Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/Venus

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

    …1; 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 during the 18th century, it allowed astronomers to make the first precision measurements of the size of our Solar System. Captain James Cook, best known for his exploration of the Pacific (for Europe, that is—the natives already knew w…

    Authored by on June 5, 2012

  • Biology Explainer: The big 4 building blocks of life–carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and nucleic acids

    …e X Extra: A triglyceride can have up to three different fatty acids attached to it. Canola oil, for example, consists primarily of oleic acid, linoleic acid, and linolenic acid, all of which are unsaturated fatty acids with 18 carbons in their chains. Why do we take in fat anyway? Fat is a necessary nutrient for everything from our nervous systems to our circulatory health. It also, under appropriate conditions, is an excellent way to store up…

    Authored by on June 8, 2012

  • After Newtown missteps, journalists get guidelines

    Protip: Don’t diagnose based on speculation. by Jessica Wright                Attention journalists: If you’ve been calling people “nuts” or “deranged” in your stories, the Associated Press is recommending that it’s time you stopped. This guideline — along with the common-sense assertion that writers shouldn’t diagnose individuals with a mental illness based entirely on speculation — is part of a new recommendation added to the AP styleboo…

    Authored by on March 27, 2013

  • 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

  • The World Will Not End Tomorrow

    …know a lot about them despite their destruction by the hand of European invaders. In particular, we know about their calendar, and the divisions they used. We use what’s called a decimal system for numbers, based on the 10 fingers of our hands. That’s why we break things up into decades (ten years) and centuries (ten decades), as well as a millennium (ten centuries). The Mayas liked different divisions of time: their b’ak’…

    Authored by on December 20, 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?

    …nt 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 used with mammography. Approval of a device of this nat…

    Authored by on September 21, 2012

  • Autism and the DSM-5

    …questions in the context of these criteria. I’ve expanded on a couple of these reports at length elsewhere, as have others with an interest in the subject. The short version is that studies overall indicate that at the least, 10% of people who would currently have an autism diagnosis under the DSM-IV-TR criteria would lose that diagnosis under the DSM-5, and some studies go as high as 55% in their estimates. Even more troubling? The committee’s s…

    Authored by on April 23, 2013

  • Depressing genes

    …ch experience — yet it was obvious he didn’t have the knack for it. This student’s dogged pursuit of a mental health career made me wonder what kind of emotional turmoil he experienced which would make him think, at age 19, that psychiatry was the only vocation worth working towards. Then there were the two graduate students who both worked incredibly hard and were both prone to obsess about their experiments. Each burned off stress in quit…

    Authored by on May 17, 2013

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