Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/NIH

  • Congress Is Killing Medical Research

    …re very real consequences to Congress’s inaction, and they are happening right now. The “continuing resolution” that Congress passed in the fall, which allowed the government to avoid a shutdown, ended in March. It included a 10% across-the-board budget cut to everything. That includes most of the critical medical research in the U.S. Every year, many NIH projects end and many others begin. (Most only last 3 or 4 years.) But not this year. Becaus…

    Authored by on March 6, 2013

  • Biology Explainer: The big 4 building blocks of life–carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and nucleic acids

    …e X Extra: A triglyceride can have up to three different fatty acids attached to it. Canola oil, for example, consists primarily of oleic acid, linoleic acid, and linolenic acid, all of which are unsaturated fatty acids with 18 carbons in their chains. Why do we take in fat anyway? Fat is a necessary nutrient for everything from our nervous systems to our circulatory health. It also, under appropriate conditions, is an excellent way to store up…

    Authored by on June 8, 2012

  • After Newtown missteps, journalists get guidelines

    Protip: Don’t diagnose based on speculation. by Jessica Wright                Attention journalists: If you’ve been calling people “nuts” or “deranged” in your stories, the Associated Press is recommending that it’s time you stopped. This guideline — along with the common-sense assertion that writers shouldn’t diagnose individuals with a mental illness based entirely on speculation — is part of a new recommendation added to the AP styleboo…

    Authored by on March 27, 2013

  • 100 Years

    By Adrienne M. Roehrich, Chemistry Editor Photo of the author with her 100 year old grandmother 10-1-2012 100 is such a nice round number.  Should I start with a disclaimer? I’m a chemist, not a biologist. Perhaps I should leave a post on centenarians to the biologists, but I have a vested interest in the topic. On October 1 of this year, my grandmother turned 100, so I’ve been a little obsessed with living until 100. In…

    Authored by on October 19, 2012

  • Modern Chemists

    Our next installment of notable women in science brings us to chemists. Many of these women were born in the early part of the 20thcentury and forged their paths in tough times. All are still inspiring others today. Presented in no particular order: Catherine Clarke Fenselau is a pioneer in mass spectrometry.  Born in 1939, her interested in science was apparent before her 10th grade. She was encouraged to attend a women’s college, whi…

    Authored by on April 23, 2012

  • Towards better drug development, fewer side effects?

    …thinks she’s counting CD4 T cells, she may actually be counting some macrophages. That overlap leads to all sorts of experimental optimization issues. An exceptionally talented flow cytometrist can assemble panels of perhaps 12 or so dyes, but it might take months to get everything just right. That’s where the mass cytometry comes in. Commercialized by DVS Sciences, mass cytometry is essentially the love-chid of flow cytometry and mass sp…

    Authored by on September 24, 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

  • Is the bar high enough for screening breast ultrasounds for breast cancer?

    …nt 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 used with mammography. Approval of a device of this nat…

    Authored by on September 21, 2012

  • Autism and the DSM-5

    …questions in the context of these criteria. I’ve expanded on a couple of these reports at length elsewhere, as have others with an interest in the subject. The short version is that studies overall indicate that at the least, 10% of people who would currently have an autism diagnosis under the DSM-IV-TR criteria would lose that diagnosis under the DSM-5, and some studies go as high as 55% in their estimates. Even more troubling? The committee’s s…

    Authored by on April 23, 2013

  • Depressing genes

    …ch experience — yet it was obvious he didn’t have the knack for it. This student’s dogged pursuit of a mental health career made me wonder what kind of emotional turmoil he experienced which would make him think, at age 19, that psychiatry was the only vocation worth working towards. Then there were the two graduate students who both worked incredibly hard and were both prone to obsess about their experiments. Each burned off stress in quit…

    Authored by on May 17, 2013

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