Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

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  • 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

  • Selling the flu shot

    …ew 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 looking specifically at ce…

    Authored by on May 2, 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

  • 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

  • To Everything (Turn Turn Turn) There is a Season

    …ey receive about the same amount of sunlight during both summer and winter. Approximately halfway between the solstices, the Sun appears directly overhead at noon at the Equator. On those days, everywhere on Earth gets about 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night. These days are the equinoxes, meaning “equal night”. (The spell to extinguish light in the Harry Potter books is “nox”, for what it’s worth. Yes, I remember such things. I&…

    Authored by on June 20, 2012

  • Is there a season for births?

    …ian section: “Oh, not the 4th … how about the following Monday?” Or an obstetrician: “I’m taking the 4th off, don’t schedule anything that day.” There’s also a local peak on Feb 14. Perhaps Valentine’s Day sounds like a good birthday to that hypothetical mom on the phone. And a lot of superstitious people might actively avoid the 13th of any month to escape giving their child an ‘unlucky’ number for…

    Authored by on February 18, 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

  • 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

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