Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/astronaut

  • Rest in peace, Sally Ride

    …n she bolstered through her fame as a former Space Shuttle astronaut. In fact, she was the first American woman in space, and only the third woman worldwide to travel into space. She flew twice aboard the Challenger, first in 1983 and then again in 1984, when she controlled the Shuttle’s robotic arm to deploy a satellite. Later, she served in the investigations after both the Challenger and Columbia disasters, the only person to sit on both…

    Authored by on July 25, 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

  • Wordless Wednesday: Best video from space–EVAR

    This is a time-lapse video of images captured from the International Space Station from August to October 2011. You’ll see the auroras (borealis for the north, australis for the south) and, well, the entire island Earth. Bora  Zivkovic, blog editor at Scientific American posted this last month. According to Bora, we owe thanks to Ron Garan, the photographer and astronaut who took the pictures and to Michael  König for editing them into t…

    Authored by on December 14, 2011

  • Friday roundup: Nature is beautiful, weird, terrifying, & gross, and vaccines are a social responsibility

    Madagascar oxymoron: a new species of giant mouse lemur has been discovered bya Malagasy-German research team. Credit: B. Randrianambinina. Women in science An important woman in science you may have never heard of,  Clelia Mosher .  Mae Jemison, first African-American woman astronaut to travel into space, now selected to head up the Pentagon’s 100-year Starship project . Nature is beautiful. Nature is weird. Nature is terrif…

    Authored by on January 14, 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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