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  • 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

  • Survival is Gendered, According to Scholastic

    …or at least help you cope with injuries (forest fires, flash floods, snakebites, etc.). Not all of these are likely to be experienced (such as polar bear attack), but at least they could happen. The score: “boys” 22, “girls” 0. Survival skills for science fiction or fantasy scenarios, which are fun, but will never happen in real life (ghost attack, vampire attack, dinosaur attack, etc.). The score: “boys”  4,…

    Authored by on June 14, 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

  • Mirror Mirror On the Wall, Mirrors Don’t Switch Hands at All

    …escope out of a single flawless piece of glass: you can make a huge metal dish, or make one big mirror out of a bunch of smaller mirrors in a tile pattern. The Keck telescopes in Hawaii are about 30 feet in diameter (actually 10 meters, to be precise): the width of a large classroom or a substantial house! These mirrors focus light onto a detector, creating the wonderful and often beautiful images astronomers use in their work. The huge size of t…

    Authored by on December 12, 2011

  • There will never be another Curie…and that’s a good thing

    For your serious Sunday consideration, from Double X Science physics editor, Matthew Francis. The above courtesy of xkcd, a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. If you had to name the top scientists of the 20th century, any reasonable list must include Polish-French scientist Marie Sklodowska Curie. She won the Nobel Prize twice, a feat only matched by three others: once in physics (in 1903) for her work in radioactivity,…

    Authored by on November 27, 2011

  • How fluorescent lights work: quantum mechanics in the home

    We have a tendency to think that “quantum mechanics” is synonymous with “out of the ordinary.” I do that, too, since there’s so much strange to talk about: the blurring of particles and waves, the apparent randomness that drove Einstein crazy, and so forth. It’s easy to forget that quantum mechanics also is an everyday matter. The odds are pretty good you’re reading this post on a computer screen (as op…

    Authored by on January 30, 2012

  • Wordless Wednesday: The faces of the women and men in science, DXS edition

    Meet Chris Gunter, science education editor for Double X Science! We (and you) are lucky to have her!Read more about Chris on our About Us page. Some of us got to meet at a conference for online science writers.From left, DXS Physics Editor Matthew Francis, Biology Editor Jeanne Garbarino,and Managing Editor Emily Willingham. And a meme of that conference was #youvebeenframed. In this case, Emily Willingham was, with th…

    Authored by on January 25, 2012

  • How large is a proton?

    …of various types, mostly hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, with plenty of others to bulk things out. Let’s think about some numbers for size, then: unless you’re a kid or a giant, your height is probably between 1 and 2 meters. One of my fingernails is about 1 centimeter across (1/100 of a meter). A red blood cell is a little less than 10 micrometers—10 millionths of a meter—across. A typical atom is a few hundred picometers (100 trillion…

    Authored by on February 13, 2013

  • 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

  • Did Einstein write his most famous equation? Does it matter?

    Why all the fuss about E = m c 2? By Matthew R. Francis Albert Einstein in Pittsburgh, 1934. (Credit: Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph/Dwight Vincent and David Topper) The association is strong in our minds: Albert Einstein. Genius. Crazy hair. E = m c 2. Maybe many people don’t know what else Einstein did, but they know about the hair and that equation. They may think he flunked math in school (wrong, though he did have conflicts with some teach…

    Authored by on May 21, 2013

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