MarkW

I had landed in Holland earlier on the day it happened, and was in a meeting at head office when the planes struck. When I came out of the meeting room and went into a colleagues office he turned his computer screen towards me and just said "Look at this". I thought it was a trailer from a new movie and said something like "Wow! That's amazing!" I still remember the plummeting feeling in my stomach when it dawned on me what I was watching. I phoned my wife and told her to put the TV on: "Which channel?" "Any channel, Vicki..." I'm in Washington at the moment, and obviously it's the main feature on the news. It was on the TV at breakfast in a room full of about 30 teenage kids on a school trip, none of whom had even been born when it happened. They all sat there asking me about it, which was nice, but made me feel very old. Perhaps I'll stop asking my mother what the 60s were like...

Ghjggfgr vghgghgj ghhuhyggftghhjjnbfds vccfghhjjjjj Sorry - just wiping the keyboard...

Or piss in the sink. That's at a more convenient height, so less chance for things to go astray.

Something that amazes me is the number of blokes I see who stand there texting - often with both hands. That's got to be an invitation to disaster, not only in terms of the lack of directional control, but also hitting the wrong button and accidentally texting a photo of your cock to a client.

We all know the basic law of motorcycling that the bike goes where you look, and that your hands will naturally react to follow your gaze. Unfortunately the same law also applies to children standing next to you at a urinal, as demonstrated by my youngest son when he just turned round to ask me a question. At least it's hot enough in Royan to dry my flip-flops...

And not one of those blokes had the gumption to unzip his trousers and threaten to urinate in her convertible if she didn't move. I don't know...

So, in response to a comment from my 8 year old that if I bought a black and white t-shirt I'd look like Po from Kung Fu Panda, I have decided to get back in shape. I'm on holiday on Ile de Re at the moment, surrounded by dirt tracks, empty roads and sandy beaches that are perfect for jogging along, so what better time and place to start? I pulled on my running shoes, clipped on the iPod Shuffle and set off into the early morning heat. I can't exercise without music, and not having listened to the iPod for ages I wasn't quite sure what was on it. I think I last used it many moons ago at the gym, so it turned out to be full of 'motivational' tracks that are easy to jog to: Absurd by Fluke, Firestarter by The Prodigy, Hysteria by Muse and a whole load of other stuff, including an extensive selection of Elvis and the TCB band. I was really getting into my stride, powering along as "Burning Love" faded out, and eagerly anticipating Ronnie Tutt's opening drum solo on "See See Rider", when instead I got something else entirely: "I like to Move It Move It" by Alvin and the Chipmunks. I'd put it on ages ago to amuse the kids, and it ruined everything. As I jogged on, fumbling with the tiny controls and completely losing my rhythm, I managed to skip forward to what can only be described as the Joss Stick and Lava Lamp Collection: San Francisco by Scott McKenzie... California Dreaming by The Mamas and The Papas... Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater... Going Up The Country by Canned Heat... I Got You Babe by Sonny and Cher (what was I thinking?)... Anyway, unable to find anything suitable and I ripped the damn thing off and trudged home having only run two miles. Pathetic. But it got me thinking: If I'm going to wipe the iPod and start again, what sort of stuff do other people find good to jog to? I have a fairly eclectic musical taste, but I do draw the line at opera, anything that sounds like a malfunctioning digital watch, or people who can't perform without making fatuous hand gestures at the camera or holding on to their cocks. Any thoughts?

Nowt wrong with a nice bit of horsey. Nom nom nom... I've been to a restaurant called Carnivore in Nairobi a few times, and they serve camel, zebra, crocodile, Maasai etc. All yummy!

Cheers guys - I was wondering what it was. I have to say was really taken with it! Fantastic shape and looked pretty cool inside too. Dave, I wonder if you remember this: when I was a kid in the late '70s / early 80s there was a TV advert for a car that had a system designed to blow debris away from the front wheels to avoid punctures. It may have been a Citroen (I think I've seen a few with grilles on the lower body panels in front of the wheels). None of my friends remembers it, but I'm sure I didn't dream it!

Thanks for the offer of help - I may well be taking you up on it at some point! I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out: it took a couple of goes to get the flash positioning right, with no glare off the glass or bright point-sources under the car. The only coloured filters I have are for my feeble old Miranda flashgun, so it took about 30 flash bursts to make this image (note to self: buy some gels for my big Speedlite!). To be honest I hadn't even considered capturing the star trails at the time, and was pleasantly surprised when I saw them. I'll investigate making them pop out more as per your suggestion. Cheers!

5D mk III, and RAW: I converted it to JPEG in Lightroom for FB and the like, but other than that it's exactly as shot. I have to get to grips with Lightroom properly, because my skills are pretty basic to be honest - I think my brain is only cut out for analogue photography!

Is it a DS? I'm hopeless with Citroens, except the 2CV. The owners were having a midnight party on the beach, so I had to work quickly before they came back: I'm not sure how I'd have explained an Englishman lying under their car in the middle of the night with a flashgun! It's a 3-minute exposure taken on a 5D, and the colour was added with an ancient Miranda flashgun and some coloured filters that I got in 1986! I keep it in the botom of the camera bag for this sort of caper. I think the car is slightly underexposed, but it was pretty much a 'grab and go' situation.

Falling off on lesson two is OK, but nailing your instructor at the same time is epic! Seriously though, someone once said there are two types of biker: those who have fallen off, and those who are going to fall off. Or they might have been talking about punctures... I forget... but nevertheless, there it is. My wife fell off during one of her lessons. In fact we went through a period of paying for a replacement brake or clutch lever at the end of every lesson because she'd dumped the damn thing during the slow speed manouevres. After she fell off on one of the road rides she got demoralised and said she'd had enough. Ever the loving husband, I gave her one of my pep talks (think Gunnery Sergeant Hartman when Private Pyle can't get over the obstacle course and you'll have it). She got back on the next day, realised she loved it and has never looked back. Jump back on and stick with it. And don't fret about motorways - that's the easiest riding you'll ever do!

During one of my frequent and ill-advised alcohol-fuelled forays on automotive websites a few weeks ago I came very close to buying a Jensen Interceptor. Imagine that: a 7 litre engine would have made driving much more exciting, at least until the 8 mpg fuel economy finished off what remained of my bank account.

Ha ha! We haven't even bought the machine yet! Our bioanalytics study director had a couple of technical guys from Bio-Rad come to see us to find out what approach would work best for us. We liked the sound of 5-plex for its time-saving potential, but they did say that whilst running five targets simultaneously is possible it takes a lot of fiddling to optimise, so unless you're always looking for the same set of organisms it's not worth the effort and 3-plex is the way to go. I gave them the list of organisms we routinely look for in our pathogen screening and they thought 5-plex looked feasible. We shall see! But whatever we end up doing it'll be a vast improvement on agar plating. In any case I'm just a simple entomologist - my role is to nod sagely and say "Absolutely" a lot whenever our study director is explaining this stuff to people.

I hired an Electraglide for a few days in California earlier this year. It was surprisingly agile and easy to chuck around for such a big bike, but the vibrations and the noise were horrendous. The front brake was comically bad too - I'm sure I stuck both feet straight out in front of me and used some bad language the first time I used it!

This reminded me of an Elvis impersonator I knew when I lived in Stoke. I couldn't imagine how Elvis hits would sound with a Stoke accent, but I guess it could work: Jaylouse Rock Well that's o'rate Artbreak 'otel (well since mar lady left me...) American Trilogy (Live in Madison Square Garden version): Oh I wish I were in the lander cotton, ode times they onner forgotten, luke away, luke away, luke away Dixieland (sing eat mar mate... forky nell, thar's on thar own son...)

Since a good proportion of our customers could be expected to die on the toilet I thought an Elvis-themed advertisement would be good. Just need to come up with a suitable tag line...

Ha! Thankfully not: we can only handle organisms up to and including Biosafety Level 3 (that's stuff like hantavirus, HIV and bubonic plague). Ebola is a level 4 organism along with other really cool stuff like Marburg virus. This was cholera. I briefly considered mass-producing it for people who wanted to lose weight, with a marketing campaign along the lines of Roger Mellie's best-selling diet book "Shit Yourself Slim".

No worries! The DNA is only split to allow us to copy a specific part of it and identify the organism it came from though, not to 'engineer' the organism in any way. Less developed countries certainly benefit from biopesticide technology, but you have to be careful what they make when they start their own production. This, for example, was isolated from a product we received for testing from Africa earlier in the year. Anyone want to guess what it is?

You've got it! As an example, the most widely used biopesticide worldwide is a bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis. It's completely harmless to mammals, but once it gets in the alkaline conditions of the caterpillar gut it releases a potent endotoxin that kills the caterpillar stone dead. So this one is definitely a good guy as far as we're concerned. A very closely related species is Bacillus anthracis, which is anthrax. That's not such good news from our perspective, and so one of the things we do is make sure that a product that is supposed to contain one doesn't contain the other. Separating them visually on agar plates is impossible - they look identical - so we either go through that whole faff I described earlier or we use PCR. In PCR we take a primer (a sequence of DNA that is unique to the species you're looking for) and stick it in a thermal cycler with the test item. The thermal cycler unzips the two DNA strands, sticks the primer to the complementary bit of DNA and then starts replicating so that you get a measurable level of the target. If what you're looking for is in there you get a fluorescence signal that corresponds to the concentration of the target DNA; if it's not there you get nothing. Simples!

Ha ha! OK, in very basic terms PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) is a molecular technique for exponentially amplifying tiny fragments of target DNA, which allows you (amongst other things) to say whether or not a certain organism is present in amongst a whole host of other organisms. It's a bit like finding a needle in a haystack. We spend a lot of time screening microbial pesticides for human pathogens, where we can be looking for a single viable pathogen spore among several billion spores of the test item, and currently that involves lengthy enrichment procedures followed by plating on selective media, incubation under various environmental conditions and then identification and enumeration in order to differentiate the contaminant from everything else in the sample, which takes days! PCR does away with all that, and allows us to identify whether a specific pathogenic organism is present in a sample or not in a couple of hours. Q-PCR goes a step further by doing it quantitatively and in real-time, which means we can say something about the amount of the organism in the sample as well. Multiplexing goes further still by allowing us to run up to five different pathogen screens in a single reaction, which speeds up our workflow even more. We've been looking at bringing q-PCR into our lab for a while now, but given the type of work we do and the regulatory requirements of the studies we perform we had a number of regulatory and validation issues to address first.

To see why I'm excited you don't need to know the first thing about molecular biology, just that multiplex qPCR will do in 2-3 hours what currently takes us a minimum of five days, and will do it better. Start-up costs are in the region of £20K, with annual running costs around the same as our current systems. I foresee a lot more time off for bike riding...