Science

Science Best Of 2018

Happy Holidays!

It time to look back on the year and celebrate some of the fascinating and inspiring science that has happened.

We have 40,000 coins to give out and have used an extremely scientific formula to assign the proper point values to each award. Each user will only be eligible to win one award, so they will receive the prize worth the most points if a given user wins multiple awards.

The awards are as follows:

Most Interesting Paper

Gold: 5455 coins
Silver: 1842 coins
Bronze: 589 coins

Most Interesting Question During an AMA or Panel Discussion

Gold: 5478 coins
Silver: 1840 coins
Bronze: 549 coins

Best ELI5

Gold: 5466 coins
Silver: 1815 coins
Bronze: 565 coins

Most Interesting Paper Below 1000 Karma

5456 coins

Most Significant Paper

5498 coins

Water is… dry?(Most interesting result debunking conventional wisdom)

5447 coins

Voting will be open until 1/15/2019. Any particular results can be discussed as a reply to the nomination for that particular post. Please keep any meta discussion to the stickied meta discussion post

17 comments

13.6k

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u/drewiepoodle

4 hours ago

masterclass.com Learn More

Researchers have identified a drinkable cocktail of designer molecules that interferes with a crucial first step of Alzheimer’s, and even restores memories in mice. The next step is to verify the compounds aren’t toxic in preparation for translation to clinical trials on humans.

news.yale.edu/2019/0...

13.6k

311 comments

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u/masterclass_official

13 days agofrommasterclass.com

Learn betting tactics and tournament strategy from Daniel Negreanu—the biggest live tournament poker winner of all time.

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13.7k

Posted by

MD-PhD-MBA | Clinical Professor/Medicine

14 hours ago

Chemistry

Researchers have discovered a new type of quasicrystal, a class of materials whose existence was thought to be impossible until the 1980s. This is the first definitive observation of a quasicrystalline superlattice that self-assembles from a single type of nanoparticle building blocks.

news.brown.edu/articl...

13.7k

261 comments

378

Posted by

u/drewiepoodle

8 hours ago

asianscientist.com/2018/1...

New studies suggest that hormone therapy for trans people is less risky than birth control pills and does not increase the risk of cardiovascular disease at all. The findings could help more trans individuals to access essential hormone therapy by increasing physician comfort with prescribing it.

prnewswire.com/news-r...

378

71 comments

810

Posted by

u/mepage

15 hours ago

Engineering

A Flexible Way To Convert Waste Heat To Electricity Researchers in Japan have engineered an inexpensive flexible material which could help harvest heat energy that would otherwise be lost.

810

24 comments

29.0k

Posted by

MD-PhD-MBA | Clinical Professor/Medicine

pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-C...

Social Science

Carrying Tasers increases police use of force, study finds: Experiment with London police found that, while rarely deployed, just the presence of electroshock devices led to greater overall hostility in police-public interactions – an example of what researchers call the ‘weapons effect’.

cam.ac.uk/resear...

29.0k

2.0k comments

416

Posted by

u/spesaeterna

Journalist | EPFL | PhD | Cell Biology

14 hours ago

Cancer

Chemotherapy-treated mammary tumors produce small vesicles that may help them spread to other organs. The study, from EPFL, is published in Nature Cell Biology.

actu.epfl.ch/news/t...

416

Posted by

NASA's New Horizons Mission Reveals Entirely New Kind of World

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China’s war on particulate air pollution is causing more severe ozone pollution. According to the new research, there was so much particulate matter in the smog around Chinese cities that it helped to quell ozone production by acting as a sponge that collected chemical radicals.

seas.harvard.edu/news/2...

4 comments

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u/getquip

26 days agofromgetquip.com

Hey Reddit! We’re quip — an electric toothbrush created by dentists and designers to help you brush better.

getquip.com Learn More

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arstechnica.com/scienc...

MD-PhD-MBA | Clinical Professor/Medicine

5 hours ago

Chemistry

A step closer to efficient carbon capture: Researchers used a pair of organic molecules to create a crystal structure that has a regular array of corkscrew-shaped tunnels running in parallel, that allowed 600 times more carbon dioxide to enter the framework than nitrogen.

3 comments

55.2k

Posted by

u/asbruckman

Professor | Interactive Computing

s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/ktoo/2...

Removing fluoride from the water in Juneua, Alaska twelve years ago led to a significant increase in dental cavities, according to an analysis of Medicaid dental claims

55.2k

4.7k comments

Posted by

u/PHealthy

MPH | Global Health | Infectious Disease

10 hours ago

journals.lww.com/plasre...

Meta-analysis reveals that botulinum toxin type A injections are superior to placebo for chronic migraines after 3 months of therapy.

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How does the brain learn by talking to itself. UNIGE scientists uncover the role of synaptic feedback systems in shaping learning processes in the brain’s cortex – a discovery that may prove valuable for developing efficient artificial intelligence.

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More than 10% of female health care workers lack health insurance. A total of 1.7 million female health care workers and their children lived in poverty.

ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10...

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The majority of deaths during the single largest murder campaign of the Holocaust, called Operation Reinhard, occurred during a single three-month period, a new study reveals.

eurekalert.org/pub_re...

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Turning back time with emerging rejuvenation strategies ["Although ageing has long been considered a one-way street, strategies to delay and potentially even reverse the ageing process have recently been developed."]

nature.com/articl...

3 comments

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u/psvue

6 days agofrompsvue.com

Live stream your favorite shows with PlayStation™Vue. Experience a powerful cloud DVR, streaming on up to five devices at once, and no annual contracts. Try it today - no console required.

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A new study supports the idea that earthquakes may be associated with increased volcanic eruptions, but over longer time spans than prior research indicated.

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Our social judgments reveal a tension between morals and statistics. People make statistically-informed judgments about who is more likely to hold particular professions even though they criticize others for the same behavior, according to findings published in Psychological Science

eurekalert.org/pub_re...

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During warm winters in the American West, the soil soaks up the snowpack moisture 70 days ahead of schedule

hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net/22/489...

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A US-based national survey of high school kids performed between 2017 and 2018 shows that nicotine vaping is up significantly, while smoking and the use of other nicotine products went down.

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Study finds medical crowdfunding drives funds toward unproven and potentially dangerous treatments

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A new neurostimulator developed by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, can listen to and stimulate electric current in the brain at the same time, potentially delivering fine-tuned treatments to patients with diseases like epilepsy and Parkinson's.

nature.com/articl...

5 comments

129

Posted by

MD-PhD-MBA | Clinical Professor/Medicine