Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/polymer

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • How pregnant are you? Let’s find out

    …or “slipping” the top plate), they flow bottom-to-top. Samples and reagents are loaded in one configuration, and the chip is “slipped” to start the readout process. The SlipChip design Source: Nat. Commun. 3:1283 doi: 10.1038/ncomms2292 (2012). Here’s how the authors describe it: In the SlipChip, two pieces of glass etched with microfluidic wells and channels are assembled together in the presence of mineral oil. A fluidic path is for…

    Authored by on January 6, 2013

  • Image Caption Test Post

    …lainer here) is derived from the Latin word for “sheath”. It is theinternal cavity within the female body*. (A high school anatomy teacher was recently investigated for using this word in an anatomy class. Because, of course, 10th -graders don’t have vaginas, aren’t interested in vaginas, and certainly have no need to know what vaginas are. Vagina: it’s not a dirty word.) Vulva denotes the external female genitals – the lady parts that you see wh…

    Authored by on April 5, 2010

  • The average human vagina

    …ainer here) is derived from the Latin word for “sheath”. It is the internal cavity within the female body*. (A high school anatomy teacher was recently investigated for using this word in an anatomy class. Because, of course, 10th -graders don’t have vaginas, aren’t interested in vaginas, and certainly have no need to know what vaginas are. Vagina: it’s not a dirty word.) Vulva denotes the external female genitals – the lady parts that you see wh…

    Authored by on April 1, 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

  • 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

  • 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

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