in their mating strategies. We operationalized a central claim of evolutionary psychology by manipulating social status of profiles at a dating website: one group of profiles was depicted with a luxury sports car (high status) and second group without car (low status). Six profile were set up (3 female, 3 male) for each of the two groups. Two type of response variables were collected: Whether a “match” occurred (n=3515), and whether a message was sent to the profile (n=1548). Beauty and hip-waist-ratio of straw persons, and age of contacting individuals were recorded. Given strong effect sizes, large sample size, and high interest in human mating, this data set should be of interest for applied researchers in human mating and social psychology.