Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/Elizabeth Roemer

  • Modern Astronomers

    …an excellent science communicator, researcher, andleader.  She earned her B.S . from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii in the 1980s. At NASA she led the imaging team of the Voyager 2’s encounter with Neptune and became known for her science communication for it.  She returned to MIT as a scientist for nearly a decade. Among her honors, she has received Vladimir Karpetoff Award , Klumpke-Roberts Award,…

    Authored by on January 19, 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

  • Ask not what science can do for you

    …against HIV/AIDS.  Today, December 1, is World AIDS Day. The theme for this year’s day is, “Leading with science, uniting for action.” Since the advent of the first-reported cases of HIV in 1981, more than 25 million people have died of AIDS worldwide. In 2008, 2 million people died, in spite of therapies that now save lives. Almost everyone who now lives with HIV lives in low- and middle-income countries and has no access to…

    Authored by on December 1, 2011

  • With height, we get what we want

    …seems like a little much. To compare these preferences to a real population, Stulp and his coauthors used data from the Millennium Cohort Study, a broad sampling of almost 19,000 babies born in the United Kingdom in the year 2000. Among other things, the parents of these babies had been asked for their heights, and 12,502 couples had answered the question. To see what it would look like if people paired off with no regard to height, the research…

    Authored by on March 12, 2013

  • Happy belated birthday, Mary Anning!

    shop permanently. By what he calls a “curious stroke of luck,” he has all of the 18th century papers of his great-great-great-great (that’s four) grandfather, including diaries, accounts, letters, and even shopping lists. In 2011, he published the story of this ancestor’s life as a social history, “The Life of a Georgian Gentleman,’ and thus, a blog was also born. We thank Mike for having graciously given us permission to publish his post here b…

    Authored by on May 25, 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

  • 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

Page 1 of 212