Airmid

Well, horses have been (and still are) a very important prey animal for ....... humans. There's plenty of archeological sites that date from the ice last age where horse bones have been found. Also there are beautiful cave paintings of horses along with other prey animals. Some people still live off horses, for instance the nomads in Mongolia, though they are tame now and it's mostly horse's milk that they use. So I guess, if the horse never had evolved, we wouldn't be here to wonder about it *grins* Airmid.

Nope, I wouldn't. But don't worry, I have no intention to actually carry out experiments like that in my kitchen. *grins* Airmid.

Becky, I'm not quite sure what you exactly want to know, but I'll give it a try anyway. Amylase is an enzyme that is used to break down starch into sugar. It can be found in humans (your saliva is quite full of it!) but also in bacteria and fungi. Not all bacteria have amylase, it depends on their diet. But if they have it, it usually can be found where it's needed, so that can be anywhere in the bacterial cell. Some bacteria are very clever and digest the starch before they even eat it. They transport their amylase outside their cell and let it do it's work there. After that, they take up the sugar and process that further inside their cell. I'm not quite sure about fungi, but I suppose it works exactly the same way. Does that help? Airmid.

Thanks for your replies, folks! jdurg: ah yes, thanks for reminding me about polarity *crosses out some of entries on the idea list*. DV8: thanks! *adds another entry to the idea list* I'm currently looking into the possibilities of mixing liquid H2S and liquid SO2. At high temperatures they react, but it's quite a nice reaction, creating water and elemental sulfur. I haven't found anything yet about their behaviour at very low temperatures, though. Do you think there's any chance they might form an eutectic mix? Airmid.

Hi Rugged, Your idea to make ATP is not bad at all, I'd say! Here's a very simplified description of how plants generate ATP: There's an enzyme called ATP synthase that is embedded in a membrane. There's a pool of ADP and phosphate on one side of the membrane, and some of it stick to the enzyme. To get ATP, the ADP and phosphate must be welded together, and the cell uses a cunning plan to accomplish this. It actually creates an electric potential over the membrane, which attracts protons (H+ ions) to cross the membrane. The only spot where the protons can cross it, is through the ATP synthase enzyme. The flow of protons through the enzyme generates enough energy to weld the ADP and phosphate together. When ATP is "used up", it gets split up again in ADP and phosphate. So it can be used again to generate new ATP. So there you go, with some of the natural enzyme and a membrane your machine would already work! You could think of ATP synthase as a kind of energy converter: it converts electrical energy (the electrical potential) into chemical energy (ATP). You also asked how fast this would work, and that's a more difficult question. The speed of the enzyme is not a problem, since enzymes typically work very fast. But of course, when the enzyme does not have a plentiful supply of ADP and phosphate, it can't do much work. Also, if there's a lot of ATP present around the enzyme, it will stop working. So your job will be to make sure the newly made ATP is transported away from the enzyme, to the place where the energy is needed, and to return the ADP and phosphate to the enzyme. If you'd like more information, try to look up "ATP synthase" or "chemiosmosis". Good luck! Airmid.

Hi folks! Reading through this forum I was amazed to find so many nice and knowledgeable people in one spot. So what better place than this to ask my question? Here goes: I'm looking for a substance that's liquid between 120K-170K, that's capable of dissolving water(ice) and other simple (organic) molecules, and that's not too rare. I already looked into the well documented mixture of ammonia and water, but it doesn't really seem to work for my temperature range. H2S mixed with water looked promising, until I hit a reference that it doesn't really mix with water but forms a clathrate instead (is that correct?). Next I tried to find information about substance like CS2, OCS, H2CS and the like, but couldn't really find any relevant information about how they behave as liquids and solvents at low temperatures. Do you think these are promising, or could you point me to information about them? Do you have other ideas? Thanks! Airmid.