Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

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  • 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

  • Biology Explainer: The big 4 building blocks of life–carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and nucleic acids

    …molecules themselves break down into a surprisingly small number of building blocks. The proteins that make up all of the living things on this planet and ensure their appropriate structure and smooth function consist of only 20 different kinds of building blocks. Nucleic acids, specifically DNA, are even more basic: only four different kinds of molecules provide the materials to build the countless different genetic codes that translate into all…

    Authored by on June 8, 2012

  • After Newtown missteps, journalists get guidelines

    …almost twice as likely to say that they don’t want to live or work near a person with mental illness if they read an article about a person with mental illness involved in a mass shooting, according to a study published March 20 in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Interestingly, this tendency is the same even if the article avoids any mention of mental illness. This may be because this link between violence and mental illness is deeply engrain…

    Authored by on March 27, 2013

  • Real science vs. fake science: How can you tell them apart?

    …ed marketing scam? Do they use, for example, a Website or magazine or newspaper ad that’s made to look sciencey or newsy when it’s really one giant advertisement meant to make you think it’s journalism? 2. What is the agenda? You must know this to consider any information in context. In a scientific paper, look at the funding sources. If you’re reading a non-scientific anything, remain extremely skeptical. What does t…

    Authored by on December 11, 2011

  • My bipolar life

    …last message, so that no one would be sending out the police. All that was going to happen is one day I would be alive. The next I would be dead. Consequences be damned. Well, the DKA didn’t kill me on day 1. Nor on day 2. What it did do was deplete my blood potassium, which caused a worse problem, an uncontrolled, and very painful heart rate. You see, I didn’t quite think this through as carefully as I should have. Through a strange…

    Authored by on February 8, 2013

  • Creating viruses to create the vaccines?

    Synthetic viruses could mean a faster flu vax. by Carrie Arnold     In 2009, scientists scrambled to develop a vaccine against the H1N1 influenza pandemic. Although the first cases of illness were reported in March, a vaccine wasn’t ready in the U.S. until late September — a lag of almost seven months. Large amounts of vaccine weren’t available until several months after that. By then, the second wave of infections had peaked, as had much…

    Authored by on May 20, 2013

  • Depressing genes

    Can depression be a matter of genetic fate? by Siobhan Mitchell          [This post is the latest installment in our I Am Mental Illness series.] What if you could know if you were fated to be depressed? With the rise of personal genotyping services such as 23andme, almost can find out what their psychiatric ‘fate’ will be, but what do you do with this information once you have it? When I first considered testing myself for depressio…

    Authored by on May 17, 2013

  • Is the bar high enough for screening breast ultrasounds for breast cancer?

    …n controversial. What’s new is the “Are You Dense?” patient 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…

    Authored by on September 21, 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

  • 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

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