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

  • This is good, and I am happy.

    …ality-check voice in my head: “What does it matter? They’re just one of billions. Just blips in the time course of humanity. They are nothing. You are nothing. We are all just nothing, living only a few seconds or 100 years for no rhyme or reason, here one minute and gone the next. What does it matter? We all end up nothing in the end.” It’s a long-winded voice and can go on like that for hours. It’s hard to tell fro…

    Authored by on May 10, 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

  • Motherhood Defined: It is in the heart of the beholder

    “Motherhood”: Sculpture at the Catacumba Park, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Motherhood.  It can mean many things, and our own definition of it is largely defined by our individual experiences.  To one person, motherhood might simply mean the act of raising children; to another, motherhood might be what defines them.   It is not uncommon to generalize the concept of “motherhood” and lump everyone who upholds a singl…

    Authored by on May 11, 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

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

    …cancers are diagnosed as IDCs. Those cancers start with the cells lining the milk ducts. The ones in the left breast were invasive lobular carcinomas (ILCs), which start in the lobules at the end of the milk ducts. Only about 10% of breast cancers are ILCs. Oncologists hate lobular cancer. Unlike ductal cancers, which form as clumps of cells, lobular cancers form as single-file ribbons of cells. The tissue around ductal cancer cells reacts to t…

    Authored by on January 31, 2012

  • 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 on May 6, 2013

  • Is the bar high enough for screening breast ultrasounds for breast cancer?

    …nt 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 used with mammography. Approval of a device of this nat…

    Authored by on September 21, 2012

  • Autism and the DSM-5

    …questions in the context of these criteria. I’ve expanded on a couple of these reports at length elsewhere, as have others with an interest in the subject. The short version is that studies overall indicate that at the least, 10% of people who would currently have an autism diagnosis under the DSM-IV-TR criteria would lose that diagnosis under the DSM-5, and some studies go as high as 55% in their estimates. Even more troubling? The committee’s s…

    Authored by on April 23, 2013

  • Depressing genes

    …ch experience — yet it was obvious he didn’t have the knack for it. This student’s dogged pursuit of a mental health career made me wonder what kind of emotional turmoil he experienced which would make him think, at age 19, that psychiatry was the only vocation worth working towards. Then there were the two graduate students who both worked incredibly hard and were both prone to obsess about their experiments. Each burned off stress in quit…

    Authored by on May 17, 2013

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