Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/Andrew Revkin

  • Frankenstorm: What is the role of climate change?

    …;————– FYI: For updates on this sort of analysis and what’s happening with Sandy in real time, the folks at Boing Boing tweeted this list of recommended people to follow on Twitter. Update 2:30 ET: Check out this beautiful, mesmerizing, and scary wind map, made with data on surface winds from a national database….

    Authored by on October 29, 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

  • Parenting paranoia comes in different forms

    …udies reporting no link between vaccines and autism, but let’s face it: Science is slow, and news is fast. In the interval, scary information takes root. The Lancet retracted the article 12 years after its publication, and in 2011, British investigative journalist Brian Deer demonstrated that Wakefield actively falsified data. Still, to this day, vaccination rates have not fully recovered, and many parents remain misinformed and concerned about v…

    Authored by on May 19, 2013

  • Stereotype threat for girls and STEM

    …wers, I F**ing Love Science. Although she’s never made any effort to hide her gender, when she recently opened a twitter account with her picture as the avatar, media attention and remarks from praise to trolls ensued. In her 27 March interview on CBS This Morning, she said: “Commenters said they were very sort of surprised they had the same bias within themselves. They were saying ‘[I] didn’t realize that I had this, but I obviously do. I never…

    Authored by on April 10, 2013

  • Chasing tornadoes is an old habit

    e discover also that the main character in The Wizard of Oz was modeled on a real person. Dorothy Gale was a young girl who died in a tornado that struck Irving, Kansas, on May 30, 1879. Storm Kings is an easy read — at 260 pages, I finished it in two days — and well annotated. If you’re interested in so-called Kansas cyclones, pick up a copy. These days, it’s as close as I want to come to the real thing. [Front page image…

    Authored by on June 4, 2013

  • Why a UN ban on thimerosal in vaccines would be a big mistake

    …ry in thimerosal. As Dr. Walter Orenstein  today’s AAP articles, “Had the evidence that is available now been available in 1999, the policy reducing thimerosal use would likely have not been implemented. Furthermore, in 2008 the World Health Organization endorsed the use of thimerosal in vaccines.” But apparently, the WHO’s endorsement can’t overcome thimerosal’s PR image problem in the eyes of the UN. And so the UN is short-sightedly and d…

    Authored by on December 18, 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

  • 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

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