jeffotron

It depends on the manufacturer but this wiki details things all gels have in common, including links to specific gelling agents that should answer your question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gel

Actually depending on your definition of where a mountain starts, neither of those are true... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions Ah crap, this posted at the end, this was supposed to be a nested response to the third or fourth response about the highest mountain...Regardless the article has a lot of neat info

I'll give a quote from a website that got me thinking about predicting evolution. “As proteins interact in the cell, they rely on each others' characteristics. It has just been shown that proteins that interact with a lot of other proteins cannot evolve, or at least, only do so at a very slow rate. See Nature, 28 June 2001, and M. Kimura, T. Ohta, Science, 26 April 2002. They propose that this is because of great internal dependencies which inhibit the changing of the 'contract' of the protein. It is also noted that evolution does take place, but very slowly as both parts of the dependency need to evolve in a compatible way at the same time.” http://ds9a.nl/amazing-dna/index.html Great site to check out if you like programming, otherwise highly recommend checking it out if only to get a different perspective on some basic biological concepts. So here's where you guys come in. Criticize or contribute to the following ideas: The quote states that complex biochemical pathways become resistant to change. As an organism progresses along a given evolutionary developmental path, does the organism become more resistant to further change too? By evolutionary developmental path (a phrase I basically made up) I mean the path an organism takes to get from point A to point B in evolutionary terms. Putting the whole thing more concretely, humans developed from small mammals in the 65million years since the disappearance of dinosaurs. In that time, I assume more biochemical processes exhibit greater degrees of interdependence in us now than they did in our ancestors of 65 million years ago (a major point of contention since I have no information to base this assumption on, it would just be convenient for my argument if it were true). So taken together with the higher degree of interdependence we must be more resistant to change. Could you give a protein a number that described its potential for change based on how many other proteins rely on its current conformation? Could you define a threshold above which the rate of change would statistically approach zero? And for the remaining pathways/proteins below that threshold could you similarly identify pathways/proteins highly susceptible to change, generate some algorithms based on the capacity for change, and run models of different environmental pressures to predict future evolution? Whatever predictions generated, you would have to be careful not to extend them too far into the future because then those statistically irrelevant pathways start creeping back towards relevancy. Interested to hear what other people think...