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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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