Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/Liza Gross

  • Think pink? I’d rather raise a stink

    Are some of these possible signs of breast cancer presentin a famous work of art? Image: public domain, US gov by Liza Gross, contributor [Ed. note: This article was originally posted on KQED QUEST on October 3, 2012. It is reposted here with kind permission.] Just a generation ago, October belonged to the colors of fall, when “every green thing loves to die in bright colors,” as Henry Ward Beecher said. (Growing up back East, you read…

    Authored by on October 8, 2012

  • Friday roundup: Nature is beautiful, weird, terrifying, & gross, and vaccines are a social responsibility

    d to head up the Pentagon’s 100-year Starship project . Nature is beautiful. Nature is weird. Nature is terrifying. National Geographic has collected together its best “Photo of the Day” selections from 2012, and this one has stayed with me since I saw it earlier this year. Astonishing.  Otters chase a butterfly . You may know that a group of crows is called a “murder.” But did you know that a group of otters…

    Authored by on January 14, 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

  • Double Xpression: Meghan Groome

    …to learn when it’s appropriate to pull out my soap box and go full-out social justice to them. This is changing, but for a long time I kept my personality under wraps in a professional setting. It’s only now — with 10 years professional experience, great organizations on my resume, and a PhD — that I can be clever, confront those I disagree with, and even smile. Anyone who’s ever had a beer with me knows that I’m a goofball and w…

    Authored by on February 6, 2012

  • A tour of digestion from nose to um…tail

    Mary Roach’s Gulp is a trip through the gooier side of human anatomy By Matthew R. Francis Mary Roach is one of the more fearless writers out there. Not in the physical sense — she doesn’t put herself into particularly dangerous situations, like certain reporters or travel writers — but intellectually. I don’t know if she’s incapable of embarrassment, but certainly she’s able to submerge that as she asks companies…

    Authored by on May 7, 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

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