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Search Results for: label/Jennifer Ouellette

  • Blog of the week: Cocktail Party Physics

    …und topics such as the relationship between Woody Woodpecker and football, Ouellette weaves the promised tapestry of the pop culture and physical science worlds. This year, Ouellette also bravely helmed the upcoming Open Lab 2011 book, serving as editor and managing a pile of hundreds of worthy entries into a sharp presentation of 51 of the best in science blogging for the year. A huge task, but the outcome is an overview of some of the best sci…

    Authored by on December 6, 2011

  • Double Xpressions: Jennifer Canale, the self-proclaimed "Flamboyant Scientist"

    …Girl Scouts, I was sent to dance school (but, much to my amazement, I enjoyed that until I was 17).  My parents started giving in around 3rdgrade, and I got the panda bear-shaped calculator I wanted, as well as the robot toy 2XL featuring the 8-track tape. My mom would beg me to watch Little House On the Prairie, but I preferred Star Trek (the original Kirk version), Lost in Space (Danger Will Robinson), and Land of the Lost. Of course this was…

    Authored by on November 30, 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

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

    …look at things on a spectrum of lower risk to higher risk and think about decisions 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 lif…

    Authored by on June 4, 2012

  • Evidence Based Parenting Carnival

    ans for us. Melinda Wenner Moyer, of The Kids column at Slate, @lindy2350 Melinda is a freelance science and health journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. She writes The Kids, Slate’s parenting advice column, and won the 2012 Society of Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology Media Award for her Slate piece The Truth About Epidurals. Polly Palumbo, Momma Data, @mommadata Momma Data debunks, demystifies and elaborates on information in the…

    Authored by on April 2, 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

  • Robotic hysterectomy more expensive: but better?

    …advantage to robotic hysterectomies, why are gynecologists pushing them? And make no mistake, they are pushing them as 3 years ago 0.5% of hysterectomies were robotic and now that number has soared exponentially to 10% (JAMA, 2013) Why this exponential increase? I can think of four reasons: They need the practice. The gynecologists want to learn the new technique (see the marketing angle below), but it takes quite a few cases to get good. A mark…

    Authored by on April 4, 2013

  • Is it really healthier to be a few pounds overweight? That’s not what the study says.

    Don’t start making plans to ignore those extra pounds just yet. by Jennifer Gunter, MD, FRCS(C), FACOG, DABPM This post first appeared at Dr. Gunter’s blog, where she wields the lasso of truth. A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) indicates that a body mass index or BMI of 25-29.9 (overweight) is associated with the lowest risk of death and that class 1 obesity (BMI 30-34.9) is not associat…

    Authored by on January 21, 2013

  • 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

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