Search Results for: label/Kate Prengaman

• Why don’t more girls get the HPV vaccine??

  like most cancers, cervical cancer is caused by a sexually transmitted virus, Human Papillomavirus, also known as HPV. The virus can cause abnormal cell growth in the cervix, which can turn cancerous. The vaccine, approved in 2006, works against many common strains of HPV. The vaccine is recommended for girls ages 11-12, and also provided to women up through their early twenties.  The goal is to protect girls long before they are ever sexually ac…

  Authored by Jeanne Garbarino on March 24, 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 Emily Willingham 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 DXS Contributor on March 27, 2013

• Blog of the Week: Context and Variation

  This week’s Blog of the Week is Context and Variation, part of the Scientific American blog network. The blog author, Kate Clancy, is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, where she studies evolutionary medicine of women’s reproductive physiology, otherwise known as ladybusiness. Clancy writes about how human behavior evolved and is evolving and is also a vocal but thoughtful advocate for women in the…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on November 7, 2011

• On this Father’s Day, let’s remember the allofathers, too

  …amily time those of us in the United States have come to expect on weekends, particularly when we work salaried weekday jobs that ostensibly promise weekends off. That means that on top of the anxiety associated with stacking 20 or 30 extra hours onto a 40-hour work week to meet a tough deadline, my husband and my children’s father also feels angst about this inability to be a part of our family time. These are first-world problems, I reali…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on June 16, 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 DXS Contributor 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 Emily Willingham 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 Emily Willingham 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 Jeffrey Perkel on May 6, 2013

• Giving girls…and science…their due

  …ere are still gaps. One of those gaps exists in the sciences — itself an area that we do not value nearly enough. While I did go to a co-ed school, studied science, and worked in a biogeochemistry lab, I’m in the minority. In 2009–2010, women represented less than a quarter of all students in secondary or post-secondary education studying STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) topics nationally. This disparity has led to great debate o…

  Authored by DXS Contributor on February 27, 2013