donkey

peon #87 from warcraft III

Well I certainly think that by any definition this is a clear case of terrorism and the public and the BBC will recognise that - terrorism isn't some complex word with a complex definition. But as a more general point, perhaps, often the real definition of the word is actually what's in common usage, as opposed to what the some dictionary says. edit: oh dear, i have a bad habit of going off on tangents...

They were certainly mass murderers and picked their targets accordingly but I'd also say I'm 99% sure that they wanted to cause havoc and terror across London as punishment for our foreign policy. I voted terrorists. I agree that the BBC perhaps simply don't want to incite anti-Muslim / anti-anyone with a dark skin hatred. I'm going to guess you're not from Europe, or at least not the UK. In the UK a lot of us also associate "terrorist" with the IRA and I guess many Spanish people associate it with ETA too. So not just Arabs. Also, here the bombers were of Pakistani decent - so yes Muslims but not Arabs. I think that's an interesting difference between the UK and the US. We have quite a lot of south Asians living in the UK, many of them Pakistani or from Pakistani parents and a lot of them are Muslims so we tend to be more familiar with Muslims being non-Arabs. I guess countries around the Asia-pacific region, such as Australia, may be more familiar with Indonesians etc. being Muslims and therefore they may associate anyone of far eastern appearance with being a potential "Islamic terrorist". Also, socialism (nor liberal for that matter) doesn't really have the same negative connotations in the UK. Of course it does in certain circles but it's not something you can immediately put someone down with - not with the same power as it seems to have over the American public. Liberal is the strangest one for me. It strikes me as strange that anyone wouldn't want to be called a liberal. liberal adj. 1. 1. Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry. 2. Favouring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behaviour of others; broad-minded. 2. 1. Tending to give freely; generous: a liberal benefactor. sounds good to me!

Just a small point but agarose isn't made of seaweed, it's produced from seaweed (i.e. only part of it). Anyway, basically it just forms a gel which has lots of holes allowing the cut DNA to migrate through the gel. check out the wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agarose

brute force rational drug design is way more fun

Sounds a lot more like biology than medicine to me. I'd be interested to hear what the mods thought

Skye, i'm definately interested in that - particularly for structure based drug design sorts of things. after reading up a bit on synthetic biology it appears that the term is pretty broad ranging. What really interests me is the possibility of using elegant biological-style solutions to do funky chemistry /pharmacology (i.e. program DNA to tailor an enzyme capable of producing a useful chemical or protein). This is the computer scientist in me trying to get out, i want to write the program (engineer DNA), run it (let nature produce the protein via translation) and then benefit from the solution (collect a product etc...) Imagine if we could grow some algae that used the energy from light to produce proteins which created loads of hydrocarbons suitable for fuel and plastics. Shame that'd result in an even bigger hole in the ozone layer >.< Can anyone think of more specific useful search terms for this sort of science or am I best to press on with synthetic biology?

Also, why is the Genetics forum in medical sciences not under biological sciences?

wow, talk about clutching at straws. I love the way that's written - it's so sure of itself. If the date has any real meaning it's bound to be related to the start of the G8. edit: d'oh, sorry i now reckon this is supposed to be a joke

Of course it's terrible but it wasn't really a case of if but when we'd get attacked so I think most people were pretty mentally prepared for this and the emergency services were well prepared in a logistical sense too. The fact that London was hit wasn't surprising but it's still shocking when it happens. Thankfully the number of deaths is still relatively low. Oh well, the pub was still packed tonight so I don't think a whole load of people will be shocked into changing their routines (not that i'm in London mind you).

you're a star

thanks a lot for your replies - i appreciate it. Very interesting and I've downloaded that Science paper Yggdrasil mentioned. I really like the sounds of this computational stuff but alas it might be too mathematical/computer science based for me. I'm pretty good with computers but I originally chose to do chemistry and not computer science (unlike my twin brother) so that i could get away from maths & programming. I'm certainly going to look into synthetic biology anyway. I've got 1 year of my undergraduate Biochemistry degree left but next year I'll be taking a year out to go on an industrial placement. After that i'll be in my final year and will hopefully have more of an idea what sort of area I want to go into

Hey, please excuse any naivety that follows. I was wondering if anyone here had much familiarity with protein structure determination or anything else relating to protein structure and function. I'm really interested in the 3D structures of proteins and would be interested in possibly persuing this as a PhD but I'm not sure which areas of research there really are available. I'm most interested in things like structure based drug design (among other related things such as understanding enzyme mechanisms by investigating their 3D structure) and generally using knowledge of protein structures to understand how things work. I am bit worried that to do this I would have to be the one spending a long time producing these structures - although this could be really exciting I'm quite worried that it'll be time consuming and complicated. This could get dangerously like physics. I'm not great at maths and am a bit daunted by having to master x-ray crystalography or NMR. How hard is it? I've not decided i don't want to determine structures I just wondered if there were a lot of people doing related stuff but not actually determining their own structures. I'm interested in how proteins fold and would be really interested in making a synthetic protein/enzyme. I know this is perhaps a pipe dream and it may be a long time before the most basic proteins are designed but I would be interested to know what you would call this type of science? Does anyone know where it would be done outside of industry... if anywhere?

I'm a bit confused about this "spinal cord". Is that also referring to this consciousness or is it to do with structure?

I was just wondering whether the powers that be thought "Biochemistry/Molecular Biology" would be a more appropriate name for the " Biochemistry/Genetic Engineering" forum?

just as an aside, water will of course form some sort of ordered structure in a cell - it'll just create hydration shells around other molecules etc. But yeah, I don't think that's what you guys are talking about - it sounds like this is some sort of homeopathy debate.

lawffles :-D

cool

i bet he wants to make a bomb

wouldn't we need to know what Tor2 does?

hey, I hope you got your assignment all done. I doubt you're still reading this but I'm going to Stockholm later this month and as you're from Sweden I was wondering if you had any suggestions as to what I should see?

I agree. When I was really young I saw a "show" where they added 2 brightly coloured mixtures to produce a colourless mixture. How was this possible? Surely it should go brown!! And then they added something else to make it go back to a coloured liquid. I think young kids will be baffled by it and interested

In the UK i'd say cable is better (or at least where you can get telewest (an ISP) instead of ntl (crap ISP)) but you're in the US so things might well be different. I guess DSL has a bit more flexibility in general as it allows you to change ISP without having to change equipment. so in short, it depends on your local circumstances.