Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/magnetic susceptibility

  • As Seen on TV! Age Your Wine in 10 Seconds!!!!

    …ould be aged! All wines actually go bad over time, including many of the usual types you may see in the store. That time may be pretty long, but you don’t want to just buy any bottle, stick it in your basement, and wait 20 years to drink it – most of them won’t taste good. According to my source, the days are gone where you might buy bottles of wine and put them in a cellar for your children. (Who has a wine cellar now anyway? I live…

    Authored by on May 14, 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 on May 17, 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 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 on March 27, 2013

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

    …n controversial. What’s new is the “Are You Dense?” patient 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…

    Authored by on September 21, 2012

  • How large is a proton?

    …of various types, mostly hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, with plenty of others to bulk things out. Let’s think about some numbers for size, then: unless you’re a kid or a giant, your height is probably between 1 and 2 meters. One of my fingernails is about 1 centimeter across (1/100 of a meter). A red blood cell is a little less than 10 micrometers—10 millionths of a meter—across. A typical atom is a few hundred picometers (100 trillion…

    Authored by on February 13, 2013

  • For Dad: A guide on strokes, including a glossary of terms

    s though ultrasound, as well as in the heart, using both an electrocardiogram(EKG) and an echocardiogram(ultrasound of the heart).  The patient might also be asked to wear a Holter Monitor, which is a device worn for at least 24 hours and can detect potential heart abnormalities that may not be obvious from short-term observations, like those obtained via an EKG.  If a stroke is due to a hemorrhagic event, an angiogramwould be performed to try an…

    Authored by on January 26, 2012

  • Biology Xplainer: Evolution and how it happens

    …he population will change over time. It will be adapted to its environment. It will evolve. Other mechanisms of evolution A pigeon depicted in Charles Darwin’sVariation of Animals and PlantsUnder Domestication, 1868. U.S.public domain image, via Wikimedia. When Darwin presented his idea of natural selection, he knew he had an audience to win over. He pointed out that people select features of organisms all the time and breed the…

    Authored by on January 29, 2012

  • 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 on September 13, 2012

  • Circumcision shuffles the penis ecosystem

    groups — that is, in both men who were circumcised and men who were not (or at least, not yet). At the start of the trial, the authors measured 150,000 bacteria (16S ribosomal RNA copies) per swab in the control arm and 200,000 bacteria in the interventional arm. A year later, they found 57,000 copies on the uncircumcised men, compared to 38,000 on the circumcised ones. That difference, they say, is significant (albeit with a p value of 0.0…

    Authored by on April 16, 2013

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