Hopefully Interesting

 Hello, it's been a while since I've written anything and I'll try to do more going forward.  I've had an eventful year, I got engaged shortly after the ball dropped in Times Square, bough a house with my fiance, commenced renovations of the house, got married, and went on a honeymoon in China.  And I thought some of the stuff I saw in China would make a good topic to write about.  There were a bunch of little things about the physical environment that were different, and not just stuff like architectural style. One thing that was present on all the sidewalks and a lot of public buildings was the tactile paving .  It's there to let blind people navigate around by the feel of the ground underneath.  There are lines to show direction of travel and dots for changes in direction, cross walks, and other things to be aware of.  This one was yellow but mostly they're the same color as the rest of the sidewalk. Another thing on the ground where these green arr...

  Introducing the Mitochondria “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” - Variously attributed Everybody learns something about Mitochondria in grade school.  That they are an organelle inside your cells.  That they let your body break down sugar and create ATP using oxygen in a way that’s far more efficient than fermentation without oxygen.  That’s clearly an important role, when we’re drowning, say, and can’t get the oxygen needed for aerobic respiration we die.  However, they’re a lot more than that too.  Mitochondria used to have independent bacterial lives charting their own fates.  That their existence came to be so enmeshed with their hosts is arguably the most unlikely but important event in the history of life on Earth and has some implications. Pump and Dump Aerobic Respiration Essentially all life lives by extracting energy from a difference in the concentration of hydrogen across a lipid membrane.  Let’s say you’re a mitoch...