Search Results for: label/It\'s Not Easy to Be Green

• What does ‘safe’ mean when we’re talking about chemicals?

  …ns as risk evaluations.  At the lower risk end, I would include things that have 1) solid, evidence-based records of few or no harmful effects, 2) relatively few/unusual circumstances in which it produces harmful effects, and 3) statistics favoring my likelihood of emerging unscathed. Here are some things I would consider lower risk  within the parameters of my life: Eating spinach. Yes, spinach contains oxalic acid, which is linked to kidney s…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on June 4, 2012

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

  …ll selection of different materials: bricks, mortar, iron, glass, and wood. Arranged in different ways, these few materials can yield a huge variety of structures. We encountered functional groups and the SPHONC in Chapter 3. These components form the four categories of molecules of life. These Big Four biological molecules are carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids. They can have many roles, from giving an organism structure to be…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on June 8, 2012

• After Newtown missteps, journalists get guidelines

  …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 stylebook. The change was announced March 7. “It is the right time to address how journalists handle questions of mental illness in coverage,” says AP senior vice president Kathleen Carroll. And what makes the time right is probably the journalism mess that arose in…

  Authored by DXS Contributor on March 27, 2013

• Depressing genes

  me overzealous and attack their own body’s tissue, often leading to serious health problems and death. Only rarely do gene variants cause primarily negative consequences, such as BRCA1, the breast cancer gene, or APOE epsilon 4, the early-onset Alzheimer’s disease gene. If insurance companies did, in fact, try to weed out clients based on their genetic make-up, they would soon find that most gene variants that put carriers at risk for some diseas…

  Authored by DXS Contributor on May 17, 2013

• Excerpts from Sophie’s Diary: A Mathematical Novel

  …: n = 4k + 2 The number is three more than a multiple of 4 : n = 4k + 3 It is easy to verify that the first and third categories yield only even numbers greater than 4. For example for any number such as k = 3, 5, 6, and 7, I write: n = 4(3) = 12, and n = 4(6) = 24; or n = 4(5) + 2 = 22, and n = 4(7) + 2 = 30. The resulting numbers clearly are not primes. Thus, I can categorically say that prime numbers cannot be written as n = 4k, or n = 4k…

  Authored by Adrienne Roehrich on May 23, 2012

• Why blueberries won’t turn you blue and other blueberry facts

  One cup (148 g) of blueberries contains about 15 g of sugar and 4 g of fiber, a single gram of protein, and half a gram of fat. If you are counting carbs, this cup has 21 g of them. That one cup of blueberries averages about 85 calories, which is approximately the same as a medium apple or orange. While almost all the vitamins and minerals nutrition gurus like to report on are present to some amount, for the 2000-calorie diet, that one cup of bl…

  Authored by Adrienne Roehrich on September 3, 2012

• Don’t take the Cinnamon Challenge

  research literature related to cinnamon ingestion or inhalation (and seriously, why would they?), but they did find a couple on rats. In one of those, within a month after the rats had been forced to inhale cinnamon in either 7.6 µg or 4.2 µg particle sizes, researchers detected inflammation in the rats’ lungs. Three to six months later, the rats had developed masses of granulation in their lungs (granulomata), interstitial lung fibrosis, a…

  Authored by Tara Haelle on April 22, 2013

• Double Xpression: Darlene Cavalier of Science Cheerleader and SciStarter

  ders cheering for science for five minutes.  I have a sneaking suspicion that fast forward 10 years from now, they might be interviewed, by you maybe, about how they got interested in science, and they might say, when I as in 8 th grade, I got called in to do this science cheer thing, and it opened my eyes to science as a valid career. If it doesn’t happen at a young age for some of these girls, they might reflect back to something they experien…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on April 18, 2012

• Why is the sky pink?

  …bs other colors in light, so only blue is reflected back to your eye. That’s not what’s happening in the air! Instead, light is being bounced off air molecules, a process known as scattering. Air on Earth is about 80% nitrogen, with almost all of the rest being oxygen, so those are the main molecules for us to think about. As I discussed in my earlier article on fluorescent lights, atoms and molecules can only absorb light of certain…

  Authored by Matthew R Francis on March 12, 2012

• HIV+ doesn’t mean you can’t have children

  …y lives for decades on proven antiretroviral drugs. In fact, a December 2012 CDC Fact Sheet states that the number of women with HIV giving birth in the United States increased approximately 30% from 6,000 to 7,000 in 2000 to 8700 in 2006. During that same time frame, the estimated number of perinatal infections per year in all 50 states and 5 dependent areas continued to decline. It’s not all good news, though, because of marked disparities in r…

  Authored by DXS Contributor on March 11, 2013