Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/poison

  • 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

  • How chili powder can kill

    …nd mucus were seen. A tracheostomy was performed. The trachea was found to be obstructed with masses of admixed pepper and mucus. Upon arrival to an emergency room he was pulseless and apneic, and he was pronounced dead about 1 h after the inhalation of the pepper.  [Homicidal asphyxia by pepper aspiration by S.D. Cohle] Like black pepper, hot peppers and their products have been used as punishments. Three children, aged 3, 5, and 7, were re…

    Authored by on January 21, 2013

  • 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

  • If you try one detox this year, make it this one

    …I eat whole grains and fruit and avoid beef and pork and, after a humiliating experience involving stuffing semisweet baking chips into my mouth with both hands, I no longer allow chocolate in the house. Even though I can run 13.1 miles in one shot, I don’t look like a model. And when it comes to the reckoning on the elliptical with that pink pile of glossy magazine paper in front of me, the images under my nose tell me that my body is riddled wi…

    Authored by on January 21, 2013

  • Don’t take the Cinnamon Challenge

    …innamon Challenge is not some harmless prank. It can have real medical consequences. The Pediatrics authors note that poison control centers in the US took 51 calls related to the challenge in 2011, which more than tripled to 178 in just the first half of 2012. Thirty of these calls required medical attention, including two with “potentially toxic” levels of exposure to the cinnamon. Yes, you read that right: potentially toxic. A comm…

    Authored by on April 22, 2013

  • Halloween and poisoned treat rumors: What are the facts?

    1920s Halloween postcard.Via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain in USA. Many of us probably heard the stories as kids: the razor in the apple, the poison in the Pixy Stix, the mean elderly lady who inexplicably wouldn’t let children run through her flowerbeds and thus was clearly planning some dire Halloween revenge on those who did. As adults, some with children, we see these rumors in a new way, one that perhaps has us trailing ou…

    Authored by on October 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

Page 1 of 212