Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/cotton

  • Cottoning on to genome duplications

    Cotton, courtesy of the USDA. What do electrons have to do with our ability to spin this into yarn? Image via Wikimedia Commons.   by Chris Gunter, Science Education Editor, DXS   Plants are hard. Not in the physical way, but in the genomics way: It’s been estimated that 75% of domesticated plant genomes are polyploid, meaning they have up to 12 sets of each chromosome in every cell. This makes genome sequencing crazily diffi…

    Authored by on December 19, 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

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

    …ory. While eating more healthy foods is always a good idea, no food has curative effects all on its own. Other aspects 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…

    Authored by on September 3, 2012

  • Avoidant personality disorder

    “I have some kind of allergy to other people.” by Emma Atkinson The first time I tried to tell a therapist about my life, I was twelve years old. I told him that I couldn’t talk to people. He laughed and said, “I know. Making small talk can be hard. Everyone feels that way.” He had missed the point so spectacularly that I wanted to cry. I didn’t try to correct him, though. I didn’t have the words for what I was trying to get across t…

    Authored by on March 29, 2013

  • Circumcision shuffles the penis ecosystem

    In adults, the snip alters more than the shape. by Jeffrey Perkel “Isaac’s Circumcision”, from the Regensburg Pentateuch, c. 1300 (Wikipedia) Can we talk about penises for a moment? It’s not what you think — well, maybe it is, actually. Lately it seems I’ve become the go-to guy on microbiomes here at Double X Science, writing, in just the past few weeks, about both the vaginal ecosystem and the oral microbiom…

    Authored by on April 16, 2013

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

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