Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/kate clancy

  • 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

  • On this Father’s Day, let’s remember the allofathers, too

    …amily time those of us in the United States have come to expect on weekends, particularly when we work salaried weekday jobs that ostensibly promise weekends off. That means that on top of the anxiety associated with stacking 20 or 30 extra hours onto a 40-hour work week to meet a tough deadline, my husband and my children’s father also feels angst about this inability to be a part of our family time. These are first-world problems, I reali…

    Authored by on June 16, 2012

  • Blog of the Week: Context and Variation

    This week’s Blog of the Week is Context and Variation, part of the Scientific American blog network. The blog author, Kate Clancy, is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, where she studies evolutionary medicine of women’s reproductive physiology, otherwise known as ladybusiness. Clancy writes about how human behavior evolved and is evolving and is also a vocal but thoughtful advocate for women in the…

    Authored by on November 7, 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

  • Why don’t more girls get the HPV vaccine??

    like most cancers, cervical cancer is caused by a sexually transmitted virus, Human Papillomavirus, also known as HPV. The virus can cause abnormal cell growth in the cervix, which can turn cancerous. The vaccine, approved in 2006, works against many common strains of HPV. The vaccine is recommended for girls ages 11-12, and also provided to women up through their early twenties.  The goal is to protect girls long before they are ever sexually ac…

    Authored by on March 24, 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

  • Friday Roundup: 2011 top science lists, radium laced condoms, and the clitoris

    A Double X Science grandma showed us this picture. We thought it was the most ridiculously cute thing we’d seen all year. As 2011 draws to a close, media outlets and science bloggers have busily collated their top-10 (or 12 or 20) lists of science-related cool/interesting/freaky/fantastic stuff this year. Here’s a selection that should keep you busy for about the first half of 2012: Smithsonian’s list , including Fran…

    Authored by on December 30, 2011

  • 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

  • Giving girls…and science…their due

    …ere are still gaps. One of those gaps exists in the sciences — itself an area that we do not value nearly enough. While I did go to a co-ed school, studied science, and worked in a biogeochemistry lab, I’m in the minority. In 2009–2010, women represented less than a quarter of all students in secondary or post-secondary education studying STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) topics nationally. This disparity has led to great debate o…

    Authored by on February 27, 2013

  • The sperm don’t care how they got there, Rep. Akin

    so if a rape resulted in pregnancy, the woman must somehow have been having a good time. Ergo, ’twas not a rape. This Guardian piece expands on that history but doesn’t get into why such a concept lingers into the 21st century. A lot of that lingering has to do with a strong desire on the part of some in US political circles to make a rape-related pregnancy the woman’s fault so that she must suffer the consequences. Those conseq…

    Authored by on August 20, 2012

Page 1 of 212