Search Results for: label/Mountain Dew

• 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

• Friday Roundup: dissolving mice, preschooler paleontologist, evolution cake, and more 2011 retrospective

  Burrunan dolphin, a new species discovered in 2011 Cool science and science ewwws Can Mountain Dew really dissolve a mouse?  Barry White’s voice may have been low, but how well could his boys swim? French botanist Jeanne Baret botanized around the 18th-century world dressed as a man. Now, she gets some recognition.  Have you had a child? Would it make you feel better to know that you each still carry around cells from one anothe…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on January 6, 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

• As Seen on TV! Restoring Hair with LASERS!!!!!!

  The author’s rapidly-expanding forehead. Anyone who watches TV, reads magazines, or flips through catalogs has seen some interesting products. Maybe they seem plausible to you, maybe they don’t. However, a little investigation shows they are based less on science and well…actually working, and more on wishful thinking. At worst they’re actual con-jobs, designed to separate you from your money as efficiently as p…

  Authored by Matthew R Francis on September 28, 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

• 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

• 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

• 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