Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/Amy Fredericks

  • A peek inside the US Naval Observatory – keepers of time and celestial motion

    …one of products, or helping to get that upgrade ready by testing it. Q. The USNO in Washington, DC has telescopes. What kind of telescopes do you have and what are they used for? A. The biggest telescope we have in DC is the 26-inch refractor. It is the telescope that Asaph Hall used in 1877 at our old Foggy Bottom location to discover the moons of Mars. It is still used today (despite DC’s light pollution!) to study double stars and the…

    Authored by on February 9, 2012

  • 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

  • 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

  • Modern Chemists

    Our next installment of notable women in science brings us to chemists. Many of these women were born in the early part of the 20thcentury and forged their paths in tough times. All are still inspiring others today. Presented in no particular order: Catherine Clarke Fenselau is a pioneer in mass spectrometry.  Born in 1939, her interested in science was apparent before her 10th grade. She was encouraged to attend a women’s college, whi…

    Authored by on April 23, 2012

  • Is there glamour in science? There are certainly no scientists in Glamour

    …ardashians not withstanding, when Amy Poehler makes a list like this, you’ve got to give the editors some credit.  So, I ask. Can the editors at Glamour give women in science some credit, too? Women like Elodie Ghedin, 2011 Macarthur Fellow and virologist whose work directly addresses critical public health issues? Or Ada Yonath, who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for working on that tiniest of cellular structures, the ribos…

    Authored by on November 17, 2011

  • Yvonne Brill: she made the satellite revolution possible

    …;t be more different. Yet both theoretical physics and rocket science are creative endeavors, and their best practitioners change the way we explore our Universe. So it was with rocket engineer Yvonne Brill, who died on March 28, 2013 at age 88. She held the patent on the “dual thrust level monopropellant spacecraft propulsion system,” a complicated name for an extremely important invention. Basically, Brill found a way to use a single type of ro…

    Authored by on April 9, 2013

  • LEGO those gender stereotypes

    le since the 1950s.  Furthermore, parents may impose toys that are gender “appropriate,” or even punish play that does not align with traditional gender expectations.  But what toys do kids actually want to play with? In 2003, researchers at the University of Nebraska conducted a study to, in part, identify the impact that stereotyped toys have on play in young children.  There were 30 children who participated in this study, ranging in age…

    Authored by on August 29, 2012

  • 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

  • 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

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