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Have you ever wondered, maybe when you’re already desperately trying to untie a stubborn knot, why things get tangled up instead of behaving the way we need them to?
No matter how careful you are, things like smartphone headphones, the hose with which you water the plants in the garden, the cables from the hair dryer … even the hair itself sometimes demands our attention at times. where it is difficult to give them.
Maybe to console ourselves we can turn to science and take advantage of Second law of thermodynamics which states that all closed systems tend to maximize entropy, a measure of disorder.
The Universe, in short, tends towards chaos.
But if that doesn’t satisfy you, tangles might not be so boring anymore if, when you untangle them, you keep in mind that they are essential to life … literally: are in the DNA.
Natural disorder
Remember in advance that all nodes are not the same. Some can be incredibly useful in saving lives.
Although today most of us only learned to tie our laces, in the past we learned to tie multiple knots. it was an essential skill.
Knots are actually a technology that our ancestors discovered before the wheel. Without them, you cannot weave fabric or tie a flint head on a stick.
And while it is true that in modern life it is not really necessary to make your own spears, for certain groups, like fishermen, sailors, surgeons or tailors, still crucial know how to tangle your strings.
However, even they probably run into annoying knots every now and then … why do they appear when you don’t want them?
Well, there is a scientist who has been looking for answers.
Doug Smith is professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego. A few years ago, he had a deceptively simple experiment with one of his undergraduate students.
The study earned him a Ig Nobel, a prize awarded to science that makes you laugh, then that makes you think.
He wanted to understand why the knots formed spontaneously and, following the scientific method, they dropped pieces of rope of different kinds into a box which was shaken by a motor.
About 3000 times later, they found that “the longer and more flexible the rope, the more likely it is for knots to form,” which is why, no matter how hard you try, it’s almost guaranteed that when you take your earphone cables out of your bag or the Christmas lights out of the box you put them in last year, they’re going to get tangled.
And something that makes it worse is twisting, according to the RAE, “the action and effect of twisting or twisting something in a helical fashion.”
That is, take a cable that you have on hand and hold it taut with your fingers at two points. Begins to twist one end; you will see that it waves and even forms a side branch.
“When twist is introduced into cables, even unintentionally, energy is converted and causes them to bend. And it is very difficult to prevent that from happening.
“The more it twists, the more impossible it is to untangle it,” says Smith.
One of the reasons this is all happening sounds like a lesson for life: “There is little chance that everything will stay the way it should, but a thousand ways to make a mess“.
It’s the natural order of things. Or rather, the natural disorder of things.
But if it is about nature, then nature has a problem.
In fact, life as we know it has a problem, because all the important information that allows our bodies to function in every cell of our being is in our DNA… which looks like those old telephone cords that were sometimes a nightmare.
molecular tracing
Are we hopelessly entangled at the molecular level?
DNA is a very long chain that resides in a very small space. If you took it out and stretched it, it would measure 2 meters.
Imagine it being packaged in a cell so small that it couldn’t be seen without a microscope, and you can probably imagine its potential for entanglement.
However, the bodies have a trick to preventing this from happening and this is what Mariel Vazquez investigated: how chain like DNA gets tangled and unraveled, is tied and untied throughout its life cycle.
Let’s go back to that thread we twisted. The first thing that formed was something that looks like the famous double helix of the so-called life molecule.
With more twist, it curls up on itself.
“DNA does exactly the same thing,” says Professor Davis of the University of California, an expert in mathematics combined with microbiology and molecular biology.
“We call it the supercoil.”
What we don’t want to happen with our cables, is crucial for the way cells package DNA.
But to fit perfectly inside the cell, DNA has to do more. It should wrap around “proteins called histones, which form like a string of pearls”.
“DNA wraps around each histone several times and passes to the next.”
However, this is not enough, so the pearl necklace is twisted on itself several times until, finally, “the DNA is very, very well packed and condensed.”
The problem is, just like sometimes you have to go out and use the things that you have so carefully ordered and stored, every time your body is making a new cell, which it is constantly doing, your DNA must be copied and that implies that he must be disturbed.
Not only that: the two propellers must be separated.
“This is where biology has a very clever trick: molecular scissors. What holds the two strands of DNA together are the hydrogen bonds. Scissors are really enzymes, special types of proteins that cut the helix in a very controlled way, ”explains Vazquez.
“Once separated, the machinery of the cell begins to create the two new strands of DNA.”
But this is where we find the family problem. The two strands of DNA are unnecessarily tangled.
It’s easier to understand what’s going on when you think of bacteria, which have a simple DNA loop.
“When the DNA has finished copying, there are two interconnected circles left but they have to be separated. The cell again uses the molecular scissors to very carefully and gently cut one of the circles, let the other go through and close the break. . ”
It happens billions and billions of times, and understand that it made it possible to create drugs.
“There are antibiotics that when they enter your body deactivate this molecular machine of bacteria so that their DNA becomes completely entangled and the bacteria die.”
Beyond the realm of medicine, scientists from many fields have attempted to take advantage of the properties of knots and tangles.
Nanoscale fabrics
One of them is David Lee, professor of chemistry at the University of Manchester, who, with his team, is dedicated to the study of supreme miniaturization and molecular knotting and weaving.
It ties together “very, very small and they have eight crosses, so it’s very complicated. It is the narrowest physical structure ever linked on this planet.“.
The one that earned him one of his two world records: the tightest knot in the world and the most finely woven fabric.
It might be a fun challenge, but why do it?
“The knots are ubiquitous in the molecular world, and nature uses them because she has found ways to take advantage of their useful functions, something that we can learn, “to do things like improve the materials that are used in technology.
And these nanoscale knots can be made into netting or mesh with incredible properties.
“Entangling the threads by controlling the crossing pattern” – that is, the weaving – “can not only make the fabric more solid, but its gaps can let the good pass through and trap the unwanted.”
Because its threads are molecular, these meshes could block “big molecules, or bacteria, or maybe even viruses.”
In short, without the ability to tie and untie knots, we would not exist. And even if you put that detail aside, our lives would be more uncomfortable: imagine a world without pillows, clothes or blankets.
Fortunately, knots are inevitable and, as the Ig Nobel Prize winner demonstrated, occur naturally wherever there is something long and thinWhether it’s a long DNA molecule, the cables on your devices, or the hairs you pull when you can’t undo them.
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