Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/logic

  • A Decision Based on Logic – Why I Choose to Vaccinate

    Source By Anna K. Eaton, PhD This post is a response to Alice Callahan’s post on vaccines (republished here).  Please note: the author is not advocating distrust towards doctors, scientists and the medical community.  Rather she advocates that clear rationale and logic should be the basis for making important decisions. Anna K. Eaton is a former research scientist who currently teaches part-time at a local community college.  Sh…

    Authored by on August 27, 2012

  • 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

  • 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

  • Pregnancy 101: On the cervical mucus plug and why I’ve never been more happy to hold something so disgusting in my hand

    …and elastic mucus, known as the cervical mucus plug. In non-scientific terms, the mucus plug is like the cork that keeps all of the bubbly baby goodness safe from harmful bacteria. It is quite large, often weighing in around 10 g (0.35 oz) and consists mostly of water (>90%) that contains several hundred types of proteins. These proteins do many jobs, including immunological gatekeepers, structural maintenance, regulation of fluid balance, and e…

    Authored by on December 29, 2011

  • Bipolar brings anxieties beyond mood shifts

    Bipolar isn’t just moods in conflict–self love and hate battle, too. by Helen Chappell [This essay is another entry in our series "I Am Mental Illness." Trigger warning: discussed suicidal ideation and attempts.] The last time I saw my midwife, she offered me a prescription for Vicodin to help me cope with my severe headaches.  When you’re pregnant, it’s pretty much Tylenol or narcotics or nothing at all for pain.  I turned her down,…

    Authored by on March 1, 2013

  • Plan B now available to younger teens

    The age group that needs it most. by Emily Willingham      In December of 2011, Kathleen Sebelius, the Obama Administration’s Health and Human Services secretary, shocked the reproductive health community by blocking a bid to make Plan B, or “morning after” contraception, available over the counter (OTC) to teens under age 17. The much-anticipated OTC availability of this intervention to this age group had already received FDA…

    Authored by on April 5, 2013

  • Double Xpression: Debbie Berebichez, PhD Physicist

    …ir life stories.  I didn’t have any family members, or anyone else for that matter, that had pursued a career in science, so I didn’t have a mentor or a role model.  I felt an extreme kinship with Tycho Brahe, who in the late 1500’s was locked in a tower, doing all of these calculations for years, hated by everyone in the town.  Go figure! I felt some kinship with these scientists.   But I didn’t have the courage nor the means to switch majors. …

    Authored by on June 2, 2012

  • 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

  • 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

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