In school I learned how, when cells need energy, ATP releases it. Supposedly, there is now a chunk of energy floating around in the cell? What is this “energy”? What is it made of? How does it get from the mitochondria way over to the part of the cell that needed it? How does it get put to use? I feel like school is leaving out a huge amount of important information.
EDIT:
So far, the answers boil down to:
1) When cells need energy, ATP releases it.
2) Our cells figure out how to get the energy where it needs to go, somehow.
3) You’re not allowed to know the answer until you go to college, sorry.
Um… thanks?
In: 4
ATP is a molecule difficult to assemble and very easy to disassemble. In other words, it costs energy to create the molecule and when disassembling it, it gives out energy.
This energy is basically an unbalance in electrical charge of each individual atom of the molecule. It is energy costly to remove or add an electron to an atom or molecule in equilibrium. If a molecule is positively charged, it will attract negative charges or negatively charged molecules at no energy cost. Nature just wants to be in equilibrium because it’s easy to attract opposites and difficult to create charged molecules, but the body of the live beings have some clever ways (molecules and ezimes) that circumvent this equilibrium craze and enables you to create molecules that contain energy. Those can be used when needed since muscles or cells that generate energy have special molecules that use the energy of the breaking of the ATP into either attraction of nearby molecules (muscles) or into a chemical reaction that gives out heat
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