AskScience AMA Series: We are Sarah Fortune and Eric Rubin, researchers at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, who study how drug resistance evolves in bacteria, and we’re here to answer your questions! | AskScience Blog

Pages

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

AskScience AMA Series: We are Sarah Fortune and Eric Rubin, researchers at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, who study how drug resistance evolves in bacteria, and we’re here to answer your questions!

AskScience AMA Series: We are Sarah Fortune and Eric Rubin, researchers at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, who study how drug resistance evolves in bacteria, and we’re here to answer your questions!


AskScience AMA Series: We are Sarah Fortune and Eric Rubin, researchers at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, who study how drug resistance evolves in bacteria, and we’re here to answer your questions!

Posted: 28 Jun 2016 05:02 AM PDT

Science AMA Series: We are Sarah Fortune and Eric Rubin, researchers at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, who study how drug resistance evolves in bacteria, and we're here to answer your questions!

Hi, reddit!

We are Sarah Fortune and Eric Rubin, researchers at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. Although our research focuses on tuberculosis, we are generally interested in how drug resistance evolves in bacteria and how we can subvert the development of resistance.

Antibiotics have helped reduce infectious diseases, particularly those caused by bacteria, from one of the most common causes of death to diseases that are mostly completely curable. However, as each new antibiotic has been developed, resistance to each has slowly or, in some cases, rapidly emerged. There have been some cases that are highly publicized, including the recent infection of a woman with a strain of bacteria that was resistant to a rarely-used but useful last ditch antibiotic, colistin. This case, in Pennsylvania, was the first example of this type of resistance mechanism in the US. But antibiotic resistance is increasing throughout the world, both in hospitals, which have long harbored highly resistant organisms, and in community settings.

How much of a threat is this? What can we do about it?

We'll be back at 3 pm EST (noon PST, 8 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask us anything!

submitted by /u/HarvardChanSPH
[link] [comments]

I remember during the 90s/00s that the Ozone layer decaying was a consistent headline in the news. Is this still happening?

Posted: 27 Jun 2016 07:36 AM PDT

If I didn't know how old I was and there was no documentation, how could my age be determined and to what degree of accuracy?

Posted: 27 Jun 2016 04:50 PM PDT

Watts, Voltage, and Amperes What are they?

Posted: 28 Jun 2016 04:18 AM PDT

The title is a bit misleading as I do know what they are but I don't entirely understand them. I have a test in Science class soon, however, taking a look back at my notes, I feel like I overcomplicated everything and am feeling confused.

I understand that Watts is the outcome of power or J/S. I know that electrons actually move slower than snails but what we generally mean is the voltage drop. I know that Voltage*Amperes=Watts

I'm not sure what volts (or voltage) are. I'm not entirely sure what a voltage drop is, is it a constant burst of energy or is it just electricity moving? Are watts per second? If I left a 20W lightbulb running for an hour and I have to pay 18c per kWh, how do we figure out how much money that costs?

submitted by /u/OtterlyGaming
[link] [comments]

Why do diesel and petrol/gas exhausts gasses differ so much at high revs?

Posted: 28 Jun 2016 05:44 AM PDT

I've long wondered why when a petrol/gas car idles you see a visible white exhaust which becomes clear or invisible when the engine is revved, where as when a diesel engine idles it's generally not visible, but when it's revved it turns into a thick black exhaust?

submitted by /u/jolyon_russ
[link] [comments]

Glasses do limit the field of view in which the wearer can perceive details. Does this limitation/restriction influence the development of the brain in children?

Posted: 28 Jun 2016 05:38 AM PDT

The development of a child seems to be influenced by pretty much everything to one degree or another, and so I was asking myself the question: do glasses influence their wearer?

The stereotype of the intelligent glasses wearing student is as old as the glasses themselves, and I always wondered if there was some truth to it. If I recall correctly no link between IQ and wearing glasses or not was found (why would there be), but I thought of something else:

Restricting one's field of view would force a person to focus on less things at once. The brain is only capable of analyzing so much data, maybe limiting the amount of detail in view at every given moment has an influence on how much 'processing power' is left for the remaining information.

If that is the case, then starting to wear glasses at an early point in life would probably shape the way we deal with visual information for the rest of our lives, wouldn't it?

Has there been research on this topic? I would appreciate pointers into the right direction

Edit: I picked the neuroscience flair, but I'm not actually sure if that's the correct category.

submitted by /u/FriendsCallMeAsshole
[link] [comments]

How common is iron on a cosmic scale?

Posted: 28 Jun 2016 05:20 AM PDT

Why does heat seem to make things shimmer? Why does it form the mirage?

Posted: 28 Jun 2016 01:31 AM PDT

If amphetamines and opiates both work by overstimulating dopamine production, why are their effects on the body almost polar opposites?

Posted: 27 Jun 2016 11:40 AM PDT

Why did it take painters so long to 'discover' the rules of perspective?

Posted: 27 Jun 2016 11:59 PM PDT

[Physics] If two songs (one at 50db and another at 30db) are playing at once, what is the total loudness?

Posted: 28 Jun 2016 04:36 AM PDT

Just wondering because I'm a hypochondriac who worries about ear issues. I had been listening to music at 50 - 60db for an hour without realizing that I had a shuffle playlist on around 20 - 30 db the entire time. Also wondering if damage is possible from that.

submitted by /u/TomOfBlades
[link] [comments]

Why was a part of NASA's observation satellite's, Landsat 8, mission overview to share data to the general public on a nondiscriminatory basis at no cost to the user?

Posted: 28 Jun 2016 01:41 AM PDT

What is with up with using words like large and very large in the names of telescopes and detectors? Is it a running joke?

Posted: 28 Jun 2016 03:52 AM PDT

Why not give these things (like the LHC) a resounding title, like "The People's Glorious Ringed Collider" or for the VLT, the "Unblinking Eye Into The Eternal Void"? Or just something like, you know, Hubble.

submitted by /u/damondefault
[link] [comments]

If you have cancer and begin starving, does cancer growth slow?

Posted: 27 Jun 2016 06:02 PM PDT

Similarly, does eating at a large caloric excess increase the speed of cancer growth?

submitted by /u/FourthLife
[link] [comments]

Does the fact that the total intrinsic mass quarks in a proton only makes up a tiny bit of it's mass, mean if we "turn off" the higgs field we would still have protons (and matter) only lighter ??

Posted: 28 Jun 2016 06:37 AM PDT

Assuming you could get a good running head start and properly time it, would tackling a person sideways while they are falling help prevent injury/death?

Posted: 27 Jun 2016 06:00 PM PDT

So lets say there's someone who's suicidal and planning to jump from a building and you have some time to prepare yourself. If you are able to tackle them sideways would that decelerate them at all? Or would it just add horizontal velocity to their vertical velocity? Logically I'm thinking the latter of the two but when trained to fall from heights you try to roll out of them, a.k.a changing the direction of your momentum. So I'd assume a tackle would just be a sloppy version of a technical roll.

submitted by /u/Truesoldier00
[link] [comments]

Is bone marrow always making blood cells? If yes, what is causing old cells to go away? If no, what starts and stops the process?

Posted: 27 Jun 2016 09:58 PM PDT

Can a city affect the weather?

Posted: 27 Jun 2016 04:32 PM PDT

If a giant storm is heading towards a city can the city affect the storm? I've watched many times on radars as storms seem to bubble around larger cities. Where I'm from they just refer to it as the "Lubbock effect" but I'm wondering if the city may actually be the cause.

submitted by /u/KingoftheCrackens
[link] [comments]

What is so special about the genetic structure of Orchids that they can hybridise so freely while retaining significant fertility.

Posted: 27 Jun 2016 12:54 PM PDT

Orchids really sort of stand out in this respect. While in other organisms, hybridization will at most involve a handfull of closely related species, with relatively rare preservation of fertility, orchid breeders routinely pump out not just interspecific, but even intergeneric hybrids with relative ease. Such complex crosses have led to artificial poly-genera such as Potinara (Brassavola x Laelia x Cattleya x Sophronitis) or even outrageous things combining input from up to 7 different genera as in Masonara (Aganisia × Batemannia × Colax × Otostylis × Promenaea × Zygopetalum × Zygosepalum). It is far from unusual for individual plants to have such a complex history of hybridation behind them they might as well be called genealogies...

And these intergenerics all seem to be relatively freely breedable with one another, provided one remains in the same alliance.

So why, and mostly how, is this possible? What is so special about orchid genomes that such artifical hybridation is possible without significantly reducing fertility?

submitted by /u/Gargatua13013
[link] [comments]

[Biology][Chemistry] What is the science behind skincare products? Is there really a reason to use face wash instead of soap on your face?

Posted: 27 Jun 2016 11:04 AM PDT

We have all heard the pH story, marketing that claims soap is too aggressive etc. But is there any scientific research that actually justifies skincare products? Or is it all just clever marketing?

submitted by /u/TheyTukMyJub
[link] [comments]

How can we reliably tell the difference between male and female voices?

Posted: 27 Jun 2016 02:13 PM PDT

Is it just tone (high for female, low for male), or is it more complex than this? Do transitional hormonal therapies change voices so that they become more reliably identifiable as the new sexual identity?

submitted by /u/paetrixus
[link] [comments]

Why does the behavior of an airflow going through a nozzle changes between subsonic and supersonic speeds?

Posted: 27 Jun 2016 04:45 PM PDT

I'm currently follow an aircraft technician course and, during the engine section, we see how a turbine engine works and how the airflow is affected by convergent and divergent nozzles at subsonic and supersonic speeds. However, my classmates and I cannot quite understand why the air behaves differently between those two speed ranges, so if anyone could help us understand better this would be very much appreciated.

submitted by /u/firefly_12
[link] [comments]

Is there a field for Weak Nuclear Force and Strong Nuclear Force?

Posted: 27 Jun 2016 04:24 PM PDT

I also learned that Coulomb's Law parallels Newton's gravity equation. Is there a similar equation for Strong and Weak Nuclear Force?

submitted by /u/Scezory
[link] [comments]

No comments:

Post a Comment