Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/ancient Rome

  • Childbirth and C-sections in pre-modern times

    …y down the pelvic canal, with its skull bones eventually sliding around and overlapping to get through the pelvis.  Culturally, we have another way to deliver these large babies: the so-called caesarean section . Up until the 20th century, childbirth was dangerous.  Even today, in some less developed countries, roughly 1 maternal death occurs for every 100 live births, most of those related to obstructed labor or hemorrhage ( WHO Fact Sheet 2010…

    Authored by on July 2, 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

  • A history lesson written in … plaque?

    …and health. As they describe in the journal Nature Genetics, the researchers collected calculus samples (ewww) from 34 human skeletons dating from between 400 (late medieval) and 7,500 years ago (mesolithic), as well as from 10 members of the research team for a modern comparison. (Worst. Cleaning. Ev-ah.) They extracted and amplified specific diagnostic segments of microbial DNA from the 16S ribosomal RNA gene, and then sequenced what they foun…

    Authored by on March 18, 2013

  • Women know something you don’t

    Make no mistake about it. by Emily Willingham Three of my four grandparents were only children. Born early in the 20th century, in the period betwixt the great wars, coming of age in the Great Depression. Only children, in spite of having parents married for decades. Three of them. In all likelihood, their own parents, my great-grandparents–and I knew all of my great-grandmothers–consciously chose not to have more children because,…

    Authored by on March 26, 2013

  • Are children today really suffering nature deficit disorder (TM)?

    …7;t have television to keep them indoors, they also didn’t have child labor laws. The result was that children who once might have been at work at age 4 in a field were now at work at age 3 or 4 in a factory, putting in 12 or so hours a day before stepping out into the coal-smoked, animal-dung-scented air of the city.  Child labor wasn’t something confined to Industrial Revolution Britain, and it continues today, both for agriculture…

    Authored by on April 30, 2012

  • Science, health, medical news freaking you out? Do the Double X Double-Take first

    …ouble X Double-Take: What to do when reading science in the news 1. Skip the headline. Headlines are often misleading, at best, and can be wildly inaccurate. Forget about the headline. Pretend you never even saw the headline. 2. What is the basis of the article? Science news originates from several places. Often it’s a scientific paper. These papers come in several varieties. The ones that report a real study–lots of people or mice or…

    Authored by on April 27, 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

  • Dinosaur Aunts, Bacterial Stowaways, & Insect Milk

    …eggs in a variety of terrestrial environments. As other mutations randomly arose and were favored by selection, milk composition became increasingly complex, incorporating nutritive, protective, and hormonal factors (Oftedal 2012). Some of these milk constituents are shunted into milk from maternal blood, some- although also present in the maternal blood stream- are regulated locally in the mammary gland, and some very special constituents are u…

    Authored by on July 17, 2012

  • Happy belated birthday, Mary Anning!

    shop permanently. By what he calls a “curious stroke of luck,” he has all of the 18th century papers of his great-great-great-great (that’s four) grandfather, including diaries, accounts, letters, and even shopping lists. In 2011, he published the story of this ancestor’s life as a social history, “The Life of a Georgian Gentleman,’ and thus, a blog was also born. We thank Mike for having graciously given us permission to publish his post here b…

    Authored by on May 25, 2012

  • Double Xpression: Karyn Traphagen, co-founder of ScienceOnline

    …llenbosch (South Africa). She has trained physics teachers through the University of Virginia’s Physics department and traveled to South Sudan to conduct professional development training for local teachers. She has more than 10 years of experience developing and teaching online courses. In addition to her science work, Karyn maintains a freelance graphic design studio. Her latest project was a work on Ancient Near Eastern royal inscriptions….

    Authored by on July 9, 2012

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