QUANTUM ENGINEERING #41: MY QUEST IN HACKING THE PERIODIC TABLE PART 1

If you listened to the beginning of part two of the podcast, I mentioned the large band gap needed to charge separate water.  This single issue sent me looking at the periodic table.  I found that answer there, but in reality, I stumbled into a bigger reality.  I finally realized how we humans evolved.  Here are the details of that POMC story.

LIGHT AND WATER BECAME THE FIRST TWO LEGS OF THE STOOL OF LIFE

Water is made from two atoms so I began with hydrogen on the periodic table because water has 2 H in its chemical formula.  As soon as I went deep I found some interesting trends about hydrogen.  Science depends on compelling narratives, and few people seem to know the real story behind hydrogen. This really explains why even today biology ignores water's role in a cell.  In fact, in a cell Nature has shown us that hydrogen can act as a metal or non-metal.  Hydrogen makes life a cooperative quantum dance and it can make other elements do things they normally would not do.

It turns out how hydrogen acts chemically,  depends wholly on the environment it is within.  Does this means hydrogen can take different forms in our body if the environment of that region is controlled by information in some way? Is it a donor or a collector of electrons? Is it a metal or a gas?  The answer is yes.

This is why on Earth hydrogen always seems to hang out exclusively with carbon and oxygen in life. The hydrogen ion (proton = H+) and electrons go to reduce (or fix) carbon dioxide into the carbohydrates and biomass of photosynthetic organisms using both the C3 or C4 pathways, which feed herbivores, and down the food web, the vast majority of animal species. The air-breathers break down carbohydrates by oxidizing them (with oxygen) in the mitochondria of cells to obtain energy for growth and reproduction, regenerating carbon dioxide and water. This completes the living dynamo of photosynthesis and respiration that turns inanimate substances into living organisms.

The measured ionization energy of H2 is 1488 kJ mol-1. This number is primarily important in comparison to the ionization energy of a hydrogen atom, which is 1312 kJ mol-1. Therefore, it requires more energy to remove an electron from the hydrogen molecule than from the hydrogen atom; the electron, therefore, has lower energy in the molecule. To pull the atoms apart, the energy of the electron must be increased.  I knew electrons can only be powered by light because of Einstein's photoelectric law of the universe.  So I looked up how much power by light was needed to break this bond. I began to understand why we needed over 12 electron volts of light power to split water into its substrates.  Hence, a lot of energy is required to break this bond. So I went looking for an answer on how photosynthesis did it.

MAGNETISM THEN BECOMES THE THIRD LEG OF THE STOOL OF LIFE

Next, I looked at oxygen.  

The oxygen molecule is a particularly interesting case, O2, to study.  This study was detailed in my 2014 conference talk at Dave Asprey's event that you heard Rick Rubin talk about in the podcast.  Asprey banned the talk because essentially it told everyone who heard the talk everything Dave was selling was snake oil.  Props to Rick for telling that story.  I would have died with it.

When I looked at oxygen I drew out its complete molecular orbital energy level diagram, and I noticed that the last two electrons must either be paired in the same 2p π* orbital or separated into different 2p π* orbitals. To determine which, it is important to note that oxygen molecules are paramagnetic—meaning they are strongly attracted to a magnetic field. I did not know that prior to this moment.  It turns out that moment was going to change my life.  To account for this paramagnetism, I recalled from my high school chemistry class that electron spin is a magnetic property. In most molecules, all electrons are paired, so for each “spin up” electron there is a “spin down” electron and their magnetic fields cancel out. If all electrons are paired, the molecule is diamagnetic, meaning that it responds only weakly to a magnetic field.  then I thought about the Earth.  We have a magnetic field and so does the sun.  Then I thought about the ATPase in mitochondria and knew it had one from the spinning Fo head where ATP was made.  Immediately I realized oxygen was being drawn to mitochondria because of magnetism.

If the electrons are not paired, they can adopt the same spin in the presence of a magnetic field. This accounts for the attraction of the paramagnetic molecule to the magnetic field. Therefore, for a molecule to be paramagnetic, it must have unpaired electrons.  This thought stopped me dead in my tracks because I knew we had some chemicals in us that had unpaired electrons called free radicals.

It turned out in my research of organic chemistry, all radicals are paramagnetic, but all paramagnetic species are not radicals. Take for example the metal Nickel. Nickel is paramagnetic, and therefore has unpaired electrons, but at the same time is not a radical because it is a stable atom and does not react with other elements. Radicals are unstable by nature and they react by donating their electrons.  I thought to myself, is this donation of electrons how a semiconductor operates?  I looked into it and found that is exactly how a semiconductor works.  That created an idea and I wrote this down on a piece of paper that became the slide below.

I left the normal periodic table of elements and then looked up the magnetic table of elements.  Here I found, Ca2+, Mg2+, K+, and Na+ are also paramagnetic. Mo is used on the inner mitochondrial membrane and is also paramagnetic. The thought crossed my mind that it seemed biology was specializing in using atoms in biochemistry that might dope semiconductors.  I knew collagen was a wide band gap semiconductor from Becker's bone work.  I began to realize atoms doped to carbon and surrounded by water are all wide-band gapped semiconductors.

Then I looked at other atoms used in cells.

H, C, N, P, S. Se, Cu, I are all dimagnetic.

It seemed immediately that H and O differ in their magnetic powers. What about water that acts as a semiconductor in cells? Water is not paramagnetic even though oxygen is, due to the absence of unpaired electron (s) in its molecule. Here is hydrogen pulling its magic tricks again on another atom. Water is reported as a diamagnetic substance with a susceptibility of − 9 × 10 ^− 6. This implies that when it is submitted to a magnetic field, it will tend to repel the field lines.

Then I thought about iron and hemoglobin and all the heme-based proteins in cells like the P450 system, catalase, and peroxides in mitochondria.   

Fe, Co, are ferromagnetic

Oxygen is paramagnetic.

All free radicals are paramagnetic.  

Anything paramagnetic is drawn to magnetic fields and inside cells this draws them to mitochondria.

Then I thought about Mammals. What did I know about them? I knew about the asteroid event.    

The rocks found at the K-T boundary, whether they are found in Europe, Canada, or the United States, all show a very high level of the element iridium. This iridium layer has been located in over 100 different spots on Earth, both on land and under the ocean. Iridium, which defines the KT boundary is also paramagnetic.

Does anyone see a trend here that I found in hacking the periodic table?

HYPERLINK

Most of the key atoms were paramagnetic and this told me semiconduction was the key to understanding how cells work.  I then looked at proteins differently and remembered Szent-Györgyi's talk in 1941 where he said he believed all proteins have the appearance of semiconductors and Becker proved him right 25 years later.

I went back to hydrogen and to protein structure to see if I could find a link.  I found it in chlorophyll, hemoglobin, and melanin.

What thoughts filled my head that day?  The retina has melanin in its RPE and it creates massive amounts of ROS at the choriocapillaris.  I thought to myself........is melanin creating a stream of electrons in the eye to electrify the brain?

When electrons are not paired, as they are in ROS/RNS they can adopt the same spin in the presence of a magnetic field around them.  The brain is filled with mitochondria that create magnetic fields. Might this account for the attraction of the paramagnetic molecule to the mitochondria's magnetic field? Might these free radicals be key to explaining how tissues are sculpted and changed?  I knew for a molecule to be paramagnetic, it must have unpaired electrons.  I went looking for a protein that was paramagnetic and could transform light into chemical energy in the form of free radicals and I found melanin.

Melanin is a paramagnetic bio-polymer that has been revealed in testing to exhibit strong and stable paramagnetism.  It is loaded in mammals' skin and in their eyes.  I also found out that melanin synthesis is an oxygen-dependent process that acts as a potential source of reactive oxygen species (ROS) inside pigment-forming cells.  I knew I was onto something.  Melanin was able to transform light energy into chemical energy, and this has been accepted by the countries of the first world patent offices.  I wondered if melanin could create hydrogen and oxygen in a cell. I found that it can.

Hydrogen is the rogue element in the periodic table that breaks all the rules we expect, and this is why life uses it in her designs. When a hydrogen bond forms between two water molecules, the redistribution of electrons changes the ability for further hydrogen bonding. In this sense, a hydrogen bond can be electrostatic. Hydrogen bonds, however, can become covalent as well.  Iodine’s addition to hydrogen favors the formation of covalent bonding in water.  You heard about this in the podcast.  This is a fancy way of saying hydrogen makes other atoms do things they normally might not want to do. Hydrogen’s will is strong because of the closeness of its one electron to its nucleus. This gives hydrogen lots of different isotopes. This is when I found out the addition of deuterium, a heavier isotpe of hydrogen changes how water absorbs light.  I did not know this.

Water with deuterium in it absorbs less IR-A light and hardly any UV light at all.

These facts meant something more interesting.  It meant hydrogen had to invoke Einstein’s relativity theory more than any other element on the periodic table! You might not understand why now just yet, but more on this aspect shortly to fill in your gaps.

Magnetic Type for all the elements in the Periodic Table

Hydrogen normally has one proton that is encircled by one electron that buzzes in its electron shell.  Its valence shell is designed to hold two electrons. So you need to ask yourself is the shell half filled or half empty?  Other atoms want to know this too because this is how they decide how they react with hydrogen. This is why hydrogen can be a chameleon. Most elements either gain or lose their electrons in chemical reactions. The pathways that hydrogen electron takes determines the chemical abilities of the atoms in this dance. Hydrogen swings, either way, depending upon the environment it finds itself in.   This makes it a very interesting player in biochemistry. It’s no wonder hydrogen is an integral part of life’s plan. Hydrogen is found in all amino acids and semiconductive protein polymers.  It also makes up 2/3 of water.  Imagine that.  Without water depleted of deuterium, you cannot convert sulfated cholesterol to Vitamin D 25 D (OH) because the photoisomerization step needs it.

When hydrogen is ionized or charge separated………however, what can happen in life at the cell level changes in a big way……….hydrogen becomes the superman of flow.  When hydrogen is ionized and loses its only electron it becomes a proton cation.

This makes H+ the lightest cation in chemistry and given the small size of the proton, explains the unusually high diffusion rate of the proton relative to that of other common cations like potassium (K+).  When hydrogen loses its electron it becomes an ionic plasma that acts like a liquid metal.

Ionic plasmas have special abilities.  One ability is called proton jump conduction or protonicity.  These rules are governed by something called the Grotthuss mechanism.   Hydrogen is a chemist's conundrum, a biologist's enigma, and a physicist's dream because it can lose or gain this single electron. I have always been of the belief that hydrogen did not really belong to any group in the periodic table based on this ability. Remember all that talk about the periodic table I did to Rick and Andrew?  Do you think that work was wasted now that you see the details in the story they missed?

After many thoughts on this topic,  I realized under some environments it can be placed into group 7 or group one in the periodic table. All known elements of group 7 are halogens. The group 1 elements compromise the alkali metals. Hydrogen is often placed in group one of the periodic table by convention due to its electron configuration,  but it is not considered by many to be an alkali metal.  Why?

Hydrogen rarely exhibits behavior comparable to that of alkali metals. For example, all the alkali metals react with water, with the heavier alkali metals reacting more vigorously than the lighter ones. The word “alkali” received its name from the Arabic word “al qali,” meaning “from ashes”. These particular elements were given the name “alkali” because they react with water to form hydroxide ions, creating very basic solutions (with pH > 7), which are also called alkaline solutions.

Hydrogen forms water with oxygen directly and does not form a basic solution. Adding more hydrogen to it does not cause a special reaction at all, as it does with the other metals in group 1.

Why is hydrogen fundamentally different? Water is most famous for forming hydrogen bonds with other water molecules and with other ions dissolved in it. A hydrogen bond consists of hydrogen shared between two electronegative atoms like oxygen or sulfur. The compound that donates the hydrogen to the chemical reaction is the hydrogen donor, and the acceptor atoms is the hydrogen acceptor.

Water is unique because it can be both an acceptor and a donor of hydrogen. It means water can be a switch hitter in many biochemical reactions.  This is why water is the universal solvent on Earth.  In fact, water can even donate two of its hydrogen if need be! This makes the water molecule take on the tetrahedral structure in its frozen form linked in a crystalline hexagonal array in crystal ice.  When I realized that water had a crystalline structure I knew immediately it had to be part of the cell's construction plan for its own wide-based semiconductors. Suddenly I understood what Gilbert Ling was hinting at in his work.

All of a sudden biology took on a new meaning to me with this new perspective.

I told you in the podcast that hydrogen can also act as a group 7 halogen.  It can mimic iodine element 53.  It means it can gain electrons to become a nonmetal.  Non-metals can become semiconductors.  It was here that I realized the water was acting as a semiconductor between sulfated cholesterol and Vitamin D in our skin to change the structure of matter.  When hydrogen does this in water when it is associated with iodine it forms an ionic liquid.

Ionic liquids are now receiving special attention in science, owing to their unique properties such as high ionic conductivity, non-volatility, and non-flammability.  This ability makes these fluids versatile alternatives to conventional solvent-based systems used to make batteries, fuel cells, and supercapacitors that hold large charges.  They are also quite helpful as heat-transfer fluids to move infrared energies within a system.  This is when I realized why iodine was being used in the breast, brain, and thyroid gland with melanin and tyrosine.  Iodine and water create another semiconductor that is transferring energy from the sun to us.

Iodine addition to iodide-based ionic liquids leads to extraordinarily efficient charge transport, vastly exceeding that expected for a standard viscous system.  Hydrogen and iodine form an ionic plasma within the CSF of the human brain. The choroid plexus of the human brain is designed to add iodine to CSF.  CSF, you will recall is an ultra-filtrate of blood plasma and is made up of 99.9% water.  When iodine meets water that has been charged separated by IR light or by the hydrophilic proteins within the dura matter a massive amount of H+ is made in the CSF of the brain.  H+ is equivalent to a proton.  Using the Grotthuss mechanism, iodine is able to move protons closer together than we would normally expect,  to alter their hydrogen bonding network to allow them to form superconducting proton cables that act like a positive charge electric current.  The mechanism allows for charges to be transported not by the movement of particles, but by the breaking and reformation of chemical bonds. As water is charge separated by IR light or by hydrophilic substances, many excess H+ ions are made adjacent to the exclusion zone of water. Gerald Pollack’s experiments have shown this exquisitely.  The excess protons can then diffuse through the hydrogen bond network of water molecules or other hydrogen-bonded liquids (iodized CSF)  through the formation or cleavage of covalent bonds.  Iodine helps UV light get from the sun and our skin to the brain.

A biological cell is a dissipative system by its very nature. You heard this in the podcast when Rick said, "I don't know what that means."  I said I will tell you.  Now I am retelling it to you here to crystallize the lesson 

A dissipative structures is built atomically to capture energy in some format and store it.  When this occurs order emerges directly from chaos.  Things get more ordered in a cell as energy continues to be pumped in.  This is essentially what melanin and water are doing for cells.  Water, created by mitochondria and powered by visible light gives flexibility to proteins, reduces the energy barrier between reactants and products, and increases the probability of quantum tunneling by a transient compression of the energy barrier.  This is my idea I call Ling 2.0

This implies it has the role or purpose to break symmetry and create a metastable system to react to all environmental possibilities that the cell may face. Breaking symmetry tells biology something about Noether's theorem.  A cell uses hydrogen and oxygen to un-condense our protein polymers, ever so slightly, to allow life to exist.  It changes the size and shape by moving charges, of electrons and H+.  Gilbert Ling tripped over this in the 1950s.  I mentioned him in the podcast.

When we sleep our semiconductive proteins are designed to be fully condensed and small.  This implies that life can only exist when our protein polymers are slightly unfolded during wakefulness.  Ling is the guy who brought the idea of unfolded proteins to centralized science.  This unfolding of protein semiconductors happens when electrons are withdrawn from proteins.  Free radicals add electrons to the holes that ATP creates to create a current.  In fact, any paramagnetic atoms can add their electrons to the semiconductor to operate it.  UV light creates hormones and hormones are tides of electrons controlled by our star.

Cortisol from ACTH in POMC do this and so does ATP made in the matrix.  Cortisol and ATP are both electron-withdrawing semiconductive biochemicals.  Gilbert Ling was the first scientist to realize what ATP did to proteins.  ATP allows for amino acids to unfold to allow for water binding sites to open to the water hydration shells around proteins.  Water is also a semiconductive protein because of the action of hydrogen bonds in water.

Ling had no idea what he found but the guys at FONAR did because they made an MRI machine from the idea.  When I read Ling's books I realized what he was saying.  Water is a semiconductor in human's and it needs specific proteins adjacent to it to operate and unleash solar energy in the electronic state.  Again, when I met Ling I asked him questions to see if he really knew what he found. He did not, and if he did I think he'd have Peter Mitchell's Nobel Prize now.  He deserved it.

WIDE BAND GAPPED SEMICONDUCTORS ARE SPECIAL BECAUSE THEY CAN SENSE UV LIGHT AND USE IT TO TRANSFER ENERGY AND INFORMATION.

When we are awake our proteins have to be somewhat unfolded and un-condensed (larger).  This means during the day we are less thermodynamically efficient.  The sun's light has to bridge the gap and this is why we evolved wakefulness from sleep.  This is why I told you in Cold Thermogenesis 2 that I believed that life's primordial condition was sleep. I believed we evolved wakefulness when we gained the ability to unfold our protein polymers and engage in semiconduction.

Within this sliver of semiconductive protein unfolding is where the magic of life happens.  Similarly, a cell is designed to break symmetries by using hydrogen and oxygen to its advantage.   This ability must be associated with a specific molecule capable of breaking symmetry.  H20 can “unfold” or ‘charge separate’ into H+ and -OH with the addition of infrared heat from the sun or when it lies adjacent to hydrophilic substances.

Proteins are made more hydrophilic with the addition of electrons to them.  They are made more hydrophobic when electrons are removed.   It turns out all proteins are hydrated in life.  Our proteins are the first smart device ever built by nature.  This might be why DNA only codes for proteins using specific amino acids.  Those amino acids work with the visible spectrum of our star.

When we die we lose that ability and our muscles get hard in stiff in rigor mortis.  Liquid water is the perfect chemical to break symmetry with all the protein polymers in all life forms. The reason is found in water’s molecular 3 D molecular arrangements. Liquid water has perfect symmetry in that no matter from which direction you look at the molecules, the view is the same from a molecular standpoint. But water, can and does, lose its symmetry in nature naturally.

During my 18 months of unlearning to relearn, I found out that symmetry in crystals is key.  When symmetry is broken by any phase transition in chemistry (water) energy and information transfers must occur by nature’s laws.  This was how sunlight info and energy entered our bodies.  I realized melanin, Vitamin D, T3, T4, RBCs, etc.....all were semiconductive crystals transferring data from the sun.

This data informs the biomolecules in biochemistry how to act because all of them have hydrogen the chemical chameleon I mentioned above.  This occurs many times in the biochemical reaction pathways of cells. And as such, all breaks of symmetry require a transfer of energy by the laws of physics to satisfy the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Symmetry is also broken any time temperature rises or falls or when electrons or protons are moving in any biochemical reaction. Any transfer of energy/information has the potential to break symmetry and therefore to give rise to emergent properties in the protein polymers or products of these reactions.  This explained why Cold thermogenesis worked to create new stronger light inside of us: VUV using melanin water and these elements on the periodic table.

The line between metal and non-metal status in any element has become quite blurred because of hydrogen. Physics is now awakened to this issue.  This is a new problem for modern chemistry. Its implications have not yet been appreciated by biology.  When you consider that hydrogen is involved in most biological reactions, this has massive implications for your biology of you and for life in general.  I am no longer in the biochemical silo of belief and I make fun of those who are toying in that cesspool of misunderstanding:  Ray Peat and the food gurus.

When I was a student growing up, hydrogen had a clear distinction in chemistry.  Sodium and hydrogen are group 1 elements.  Not only is hydrogen capable of switching teams but so is sodium its neighbor. Sodium is also used by life in a big way in extra and intracellular ionic fluids.  Now we know that hydrogen and sodium “switch teams” based on their local environment.  When the conditions of existence in these atoms' environments are altered, they can change their chemical abilities. This action seems very counterintuitive, yet it has been proven by experiment.  This makes them “metastable atoms”. Life appears to like to use atoms that are cationic, small, and metastable. Ling realized this too.  Ling was a smart cookie.

I went back to the periodic table.

We all think hydrogen is a clear gas. But on Jupiter, hydrogen is under so much pressure with an altered temperature, it becomes an extraordinary superconducting metal. In mitochondria, H+ becomes a metal-like plasma as well.  MEG data shows that the two tissues with the highest mitochondrial densities have large magnetic fields, namely the brain, and heart.

This is why Jupiter is believed to have a stronger magnetic field than the sun. Hydrogen gas is diamagnetic on Earth while its dance partner gas oxygen is paramagnetic.  One repels a magnetic field while the other is drawn to one.  So hydrogen acts differently on both planets because each planet fosters a different environment.  In space, hydrogen also acts differently magnetically. Hydrogen is a plasma in space. When air or gas is ionized, it loses its electrons, and plasma forms with conductive properties similar to those of metals. We see this in our ionosphere with aurora.

Plasma is the most abundant form of matter in the Universe because most stars are in a plasma state. Heating a gas may ionize its molecules or atoms by reducing or increasing the number of electrons in them, thus turning it into a plasma.  A plasma contains charged particles: positive ions and negative electrons or ions.  I’d like to remind you here that your mitochondrial matrix is filled with H+.  This is a hydrogen proton missing its electrons.  Mitochondria also liberate light in the form of infrared light or heat.  They also create WATER!  That water is needed to fabricate our wide-bandgapped semiconductors.   It too acts as an ionic plasma in you.

These were all the connections I was making that fateful day in the library of the medical school.

Here is how cells bury the sun's magnetic flux in cells.  It uses H+ to do it.   Magnetism is the essential force that determines the form of plasma or ionized matter taken in an environment. The hydrogen regions around galaxies are also considered plasmas, despite their degree of ionization being small. The degree of ionization in interplanetary space varies between unionized states or can morph into fully ionized states in other regions of space.

In space, however, even the weakly-ionized plasma in the hydrogen region reacts strongly to electromagnetic fields.  Magnetized plasma, such as that contained in the hydrogen region, is the dominating state in the universe as a whole.  Our sun produces massive amounts of plasma it spits out at us into the solar system as the solar wind or a coronal mass ejection.  The sun’s plasma is contained by the high electric and magnetic fields of the sun.

So is the H+ in our mitochondria.  This makes your colony of mitochondria an antenna for the sun's photons.  To decipher the electric and magnetic codes you need wide-band gapped semiconductors to get Nature's recipes to run your cells far from equilibrium to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics.  Not too hard to understand once you see it.

SUMMARY

Modern semiconductor technologies are only 70 years old but have already transformed human society. At the heart of the technologies are the physical characteristics of the semiconductor materials themselves: their fundamental electronic and optical properties that enable electrons, holes, and photons to interact and control each other in a wide variety of device architectures and operating environments. For the first 40 years of semiconductor technology, through the late 1980s, the major semiconductor materials were Ge, Si, and the “conventional” III-Vs elements of non-metals. The Ge- and Si-based technologies were spawned in 1947 by the demonstration of the first transistor. The early devices were discrete and modest, but further development enabled the replacement of bulky, inefficient, and slow-turn-on vacuum tubes in applications that began with civilian radios and walkie-talkies but quickly expanded to police radios and later military communications satellites. Shortly thereafter, these devices were followed by integrated microelectronics, enabling the rise and spread of computer technology. By 2015, Si technology, was dominated by Si complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) architectures. The “conventional” III-Vs refer to the narrower-band gap subset of compound semiconductors composed of elements from columns III and V of the periodic table. None of them were paramagnetic.

In electronics, the discovery in the 1970s that the AlGaAs/GaAs heterojunction could give rise to a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) was pivotal, enabling the first high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs) in GaAs and thin pseudomorphic strained InGaAs6 channels. In the 1980s, these devices and their cousins, GaAs- and InGaAs-based heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs), quickly began setting records for unity-current-gain frequency (fT) and output power above 10 GHz. In 1989, recognizing these benefits, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched its GaAs-based monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MIMIC) program. In optoelectronics, the invention in the 1960s of the laser diode was just as pivotal. A long chain of progress led, among other devices, to the single-mode InP-based laser diodes that now power the broadband dense-wavelength-division-multiplexed (DWDM) optical fiber networks, and which in turn are the backbone of the modern Internet.

By hacking the periodic table I found out that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a series of pivotal materials breakthroughs were made by Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura, for which they were awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics. Their breakthroughs, built upon the efforts of many earlier researchers, were completely unexpected: seemingly “magic” AlN and GaN buffer layers on sapphire that dramatically reduced dislocation densities; methods to activate p-type Mg doping of GaN; and the remarkable resilience of InGaN quantum well luminescence against structural defects. Magnesium doping was the key to my hacking eureka. Magnesium also doped chlorophyll. My search for other atoms to dope carbon was open full bore.

The KT event caused a brownout on Earth with respect to photosynthesis. This meant less food for the big dinosaurs but it also meant less oxygen for all life. Why did mammals do so well in this environment?

Mammals began to specialize in using paramagnetic atoms with unpaired electrons to control their cellular circuitry. This helped make them more hydrogen, oxygen, and electrons instead of having to rely on their ATPase. Melanin crystals they absorbed from their surface were their innovative event to give them superpowers.

Oxygen is considered critical to nearly all life on earth, as the end electron acceptor in mitochondria that makes, theoretically, mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation possible, and thereby energy production. This is modern centralized dogma. Is there another pathway to oxygen that mammals specialize in? Anaerobic energy sources can only temporarily supply ATP and maintain cellular function before substrate depletion, energy shortfall, or end-product poisoning that threatens survival. In most vertebrates, the limits of anoxia tolerance are short, on the order of minutes, because of the urgent dependence of the heart and central nervous system on a continuous supply of O2. Modern humans can only handle 4 minutes of anoxia before neuronal cell death occurs. What happened 65 million years ago with mammals is interesting because their hearts and brains were small organs and not energy dense. Today that is not true.

This brings up the key question, what did early mammals look like and how were they sculpted by melanin moving in their bodies from their surfaces to their interior organs?

That story continues in the next blogs.

CITES:

My cerebral cortex.