Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/nature-deficit disorder

  • Are children today really suffering nature deficit disorder (TM)?

    …. While they certainly didn’t have television to keep them indoors, they also didn’t have child labor laws. The result was that children who once might have been at work at age 4 in a field were now at work at age 3 or 4 in a factory, putting in 12 or so hours a day before stepping out into the coal-smoked, animal-dung-scented air of the city.  Child labor wasn’t something confined to Industrial Revolution Britain, and it conti…

    Authored by on April 30, 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

  • 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

  • UneXXpected Science: Does ADHD have benefits in certain environments?

    …nary terms. Modern society is just that—modern. This way of life has only been around for, at most, a few thousand years, which can be a blink of an eye for processes of natural selection. Dial back time about 10,000 years or 20,000 years, and you’ll be hard pressed to find any humans living in an environment anything remotely like a cubicle. Natural selection results from the interaction of genes and environment, and the “selection̶…

    Authored by on April 16, 2012

  • 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

  • I Am Mental Illness: Anorexia–Biting Back

    …rexia. Fit back into those old jeans.” Tee hee. There’s no such thing as a little bit of anorexia. And no pair of jeans, no matter how hallowed, are worth having the crumbling bones of a 70-year-old while you’re still in your 30s. Or spending your 21st birthday in a locked psych ward because you weigh what you did when you were eight. I couldn’t even do a shot of Diet Coke. It’s not worth not eating (and digesting) your own birthday cake for a de…

    Authored by on January 25, 2013

  • 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

  • Friday roundup: Nature is beautiful, weird, terrifying, & gross, and vaccines are a social responsibility

    d to head up the Pentagon’s 100-year Starship project . Nature is beautiful. Nature is weird. Nature is terrifying. National Geographic has collected together its best “Photo of the Day” selections from 2012, and this one has stayed with me since I saw it earlier this year. Astonishing.  Otters chase a butterfly . You may know that a group of crows is called a “murder.” But did you know that a group of otters…

    Authored by on January 14, 2012

  • Avoidant personality disorder

    …mostly non-fiction), writes poetry, and plays with her cats.] You can find more information about avoidant personality disorder here and here. [Image credit: Danielle Blue, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 License.]…

    Authored by on March 29, 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

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