Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/pseudoscience

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

    …211;and answer–before shelling out the benjamins for anything, whether it’s anti-aging cream, a diet fad program, books purporting to tell you secrets your doctor won’t, or jewelry items containing magnets: 1. What is the source? Is the person or entity making the claims someone with genuine expertise in what they’re claiming? Are they hawking on behalf of someone else? Are they part of a distributed marketing scam? Do th…

    Authored by on December 11, 2011

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Congress Is Killing Medical Research

    …re very real consequences to Congress’s inaction, and they are happening right now. The “continuing resolution” that Congress passed in the fall, which allowed the government to avoid a shutdown, ended in March. It included a 10% across-the-board budget cut to everything. That includes most of the critical medical research in the U.S. Every year, many NIH projects end and many others begin. (Most only last 3 or 4 years.) But not this year. Becaus…

    Authored by on March 6, 2013

  • Evidence Based Parenting Carnival

    A new community resource to help us not mess up By Jeanne Garbarino The cyber mom-o-sphere might be one of the largest internet communities out there. Between the brutally honest musings of Dooce, the ridiculous hilarity of The Bloggess, and the “delightful snarkiness” of Mom 101, there lies at least a gazillion blogs waxing poetic about the true – and often very unkept –  face of motherhood. These sites have done an incredible servi…

    Authored by on April 2, 2013

  • Facebook influences voting behavior, you, your friends

    …publicly available. These states include Arkansas,California, Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, and the authors report that “about 1 in 3 users” were matched successfully with their voting records.  If it seems a little creepy that a group of complete strangers might influence your voting behavior via Facebook and then check that against public r…

    Authored by on September 12, 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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