ATP synthase in action

What people said

whoisburbansky · 2022-02 · Recommendation

Professor Lue from Harvard has a pretty cool visualization of how ATP synthase uses rotation and the energy produced through cellular respiration to produce ATP at [VIDEO] , slightly more visceral than digging through a paper for a layperson.

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dopylitty · 2022-02 · Recommendation

Motor proteins are so incredibly cool. Like many others I was blown away by the 3D animated Inner Life of the Cell[1] showing these proteins physically walking around in the cell. Previously I had this idea that cells were just blobs of jelly and somehow they interacted with each-other to produce macro phenomena like muscle movement. And then you get into the other protein machines like the ATP synthase in the mitochondria [2] (also linked below) which are actually little motors/pumps. And we all have billions of these inside use spinning away. It's just amazing. 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO]

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kragen · 2025-04 · Reference

It seems like you've misremembered the situation somewhat. Merkle developed several of his families of mechanical logic, including this one, in order to answer some criticisms of Drexler's earliest mechanical nanotechnology proposals. Specifically: 1. Chemists were concerned that rod logic knobs touching each other would form chemical bonds and remain stuck together, rather than disengaging for the next clock cycle. (Macroscopic metal parts usually don't work this way, though "cold welding" is a thing, especially in space.) So this proposal‚ like some earlier ones like Merkle's buckling-spring logic, avoids any contact between unconnected parts of the mechanism, whether sliding or coming into and out of contact. 2. Someone calculated the power density of one of Drexler's early proposals and found that it exceeded the power density of high explosives during detonation, which obviously poses significant challenges for mechanism durability. You could just run them many orders of magnitude slower, but Merkle tackled the issue instead by designing reversible logic families which can dissipate arbitrarily little power per logic operation, only dissipating energy to erase stored bits. So, there's nothing preventing this kind of mechanism from scaling down to single atoms, and we already have working mechanisms like the atomic force microscope which demonstrate that even intermittent single-atom contact can work mechanically in just the way you'd expect it to from your macroscopic in

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