{"id":23518,"date":"2016-03-14T23:02:54","date_gmt":"2016-03-15T06:02:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/03\/high-power-biological-wheels-and-motors-imaged-for-first-time"},"modified":"2017-04-24T21:46:19","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T04:46:19","slug":"high-power-biological-wheels-and-motors-imaged-for-first-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/03\/high-power-biological-wheels-and-motors-imaged-for-first-time","title":{"rendered":"High-power biological wheels and motors imaged for first time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/high-power-biological-wheels-and-motors-imaged-for-first-time.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Behold \u2013 the only known example of a biological wheel. Loved by creationists, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/dn13663-evolution-myths-the-bacterial-flagellum-is-irreducibly-complex\/\">who falsely think they are examples of \u201cintelligent design\u201d<\/a>, the bacterial flagellum is a long tail that is spun like a propeller by nano-sized protein motors.<\/p>\n<p>Now these wheels and their gearing have been imaged in high resolution and three dimensions for the first time. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imperial.ac.uk\/people\/m.beeby\">Morgan Beeby<\/a> and his colleagues at Imperial College London used an electron microscope to resolve the mechanisms that provide different amounts of torque to the motors.<\/p>\n<p>The motors are diverse, coming in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and power outputs. Indeed, the <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scientificamerican.com\/artful-amoeba\/bacterial-motors-come-in-a-dizzying-array-of-models\/\">diversity of the motors<\/a> and the fact that they have evolved many times in different bacterial lineages, scuppers the creationist view that the machinery is \u201cirreducibly complex\u201d.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/2080642-high-power-biological-wheels-and-motors-imaged-for-first-time\/\">https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/2080642-high-power-biol...irst-time\/<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Behold \u2013 the only known example of a biological wheel. Loved by creationists, who falsely think they are examples of \u201cintelligent design\u201d, the bacterial flagellum is a long tail that is spun like a propeller by nano-sized protein motors. Now these wheels and their gearing have been imaged in high resolution and three dimensions for [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":395,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy","category-nanotechnology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/395"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23518"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50915,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23518\/revisions\/50915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}