John Michael Strubhart’s Kindle Notes & Highlights for Wonders of Life: Exploring the Most Extraordinary Phenomenon in the Universe (Wonders Series)

This demonstration illustrates one of the most important chemical processes in living things: the use of proton gradients, or waterfalls. A high concentration of protons on one side of a membrane can be used to power things – in this case, an electric motor. Proton gradients occur quite naturally on Earth, and Taal’s twin lakes are a geologically spectacular example. The acidic inner lake, primed by bubbling volcanic gases, is a reservoir of protons – the top of a waterfall. Taal’s outer lake is mildly alkaline, owing to the reaction of the water with the rocks of the shore. This is the bottom ...more

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SEARCHING FOR EDEN: A WARM LITTLE POND…

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These vents provide the most compelling scientific vision of Eden: high concentrations of organic materials, held in what chemists would call the far-from-equilibrium conditions of proton waterfalls, mean that complex chemistry emerges quite naturally. And, so the theory goes, this is the reason why all life on Earth today shares the same predisposition for proton gradients. It always did! Our common ancestor was not a cell, nor even some kind of simpler free-living thing, but a set of chemical reactions occurring inside a small chamber of rock, rich in organics and lined with naturally ...more

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UNIVERSAL LIFE

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Cells are divided into two distinct types: eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Prokaryotic cells are the simpler of the two, containing far less cellular machinery and, crucially, lacking a nucleus. This is the structure of the simplest life forms on Earth – the bacteria and archaea. Prokaryotic organisms are almost always unicellular, and provide the clearest living example of how life must have looked and lived during the first 2 billion years of life on Earth. Eukaryotic cells, in comparison, are far more complex machines that emerged only around 2 billion years ago. These cells are the building ...more

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Prokaryotes do not have the machinery needed to produce a bounty of ATP, a necessary luxury for the evolution of complex, multicellular life.

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The mitochondria, with their chemistry echoing early Earth, and their rings of DNA betraying their bacterial origins, are the signpost pointing back to the origin of life in deep ocean vents, powered by energy locked away from Earth’s formation and the deaths of ancient stars. What a beautiful thought.

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PROKARYOTIC AND EUKARYOTIC LIFE

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LIFE AND THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS: SCHRÖDINGER’S PARADOX

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The second law of thermodynamics can be expressed as ‘No process is possible in which the sole result is the absorption of heat from a reservoir and its complete conversion into work.’ This means that it is impossible to build solar panels that are 100 per cent efficient.

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This is a universal law of physics – things tend to get more disordered, because it is overwhelmingly more likely for them to do so.

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FOLLOW THE SUN

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THE ORIGIN OF LIFE’S ORDER

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There is no mystery here; seen as a whole, the entropy of the Universe is increasing, but a little machine such as a chloroplast can do work, using energy supplied to it in a useful form from the Sun, to build an ordered thing, as long as it increases the disorder around it. This is part of the answer to Schrödinger’s paradox.

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Life began in an environment that was out of equilibrium; there were naturally occurring gradients. In the case of the ocean vents, these were proton and temperature waterfalls – hot, alkaline water in contact with a cold, acid ocean. These gradients can provide the thermodynamic imperative for simple chemicals to assemble themselves into more complex ones. In the gradient-rich and ingredient-rich environments of vents, we know that complex molecules such as acetyl thioesters and pyruvate are formed. These are molecules, more complex than glucose, that are used at the heart of life’s metabolic ...more

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Gradients don’t last long in nature as they soon balance out; the ultimate complex system – life – may be just another consequence of this fundamental truth.

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Schrödinger noted that there are two questions arising from life’s intriguing order. We have seen how ordered structures emerge quite naturally, in accord with the laws of thermodynamics, in non-equilibrium conditions. But there is a second question that is equally pressing if we are to seek a full explanation for the complexity of the living things we see today. How did the first, relatively simple biological molecules gradually ratchet up their complexity?

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ONE BIG FAMILY

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Every time one of these cells divides, its DNA must be copied and, despite the gargantuan task of copying 3 billion letters, this process is highly resistant to copying errors. Led by the enzyme DNA polymerase, the chemical machine that does the copying is incredibly accurate, on average making only one mistake in a billion letters. To put that into context, it is like copying out each of the 775,000 words in the Bible around 280 times, and making just one mistake.

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All life on Earth is related – connected through our genetic code. DNA is the blueprint of life, and the keeper of a great story.

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DNA is the blueprint of life, but it is also the keeper of a great story, perhaps the most astonishing story ever told, because our DNA not only connects us to every plant and animal alive today, but to every single thing that has ever lived.

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LIFE-SIZE DIFFERENCES

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SAME PLANET, DIFFERENT WORLD

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OCEAN GIANTS

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The great white is of course one of the world’s iconic predators, and justifiably so. Reaching up to 6 m in length and weighing over 2,000 kg, it has been calculated that this creature bites with a force three times that exerted by the jaws of a fully grown African lion.

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Great whites are armed with an array of adaptations that make them extremely efficient predators. They display a multi-rowed arsenal of continuously growing serrated teeth, and around two-thirds of their brain is taken up by the olfactory lobes, allowing them to detect as little as one part per million of blood in the water. Great whites often approach their prey from below and at high speed; at 32 km/h they can break the surface with such ferocity that their not inconsiderable bulk is launched clean into the air.

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THE PHYSICS OF A KILLER

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There is a dimensionless physical quantity (a pure number, in other words), known as the Reynolds number, which is widely used in the design of aircraft and submarines, and indeed in many problems that involve the flow of gases or liquids around shapes. It is the ratio of the inertial forces on a shape – the difficulty of shifting the fluid out of the way – to the viscous forces – the stickiness.

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where ρ is the density, V is the velocity, μ is the (dynamic) viscosity and D is a quantity related to the cross-sectional area known as the hydraulic diameter.

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Sharks are covered in scales called dermal denticles, near-invisible collagen structures made of the same material as their teeth. They are aligned parallel to the flow of water, and are ribbed with longitudinal grooves, making the surface of the shark more streamlined as it moves through the water. Recent research at the University of Alabama suggests that the denticles may increase the shark’s efficiency through another mechanism. The scales are loosely embedded in the skin, tethered with rubber-band-like tendons, allowing each one to move independently. It is thought that this allows them ...more

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SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL

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ARCHIMEDES’ PRINCIPLE Archimedes’ principle states that the upward buoyancy force on an object immersed in a fluid is equal to the weight of the displaced fluid.