Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/bottleneck

  • 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

  • Biology Xplainer: Evolution and how it happens

    …he population will change over time. It will be adapted to its environment. It will evolve. Other mechanisms of evolution A pigeon depicted in Charles Darwin’sVariation of Animals and PlantsUnder Domestication, 1868. U.S.public domain image, via Wikimedia. When Darwin presented his idea of natural selection, he knew he had an audience to win over. He pointed out that people select features of organisms all the time and breed the…

    Authored by on January 29, 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

  • Creating viruses to create the vaccines?

    …world had to wait several months for the right virus to be isolated for use in a vaccine. In March, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report indicating that H1N1 vaccination prevented 700,000 to 1,500,000 cases. But the report authors note that more illnesses and deaths could have been prevented if the vaccine had been available earlier. In spite of being a public health threat, the influenza virus holds a major adv…

    Authored by on May 20, 2013

  • Crowdfunding on the Brain: Finding Biomarkers for Early Autism Diagnosis

    …recent technology, and according to the Darie Lab, they have been able to identify over 700 proteins in the saliva alone. This is quite an incredible step up from traditional mass spectrometers, which could detect only around 100 proteins in saliva. Just because we haven’t been able to identify biomarkers for autism in the past doesn’t mean we can’t do it now.  In addition to the use of this new technology, the Darie Lab presents some compelli…

    Authored by on December 3, 2012

  • Tracing the taming of the turkey

    …story, indicating a severe reduction in numbers and genetic diversity, shows that the native peoples of the Southwest strongly selected for a specific breed of their domesticated bird. And then they propagated it for at least 1000 years. You might think that the turkeys we eat today in the United States would be descendents of these Southwestern birds. They’re not. When Europeans showed up in the Americas, they grabbed a few of the birds and too…

    Authored by on November 21, 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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