energy – Quanta Magazine https://www.quantamagazine.org Illuminating science Mon, 16 Sep 2024 14:10:47 -0400 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2 To Be Energy-Efficient, Brains Predict Their Perceptions https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-be-energy-efficient-brains-predict-their-perceptions-20211115/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-be-energy-efficient-brains-predict-their-perceptions-20211115/#respond Mon, 15 Nov 2021 16:42:58 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=110318 The post To Be Energy-Efficient, Brains Predict Their Perceptions first appeared on Quanta Magazine

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How our brain, a three-pound mass of tissue encased within a bony skull, creates perceptions from sensations is a long-standing mystery. Abundant evidence and decades of sustained research suggest that the brain cannot simply be assembling sensory information, as though it were putting together a jigsaw puzzle, to perceive its surroundings. This is borne out by the fact that the brain can...

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Radioactivity May Fuel Life Deep Underground and Inside Other Worlds https://www.quantamagazine.org/radioactivity-may-fuel-life-deep-underground-and-inside-other-worlds-20210524/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/radioactivity-may-fuel-life-deep-underground-and-inside-other-worlds-20210524/#respond Mon, 24 May 2021 15:50:23 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=104743 The post Radioactivity May Fuel Life Deep Underground and Inside Other Worlds first appeared on Quanta Magazine

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Scientists poke and prod at the fringes of habitability in pursuit of life’s limits. To that end, they have tunneled kilometers below Earth’s surface, drilling outward from the bottoms of mine shafts and sinking boreholes deep into ocean sediments. To their surprise, “life was everywhere that we looked,” said Tori Hoehler, a chemist and astrobiologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

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New Clues to Chemical Origins of Metabolism at Dawn of Life https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-clues-to-chemical-origins-of-metabolism-at-dawn-of-life-20201012/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-clues-to-chemical-origins-of-metabolism-at-dawn-of-life-20201012/#respond Mon, 12 Oct 2020 15:00:47 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=94028 The post New Clues to Chemical Origins of Metabolism at Dawn of Life first appeared on Quanta Magazine

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Popular speculations about how life evolved out of a soup of chemicals on the early Earth often focus on the origins of DNA and RNA, the molecules of genetic information. But the genesis of genes is only one of the mysteries that origin-of-life theories must reckon with. Another is the rise of metabolism — the biochemical processes inside cells that make life possible by continuously drawing...

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‘Zombie’ Microbes Redefine Life’s Energy Limits https://www.quantamagazine.org/zombie-microbes-redefine-lifes-energy-limits-20200812/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/zombie-microbes-redefine-lifes-energy-limits-20200812/#respond Wed, 12 Aug 2020 14:05:05 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=90554 The post ‘Zombie’ Microbes Redefine Life’s Energy Limits first appeared on Quanta Magazine

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Energy drives the planet; it’s the currency that all living things use to grow, develop and function. But just how little energy do cells need to get by? Sediment-dwelling microbes below the seafloor — which may outnumber the microbial cells found in the oceans themselves — are providing some surprising answers. The organisms not only challenge what scientists thought they knew about life’s energy...

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Swarming Bacteria Create an ‘Impossible’ Superfluid https://www.quantamagazine.org/swarming-bacteria-create-an-impossible-superfluid-20180726/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/swarming-bacteria-create-an-impossible-superfluid-20180726/#respond Thu, 26 Jul 2018 15:44:28 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=61268 The post Swarming Bacteria Create an ‘Impossible’ Superfluid first appeared on Quanta Magazine

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Outside of the imaginations of physics teachers, frictionless devices are hard to come by. But putting a bunch of swimming bacteria into a drop of water achieves just that: a fluid with zero resistance to motion. Incredibly, that resistance (or viscosity, as it’s properly known) can even go negative, creating a self-propelling liquid that might, say, turn a motor in a way that seems to defy the...

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