Life on Wednesday..

What's up everyone? Not much here. I had a boring lab today, and every Wednesday. My partner and I had to grow a culture of DNA (with the vector, insert and ligate and allll..into the bacteria). The worst part of all, it is a multiple-day lab where we need to enter the lab more than once a week. And now, I am supposed to figure out what to write for the lab report. OuCh!! Wanna know more about this lab? Go to http://www.biochem.wisc.edu/courses/biochem651/index.html. I really really doubt any of you guys will be interested but if you do, let me know what you think. Anyways, I browsed through an interesting piece of news today. It is amazing how ignorant these people are. People in Sydney...errr..There you go, the news from Reuter:

Lonely deaths of elderly shock Australia

By Michael Perry

SYDNEY (Reuters) - They were five lonely deaths and only discovered because of the stench of decomposing bodies, but the realisation that someone can die in their Sydney home unnoticed for months has shocked Australia's biggest city.

In the past 10 days, the bodies of five elderly Australians have been found in their loungeroom or bedroom -- one a mere skeleton after dying an estimated eight months ago.

The latest two, an elderly couple in their 80s, were found in their apartment on Tuesday on Sydney's affluent north shore, police said Wednesday.

"What sort of a heartless society can it be in which elderly are so irrelevant and unimportant that they can die alone and unnoticed, unmissed for months on end?," asked Sydney's The Daily Telegraph newspaper in its editorial on Wednesday.

"A society like ours, obviously."

Sydney won an international reputation as a warm and friendly city during the 2000 Olympics, but the elderly deaths have left many wondering what happened to their community.

"We have to come back to being a community, not only those that surround the older person living by themselves to make sure they are not isolated," Lillian Jeter, spokeswoman for the Elder Abuse Prevention Association told reporters on Tuesday.

Sydney's radio bristled on Tuesday with discussion on whether the city of four million people had become mean spirited.

A newspaper survey this week found half of Australians feel their country has become a meaner place in the past 10 years since Prime Minister John Howard first came to power in 1996.

The Sydney Morning Herald survey also found that one in 10 people felt Australia was a "less fair society".

The survey found the overwhelming majority supported Howard's economic stewardship, with Australia enjoying 15 years of growth, and his stand against terrorism, but 55 percent of people regarded the prime minister as divisive.

News of the elderly deaths in Sydney coincided with media reports that four elderly women suffering dementia, one aged 98, were allegedly raped while being cared for in nursing homes in the southern state of Victoria.

Police have charged one man with alleged sexual assault.

The Australian government has ordered an urgent summit on the country's care system for the aged following the rape reports.

Australian Minister for Ageing, Santo Santoro, said on Tuesday he will consider mandatory reporting of elderly abuse, with some pro-elderly groups claiming thousands of abuse cases a year.

"There can be no guarantees because bad people do bad things when you least expect them," Santoro told Australian television.