Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/fecal transplants

  • Do fecal bacteria from face mites cause rosacea?

    …DF], which is drawn to your sebaceous (oil) glands, also on your face. Because they have “piercing-sucking mouth parts,” pedipalps, and eight legs in four pairs, according to one lovingly detailed description in a 1976 paper, they are arachnids, just like spiders. Tiny arachnids that live on your face, taking moonlit strolls when it’s dark and diving for cover in light. They live there, just as you live in a house, except your f…

    Authored by on September 6, 2012

  • 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

  • A tour of digestion from nose to um…tail

    Mary Roach’s Gulp is a trip through the gooier side of human anatomy By Matthew R. Francis Mary Roach is one of the more fearless writers out there. Not in the physical sense — she doesn’t put herself into particularly dangerous situations, like certain reporters or travel writers — but intellectually. I don’t know if she’s incapable of embarrassment, but certainly she’s able to submerge that as she asks companies…

    Authored by on May 7, 2013

  • Friday Roundup: Jane Austen’s arsenic poisoning, breastfeeding and bones, dog bites that trigger pregnancy, and a cranky crab

    Jane Austen. Engraving via Wikimedia Commons, in the U.S. public domain. Curious about how climate has changed over the long term–the very, very long term? This video from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration puts it all into perspective: Jane Austen poisoned by arsenic ?  A mystery author claims that all signs point to arsenic poisoning as the cause of Jane Austen’s death. The rationales that treatments w…

    Authored by on November 18, 2011

  • 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 helpful are dense-breast right-to-know laws?

    …sk factor for breast cancer; §   mammography sees cancer less well in dense breasts than in normal breasts; and §   women may benefit from additional breast cancer screening. The California law goes into effect on April 1, 2013. It follows four states (Connecticut, Texas, Virginia, and New York) with similar statutes. All have enjoyed solid bipartisan support. Rarely do naysayers or skeptics speak up. Young women who are leading the charge oft…

    Authored by on October 1, 2012

  • What causes recurrent UTIs?

    …h. They “are considered to be the most common bacterial infection,” according to one 2002 report, which notes that almost one third of women will have had a UTI requiring antibiotic treatment by the time they turn 24. About half of women will have at least one UTI in a lifetime. That sucks, but at least many of these infections do resolve with antibiotics. For some unfortunates, though, UTIs come back again and again, a condition call…

    Authored by on May 22, 2013

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

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