A document by PLOSScienceWednesday . Click on the document to view its contents.

Hiya. I’m David McCandless, a London-based author, writer, designer and founder of Information is Beautiful (Facebook / Twitter). I’m interested in how visualized information & data can help us understand the world, and reveal the hidden connections, patterns & stories beneath the surface. Edit (12:00 ET): I’m back, chomping through these great questions. Keep asking. Edit (12:21 ET): Nice (inevitable) discussion on pie charts already: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3ol03x/hi_im_david_mccandless_founder_of_information_is/cvy3emu Edit (12:37 ET): Getting stuck into Excel now too… https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3ol03x/hi_im_david_mccandless_founder_of_information_is/cvy3eq3 **edit (13:50 ET): Taking a break - back in 10 or so. Back and on it. edit (15:12 ET) I’m done. My brain is cooked! What amazing and insightful questions. Thank you all very much for a great experience. I’ll try to pop back later and answer some more questions. I’ve been a big lurker on Reddit for years but maybe now I will come out a bit more. At least to polish off some of the fights below… My main passion is visualizing data & information about anything I don’t fully understand, such as Snake Oil? Evidence for Nutritional Supplements, A Million Lines of Code, or How Many Gigatons of CO2 Will it Take to End the World?. The more stupified or confused by a subject I am, the better the resulting viz, I’ve found. I particularly love applying a visualization / design lens to unusual subject matter. Like The Left vs Right Political Spectrum, Psychological Defenses, Rhetological Fallacies or The Best Data Dog. Before design, I freelanced for outlets like The Guardian and Wired. Before that, I was a video games reviewer and Doom champion (I have eerie gaming skills). And yes, it’s true. I made The Helicopter Game. These days, I’ve been playing with software, developing a platform called VizSweet to generate static & interactive data-visualisations. Examples: World’s Biggest Data Breaches, The Internet of Things or every key relationship in the Middle East. I’ve recently started teaching too so happy to answer questions on What Makes a Good Visualization?. I see visualization as a new language, culture and form of expression. I’m very excited about its future. I’m a longterm Reddit lurker - so very honoured to be here. Here’s proof that it’s me. I’ll be back at noon ET to answer all your questions. In the meantime, Ask Me Anything.

A document by Lorne Campbell. Click on the document to view its contents.

What you put on your skin or in your hair is personal. Whether it’s because of vanity or hygiene, it’s good to have an understanding of what’s in your personal care products and what makes them effective. Together, we’ve spent the last five decades improving the science in this area and we’re “lathered up” about soap as a method to prevent disease. For a technology that is as fundamental as soap, there is a surprisingly large amount of technical development activity in the area. The early days of using fatty acid and pot ash to create soap are behind us and new trends are driving innovation, including formulating for improved sustainability, new sensorial benefits and multifunctional traits. The need for washing with soap is clear. From bar to liquid and even powder, soap is used globally in different ways. We’re here to talk about what’s required to make a good soap, the challenges that are driving new research and how we can deliver solutions that will have a positive societal impact. CURTIS SCHWARTZ: I am an R&D director at Dow and have spent the last 30 years in industrial science working on formulations to improve the performance of personal care products, including everyday items such as laundry detergents, soap bars, hair sprays, shampoos, body washes and sunscreens. I received my Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Illinois and hold over 10 patents. I was part of the POLYOX – Lifebuoy collaboration that was recently awarded a GOLD Edison award for our work with Unilever. JANET WINDISCH – I have a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania and have spent the last 25 years working in the polymers and specialty materials space for personal care, adhesives, coatings and medical applications. I have authored 8 papers, hold 1 patent and enjoy talking all things science. Ask Us Anything! Note: We will start responding to questions at 1:00 PM Eastern Time (10 am PT, 5 pm UTC.) Edit: Minor technical issues, we’re here and trying to post!

Hi r/Science! My name is Dr. Arif Kamal and I am a palliative care physician at Duke University. Palliative care, also known as palliative medicine, is specialized medical care for people living with serious illness. It focuses on providing relief from the symptoms and stress of a serious illness—whatever the diagnosis. The goal is to improve quality of life for both the patient and the family. Palliative care is provided by a team of palliative care doctors, nurses and other specialists who work together with a patient’s other doctors to provide an extra layer of support. It is appropriate at any age and at any stage in a serious illness and can be provided along with curative treatment. As a palliative care physician, I hope to demystify what palliative care means to those who worry that a focus on quality of life during incurable illness may mean shortening life in the process, or even worse, that we have anything to do with “death panels”. In addition to direct patient care, I also co-founded the Global Palliative Care Quality Alliance, a collaboration of palliative care organizations dedicated to exploring how to further best practices and quality within the palliative care field. On October 15th, we will be holding the first virtual conference dedicated to quality within palliative care called the Quality Matters Conference. To find out more about the GPCQA and the Quality Matters Conference, visit us at www.gpcqa.org. I will be answering your questions at 4 pm ET (1 pm PT, 9 pm UTC). Ask Me Anything! Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @arifkamalmd and the Global Palliative Care Quality Alliance @GPCQA

A document by Miia Parnaudeau. Click on the document to view its contents.

This is a pilot study to begin examining whether ustekinumab, a drug typically used for psoriasis, has the potential to reduce or eliminate the need for insulin injections in people with recently diagnosed Type 1 diabetes. “As one of the first clinical trials to target the immune cells that cause Type 1 diabetes, we are hopeful that this treatment will be a step towards finding a way to stop or slow the destruction of the body’s own insulin-producing cells.” Dr. Jan Dutz, Principal Investigator We are here to answer questions about diabetes, what this drug could mean for people with Type 1 diabetes, why we are looking at repurposing what seems like an unrelated medication, and anything else you’d like to ask us. http://www.bcdiabetes.ca/type1study/ Dr. Tom Elliott: Since 1992, Dr. Elliott has been a faculty member at UBC, where his current rank is Clinical Associate Professor. He was Co-Director of Undergraduate Medical Education for the UBC Division of Endocrinology from 1992 to 2012, and chaired the Endocrinology & Metabolism Society of BC, the professional body representing all BC endocrinologists and diabetes specialists, from 2008 to 2012. Also since 1992, Dr. Elliott has been on the active medical staff at Vancouver General Hospital, as well as conducting a busy private office practice in Endocrinology & Diabetology. Dr. Elliott is Director of Clinical Trials at BC Diabetes. He has authored more than 50 scientific papers and is actively engaged in 15 ongoing research projects. Dr. Ashish Marwaha Dr. Ashish Marwaha is a clinical pediatric academic who was appointed as a Radcliffe Travelling Fellow of University College, Oxford to pursue a PhD, in which he identified a novel subset of highly inflammatory immune cells (Th17) were present in children with new-onset type 1 diabetes (T1D) (Cutting Edge: Journal of Immunology, 2010). He has taken an active role in obtaining funding, designing, setting-up and running the current clinical trial of ustekinumab that will block the Th17 pathway in T1D.

Hey Reddit! I’m Rich Ross, a husbandry biologist specializing in cephalopods and coral at the California Academy of Sciences’ Steinhart Aquarium. I keep weird and unique animals thriving and breeding in aquariums, as well as do fieldwork on coral spawning and animal-collection for display and animal-behavior studies. Cephalopods are the coolest animals on the planet (3 hearts, blue blood, ring-shaped brain, related to snails, like something from a Harryhausen movie and secretly plotting to take over the world), and I’ve been working with them for almost 20 years. I was the first to close the lifecycle of the dwarf cuttlefish, and my colleagues and I recently published a paper on the breeding and behavior of the currently undescribed Larger Pacific Striped Octopus—an octopus that does things very differently from other octopuses (like beak-to-beak mating). I’ll be answering questions starting at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET, and you can find me anytime on Twitter or packhead.net. Also accepting questions about juggling, martial arts, glassblowing, and hairless dogs. It is 12:11 and I have to run to do some work stuff. I’ll check back in tonight around 6 pm Pacific Time to answer any follow ups or questions I missed. Thanks! 8pm, I think I got everyone, I’ll check back again tomorrow.

On July 27, reddit, WIRED, and Nokia brought us the first-ever AMA with Stephen Hawking with this note: At the time, we, the mods of /r/science, noted this: “This AMA will be run differently due to the constraints of Professor Hawking. The AMA will be in two parts, today we with gather questions. Please post your questions and vote on your favorite questions, from these questions Professor Hawking will select which ones he feels he can give answers to. Once the answers have been written, we, the mods, will cut and paste the answers into this AMA and post a link to the AMA in /r/science so that people can re-visit the AMA and read his answers in the proper context. The date for this is undecided, as it depends on several factors.” It’s now October, and many of you have been asking about the answers. We have them! This AMA has been a bit of an experiment, and the response from reddit was tremendous. Professor Hawking was overwhelmed by the interest, but has answered as many as he could with the important work he has been up to. If you’ve been paying attention, you will have seen what else Prof. Hawking has been working on for the last few months: In July, Musk, Wozniak and Hawking urge ban on warfare AI and autonomous weapons “The letter, presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was signed by Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis and professor Stephen Hawking along with 1,000 AI and robotics researchers.” And also in July: Stephen Hawking announces $100 million hunt for alien life “On Monday, famed physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian tycoon Yuri Milner held a news conference in London to announce their new project:injecting $100 million and a whole lot of brain power into the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, an endeavor they’re calling Breakthrough Listen.” August 2015: Stephen Hawking says he has a way to escape from a black hole “he told an audience at a public lecture in Stockholm, Sweden, yesterday. He was speaking in advance of a scientific talk today at the Hawking Radiation Conference being held at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.” Professor Hawking found the time to answer what he could, and we have those answers. With AMAs this popular there are never enough answers to go around, and in this particular case I expect users to understand the reasons. For simplicity and organizational purposes each questions and answer will be posted as top level comments to this post. Follow up questions and comment may be posted in response to each of these comments. (Other top level comments will be removed.)

Tasmanian devils, the largest marsupial carnivores, have lived in relative isolation on the island of Tasmania. Consequently, there is limited genetic diversity within the devil population, reducing the population's overall fitness and making them more susceptible to the spread of infectious disease. In the past 30 years one such disease, a contagious cancer, has emerged posing an existential threat to the species. The cancer, devil tumor facial disease, is of non-viral origin and is spread by biting which has enabled it to disseminate throughout the devil population, in-and-between different geographic loci. Under this intense selective pressure an evolutionary arms race emerged between the contagious disease and the genetics of the devil host. Aided by the efforts of conscientious scientists there is now hope for the future of the Tasmanian devil population. Furthermore, the Tasmanian devil facial tumor has served as a case study in the value of interdisciplinary science, bringing together ecologists, immunologists, cell biologists, epidemiologists, and cancer biologist, all with the combined goal of saving the Tasmanian devil species.

Hi Reddit! I am Tom Kaye, Associate Researcher with the Burke Museum in Seattle, Washington. My research uses lasers to make fossils and minerals fluoresce in ways never seen before. My team recently published a paper in PLOS ONE titled “Laser-Stimulated Fluorescence in Paleontology” where in one example we used our system to identify the origin of a bracelet that was placed around the arm of a 6,000 year old skeleton of a girl. We also demonstrated the use of laser fluorescence to automatically sort microfossils, its ability to “back light” feathers preserved as carbon films and light up micro-fossils that were normally invisible under the surface. We are also taking the laser underground and using it to fluoresce and photograph cave formations at great distances! I hope to answer lots of interesting questions at the PLOS AMA at 1pm ET (10 am PT, 5 pm UTC), and you can follow my science adventures on Facebook. See you all soon!

Hi Reddit – I am a professor of Chemistry and also a professor in several other departments/programs including Neuroscience and Physiology, all at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My research has two major themes: one is developing new analytical tools to characterize the chemistry occurring in small volume samples, and the second uses these tools to understand the chemistry occurring in the brain. More specifically, I study novel neurochemical pathways in a range of animal models. Perhaps more important to the suggested topic of the AMA, I am the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Analytical Chemistry, published by the American Chemical Society. This journal receives thousands of submissions each year. With the help of a talented team of seventeen active researchers (our expert associate editors), and the thousands of peer reviewers who donate their time and expertise, we publish about one third of the submitted manuscripts. Last week was Peer Review Week and I thought it would be fun to discuss how manuscripts are selected to be published. Thus, I am here to answer your questions and have discussions on the peer review process, or on anything else you have in mind. I’ll be back at 1 pm ET (10 am PT, 5 pm UTC), so AMA and I look forward to hearing your thoughts! I am online and ready to answer your questions. Thanks all for your participation. Thank you again for participating in this AMA. I hope it was a positive experience for you! Please let me know if you need anything else.

A document by Brianna Marshall. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Viputheshwar Sitaraman. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Gary S. McDowell. Click on the document to view its contents.

Ongoing, random mutation to DNA ensures that no two cells in an individual are genetically identical. Since mature neurons can survive for the lifetime of an individual, their DNA is exposed to mutagens (oxygen free radicals, electromagnetic radiation, endogenous transposable elements, etc.) on an ongoing basis. These forces have the potential to induce somatic mutations, and potentially contribute to normal aging and neurodegenerative disease. We sequenced single neurons from normal postmortem human brains to identify rates and patterns of somatic mutations published in the October 2nd issue of Science, layman’s summary at The Atlantic Most of the mutations we identified are unique to a single neuron, and we can use them to say something about the kinds of mutational processes that impact a neuron’s genome. Many of the mutations appear to have happened during the process of gene transcription, which is unfortunate, because it means that the genes a neuron needs most and uses most often are those that are most likely to be mutated. A small fraction of the mutations are shared among multiple neurons. Since neurons don’t divide in the brain after about week 20 of fetal development, we know that those shared mutations happened during embryonic and fetal development in progenitor cells, and then were passed on to their progeny. We can use those shared mutations as tags to mark particular lineages of cells in brain development, much in the same way that we can use viruses or other markers as tags to mark lineages in experimental organisms. Because somatic mutations in the brain represent a durable and ongoing record of neuronal life history, from development through post-mitotic function, our work enables us to make a lineage map to identify family relationships between cells in the brain. tl;dr Mutations are happening in your neurons every day! We looked at individual neurons to find out how many. EDIT: Thanks so much for all your thoughtful questions, and for the great discussion! We had so much fun doing this today.

A document by Ernesto Priego. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Ernesto Priego. Click on the document to view its contents.

Hello, r/Science! I am Albert Li, President and CEO of In Vitro ADMET Laboratories (IVAL), located in Columbia, MD and Malden, MA. For the past three decades, I have devoted my scientific career to the improvement and application of human-based in vitro experimental systems (experiments done outside of a living body) in the development of pharmaceuticals. In 2004, I founded IVAL, an organization dedicated to creating innovative approaches to the evaluation of human drug properties. We strive to develop products and preclinical applications that help scientists study how the body processes a compound, how that compound interacts with others already in the body, and predict any potential harm that the compound may cause. This improves the drug discovery process, allowing for more accurate prediction of drug safety and efficacy in the early phases of drug research and ensuring that only the safest and most promising candidates move on to clinical trials. One achievement in this effort is the Integrated discrete Multiple Organ Co-Culture experimental tool (IdMOC). This testing plate consists of multiple wells that can be seeded with cells from different organs. These wells are then connected by an overlying medium, which allows for well-to-well communication, mimicking the way organs communicate within the body. Researchers can then apply a test compound to the target cell type and assess how the compound might travel through the body and affect other organs. In addition to providing far more complete information on drug metabolism and interaction, the IdMOC can allow for the refinement, reduction, and replacement of live animal usage in drug research. This not only aides animal welfare but also creates more accurate data, since the use of human cells can provide human-specific information that cannot be obtained with laboratory animals. We also work on optimizing cryopreservation of primary human and animal cells, particularly hepatocytes, a major cell type found in the liver. Hepatocytes play an important role in metabolizing outside compounds and altering them so that they can be excreted from the body. This makes them vital to drug research and development. Cryopreservation is an ideal method for long term storage and allows researchers to have a steady supply of cells available for experimentation. We have a (newly minted) blog http://invitroadmetlabs.com/ as well as Twitter https://twitter.com/InVitroADMET and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/In-Vitro-ADMET-Laboratories-LLC-441026892766841/timeline/ . Here are links to a few of our recent papers: Evaluation of Adverse Drug Properties with Cryopreserved Human Hepatocytes and the Integrated Discrete Multiple Organ Co-culture (IdMOC) System http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26191380 (Full Text) In Vitro Heptocyte-based Experimental Systems http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24805059 (Abstract) Evaluation of Human Hepatocytes under Prolonged Culture http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25313020 (Abstract) A Novel Plated Hepatocyte Relay Assay (PHRA) for In Vitro Evaluation of Hepatic Metabolic Clearance of Slowly Metabolized Compounds http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26282592 (Epub Ahead of Print) Also with me today is IVAL researcher Yang Qian (YQ) out Social Media Coordinator, Allison Isberg (AI), who will be helping us take questions and type answers. We will be back to answer your questions at 1 pm ET (10 am PT, 5 pm UTC), Feel free to AUA about in vitro drug research and development, drug toxicology, cryopreservation of cells, biomedical entrepreneurship, or anything else you have in mind! Edit AI- Hey everyone, that’s about all we have time for today. Thank you so much for your questions; Dr. Li really enjoyed answering them! And thank you to the r/Science mods for setting this up. If you’re interested in following more of our research, please feel free to follow the Twitter or send a PM to this account. If anyone is interested in full copies of any of our papers, PM this account and we should be able to get those to you. We will check back again and answer any more questions if possible. Thanks again!

A document by Alexey Zagalsky. Click on the document to view its contents.

Hi Reddit, My name is Zhengquan Yu and I am an associate professor at the China Agricultural University. Joining me in this AMA is my colleague, Maksim Plikus from the University of California, Irvine, who studies the principles and mechanisms of adult stem cell regulation using hair follicle as the primary model system. My research focuses on regulatory network of somatic stem cells in hair follicle and mammary gland. We recently published a research article titled Post-transcriptional Regulation of Keratinocyte Progenitor Cell Expansion, Differentiation and Hair Follicle Regression by miR-22 in PLOS Genetics. We describe an essential role for a highly conserved microRNA, miR-22, in regulating the regression of mouse hair follicles. We found that increasing miR-22 results in hair loss in mice due to the premature regression of follicles, and that silencing of keratin-mediated hair shaft assembly by miR-22 is a prerequisite for follicle regression. There are hundreds of microRNAs expressed in hair follicles, but most of them are not well studied. This paper highlights the importance of determining the combinatorial effects of the microRNA regulatory network in hair cycling and provides new insights into the mechanism of premature hair follicle regression in understanding the pathology of hair loss. We will be answering your questions at 1pm ET (10 am PT, 5 pm UTC), Ask Us Anything!

A document by Jean-Louis Bertrand. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Jean-Louis Bertrand. Click on the document to view its contents.

Hello, everyone! We are Chemjobber and Gregory Eells, and we’re here to chat with you about graduate school stress. A little bit about us: My pseudonym is Chemjobber, as is the name of my blog. I am a Ph.D. chemist in industry. I mostly cover the chemistry job market, but I also like to talk a lot about life as a chemist, whether it’s how to find a job, how to relate to your coworkers and also just how to get through the journey/adventure/joy/living hell that can be getting a graduate degree in chemistry. And my name is Dr. Gregory Eells; I have a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology and am a licensed psychologist in the State of New York. I have worked in higher education mental health for 20 years and have served as a director of a university counseling service for the past 17 years. I am currently the Director of Counseling and Psychological Services at Cornell University. Hi, Chemjobber again. One day in late 2012, a chemistry blogger (Vinylogous) and I decided to write a five-part series on different mental health aspects of graduate school. It was quite a journey, with lots of people jumping in, including prominent chemistry bloggers and also full professors talking about their difficulties with the vagaries of research. Everyone has a story to tell about this, and a lot of them came out. It’s Greg again. Graduate school stress is in fact a big problem. In the time I have worked in higher education mental health, I have seen hundreds of graduate students struggling with mental health and general life concerns. Graduate school can be an incredible time of discovery and professional development and can also be a time where work expectations are very high and students often do not have some of the same protections of undergraduates or faculty members. In my graduate training I was very fortunate to have very supportive faculty and at times I did find the transition from graduate student to new professional very challenging and difficult. Feel free to ask us anything that’s on your mind, we’re here to help. We’ll be online at 10:00am ET to begin answering your questions! For more on grad school stress, check out these articles in the Sept. 14 issue of C&EN: Opening Up About Stress In Graduate School: http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i36/Opening-Stress-Graduate-School.html Grad students share strategies for taking their minds off work: http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i36/Stress-Relief.html Also, check out Chemjobber and Vinylogous’ five-part series on grad school stress: http://chemjobber.blogspot.com/2013/01/is-graduate-school-in-chemistry-bad-for.html CJ and I were just talking about graduate school stress and we thought it was worth discussing the role of alcohol in how many graduate students manage their stress and anxiety. Obviously, alcohol use is a part of social life and many social gatherings in the US and other countries. However, graduate students can turn to alcohol or other substances as a way to escape stress. There can often be a “work hard play hard” component to some graduate school cultures. The challenge is this use can become problematic and evolve into dependence. Alcohol use is not an effective long term strategy for stress management. This is Greg and I have to sign off for now. Great discussion everyone. UPDATE: CJ here, it’s 11:20 Eastern, I’ll be back in an hour or so.