Replicate this

I'm learning to make DNA this week. Manually that is, not by the unconscious mitosis that goes on in my cells every day.

Maybe you've heard that DNA is made up of the 4 bases: adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine. Well, pretty much all you do is chuck some of each into a bucket, give it a stir, and 'hey presto' DNA!

I jest of course. The protocol is much more interesting that this, although it is taking all freakin' week...

Rather than manually sticking together all the base pairs like some kind of Lego train, we get bacteria to do it for us. Put the DNA sequence inside some E. Coli, and let the whole thing replicate over and over until there's millions of copies of the original DNA sequence. We left those little bad boys incubating overnight, (as so often occurs in curry lover's gut after consuming a dodgy chicken tikka misala), so that when we arrive tomorrow morning the lab will be full of stinky, bacterial goodness ready to burst its contents into the world.

I'm reading 'Cooking for Geeks' by Jeff Potter, and I'm marveling at the similarities between a laboratory protocol and a kitchen recipe. Add some starter culture, incubate overnight, and there you have it, Yoplait!

How does a cake rise? Obviously the air gets in there somehow, but how does the actual chemistry work? As embarrassing as this is to admit, I really don't know the difference between baking soda and baking powder. (I will read on... Watch this space.)

If I don't know this already, clearly I'm no cook, and perhaps that says something about my skill as a scientist. Perhaps it's time to take my PhD into the kitchen and get practicing! E. Coli yoghurt anyone? How about yeast cake?

The question is, can I DNA sequence a sponge cake?

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Stress and the city

Urban living is associated with stress. Not a new idea.

I grew up in the bush, far away from the city. I could hear the faint echo of cars in the distance, but I couldn't see them from my house. I couldn't hear street noise, or other people. Once in a blue moon did someone come to our front door. And when they did, ironically that seemed to cause me far more stress than perhaps it should.

Now I choose to live in the city for the convenience it affords me. I find it hard to imagine that the location of my current apartment is doing my brain some untold damage. Despite the somewhat seedy location, I do not find the undesirable characters who hover in the backstreets of the surrounding suburbs a threat, but rather a mere curiosity. As soon as I open those jail-like gates that lead into my apartment, I enter my refuge. Weekend bar noise is muffled through the new-ish walls, and I find the faint echo of a passing car somewhat comforting. Importantly, the location makes up for all the birds and trees I am missing.

But perhaps this isn't the detrimental kind of city living this study refers to. One city apartment I lived in previously was not so 'idyllic'. There was a bus stop directly outside my window, and as I lay in bed at night I could often smell cigarette smoke wafting through the windows from some late-night commuter waiting for the bus home. The roar of the forced gear change as the bus struggled up the hill would partially wake me at 5am every morning. I feared for both my lungs and my fatigued brain.

Let's blame the amygdala for 'stress and the city'. It makes perfect sense after all. Responsible for processing emotional learning and memory, emotional intelligence and social awareness, then this 'neural social stress' caused by city living can surely point the finger at the amygdala as a potential culprit.

Obviously we need to identify exactly what aspect of urban living causes this stress. Personally I wonder if it all comes down to noise--too much auditory input during development. If auditory neurons are continually overstimulated, maybe the brain has to develop some introverted self-protection mechanisms that allow the child to switch off the outside world. Maybe I'm just explaining Autism here. Anyway, are the rates of Autism are higher in these socially stressed environments...? Something to look up.

Anyway, I can see the effects in myself, as an adult. When I'm trying to perform a complex task ('such as walking', my boyfriend PT would quip) then too much noise from the radio, conversation, or even traffic overwhelms me. Perhaps I need to go back and visit my childhood home in the countryside.

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Categorising emos

I'm reflecting on how to organise my blog. Being an emotional person, I want you, the reader to be able to select blog posts based on emotions.

So I attempted emotional categorisation. I hopped onto Google expecting to find a nice simplified list somewhere of all the human emotions. Surely there couldn't be that many, once you remove all the repetition. Joy = happy, bewilderment = confusion etc.

Failure = incorrect! This is not a simple task!

My question was whether psychologists classify emotions into groups, kind of like 'primary colours'. I learned that yes they do... However, it depends who the psychologist is, as to how they do it!

Not only are there too many emotions to apply as categories, but simplifying them into categories seems way too arbitrary for me. According to Plutchick, for example, all emotions can be categorised into 7 basic emotions. If I use his categorisation as the basis of my blog, then everyday I will have to decide whether what I feel is a category of joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, or anticipation. Where does apathy fit in there? Or worry? I guess I would have to choose the basic emotion that I think is most similar, meaning that I would need to apply my own personal opinion to Plutchik's classification (surely different to his own), making the whole thing somewhat pointless. I may as well write a research paper myself with my own opinion on what the 'basic emotions' are (that is if they even exist).

The solution? I can't categorise my emotions, they are too complicated. I tag what I feel at the time with the first descriptive word that comes to mind.

Look right. This is my emotional storm cloud' (with some inspiration credit owing to my boyfriend PT). Isn't she a pretty little thunder cloud? Wonder if she'll fine up someday...

Maybe I'm struggling so much with this because I have low emotional intelligence, (lowest percentile).

Amazing where surfing the internet takes you.

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