Search Results for: label/hygiene hypothesis

• Leaky gut and wonky immune response might be double whammy leading to inflammatory bowel disease (in mice)

  A case of ulcerative colitis, a form of inflammatory bowel disease.Photo via Wikimedia Commons. Credit: Samir. A two-hit punch in the gut might explain why some people find themselves alone among their closest relatives in having inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The double gut punches come in the form of a compromised intestinal wall coupled with a poorly behaved immune system, say Emory researchers, whose work using mice was publishe…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on September 13, 2012

• About that pacifier study…

  …moms gave birth vaginally. There was still a lower risk of eczema among the pacifier-sucking parents’ kids, but there also was a lower risk of eczema among those born vaginally, regardless of pacifier cleaning methods: 20% of the kids born vaginally whose parents cleaned pacifiers with their mouths had eczema 31% of the kids who were born vaginally or had mouth-cleaned pacifiers had eczema 54% of the kids born by C section whose parents ne…

  Authored by Tara Haelle on May 8, 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 Emily Willingham 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 DXS Contributor on March 27, 2013

• #DispatchesDNLee: Handling lady-business in the field

  An African-American woman and scientist in Tanzania by Danielle Lee, Ph.D. Actual field diary entry,  Tuesday, August 7, 2012,  ~8:30 am I cried this morning. In the shower. I was trying (poorly) to suppress screams of pain as I let the water run on my leg. I knew it was going to be bad when I saw blood on my pants as I pulled my field cover pants off.  I had been running into the same bush on line 3 between traps C and D every day. It has scrap…

  Authored by DXS Contributor on February 21, 2013

• Literal XX Xplainer: How we can live with two X chromosomes

  …ression of one X chromosome in each cell makes each woman a lovely mosaic of genetic expression (although not true genetic mosaicism), varying from cell to cell in whether we use genes from X chromosome 1 or from X chromosome 2. Because these gene forms can differ between the two X chromosomes, we are simply less uniform in what our X chromosome genes do than are men. An exception is men who are XXY, who also shut down one of those X chromosomes…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on June 27, 2012

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

  …ing. What is morning sickness? Tick-tock. Credit: Jeanne Garbarino It has long been known that nausea and vomiting are common symptoms of pregnancy. In fact, documentation of this phenomenon goes as far back as 2000 BC. However, the term “morning sickness” is a complete misnomer. For one, pregnancy-related nausea and vomiting is not just a morning thing. It can happen at any time of day. Second, the term “sickness” suggests a state…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on February 14, 2012

• Childbirth and C-sections in pre-modern times

  …y down the pelvic canal, with its skull bones eventually sliding around and overlapping to get through the pelvis.  Culturally, we have another way to deliver these large babies: the so-called caesarean section . Up until the 20th century, childbirth was dangerous.  Even today, in some less developed countries, roughly 1 maternal death occurs for every 100 live births, most of those related to obstructed labor or hemorrhage ( WHO Fact Sheet 2010…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on July 2, 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 DXS Contributor on May 17, 2013

• 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 Jeffrey Perkel on May 6, 2013