[HN Gopher] 'Turbocharged' Mitochondria Power Birds' Epic Migrat...
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'Turbocharged' Mitochondria Power Birds' Epic Migratory Journeys
Author : rbanffy
Score : 83 points
Date : 2025-05-21 14:11 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| parpfish wrote:
| It's interesting how "turbo" has had so much semantic drift that
| people don't even know it's a specific component in an engine.
| They just think it means "fast". Wouldn't be surprised to
| eventually see a "turbo" trim levels for EVs someday.
| neogodless wrote:
| https://finder.porsche.com/us/en-US/details/porsche-macan-tu...
|
| Too late.
| tim333 wrote:
| Although that is an electric equivalent of an actual turbo
| car rather than just trim.
| neogodless wrote:
| Well, the Taycan is electric only, and has a Turbo trim!
|
| https://www.porsche.com/usa/models/taycan/taycan-
| models/tayc...
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Was gonna say, do they know how turbos work?
| 762236 wrote:
| With the right level of abstraction, we can say that there's
| only one of four fundamental forces generating the birds' and
| engine work, electromagnetism, and so maybe can work a
| relationship about turbos in that way.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Flight relies on gravity. And I wouldn't want to be a bird
| experiencing a sudden loss of the Strong or Weak force.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| In fairness, they put "turbocharged" in quotes.
| jchw wrote:
| Using "turbocharged" as a metaphor for something being made
| faster seems reasonable enough to me. Not all engines have
| turbochargers, installing one makes it perform better by
| improving combustion, profit? Of course I'm not a car person so
| my understanding of an ICE is pretty surface level, but it
| seems like a decent metaphor.
|
| I'm not sure _most_ people knew what a turbocharger was to
| begin with.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| but thats the semantic drift right?
|
| imagine if i said something like, "after removing all
| extraneous weight and safety features, my car has been
| turbocharged."
|
| kinda nonsensical imo, if someone said this i'd just assume
| they lacked a thesaurus
| neogodless wrote:
| > The scientists found that birds experiencing the
| "migration" condition had more mitochondria, and that those
| mitochondria had a greater capacity to make energy (opens a
| new tab), compared to those in the "nonmigratory" birds. This
| suggested that during migration, the birds' mitochondria are
| "turbocharged," Coulson said.
|
| So this isn't too terrible. It's a bit more like
| _overclocking_ than turbocharging.
|
| A typical ICE turbocharger is a recycler - the exhaust gases
| are used to spin the turbo which in turn forces air/oxygen
| into the combustion chamber (cylinder) at a faster rate,
| which can be tuned alongside fuel intake for increased power.
|
| Of course, this tends to be _harder_ on the engine and must
| be accounted for in engine design. It 's not free, and you
| don't want every engine to be turbo.
|
| And rather than be good for _endurance_ it 's really good for
| bursts of power.
| hinkley wrote:
| Rocket engines have turbochargers that run before primary
| combustion. Just to make things more confusing.
| neogodless wrote:
| Presumably _not_ off exhaust?
|
| In automobiles, if they are powered by something other
| than exhaust (e.g. electricity) are called
| "superchargers."
|
| Ah quick web search, I believe they do run off exhaust
| using "pre-burners" that burn before the burn.
| hinkley wrote:
| They make their own exhaust in a little combustion
| chamber and use it to blast fuel into the primary at
| ridiculous volumes. SpaceX is unique in that none of the
| pre burn is wasted. It all ends up back in the bell
| instead of leaving out the side. The soviets invented it
| but it never made it to production. I think it flew once
| and exploded.
| mulmen wrote:
| I'm not sure I would say the exhaust is wasted just
| because it doesn't go into the main combustion chamber.
| The exhaust of the turbo fuel pump on one Saturn V F-1
| engine provides more thrust than an F-16 in afterburner.
|
| The Raptor is the first operational Full Flow Staged
| Combustion rocket engine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki
| /Staged_combustion_cycle#Full...
| zardo wrote:
| > Not all engines have turbochargers, installing one makes it
| perform better by improving combustion, profit?
|
| There are many ways you can make an engine faster. To me the
| choice of "turbocharger" implies some parallel to the
| turbochargers actual function, extracting energy from a waste
| product to process input material at a higher rate.
| hinkley wrote:
| "Blown" is often more accurate but it sounds dirty.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| kinda double weird when ATP synthase is said to be a molecular
| turbine.
|
| we put a turbo in your turbo
| hinkley wrote:
| Not enough people are old enough to get the more accurate
| analogy which would be multiple carburetors.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| One of my all time favorite molecules. Up there with Actin
| and DNA itself.
|
| Biology is crazy, man.
| SoleilAbsolu wrote:
| Haha as a car enthusiast, whenever I see "turbo" my next
| thought is always the inherent downside, "turbo lag" (the non-
| zero time it takes for the turbo to actually kick in)!
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm a little surprised we don't have mild hybrids with
| blowers on them.
|
| Split the turbocharger into a recovery unit, genset, a
| supercharger and a battery and no more lag.
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| Weight, size, cost, and loss of efficiency.
|
| There are better things you could do to increase engine
| performance that are lighter, smaller, and cheaper.
|
| Also of you really really want to defeat turbo lag. The
| easiest way is to seriously delay ignition timing so the
| fuel is still burning as it enters the turbine leaving more
| energy for it to extract and therefore staying spooled up.
|
| edit: Not to say your idea wouldn't work, indeed I'd love
| to see it. Its just not a practical solution. Not that In
| ever let practicality stop me.
|
| Edit to the edit:
| https://dieselnet.com/tech/engine_whr_turbocompound.php
|
| https://www.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/pdfs/deer_2004
| /...
|
| So, ya know, disregard everything above.
| hinkley wrote:
| There's been talk for years of just scavenging energy
| from the exhaust for hybrid drivetrains. To power the
| peripherals if nothing else.
|
| Part of it is that there's another reason besides a turbo
| to have a little extra energy left in the exhaust:
| thermal catalysis of noxious chemicals in the exhaust
| flow. So there's a bit of unburned fuel going to the cat
| for emissions control and people have wondered if we can
| take some of it back after the converter. For a while
| every time there was a breakthrough in solid state heat
| recovery someone mentioned vehicle exhaust.
| xeonmc wrote:
| So like the MGU-H? Or the new always-stoichiometric 911?
| gherkinnn wrote:
| You're behind the times, turbo has drifted (heh) far in to
| meaning 'fast' of sorts:
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal
|
| - https://www.specialized.com/il/en/turbo-
| levo-4-pro/p/4218703...
|
| - https://turbo.hotwired.dev (Drifts right back to turbo
| charger, but using one as the logo)
|
| Or it can be used to amplify as in "Turbo Clippy":
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42865194
| hinkley wrote:
| Don't forget the turbo button, which is almost as old as
| turbo pascal.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I'm curious did anyone here have a turbo button that
| actually did speed up performance? My 386SX had a turbo
| button but all it did was turn on a light.
| acdha wrote:
| It varied but the older ones definitely had a visible
| impact if you had something CPU bound running. There was
| an old helicopter-themed game my dad had which would
| start running impossibly fast because everything was
| based on cycle counts rather than actual time.
| hinkley wrote:
| I was disappointed to discover that the screen scrolling
| in Warcraft III was too fast to make large maps usable. I
| was so excited to find that game used and I couldn't play
| it in the early 00's.
| hinkley wrote:
| For most of us it was a misnomer because it was a lag
| button not a turbo button. It defaulted to on. If you
| turned it off it would make the machine slower, allowing
| certain programs to run properly instead of too fast for
| humans.
|
| But we all have stories of a friend whose machine was
| slow because they hit the button not understanding what
| it does. For them it did become the turbo button.
| ajb wrote:
| It seems like mitochondria research is going to have a lot of
| impact over the next decades. For example, apparently some people
| with fatigue diseases have damaged mitochondria (eg, Dianna
| Cowern aka ThePhysicsGirl who has had a terrible long COVID
| illness)
| parpfish wrote:
| mitochondria is the powerhouse of the fatigue research
| Aurornis wrote:
| > apparently some people with fatigue diseases have damaged
| mitochondria (eg, Dianna Cowern aka ThePhysicsGirl who has had
| a terrible long COVID illness)
|
| In these conditions it's more likely that mitochondrial
| dysfunction is part of the chain of events leading to the
| fatigue, not necessarily the root cause of the condition.
|
| Also I have to tread very lightly on this topic to avoid giving
| the wrong idea: Be a little cautious when taking statements
| about Long COVID and ME/CFS from individuals, as it's not
| uncommon for people to present hypotheses as more concrete than
| the research suggests. With all due respect to Dianna Cowern,
| some of her past updates on the topic have blurred the lines
| between conjecture and fact and she's collaborated with at
| least one Long COVID / ME/CFS organization that is known for
| having members that are sometimes less than scientific about
| their personal theories. It's a very difficult and complex
| topic and it can be hard for patients to stay on top of all the
| different directions the research is looking.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| In these conditions it's more likely that mitochondrial
| dysfunction is part of the chain of events leading to the
| fatigue, not necessarily the root cause of the condition.
|
| Can you elaborate, what is this based on?
| treyd wrote:
| To rephrase, it's possible she already had an underlying
| mitochondrial dysfunction that was not caused by COVID, but
| then when she caught the virus it triggered some
| symptomatic metabolic dysfunction that's persisting even
| after she cleared the virus. This kind of thing is known to
| happen in some people with some viral diseases, but it's
| poorly understood.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Mitochondria might be involved, but the impairment might be
| the result of some other factor.
|
| In other words, it could be more of a symptom than a root
| cause.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| What would be the root cause then?
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| More grant funding needed to answer.
| ajb wrote:
| Makes sense. To be fair, I don't think Diana claimed that
| that was the root cause, only that her mitochondrial function
| was "f'd".
| smj-edison wrote:
| Thank you for posting this :) I've have chronic fatigue for 6
| years, and yeah, there's tons of uncertainty here (if there
| was an easy answer we would've all used it by now, lol).
| ME/CFS overlaps a lot with long covid, but there's also
| common comorbidities that further muddy the picture (MCAS,
| POTS, ehler-danlos syndrome, CCI, fibromyalgia, etc).
|
| The #1 sign of ME/CFS is post-exertional malaise, which is a
| _delayed_ crash after even mild exertion, with the crash
| arriving anywhere from 4-48 hours later, and lasts for days
| after. Exertion can be taking a shower, thinking hard, etc.
|
| I just recently ruled out ME/CFS for me personally after
| figuring out that I don't have delayed crashes, but I still
| haven't figured out source of the fatigue (potentially
| MCAS?).
|
| Feel free to ask any questions :)
| Aurornis wrote:
| MCAS is actually one of the trending diagnoses that has
| attracted a lot of misinformation and misdiagnosis.
|
| Specialists who treat MCAS are overwhelmed by referrals and
| requests from patients who don't meet the criteria or don't
| have any basic lab work that suggests MCAS. Many of the
| diagnoses from primary care or self-diagnoses are from
| people who have been led to believe that it explains their
| vague symptoms. There are also a lot of people who believe
| they have MCAS despite negative labs, non-traditional
| symptoms and a non-response to medication, which is another
| way of saying they probably don't have it.
|
| So watch out. It's trending among doctors who dabble in
| alternative medicine or who use it as a catch-all
| explanation for vague symptoms, but the social media
| version of MCAS has diverged from the medical definition.
|
| Ehlers-Danlos is another self-diagnoses that is spreading
| in these communities. This one is so bad that actual
| Ehlers-Danlos specialists have difficulty sorting through
| referral requests because so many people and even doctors
| think it explains vague symptoms. It's also trending
| heavily on TikTok.
|
| CCI was briefly popular as an explanation due to a few high
| profile influencers. For a few years everyone was demanding
| imaging and sending it to one of a few doctors who
| specialized in it. Unfortunately those doctors were found
| to be excessively quick to diagnose. There were a lot of
| people on forums who rushed into those surgeries with no
| improvement at all.
|
| Be really careful on the forums. When people start claiming
| they have a long list of hard to diagnose conditions (MCAS,
| Ehlers-Danlos, CCI, etc) all at once it's more likely that
| they've been either self-diagnosing with each trend or they
| have a doctor who will confirm any vague diagnosis they
| suggest. These things come in waves of popularity and you
| can tell when some of these people joined the social media
| circles by their list of self-diagnoses. Sadly, so much
| time has been wasted on chasing dead end diagnoses that
| spread via social media.
| smj-edison wrote:
| Thanks for the warning :) I have responded to mast cell
| stabilizers and H1/H2 blockers, which is one reason I'm
| pursuing further treatment. I've also read Dr. Afrin's 70
| page paper of MCAS diagnosis, so I have a pretty good
| idea of what is and isn't MCAS. After 6 years of pursuing
| and failing to find treatment, I've also got fairly good
| at avoiding quacks...
|
| > There are also a lot of people who believe they have
| MCAS despite negative labs, non-traditional symptoms and
| a non-response to medication
|
| Will agree on non-response, but typical the typical blood
| test (tryptase) is not accurate in many cases[2]: "For
| example, in contrast to proliferative mastocytosis which
| usually drives significantly elevated tryptase levels,
| relatively non-proliferative MCAS usually presents with
| normal tryptase levels;"
|
| > When people start claiming they have a long list of
| hard to diagnose conditions (MCAS, Ehlers-Danlos, CCI,
| etc)
|
| Yes and no. [1] is a recent review that finds that these
| things really are quite comorbid with ME/CFS. All of them
| at once? Probably not, but a couple is common.
|
| [1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.27.24
| 317656v...
|
| [2] https://www.mastcellaction.org/assets/_/2021/09/18/b7
| 4c0e90-...
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| I really hope so.
|
| I went through a bout of cronic fatigue after a nose surgery
| that lasted ~4 months and it was utter hell. It really feels
| like the life has been drained from your body and on top of
| that, random things go wrong with your body seemingly every
| day. One day you'll have strange stomach bloating and feel
| nauseous, another day you'll barely be able to stand without
| fainting, another day you'll feel heart palpitations, etc.
|
| What made it so much harder to deal with was it's an invisible
| illness. Nobody knows about it, and it generally doesn't show
| up on tests. The only test that showed anything significant was
| a tilt-table test where I fainted in the middle of it.
|
| Otherwise I went to the hospital multiple times because I
| thought I was having a heart attack, I've had doctors get angry
| at me for "wasting their time", thinking I'm faking it, and
| friends/family not understanding.
|
| Not to mention having to pretend everything was fine at work.
| There were times I had to lie down on the bathroom floor to
| keep myself from fainting or due to heart palpitations. Luckily
| we had clean, private bathrooms.
|
| As I said, I slowly got better over the course of months, and
| not everyone is that lucky unfortunately. Honestly if I didn't
| get better I probably wouldn't be here to write this...
|
| Not to trauma dump but a lot of people don't know about these
| illnesses or think they're fake so I wanted to relay my
| experience.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Sounds horrible! I'm glad you recovered!
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| Thanks! This was years ago so thankfully I'm well past it.
| aurizon wrote:
| Some longevity researchers could investigate the DNA sequence of
| the mitochondrial DNA(a discrete object) to see if there is a
| length of life correlation = CRISPR edit towards longer life. It
| would be easily explored in mice and then there could be some
| edits in an egg very soon after fertilisation to replace that
| mitochondrial DNA in that egg to see the result. Might be a hard
| task to find/replace all these mitochondria and maintain life? In
| a single mouse egg = how many are there? A search finds this
| interesting paper = a good rabbit hole indeed. It is an area of
| intense research.
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4684129/
| reubenswartz wrote:
| There are ~100,000 mitochondria in a human egg cell-- I think
| that's a pretty tall order.
| aurizon wrote:
| Yes, I suspect is starts with extra metabolic capability =
| greater need for the task it is being prepared for. Since
| women have all their oocytes from an early age - speculating
| they might mature for fallopian release, and in that
| maturation mitochondrial proliferation occurs? Alternatively
| this might occur at puberty with hormonal triggering oocytes
| in some sequential manner as evolutionary efficiency might be
| a 'just in time' process?
| koeng wrote:
| It's doable
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33530-3
|
| 100,000 x 6kbp == 600 million, or less than 1/5 of our
| genome. Difficult part is the barcoding bits, but that is not
| THAT hard.
| koeng wrote:
| We are not able to modify human mitochondria other than with
| TALENs or ZFNs - CRISPR doesn't work (can't import the sgRNA).
| Even that doesn't work that well. We have not been able to
| genetically transform human mitochondria. It's a big open
| question of how we could do it. In yeast you use a gene gun
| because they can actually survive it, and even that is
| exponentially harder than normal yeast engineering.
|
| Hundreds to thousands of mitochondria per cell. They also
| encode pretty few genes, and those genes are mainly there
| because they directly get injected into the membranes. There
| are like a thousand mitochondrial genomes per nuclear genome,
| each with only ~10 genes that repair each other, while the
| nucleus has literally thousands of mitochondrial genes in two
| copy. Much easier to look at that
| jonplackett wrote:
| Would be interesting if there's some trigger hormone or other
| mechanism that triggers turbo mode. It'll be being used in the
| Tour de France in no time if so.
|
| (FYI I'm not a biologist and have no idea what I'm talking about)
| xg15 wrote:
| Also if this is something that is specific to the birds'
| mitochondria or could be triggered in mitochondria of any
| species.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| We've been evolutionarily divergent for at least a hundred
| million years so it seems slim, but not zero.
|
| Also don't forget that mitochondria have _their own genome_
| and that it's undeniable that the avian mito-dna lineage
| would also experience Darwinian (haha, apt) forces spurring
| the developments of these capabilities that our ancestors
| didn't go through.
| mulmen wrote:
| > We've been evolutionarily divergent for at least a
| hundred million years so it seems slim, but not zero.
|
| But how much has our mitochondria differed in that time?
| sigmaisaletter wrote:
| "With few exceptions, all animal mitochondrial genomes
| contain the same 37 genes: two for rRNAs, 13 for proteins
| and 22 for tRNAs. (...) the comparison of animal
| mitochondrial gene arrangements has become a very
| powerful means for inferring ancient evolutionary
| relationships, since rearrangements appear to be unique,
| generally rare events that are unlikely to arise
| independently in separate evolutionary lineages."
|
| Source: Boore (1999) Animal mitochondrial genomes.
| Nucleic Acids Res. 1999 Apr 15;27(8):1767-1780
|
| Hyperlink:
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC148383/
|
| i.e. mtDNA changes a lot less than our "normal" cell
| nucleus nDNA
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Mitochondria Are More Than Powerhouses-They 're the Motherboard
| of the Cell_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44052909
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| One of the interesting findings in the article's linked paper was
| that vitamin E is an effective dietary antioxidant (in birds) but
| only if they do 2 hours of cardio per day.
| koeng wrote:
| Fun fact: respiration is what really caused eukaryogenesis and
| the ability for multicellular life to occur. If archaea (what our
| nuclear genomes are derived from) weren't being kinda weird in
| the deep ocean, we would never have existed. Bacteria and archaea
| (other than eukaryote ancestor) have never created multicellular
| life. And it's because respiration. (cross posting below from my
| comment on another thread)
|
| For efficient respiration, you need to have the
| translation/transcription of certain ATP synthase genes near to
| the membrane for basically JIT-ing them when ready to maintain
| membrane potential, and hence energy generation. Otherwise, the
| membrane potential falls apart. This simple need is why there are
| zero multicellular bacteria and multicellularity evolved 6 times
| in eukaryotes. By decoupling the rest of the genome from the JIT
| bits (ie, mitochondrial DNA), you can scale energy independently
| of genetic information. So if you need 1000x the energy, you need
| like 5% more DNA (mitochondrial DNA) instead of 1000x more DNA in
| your genome.
|
| Some estimates say that our eukaryotic genes are in charge of
| 5000x more energy than the equivalent bacterial gene. Hence, our
| genomes can inflate that much and its fine. And they have. All
| that inflation lets us have bullshit hang around in our genome,
| and hey, sometimes evolution figures out something to do with all
| that bullshit. We evolved 1000x more complexity than bacteria
| because we decoupled the performance code from the rest of the
| code.
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