Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/July 4

  • 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

  • Is there a season for births?

    …t of superstitious people might actively avoid the 13th of any month to escape giving their child an ‘unlucky’ number for a birthday. Does scheduling delivery really affect annual birth patterns? Actually, yes – the fact that 22% of labors are induced means selecting specific days for a birth, and those choices tend to be weekdays. In fact, there is a strong “weekday bias” in births that dates back to the 1930s, when the trend for hav…

    Authored by on February 18, 2013

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Blog of the Week: Bug Girl’s Blog

    …d embrace the enormous diversity that is the world of “bugs,” or, more specifically, arthropods. The number of species of bugs may well account for the vast majority of all known animals species and easily exceeds 1 million. With 1 million+ species from which to choose, how can anyone “hate bugs”? So, it is with great delight that we highlight a blog today that’s about a woman and her love of bugs. The appropriately…

    Authored by on November 28, 2011

  • Wordless Wednesday: Marie Curie, scientist, sister, and mother

    Today’s Wordless(ish) Wednesday Marie Curie, November 7, 1867-July 4, 1934 “We must believe that we are gifted for something.” The future scientist and mother as a girl of 16. Marie (far left) with her sisters and father. How did they breathe in those corsets? We don’t know. Marie in 1903, the year she won the Nobel prize in physics. She turned 36 that year. The scientist in her lab. Marie in 1911, the year s…

    Authored by on November 9, 2011

  • Pregnancy 101: On the cervical mucus plug and why I’ve never been more happy to hold something so disgusting in my hand

    Like the eye of Sauron drawn to the One Ring, one cannot resist looking at the mucus plug. June 3rd, 2007 fell on a Sunday. I awoke that morning feeling disappointed that I was still pregnant. My due date had come and gone and, honestly, I was sick of being a human incubator. I had enough of the heartburn, involuntary peeing, and the overall beached-whale feeling. The baby in utero was resting comfortably on my sciatic nerve, and I cou…

    Authored by on December 29, 2011

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