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Search Results for: label/The Knight Bus

  • Why being a Nature editor is like riding the Knight Bus

      Have you seen a picture of our science education editor, Chris Gunter (above)? She looks kinda nice, doesn’t she? Would it surprise you to learn that once upon a time, she was viewed along the lines of the love child between a rock goddess and Darth Vader? Perhaps picture Grace Slick in a long black cape, glaring at you. Like this:   Via Wikimedia Commons. Why was Chris such a badass? Because she was an editor at Nature, scienc…

    Authored by on December 12, 2012

  • Mother’s Day: Part of me forever

    …f you hear yourself telling your child, “You are KILLING me!”] Source. In fact, testing women’s cells for the presence of the Y chromosome — the “male” chromosome, which females shouldn’t carry — uncovers it in about 30% of the bone marrow of grown women and 47% of cardiac aortas. Even among women who have truly never had a reportable pregnancy, 7% or more would test positive for XY cells. Doubling those numbers to account for fetuses of…

    Authored by on May 12, 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

  • 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

  • Good Deeds, Good Science: Dr. Ben and The BioBus

    ing called the Cell Motion BioBus, which is a 1974 San Francisco transit bus that has been converted into a high-tech mobile microscopy lab, and for that particular day, the duties of the scientist volunteer involved teaching 3rd graders about the tiny crustacean,  Daphnia.   A few weeks later, I found myself inside The BioBus, hanging out and talking science with a bunch of very excited 8-year-olds. We spoke about the habitat where  Daphnia l…

    Authored by on January 3, 2012

  • Dating research update

    …ht be interested in a third article:  Mongeau, P. A., Knight, K., Williams, J., Eden, J., & Shaw, C. (2013). Identifying and Explicating Variation among Friends with Benefits Relationships. Journal of Sex Research, 50(1), 37–47. doi:10.1080/00224499.2011.623797. I learned something right in the abstract: “ Qualitative analysis of these data identified seven types of FWBRs (true friends, network opportunism, just sex, three types of transition…

    Authored by on January 31, 2013

  • The vaginal ecosystem.

    …g announcement says. “Preterm infants are at increased risk of life-long disability, poor health, and early death compared with infants born later in pregnancy.” Nearly one in eight children were born prematurely in the US in 2009 (12.18%). Beyond the emotional toll on families, preterm birth also imposes a serious financial cost. “A report by the Institute of Medicine estimated that the annual societal economic burden associated with preterm bir…

    Authored by on February 25, 2013

  • 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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