I realised I have a sort of explanatory image at hand.

It has a part that is embedded in a mitochondrial membrane and works as a rotor. The other part is sticking out from the membrane and is responsible for synthesis of ATP from ADP and phosphate. An off-axis part of the rotor pushes the stator, it changes shape and pushes ADP and phosphate together, until they fuse to ATP.

To make the rotor move, it makes use of membrane potential. One side of the membrane has a lot more H⁺ (just protons, really) than the other. The excess H⁺ want to go to the other side. The membrane doesn’t let them through. It is hydrophobic on the inside, so it does’t let through anything charged (like H⁺) or polar (like water). This is the potential and it has quite a lot of energy. ATP synthase lets the H⁺ through by binding them to the rotor in the membrane in a particular place and releases them in another in such a way that forces the rotor to turn almost a full turn before they can leave and stops it from rotating the other way. As mentioned, the rotation is transfered to the stator, changing its shape and thus creating ATP. As a side note, multiple H⁺ are bound on the rotor along its circumference, so each rotation is powered by the potential energy of multiple protons.

Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but I don’t think there’s anything downright wrong or misleading in what I wrote. I hope I managed to make it understandable. Also, I recommend animations of the synthase on youtube.

That’s the case for most species.

As a very specific and highly functional example of critical viral proteins in other organisms, there wouldn’t be any placental mammals without viruses. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placenta

Mammalian placentas probably first evolved about 150 million to 200 million years ago. The protein syncytin, found in the outer barrier of the placenta (the syncytiotrophoblast) between mother and fetus, has a certain RNA signature in its genome that has led to the hypothesis that it originated from an ancient retrovirus: essentially a virus that helped pave the transition from egg-laying to live-birth.

I don’t, Musk is too influential. And honestly, I don’t think there needs to be much concern about space launch part of the business. I’m under the impression that it is already regulated enough to be relatively safely under control. And I would be sad to see it taken away from SpaceX and probably even Musk specifically. He is an incredible idiot and dangerous person, but the progress they did and triggered in others is undeniable and I’d like to see it continue.

But Starlink is a completely different matter. Private company strongly lead by a single, somewhat crazy person, is very dangerous. I think few people expected it to be such a game changer in the beginning, I certainly didn’t. But it is important and very influential. Maybe ideal would be if it was controlled by the government, if it had the final say in geopolitical decisions etc., but the profits (or some part), development and such remained in the hands of SpaceX. Well, some international body as isolated from political influence as possible would be even better, but there’s no chance of that happening.

Oh, thank you. I stopped reading when it started to talk about someone else 9 years later, I thought it would be some other controversy. I wish he crowdsourced the $150 though. I wonder how many citations it could have gotten…

And how did it end? Was it published? Did they get off the fucking mailing list? Wikipedia doesn’t say.

I think pokemon used to be an oncosuppressor gene, but since its mutations caused cancer, Pokemon owners threatened (or mayvbe even sued), until the name was changed.

The reason for the 50 years of oil, as I heard it explained, is that this is how far ahead the oil companies plan. They look for enough oil to cover the timeframe they plan for. When they have that covered, they don’t look, until they need more. When they need more, they go and find it.

I use Pocketbook. It opens just about anything - epub, mobi, pdf, pdb, and many more formats. Just get a book anywhere and copy it via USB. Or send it as an email attachment to your special address and it will download automatically. You can even replace the reading app with another relatively easily, if you want.

I thought these were disproved by lack of gravitational microlensing?

Not everyone feels the need to read such articles. I’m glad for this summary. Provided it’s true, but it’s entirely believable.

Frankly? Yes, a bit. I wouldn’t have expected Tesla to make it that high and I would expect Google somewhere near the top. And I guess it focused only on american companies, or I would be much more surprised.

That makes sense. Thanks!

What does the “/s/” mean? Probably not that the “Respectfully” is sarcasm, right?

I didn’t check the calculation, but I guess it assumes perfect conversion of motion to heat. But it’s good to know that if you can get a perfectly static chicken, you can hypersonic-slap it cooked.

Tell me more!

Yes. Behind the toilet.

Do they actually work? I don’t have actual experience, but I heard that they are only used by people who might benefit from them and thus the authors are automatically suspicious to the reviewer, plus you almost always cite your previous papers in a pretty obvious way, so it’s hardly blind anyway.

I relatively often meet 4 of these:

• no speed limit (use the normal limit for this type of road)

• car tires may defy laws of nature (slippery road, usually followed by a sign saying it applies during rain)

• speed camera ahead

• no water polluting goods (not very common, but occasionally comes up. There is also no dangerous materials with an orange trapezoid instead of an ellipse)

I also saw don’t drive off the pier (around ferries), watch for skiers (in the mountains with cross-country skiing routes), and warning about planes, although in different design (around airports).

Cool, thanks for the info!