This (arguably unhelpful) phrase seems to be taught across schools all over the world. What are some other phrases like this that are common ?
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.
What if an extraterrestrial had the same mitochondria? Would sort of scientific impact would that have of our understanding of everything.
It would basically prove this.
Fascinating thanks for sharing.
That’s probably why science dwellers are so bent on finding microscopic life outside of earth.
This is prokaryote erasure.
Thank you! I couldn’t stand to hear this anti mitochondria slander.
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.
Not a parasite. A vital sidekick whom we cannot exist without.
A parasite, you say?
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.
The phrase became unhelpful when it wat teached at very young age without any context…
Did your lecture get you laid?
Are you kidding, I’m married.
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I’m genuinely curious, how do you feel about parasite eve?
It’s one of my all time favourite games.
Never played it, is it an RPG or f/tps? Is it available on steam?
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!
Tell me more about avocado lungs…
Mitochondria are our best ally.
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.
Could cells live without mitochondria?
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.
it only fuels reading DNA and it’s decoding and replication
and its* decoding and replication
Thanks! I’m no etymologist, I had to Google which was bugs and which was words.
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.
Try High Intensity Interval Training. Really intensive short workouts of a few minutes seem to regenerate mitochondria.
Do you have a source I can follow
There are a number of articles and these are a couple.
Very interesting, wonder how this compares to just exercising
From what I’ve read it is claimed to regenerate mitochondria, be quite quick to do so you save time but other forms of exercise achieve different results like burning fat, cardio etc.
Wonder if you need good mitochondria to put on fat? I can only put on muscle
Source, please.
Edit: I read your sources. Very interesting!
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.
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)
Physics can be done without mass. Next question
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).
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.
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
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.
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)
No
that phrase is to biology as “donde esta la biblioteca” is to spanish
Troy and Abed in the mooorning!
‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’
Or when sounding like “A” as in neighbor and weigh
And on weekends and holidays, and all throughout May
And you always be wrong, no matter what you say.
yes, Bryan, we all call that “desk”
I bought 2 boxen of doughnuts
*diesk
This is honestly one of my favorite ones, and legit runs through my head whenever I can’t remember the spelling of a word
Which is way more useful of a tip.
Except in glacier, because English is fucked.
I always thought this one was pretty… WEIRD…
Like in “science”.
I’ve only heard this phrase from Americans, so I think “all over the world” is a stretch
It’s a meme in the netherlands as well.
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Fair point. I only have english textbooks for college, and it’s in pretty much evry single one of them. My dutch teachers said the meme in a translated version during lectures. Only happened twice though.
Its taught in India as well, (and is also a meme here)
Can confirm in south india
Australian here, they taught us this meme in school.
Mitochondria is plural. Mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell.
What’s the singular, then?
Mitochondrion
This one ^
Mitochondreez nutz
Mitochondrium
The correct phrase is “The Mitochondria…” OP left off the “the”
I believe most nations have a version of “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” that is taught in early education.
While not unhelpful, stop-drop-and-roll and quicksand don’t come up as often as we thought back then
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.
yeah I’ve been on fire three times and it never occurred to me to stop drop and roll.
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.
I can’t even visualise what you are saying
I don’t hear it either, though.
I can. But I can’t hear it at all.
I know the equation but “hearing” something in your head sounds… weird
I’ve been hearing the Donkey Kong song in my head for the last 6 hours. If you know how to make it stop, I’m all ears.
Things tend to linger when we don’t understand them or didn’t initially hear them well
We reprocess them until they make sense
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Yes, I mean I have 10/10 visualisation/internal hearing/etc but the language denotation of “hearing” something that does not enter your auditory nerve is… odd
I’ve never seen it with the x equals up front. It works much better when it starts with -b.
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 2AFinding 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.
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.
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.
- 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.
Thanks for the alternative explanation. Completing the square never made much sense to me either, so I never would have arrived there.
Do you have any evidence your phrase is used all over the world? I never learnt it.
I learned it in German in Germany. Do we have evidence from the francophone world? Latam? China?
Checking in from NZ, sounds familiar to me
Definitely did it in Australia.
What class? What year?
Biology class circa 2001-2003
I think this phrase was made into a meme by an American children’s TV show called Bill Nye the Science Guy; it’s said during the intro sequence.
Ohhhhhh I had never put two and two together on that
Apparently the phrase dates from a biology paper published in 1957. I think I’ve been Mandela Effected; I have a memory of several voices coming in and saying science phrases, in between “Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!” but having just rewatched the intro sequence on Youtube this only happens once and the phrase it says is “Intertia is a property of matter.”
Question and all comments (apart from “donde esta la biblioteka”) are not “all over the world”, but American
“Don’t use Wikipedia as a source.”
Man, if I want to get a pretty good overview on almost anything, Wikipedia is the best and most accessible way. Luckily, the consensus seems to slowly change to a cautious “Don’t use Wikipedia as your only source, especially on controversial topics.”
Didn’t that originate in a Sabrina The Teenage Witch episode? Or did I just imagine that?
y = mx + b
“Christopher Columbus discovered America” (hopefully they’re not still teaching this)
Even worse: Columbus thought the earth was round but nobody believed him.
In 14 hundred and 92 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. And also committed genocide
We never learnt that.
I don’t remember hearing that specific phrase in school. I remember hearing a teacher tell us to take deep breaths to fire up the mitochondria but not that it was “the powerhouse of the cell.” This was a meme that became common after my education was done. Because it became a popular meme it’s possible more teachers said it specifically along with whatever other fun phrases they had.
I think a big part of why it took off and lives on as a meme in the internet forums sense of the word, was the familiarity of the bizarre and unnatural phrase to the young adults using those forums who remembered it from biology class.
Certainly that’s how it was for me because before Digg, or Reddit, even before Facebook (though I guess not that long before), I had had that phrase uttered sincerely as part of my education and it was so uncanny and funny to see that this highly specific and distinctive phrase was used rote, word for word, at schools all over the world and was as memorably unhelpful to others as it had been to me. Perhaps the positive feedback loop from this phrase’s new life on the web really has fed in to education in a life imitating art kind of way like you describe, but I can assure you it definitely predated it’s status as a joke, and that’s where that joke came from.
I’m not doubting it was used before the meme, I’m just doubting the ubiquity of it prior to the meme. I believe it is a bit of a Mandela effect type of thing. People remember the general purpose of mitochondria and remember their science teachers saying things similar to the effect of “powerhouse of the cell” even if they didn’t actually say that. Sort of like how “beam me up, Scotty” was specifically never used in Star Trek but just about every other variant of the phrase was.
I’m not gonna go looking for scans or anything, but KnowYourMeme lists the popularity of this one as starting between 2013 and 2015, and I definitely remember seeing this phrase in a textbook around 2010 or 2011. So honestly, I might blame Pearson or McGraw Hill.
That’s after my time in highschool. (Class of 2010.) It’s possible there was enough of a push to get new editions of books and they all happened to use that phrase right around the time a bunch of future memers would be online that it caused it.
The unlikely story of how two country singers are behind the mitochondria is the powerhouse. Aaaaaand now that I’m double checking that I’m wondering if I’ve been a victim of misinformation. I thought somebody told me Tim McGraw and Faith Hill founded McGraw Hill but I’m not seeing anything to support that.
