Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/Summer Ash

  • Hey Science, "How YOU doin’?"

    …ion can become a scientist. I called my (neglected as of late) blog “Newtonianism for the Ladies” not because science needs to be dumbed down or spoon fed to women, but after a book by the same title written in 1737 by Francesco Algarotti. Algarotti wrote the book to help spread Newton’s ideas on the nature of light and optics to women of the upper class who were only beginning to be educated. The book was also one of the…

    Authored by on June 22, 2012

  • To Everything (Turn Turn Turn) There is a Season

    Today – June 20 – is the northern Summer Solstice, sometimes known as the Northern Solstice, “first day of summer”, or Midsummer’s Day, depending on where you live. It’s the longest day and shortest night of the year in the northern hemisphere (where I live), though exactly how long or short depends on how far north you live. And of course in the southern hemisphere, today is is the shortest day and longest night, since the seasons a…

    Authored by on June 20, 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

  • 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

  • A Once-in-a-Lifetime Truly Double X Event: Venus in Transit

    By DXS Physics Editor  Matthew Francis , who usually brings you Everyday Science. As you will see, this is science of the Not-So-Everyday sort. Perhaps the most important question to ask in science is “how do we know?” While it’s appropriate to ask this every day, today it feels even more so, as we prepare to witness a very rare astronomical event. This time, it’s happening on June 5, 2012; when this event occurred durin…

    Authored by on June 5, 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

  • Double Xpression: Debbie Berebichez, PhD Physicist

    …m.  My femininity allows me to be a voice in a field that has tended to isolate themselves from the public, which is bad. Some of my colleagues have become a little snobbish.  The fact that I have serious credentials (PhD and 2 postdocs) shows that I had to work like crazy – looks and personality can only go so far.  It s hard work that gets you there! Serious science communication has a lot of math and problem solving in order to explain things…

    Authored by on June 2, 2012

  • African-American and female, doing field research in Africa

    …at Oklahoma State University. She is currently studying African-Pouched Rats, Cricetomys gambianus, an interesting yet largely mysterious animal whose keen sense of smell serves in the detection of landmines. She spent summer 2012 in Morogoro, Tanzania, studying the animals in the wild and in captivity….

    Authored by on January 23, 2013

  • #DispatchesDNLee: Handling lady-business in the field

    An African-American woman and scientist in Tanzania by Danielle Lee, Ph.D. Actual field diary entry,  Tuesday, August 7, 2012,  ~8:30 am I cried this morning. In the shower. I was trying (poorly) to suppress screams of pain as I let the water run on my leg. I knew it was going to be bad when I saw blood on my pants as I pulled my field cover pants off.  I had been running into the same bush on line 3 between traps C and D every day. It has scrap…

    Authored by on February 21, 2013

  • Stereotype threat for girls and STEM

    …wers, I F**ing Love Science. Although she’s never made any effort to hide her gender, when she recently opened a twitter account with her picture as the avatar, media attention and remarks from praise to trolls ensued. In her 27 March interview on CBS This Morning, she said: “Commenters said they were very sort of surprised they had the same bias within themselves. They were saying ‘[I] didn’t realize that I had this, but I obviously do. I never…

    Authored by on April 10, 2013

Page 1 of 3123