Quantum Secrets of Photosynthesis Revealed.. »
Posted by: GregD 1 year, 4 months agoThrough photosynthesis, green plants...are able to transfer sunlight energy to molecular reaction centers for conversion into chemical energy with nearly 100-percent efficiency...How photosynthesis achieves this near instantaneous energy transfer is a long-standing mystery that may have finally been solved.
Read Full Story at lbl.gov
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SevenHundredV141 year, 4 months ago
If there is this "great designer" out there what are your thoughts on ebola?
"The infected victim staggers, disoriented and exhausted, and collapses in a fever, which is known as the Haemorrhagic fever. The fever is characterized by weakness, muscle pain, headache and sore throat. The victim's eyes turn bright red, and starts vomiting blood. The tongue peels, and the heart muscle becomes soft. Scientists believe that when the victim get in contact with the virus, the virus first triggers a combination of blood clots and hemorrhages. The patient's bloodstream throws clots, and the clots lodge everywhere, especially in the spleen, liver, and brain, then it settle in the victim throat. Bleeding involves the nose, abdomen, and pericardium. Capillary leakage appears to lead to loss of interavascular volume leading the patient to fall in a shock and acute respiratory disorder leaving the patient desperately trying to gasp their breath."
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invest071 year, 4 months ago
The designer created the universe with warts as well as roses. Predators and prey. Healthy and unhealthy. Noble horses and weird armadillos. Beneficial bacteria and deadly ones. Good people and not so good ones.
Some scientists who agree with design are at this link.
http://www.discovery.org/articleFiles/PDFs/100S...
This list is out of date. The current list is several times longer.
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thomas9981 year, 4 months ago
Okay God follower... Here is a simple question for you. God in any religion you choose is a perfect being all knowing all powerful.
Then how could a perfect all powerful being create anything that wasn't perfect. God couldn't. So either you have an imperfect God which can't be the case or God had nothing to do with man or the earth for that matter. Even if you simply said your God just created the world and then walked away you are left with the problem that a God would create a perfect world and any life that sprang from it would also be perfect. Nothing imperfect can come from some thing perfect, or if you like something perfect can create something imperfect if it did it wouldn't be perfect.
Now go read your bible and have another brain fart.
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quackpot1 year, 4 months ago
I wonder if the room is painted green to hide the chlorophil stains.
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brothers1 year, 4 months ago
Good stuff. However, since I do not speak scientificees I did not understand what they were saying but whatever it is looks exciting.
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TryingToBeSane1 year, 4 months ago
That is the problem with articles such as this. They are written to look exciting and try to convey that something is happening. What took place here is that a display was shown in a Labview-like graphic on a laptop which shows an insync to a predicted, or manufactured, graph of the process in question. It does not go into how the transfer of sunlight energy to chemical energy takes place. It simply gives evidence of the efficiency of the transfer. More impressive would be the CO2 processes analyzed enough so we could artificially or industrially breakdown this compound to harvest both carbon and oxygen ourselves while diminishing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and reducing the greenhouse effect. Then cost of such projects could be justified.
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ryan6011 year, 4 months ago
True, but the fact that the energy transfer comes in quantumed packages rather than a single burst is actually a remarkable finding.
Biologists tend to think of biochemical changes as being a relatively immediate circumstance (e.g. the enzymatic cleavage, or phosphorylation and/or dephosphorylation of a substrate) without much in the way of intermediates (at least not long-lived intermediates).
But if this research is correct, then perhaps we need to revisit some of our most basic assumptions about biochemistry, that perhaps energy transfer exists in a fundamentally different way then we thought. It would be interesting to see if a similar pattern of energy transfer exists in the Electron Transport Chain of mammalian cells.
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invest071 year, 4 months ago
Much has been written about "packets" rather than a steady stream.
Some plants grow better under shade cloth that has alternating stripes. Screen and opague. That way as the sun moves across the sky, each area of the leaf is alternately exposed to shade and sun. Growth has been stimulated by this process.
Unrelated to natural processes is the way information moves through a network. In packets with headers and tailers and info in between.
The best battery chargers use a pulsed wave rather than a steady stream. The pulsed wave tends to erase the memory of older batteries and improves the run time.
Interesting that leaves may also read pulses rather than steady streams.
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thomas9981 year, 4 months ago
yet it is misleading. the claim is that near 100 percent efficency in energy transfer... yet it ignores the fact that a considerable amount of light is reflected back.... If you force feed any system with more fuel than it can possibley use you can skew result showing what was used was used efficiently... If I have a box with a hole in it of a certain size and cram playdough against it to the point that some forces it way through the hole I could claim my box was 100% efficent at letting playdough through... but so what, I would be ignoring all the playdough that was pushed to the side. THat's what these guys are doing only on a microsize.
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m-simon1 year, 4 months ago
If we can reduce CO2 below 90 ppm we can stop natural photosynthesis. At 200 ppm plants start starving for CO2.
If we can increase CO2 we can increase the efficiency of energy collection. More food more trees.
The anti-CO2 folks hate food and trees.
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canadianrancher571 year, 4 months ago
This is all way beyond me, but coming up with an idea and trying to prove it gives life a real challenge, hope they have continued sucess.
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crespi1 year, 4 months ago
Adenosine triphosphate rocks. Kreb's cycle, too.
However, TryingToBeSane is right that we are a long way from taking sunlight and dirt and creating living tissue the way plants do.
If we do get implanted "chlorophyll people" the ensuing "racial" prejudice will give a whole new meaning to "It Isn't Easy Being Green."
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ryan6011 year, 4 months ago
"If we do get implanted "chlorophyll people" the ensuing "racial" prejudice will give a whole new meaning to "It Isn't Easy Being Green."
hehehe :-)
Kermit may see a resurgence in popularity, however.
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caneher1 year, 4 months ago
Chloroplast has been implanted in animal cell. Turning a person green would be easy compared to gaining a full understanding of how this process work. The experiment shows that much of it may take place on a quantum level which in effect mean that it will be even more difficult to trace just how it work than thought.
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joeblowe1 year, 4 months ago
It adds to our understanding of the process, but I'm not sure it puts us THAT much closer to being able to replicate it by artificial means. When we can convert sunlight to electricity as efficiently as plants convert it to hydrocarbons, we will be ready to tell the Saudis to pis* off.
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espse1 year, 4 months ago
The big advance here is being able to measure femtosecond quantum changes. As instrumentation and metrology improves, scientists can observe more. If you read the literature, oservations of "very fast" processes in physical chemistry are all the rage.
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slate1 year, 4 months ago
This sounds like a way to maybe bring solar enegry to it's max potential as well
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Countryhick1 year, 4 months ago
Quantum computers just around the corner , talk about green friendly .
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wildman65571 year, 4 months ago
No one really knows what high C02 levels will bring since we haven't had that since the dinosaurs. It might be better or it (more likely) might be worse. No one knows. I think the wisest statement above is to achieve C02 stability. However, this is very difficult.
What we need is more basic science like this work to try to get around the problems we face. We are going in the right direction. The production of C02 per $ of GNP (inflation adjusted) has been in a steady decline anyway (even before Al Gore). What we need to do is speed up what is already happening. Basically, we need more money dedicated to this kind of research. What we have now just isn't going to do it.
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