Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/Nancy Roman

  • Childbirth and C-sections in pre-modern times

    …y down the pelvic canal, with its skull bones eventually sliding around and overlapping to get through the pelvis.  Culturally, we have another way to deliver these large babies: the so-called caesarean section . Up until the 20th century, childbirth was dangerous.  Even today, in some less developed countries, roughly 1 maternal death occurs for every 100 live births, most of those related to obstructed labor or hemorrhage ( WHO Fact Sheet 2010…

    Authored by on July 2, 2012

  • Modern Astronomers

    …an excellent science communicator, researcher, andleader.  She earned her B.S . from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii in the 1980s. At NASA she led the imaging team of the Voyager 2’s encounter with Neptune and became known for her science communication for it.  She returned to MIT as a scientist for nearly a decade. Among her honors, she has received Vladimir Karpetoff Award , Klumpke-Roberts Award,…

    Authored by on January 19, 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

  • 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

  • The real scandal: science denialism at Susan G. Komen for the Cure®

    …mbassador Nancy Brinker, awkwardly attempted to explain the decision, and yesterday, Handel resigned her position. (Whether she’ll receive a golden parachute remains unclear, but former CEO Hala Moddelmog received $277,864 in 2010, despite her resignation at the end of 2009.) The Planned Parenthood debacle brought renewed attention to other controversies that have hounded Komen in recent years—like its “lawsuits for the cure” program that spent n…

    Authored by on February 11, 2012

  • What blinded Mary Ingalls?

    …y gone, yellow fever only exists in a few parts of the world and measles is now very rare – all due to vaccines. It’s easy to forget how devastating the “usual childhood diseases” of the 19th and early 20th centuries were to families. Sanitation improvements have helped tremendously. So have antibiotics and other medical advances. And so have vaccines. This post originally appeared at Red Wine & Apple Sauce. Photo cour…

    Authored by on February 19, 2013

  • Ask not what science can do for you

    …against HIV/AIDS.  Today, December 1, is World AIDS Day. The theme for this year’s day is, “Leading with science, uniting for action.” Since the advent of the first-reported cases of HIV in 1981, more than 25 million people have died of AIDS worldwide. In 2008, 2 million people died, in spite of therapies that now save lives. Almost everyone who now lives with HIV lives in low- and middle-income countries and has no access to…

    Authored by on December 1, 2011

  • A history lesson written in … plaque?

    …and health. As they describe in the journal Nature Genetics, the researchers collected calculus samples (ewww) from 34 human skeletons dating from between 400 (late medieval) and 7,500 years ago (mesolithic), as well as from 10 members of the research team for a modern comparison. (Worst. Cleaning. Ev-ah.) They extracted and amplified specific diagnostic segments of microbial DNA from the 16S ribosomal RNA gene, and then sequenced what they foun…

    Authored by on March 18, 2013

  • Double Xplainer: Once in a Blue Moon

    Full Moon, from Flickr user Proggie under Creative Commons license. Tonight—August 31, 2012— is the second full Moon of August. The last time two full Moons occurred in the same month was in 2010, and the next will be in 2015, so while the events are rare, they aren’t terribly uncommon either. In fact, you’ve probably heard the second full Moon given a name: “blue moon”. (The Moon will not appear to be a blue col…

    Authored by on August 31, 2012

Page 1 of 212