Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/James Fowler

  • Facebook influences voting behavior, you, your friends

    Maybe, maybe not. By Emily Willingham This one will have you wondering if you have inadvertently participated in a science experiment by way of Facebook. Actually, you probably did. In 2010, a team of researchers led by UC San Diego political science professor James Fowler managed to get more than 60 million people to see a “get out the vote” message at the top of their Facebook news feed. The date, in case you want to rev…

    Authored by on September 12, 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

  • Diversity in Science Carnival #14: Women’s History Month–Exploring the role of women in the STEM enterprise

    …and I close with a quote from it. It’s a letter by Chitra Thakur-Mahadik, who earned her PhD in biochemistry and hemoglobinopathy from the University of Mumbai and served as staff scientist a Mumbai children’s hospital for 25 years. She wrote to her younger, “partially sighted” self that, “The future is ahead and it is not bad!” She goes on to say, “Be fearless but be compassionate to yourself and others… be brave, keep your eyes and ears open…

    Authored by on March 29, 2012

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Anorexia nervosa, neurobiology, and family-based treatment

    sume eating. If they were still alive. Bruch’s observations dictated eating-disorders treatments for decades, treatments that led to spectacularly ineffective results. Only about 35% of people with anorexia recovered; another 20% died, of starvation or suicide; and the rest lived with some level of chronic illness for the rest of their lives. Not a great track record, overall, and especially devastating for women, who suffer from anorexia at a ra…

    Authored by on August 10, 2012

  • Are children today really suffering nature deficit disorder (TM)?

    …7;t have television to keep them indoors, they also didn’t have child labor laws. The result was that children who once might have been at work at age 4 in a field were now at work at age 3 or 4 in a factory, putting in 12 or so hours a day before stepping out into the coal-smoked, animal-dung-scented air of the city.  Child labor wasn’t something confined to Industrial Revolution Britain, and it continues today, both for agriculture…

    Authored by on April 30, 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

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