Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

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  • 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

  • Anorexia nervosa, neurobiology, and family-based treatment

    Via Wikimedia Commons Photo credit: Sandra Mann By Harriet Brown, DXS contributor Back in 1978, psychoanalyst Hilde Bruch published the first popular book on anorexia nervosa. In The Golden Cage, she described anorexia as a psychological illness caused by environmental factors: sexual abuse, over-controlling parents, fears about growing up, and/or other psychodynamic factors. Bruch believed young patients needed to be separated from…

    Authored by on August 10, 2012

  • Is there a season for births?

    …ian section: “Oh, not the 4th … how about the following Monday?” Or an obstetrician: “I’m taking the 4th off, don’t schedule anything that day.” There’s also a local peak on Feb 14. Perhaps Valentine’s Day sounds like a good birthday to that hypothetical mom on the phone. And a lot of superstitious people might actively avoid the 13th of any month to escape giving their child an ‘unlucky’ number for…

    Authored by on February 18, 2013

  • Thanks, Mom, for not eating me

    …could just eat him up!” No, grandma. Just … no. Happy Mother’s Day! Supporting Literature J. Bartlett,  Filial cannibalism in burying beetles, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Vol. 21, No. 3 (1987), pp. 179-183 [PDF] Hope Klug and Michael B. Bonsall, When to Care for, Abandon, or Eat Your Offspring: The Evolution of Parental Care and Filial Cannibalism, The American Naturalist, Vol. 170, No. 6 (December 2007), pp. 886-901 […

    Authored by on May 13, 2013

  • Pregnancy 101: Peas made me puke, but not just in the morning

    …d picked up on my soaring level of discomfort and without missing a beat, ate all my peas when Diane wasn’t looking. We ended the evening with my stomach contents intact, but barely. The next morning, as I was preparing my 18 month-old daughter’s daycare lunch, I remembered that we were provided with a parting gift of sautéed peas. I took them out of the fridge and proceeded to aliquot them into containers more suitable for a toddler. As I rem…

    Authored by on February 14, 2012

  • I Am Mental Illness: Anorexia–Biting Back

    Battling the uninformed, insurance companies, and your own compulsions [Ed. note: This post is the first in our series, “I Am Mental Illness,” bringing you personal experiences living with a mental illness. It’s likely that no single one of us lives a life untouched by mental illness, our own or that of someone we know. Yet in spite of their high prevalence, these disorders remain stigmatized and undersupported. To learn more about mental illnes…

    Authored by on January 25, 2013

  • Dinosaur Aunts, Bacterial Stowaways, & Insect Milk

    …mazing because they have a uterus and provide MILK internally through the uterus to larva! Male and female bat flies have endosymbiotic bacteria living in bacteriocytes along the sides of their abdominal segments (revealed by 16S rRNA). Additionally, females host bacteria inside the milk gland tubules, “indicating the presence of endosymbiont cells in milk gland secretion”.  The authors are not yet certain of the specific nutritional role that th…

    Authored by on July 17, 2012

  • 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

  • About that pacifier study…

    …e findings, so jumping to conclusions about what it “means” or what pacifier “cleaning” methods do or don’t “cause” is definitely premature. First the study: The researchers recruited 184 women within a few days of giving birth to participate in the study if they gave birth at full term and their children did not receive neonatal intensive care. Most of the babies (80%) had at least one parent with allerg…

    Authored by on May 8, 2013

  • 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

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