Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/Todd Akin

  • The sperm don’t care how they got there, Rep. Akin

    so if a rape resulted in pregnancy, the woman must somehow have been having a good time. Ergo, ’twas not a rape. This Guardian piece expands on that history but doesn’t get into why such a concept lingers into the 21st century. A lot of that lingering has to do with a strong desire on the part of some in US political circles to make a rape-related pregnancy the woman’s fault so that she must suffer the consequences. Those conseq…

    Authored by on August 20, 2012

  • Arousal during rape

    …violent. I am struggling and overpowered. I am screaming.  And I am certainly not getting off. Although in the United States, where I live, rape survivors are now more common than smokers, I am not currently among the nearly 20% of women or 3% of men (or more) who are sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. I am not one of the 1 in 3 Native Americans who are raped. My mother has never felt the need to tell a doctor, as one Native American mother…

    Authored by on May 30, 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Motherhood, war, and attachment: what does it all mean?

    is son love football, that they spoke with their pediatrician about it, and that their son will continue with football at least into middle school. There’s a bit of wary nodding, and then, back to the Pinewood Derby. Scene 2: Two mothers meet on a playground. After a little conversation about their toddlers, one mother mentions that she still breastfeeds and practices “attachment parenting,” which is why she has a sling sitting next to her. Th…

    Authored by on May 16, 2012

  • La vie est belle, n’est-ce pas?

    …e within rather than without — and by within, I mean through the oculars of a microscope. Beta-tubulin expression of a Drosophila third instar larval brain, with attached eye imaginal discs. This image placed 7th in the 2012 Olympus BioScapes competition.  (Source) To me, there’s nothing quite so lovely as a really powerful photomicrograph or time-lapse series. Want a good example? Here’s one: On 18 March, Howard Hughes Medical…

    Authored by on April 14, 2013

  • A Decision Based on Logic – Why I Choose to Vaccinate

    …ere. I was forced to operate blindly. I questioned the vaccine schedule, I questioned my doctors and I questioned vaccines in general (I’m a scientist, would you expect anything else?). My first child was born at the start of 2010, when Wakefield’s MMR paper had yet to be officially retracted. Every instinct in my newfound maternal arsenol of instincts screamed NO, don’t vaccinate! But years of studying microbiology challenged these instincts and…

    Authored by on August 27, 2012

  • Unicorns and Brainbows

    Brainbow is a mouse with a rainbow brain. By Jeffrey Perkel    A couple weeks ago I wrote about the beautiful world right under our noses, a world visible only under the microscope. The cover image for that post was this picture, a “‘Brainbow’ transgenic mouse hippocampus,” which placed 18th in the 2008 Nikon Small World Photomicroscopy contest. Brainbow technology also won the 2007 Olympus Bioscapes contest, with this be…

    Authored by on May 6, 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

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