The aquaporins are not ''an intelligent being'' in any real sense, yet they are so formidable selective that they could easily parallel Maxwell demon's efficiency in creating the right conditions for the cell. Wu et al. give us some clues on the role of point mutations in the AQP1 and how their effective electrostatic proton barrier can be impaired [692] . The elicitation of the detailed mechanistic explanation of this extraordinary selectivity is under intense investigation with a number of techniques, including sophisticated molecular dyanamics simulations, for an overview of this field see [665, 693, 694, 695, 696, 697, 698, 699, 700, 701, 702, 703, 704, 705, 706, 707, 708] . One less known feature of aquaporins is that they may not only channel water, but also carbon dioxide and ammonia [709, 710, 711] , glycerol [712] and urea and other small solutes [713] and, very relevant for cancer research, hydrogen peroxide [188] . At least two of members of this family have been observed in the inner mitochondrial membrane in different tissues. This in turn may indicate mitochondrial roles for aquapotins in osmotic swelling induced by apoptotic stimuli [714] .