Nova - Hunting the Hidden Dimension

Was just watching an episode of Nova that focused on fractals, and some stuff came up that made me think.

The subject came up of "The larger an organism is, the more efficiently it uses energy." So if an elephant is 10,000,000 times the size of a mouse, somehow it only needs 10,000 times the energy to run itself. This has been a long-known fact, and the formula for it is E=M^3/4
This also makes me think about how big things are slow(elephants, whales), and small things (mice, hummingbirds, etc) have high metabolisms and move much more quickly.
But the other thing that it made me think of is merchandise. If you buy a big tube of toothpaste, a tube that's say 5 times as big, it doesn't cost 5 times as much, usually it doesn't even cost twice as much.
The smaller something is, the less efficient it is - in terms of cost, energy, resources, whatever.
This is just something I thought of.

I think this might have to do with the fact that things can only be so small - cells, for example. There are many more cells in an elephant than a mouse, therefore the elephant's cells can be more organized. Think of it as being similar to pixels - the more pixels you have, the more definition you can have. Pixels are a set size, however - as are cells - and so if the image is going to be smaller, it's going to have less definition. Cells are *probably* the same size no matter what animal it is (the same or very close to the same - i haven't done biology in too long, and food stamps won't pay for microscopes - or elephant & mice tissue, to my knowledge).

It's like the small tube of toothpaste essentially costing more. The exterior tube that holds the toothpaste is still going to have to be thick enough to hold it, whether it's holding 1 ounce or 4 ounces. I think, though, i'm not really sure.

One thing that I am sure of: surface tension. Surface tension is the reason that shrinking/growing things doesn't work. Let's say you've got your jesus lizard, at its small size it can run across the top of water. But if you made it bigger, say, the size of the actual Jesus, then no way, it wouldn't be able to do it, the surface tension wouldn't hold it.

In the larger animal, more systems can be automated. More cells are the same and don't need "blueprints". So say in a large animal there are 10 organs with 10,000 cells each. That means you need 10 sets of blueprints for 1,000,000 cells. But if you've got a small animal with 10 organs but each organ only has 100 cells, that's 10 sets of blueprints for only 1,000 cells. So clearly, you're going to have less efficiency there.

Also: I know it is very very unlikely that any animal would have 10 organs with 100 cells each. I'm trying to keep this simple.

Eh, it's 4:38 AM.

I shouldn't get into math/science stuff this late at night. I'm more "mad" and less "scientist".