Purifying ethanol is energy-intensive and expensive. When we’re just using it in a fuel blend, it’s also unnecessary. The real end-product of ethanol production for fuel use isn’t pure ethanol itself but rather a fuel blend which contains ethanol; pure ethanol need not be an intermediate step. Reconsidering the overall flow-sheet in this way opens up a far broader optimization space in which to find energy-efficient separation processes and in a recent Energy and Fuels paper, my colleagues and I demonstrated a more energy-efficient separation process making use of a natural liquid phase split to eliminate water without the addition of further energy for separation. Our process cuts the energy consumption of ethanol production by up to 2MJ per liter and has a lower capital cost than conventional azeotropic distillation. It is, however, just one of many new processes that become possible once you discard the assumption that a pure biofuel is the ultimate end-product. I am here with Shell engineer Ari Hadjitheodorou to talk about the challenges of implementing this concept in the field. Ask us anything! Questions about the violent #FeesMustFall protests on our campus are not off-limits, though we prefer to stick to the science. We will be back at 11 am ET (8 am PT) to answer your questions, ask us anything! Edit: Link to paper. Sadly our currency in South Africa has recently stopped being worth anything, so the university wouldn’t fork out the fee for Open Access, so here’s a link to a news article that summarizes it. Edit2: It’s 7PM over here, so I need to do some real-world stuff (dinner, human contact etc) so I’ll be wrapping up for now. I’ll stop by again in the morning to answer anything else that’s come up. Thanks everyone for the questions and the support and a big thank you to the mods!

I do epistemology and philosophy of language, and I’m the graduate adviser for NIU’s terminal MA program in philosophy. My recent work is on contextualism in epistemology, norms of assertion, and skeptical arguments. I’m now thinking about testimonial injustice and epistemic degradation. I like talking about nearly any philosophical topic! I’ve done a number of Wi-Phi videos, a few of which are part of the knowledge series spearheaded by Jennifer Nagel, who did a fantastic AMA a while ago. Proof: https://www.facebook.com/geoffpynn/posts/10154584960522232 EDIT 5:15pm EST: thanks for all the great questions! There are still a few unanswered & I will try to get to them later tonight. I’ll check back later on as well, so feel free to post more if you’re interested.

Hi Reddit, We are members of the Tropical Aquaculture Laboratory (TAL) and the Indian River Research and Education Center (IRREC), two University of Florida labs, who have aquacultured the Pacific blue tang (Paracanthurus hepatus) for the first (TAL) and second (IRREC) documented times. This species is the most commonly imported member of the surgeonfish family at approximately 200,000 individuals per year. Recent popular animated movies such as Finding Nemo and Finding Dory have only increased the interest this species. Many marine fish species are collected directly from the ocean’s reefs. Collection of the Pacific blue tang can cause damage to the reefs where these fish live. Rising Tide Conservation is a program designed to develop aquaculture for marine fish to provide alternative sources for these beautiful animals. You can read more about the journey here. Here are the pictures of our babies (TAL)(IRREC). Ask us anything! Our bios: Eric Cassiano, biologist at TAL who specializes in live feed production and larval rearing. Isaac Lee, masters student at IRREC who works on marine ornamentals Andrew Palau, technician at IRREC who specializes in live feed production and larval rearing Carter Cyr, Masters Student at IRREC who worked on marine ornamentals and sportfish Cortney Ohs, Associate Professor at IRREC We’ll be back at 1 pm EST (10 am PST, 5 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask us anything! Edit: Cortney, Andrew, Isaac, Carter and Eric here to answer your questions. Edit2: Thanks for your questions /r/science. Hopefully we’ll be back again with more exciting news.

Hi Reddit, We’re Igor Grigoriev, Steve Goodwin and Gert HJ KEMA, and we recently published an article titled Combating a Global Threat to a Clonal Crop: Banana Black Sigatoka Pathogen Pseudocercospora fijiensis (Synonym Mycosphaerella fijiensis) Genomes Reveal Clues for Disease Control in PLOS Genetics. Gert HJ Kema, Professor of Tropical Phytopathology at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, researches fungal diseases in banana and wheat, with a focus on genetic diversity and mechanisms of pathogenicity of the causal agents. Igor Grigoriev, Head of Fungal Genomics program at the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute and Adjunct Professor of Plant and Microbial Biology at University of California Berkeley, employs genomics tools to explore fungal diversity for energy and environment science and applications. Steve Goodwin, Research Plant Pathologist with the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Adjunct Professor of Plant Pathology at Purdue University, uses genetics, genomics and bioinformatics approaches to analyze host-pathogen interactions between wheat and fungal pathogens and to utilize genetic diversity in hosts and pathogens. The PLOS Genetics article focused on determining the DNA sequence of the fungus and applies it by focusing on two major aspects of current banana production: overall susceptibility of the crop and reduced efficacy of disease control agents (fungicides). The overall susceptibility of the major export Cavendish banana varieties - that essentially form one huge monoculture around the globe - is the underlying problem of the unsustainable banana production. Hence, the only way to manage black Sigatoka is the use of fungicides. However, due to the high application frequencies (between 50-70 times per year) their efficacy continually decreases, which in turn requires more/different control strategies. Our paper unveils the unsustainable status quo by showing the need and possibility for developing new and better varieties with improved disease resistance. This helps growers in the developing world and meets consumer demands for a caring society. To learn more about the featured study, read Gert’s PLOS Blogs post on Biologue. See for another effect of the global banana monoculture the PLOS Pathogens study Worse Comes to Worst: Bananas and Panama Disease—When Plant and Pathogen Clones Meet. Also, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter: DOE Joint Genome Institute and USDA and Wageningen University. Visit us at www.panamadisease.org and/or subscribe to the newsletter. We’ll be back at 1 pm EST (10 am PST, 5 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask us anything!

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Hello Reddit! I’m Neil Brown, a fungal biologist and a BBSRC Future Leader Fellow at Rothamsted Research in the UK. In my school leavers book, my friends were asked “What will Neil end up doing?” They answered “saving trees”, to which I laughed. But it appears that they knew more about me than I did, as I now devote my days to understanding plant diseases, contributing to the knowledge and innovation needed to develop new ways to protect our crops. New approaches to control fungal diseases that threaten our food security and health, through the contamination of crops with harmful toxins, are urgently needed. To achieve this, I am asking: how does a fungal pathogen landing on a plant decide if it is a suitable host; how does it know where to infect or where to find the best source of food; and how does it know when to deploy different virulence strategies, such as the secretion of toxins or hydrolytic enzymes? These are the questions I hope to answer in my study of fungal ‘touch and taste’ receptors, similar to those found on our tongue. I will focus on Fusarium, a fungal pathogen that cause disease on wheat, barley, rice and maize. The goal is to determine whether these fungal ‘touch and taste’ receptors are biological targets that can potentially be drugged to prevent a pathogen from causing crop diseases and toxin contamination. It would be great to discuss my research with you. So go ahead. Ask me anything. I will be back at 11am ET (4pm BST). In the meantime, you are welcome to find out more about me, and my international experiences as an early career researcher, in a blog entry I recently wrote for Rothamsted Research’s ‘A day in the life of a Research Scientist’ blog series (http://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/day-life-dr-neil-brown). Hi everyone! Thank you all for this broad range of interesting questions. I will check back later to answer a any I missed. All the best, Neil

Hi Reddit! My most recent study (https://news.osu.edu/news/2016/06/16/overtime-women/) found that women, in particular, have higher rates of cancer, diabetes, heart disease and arthritis when they work long hours for many years. I think that life demands outside of work could contribute and help explain why we found these life-threatening problems for women but not for men. (More information about my work is available at: https://cph.osu.edu/people/adembe) I will be back at 1 pm ET (10 am PT) to answer your questions, ask me anything! UPDATE: I’d just like to say I’m really appreciative of having had the opportunity to talk with so many of you today. We had a huge turnout of more than 350 people asking questions and I’m sorry I was not able to provide information back to all of you. If you have additional questions, please contact me on my website, listed above. I know that many of you are struggling with trying to find work scheduling arrangements that will be most effective and appropriate for each of your situations and I’d very much like to have future opportunities to interact with you on these issues.

As previously announced, /r/philosophy is hosting an AMA series this fall semester which kicked off with AMAs by Caspar Hare (MIT), Kevin Scharp and Kenneth Ehrenberg. Check out our series announcement post to see all the upcoming AMAs this semester. We continue our series this upcoming Wednesday with Geoff Pynn, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University. Hear it from him: Geoff Pynn is an associate professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois University. He earned his PhD from Yale University; specializes in epistemology and philosophy of language; and regularly teaches early modern European philosophy, philosophy of religion, and logic. He is also interested in the philosophical problems posed by addiction, anarchism, conspiracy theories, moral panics, and social justice movements. His favorite philosophers are Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, and the nineteenth-century anarchist feminist Voltairine De Cleyre. His most recent published work is on contextualism in epistemology. You can download all his papers from his academia.edu page. He has a number of Wi-Phi videos on: Critical thinking Deductive arguments Abductive arguments Inductive arguments (coming soon!) The tracking theory of knowledge Virtue epistemology Contextualism (coming soon!) Geoff’s current research focuses on social epistemology. Miranda Fricker coined the phrase “testimonial injustice” to describe what occurs when some prejudice or bias causes a person’s testimony to be granted less (or more) credibility than it deserves. For example, imagine a police officer who refuses to believe a suspect’s truthful eyewitness testimony simply because the suspect is black. Or consider how someone’s rural accent or stilted English can make you more skeptical than you’d otherwise be about whether he is telling the truth. Intuitively, it seems wrong to let your prejudices sway your credibility judgments, and it seems like people who are disbelieved because of someone else’s bias have a right to complain. But it’s hard to say why such treatment is wrongful. In one paper, Geoff is developing an account of the harm of testimonial injustice. The basic idea is that when you let your prejudices sway your credibility judgments, you’re degrading the speaker. Degradation is a complex social harm where a person a mistreated in a way that represents her as if she deserved the mistreatment in virtue of the kind of person she is. Epistemic degradation may not be as dramatic or painful as torture, revenge porn, or public humiliation, but it can be extremely demoralizing and have lasting effects. Like all forms of degrading treatment, biased credibility judgments reduce a person’s social standing, encouraging and rewarding behavior that treats them as if they deserved disrespect. (Working on this paper has also sparked Geoff’s interest in degradation, humiliation, shame, and other forms of psycho-social harm.) Geoff’s other current project is on testimonial injustice, plea bargaining, and false confessions. More than 90 percent of criminal cases in the U.S. never go to trial. Instead, a prosecutor extracts a guilty plea from a suspect by either promising him a reduced sentence in exchange for a guilty plea, or threatening him with a more severe charge should his case go to trial. While many people who accept plea bargains are guilty, at least some plead guilty simply to avoid the risk of a more severe punishment. Such cases involve a particularly nasty form of testimonial injustice: enticing a speaker to lie in order to treat her lie as if it were credible enough to justify punishing her. Geoff is also the graduate adviser for Northern Illinois University’s top-rated philosophy MA program, which caters primarily to students who want to get a PhD in philosophy, but do not have the background to get into a PhD program directly. Like many other terminal MA programs, NIU’s offers full funding and living stipends, and Geoff maintains a guide to funding opportunities at terminal MA programs. He’s happy to talk about any aspect of philosophy grad school. Some relevant papers: An overview of contextualism in epistemology (forthcoming in Oxford Handbooks) A piece on the “intuitive argument” for contextualism (forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Epistemic Contextualism) A new form of contextualism, designed to side-step a slew of objections to the view that emerged in the early 2000s An explanation of the “illusion of ignorance” produced by skeptical arguments A sort of math-y piece dismantling a popular criticism of the Moorean response to skepticism AMA Professor Pynn will join us Wednesday for a couple hours of live Q&A on his research in epistemology, the philosophy of language and other areas. Please feel free to post questions for Professor Pynn 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 Pynn to our community!

Hi redditors! We are Greg Mandt, System Program Director for NOAA’s GOES-R satellite series, and Dr. Steve Goodman, GOES-R Senior Scientist. Together, we have worked with our team to plan, develop, and launch NOAA’s GOES-R, a revolutionary new geostationary weather satellite! We cannot wait to see it launch atop its Atlas V 541 rocket and make its way to geostationary orbit. GOES-R is scheduled to head to space in less than 30 days—leaving Earth at 5:40pm EDT on November 4, 2016. GOES-R, or GOES-16 as it will be known once it reaches orbit, will provide five times faster weather coverage, more accurate data for hurricane tracking and intensity forecasts, real-time mapping of total lightning for improved severe weather prediction, advanced warning of space weather hazards, and improved transportation safety– all from ONE satellite! Want to know more about the mission, the satellite, the launch, or the science behind it all? We are here today to discuss all things GOES-R! Thank you everyone! We appreciate all of the questions. If you would like more information on the launch, please visit www.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES-R You can learn more about the GOES-R satellite series and see the countdown to launch here!

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Hi Reddit, The Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry is hosting the 5th Australasian annual meeting this week and has asked experts from across academia, government and industry to answer questions on a wide array of environmental issues. The theme for this year’s conference is “Industry, Science and Environment: Towards a Sustainable Future”. We will have experts across a wide range of environmental science topics including pesticides, metals, pharmaceuticals, nanotechnology, microplastics, oil and gas, risk assessment and remediation in extreme environments, environmental analysis and monitoring, sustainable waste management and human health issues and many more. If you have questions about chemicals or toxicants in the environment – we’ll try to get you the best possible answers according to the latest science. Please do note that we are asking members of the society who represent researchers from a variety of disciplines and sectors; the answers are not official SETAC positions. We encourage discussion and debate! Just keep it professional. For more information on SETAC http://www.setac.org EDIT: We’re here having lunch and answering questions! Post your question and the organizers of the conference will find someone to answer it as soon as possible. Answers to questions will begin at 12:30PM AEST (2:30PM NZDT, 9:30AM AWST, 7:30AM BST, 9:30PM 5/10/16 EST, 6:30PM 5/10/16 PST) until 4:30PM AEST (6:30PM NZDT, 1:30PM AWST, 11:30AM BST, 1:30AM EST, 10:30PM 5/10/16 PST). Edit (5:00pm AEST): And we’re done. Thanks for all your questions! We hope you got something out of it! If you’re interested in following us on twitter you can do so at https://twitter.com/SETAC_AU Or on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/SETACAu Our conference is on for one more day, so you can follow along at the hashtag #setacau2016 Thanks everyone!