Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/electromagnetic spectrum

  • How large is a proton?

    …of various types, mostly hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, with plenty of others to bulk things out. Let’s think about some numbers for size, then: unless you’re a kid or a giant, your height is probably between 1 and 2 meters. One of my fingernails is about 1 centimeter across (1/100 of a meter). A red blood cell is a little less than 10 micrometers—10 millionths of a meter—across. A typical atom is a few hundred picometers (100 trillion…

    Authored by on February 13, 2013

  • Autism and the DSM-5

    …ial social aspect of this change, and the one thing that might, when it comes to autism, elevate the DSM-5 above the level of doorstop. [Image credit: Dave Bullock, UK, via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 generic license.]…

    Authored by on April 23, 2013

  • 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

  • So What’s the Big Deal About the Higgs Boson, Anyway? A Physics Double Xplainer

    The ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider, one of four detectors to discover a new particle. By Matthew Francis, physics editor After decades of searching and many promising results that didn’t pan out, scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe announced Wednesday they had found a new particle. People got really excited, and for good reason! This discovery is significant no matter how you look at it: If the…

    Authored by on July 6, 2012

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

    …n holds up with an increased number of study participants, the implications could be quite significant for autism research.       Preliminary data from the Darie Lab shows that there are saliva proteins showing a 20X or greaterdifference  between ASD (ovals) versus sibling non-ASD controls (rectangles). If you decide to kick in some funds, your good deed will not go unrewarded. As a thank-you for contributing, the Darie Lab has o…

    Authored by on December 3, 2012

  • Not knowing

    of eleven. When talking to my health care team, they would ask “How many times have you tried to kill yourself?” And I can’t answer. A lot. “Once, twice, five times?” they ask. Over the course of my life, those numbers times 20. For so many times, you’d think someone would have noticed or I’d have succeeded. Believe me, it only made my depression worse when it didn’t work because it was evidence I was too stupid and inept to take my own life pro…

    Authored by on May 24, 2013

  • 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

  • How important for children is imaginary play?

    interactions to reinforce self-regulation. The NESCA post notes that an absence of pretend play is still a red flag for developmental conditions on the autism spectrum, particularly if noted between the ages of 18 months and 2 years. With an anecdatum alert, my oldest son is on the autism spectrum and engaged in pretend play. He just did it ways that in retrospect stand out as unusual for his age–and he still does. A lack of pretend play i…

    Authored by on September 8, 2012

  • What does ‘safe’ mean when we’re talking about chemicals?

    …look at things on a spectrum of lower risk to higher risk and think about decisions as risk evaluations.  At the lower risk end, I would include things that have 1) solid, evidence-based records of few or no harmful effects, 2) relatively few/unusual circumstances in which it produces harmful effects, and 3) statistics favoring my likelihood of emerging unscathed. Here are some things I would consider lower risk  within the parameters of my lif…

    Authored by on June 4, 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

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