Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

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  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Double Xpression: Meghan Groome

    …to learn when it’s appropriate to pull out my soap box and go full-out social justice to them. This is changing, but for a long time I kept my personality under wraps in a professional setting. It’s only now — with 10 years professional experience, great organizations on my resume, and a PhD — that I can be clever, confront those I disagree with, and even smile. Anyone who’s ever had a beer with me knows that I’m a goofball and w…

    Authored by on February 6, 2012

  • Friday Roundup: Arsenic in juice, self-medicating chimps, science tattoos, Guinness Record-setting science cheerleaders, and more!

    …et in what are known as “parts per billion” (ppb). That means what you think: if the cutoff is 3 ppb, that means, for example, three drops in a billion drops. Right now, the cutoff for arsenic in drinking water is 10 ppb, and consumer groups are asking the EPA to drop that to 3 ppb. Deborah Blum has addressed the fact that arsenic is present in food, water, and soil and that different forms of it have different effects. As always, it&…

    Authored by on December 2, 2011

  • The path from science to alarmism: How science gets twisted before it gets to you

    …ajority of what they’re looking at has never been demonstrated to have any kind of relationship to autism, not even a correlation. Problem #1 is the unnecessary autism name-checking. Problem #2 is much worse, it’s the list of 10 chemicals they suggest for future study. The list itself isn’t a bad idea, I guess. They’re suggesting places for potential research, which certainly needs to be done. But it does reek a little bit of the kind of thing ma…

    Authored by on May 4, 2012

  • Breast cancer screening and treatment, especially in younger women

    …cancer http://www.sccablog.org/2012/10/tweeting-for-breast-cancer-awareness-month/ Twitter handles @SeattleCCA, @UWMedicineNews, and @HutchinsonCtr; also @jrgralow and @SeattleMamaDoc Storified by Emily Willingham · Mon, Oct 15 2012 13:00:07 “@stales: MT @SeattleMamaDoc: Exercise lowers hormone levels, consequently lowers risk of breast cancer.#SCCAbc #SCCAbc”MESFER AL SHAHRANI #SCCAbc Topic 3: If your mother or sister had breast cancer, especia…

    Authored by on October 17, 2012

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