from the I-don't-need-no-stinkin'-sunshine dept.
Photosynthesis has evolved in plants for millions of years to turn water, carbon dioxide, and the energy from sunlight into plant biomass and the foods we eat. This process, however, is very inefficient, with only about 1% of the energy found in sunlight ending up in the plant. Scientists at UC Riverside and the University of Delaware have found a way to bypass the need for biological photosynthesis altogether and create food independent of sunlight by using artificial photosynthesis.
The research, published in Nature Food, uses a two-step electrocatalytic process to convert carbon dioxide, electricity, and water into acetate, the form of the main component of vinegar. Food-producing organisms then consume acetate in the dark to grow. Combined with solar panels to generate the electricity to power the electrocatalysis, this hybrid organic-inorganic system could increase the conversion efficiency of sunlight into food, up to 18 times more efficient for some foods.
[...] Experiments showed that a wide range of food-producing organisms can be grown in the dark directly on the acetate-rich electrolyzer output, including green algae, yeast, and fungal mycelium that produce mushrooms. Producing algae with this technology is approximately fourfold more energy efficient than growing it photosynthetically. Yeast production is about 18-fold more energy efficient than how it is typically cultivated using sugar extracted from corn.
[...] By liberating agriculture from complete dependence on the sun, artificial photosynthesis opens the door to countless possibilities for growing food under the increasingly difficult conditions imposed by anthropogenic climate change. Drought, floods, and reduced land availability would be less of a threat to global food security if crops for humans and animals grew in less resource-intensive, controlled environments. Crops could also be grown in cities and other areas currently unsuitable for agriculture, and even provide food for future space explorers.
Journal Reference:
Hann, E.C., Overa, S., Harland-Dunaway, M. et al. A hybrid inorganic–biological artificial photosynthesis system for energy-efficient food production. Nat Food 3, 461–471 (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s43016-022-00530-x
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @10:57AM
> the increasingly difficult conditions imposed by insatiable human consumption impacting on the rest of the planetary biosphere
ftfy
..so how is tech that allows human to continue to be fed /after they've' destroyed the planet/ a good thing?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @11:52AM (7 children)
So we are saved from the apocalypse?
People who live without Sun can get serious Vitamin D deficiencies and become miserable as the link between Seratonin is busted,
Good thing mushrooms are a source, albeit not a sufficient one.
You need to be in the Sun 20 min. twice per week to avoid deficiencies.
WIth clothing and sunscreen, city life can be a big problem.
And so if we get to the point where we need to rely on this tech, there will be a bigger issues regarding our lack of Sun light.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Saturday June 25 2022, @01:01PM (3 children)
The sun isn't going anywhere, but reliably arable farmland is. Between heat waves, floods, droughts, and unseasonable freezes, traditional farming is going to become an increasingly tenuous endeavor.
Greenhouses can help with water problems and freezing, but tend to make heat waves even worse. And they tend to be better suited to cash crops than cheap staples like countless square miles of corn and wheat.
Fully indoor farming allows you to basically ignore the weather, and grow crops many layers deep, allowing for much smaller footprints than greenhouses with the same yield - but using artificial sunlight consumes a huge amount of energy, equal to solar panels covering several times the equivalent acreage of farmland due to efficiency losses.
If we can side-step the abysmally low efficiency of photosynthesis and synthetically create bio-available calories with a fraction of the sunlight, then we've got a prime candidate for bioreactor "fuel". Yeast, algae, etc. vats won't be replacing strawberries any time soon - but may well offer a more effective source of processed staple ingredients like sugar, flour, vegetable oil, and protein powders. Which would leave what arable land there is available for fruits and vegetables.
We can already do that with some microbes that feed on hydrogen, and I believe there's some research going into finding options that grow on methane - but acetate is a much more biologically "normal" energy carrying molecule, so it's likely to open up a much wider range of organisms that can be grown. Mushrooms in particular are promising as they offer more substantial fare in a wide range of pleasant flavors and textures. One group has even figured out how to trick some varieties into growing in wide, thick sheets rather than their normal shapes, which makes harvesting and processing much easier, as well as significantly improving yield per acre, and being far more suitable for being further processed into things like sheets of vegan bacon or leather.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Saturday June 25 2022, @03:30PM
Don't need arable land to make strawberries, indoor factory will do:
https://oishii.com/pages/our-farms [oishii.com]
Ok, it's $2 per strawberry... but hey if there isn't any arable land...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday June 26 2022, @01:13AM
I'm not sure traditional farming exists in many places anymore, at least not on any survivable scale. Heatwaves and droughts have a more far reaching negative effect on places that really weren't meant to be farmed in the first place, like much of the American Southwest and the Great Plains. We have (in the US) made many mistakes along the way, but in the long run the worst might be how we have squandered our best farmland. It's been that way from the start, with land that should have been farmed to produce food instead being squandered on growing tobacco, which abuses the land. It's worse now, where most of the prime farmland in the East/Northeast/Midwest has fallen to development. There might be more acreage available in the SW and Great Plains, but all of it requires a great deal more of resource use to produce crops. The South is OK for now, but with changing climate, population growth, etc., water and fertilizer costs will continue to rise. Only one thing is certain, with corporate interests running the show for the most part you can bet long term sustainability is not often discussed in meetings.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2022, @09:50AM
this is also a big deal because you can use it where you don't have the sun.
think skandinavia and other short-summer places.
on longer term, it's a big deal because growing food on interstellar voyages will be cheaper.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday June 25 2022, @01:06PM (1 child)
I guess a sun bed works for Vitamin D, too. And it doesn't need the actual sun, just electricity. And for serotonin all you need is bright light with sufficient amount of blue, that also can be produced electrically.
Of course, replicating the psychological effects of being out in the sun will likely be quite a bit harder …
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Sunday June 26 2022, @04:02PM
Data point: One of Jacques Cousteau's undersea habitats included hardware specifically for these purposes. I think it was the one in the Red Sea.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday June 25 2022, @04:18PM
You have to understand that believers in the magic technology fairy solution to climate change have considered blotting out the sun [cfr.org] a serious proposal for addressing the problem. Or at least, a more serious proposal than anything that might reduce CO2 emissions.
So yeah, this might end up being relevant tech, to deal with the damage caused by other tech.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @12:11PM (5 children)
Hey guys, have you noticed how Soylentnews is losing its comments traffic?
The stories are being slowly chocked off due to too much,
"Invalid Key" and "Bad IP" filtering.
At some point you will kill the site cause even the valid active users will be blocked or forced behind AC and give up entirely.
Look even on the front page,
the largest comment activity is at 68 with only 15 signed in users.
It use to be a controversial post would generate 100s of responses.
Interest is wanning as they strangle the active users trying to control the supposed bad ones and the blocking has only recklessly accelerated.
Let's face it, we are here for the dialogue, NOT just the stories.
/. is starting to look more attractive again.
But as usual, we can not talk about that at Soylentnews, just watch as this post gets downmoded and the IP blocked.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday June 25 2022, @01:12PM (3 children)
It's a very long time since I've last got an “invalid key” error. And I never in my whole life got a “bad IP” error; I didn't even know that exists.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @04:04PM
I've gotten both multiple times in the last week. Sometimes I'm motivated enough to launch TOR to post. Most of the time I just move on.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday June 26 2022, @12:47AM (1 child)
I suspect the anonymous OP is one of the continuing bad actors that gets shut down as a result. They're likely the ones driving off "viewers".
OP, instead of constantly complaining, try making posts with relevant and legitimate responses to topics or GP's, and maybe you'll start seeing better results.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2022, @09:53AM
also possible: AC is using the same VPN as a bad actor.
although I do find it likely that this particular AC is themselves a bad actor, infecting their IP with badness as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 06 2022, @01:25AM
Why is this marked as spam? Was the same thing posted before?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @10:32PM
Anything that requires no human effort is 100% efficient.