Five is between 4 and 6 and is the third prime number, after 2 and 3, and before 7. Because it can be written as 2^(2^1)+1, five is classified as a Fermat prime. 5 is the third Sophie Germain prime, the first safe prime, and the third Mersenne prime exponent. Five is the first Wilson prime and the third factorial prime, also an alternating factorial. It is an Eisenstein prime with no imaginary part and real part of the form 3n − 1. It is also the only number that is part of more than one pair of twin primes.

Five is conjectured to be the only odd untouchable number.

Every hero needs a flaw. In the case of Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) it’s being a serial killer. Although, that’s not so much his flaw as what makes him a hero. Welcome to the world of Dexter, Showtime’s startling interpretation of Jeff Lindsay’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter novel. On the face of it, a regular guy working in forensics at the Miami-Dade Police Department, specialising in blood spatter analysis, Dexter hides a grim secret from those close to him. He has a talent for murder - not the assassin’s talent or the slasher’s artful blood-lust but rather an addiction to the systemic elimination of bad elements from society. Because Dexter does not murder the innocent - he only kills bad guys. That’s my idea of a hero.

And just like a true hero, Dexter must Clark Kent his way through the world unacknowledged. The product of a troubled childhood, Dexter’s foster father Harry Morgan took the infant Dexter under his care after finding him at the scene of the horrific butchering of his mother. Harry Morgan was a respected cop with good instincts. So when he discovered that Dexter had a “little something missing” psychologically (killing and dissecting the neighbour’s dog was a clue) he knows what needs to be done. To stop the boy from going down a road that ends in lethal injection or electric chair, Harry teaches him to use his inclinations for good, tracking down and killing the monsters who slip through the system’s fingers.

Drunken hit-and-run drivers, black widows, serial killers - all of them meet their end at Dexter’s slice-and-dice emporium of pain. He keeps a sample of their blood on a slide as, like many serial killers, he likes to keep momentos of his victims. And the Miami underworld keeps him supplied with plenty of sickos who’d be better off dead for his hobby and plenty of gruesome blood spattered rooms for his professional life. Dexter is liked and respected at work though it has its complications. He works with his policewoman sister Debra (Jennifer Carpenter), a foul-mouthed feisty bag of bones with poor taste in haircuts and worse taste in men. Then there’s Sergeant Doakes, the no-nonsense head cracker of the precinct who is the only one in the Department who senses something is wrong with Dexter. He’s not afraid to say it out loud either though everyone dismisses it as a clash of personalities (hands up who has suspected a co-worker of being a serial killer?)

Season’s one is main focus is the pursuit of the Ice Truck Killer - a serial killer with a devilish ingenuity to his kills who appears to know Dexter intimately. As each of his murders send an enigmatic message to Dexter showing knowledge of his past, Dexter becomes increasingly obsessed with finding him. His relationship with Ice Truck Killer is almost erotic. As a corpse bearing some of ITK’s trademarked turns up he wonders “Dramatic, cryptic, playful. Could it be him…?”. As alone as any one man in this world can be, Dexter knows that, with foster father Harry long since dead, Ice Truck is the only one alive who understands him.

And you’re constantly left wondering if he wants to discover him to stop him or to simply be understood. For Dexter is an emotionally dissociated individual. He starts a relationship with Rita (Julie Benz), a damaged domestic abuse victim, because she has as many intimacy issues as he. He can act like a normal human but he’s under no illusion about what he is - repeatedly referring to himself in the voice-over as a monster. Voice-over can be a graveyard for clunky exposition but not in this case - Dexter’s bleak insights into himself and the story are always relevant and often witty.

Dexter is one of those dark, intelligent shows you get from time to time that make you feel better about life by showing you bad things. It’s tricky to bring a literary socio path to life but Michael C. Hall does a great job of portraying Dexter’s stunted emotional life and pathological need for control while still retaining an air of the guy you wouldn’t mind having as a neighbour. For his powers must only be used for good. The psychological cat-and-mouse with Ice Truck Killer is enthralling and while it sometimes slips into familiar serial-killer drama territory it’s a genuinely fresh take on the forensic thriller raising any number of complex moral dilemmas. Are we happy with the serial killer as boy-next-door? And will we ever see those meat knives we lent him again?

• The genome is the complete list of coded instructions needed to make a person.
• The 4 letters in the DNA alphabet - A, C, G and T - are used to carry the instructions for making all organisms. The order (or sequence) of these letters holds the code just like the order of letters that makes words mean something. Each set of three letters corresponds to a single amino acid.
• There are 20 different building blocks - amino acids - used in a bewildering array of combinations to produce our proteins. The different combinations make proteins as different as keratin in hair and haemoglobin in blood.
• The information would fill a stack of paperback books 200 feet high.
• The information would fill two hundred 500-page telephone directories.
• Between humans, our DNA differs by only 0.2%, or 1 in 500 bases (letters). (This takes into account that human cells have two copies of the genome.)
• If we recited the genome at one letter per second for 24 hours a day it would take a century to recite the book of life.
• If two different people started reciting their individual books at a rate of one letter per second, it would take nearly eight and a half minutes (500 seconds) before they reached a difference.
• A typist typing at 60 words per minute (around 360 letters) for 8 hours a day would take around 50 years to type the book of life.
• Our DNA is 98% identical to that of chimpanzees.
• The estimated number of genes in both humans and mice is 60,000-100,000; in the round worm (C. elegans), the number is approximately 19,000; in yeast (S. cerevisiae) there are around 6,000 genes; and the microbe responsible for tuberculosis has around 4,000.
• The vast majority of DNA in the human genome - 97% - has no known function.
• The first chromosome to be completely decoded was chromosome 22 at the Sanger Centre (now the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute) in Cambridgeshire, in December 1999.
• There is 6 feet of DNA in each of our cells packed into a structure only 0.0004 inches across (it would easily fit on the head of a pin).
• There are 3 billion (3,000,000,000) letters in the DNA code in every cell in your body.
• There are 100 trillion (100,000,000,000,000) cells in the body.
• If all the DNA in the human body was put end to end it would reach to the sun and back over 600 times (100 trillion x 6 feet divided by 93 million miles = 1200).
• 12,000 letters of DNA are decoded by the Human Genome Project every second.
• If all three billion letters were spread out 1mm apart they would extend 3,000 km or about 7,000 times the height of the Empire State Building.
• If all three billion letters were spread out 3mm apart they would extend 9,000km more than twice the length of the Mississippi river at 3,779km.

Being bored.. the human desire to access as many active processes and learning resources as possible, or to put it negatively, an aversion to boredom caused by redundant specialised activity.