Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

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  • As Seen on TV! Restoring Hair with LASERS!!!!!!

    The author’s rapidly-expanding forehead. Anyone who watches TV, reads magazines, or flips through catalogs has seen some interesting products. Maybe they seem plausible to you, maybe they don’t. However, a little investigation shows they are based less on science and well…actually working, and more on wishful thinking. At worst they’re actual con-jobs, designed to separate you from your money as efficiently as p…

    Authored by on September 28, 2012

  • Miscarriage: When a beginning is not a beginning

    …ntaneous abortion. Except that some didn’t like the term spontaneous abortion and used intrauterine mortality (Wood, 1994). Or fetal loss. Fetal loss is probably the most common. There is also pregnancy loss (Holman and Wood, 2001). You can use that term, too. Oh, or a-conceptions (a for abortion), compared to l-conceptions (l for live birth) (Wood, 1994). A large number of these fetal losses are before or close to the time of implantation. For m…

    Authored by on September 5, 2012

  • Friday Roundup: Obese babies, cancer vaccine, human hair fonts, and the grandeur of a dead tree

    It’s Friday! Links to information for you to share with family, friends, children, and total strangers: Babies on obesity path? Well, it’s questionable. Study says that babies who hit two growth markers before age 2 have increased risk of obesity. But only 12% of the 45,000 infants in the study who did hit the mark were obese by age 5. Two of my children have always been off the charts for growth. They are both quite slender. Resea…

    Authored by on November 11, 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

  • From spiders to breast cancer: Leslie Brunetta talks candidly about her cancer diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up

    …very giving. I live in Cambridge, MA, where I could actually make choices about where I wanted to be treated at each phase and know I’d get excellent, humane care and where none of the facilities I went to was more than about 20 minutes away. Some things that women might have some control over and that their families might help nudge them toward: Find doctors you trust. Ask a lot of questions and make sure you understand the answers. But do…

    Authored by on January 31, 2012

  • Double Xpressions: Jennifer Canale, the self-proclaimed "Flamboyant Scientist"

    …Girl Scouts, I was sent to dance school (but, much to my amazement, I enjoyed that until I was 17).  My parents started giving in around 3rdgrade, and I got the panda bear-shaped calculator I wanted, as well as the robot toy 2XL featuring the 8-track tape. My mom would beg me to watch Little House On the Prairie, but I preferred Star Trek (the original Kirk version), Lost in Space (Danger Will Robinson), and Land of the Lost. Of course this was…

    Authored by on November 30, 2012

  • Hormonal birth control explainer: a matter of health

    …ich exists to prepare an egg for fertilization and to make the uterine lining ready to receive a fertilized egg, should it arrive.  Fig. 1. Female reproductive anatomy. Credit: Jeanne Garbarino. In the theoretical 28-day cycle, fertilization (fusion of sperm and egg), if it occurs, will happen about 14 days in, timed with ovulation , or release of the egg from the ovary into the Fallopian tube or oviduct (see video–watch fo…

    Authored by on March 5, 2012

  • I Am Mental Illness: Anorexia–Biting Back

    …nd I was fainting several times a day. A normal person would have begun to eat long before. But for someone with anorexia nervosa, the concept of “just eat” was far from simple. I was diagnosed with anorexia shortly before my 21st birthday, although I had begun restricting my food and exercising more several years before. In many ways, my story sounds like your stereotypical eating disorder saga: Young White Girl Feels Fat, Loses Weight, Can’t St…

    Authored by on January 25, 2013

  • What do you know about Charles Darwin?

    …ilitating health problems in later life. Today is Darwin Day, so designated because Charles Darwin (and Abraham Lincoln,while we’re at it) was born on February 12. Darwin’s year of birth was 1809, so he’d be 204 today were humans capable of a tortoise-like lifespan. I often wonder what Darwin would make of today’s persistent caricatures of him as upending science or religion or both with his ideas. I’m not a Darwin…

    Authored by on February 12, 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

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