Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/open laboratory

  • 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

  • Crystallographers of merit

    …from the light’s diffraction. The women in this post used this technique to look at large molecules, many of which were biologically relevant. Order of Merit medal of Dorothy Hodgkin, displayed in the Royal Society, London, 20 April 2004. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was a Chemistry Nobel Laureate.  (1910 – 1994) While her father was in Cairo, Egypt on an archaeological dig for the British government, Dorothy Crowfoot was born. Accompanying h…

    Authored by on March 7, 2013

  • What’s on your wishlist?

    …board for that iPad or iPhone? Look no further than the Cube Laser Digital Keyboard ($180) . What about other great gadgets? The DOTKLOK (from $150) is an open-source and hackable digital clock. It also consumes 2W for power! Runners and cyclists who love their gadgets may like the Garmin Forerunner 610 GPS watch ($320). Track your workouts, train like a pro, and analyze all the data this watch feeds to you for the height of fitnes…

    Authored by on November 23, 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

  • 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

  • Crowdfunding on the Brain: Finding Biomarkers for Early Autism Diagnosis

    …n holds up with an increased number of study participants, the implications could be quite significant for autism research.       Preliminary data from the Darie Lab shows that there are saliva proteins showing a 20X or greaterdifference  between ASD (ovals) versus sibling non-ASD controls (rectangles). If you decide to kick in some funds, your good deed will not go unrewarded. As a thank-you for contributing, the Darie Lab has o…

    Authored by on December 3, 2012

  • Shmeat and Potatoes: The dinner of the future?

    …t on this petri dish to kitchen dish phenomenon. The shmeaty deets When it comes to producing shmeat, scientists are taking advantage the extensive cell culture technologies that have been developed over the course of the 20th century (for a brief history of these developments, check this out).  Because of what we have learned, we can easily determine the conditions under which cells grow best, and swiftly turn a few cells into a few million…

    Authored by on July 20, 2012

  • The Women in ‘Modern Men of Science’

    cientists highlighted in 1966 among the “modern men,” seven were women. By then, 11 women had earned the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy  (and even with an award named after her, she isn’t in the collection), 23 women had achieved the Garvan Medal in Chemistry, and 10 had won a Nobel Prize (one of them twice – she also doesn’t appear in this collection.) Some of these awards overlap. However, by 1966, there were clearly mor…

    Authored by on April 11, 2013

  • Why Are Snowflakes Always Six-Sided?

    …y water molecules are arranged like they are. Water seems like a simple enough molecule. It consists of one oxygen atom with two hydrogen atoms bonded to it. The hydrogen atoms bond to the oxygen atom at a distance of exactly 104.5 degrees from each other (1). Why that particular angle? An oxygen atom has a total of eight electrons. Two of them take up all the available spots in the shell closest to the atom’s nucleus. The remaining six elec…

    Authored by on February 3, 2012

  • A peek inside the US Naval Observatory – keepers of time and celestial motion

    …one of products, or helping to get that upgrade ready by testing it. Q. The USNO in Washington, DC has telescopes. What kind of telescopes do you have and what are they used for? A. The biggest telescope we have in DC is the 26-inch refractor. It is the telescope that Asaph Hall used in 1877 at our old Foggy Bottom location to discover the moons of Mars. It is still used today (despite DC’s light pollution!) to study double stars and the…

    Authored by on February 9, 2012

Page 1 of 512345