This (arguably unhelpful) phrase seems to be taught across schools all over the world. What are some other phrases like this that are common ?

  • Donjuanme@lemmy.world
    167·
    3 months ago

    Okay, as a biologist it really upsets me how that phrase is written off. I did an impromptu half hour lecture for my wife about how significant “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” is,

    The mitochondria is what ties everything on this planet together, it’s the one thing that ties all life together, it is the exact same mechanism in plants as it is in animals, it takes the same ingredients and does the same function, and comes from the same origin.

    There is no chain in our DNA that codes for the mitochondria, it exists outside of our DNA, it has no relationship with our DNA, it only fuels reading DNA and it’s decoding and replication, but it isn’t included in our genetics. It replicates itself, it exists as a separate entity, and it acts as the functioning unit for all energy within the cell.

    It would be like if when a child was born their lungs were provided by an outside source and had the same genetic material as everyone else’s lungs. Oh and puppy lungs, and crab lungs, and avocado lungs, and grass lungs, every single living thing on this plant has the same lung genetic material. And it has no clue that it serves this function, all it knows is ADP goes in, ATP goes out, and ATP is energy that fuels all function of all life.

    And it comes from the friggin mitochondria.

    Please be impressed with that little hitch hiker, it is the powerhouse that powers your neurons, grows the vegetables you eat, and makes life happen on earth.

    How will we know something extraterrestrial comes our way? They’ll have their own mitochondria, because something needs to power their cells, and it won’t be the same as ours.

    Writing off the mitochondria from biology is like writing off the exchange of goods in economics, or doing physics without the concept of mass, or art without feeling. There is nothing more basic, more fundamentally important to biology than the existence of the mitochondria, and it’s role as the powerhouse of the cell.

    MITOCHONDRIA IS THE POWERHOUSE OF THE CELL. That you know that makes me happy.

    • Walican132@lemmy.todayEnglish
      26·
      3 months ago

      What if an extraterrestrial had the same mitochondria? Would sort of scientific impact would that have of our understanding of everything.

    • Caveman@lemmy.world
      11·
      3 months ago

      Alien civilisation: Wait, you’re telling me everyone here has a parasite that’s within their own cells that is so well established that you can’t live without it?

      Human: Yeah, pretty much everything alive has it. Nbd.

    • Fosheze@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      3 months ago

      How will we know something extraterrestrial comes our way? They’ll have their own mitochondria, because something needs to power their cells, and it won’t be the same as ours.

      New writing prompt, aliens show up and they are wildly different from us but they and all life on their planet also use the exact same mitochondria as us.

    • Kushan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      3 months ago

      I’m genuinely curious, how do you feel about parasite eve?

      It’s one of my all time favourite games.

        • Kushan@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          3 months ago

          Sadly it’s a PS1 exclusive game, but the story is super interesting a it revolves around mitochondria.

          It’s sort of a mixture of resident evil and final fantasy. Worth checking out on an emulator though!

    • ryannathans@aussie.zone
      32·
      3 months ago

      My mitochondria are retarded, do you have any advice? I have the mitochondrial dna sequenced in cram format if that’s useful. Low heteroplasmy, very low mitochondria number per cell (0th percentile), and poor energy production.

      • Donjuanme@lemmy.world
        4·
        3 months ago

        Can you live without your lungs? Maybe stomach is a tiny bit more appropriate, I guess you could if you had something pumping nutrients into your body, and taking away the waste, but you’d be on life support for the rest of your days.

        ATP, what the mitochondria is there to produce, is used for almost every action in the cell (not used in passive transport and some enzymatics, maybe other stuff, it’s been 20 years since I studied cellular bio), and ADP is leftover that needs to be resynthesized into ATP. I guess life could’ve developed an alternative way to synthesize it, but the mitochondria is so good at it that it was never needed.

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      1·
      3 months ago

      wait, we do inherit mitochondria through our mothers, and we can sequence it to find different maternal haplogroups.

      Though it exists in parallel to our DNA, it does encode a lot about us and our genetics.

    • Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml
      14·
      3 months ago

      I think you’re missing the point of why that phrase became a bit of a joke and is considered unhelpful. It’s not written off because people think mitochondria are unimportant or should be written off, it’s because when you’re a teen learning this stuff and they’re trying to explain how cells work, mitochondria are a particularly strange and complicated thing that’s thrown in to the mix, and it sounds important and complicated but in lieu of any real details there’s the sudden brick wall of this weirdly uncharacteristic phrase that doesn’t really sound like how you’re teacher normally speaks, doesn’t really read like how the rest of the textbook reads and other than some vague allusion to “power” fails quite spectacularly to tell you what mitochondria are.

      Part of what made it maddeningly confusing was that these lessons are getting you thinking about how mechanisms can coalesce to form larger systems, encouraging you interrogate macro scale phenomena down to the smallest scales and see how it all ticks and then suddenly they hit you with this magic “powerhouse”, very poorly explained, and which because of that poor explanation appears somehow irreducibe. You know mitochondria have “power” of some sort but any of their own mechanisms are conspicuously left out of the picture. This is probably for good reason because of the difficulty of making a syllabus that isn’t too deep or broad for the time available and for teenagers to pick up but it’s a very sudden brick wall. HOW do the mitochondria power cells? Do the mitochondria have cells? Do the mitochondria’s cells have mitochondria? How are they transmitting this power to our cells? The way this phrase was used was more reminiscent of a slogan, or an ad campaign and quite unlike much of anything else one remembers from biology class, it felt very… out of context. Even the choice of the word “power house” always felt weird, as it wasn’t for me at least, a word commonly encountered so to use it as an analogy really undermined it’s ability to help you grasp anything as it sought to explain one concept in terms of another only vaguely understood concept. I gathered this was a similar term to “power plant” although other than a popular museum in Sydney I had never heard the term used outside of that goofy phrase and to say mitochondria function similar to a power plant, in that they produce power doesn’t really say much more than, “mitochondria are the energy source of cells” which is similarly meaningless in all but the most basic sense.

      So, don’t blame the mocking meme for dismissing mitochondria, blame the weird ass phrase the meme mocks for completely failing to explain anything about them and relegating them to a single, cryptic, hand waving sentence.

    • wuphysics87@lemmy.ml
      813·
      3 months ago

      Knowing ‘the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell’ means absolutely nothing sans any context. It should make you sad that people’s knowledge of your field is as shallow as a puddle. (Kidding mostly. Also projecting)

      • Nawor3565@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        20·
        3 months ago

        It’s pretty hard though. Without mass, everything travels at the speed of light and doesn’t experience the flow of time, which don’t really mesh well with classical physics (or quantum mechanics, and definitely not relativity).

        • wuphysics87@lemmy.ml
          15·
          3 months ago

          Define the speed of light to be 1 (gaussian units). Then Einstein’s E=mc^2 becomes E=m. Mass is energy. In physics mass is not fundamental. Energy is.

          • Donjuanme@lemmy.world
            4·
            3 months ago

            In biology mitochondria are not essential, hydrocarbons are. Life sprung up without mitochondria, but it wouldn’t be what it is without them. Chemistry is fundamental to biology, mitochondria aren’t, but I think you’d agree physics wouldn’t be what it is today without mass, nor would biology be without the mitochondria

            • wuphysics87@lemmy.ml
              13·
              3 months ago

              Depends what you mean by “what it is today.”. Mass isn’t fundamental. It is a particle’s coupling to the Higgs Boson which generates mass. The Lagrangian of the Standard Model is an energy equation. Not a mass one.

              • Donjuanme@lemmy.world
                2·
                3 months ago

                Do you watch a lot of v-sauce? There’s a certain argumentative style that he instills in his audience that I’m picking up when reading your comments. There’s a lot of nuance and acceptability outside of the strict definitions that goes into the scientific process (as much as strict adherents don’t like it, science is done when we close those gaps, it isn’t immediate nor absolute)

  • tias@discuss.tchncs.de
    242·
    3 months ago

    I’ve only heard this phrase from Americans, so I think “all over the world” is a stretch

  • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
    14·
    3 months ago

    I believe most nations have a version of “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” that is taught in early education.

  • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
    10·
    3 months ago

    While not unhelpful, stop-drop-and-roll and quicksand don’t come up as often as we thought back then

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      4·
      3 months ago

      I was always worried about proper handling of nitroglycerin. Talking to my friends it seems that wasn’t as common as quicksand or even thinking you’d need to tell gold apart from fool’s gold (pyrite). Games like Crash Bandicoot, shows like Dexter’s Lab, and a general interest in science may have meant I heard more about it as a kid.

    • Captain AggravatedEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      yeah I’ve been on fire three times and it never occurred to me to stop drop and roll.

  • Badabinski@kbin.earth
    10·
    3 months ago

    To the tune of “Pop Goes The Weasel”:

    x equals negative b /
    plus or minus the square root /
    of b squared minus 4 ac /
    all over 2a!

    I cannot believe that stupid fucking song is still in my head, but good God damn it worked. It’s there for all 0 times I’ll need the quadratic equation in my daily life.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      3·
      3 months ago

      It was to to the tune of Frère Jacques when I learned it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frère_Jacques

      Negative b, negative b
      Plus or minus square root, plus or minus square root
      B squared minus 4 AC, b squared minus 4 AC
      Over 2A, over 2A

      Finding the name of the original song was a pain. I’d never seen it written as an adult and thought it said “do re mi” so every search result kept telling me it was from the sound of music.

    • Caveman@lemmy.world
      2·
      3 months ago

      If you already know that much algebra you can use ax2 + bx + c = 0 and solve for x to get the formula if you forget it.

      • JWBananas@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Hurr durr what if I just multiply the whole thing by 4a for some reason? Oh and then after that I’ll add b² to both sides, just for shits and giggles. And for good measure, I’ll move a few numbers from one side to the other, and that leaves me with 4a²x² + 4abx + b² = b² - 4ac.

        And then golly gee! Wouldn’t you know it? That just happens to let the left side factor neatly into (2ax + b)²! So I’ll just take the square root of both sides…

        No!

        No!

        Bad!

        This is fucking voodoo. I hate this shit. It’s like trigonometric substitution.

        Math is procedural. Math is algorithmic. Math is repeatable.

        “If these numbers looked a little different than they do, I could solve this. Oh, wow! If I just sprinkle these magic values into my problem, everything works out great!”

        Oh yes, I can see how if you just plug in this shit you pulled out of your ass, everything works out great! But when you aren’t around for a fecal transfer, I have no idea how to come up with that.

        I was top of my class in math. But that voodoo shit never made any sense to me.

        And there is absolute value of zero chance I could figure all that out in the heat of the moment if I forgot the quadratic formula. I had to work backwards from the formula to even get all that in the first place.

        • Caveman@lemmy.world
          3·
          3 months ago
          • ax^2 + bx + c = 0
          • ax^2 + bx = -c move the c over
          • x^2 + (b/a)x = -c/a divide by a
          • x^2 + (b/a)x +(b/2a)^2 = -c/a + (b/2a)^2 complete the square
          • (x + b/2a)^2 = -c/a + (b/2a)^2 factor the left hand side
          • x + b/2a = sqrt(-c/a + (b/2a)^2) now we just tidy it up
          • x = -b/2a + sqrt(-c/a + b2/4a2)
          • x = -b/2a + (2a/2a) sqrt(-c/a + b2/4a2)
          • x = (-b + (2a)sqrt(-c/a + b2/4a2))/2a
          • x = (-b + sqrt(-4ac + b^2))/2a move 2a into the square root and multiply it with what’s inside

          The derivation of the quadratic formula is nice because it doesn’t rely on anything fancy and it’s all tricks the teacher is likely to teach around the same time you’re learning it. It’s not voodoo shit, it’s just the ax^2 + bx + c = 0 and you solve for x.

          • JWBananas@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            3 months ago

            Thanks for the alternative explanation. Completing the square never made much sense to me either, so I never would have arrived there.

  • SwordInStone@lemmy.world
    102·
    3 months ago

    Question and all comments (apart from “donde esta la biblioteka”) are not “all over the world”, but American

  • Rob Bos@lemmy.ca
    61·
    3 months ago

    Didn’t that originate in a Sabrina The Teenage Witch episode? Or did I just imagine that?

  • dillydogg@lemmy.one
    41·
    3 months ago

    I have met multiple people from across the USA who specifically learned about “the fertile silt of the Nile river delta.”