Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/population control

  • DXS Op-Ed: How birth control can save the world

    …over the last 50 years, reaching 7 the billion mark in March of this year.  This is an astounding statistic since it took until 1804 – around 50,000 years – to reach our first billion.  World Population: 1800 – 2100 (Wikimedia Commons) What makes these numbers really scary is the concept of carrying capacity, which is an ecological term used to describe the maximum number of individual members of a species that a certain habita…

    Authored by on May 2, 2012

  • 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

  • Women know something you don’t

    Make no mistake about it. by Emily Willingham Three of my four grandparents were only children. Born early in the 20th century, in the period betwixt the great wars, coming of age in the Great Depression. Only children, in spite of having parents married for decades. Three of them. In all likelihood, their own parents, my great-grandparents–and I knew all of my great-grandmothers–consciously chose not to have more children because,…

    Authored by on March 26, 2013

  • Excerpts from Sophie’s Diary: A Mathematical Novel

    …t’s diary to discuss how Germain may have taught herself math while dealing with the social upheaval of the French Revolution, which occurred at this time in her life. Read on for an engaging lesson in math. Monday | January 2, 1792 I begin the new year with more determination and a renewed resolve to study prime numbers. One of my goals is to acquire the necessary mathematical background to prove theorems. Prime numbers are exquisite. The…

    Authored by on May 23, 2012

  • Hormonal birth control explainer: a matter of health

    …ich exists to prepare an egg for fertilization and to make the uterine lining ready to receive a fertilized egg, should it arrive.  Fig. 1. Female reproductive anatomy. Credit: Jeanne Garbarino. In the theoretical 28-day cycle, fertilization (fusion of sperm and egg), if it occurs, will happen about 14 days in, timed with ovulation , or release of the egg from the ovary into the Fallopian tube or oviduct (see video–watch fo…

    Authored by on March 5, 2012

  • 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

  • From spiders to breast cancer: Leslie Brunetta talks candidly about her cancer diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up

    …very giving. I live in Cambridge, MA, where I could actually make choices about where I wanted to be treated at each phase and know I’d get excellent, humane care and where none of the facilities I went to was more than about 20 minutes away. Some things that women might have some control over and that their families might help nudge them toward: Find doctors you trust. Ask a lot of questions and make sure you understand the answers. But do…

    Authored by on January 31, 2012

  • Circumcision shuffles the penis ecosystem

    groups — that is, in both men who were circumcised and men who were not (or at least, not yet). At the start of the trial, the authors measured 150,000 bacteria (16S ribosomal RNA copies) per swab in the control arm and 200,000 bacteria in the interventional arm. A year later, they found 57,000 copies on the uncircumcised men, compared to 38,000 on the circumcised ones. That difference, they say, is significant (albeit with a p value of 0.0…

    Authored by on April 16, 2013

  • Selling the flu shot

    …t decade reveals a few bright spots. For most age groups, vaccination rates have been gradually ticking up over the past two decades, or at least holding steady. According to the National Health Interview Survey from the year 2000, approximately 17% of adults age 18–49 received a flu shot. That value had increased to 29% for the 2011–2012 season. Although this isn’t exactly a stellar improvement, a more promising picture emerges when lookin…

    Authored by on May 2, 2013

  • Miscarriage: When a beginning is not a beginning

    …ntaneous abortion. Except that some didn’t like the term spontaneous abortion and used intrauterine mortality (Wood, 1994). Or fetal loss. Fetal loss is probably the most common. There is also pregnancy loss (Holman and Wood, 2001). You can use that term, too. Oh, or a-conceptions (a for abortion), compared to l-conceptions (l for live birth) (Wood, 1994). A large number of these fetal losses are before or close to the time of implantation. For m…

    Authored by on September 5, 2012

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