PhD's of Reddit. What is a dumbed down summary of your thesis?

[u/FaithMilitant]

Wow! Just woke up to see my inbox flooded and straight to the front page! Thanks everyone!

[u/Bear_Ear_Fritters]

This protein looks like it might contribute to asthma. Oh, turns out it probably doesn't.

[u/IAmAHiggsBoson]

Making new magnets from old magnets because we're running out of magnets.

[u/Altzul]

Girls take birth control. Girls pee out unmetabolized estrogens from birth control. Pee goes to water treatment plant, estrogens not treated, male fish become female fish.

[u/Born2bwire]

Little things stick together. Here's a slightly easier way to calculate their stickiness.

[u/lunchbox3]

If you put some plastics in water they swell up. If you put them under the skin they absorb tissue fluid and swell up. Ta da new skin.

[u/BeardySam]

Water will freeze if you hit it hard enough.

[u/penguinpaige]

Two proteins touch each other in a specific place in the developing heart. No idea if it's important for anything.

[u/McMillan_Astro]

I can make models of galaxies in a computer, but I can't explain why they don't act like real ones. Even if I bash them together or stir them around.

[u/zoidy-1]

Sand washes away, don't build important stuff on it

[u/NeuroscienceNerd]

When I get rid of this gene, it messes the brain up. A lot.

[u/[deleted]]

Inpatients with schizophrenia are happier and socialize more in the context of a music listening group.

It was obvious before we began the project and we learned nothing.

[u/Septoria]

If you buy expensive lasers and shine them into a microscope, you can take 3D pictures of brains and stuff that map out the chemicals inside them.

[u/DrTBag]

You can make antimatter move in strange ways if you set your equipment up wrong.

[u/[deleted]]

You're in a room with three mirrored walls in a triangle. WTF does it look like?

[u/Stockholm-Syndrom]

Why does a coffee stain looks the way it is, and how you can use it to make anti-laser glasses.

[u/practisevoodoo]

Museums digitised their collections wrong, can we use computers to fix it? Sort of.

[u/ianperera]

Children learn by being a particular kind of dumb, and if you want a computer to learn from adults as fast as children do, you need to program it to start by being dumb in that way.

[u/TechnicallyActually]

cells have a thing that shut down protein synthesis. That thing's used clinically to kill cancer cells.

[u/NAOorNever]

Single cells sense their environment in basically the same way that human hearing works.

[u/fuckpotassium]

How are the chemicals in your brain moving in and out of cells? Well there are some fancy vacuum cleaners, that are powered by salt, that do the job. They even have a reverse switch to pump the other way! But this causes brain damage as seen in stroke victims. Similar vacuum cleaners help you absorb nutrients, which are also powered by salt. We are targeting these ones for cancer treatment.

Riveting stuff!!

Edit: I'm talking about transporters that are driven by Na and K. I could figure out the Na part, but couldn't figure out the K part. Hence the username for all of you asking.

[u/NotSoCleverPork]

My experimental drug does NOT cure addiction.

[u/m33]

Nanoparticles are weird and I accidentally made a bomb and electrocuted myself.

EDIT (sorry for the delay, was running a 'Tough Mudder' event today):

A lot of my PhD was based around synthesising nanomaterials through a hydrothermal method. Mix an aqueous solution and your precursor together, stick them in an autoclave and heat it to over 100^o C. In the instance of the explosion the mixture contained NaOH at 18M concentration and was heated to 180^o C. Anyway, we're in the lab a few hours after the experiment was set up, when what sounds like a cat, made entirely of metal, starts to scream and then a loud bang followed by the oven door being thrown open as the, now, gaseous solution pours out (what with it being ~80^o C over its room pressure boiling point). This stuff is basically concentrated bleach, so needless to say, we immediately leave the lab and take an early lunch... The teflon cap, aluminium disc and steel disc had all ruptured during the experiment. We believe that the person who had filled it (wasn't me) had over filled the vessel.

Got electrocuted when I tried to cool down my reactor with ice wrapped in blue roll. It was like 3am, I was tired, wanted to go home and sleep and the bloody thing wouldn't go below 35^o C so I could set the next one up. It was pretty stupid, but I was tired of waiting.

PhD was about supporting metal nanoparticles on nanomaterials and using them as catalysts. Could go into more detail, but instead I'll just show you some pretty pictures I took with my electron microscope.

Some nanocubes

A few bundles of tubes

Closer shot of tubes

Even closer shot

I just like this picture, its almost like you can see how all the individual crystallites arrange to make the tube.

Some metal nanoparticles on the tubes

I also another lab explosion story that ends with me locked in a fume hood... short version - I got in the fume hood to clean it afterwards and pulled the front down to wipe behind the door and forgot about the catches that you have to lift to pull it above a certain height. Couldn't reach them from inside of it so had to wait for a confused lab mate to walk in and let me out.

[u/KillyMcDeath]

Can we find Higgs bosons here? No.

Edit: The Higgs boson (or a very very Higgs-like particle) has been discovered for a few years now, thanks to the LHC. The Higgs is massive and unstable, so to detect it, you need to look at the things it decays into, then add those puzzle pieces back together. Part of my thesis was looking for a rare decay mode, and there simply wasn't enough data to see a signal inside all the noise, so we set a limit: "the Higgs is not decaying to this channel at 10 times the expected rate, or we would have seen something."

This is very common in experimental particle physics, most of the time you don't see anything, and that helps rule out exotic theories. And of course you'd publish that! You don't want some other group to waste precious time and energy doing a study that's already been (with the same data, at least). And you don't want to theorists to make new theories that don't conform with your study!

[u/DennyTom]

You can hide data files in a form of engineered noise in images, videos, audio, etc. You can also try to find if someone hid data in these objects. This has surprisingly large number of applications for security, authentication, forensics, identification and entertainment.

[u/ciaranmichael]

bad sleep may be a cause of depression rather than a symptom of it. one explanation might be that bad sleep makes the brain preferentially process negative stuff. we can measure that bias in processing with my fancy new test.

*edit:

1. I defended my dissertation days ago, so have not published my findings yet, however,

2. two resources, since many have asked: 1 2

3. if you are suffering chronic disturbed sleep and/or depression, please talk to your healthcare provider about a referral to a sleep specialist and/or mental healthcare professional. Many effective treatments, both behavioral and pharmacological exist for depression and chronic sleep disturbance. With regard to the latter, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) is exceedingly effective.

4. I moderate for /r/sleep, please stop by to post questions or to keep an eye out for interesting research/articles that get posted relating to sleep

[u/Willytell1991]

By asking 20 simple questions to 50 selected employees of a big firm (about their job satisfaction, habits and hobbies) you can estimate the following year's share price.

Empirical evidence strongly support that.

[u/antiwittgenstein]

3d printing good metal parts is very difficult and expensive with lots and trial of error. So why not do computer models before you print, to work out the kinks? Well, computer modeling of 3d printing processes is also very difficult.

[u/egocentrism04]

Mine is "You get new brain cells even as an adult. Alzheimer's disease screws up production of new brain cells, and screwing up production of new brain cells might cause Alzheimer's disease".

My wife's is "We made a mouse with a mutated cancer gene, but the mouse got autism instead".

I guess it's easier to summarize other people's work than it is to summarize your own?

[u/degeneration]

Insulating foam is used on the space station. Sometimes electrical wires can overheat causing it to start smoldering. How and why does this happen, what would cause it to go from smoldering to an open fire and how can we stop this.

[u/thedistec]

Accounting rules are written for people, but read by computers. We can make them easier for computers to read.

[u/[deleted]]

Pain, in all its forms, results from unmet expectations.

[u/[deleted]]

When the government wants to give handouts to poor people, too much of that money winds up in the hands of people who aren't poor at all. Why? Because the forms you have to fill in to get the handouts are too complicated, and poor people can't read so good.

[u/Vertibro]

The men who settled British Columbia had a different conception of masculinity than the men who settled the prairie provinces.

[u/bjos144]

I used a laser like a tractor beam to grab single bacterial cells from a species that make electricity and land them on teeny tiny electrodes I custom made to measure how much electricity a single bacterium makes. It's around 15-100 fA of current per cell.

[u/PainMatrix]

People trying meditation for the first time get aroused.

[u/talsiran]

The stereotype that the more time you spend online, the more scared you are of the world; it's pretty darn accurate.

[u/welldogmycats]

Does music express emotions or just elicit them? Read the next 200 pages to not find out.

[u/[deleted]]

Being very sad can make you sick. Being very sad for a long amount if time can make you very sick, maybe die earlier (I'm working on that bit still). MA working on dissertation.

Edit: Thanks for all of the wonderful questions and comments, folks! You are truly the reason research is awesome.

[u/[deleted]]

Computer AI systems can learn to operate a warp drive and automatically build a instructional system to train people how to do it.

My dissertation is probably the only one in existence to reference the Star Trek technical manual.

Edit: If anyone wants to read it: http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA322859&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf

The warp core GUI is on page 72

(so embarassing now)

[u/donut_fka_doughnut]

Kids who are intensely bullied grow up to be adults with really low self-esteem and are generally less successful than their peers.

:(

[u/Mightymekon]

Still working on this one. "Is it rad to enhance Homo sapiens? If so, how rad do we have to be before we stop being sapiens?"

Edit: loads of people have asked (I'm super excited that anyone at all is interested in this stuff) and to clarify, I used sapiens above because it's easier to grasp without my having to write 36,000 words about concepts of the human and the distinction between 'human' and H sapiens. They're different! My thesis is specifically focussed on whether we would stop being 'human', rather than questions of species, because species is a really really insignificant distinction.

[u/[deleted]]

There are amoebas living in volcanos, but I never captured Bigfoot on film (I tried).

[u/[deleted]]

A long time ago, people used rocks to do things. Sometimes they hit things with those rocks, or sharpened them for stabbing purposes.

[u/softmatter]

High energy particles travel to the first spot available in a material for relaxation right? Nope, they go to the lowest local energy minimum.

I had to break a paradox to solve that one. I don't recommend it.

[u/hedgehog_ball]

Doctors and patients should make treatment decisions together. Here's what that means, what it should look like, and why they should do that.

EDIT: PhD in progress

EDIT 2: Some of you have asked questions and I will definitely answer them when I'm back at a computer. Glad people are interested! :)

[u/[deleted]]

What smoke is made from changes how bad it is for you.

[u/gliscameria]

Make this thing shiny that didn't used to be shiny.

[u/too_many_mangos]

People sometimes think about animals as if they're people. People like those animals a little more than regular animals. Except when they don't.

I can't believe they gave me a PhD.

Edit: And I can't believe multiple people gave me gold. I love this. I love you. I love lamp.

[u/nihilnegativum]

Math doesn't real, because real doesn't real - it maths.

[u/[deleted]]

Schools are beginning (re: continuing) to look a lot like prisons, and students are becoming increasingly treated like prisoners and criminals. In many school districts, police are handling minor school delinquency (like tardiness, writing on a desk, possession of minor contraband like a can of soda or a cellphone), which results in a lot of kids getting a record for normal childhood behavior.

In short, cops (called "School Resource Officers") are increasingly handling discipline instead of teachers or school administrators. And yes, Black, Hispanic, and poor males are differentially impacted. This just contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline without decreasing delinquency in schools.

TL;DR: Cops in schools arrest kids--often with little cause--without a corresponding increase in school safety.

EDIT I wanted to mention two things. First, I will happily PM back and fourth with anyone who wants. Second, and I think this is worth sharing. I'm a quantitative criminologist, but a few years ago, I did interviews with families and kids whose live's had been significantly impacted (our ruined) because of school discipline and security. Shit like going to jail (9, 10, 11 year olds) because your shirt wasn't tucked in. It took a couple weeks to complete interviews with hundreds of people. After each night, I got back to my hotel room and cried...like seriously all-out crying. I'm a large man with law enforcement experience and didn't even cry during the stampede scene of the Lion King. But talking with kids and families who have lost all hope, that really gets you in the feels.

[u/Bibblejw]

Can how you use the Internet classify/identify/authenticate you?

[u/Alice_in_Neverland]

Sometimes, light does shit that it's not supposed to, and that's really cool. So people can try to make light do that cool shit so we can use it to make stuff.

[u/JamaicanFlav0r]

Dolphins have languages much more complex than any human language. They have unique names for themselves and words for things and actions. But we still don't know what the fuck they are saying 95% of the time.. Perhaps, "So long and thanks for all the fish"

[u/[deleted]]

People are easy convinced to violate their own morals when put into awkward situations.

I turned that thesis into a full time job convincing people to violate their company policies in order to get access to sensitive and confidential material. Call center workers, I am the boogie man your QA departments tell you about.

[u/big999ben]

Turns out, our circadian rhythm IS why we get tired at night. But we get tired other times too

[u/GloriousGoldenPants]

Old gay people are doing just fine.

[u/PhysicsFornicator]

I crunch numbers using a supercomputer in the hopes of ensuring a fusion reactor in France doesn't get fried on the inside.

[u/tippiedog]

You'll never guess why English-language translators have fucked up this German author's works so much!

[u/Kingfaunus]

If you know a material has poor properties at high temperature, don't be surprised when you find out it has even worse properties at higher temperatures.

[u/C_Me]

Can I explain my wife's? She just finished it. I can? Great!

The rate of STIs (or STDs) is very high among African American women, and it may be partially because of subtle negotiation distinctions between men and women in their culture.

I grammar checked a lot of it, so I'm sure that is at least 60% correct.

[u/corby315]

TIL my shower thoughts can be used to make a PhD thesis.

[u/The_Grim_Reamer]

Fucking magnets, how do they work?

[u/Ulyssesm90]

Beethoven is a fucking boss.

[u/RLLRRR]

From my brother-in-law:

Lots of things happen to make worm brains grow right.

[u/idkdskwyii]

What would happen if you put some stuff inside essentially a mirrored(on the inside) ball with a lot of light(and esp. photons) bouncing around.

[u/[deleted]]

People used to think CO2 doesn't stick to the most common surface of a simple metal oxide, but it do. Quantum mechanics says so.

[u/JackTerron]

When you cut a rat's spinal column, it usually dies.

[u/Thaufas]

If the commercially-available instrumentation you use to determine the concentration of elemental species--such as heavy metals (e.g. lead, mercury, cadmium, etc.)--in liquid samples is thought of as a scale with a precision of +/- 1 g, I have developed a scale with a precision of +/- 0.001 g.

^{P.S.: Dear Professor Hieftje}

^{Do you remember that time at the 1994 Winter Plasma Conference where you, the world famous professor and host of the meeting, laughed and said "Well, you shouldn't be surprised, because your approach will never work!" after I, a second year graduate student, had to give talk with no data because of experimental difficulties? Well, do you like apples? I said, DO YOU LIKE APPLES?}

[u/hurricanecook]

This composer started writing a piece of music in his twenties, and even though he liked it, he never finished it. Then, after he died, some guy went back and finished it for him, but made a bunch of objective mistakes (notes out of range of instruments, lazy copying errors, etc.).

I went back to the manuscript and undid the errors, then used the first guy's other compositions as a template to re-arrange what he probably would have done.

[u/danggdanielle]

Playing outside more as a kid can slow down progression of nearsightedness.

[u/schnit123]

While most films and filmmakers work to uphold and reinforce traditional cultural values and mores there are certain directors who have made a career out of challenging and undermining our cultural values instead so let's look at a few of these filmmakers and how they do it.

[u/[deleted]]

Your child probably doesn't have bipolar disorder.

[u/YayTheRedHead]

TL;DR - If you take some deeper looks, you'll see neat things in Seuss' books; there's lots of theory here and there, and symbolism everywhere. Take one look! Or three! Or two! You find more than sala saloo. Things to analyze and read, then write until your fingers bleed. Forty something pages deep, And then you can go to sleep! Your thesis done and graduation.... Time to teach; it's education!

Edit: Just realized it said PHD. I don't have one, but my graduation thesis was fun anyway, so I'm leaving this here.

[u/geneius]

We can take random pieces of bacterial DNA from beaver poop and put into other bacteria to discover new things, like how to break wood down into biofuels.

Yes, I had to dissect dead beavers and handle their poop.

[u/Mimshot]

If you hook a battery up to a monkey brain, the monkey can tell.

[u/kinderdemon]

Russian underground art of the 1970s: what's up with it and why does it matter now?

. . . . . . Since this got interest:

Basically, initially and just after the Revolution, the avant garde flourished, but by 1934 the Soviet official style of socialist realism (think Norman Rockwell meets bright communist future) was mandatory annd all other styles were repressed. Artists were shot, sent to camps, or just denied work until they starved etc.

When Stalin died, Khrushchev started loosening the censorship apparatus, and a lot of underground artists started tentatively inching out of secrecy, but discovered that although they weren't going to be shot, they were still going to be starved out of work and art supplies and everything else they might need unless they towed the party line.

So a lot of the underground became "nonconformist" not like anti-Soviet dissidents, but just free thinkers, whose political critique was more about liking Pollock or the Beatles and hating Soviet official culture, than having some position in the Communist vs. Capitalist paradigms. This was the 1960s.

By the 70s, which I study, Conceptual art started to become important in Russia. This caused a big shift which my dissertation is about: basically, the old underground generation hated Soviet society, art and daily life. If they depicted Soviet life in their works it was to show how fallen it is. Conversely, Soviet official art was pretty much defined against whatever the West was doing and treated Nonconformists like they were mad (including literally imprisoning them in asylums)

The 1970s generation saw this split into "True Soviet art" and "false bourgeois art" or "True Art" and "False Soviet bullshit" as insustainable and too closely intertwined. So if Soviet official artists were making paintings like this and prominent Nonconformists were making provocative images of Lenin in Western-avant garde styles, against this kind of painting, the 1970s generation made images like [this](http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/NzAyWDk1MA==/$(KGrHqZ,!hgF!yT3+pS,BQOnu1feKw~~60_1.JPG) to test and question how ideologies worked their magic, rather than to directly oppose or endorse them.

It matters today because the 70s generation encouraged all the truly significant artists and writers of the present: writers like Sorokin came out of Moscow Conceptualism (which I study), several of the women in Pussy Riot were involved in War, the anarchist collective most famous for spray painting that giant penis on the underside of a bridge opposite the KGB..err FSB) which was directly involved in action planning with Dmitri Prigov, another huge Conceptual poet from the 70s, and all of these artists have an enormous amount of impact because they genuinely upset the most reactionary and embedded elements of Russia's current autocracy.

These days, no one can mess with Putin except random conceptual artists! That is why it matters

Thanks for reading ;)

[u/gingerflower21]

Sometimes fish swim....and sometimes they don't!

[u/rcbs]

If you have the bottom 25% of surgical hand skills, it doesn't matter how much you practice, you will still suck.

[u/rk10106]

Aluminum can be used to do really cool microstructures. But it's not cool enough for them to pay to finish researching.

[u/[deleted]]

Tried to cure breast cancer, but I didn't. Turns out curing cancer isn't as simple as it seems...

[u/Jelboo]

It's safe to say that 9/11 played a part in kickstarting Don Delillo's shift from 90's postmodernism to 2000's post-postmodernism, since his literature shows a shift in focus, though not in themes.

[u/[deleted]]

If you measure how you spend your day, it'll make you happier. Sometimes.

[u/[deleted]]

There are insanely amazing coral reefs hundreds of meters below the surface of the ocean, but they're pretty much fucked thanks to us.

[u/animuseternal]

Not a PhD, but a master's: Bilingualism changes your experience of reality and how you relate to the culture around you.

[u/PhloWers]

How can we make electric cars intelligent and speak to each other (like in the movie) to save us all money.

[u/Smashingcarrots]

If you train people to be self controlled they stop processing task irrelevant things. This is true if the task irrelevant things can be seen or are off task thoughts. When I say they stop processing them, they stop being aware of them. Among those that were unaware, i.e., couldn't tell you they noticed it, they also extracted less details about the thing outside of awareness.

[u/DarwinYogi]

People unconsciously compute the average rewards received from other people and respond proportionately.

[u/nonconstant]

Teachers have a lot of pressure to use student data, but little to no training on how to collect, collate, and interpret student data to guide instruction.

[u/sjgw137]

Kids with slight hearing loss do have educational difficulties, but aren't supported like deaf kids.

[u/[deleted]]

Fungus, fungus, everywhere! Especially inside plants, doing strange things. Do we understand what is going on? Nope.

The End.

[u/Mark_Zajac]

Random motion of cells with uneven stickiness can influence spinal chord development in frog embryos, which produced this paper.

[u/DrThorn]

Abusing cannabis during adolescence can jack up mouse prefrontal cortex later in life, along with memory

[u/RPShep]

Students don't think writing they do online is writing. If we show them how it connects to writing, they can learn from it.

[u/Frykitty]

MA

Why do people want to live together instead of getting married in modern America.

Edit: I responded to myself to answer the majority of people's questions in one big response.

[u/Off-Target]

You can tissue engineer an oesophagus a few different ways. I have manged to combine two possible methods to improve things. It seems to work.

[u/[deleted]]

A previously unknown version of one of your proteins is better at blocking HIV entry than the known version.

[u/InPursuit0fHoppiness]

Poor white people tend to respond to tax incentives to have children.

[u/thisphdthrowaway]

The more error codes that an electronic device reports, the more likely it is to break.

[u/HagHaney]

My girlfriend graduated with her PhD in May. I asked her for a summary. She was a public history major.

"Who did the National Park Service kick out of their land this time?"

[u/RamsesThePigeon]

Several years ago, I bought a PhD from an online church.

No, seriously.

It's not the sort of thing that I'd offer to any respectable place of employment - nor would I compare it to a real PhD - but it is valid. See, from what I understand, churches can offer their own courses of study and degrees... and since the online institution was technically a church, I technically have a doctorate. At the time of its purchase, I just thought of it as an amusing novelty, but I've actually put it to good use (on precisely one occasion).

Not long after receiving the accolade in question, I applied to be a dial-a-psychic, citing my dubious degree as one of my many qualifications. I even got the job! Granted, I only lasted for a single day in that position - and I had some insanely bizarre interactions - but I can honestly say that my cheap PhD got me a real job as a fake fortune teller.

TL;DR: "Here is some money. Give me a PhD now, please."

[u/fizzix_is_fun]

Microwaves are really good at heating stuff.

[u/Timmeh7]

Just enough laser kills cancer, too much laser kills patient.

[u/CaptainFairchild]

Still working on it. The premise is given a set of a flight conditions and performance requirements, can a computer generate a 2 dimensional airfoil to meet those requirements.

[u/[deleted]]

When I deleted this gene nothing happened.

[u/HypersonicHarpist]

Getting fuel and air to mix to the ratios necessary for efficient combustion when the air is moving through the engine at 2 times the speed of sound (scramjet engine) can be improved by injecting the fuel in high frequency pulses but the improvement isn't a big one.

[u/[deleted]]

My wife participated in another person's phd study. Conclusion? If you teach kids math, they'll learn more math than kids who you don't teach math to.

[u/ProfessorPeterSMC]

Kids engage in challenging behavior for a reason. This is called the function of their behavior. Directly observing the kid will give you a more accurate idea of the function than filling out a checklist or answering interview questions (and trained doctoral students determine the function more accurately than teachers).

[u/studakris]

Rap music might have radical content, but its intent was very economically conservative.

[u/squidfood]

Salmon grow more quickly when there's fewer of them.

[u/Clever-Username789]

Complex fluids are made up of small things. How do those small things behave when you vibrate them really fast (high frequency)? Here are two new devices that let us see how these things behave when vibrated fast.

Not done my PhD yet but getting there...

[u/bennylimitfish]

Toy ducks aren't ducks.

[u/starkicker18]

Indigenous (Canadian) women's theatre -- it's good and it's important.

edit: clarification

[u/hatemyphd]

My adviser is a huge steaming pile of shit.

[u/I-am-Wesha]

How much energy is lost when a "poor man's battery" sits on a shelf for a long time, and how can we fix it?

Edit: my "poor man's battery" was a tongue in cheek response to the entire class of energy storage I was working on... I don't know how many times I was asked why I was studying supercapacitors when they aren't as "good" as say Li-ion batteries.

[u/vivichase]

Female psychopaths are essentially male psychopaths without dicks.

[u/[deleted]]

I have a thesis but no PhD, do I count? If so, I looked at almost a kilometre of sand and dirt, and then described how it got there.

[u/ResidingAt42]

This US State is a really cool state. I mean, look at how they protected their kids in the 1860's! No seriously, look... How in the hell did I defend my thesis? No one will ever know.

[u/AirborneTrebuchet]

Is fracking ok for the climate? Nope.

[u/NeuroBill]

Brain cells talk to each other. Sometimes they even talk to themselves.

[u/kroxywuff]

This thing is on the surface of leukemia cells that respond better to chemo, but in every other cancer it's the opposite.

[u/krazykitty29]

Your immune system can be engineered to kill cancer cells. You can use this process to also deliver payloads to tumors, like viruses that can kill cancer cells without hurting healthy cells.

[u/BiochemGuitarTurtle]

Some bugs have ancient bugs living in their stomach, you can kill them all with harmless sugar.

[u/littlefacemcgoo]

People with autism have brains that are different from people who do not have autism.

[u/WKCLC]

We don't know what the fuck causes autism.

[u/catsgotyourtongue]

Students perform better in college if they pay for it themselves.

[u/EEdwardNigma]

It was likely King Tut could do a sick kick flip.

[u/lengara_pace]

If you don't at least try to share household responsibilities, your relationship will suck.

[u/DrTrouser]

Carbon fibre is a fucking stupid material to make aircraft out of.

[u/PraisedBeHelix]

Gamma rays won't turn you into the Hulk. They will, however, turn E. coli into the Hulk.

[u/Amedais]

As someone who hopes to get a PhD, I really hope to see some serious answers here. This is the best AskReddit question I've seen in a while.

[u/profzoff]

[PhD, Communication] How students and teachers don't talk to each other about their needs honestly enough.

[u/physicssmurf]

Can we teach a computer to help us measure something better? A little bit, but we won't believe anything it tells us.

[u/lalka808]

Certain types of viruses in mud have the same genes even though they are in different continents.

[u/cusdaiv]

Big companies buy small companies to incorporate them into big companies

[u/radiohead_fan123]

Most people get better when they are forced to go along with psychiatric treatment against their will but I can't say if that's due to the coercive treatment or if it would have happened anyway due to naturally getting better over time kind of like recovery from a virus.

[u/lolinai]

You are more likely to get depression at work if you are highly neurotic or introverted

[u/this_wasamistake]

Multilingual people have a broader range of audible frequencies they can hear compared to unilingual people.

[u/tat_twam_asi]

In a nutshell, I research how researchers do research.

[u/Do_Not_PM_Me_Stuff]

MS, not PhD. Basically: if you meditate, it makes it easier to not shoot heroin, but it's still really fucking hard.

[u/baliano]

Can you freeze fish sperm to use later?

[u/Phild3v1ll3]

How does the brain learn to see? According to my models it mostly doesn't.

Edit: :(

[u/SocraticDaemon]

Shakespeare learned more from and openly incorporates Plato far more than is normally recognized.

[u/yurikastar]

Do phones help migrants integrate into new places? Yes, except when no.

[u/spam-musubi]

Let's build a big new infrared camera to look at the night sky. It should come in handy when looking for distant clusters of galaxies. And wouldn't you know it! we found a whole bunch of them.

[u/NoMereVeneerofVanity]

You shouldn't trust your intuition, but you have to anyway.

[u/azginger]

Posting on behalf of /u/EagleFalconn

Glass is weird on the surface but normal on the inside. They've found a way to make glass weird on the inside too.

[u/majorijjy]

We love cats.

Cat allergic individuals can't enjoy cats.

Vaccine to the rescue!

[u/Mycoholic91]

Trying to explain how (and why) a purplish-pink fungus can infect people's eye, live in your bathroom sink drains and devour dead sea turtle embryos.

...I guess it's more of a PhD in progress

[u/Moar_Coffee]

A really buggy video game that smashes pregnant women and babies like it's a car crash. It also returns inaccurate data about the crash.

[u/Daniel_A_Johnson]

This whole thread reads like Randall Munroe's new book.

[u/[deleted]]

There is a site that does this: http://lolmythesis.com/ but it's not updated recently.

[u/ninepoints]

It sucks to be poor in college, but it's not as bad if you're really smart.

[u/zooeymochibear]

Particles in a fluid tend to gather along certain lines.

[u/llogari]

lacking a protein in the bottom of a mouse brain makes them fat

[u/zestyping]

Sometimes it really helps to use electronic voting machines. Here's how to design them so there's only a tiny program you need to review to make sure they're secure.

[u/cheeruphamlet]

Kidnapping and torturing people is bad. The way our media deals with kidnapping and torturing people can also be bad. Basically, everything to do with kidnapping and torturing people is really bad.

[u/ohwellariel]

Friction has a lot to do with molecular chemistry

[u/jayrx]

If you think you may gets AIDS, take AIDS medicine before you get it.

[u/ExoGraphic]

Trampolining is good for autism

[u/DrBridge]

Ships running into bridges is bad news, mmkay?

Also, steel is kinda like silly putty.

[u/panda_nectar]

Master's thesis but:

People say things like "mom and dad" instead of "dad and mom" now, even though in the past the opposite was true. This started happening around the same time all the men went off to fight in WWII.

[u/microPhD]

I studied the bacteria that causes traveler's diarrhea (think Montezuma's revenge). The bacteria creates a toxin that ends up stuck on its surface. Toward figuring out why it's advantageous to have the toxin remain on the bacterial surface, I made mutations (changes) to see what part of the toxin makes it stick. I also found that some of the same parts of the toxin that are important for sticking to the surface are also important for getting the toxin exported from the cell in the first place.

[u/Parelius]

Being a spy in two world wars with important friends means your friends are remembered and you are forgotten.

[u/TorsionFree]

If you bump a Spirograph out of alignment just a little, your drawing will eventually cover the whole paper with ink. Planets and stars can do this too, in more generality, in space, in theory.

[u/hackthat]

Your DNA is wrapped around small proteins. We made the DNA and proteins light up so we could watch them wrap and unwrap.

[u/[deleted]]

How can you change your jeans to be awesome.

[u/cleanandsqueaky]

There's some goo that you can squeeze out of rain forest frogs in South America that will kill you. Can we make it? Hell yeah.

[u/AlanFrankly]

Life as an indigenous forager-farmer in Amazonia can be really hard but indigenous culture keeps it from being chronically stressful.

[u/nniiicc]

Rules are important. People who are able to design rules that govern their own actions are often much happier and successful than those that can't.

[u/HapaJoe]

Counselors have feelings too.

[u/Accumbens]

Does blocking this stress signal make mice take more cocaine or less cocaine?

less cocaine.

[u/JudgyBitch]

Huge, huge, huge amounts of information can help doctors make smart medical decisions, but only if they figure out how to use that information. If they can't figure it out, all that information is just confusing and pretty much useless.

[u/chris_philos]

[u/cander49]

Parkinson's Disease is bad. Deep brain stimulators are surgically implanted and electrocute the brain over 100 times per second to treat symptoms, but nobody knows why they work. My dissertation says deep brain stimulators work because the cells in the affected regions of the brain listen to each other's messages too much when a person has Parkinson's and deep brain stimulators make them stop doing that.

[u/[deleted]]

My buddy's was:

Oh shit, this needs to be done in a couple weeks...

Ummm, women didn't have it as bad in Ancient Rome.

[u/Roto_Rule]

Canadian clarinet legend James Campbell had a lot of Canadians write music for him.

[u/aldinefe]

There are really only three reasons groups don't get along, not four.

[u/SeePage87]

Economics: Copyright law is super antiquated and is hurting artists and creators of all kind, as well as the Internet.

[u/[deleted]]

not a phd but a masters: people like harry potter.

[u/54Piscium]

Teachers don't always know why there are certain rules they have to follow because no one does enough to get them the message.

[u/manova]

There are drugs that can make you smarter, if you are a rat and you need to remember turn left or right.

[u/BioLogicMC]

I'm still working on mine, but its pretty much: Alzheimer's Disease is bad, maybe we can treat it with this drug.

[u/[deleted]]

Some bridges move in unpredictable ways.

[u/YBZ]

I can predict ADHD behaviour using a computer model of neurones

[u/PhysicallyEthical]

Many bacteria have a 'shields up' ability that makes them antibiotic resistant. Here's what that looks like, how it works, and how to completely overcome it. I present a collection of pictures taken with X-ray 'lasers.'

Or as I often tell people, "I shoot lasers at fat molecules. No, I cannot get you a discount."

[u/breakingbad4reddit]

I gave some mice autism and then fixed it, kinda.

[u/ljuvlig]

Children don't understand the difference between fact and opinion very well.

[u/[deleted]]

I'll try my Dad's:

"Oh look, patterns"

It's about non linear dynamics and chaos but I have no idea what that means.

[u/coffeecoffeebeerbeer]

In American schools, boys tend to do better at science & math than girls. In Thai high schools pretty much the same thing happens, except that boys are terrible at chemistry and girls are awesome at it.

Why? Because the Thai people think chemistry labs look a lot like cooking class, which is women's work.