Hmm, I was reading an article in my Biological Sciences where I came across an article about the uses of seaweed. Well, the interesting thing about seaweed is that is contains agarose instead of cellulose like most plants so the cell walls are made out of that. Okay, not interesting to you guys and I didn't think it was at first, just hold on; it gets better. Well, we get the important substance of agar jelly (also known as agar agar for some strange reason) which is important in growing bacteria cultures and we can't find any other replacement to date.

Anyways, we also get carrageenans, an algal polysaccaride (that's carbohydrate to you and me), and this is where it gets interesting. Sulfate groups on this particular polysaccaride cause electrostatic interactions with other molecules - particularly proteins. So, that makes it an ideal food additive so it's algae that keeps your chocolate milkshakes from layering out too much and thickens soya milk to the same kind of constituency of whole milk etc, etc. So you may be wondering why I'm still rabbiting on about this. Well the other uses of carrageenan is to form carrageenan-based gels such as (and here's where it ties into the title) sexual lubricants and a topical microbiocide which can block some sexually transmitted viruses (a noteable example is herpes). So yeah, very interesting stuff. You probably won't look at chocolate milk in the same way but you gained an interesting bit of trivia.

Oh and whilst I was at 's birthday bash we played Trivial Pursuit. We concluded that the writers of the questions were Simpsons fans, like the Eminem song 'Stan' and had a peculiar obsession with condoms. Anyways, take care now lovies!