Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/plants

  • 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

  • Cottoning on to genome duplications

    Cotton, courtesy of the USDA. What do electrons have to do with our ability to spin this into yarn? Image via Wikimedia Commons.   by Chris Gunter, Science Education Editor, DXS   Plants are hard. Not in the physical way, but in the genomics way: It’s been estimated that 75% of domesticated plant genomes are polyploid, meaning they have up to 12 sets of each chromosome in every cell. This makes genome sequencing crazily diffi…

    Authored by on December 19, 2012

  • Walnuts, willful murder, & World Book Night

    …it’s the dose that makes the poison. It can take a black walnut tree 25 years to introduce enough juglone into the surrounding soil to cause “walnut wilt” or death in sensitive plants –  but less than 10 years can do the trick in some cases. This wide window of lethality results from many factors, such as rate of tree growth, soil and drainage conditions, and diversity of soil microorganisms. Plants sensitive to juglone i…

    Authored by on April 24, 2013

  • Why blueberries won’t turn you blue and other blueberry facts

    …ory. While eating more healthy foods is always a good idea, no food has curative effects all on its own. Other aspects of blueberry nutrition includes it as a source of sugar. One cup (148 g) of blueberries contains about 15 g of sugar and 4 g of fiber, a single gram of protein, and half a gram of fat. If you are counting carbs, this cup has 21 g of them. That one cup of blueberries averages about 85 calories, which is approximately the same…

    Authored by on September 3, 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

  • That deadly, imported, meningitis-toting snail? Isn’t.

    …they were too giant?) and instead began consuming, with tremendous efficiency, the local Hawaiian snails. Not surprisingly, it’s other name is “the cannibal snail.” The upshot was the extinction of more than 100 species of local snails and the continued persistence to this day of invasive rosy wolf snails in Hawaii. Note to humans: These kinds of efforts are always a disaster. No. Introducing. Species. [Image credit: Rosy wolf s…

    Authored by on May 9, 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

  • Drill, baby, drill — microbial-style

    …ry pieces to make gasoline. But they weren’t producing them at the same levels. In other words, the factory had more workers at one part of the assembly line than at others. As a result, productivity was relatively low (about 10 mg isobutanol per liter of culture). To boost that output, the researchers dialed up expression levels of several proteins to get them all in sync. They also shut down a handful of other chemical assembly lines, too, “car…

    Authored by on September 10, 2012

  • Friday Roundup: Land-walking octopus, he’s having a baby, defining veggies, & lots for the ladies

    …surrounding it for extra cushioning. But the human brain was never meant to endure years of the Newtonian physical pounding that comes with playing football. Now, researchers are beginning a brain study to test the brains of 100 former National Football League players to see what harm has been done and how to identify it early. Watch the video below. Imagine the brains inside those skulls. Recall that for every action, there is an equal and oppo…

    Authored by on November 25, 2011

  • 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

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