Tag: meaning of life

Fats typically provide more than half of the body's energy needs. Fat from food is broken down into fatty acids, which can travel in the blood and be captured by hungry cells. Fatty acids that aren't needed right away are packaged in bundles called triglycerides and stored in fat cells, which have unlimited capacity. Fat is the body's most concentrated source of energy, providing more than twice as much potential energy as carbohydrate or protein (9 calories per gram versus 4 calories each per gram).

Entropy is the measurement of this disorder in energy, in which heat energy, is not usable, is considered disorganized. Thus, a system with a large amount of usable energy has low entropy, a system with little usable energy has high entropy. Based on the second law of thermodynamics, entropy will continually increase in the universe as energy becomes more and more disorganized.

First law of thermodynamics defines that the energy neither created nor destroyed but can only be transformed. Ecosystem is not accepted by the 1st law of thermodynamics because the energy is created.

The energy flow starts from the sun. The light energy enters the space and then into the atmosphere. The energy in the atmosphere is captured by the plants which are autotrophs. Plants convert this light energy to chemical energy by photosynthesis. The food prepared by the plants is consumed by the heterotrophs. The heterotrophs are utilized by the decomposers.

The amount of energy at each trophic level decreases as it moves through an ecosystem. As little as 10 percent of the energy at any trophic level is transferred to the next level; the rest is lost largely through metabolic processes as heat. The efficiency with which energy or biomass is transferred from one trophic level to the next is called as the ecological efficiency. Consumers at each level convert on average only about 10% of the chemical energy in their food to their own organic tissue (the ten-percent law).