Very roughly how many water molecules would you guess there are in a single cell? Within a couple of orders of magnitude? I got it quite wrong.
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You can do a Fermi estimate based either on mass (which didn’t occur to me, but several tweeps did it that way!) or based on volume. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem …
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A water molecule is roughly 3Å (I remembered this!). An Å is 10^-10m (I remembered this too!) How big is a cell? (I didn’t remember this, if I ever knew!) 10μ is too small and 100μ is too big (although for a Fermi estimate, but might be reasonable).
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So call it 30μ, i.e. 3*10^-5. Then the ratio of linear dimensions is 10^5, or volumetrically 10^15. But water isn’t the whole of the cell, so less than that. Maybe 10^14. This is larger than most numbers I found on the web, but not way off.
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