The fact that ATP is the universal energy storage mollecule of all life on Earth is such an incredible unifying principle of biology!
It is the direct output of all the major forms of "energy generation" in cells: ATP synthesis mechanism.
It is just as fundamental as the genetic code for example.
No wonder dozens of Nobel Prizes were related to its discovery, given its complexity.
Khômiss by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The Khômiss was a Binet that had 12 undisclosed participants every year.
They intentionally projected the idea of a semi scary and cool secret society/cult/Fascist/Gestapo/non-racist Ku Klux Klan-like organization
Khômiss members would wear a face cover whenever they would go out "on duty", notably to break a student's door with a fire axe when some student had fucked up particularly bad.
The Khômiss had an ambivalent character: while on one hand they would punish students that they felt had fucked up, they were actually semi approved by the school's head.
And conversely, they could also play pranks on the school head, e.g. vandalizing their office with funny objects if they had made some decision that was particularly unpopular to the students. This also likely with tacit approval, and as a way to be a "cool independent organization that also represents the students".
As such, the Khômiss aimed to be a sort of a "conscience" of the cohort, punishing the evil deeds of either side.
They were apparently unfortunately disbanded by the school in 2013 it seems, just after Ciro Santilli left. They took some poor student out by car and left him more than 1km outsie of the school for some reason. But he had a cell phone and walked came back, so doesn't feel that serious. Likely the political correctness of the times just caught up with them.
Figure 2.
Low resolution image of Khômiss members standing on top of a roof in Paris
. Source. They are wearing their official unmasked clothing in that photo. It appears that ex-Khômiss are allowed to reveal their identities from this. The one with a French military cap is the their leader, and is known as the "GénéK" in their jargon.
quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/26/lazy-job/ (archive):
I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.
"Barys" means "heavy" in Greek, because protons and neutrons was what made most of the mass of known ordinary matter, as opposed notably to electrons.
Baryons can be contrasted with:
Caesium standard by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Uses the frequency of the hyperfine structure of caesium-133 ground state, i.e spin up vs spin down of its valence electron , to define the second.
International System of Units definition of the second since 1967, because this is what atomic clocks use.
TODO why does this have more energy than the hyperfine split of the hydrogen line given that it is further from the nucleus?

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact