A True Life Hack: What Physical 'Life Force' Turns Biology's Wheels?

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PProf_Sigmund 2 days ago 31 commentsRead Article on quantamagazine.org

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pawelduda•about 7 hours ago

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...

djokkataja•about 8 hours ago

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

kranner•about 6 hours ago

For explorations of simple mechanisms like this leading to complex behaviour, Valentino Braitenberg’s book Vehicles is a classic.

bryancoxwell•about 5 hours ago

Would it do well on a Kindle or does it rely on illustrations?

kranner•about 5 hours ago

Definitely relies on illustrations.

The author passed away 15 years ago so I will mention the PDF of the book shows up in the first few search results on Google.

sandworm101•about 5 hours ago

Simple spin-scan but with a rolling airframe. The technique is still used today. It is simple only if one looks at individual components. The total package is a different beast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-116_Rolling_Airframe_Missi...

FleursDuMal•about 1 hour ago

https://allpoetry.com/The-Force-That-Through-The-Green-Fuse-...

abhikul0•about 10 hours ago

Relevant Smarter Every Day video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPSm9gJkPxU

bacteriumiu•about 9 hours ago

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.

Almured•about 12 hours ago

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

ssivark•about 10 hours ago

But at the same time the motor is extremely finicky/fragile in the source of energy (negentropy) it will accept, while natural life is extremely hardy and adaptable.

I wonder how much of machine-like "efficiency" is actually "overfitting" at the cost of robustness.

justonceokay•about 4 hours ago

Who are we to say the mechanisms of biology are “overfit”? Maybe it would be nice if our personal machinery was more robust, but that robustness comes at an evolutionary cost. The greater force that is life on earth as a system for regulating planetary energy dissipation does not care about the needs of the individual. It does not care about the fashions of the millennia. Its sights are set much farther and its history much deeper than that

anjel•about 8 hours ago

For more complicated organisms, robustness comes in the form of cellular turnover, and regenerative healing in response to injury, at least in youth. I wonder though if single celled organisms have or even need such a function.

brazzy•about 7 hours ago

Individual cells absolutely do have mechanisms to repair damage: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5664224/

They can even repair their own DNA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_repair

Almured•about 9 hours ago

That is a fair point to be honest! I guess when you a 20min lifetime you can probably compromise on reliability in favour of extra efficiency

01HNNWZ0MV43FF•about 9 hours ago

Every race, the engine of a top-fuel dragster only completes about 900 revolutions and then has to be rebuilt! https://www.motortrend.com/features/top-fuel-dragsters

01HNNWZ0MV43FF•about 9 hours ago

The need to reproduce and repair our bodies is a big trade-off.

Electric motors are sort of like hermit crab shells - Hard and long-lasting, but they only exist because they piggyback off of a living species.

pazimzadeh•about 11 hours ago

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

zimpenfish•about 10 hours ago

For some context, a billion years at a 20 minute breeding cycle is 26.3 trillion generations.

ur-whale•about 9 hours ago

> For some context, a billion years at a 20 minute breeding cycle is 26.3 trillion generations.

Which if you want an actual feel for the true scale of things, must be multiplied by (order of magnitude) the number of bacteriums on the planet.

f6v•about 9 hours ago

> Which if you want an actual feel for the true scale of things

The caveat is that more zeros do nothing for our comprehension of the scale. That's the problem because most people can't comprehend how evolution is even possible. We just don't have a mental model for a trillion, it's all the same to us after a certain threshold.

zimpenfish•about 9 hours ago

Good point, forgot about that. Add another 10-20 zeros?

bgilroy26•about 2 hours ago

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

svieira•about 1 hour ago

Doesn't "irreducible complexity" here mean "it wouldn't function in any reduced form", e. g. "it would not be possible to build this up in tiny parts useful for other things and then have those things transformed into these things by tiny accretions and removals over the course of the lifespans of these creatures."? The article doesn't cite anything that would suggest that this argument is any less relevant now that we understand how the system works than it was before we understood it at this level.

cineticdaffodil•about 6 hours ago

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 ?