alt Hacker NewsWhat physical ‘life force’ turns biology’s wheels?
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This reminds me of a gem of a comment from about a month back, about a dead simple Russian guidance system from a Cold War-era missile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389285
Actually, someone even commented in that thread about how it was similar to biological mechanisms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390619
Article stopped exactly where stuff got interesting.
This whole "protons entering bacterium and being pumped out" is exactly the ancestor of the mitochondria, that's what it does, except now the "outside" is the inside of the parent cell.
Visualisation of DNA polymerase enzyme copying mechanism.
Relevant Smarter Every Day video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPSm9gJkPxU
Beautifully written. This doesn’t just explain the flagellar motor — it feels like watching the very “life force” behind biology running on protons and entropy. Amazing how much of life boils down to such elegant physics.
What I find fascinating is the extreme efficiency of what is effectively an electric motor, reaching nearly 100% efficiency. At human scale we struggle with heat dissipation and friction
For some context, a billion years at a 20 minute breeding cycle is 26.3 trillion generations.
at the scale that it operates, the flagella is more a drill than a propeller
there's a good richard feynam video about how things feel when they're that small https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eRCygdW--c
For those who remember, the flagellum was a major site of the Intelligent Design debate that gave us Christopher Rufo (via the Discovery Institute)
The general idea was that there were specific examples of "irreducible complexity" that proved that there was an intelligent designer. The project on the part of certain Christian political factions was to add a veneer of hypothesis testing to creationism. The god of the gaps retreats further
Interesting that humans and bacteria both use an electrochemical gradient to produce energy but in different ways. In humans, this happens in our mitochondria, but in bacteria this occurs across their cytoplasmic membrane. Would you agree this is a result of evolution?
Protons are also called "hydrogen ions." Stuff that donates protons is called an "acid." So this is an acid chemical process but I'm not enough of a chemist to know more than that. Would welcome comments from someone who is.
To not use the motor is to prolong its life? So do not heat your body with the motor?
Also can work as atp generator by applying rotation ?
Truly mind blowing. A few days ago I found this animation [1] that shows it in motion
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/educationalgifs/comments/17squg1/ho...