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Search Results for: label/emergent properties

  • Turkey, spice, everything nice: What are those Thanksgiving smells made of?

    Traditional Thanksgiving food. Just looking may evoke smell memories. Via Wikimedia Commons. Spices, turkey, stuffing, those casseroles you never make at any other time of the year. What is it about the smells at Thanksgiving that are so evocative that if you encounter them any other time of the year, your mind flies back again to memories of family, friends, and a turkey or Tofurkey? Well, as Brainpicker’s Maria Popova highlight…

    Authored by on November 24, 2011

  • 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

  • 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

  • From alchemist to chemist: What kind of chemistry is that?

    nd, inorganic chemistry involves all the elements present in the periodic table. Inorganic chemistry delves into theories surrounding the bonding of metals to molecules and the shapes of molecules themselves. Figure 2: Components of Urine While the process of collecting phosphorus from urine requires organic and inorganic chemical reactions, the process of making the products in urine is biochemistry. Note in figure 2 that the primar…

    Authored by on December 15, 2011

  • 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

  • Depressing genes

    Can depression be a matter of genetic fate? by Siobhan Mitchell          [This post is the latest installment in our I Am Mental Illness series.] What if you could know if you were fated to be depressed? With the rise of personal genotyping services such as 23andme, almost can find out what their psychiatric ‘fate’ will be, but what do you do with this information once you have it? When I first considered testing myself for depressio…

    Authored by on May 17, 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

  • Is the bar high enough for screening breast ultrasounds for breast cancer?

    …n controversial. What’s new is the “Are You Dense?” patient 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…

    Authored by on September 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

  • Dating research update

    …erences cited within) romantic love at least once in our lives, and can attest to multiple stages with different feelings involved. In order to measure two distinct but not mutually exclusive states, the authors propose a new 20-item Infatuation and Attachment Scales questionnaire. Dutch and Welsh study participants were asked to rate their levels of agreement on a 7-point Likert scale to questions serving as proxies for each state. For example,…

    Authored by on January 31, 2013

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