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

  • Blog of the Week: Bug Girl’s Blog

    …d embrace the enormous diversity that is the world of “bugs,” or, more specifically, arthropods. The number of species of bugs may well account for the vast majority of all known animals species and easily exceeds 1 million. With 1 million+ species from which to choose, how can anyone “hate bugs”? So, it is with great delight that we highlight a blog today that’s about a woman and her love of bugs. The appropriately…

    Authored by on November 28, 2011

  • 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

  • So What’s the Big Deal About the Higgs Boson, Anyway? A Physics Double Xplainer

    The ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider, one of four detectors to discover a new particle. By Matthew Francis, physics editor After decades of searching and many promising results that didn’t pan out, scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe announced Wednesday they had found a new particle. People got really excited, and for good reason! This discovery is significant no matter how you look at it: If the…

    Authored by on July 6, 2012

  • Avoidant personality disorder

    “I have some kind of allergy to other people.” by Emma Atkinson The first time I tried to tell a therapist about my life, I was twelve years old. I told him that I couldn’t talk to people. He laughed and said, “I know. Making small talk can be hard. Everyone feels that way.” He had missed the point so spectacularly that I wanted to cry. I didn’t try to correct him, though. I didn’t have the words for what I was trying to get across t…

    Authored by on March 29, 2013

  • An obituary fail of the Finkbeiner test

    …she received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Obama in 2011 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2010. Coolest of all? She even worked for a couple of years at NASA in the 1980s on the rocket motor for the space shuttle. She was, quite literally, a freaking rocket scientist. But the original NY Times obituary left that information for later paragraphs. The first version of the obit (it’s…

    Authored by on April 1, 2013

  • Double Xplainer: Once in a Blue Moon

    …heard the second full Moon given a name: “blue moon”. (The Moon will not appear to be a blue color, though, cool as that would be. More on that in a bit.) What you may not know is that this term dates back only to 1946, and is actually a mistake. According to Sky and Telescope, a premiere astronomy magazine (check your local library!), the writer James Hugh Pruett made an incorrect assumption about the use of the term “blue moo…

    Authored by on August 31, 2012

  • 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

  • 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

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