Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/mating behavior

  • Dominants, alphas, and queens: Happy Mother’s Day!

    …mammoths. Here are a few examples: The Queen, surrounded by her supportive workers. Honey bees: Bee colonies are giant matriarchal societies ruled by a single queen—quite literally the “queen mum.” Her offspring (as many as 25,000 at a time) make up the entire clan of female workers and male drones. The queen spends her life tended to by her worker daughters. These workers have underdeveloped reproductive systems, so the queen is the only femal…

    Authored by on May 13, 2013

  • Autism and the DSM-5

    …ial social aspect of this change, and the one thing that might, when it comes to autism, elevate the DSM-5 above the level of doorstop. [Image credit: Dave Bullock, UK, via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 generic license.]…

    Authored by on April 23, 2013

  • Facebook influences voting behavior, you, your friends

    Maybe, maybe not. By Emily Willingham This one will have you wondering if you have inadvertently participated in a science experiment by way of Facebook. Actually, you probably did. In 2010, a team of researchers led by UC San Diego political science professor James Fowler managed to get more than 60 million people to see a “get out the vote” message at the top of their Facebook news feed. The date, in case you want to rev…

    Authored by on September 12, 2012

  • Thanks, Mom, for not eating me

    …he’s so cute, I could just eat him up!” No, grandma. Just … no. Happy Mother’s Day! Supporting Literature J. Bartlett,  Filial cannibalism in burying beetles, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Vol. 21, No. 3 (1987), pp. 179-183 [PDF] Hope Klug and Michael B. Bonsall, When to Care for, Abandon, or Eat Your Offspring: The Evolution of Parental Care and Filial Cannibalism, The American Naturalist, Vol. 170, No. 6 (Decembe…

    Authored by on May 13, 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

  • Motherhood, war, and attachment: what does it all mean?

    is son love football, that they spoke with their pediatrician about it, and that their son will continue with football at least into middle school. There’s a bit of wary nodding, and then, back to the Pinewood Derby. Scene 2: Two mothers meet on a playground. After a little conversation about their toddlers, one mother mentions that she still breastfeeds and practices “attachment parenting,” which is why she has a sling sitting next to her. Th…

    Authored by on May 16, 2012

  • Mental illness, autism, and mass murder, and why Joe Scarborough needs to stop talking

    …vulnerable developmental periods like adolescence and early adulthood. Not only does autism not fit here simply by virtue of its lifelong presence, but also, it’s not something that just kinda shows up when a man turns 24 years old.  The man who destroyed so many lives showed several signs of extreme stress prior to his murderous rampage. Were these stressors the trigger for him? That I cannot say. But I can say that stress does not bring…

    Authored by on July 23, 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

  • McConnell and mental illness

    …y unbalanced” because she was hospitalized “for 42 days” in the 1990s for a “mental breakdown” and because she’s talked about having depression. Had Judd been hospitalized for 42 days 15 or 20 years ago for a brain tumor or a heart condition, no one would go near those parts of her history as a way to try to smear her. But mental illness–again–is an open target, a free-for-all for anyone who wants t…

    Authored by on April 12, 2013

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