Addy Pross
speaker
120 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Addy Pross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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literally millions of kinetic, potential kinetic states, depending on the proportion of the acid and the ester that you would have in the hydrogel. So if the hydrogel is primarily ester, it'll be more solid in its behavior and its structure. If there is more of the acid in there, it'll be softer. So you can play around with its properties. And guess what?
Life uses that flexibility of kinetic states all the time. In fact, every time you do any motion, you lift your hand, you scratch your nose, whatever, You're actually moving from one dynamic kinetic state. Your cells are moving from one dynamic kinetic state to another, which is more appropriate for the new conditions, which have been induced by, of course, your brain.
And that's already a complicated system. But just to give the simple example that was discovered some years ago that shows how useful this is, is the cytoskeleton. Now, you have a skeleton, and it's fairly rigid in structure, happily. Cells have a skeleton as well, but the skeleton in the cell, the cytoskeleton, needs to have dynamic function in order to suit the cell's requirements.
So sometimes the cell wants a rigid structure, and sometimes it wants a softer one to facilitate transport of material, motion of the cell, and it can play around with that with that structure because it's a DKS system made up. The dynamic system is made up of tubulin dimers and microtubules, the equivalent, the analog of the ester and acid that I spoke about in the simple chemical reaction.
So the cell, if it wants a more solid structure, microtubules largely. If it wants a softer structure, it It degrades the microtubules to tubulin, but this is all continually done in a way that dissipates energy. In other words, this is very important. Just like the fountain is dissipating energy all the time, You put energy in, but of course the energy doesn't disappear.
It dissipates, ends up as heat energy. The body does exactly the same thing, and that's why our body is releasing heat all the time, because the energy that is dissipated ends up in the lowest form of energy, heat energy.
Well, that's a good point. And let me be very clear here that human technology is always way behind natural technology. Nature is so very smart. And I mean, some Nobel Prizes were given out now for artificial intelligence and neural networks. Nature discovered neural networks very, Well, not billions of years ago. Let's say millions of years ago. So that's how it is.
You know, nature is smarter than we are.
Well, Here's the problem. When people have tried to make life, they haven't thought too much about the dynamic state that life is. And they've tried to take chemical stuff, proteins, nucleic acids, to move in that direction. play around with it in the test tube and hopefully move it towards life.
But that doesn't work just in the same way that if you're wandering around on the earth, you can wander around on a horse or walk or in a car. That's not going to get you airborne. That's a new dimension. That's another dimension. And you've got to do something different to access that dimension. And once we found flight, there, transport changed.
It's the same with this new kinetic state of matter. It's the equivalent of flight in that we've discovered, we've accessed a new means of doing things. Nature discovered this new
new dimension of stuff and life is a manifestation of what can be done once you're in that new dimension extraordinary and i hope in the course of our discussion we'll be able to understand how life's most striking characteristics um its purposeful nature It's mental dimension. How can we think? What's going on here? Cognition. Where did all of this come from?
And physics is struggling with that because it's not in the physical description of stuff for stuff to think and to have feelings and to get angry and to be happy, etc.
Yeah, well, people have been making them now in the lab for some years to serve some particular purpose. for a purpose, because once you have these systems, they can be utilized in a functional way. You can, for instance, if you have vesicles, which are in this kind of state with a drug inside, you can activate it and tell it to release. You can trigger it to release the drug.
So you have what has been discovered here as a means of doing what life does to use matter in a more functional way, in a more dynamic, in a more useful way. And that's it. It's a new area in material science which is really just getting started.
But the facet that fascinates me is not the material aspect, but the biological connection, because biology has taken this capability, you know, just so far, because as you say, it's had a lot of time to work on ways of doing that.
Yeah. Well, there have been different theories, of course, of how life began. And the problem is that there hasn't been any real way to check, you know, which is the right one. And an essential part of the problem is that It's hard to understand how it began if you don't know what it is. And I think what we've been talking about is starting to give some more insight into what it is.
So probably the strongest idea for the origin of life began with what was called is the RNA worldview. The RNA worldview, it was discovered some 60 almost 70 years ago that certain molecules have an extraordinary capability they can
replicate they can make copies of themselves actually the mechanism of it is very simple it's not it sounds like dramatic but basically a nucleic acid is a long chain molecule made up of segments now if you put such a molecule in a test tube with lots of the segments the component bits floating around, the component bits tend to be attracted to the long chain molecule, the RNA in this case.
So they latch on in a template type mechanism, and then those segments can join up. And then when the segments that have joined up separate from the original nucleic acid molecule, you end up with two molecules that And the molecule has copied itself.
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