Cosmic connection how to#
Cosmic connection free#

“This means that there is some deep thing we don’t understand about how to model the nuclear system,” Huber said. The ratio between the two is a factor of a million (10 -6), yet these two vastly different regimes make the same shapes. For intracellular membranes like the ER, the length scale is nanometers (10 -9). In the nuclear case, the structures are based on nucleons such as protons and neutrons and those building blocks are measured using femtometers (10 -15). At first glance, these couldn’t be more different.”Īnother difference is scale.

Cosmic connection free#

“In the interior of cells, the forces that hold together membranes are fundamentally entropic and have to do with the minimization of the overall free energy of the system. “For neutron stars, the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic force create what is fundamentally a quantum-mechanical problem,” Huber explained. Typically matter is characterized by its phase, which depends on thermodynamic variables: density (or volume), temperature and pressure - factors that differ greatly at the nuclear level and in an intracellular context.

However, differences can be found in the underlying physics. We see sheets connected to each other through topological defects we call Terasaki ramps. “We see a tubular network we see parallel sheets. “They see a variety of shapes that we see in the cell,” Huber explained.

These include tubes (spaghetti) and parallel sheets (lasagna) connected by helical shapes that resemble Terasaki ramps. Nuclear physicists have an apt terminology for the entire class of shapes they see in their high-performance computer simulations of neutron stars: nuclear pasta. The resulting collaboration, highlighted in Physical Review C, explored the relationship between two very different models of matter. “It was news to him, so I realized then that there could be some fruitful interaction.” “I called Chuck and asked if he was aware that we had seen these structures in cells and had come up with a model for them,” said Huber, the deputy director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP). Using computer simulations, Horowitz and his team had found the same shapes deep in the crust of neutron stars. Huber thought these “parking garages” were unique to soft matter (like the interior of cells) until he happened upon the work of nuclear physicist Charles Horowitz at Indiana University. Huber and his colleagues dubbed them Terasaki ramps after their discoverer, Mark Terasaki, a cell biologist at the University of Connecticut. In 2014, UC Santa Barbara soft condensed-matter physicist Greg Huber and colleagues explored the biophysics of such shapes - helices that connect stacks of evenly spaced sheets - in a cellular organelle called the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). We humans may be more aligned with the universe than we realize.Īccording to research published in the journal Physical Review C, neutron stars and cell cytoplasm have something in common: structures that resemble multistory parking garages.