Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/US Naval Observatory

  • A peek inside the US Naval Observatory – keepers of time and celestial motion

    …one of products, or helping to get that upgrade ready by testing it. Q. The USNO in Washington, DC has telescopes. What kind of telescopes do you have and what are they used for? A. The biggest telescope we have in DC is the 26-inch refractor. It is the telescope that Asaph Hall used in 1877 at our old Foggy Bottom location to discover the moons of Mars. It is still used today (despite DC’s light pollution!) to study double stars and the…

    Authored by on February 9, 2012

  • 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

  • Notable Women in Science: Historical Astronomers

    s for a woman in math was very difficult, and she longed for something more. She married a Russian astronomer, Alexander Vyssotsky, the same year she finished the requirements for her Ph.D. The degree was awarded when she was 35. She relocated to the University of Virginia to follow her husband’s career. Dr. Vyssotsky was hired as an instructor while her husband became an assistant professor. As a team, the Vyssotskys discovered dwarf stars using…

    Authored by on December 28, 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

  • Crystallographers of merit

    …B.A. with honors from Somerville College at Oxford University in 1931, then went onto a research fellowship there. She earned her D.Phil. from Cambridge University in 1936, followed by marrying Thomas Hodgkin in 1937. She had 3 children within the next 10 years. Dr. Hodgkin did research using x-ray crystallography to study and clarify large biomolecules and pioneered the use of computers in crystallography. In 1964, she received the Nobel Prize i…

    Authored by on March 7, 2013

  • Historical Physicists

    Featured today are 10 more women who broke boundaries by their presence in physics. They lived from 1711 to 2000. While I again limited information to one paragraph, I tried to highlight how they got their start, what universities, family members, and scientists were supportive of them. For these women, without the support of fathers, mothers, husbands, and mentors (all male with one exception) their life in science would not have happened. Whil…

    Authored by on February 21, 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

  • You – Yes, You – Are an Astronomer

    On January 7, 1610 (402 years ago today!), Galileo first identified three moons of Jupiter, the first satellites ever observed orbiting another planet. He later found a fourth, and today those moons — Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto — are known as the Galilean moons in his honor. Galileo was able to do this because he used a telescope to observe: every new way to see reveals something new to be seen. You can buy a telescope that’s more…

    Authored by on January 7, 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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