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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday December 29 2016, @09:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the yellow-and-blue-make-green dept.

Using ultrafast imaging of moving energy in photosynthesis, scientists have determined the speed of crucial processes for the first time.

This should help scientists understand how nature has perfected the process of photosynthesis, and how this might be copied to produce fuels by artificial photosynthesis.

During photosynthesis, plants harvest light and, though a chemical process involving water and carbon dioxide, convert this into fuel for life.

A vital part of this process is using the light energy to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. This is done by an enzyme called Photosystem II. Light energy is harvested by 'antennae', and transferred to the reaction centre of Photosystem II, which strips electrons from water. This conversion of excitation energy into chemical energy, known as 'charge separation', is the first step in splitting water.

It was previously thought that the process of charge separation in the reaction centre was a 'bottleneck' in photosynthesis - the slowest step in the process - rather than the transfer of energy along the antennae.

Marius Kaucikas, Karim Maghlaoui, Jim Barber, Thomas Renger and Jasper J van Thor, Ultrafast infrared observation of exciton equilibration from oriented single crystals of photosystem II will be published in Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/NCOMMS13977


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 29 2016, @10:00AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 29 2016, @10:00AM (#447022)

    This gonna be great for self driving Uber trucks to suck energy directly out the sun and put everbody out of work. Self driving deliveries to rich peoples who can pay. Fuck the poor people.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday December 29 2016, @10:19AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday December 29 2016, @10:19AM (#447026) Journal

    If the poor people get too poor to buy stuff, then most things stop being profitable, because you need the poor people buying them to make a profit. And even those who only sell to rich people must be interested in the buying power of the poor people, because most of the rich they sell to are only rich through selling to the poor people. Take away their ability to sell to the poor people, and they soon will be poor themselves and not be able to buy your rich people's toys. Which isn't exactly good for profit either.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 29 2016, @10:33AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 29 2016, @10:33AM (#447027)

      Not a problem. We can just outsource the market and sell to buyers overseas. There are plenty of emerging markets in developing countries. The developed countries belong to the rich. The remaining poor people in developed countries will fit nicely into profitable prisons.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 29 2016, @02:00PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 29 2016, @02:00PM (#447073)

        This strategy will work in the short term, but we need to engage in long term thinking here. I propose that Uber should begin preparing for the future after peak poor person by innovating automated poor person robots. In the future, robots will fill the role of consumers, buying useless shit and filling landfills with it.

    • (Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday December 29 2016, @06:48PM

      by Francis (5544) on Thursday December 29 2016, @06:48PM (#447163)

      Then you just cut rates to below zero and make sure that inflation is high enough that they can't afford to save money. Also, you change the bankruptcy laws so that they can't get their debt discharged in court.

      By the time the economy tanks, the execs have already got their bonuses and are living somewhere with a sanely managed economy.