Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

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

    …e X Extra: A triglyceride can have up to three different fatty acids attached to it. Canola oil, for example, consists primarily of oleic acid, linoleic acid, and linolenic acid, all of which are unsaturated fatty acids with 18 carbons in their chains. Why do we take in fat anyway? Fat is a necessary nutrient for everything from our nervous systems to our circulatory health. It also, under appropriate conditions, is an excellent way to store up…

    Authored by on June 8, 2012

  • Headlights and beads on a string

    …access the important information kept in our genetic code? The answer starts with the enlistment of specialized proteins called histones.  A length of DNA will wrap around a histone core (1.75 times to be exact; equivalent to 146 base pairs), essentially giving the illusion of a “bead” with each bead separated by a short, linear segment of DNA approximately 60 base pairs long, called a “linker.” Together, one bead plus its neighboring linker sequ…

    Authored by on November 9, 2012

  • Depressing genes

    …ch experience — yet it was obvious he didn’t have the knack for it. This student’s dogged pursuit of a mental health career made me wonder what kind of emotional turmoil he experienced which would make him think, at age 19, that psychiatry was the only vocation worth working towards. Then there were the two graduate students who both worked incredibly hard and were both prone to obsess about their experiments. Each burned off stress in quit…

    Authored by on May 17, 2013

  • HPV and cervical cancer don’t care what month it is

    …).  One thing that cervical cancer awareness overlooks is that HPV causes not only that cancer but also can play a role in penile, vaginal, urethral, anal, and head and neck cancers. In fact,  a recent study found that about 1 in 10 men and almost 4 in 100 women are orally infected with HPV, the most common sexually transmitted virus in the United States, and HPV-related head and neck cancer rates are higher among men. Further, HPV-related oral…

    Authored by on February 1, 2012

  • What’s on your wishlist?

    …ry of cooking. They might want to check out Cooking for Geeks or Modern Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. Do you love gadgets? Do you have the newest smartphone or tablet? Perhaps you’ve already checked out the Nexus 10 tablet from Google (from $399) which arrived last month. The Nexxus has arrived to generally good reviews to compete with the standard iPad (from $399) tablet size. Google and Apple have also gone “mini” with the Nexus 7…

    Authored by on November 23, 2012

  • Geektastic gift-giving ideas from Double X Science!

    …es found on the shelves of cookie-cutter toy stores, this highly personalized jigsaw will tickle the fancy of puzzle-lovers anywhere.  I’m probably going to get this for my mom.  NOTE: You need to order this by 12/13 if you want it by 12/25. Hands-on Mushroom Garden, Back to the Roots, $19.95 Bring out the ‘fun guy’ in all of us with this great grow-your-own mushroom kit.  Seriously, this is one of the coole…

    Authored by on December 6, 2011

  • After Newtown missteps, journalists get guidelines

    Protip: Don’t diagnose based on speculation. by Jessica Wright                Attention journalists: If you’ve been calling people “nuts” or “deranged” in your stories, the Associated Press is recommending that it’s time you stopped. This guideline — along with the common-sense assertion that writers shouldn’t diagnose individuals with a mental illness based entirely on speculation — is part of a new recommendation added to the AP styleboo…

    Authored by on March 27, 2013

  • Are your children always on your mind? They may be IN your mind

    …). In this study, researchers examined postmortem brain tissue from 26 women who had no detectable neurological disease and 33 women who’d had Alzheimer’s disease; the women’s ages at death ranged from 32 to 101. They found that almost two thirds (37) of all of the women tested had evidence of the Y chromosome gene in their brains, in several brain regions. The blue spots in the image below highlight cells carrying these “…

    Authored by on September 26, 2012

  • Anorexia nervosa, neurobiology, and family-based treatment

    Via Wikimedia Commons Photo credit: Sandra Mann By Harriet Brown, DXS contributor Back in 1978, psychoanalyst Hilde Bruch published the first popular book on anorexia nervosa. In The Golden Cage, she described anorexia as a psychological illness caused by environmental factors: sexual abuse, over-controlling parents, fears about growing up, and/or other psychodynamic factors. Bruch believed young patients needed to be separated from…

    Authored by on August 10, 2012

  • A history lesson written in … plaque?

    …and health. As they describe in the journal Nature Genetics, the researchers collected calculus samples (ewww) from 34 human skeletons dating from between 400 (late medieval) and 7,500 years ago (mesolithic), as well as from 10 members of the research team for a modern comparison. (Worst. Cleaning. Ev-ah.) They extracted and amplified specific diagnostic segments of microbial DNA from the 16S ribosomal RNA gene, and then sequenced what they foun…

    Authored by on March 18, 2013

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