Want your mind boggled? Here’s a little information I picked up along the way to 2017. In your body there are around a hundred trillion cells. Inside each cell there are over twenty compartments separated by membrane walls, like the rooms in your home. Each room has a specific function. There are rooms for the mitochondria to create energy, energy storage rooms, rooms to create protein, rooms to store protein for transportation, fat digestion rooms, even rooms to store garbage created in the process.

Protein is created in certain rooms by molecular machines called ribosomes. Ribosomes have some fifty molecules each containing more than one million atoms. This is just who they are, not what they can do. They “can construct any protein based biological machine, including another ribosome, regardless of the complexity.” They do it all the time. They do it in just minutes. And that’s any of about 20,000 proteins, as needed.

There is also a complex transportation system to get material from room to room. There are designated pathways, little protein highways and molecular trucks with tiny motors. There is an information system that tells the trucks where to go, what to transport, and where to transport it, and little tickets that tell each protein where to get off. (Haven’t you ever wanted to just tell a protein where to get off.)

The motors on the molecular trucks are called flagellum and they can spin at ten thousand RPM’s, stop spinning within a quarter turn, and spin the other way at the same speed. (They’re about 2/20,000th of an inch small.)

The information that guides all these processes is in the nucleus of each cell, in a strip of DNA about six feet long, somehow crammed in there. One molecular machine unwinds sections of the DNA, another copies information, and RNA (not sure just where it came from) transports the info to the ribosomes, which use the information to build sequenced chains of amino acids hundreds of units long like miniature coal trains. (Here you are allowed to relax, and put on some Coltrane. Your hundred trillion cells will keep on working)

The protein train then gets folded into shapes critical to its function by molecular folding machines and shipped off to where it is needed. Now I think I know what that sound in my ears is. It’s the whirring of thousands of trillions of flagellum all spinning at once.

Why is this important. It’s not really. That’s why it’s here in Pseudo News. But considering how purposefully you have been constructed, you might just want to reconsider that New Year’s resolution. I mean, “I’m gonna quit eating so much?” Surely we can all be a little more purposeful this year.

Happy New Year everyone,

Larry Berger

Biochemical information from the book, “The Case for a Creator” by Lee Strobel.