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

  • 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

  • Happy belated birthday, Mary Anning!

    Mary Anning and a small, non-fossilized dog. (Source) [Today, we’re featuring a post by Mike Rendell, author and keeper of Georgian Gentleman, a blog chronicling aspects of 18th century life. Mike spent 30 years as a lawyer–poor fellow–before he retired to time travel in his mind back to the 18th century, where he has set up mental shop permanently. By what he calls a “curious stroke of luck,” he has all of the 18th century papers o…

    Authored by on May 25, 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Mirror Mirror On the Wall, Mirrors Don’t Switch Hands at All

    …escope out of a single flawless piece of glass: you can make a huge metal dish, or make one big mirror out of a bunch of smaller mirrors in a tile pattern. The Keck telescopes in Hawaii are about 30 feet in diameter (actually 10 meters, to be precise): the width of a large classroom or a substantial house! These mirrors focus light onto a detector, creating the wonderful and often beautiful images astronomers use in their work. The huge size of t…

    Authored by on December 12, 2011

  • Geektastic gift-giving ideas from Double X Science!

    …es found on the shelves of cookie-cutter toy stores, this highly personalized jigsaw will tickle the fancy of puzzle-lovers anywhere.  I’m probably going to get this for my mom.  NOTE: You need to order this by 12/13 if you want it by 12/25. Hands-on Mushroom Garden, Back to the Roots, $19.95 Bring out the ‘fun guy’ in all of us with this great grow-your-own mushroom kit.  Seriously, this is one of the coole…

    Authored by on December 6, 2011

  • From alchemist to chemist: What kind of chemistry is that?

    Figure 1: The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus What does the word chemistry  mean to you? For many, it was a class in high school or college to get through. In these introductory courses, called general chemistry, one gets a mix of all the flavors of chemistry – but the flavors are very different. To those who hear the calling of chemistry, it isn’t just any chemistry that will do. Some courses are more interesting to them than othe…

    Authored by on December 15, 2011

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