Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/mucus in stool

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

    Like the eye of Sauron drawn to the One Ring, one cannot resist looking at the mucus plug. June 3rd, 2007 fell on a Sunday. I awoke that morning feeling disappointed that I was still pregnant. My due date had come and gone and, honestly, I was sick of being a human incubator. I had enough of the heartburn, involuntary peeing, and the overall beached-whale feeling. The baby in utero was resting comfortably on my sciatic nerve, and I cou…

    Authored by on December 29, 2011

  • How chili powder can kill

    pronounced dead about 1 h after the inhalation of the pepper.  [Homicidal asphyxia by pepper aspiration by S.D. Cohle] Like black pepper, hot peppers and their products have been used as punishments. Three children, aged 3, 5, and 7, were repeatedly disciplined over a period of months in the following manner. A split jalapeno pepper was placed in the child’s mouth and a timer set for 15-20 minutes. If the child spit the pepper out, swallowed…

    Authored by on January 21, 2013

  • Biology Explainer: The big 4 building blocks of life–carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and nucleic acids

    …ll selection of different materials: bricks, mortar, iron, glass, and wood. Arranged in different ways, these few materials can yield a huge variety of structures. We encountered functional groups and the SPHONC in Chapter 3. These components form the four categories of molecules of life. These Big Four biological molecules are carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids. They can have many roles, from giving an organism structure to be…

    Authored by on June 8, 2012

  • Colon Cancer Awareness Month: Get your ass screened. We mean it.

    …se risks can be known and for anyone to have appropriate screening either at the recommended age or in the presence of symptoms. Speaking of family, there is my own. My having been diagnosed with a precancerous growth at age 38 means that my first-degree relatives–siblings, parents, children–should have screening at least by that age and preferably years before. There is some understandable reluctance to have a colonoscopy. Outside o…

    Authored by on March 7, 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

  • What causes recurrent UTIs?

    …cyte esterase … and were instructed to record all episodes of sexual intercourse, urinary symptoms (dysuria, frequency, or urgency), and the leukocyte esterase reading (0–3+) in a daily diary. Subjects were followed for 3 months and were asked to return to the clinic monthly and whenever they felt that they had a rUTI.  The point of this study was to get a handle on the events that precede rUTI, and the authors concluded: “Among wome…

    Authored by on May 22, 2013

  • Unicorns and Brainbows

    orite, shown below: A cerebellar flocculus, a lobe in the cerebellum, from the original Brainbow paper (Source) Since its original description, researchers have used the Brainbow concept extensively — it has been cited 361 times, according to the Web of Science – and extended it into zebrafish and fruit flies, both species that researchers frequently use in experiments to trace gene expression and how animals develop. But though Lich…

    Authored by on May 6, 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

  • 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

  • Depressing genes

    ter all, that’s one of the reasons why scientists are trying to identify risk genes: to design better treatments for those disorders. [Image credit: DNA, public domain image from US govt. Image of Prozac, credit Tom Varco, CC 3.0 license.] [Siobhan Mitchell obtained a Neurobiology Ph.D. at the State University New York at Albany (SUNY Albany), followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at University of Washington, Seattle. She currently works at the…

    Authored by on May 17, 2013

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