Blog and podcast use is rising among learners in the health professions. The lack of a standardized method to assess the quality of these resources prompted a research agenda aimed at solving this problem. Through a rigorous research process, a list of 151 quality indicators for blogs and podcasts was formed and subsequently refined to elicit the most important quality indicators. These indicators are presented as Quality Checklists to assist with quality appraisal of medical blogs and podcasts.

A document by Henry Rzepa. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Henry Rzepa. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Henry Rzepa. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Henry Rzepa. Click on the document to view its contents.

It has been my honor for the last 4 years to facilitate open reagent sharing with the team at Addgene. Addgene accelerates discovery by facilitating collaboration and the open sharing of ready-to-use research materials between scientists all over the world. Since its founding, Addgene has helped thousands of scientists all over the world collaborate to design and carry out their experiments by creating open access to plasmids and their associated data. The Addgenies are proud to facilitate the success of this sharing community.

There are two things I consider more important than sleep: air and water. We spend more time sleeping than engaging in any other single activity, but we know very little about how day-to-day sleep behavior is regulated. My lab uses human genetics to gain a better understanding on this topic. We’ve found that sleep behavior is heavily influenced by our genetic makeup. Just like many other traits — height, weight, body shape — sleep behavior is at least partly inherited. In 2009, we discovered a mutation in the DEC2 gene that allows some people to sleep only four to six hours a night and feel completely refreshed. We study such efficient sleepers in hopes to understand why sleep is so important! Ask me anything about how genes affect sleep and why we need to pay attention to sleep! Here’s my lab at UCSF Here’s a recent UCSF article about the impact of sleep-deprivation: Short Sleepers Are Four Times More Likely to Catch a Cold Here’s a BBC article about the sleep gene, The People Who Need Very Sleep I will be back at 1 pm ET (10 am PT, 5 pm UTC) to answer your questions, AMA! EDIT: Good morning everyone. Thanks for all the great questions and lets get to the answers! EDIT: Thanks for all the great questions. I enjoyed it very much. I am signing off!

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

Hi Reddit, My name is Dr. Stuart Kim and I am professor at Stanford University. My research focuses on genes that contribute to extreme longevity, such as supercentenarians that live to be over 110 years. I recently published a study titled “Whole Genome Sequencing of the World’s Oldest People” in PLOS ONE. Supercentenarians are the world’s oldest people, with just 17 or so alive in the United States at any time. Supercentenarians often show a remarkable delay in aging, such as one that worked as a physician in Georgia until age 103 and another that worked as a stockbroker on Wall Street until age 109. In order to begin to find the genetic basis for extreme longevity, we sequenced the genomes of 17 supercentenarians. The full genome sequences of the supercentenarians are available as supplemental data from the paper, and we hope that our data contributes to future research to unlock the secret for extreme longevity. Thank you everyone for your questions, it was a pleasure to answer your questions. I think trying to understand the biology of aging is really interesting and I hope you find it interesting too. I’ve signed off for now. Best wishes, Stuart Kim

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

A document by Amber Thomas. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Kevin Moerman. Click on the document to view its contents.

Hey-o! I created D3, a popular open-source JavaScript library for visualizing data. Until recently, I was also a graphics editor for The New York Times, where I helped produce a variety of data visualizations (such as Is It Better to Rent or Buy? and 512 Paths to the White House), maps (The Most Detailed Maps You’ll See From the Midterm Elections), and articles (A Game of Shark and Minnow). I write occasionally (Visualizing Algorithms, How To Scroll). You can see more of my work on my website and Twitter. I studied information visualization at Stanford, though it seems increasingly unlikely that I will finish my PhD. I got my BSE in Computer Science from Princeton, and I worked at a handful of tech companies prior to my stint as a newspaperman. The first code I wrote was a chat program for the TI-82 graphing calculator; you could send one letter at a time over a 2-foot serial cable. It wasn’t very useful. The last code I wrote was to compute the smallest enclosing circle for a set of circles. So far, that hasn’t been very useful either. These days I’m focused on the next major release of D3. My wife and I had our second child in July, though, so most of my time lately has been just takin’ care of the family. Here’s proof it’s me. So, yeah. I like infovis, maps, algorithms, javascript, design, video games, pretty colors that move… Ask me anything! I’ll be back at 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT to answer your questions. Edit: Wow, so many questions! Thank you. I’m starting to answer now. Keep ’em comin’! Edit 2:30 PM ET / 5:30 PM ET: Still here, still answering questions! Sorry I’m slow. Edit 4:15 PM PT: Thanks for all the questions! I gotta go now, but I’ll try to answer more questions later tonight. If I missed your question, I apologize. I’m @mbostock on Twitter if you want to ask anything else.

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

An academic career takes years to develop.  I share below some experiences on how my perception and the meaning of a PhD was altered through a chance encounter with Freeman Dyson’s story in physics and impacts on my contributions to science and agriculture in Africa.

Hi everyone, I am an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Memphis and an affiliate with the Institute for Intelligent Systems which is a center for interdisciplinary research https://sites.google.com/site/stephaniehuette/ . I study language processing as it unfolds using eye tracking and motion tracking technologies. Words have a profound impact on behavior, changing everything from perception, to judgements and decisions we make every day, all the way up to political viewpoints (e.g. http://news.sciencemag.org/2010/10/politicians-watch-your-grammar for discussion of a colleague’s work along these lines). I specifically study negation and usage of modal verbs “should” and “must” and how these words are used, affect learning, and activation dynamics in the lexicon (your mental dictionary). While many people are aware Cognitive Science has made many advances in Natural Language Processing in machine learning areas and are being used actively on projects like IBM’s jeopardy playing Watson, less well known are the advances we’ve made in the understanding of how people develop and process linguistic information at both a millisecond, hourly, and yearly timescale. I will be back at 1 pm ET (10 am PT, 5 pm UTC) to answer questions, Ask me anything about how you process language (fleeting milliseconds that make differences in how we understand cognition in general), or how negation hyperbolizes the perception of truth of a statement (a recent finding in my lab!)

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

Last Thursday, our article “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science” was published in Science. Coordinated by the Center for Open Science, we conducted 100 replications of published results in psychology with 270 authors and additional volunteers. We observed a substantial decline effect between the original result and the replications. This community-driven project was conducted transparently, and all data, materials, analysis code, and reports are available openly on the Open Science Framework. Ask us anything about our process and findings from the Reproducibility Project: Psychology, or the initiatives to improve transparency and reproducibility in science more generally. We will be back at 12pm EDT (9 am PT, 4 pm UTC), AUA! Responding are: Brian Nosek, Center for Open Science & University of Virginia Johanna Cohoon, Center for Open Science Mallory Kidwell, Center for Open Science [EDITED BELOW] Some links for context: PDF of the paper: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716.full.pdf OSF project page with data, materials, code, reports, and supplementary information: https://osf.io/ezcuj/wiki/home/ Open Science Framework: http://osf.io/ Center for Open Science: http://cos.io/ TOP Guidelines: http://cos.io/top/ Registered Reports: https://osf.io/8mpji/wiki/home/ 12:04. Hi everyone! Mallory, Brian, and Johanna here to answer your questions! 12:45. Our in house statistical consultant, Courtney Soderberg, has joined us in responding to your methodological and statistical questions. 3:50. Thanks everyone for all your questions! We’re closing up shop for the holiday weekend but will check back in over the next few days to give a few more responses. Thanks to all the RPP authors who participated in the discussion!

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

A document by Juan Pablo Alperin. Click on the document to view its contents.

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

Evolutionary artificial life systems have demonstrated many exciting behaviors. However, there is a general consensus that these systems are missing some element of the consistent evolutionary innovation that we see in nature. Many have sought to create more “open-ended” evolutionary systems in which no stagnation occurs, but have been stymied by the difficulty of quantifying progress towards such a nebulous concept. Here, we propose an alternate framework for thinking about these problems. By measuring obstacles to continued innovation, we can move towards a mechanistic understanding of what drives various evolutionary dynamics. We propose that this framework will allow for more rigorous hypothesis testing and clearer applications of these concepts to evolutionary computation.

Hello everyone, I’m Mona Chalabi, a data journalist at FiveThirtyEight and I work with NPR to produce the Number Of The Week. I try to think about data in areas where other people don’t – things like what percentage of people pee in the shower, how many Americans are married to their cousins and (of course) how often people men and women masturbate. I’m interested in more sober topics too. Most recently, I worked on FiveThirtyEight’s coverage of the UK election by profiling statistical outliers across the country. And I’m in London right now to work on a BBC documentary about the prevalence of racism in the UK. I used to work for the Guardian’s Data team in London and before that I got into data through working at the Bank of England, then the Economist Intelligence Unit and the International Organisation for Migration. Here’s proof that it’s me. I’ll be back at 1 PM ET to answer your questions. Ask me anything! (Seriously, our readers do each week, so should you!) I’M HERE NOW TO READ YOUR WEIRD AND WONDERFUL QUESTIONS AND DO MY BEST TO ANSWER THEM UPDATE: 30 MINS LEFT. KEEP THE QUESTIONS COMING! UPDATE: My times up - I’d like to stay but the probability of me making typos/talking nonsense goes up exponentially with every passing minute. I’m so sorry I couldn’t answer all of your brilliant questions but please do get in touch with me by email (mona.chalabi@fivethirtyeight.com) or on Twitter (@MonaChalabi) and I’ll do my best to reply. Hope the numbers are helping! xx

Hi Reddit! I’m a Scientia Professor at UNSW in New South Wales, Australia. I co-founded and co-direct the Australian Centre for NanoMedicine (ACN), a group that brings together experts in engineering, medicine, and science to solve big problems in human health. My research focuses on surface modification, biosensors, functional nanomaterials, cell-based diagnostic devices, and electroanalysis. I’m helping develop things like portable diagnostic devices, 3D cell bioprinters, and other cool stuff. My research group at UNSW specializes in ways to modify sensor surfaces at the molecular level. We use self-assembled monolayers, biological molecules, and nanomaterials to make sensors do things like selectively detect analytes, influence biological processes, and communicate electrically with biological molecules. I’m also the editor-in-chief of ACS Sensors, a brand-new journal that will publish the latest and greatest work in sensor science. Look for our first issue online in January 2016. This is a really exciting time for sensors research. Many experts think the global sensors market will surpass $110 billion by 2019. Much of this money will come from the many applications of “personalized medicine.” For example, single-molecule sensors are about to explode. We could use them to find out immediately whether a patient will respond to a particular cancer treatment. We may also see sensors used in environmental and food monitoring. On the other hand, as a field we’re constrained by what sensors can currently do, and are having trouble making certain types of sensors commercially viable. So ask me anything about this diverse, interdisciplinary field: biosensors, chemical sensors, gas sensors, intracellular sensors, single-molecule sensors, cell chips, arrays, or microfluidic devices. I’m happy to answer your questions about how sensors affect our everyday lives, as well as about the future challenges and directions facing our field. I will be back at 3:00pm ET (5:00am my time in Australia, please wake me gently).