Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/Reka Albert

  • 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

  • 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

  • A Few Modern Physicists

    …l and mechanical acumen served her well as a group leader at the Fermilab. Dr. Edwards is a team player and insists upon acknowledging the contributions of her colleagues in her and Fermilab’s success. Vandana Shiva in 2008. [Edited, 11/26/12, 14:43 ET]: Vandana Shiva was trained in physics and the philosophy of science and now works as an environmentalist, achieving considerable global prominence. She  was born in 1952 and, according t…

    Authored by on November 26, 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

  • 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

  • Real science vs. fake science: How can you tell them apart?

    …ed marketing scam? Do they use, for example, a Website or magazine or newspaper ad that’s made to look sciencey or newsy when it’s really one giant advertisement meant to make you think it’s journalism? 2. What is the agenda? You must know this to consider any information in context. In a scientific paper, look at the funding sources. If you’re reading a non-scientific anything, remain extremely skeptical. What does t…

    Authored by on December 11, 2011

  • 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

  • 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 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

Page 1 of 212