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!

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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 ([email protected]) 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).

We work in one of the few offices in the country dedicated to helping students (health professional, life sciences, population and social sciences) and postdocs navigate the job market. Our team designs career & professional development programs and resources, and offers 1:1 counseling support to graduate-level biomedical trainees. Feel free to ask us anything about how biomedical scientists can prepare and position themselves for the job market, how institutions can provide career development support to their PhD-level trainees, or strategies to improve the career prospects of the nation’s STEM PhD’s. More about our work: • The UCSF Office of Career & Professional Development • Motivating INformed Decisions Program • Graduate Student Internships for Career Exploration Answering your questions here today are: Laurence, Clement, PhD. Program Director, Academic Career Development Anna Correa, MS. Program Director, Clinical Careers Bill Lindstaedt, MS. Executive Director, Career Advancement, International and Postdoctoral Services Thi Nguyen, PhD. Program Director, Non-Academic Career Development Naledi Saul, MPM. Director, Office of Career and Professional Development Liz Silva, PhD. Program Director, Motivating INformed Decisions (MIND) Program Alexandra Schnoes, PhD. Program Manager, Graduate Student Internships for Career Exploration(GSICE) Program Claire Will, PhD. Program Director, Professional Skills Development We will be back at 1 pm ET (10 am PT, 5 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask us anything! EDIT: Hello everyone! We’re all here and are reading your great questions. We’ll begin answering now! 2nd EDIT: Thanks everyone - these were amazing questions, and we had a lot of fun. Thanks for participating!

We recently co-authored an open letter to President Obama, which was signed by several dozen prominent scientists, supporting the nuclear deal with Iran. We are physicists and experts in nuclear issues, and are here to answer questions about the science and technology of producing fissile materials and nuclear weapons, operating nuclear power plants, and monitoring these and other activities to prevent nuclear proliferation, especially as they relate to the proposed Iran deal. Rush Holt: I am an astrophysicist and currently head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). I was a New Jersey congressman from 1999-2015, and a five-time Jeopardy champion who beat IBM’s supercomputer Watson. I have worked on international security and proliferation issues for many years, both in and out of government. Frank von Hippel: I am a physicist and professor at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, where I work on nuclear arms control, nonproliferation, and energy issues. I was founding co-chair of the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), served as assistant director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from 1993-4, and am a MacArthur fellow. Since there are two of us, we’ve enlisted a helper to collate our answers, but we’ll leave our names so you know who’s talking. Ask us anything! We’ll start posting answers around 1pm eastern (5 pm UTC, 10 am PT) Edit: That’s it for us, thanks everyone. This has been a pleasure.

Hi everyone, Nathan Yau here. I run FlowingData, a blog on visualization, statistics, and information design. I started it on a whim as a statistics graduate student, but now it’s my full-time job. My PhD research was on how visualization could help non-experts understand their personal data better, and that spilled over to more general sorts of visualization. I’ve written two books, Visualize This and Data Points, and I write a lot of practical how-tos. I also work on random data projects, some more traditional and others more experimental. Recently, I remade the Statistical Atlas of the United States from 1870 with modern data, brewed beer based on county demographics, and illustrated famous movie quotes as charts. Here’s proof that it’s me. I’ll be back at 1:30 PM ET to answer your questions. Ask Me Anything! Update: Away we go. Update: And still going. I’ll answer as many more as I can before I break for lunch. You know those Snickers commercials with the cranky, hungry celebrities? Those are about me. Update: Calling it. Thanks for all the questions, everyone. It was fun.

We got interested in the idea that quantum mechanics is involved in biology nearly two decades ago when Johnjoe was puzzling over weird kind of mutations that seemed to become more frequent when they provided an advantage to bacteria, and teamed up with Jim to see if quantum mechanics might provide an explanation. We wrote a paper describing a quantum model for the mutations back in 1999 (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0303264799000040) and have since maintained an interest in all aspects of quantum biology. The field exploded about a decade ago when microbes and plants were shown to use quantum coherence in photosynthesis and enzymes were found to use quantum tunnelling to accelerate biochemical reactions. Evidence for quantum effects has since turned up in avian navigation, the sense of smell, even how the mind works. We believe that biology’s connection to the quantum realm provides life with the spark that makes us so different from the inanimate world. To describe this fascinating new field we recently teamed up again to write, ‘Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology’. We are here today to talk about our own work and interests in the field of quantum biology but also the fascinating work of our colleagues who have discovered weird quantum effects in such a diverse range of biological activities. We’ll do our best to answer any relevant fundamental quantum or biology questions, such as what is quantum entanglement or how do enzyme work. We are also happy to speculate on how revolutionary quantum biology technologies may be developed from these ground-breaking discoveries. We hope to stimulate interest in what, we believe, is the most exciting emerging science of the 21st century! We will be back at 1 pm ET to answer your questions, ask us anything!

Hello world! Tamara Munzner here. I’ve been doing computer-based visualization for almost 25 years, starting as technical staff at the NSF-funded Geometry Center, continuing as a grad student in the Stanford graphics group with Pat Hanrahan, and then as a professor at UBC since 2002. I have worked in a broad range of application domains including genomics, evolutionary biology, fisheries management, energy and sustainability, geometric topology, large-scale system administration, web log analysis, computer networking, computational linguistics, data mining, and journalism. Yet more details on my web site in general or my bio page in particular. Let’s talk about the science behind visualization! I’m particularly excited to talk about the ideas covered my book, Visualization Analysis and Design. Since it’s done at long last. Or any of the visualization research papers, videos, or software at on my lab web site. Or anything about the visual representation of data, broadly construed. And hey, it’s an AMA, so anything else is fair game too. Including books, especially science fiction and fantasy, since reading too much is a vice of mine. As you can see from my reading lists: books read in reverse chronological order and books read ordered by author, with commentary. Proof: https://twitter.com/tamaramunzner/status/636466649541902336 Update 1: forgot to say that the official start time for me answering is noon Pacific time which is 3pm Eastern. That’s soon! Update 2: Answers have started. Typety-type-type. Update 3: 3pm Pacific, taking the teeniest of breaks for a snack and cup of tea. Must hold body and soul and neurons together. I’ll be back! Update 4: 3:15pm Pacific, back to the keyboard. A runny Brie on rosemary bread toast and an acceptable Cream Early Grey have saved the day. Might need to move on to the big guns of Lapsang Suchong or a hefty Assam soon if the questions continue at this rate! Update 5: 6:30pm Pacific. Not dead yet - still answering! Although admittedly my posting rate slowing down, despite my fresh cup of Halmari Assam… Update 6: 10pm Pacific. Declaring victory, or at least throwing in the towel. I’ve completely run out of time, I’ve mostly run out of neurons, and I think dinner sounds like a fine idea right about now. Wow, this has been an amazingly fun day! Many thanks to everybody below for your thoughtful questions, and also thanks to @frostickle in particular for both talking me into this and for shepherding me through it.

Hi Reddit, My name is Corina Logan and I am a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. I study behavioral flexibility in birds: their ability to adapt their behavior to changing circumstances. I recently published a study titled “Modifications to the Aesop’s Fable paradigm change performances in New Caledonian crows” in PLOS ONE. My colleagues and I set out to understand how New Caledonian crows solve novel foraging problems involving a clear tube that is partially filled with water and contains a floating food reward. Dropping objects into the water to raise the water level and bring the food within reach solves the problem. We found that crows can discriminate between water volumes: they dropped more objects into the narrower tube rather than the wider tube when the initial water levels were the same in both tubes, and they switched their preference later when the wide tube became the functional option. Also, one crow appeared to inhibit attention to causal cues to learn to associate the color of one tube with receiving food in its adjacent tube. I will be available to answer your questions at 1pm ET (10am PT, 6pm GMT) so Ask me Anything! And don’t forget to follow me (and the birds!) on Twitter @LoganCorina.

Hello, May Nyman here, professor of chemistry at Oregon State University. A warehouse exploded in Tianjin, China last week that did the damage of 20 tons of dynamite, felt like an earthquake, looked like a nuclear explosion from space, but we don’t know yet what caused it. Many different chemicals were stored in that warehouse, and scientists and other experts can only hypothesize what happened, and what will happen next. At Oregon State University, I run a research lab, training young scientists from all over the country and the world. We are inorganic synthetic chemists, and we make materials for energy and environmental applications. For example, we collaborate with other scientists in the Center for Sustainable Materials Chemistry developing low energy methods to make the materials you find inside your smartphone and computer. We also work with scientists in the Energy Frontier Research Center, Materials Science of Actinides to discover new ways to make nuclear energy more efficient and safer. For the Department of Energy, we figure out ways to make new materials with new properties. I have not always been a professor; for only three years in fact. I started my career at Sandia National Labs, studying nuclear wastes, and inventing ways to remove the radioactive elements and store them safely. I also figured out ways to make the water that we drink cleaner. But what I love most of all about chemistry is the beautiful and perfectly functional things in nature that are completely composed of the elements of the periodic table; including rocks and minerals, butterfly wings, leaves, and DNA! August 12, 2015 was a sad day for chemists when such a tragic accident happened that gives chemistry a bad name, and results in people fearing chemicals. The officials do not yet know what exactly happened, what caused the explosion, how it could’ve been prevented, and which chemicals stored in the warehouse might have been the source of explosion. We also do not know why the fish are dying and why ‘soap suds’ are observed everywhere after it rained in Tianjin. We do not know what the short-term or long-term impact of this accident will be, or if the people living near the accident site or sites like it are in danger of future explosions. We know of about a half dozen chemicals that were stored there including calcium carbide; ammonium potassium and sodium nitrate; sodium cyanide; toluene diisocyanate; and compressed gases. As scientists, we can form hypotheses of what chemical reactions could have occurred in Tianjin at the scene of this most unfortunate event. Update: strangely enough there was a second warehouse explosion a few hundred miles away, 10 days later in Shandong; the chemical mentioned here is adiponitrile I’ll be back at 1:00pm ET to begin answering your questions. EDIT: 9:53 PT good day Reddit community, Thank you for all your questions. I am online now until 2:00 Eastern time. May Nyman EDIT: 11:10 PT. thank you for all the fantastic questions and comments, Reddit community. My official hour is up, and I need to take a break and work on my day job. I will come back at 3:00 PT to answer some more questions. May Nyman EDIT: 2:59 PT I am back to answer a few more of these many many questions. and I will be sure to address storage, as this question comes up in various forms. May Nyman EDIT: 3:49 PT. It has been fun talking with you, Reddit community. A good day to all. May Nyman