Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/blue sky

  • Why is the sky pink?

    On Mars, the sky is pink during the day, shading to blue at sunset. What planet did you think I was talking about? On Earth, the sky is blue during daytime, turning red at as the sun sinks toward night. Scattering light Well, it’s not quite as simple as that: if you ignore your dear sainted mother’s warning and look at the Sun, you’ll see that the sky immediately around the Sun is white, and the sky right at the horizon (i…

    Authored by on March 12, 2012

  • Double Xplainer: Once in a Blue Moon

    Full Moon, from Flickr user Proggie under Creative Commons license. Tonight—August 31, 2012— is the second full Moon of August. The last time two full Moons occurred in the same month was in 2010, and the next will be in 2015, so while the events are rare, they aren’t terribly uncommon either. In fact, you’ve probably heard the second full Moon given a name: “blue moon”. (The Moon will not appear to be a blue col…

    Authored by on August 31, 2012

  • Why blueberries won’t turn you blue and other blueberry facts

    …of blueberry nutrition includes it as a source of sugar. One cup (148 g) of blueberries contains about 15 g of sugar and 4 g of fiber, a single gram of protein, and half a gram of fat. If you are counting carbs, this cup has 21 g of them. That one cup of blueberries averages about 85 calories, which is approximately the same as a medium apple or orange. While almost all the vitamins and minerals nutrition gurus like to report on are present to s…

    Authored by on September 3, 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

  • 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

  • Aren’t you curious?

    Source: IFLS By Courtney Williams, DXS contributor Recently my on-line science pal Emily J. Willingham asked on Facebook, “You are a consumer of science. As one, what bothers you about how science is offered to you? What questions do you have? How do you consume scientific information? How do you use it?” She’s going to be blogging on the Forbes network, see her here, and I’m guessing this was the impetus for that particular set of questio…

    Authored by on October 15, 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

  • 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

  • To Everything (Turn Turn Turn) There is a Season

    Today – June 20 – is the northern Summer Solstice, sometimes known as the Northern Solstice, “first day of summer”, or Midsummer’s Day, depending on where you live. It’s the longest day and shortest night of the year in the northern hemisphere (where I live), though exactly how long or short depends on how far north you live. And of course in the southern hemisphere, today is is the shortest day and longest night, since the seasons a…

    Authored by on June 20, 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

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