A True Life Hack: What Physical 'Life Force' Turns Biology's Wheels? (quantamagazine.org)
106 points by Prof_Sigmund 2 days ago
pawelduda 2 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 3 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 an hour ago
For explorations of simple mechanisms like this leading to complex behaviour, Valentino Braitenberg’s book Vehicles is a classic.
bryancoxwell 16 minutes ago
Would it do well on a Kindle or does it rely on illustrations?
kranner 3 minutes ago
Almured 7 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 5 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.
anjel 4 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 2 hours ago
Almured 5 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 4 hours ago
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 4 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 6 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
abhikul0 6 hours ago
Relevant Smarter Every Day video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPSm9gJkPxU
bacteriumiu 4 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.
cineticdaffodil an hour 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 ?
zimpenfish 6 hours ago
For some context, a billion years at a 20 minute breeding cycle is 26.3 trillion generations.
ur-whale 5 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 4 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 4 hours ago
Good point, forgot about that. Add another 10-20 zeros?