Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/turkey

  • Tracing the taming of the turkey

    …story, indicating a severe reduction in numbers and genetic diversity, shows that the native peoples of the Southwest strongly selected for a specific breed of their domesticated bird. And then they propagated it for at least 1000 years. You might think that the turkeys we eat today in the United States would be descendents of these Southwestern birds. They’re not. When Europeans showed up in the Americas, they grabbed a few of the birds and too…

    Authored by on November 21, 2012

  • Turkey, spice, everything nice: What are those Thanksgiving smells made of?

    Traditional Thanksgiving food. Just looking may evoke smell memories. Via Wikimedia Commons. Spices, turkey, stuffing, those casseroles you never make at any other time of the year. What is it about the smells at Thanksgiving that are so evocative that if you encounter them any other time of the year, your mind flies back again to memories of family, friends, and a turkey or Tofurkey? Well, as Brainpicker’s Maria Popova highlight…

    Authored by on November 24, 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

  • A “Brontosaurus” for you

    …nimals—realized the Brontosaurus specimen was actually a member of a previously known species, Apatosaurus. In other words, Brontosaurus isn’t the proper name of any dinosaur. Even though the whole episode happened over 100 years ago, people still react emotionally about it. However, the animal itself was a marvelous creature, whatever name we happen to give it. If your last exposure to dinosaurs was elementary school or Jurassic Park, Swit…

    Authored by on March 13, 2013

  • Does penis size matter?

    …the times I’ve wished a man would look at my face instead of a foot below it, and I wonder if men once had that problem with women’s roving eyes as well. Given that one estimate puts the development of clothing at 170,000 years ago, that certainly leaves plenty of time before the loin cloth for women’s preferences to influence the evolutionary course of the penis. (Oh, the power cave women might have… wielded!) Scientists alread…

    Authored by on April 8, 2013

  • The sperm don’t care how they got there, Rep. Akin

    17 c. rendition of human inside sperm.Public domain in US. [Trigger warning: frank language about sexual assault] By Emily Willingham By now, you’ve probably heard the phrase: legitimate rape. As oxymoronic and moronic as it seems, a Missouri congressman and member of the House Science, Space, and Technology committee used this term to argue that women who experience “legitimate rape” likely can’t become pregnan…

    Authored by on August 20, 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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