New insights on photosynthesis bring us one step closer to solar fuels

For billions of years, nature has been harnessing the energy from the sun through photosynthesis. This way, plants, algae and cyanobacteria use sunlight to split water and produce energy-rich chemical compounds from carbon dioxide (CO2). This energy is then transferred to animal that eat these plants, and animals that eat plant-eating animals, including us humans. It’s clear that without photosynthesis, there

Popeye’s secret: spinach provides key insight that might one day lead to artificial photosynthesis

While scientists have been studying and incrementally increasing solar cell efficiency, we’ve yet to reach nature’s magnitude of solar energy conversion through photosynthesis. Artificial photosynthesis is a goal in alternative energy research, yet the process is extremely difficult to mimic since, in nature, the process involves numerous stages and transformation of matter and energy. Purdue University physicists used spinach and applied

Progress in artificial leaf development made

What nature seems to perform effortlessly with photosynthesis has proven to be an immense hurdle for scientists trying to mimic it with so called artificial leafs. In recent years, important breakthroughs have been made with this scope in mind, yet the artificial leaf is so inefficient at the moment that it’s absolutely not worth pursuing on a large scale. Researchers