My mother, the wave

Ocean waves continue to wash through our every cell, say Masa Tsuchiya and John Ross (Stanford University, Stanford, CA). They have found that oscillatory metabolism—a more efficient method of creating chemical energy even with constant nutrient inputs—develops faster and more efficiently in response to oscillatory inputs such as the wash of nutrients from seashore waves. Thus such metabolism may have arisen at the seashore and then spread over the rest of the Earth.

Oscillatory metabolism has been seen in reactions such as glycolysis and proton import into mitochondria. The Stanford group earlier showed that oscillatory metabolism can be more efficient than linear metabolism as the oscillations force large amounts of reactants through a reaction when the reactant to product ratio is at its maximum. (This is comparable to the...