Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/diffraction

  • Why Can You Hear Around Corners But Not See?

    …ince our ears respond to frequency, not wavelength. The specific wavelength of sound depends on the temperature and humidity of the air, but if we assume dry room-temperature air, a low-pitched sound has a wavelength of about 17 meters and high-pitched sounds have wavelengths around 2 centimeters. That’s a big range, and not all those sounds will travel around corners. Shorter wavelengths are ultrasound, which are probably most familiar for…

    Authored by on December 27, 2011

  • 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

  • The Bright Crystal

    …he molecular structures of drug targets to design molecules that “fit” them like a lock to a key. The technique most often used to solve those molecular structures is x-ray crystallography. With this approach, which turned 100 years old in November, a high-powered beam of x-rays is shot at a crystal of protein molecules. The x-rays collide with the crystal’s atoms, scattering at specific angles. Working backwards from that information, researc…

    Authored by on December 5, 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

  • Crystallographers of merit

    …rge molecules, many of which were biologically relevant. Order of Merit medal of Dorothy Hodgkin, displayed in the Royal Society, London, 20 April 2004. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was a Chemistry Nobel Laureate.  (1910 – 1994) While her father was in Cairo, Egypt on an archaeological dig for the British government, Dorothy Crowfoot was born. Accompanying her parents on their work trips sparked her interest in archaeology, but she also develo…

    Authored by on March 7, 2013

  • We gotta watch out for feminine role models wearing pink

    Beware blonde, feminine role models wearing pink.(Source) Today’s guest post comes to us courtesy of Sara Callori. She is a physics Ph.D. candidate at Stony Brook University in Long Island, NY. In the lab, Sara loves working with x-rays and even has a Bragg diffraction tattoo. She would eventually like to focus on science teaching and outreach because she loves to get people to stop being intimidated when they think of physics….

    Authored by on May 18, 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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