Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/Barr bodies

  • 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

  • Women know something you don’t

    Make no mistake about it. by Emily Willingham Three of my four grandparents were only children. Born early in the 20th century, in the period betwixt the great wars, coming of age in the Great Depression. Only children, in spite of having parents married for decades. Three of them. In all likelihood, their own parents, my great-grandparents–and I knew all of my great-grandmothers–consciously chose not to have more children because,…

    Authored by on March 26, 2013

  • Literal XX Xplainer: How we can live with two X chromosomes

    …ression of one X chromosome in each cell makes each woman a lovely mosaic of genetic expression (although not true genetic mosaicism), varying from cell to cell in whether we use genes from X chromosome 1 or from X chromosome 2. Because these gene forms can differ between the two X chromosomes, we are simply less uniform in what our X chromosome genes do than are men. An exception is men who are XXY, who also shut down one of those X chromosomes…

    Authored by on June 27, 2012

  • Arousal during rape

    …violent. I am struggling and overpowered. I am screaming.  And I am certainly not getting off. Although in the United States, where I live, rape survivors are now more common than smokers, I am not currently among the nearly 20% of women or 3% of men (or more) who are sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. I am not one of the 1 in 3 Native Americans who are raped. My mother has never felt the need to tell a doctor, as one Native American mother…

    Authored by on May 30, 2013

  • If you try one detox this year, make it this one

    …is 7, values above 7 are basic, and values below are acidic. But our bodies vary from location to location in what the “just-right” pH should be. So what does a “steady pH” even mean? The pH of your stomach, a nice digestive 2? The pH of your muscle and muscle, around 7? The pH of your vagina, at 4? One fruit can’t possibly do all of these things, and it’s doubtful that it even does one of them. What about acai berries and other foods “packed wi…

    Authored by on January 21, 2013

  • 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

  • The Amazing Antibody and its Therapeutic Potential

    …ll recognize and attach itself to the invader, which is scientifically referred to as an antigen.  When an antibody attaches to an antigen, it signals to our body to get rid of it.  Amazingly, each antibody can only recognize 1 antigen, which is why we need so many different types of antibodies!      To get a better idea of how antibodies work, it is important to learn their basic structure.  Antibodies are ‘Y’ shaped proteins, and have both co…

    Authored by on October 12, 2012

  • The Vampire of Venice Returns, or What Is that Brick Doing in that Skull’s Mouth?

    of childbirth and caesarian sections. ] It seems like every spring there is renewed coverage of a partial skeleton that was found on the island of Lazaretto Nuovo (one of two 15th-16th century leper colonies near Venice) in 2009. I’ve never covered it here, but since I was alerted to an airing of a documentary about the skeleton on Italian TV this week, I thought it may be time to track the progress of the so-called Vampire of Venice (…

    Authored by on July 11, 2012

  • How large is a proton?

    …of various types, mostly hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, with plenty of others to bulk things out. Let’s think about some numbers for size, then: unless you’re a kid or a giant, your height is probably between 1 and 2 meters. One of my fingernails is about 1 centimeter across (1/100 of a meter). A red blood cell is a little less than 10 micrometers—10 millionths of a meter—across. A typical atom is a few hundred picometers (100 trillion…

    Authored by on February 13, 2013

  • Pregnancy 101: On the cervical mucus plug and why I’ve never been more happy to hold something so disgusting in my hand

    Like the eye of Sauron drawn to the One Ring, one cannot resist looking at the mucus plug. June 3rd, 2007 fell on a Sunday. I awoke that morning feeling disappointed that I was still pregnant. My due date had come and gone and, honestly, I was sick of being a human incubator. I had enough of the heartburn, involuntary peeing, and the overall beached-whale feeling. The baby in utero was resting comfortably on my sciatic nerve, and I cou…

    Authored by on December 29, 2011

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