DNA model

Had a very fun biology pratical today.We had to make a model of a DNA. I guess mine was the longest since ihad finished it very fast :P but it wasn't very good i thk. I have taken a picture of mine and a model of my teacher's DNA model.

My teacher's model(above)

My model :) (above)
A little bit of infomation on the DNA..You should be able to see "coloured" nitrogen bases
held together like rungs of a ladder by the sugar phosphate backbone. Red and Blue is Adenine(red) and Thiamine (Blue) while Yellow and Green is Cytosine (Yellow) and Guanine (Green). Of course, in actual life our DNA has no colour.

Spinach fights the flu

This article comes from the febrary issue of discover - "Spinach fights the flu" This is quite interesting: Spinach may soon be packing health benefits Mom never dreamed of. Molecular Biologists at Philadelphia's INB:Biotechnologies are using the vegetable to make vaccines against anthrax, influenza, even plague. The new vaccines are cheaper to produce than traditional ones made from animales - and could be quicker to make. Until now, biologists had long assumed that using plants to grow human vaccines was impossible. But INB found a way to trick spinach ( along with Swiss chard and Petunias) into producing harmless bits and pieces of common human pathogens that cause diseases like flu and plague. When these chopped-up, deactivated pathogens are injected into mammals, the animals acquire immunity, just as if they had been infected with a virulent version. " now that's cool i mean in the past no one thought that vaccines could come from vegetables it would be great because vegetables are easier to produce better than using animals which may be at a disadvantages especially if they come from chickens and they happen to have the bird flu. Stay tune for more articles.

Disaster upon disaster

This extract is from a very long article from The Straits Times Feb. 23..some of you may have read it but i would like to make a few comments about it. I would, however, only stress on two parts of this article and they are "Vicious Winter" and " Lethal storms". In the part "vicous winter", it said that "at least 180 children have died in Afghanistan's coldest winter in years, the Health Minister said yesterday, amid warnings that the final toll from the subzero temperature and heavy snow could run into the thousands" and in Kashmir "Heavy snow and low temperatures have gripped the Kashmir valley since last week. Avalanches and mudslides have buried entire villages and collasped houses across the state." Okie..look.. for these two countries it seemed that winter this year was the coldest that they ever had and it really does seem that there is something very wrong with the climate. For the part "Lethal Storms": "Mudslides trapped residents in their homes and forced others to flee as lethal storms continues to pound southern california for the fifth consecutive day, in what could prove to be the wettest rainfall season on record in Los Angeles" In the later part of this part: "There is also a possibility of severe thunderstorms and hailstorms in the coastal valleys and blizzard conditions in the mountains. "If it keeps raining like this, and it will, it'll break the record set more than 120 years ago," said Mr. Bill Patzert, a meteorologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada." okie so in this article it is obvious that it kept raining, yes, the thing is look at the phrase "it'll break the record set more than 120 years ago" it seemed to be similar to the first one " coldest winter in years" so therefore the climate is moving into the EXTREME. In singapore, we are now experiencing a dry spell though it's getting better now but two weeks ago it was so hot tt u could just cook an egg on the ground. Temperatures could go to 34, 35 and the Fire stations had received more bush fire cases compared to the last few years and it is said that it is the worst dry spell in the last 29 years. So, the conclusion is still the same thing. Global Warming.