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Search Results for: label/Alice Callahan

  • Evidence Based Parenting Carnival

    ans for us. Melinda Wenner Moyer, of The Kids column at Slate, @lindy2350 Melinda is a freelance science and health journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. She writes The Kids, Slate’s parenting advice column, and won the 2012 Society of Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology Media Award for her Slate piece The Truth About Epidurals. Polly Palumbo, Momma Data, @mommadata Momma Data debunks, demystifies and elaborates on information in the…

    Authored by on April 2, 2013

  • Biology Explainer: The big 4 building blocks of life–carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and nucleic acids

    …molecules themselves break down into a surprisingly small number of building blocks. The proteins that make up all of the living things on this planet and ensure their appropriate structure and smooth function consist of only 20 different kinds of building blocks. Nucleic acids, specifically DNA, are even more basic: only four different kinds of molecules provide the materials to build the countless different genetic codes that translate into all…

    Authored by on June 8, 2012

  • On Parenting, Science, and Trust

    The following was originally posted over at The Mother Geek (RIP) in January of this year.  The guest author is Alice Callahan, who is a research scientist turned stay-at-home mom. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with her husband and 14-month-old daughter. Alice writes about the science of parenting, as well as her adventures in mothering, at scienceofmom.com.  You can also find Alice on Twitter. Via Creative Commons Having a PhD in sci…

    Authored by on August 2, 2012

  • Motherhood Defined: It is in the heart of the beholder

    “Motherhood”: Sculpture at the Catacumba Park, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Motherhood.  It can mean many things, and our own definition of it is largely defined by our individual experiences.  To one person, motherhood might simply mean the act of raising children; to another, motherhood might be what defines them.   It is not uncommon to generalize the concept of “motherhood” and lump everyone who upholds a singl…

    Authored by on May 11, 2012

  • A Decision Based on Logic – Why I Choose to Vaccinate

    …ere. I was forced to operate blindly. I questioned the vaccine schedule, I questioned my doctors and I questioned vaccines in general (I’m a scientist, would you expect anything else?). My first child was born at the start of 2010, when Wakefield’s MMR paper had yet to be officially retracted. Every instinct in my newfound maternal arsenol of instincts screamed NO, don’t vaccinate! But years of studying microbiology challenged these instincts and…

    Authored by on August 27, 2012

  • After Newtown missteps, journalists get guidelines

    …almost twice as likely to say that they don’t want to live or work near a person with mental illness if they read an article about a person with mental illness involved in a mass shooting, according to a study published March 20 in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Interestingly, this tendency is the same even if the article avoids any mention of mental illness. This may be because this link between violence and mental illness is deeply engrain…

    Authored by on March 27, 2013

  • Unicorns and Brainbows

    Brainbow is a mouse with a rainbow brain. By Jeffrey Perkel    A couple weeks ago I wrote about the beautiful world right under our noses, a world visible only under the microscope. The cover image for that post was this picture, a “‘Brainbow’ transgenic mouse hippocampus,” which placed 18th in the 2008 Nikon Small World Photomicroscopy contest. Brainbow technology also won the 2007 Olympus Bioscapes contest, with this be…

    Authored by on May 6, 2013

  • Is the bar high enough for screening breast ultrasounds for breast cancer?

    …n controversial. What’s new is the “Are You Dense?” patient movement and legislation to inform women that they have dense breasts. Merits and pitfalls of device approval The approval of breast ultrasound hinges on a study of 200 women with dense breast evaluated retrospectively at 13 sites across the United States with mammography and ultrasound. The study showed a statistically significant increase in breast cancer detection when ultrasound was…

    Authored by on September 21, 2012

  • Autism and the DSM-5

    …ial social aspect of this change, and the one thing that might, when it comes to autism, elevate the DSM-5 above the level of doorstop. [Image credit: Dave Bullock, UK, via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 generic license.]…

    Authored by on April 23, 2013

  • Depressing genes

    Can depression be a matter of genetic fate? by Siobhan Mitchell          [This post is the latest installment in our I Am Mental Illness series.] What if you could know if you were fated to be depressed? With the rise of personal genotyping services such as 23andme, almost can find out what their psychiatric ‘fate’ will be, but what do you do with this information once you have it? When I first considered testing myself for depressio…

    Authored by on May 17, 2013

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