• Question: whats a synchroton? and r the building blocks of life DNA?

    Asked by 11redme to Ed on 17 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by njade.
    • Photo: Ed Lowe

      Ed Lowe answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      A synchrotron is a huge machine that generates very bright X-rays using beams of electrons traveling close to the speed of light – it’s a practical way of making use of Einstein’s theory of relativity. There is one in the UK called Diamond in Oxfordshire and you can see a bit more about it here http://www.diamond.ac.uk/

      DNA holds the information for putting together an organism, but I tend to think of proteins as the building blocks for the most part. A pretty decent analogy would be building some flat pack furniture, where DNA is the instruction book and proteins are all the pieces of wood, screws and so on.

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