Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

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  • Childbirth and C-sections in pre-modern times

    …the skeletons is severely lacking: We found the skeletal remains of a girl (sic) aged about 14 at death in an undisturbed family burial tomb in Beit Shemesh, near Jerusalem.  Three bronze coins found in the tomb dating to AD 315-392 indicate that the tomb was in use during the fourth century AD.  We found the skeletal remains of a full-term (40-week) fetus in the pelvic area of the girl, who was lying on her back in an extended position, apparen…

    Authored by on July 2, 2012

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

    …ll selection of different materials: bricks, mortar, iron, glass, and wood. Arranged in different ways, these few materials can yield a huge variety of structures. We encountered functional groups and the SPHONC in Chapter 3. These components form the four categories of molecules of life. These Big Four biological molecules are carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids. They can have many roles, from giving an organism structure to be…

    Authored by on June 8, 2012

  • The Vampire of Venice Returns, or What Is that Brick Doing in that Skull’s Mouth?

    Science, in an episode entitled “Vampire Forensics” (really, NatGeo? I expect more from you than this sort of pandering). You can actually watch the entire documentary in segments on YouTube: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. (Warning: Part 5 has some very graphic forensic images, which may be re-creations but which are even more graphic than what I normally show my forensic anthropology students.) Or you can watch this les…

    Authored by on July 11, 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

  • Explosions, Just a Bit More Than Fireworks

    …an element (within a compound.) The original definition can easily be shown in terms of explosives. The simple mixing of hydrogen and oxygen with the addition of just a bit of heat, will form water in an explosive display: 2H2 + O2 –> 2H2O The little flame used to catalyze the reaction in the video is actually much more energy than is necessary to cause this reaction to occur, but it’s difficult to get an even littler source of heat…

    Authored by on July 4, 2012

  • Yvonne Brill: she made the satellite revolution possible

    …;t be more different. Yet both theoretical physics and rocket science are creative endeavors, and their best practitioners change the way we explore our Universe. So it was with rocket engineer Yvonne Brill, who died on March 28, 2013 at age 88. She held the patent on the “dual thrust level monopropellant spacecraft propulsion system,” a complicated name for an extremely important invention. Basically, Brill found a way to use a single type of ro…

    Authored by on April 9, 2013

  • What’s on your wishlist?

    …board for that iPad or iPhone? Look no further than the Cube Laser Digital Keyboard ($180) . What about other great gadgets? The DOTKLOK (from $150) is an open-source and hackable digital clock. It also consumes 2W for power! Runners and cyclists who love their gadgets may like the Garmin Forerunner 610 GPS watch ($320). Track your workouts, train like a pro, and analyze all the data this watch feeds to you for the height of fitnes…

    Authored by on November 23, 2012

  • Depressing genes

    ter all, that’s one of the reasons why scientists are trying to identify risk genes: to design better treatments for those disorders. [Image credit: DNA, public domain image from US govt. Image of Prozac, credit Tom Varco, CC 3.0 license.] [Siobhan Mitchell obtained a Neurobiology Ph.D. at the State University New York at Albany (SUNY Albany), followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at University of Washington, Seattle. She currently works at the…

    Authored by on May 17, 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

  • 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

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