13 ms·
New “Leaf” Is More Efficient Than Natural Photosynthesis
- Osiris30 10y agoPrevious discussions on 'artificial leaves': https://hn.algolia.com/?query=artificial+leaf https://hn.algolia.com/?query=artificial+leaf
- thenewwazoo 10y agoHilarious. Thank you for that. See also: flying car, battery that lasts for years, and fusion power.
- zem 10y agostross's "accelerando" had a great reference to that: ------------- Getting back to the history lesson, the prospects for the decade look mostly medical. A few thousand elderly baby boomers are converging on Tehran for Woodstock Four. Europe is desperately trying to import eastern European nurses and home-care assistants; in Japan, whole agricultural villages lie vacant and decaying, ghost communities sucked dry as cities slurp people in like residential black holes. A rumor is spreading throughout gated old-age communities in the American Midwest, leaving havoc and riots in its wake: Senescence is caused by a slow virus coded into the mammalian genome that evolution hasn't weeded out, and rich billionaires are sitting on the rights to a vaccine. As usual, Charles Darwin gets more than his fair share of the blame. (Less spectacular but more realistic treatments for old age - telomere reconstruction and hexose-denatured protein reduction - are available in private clinics for those who are willing to surrender their pensions.) Progress is expected to speed up shortly, as the fundamental patents in genomic engineering begin to expire; the Free Chromosome Foundation has already published a manifesto calling for the creation of an intellectual-property-free genome with improved replacements for all commonly defective exons. Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death - with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights - will become the biggest civil rights issue of all. For a small extra fee, most veterinary insurance policies now cover cloning of pets in the event of their accidental and distressing death. Human cloning, for reasons nobody is very clear on anymore, is still illegal in most developed nations - but very few judiciaries push for mandatory abortion of identical twins. Some commodities are expensive: the price of crude oil has broken eighty Euros a barrel and is edging inexorably up. Other commodities are cheap: computers, for example. Hobbyists print off weird new processor architectures on their home inkjets; middle-aged folks wipe their backsides with diagnostic paper that can tell how their cholesterol levels are tending. The latest casualties of the march of technological progress are: the high-street clothes shop, the flushing water closet, the Main Battle Tank, and the first generation of quantum computers. New with the decade are cheap enhanced immune systems, brain implants that hook right into the Chomsky organ and talk to their owners through their own speech centers, and widespread public paranoia about limbic spam. Nanotechnology has shattered into a dozen disjoint disciplines, and skeptics are predicting that it will all peter out before long. Philosophers have ceded qualia to engineers, and the current difficult problem in AI is getting software to experience embarrassment. Fusion power is still, of course, fifty years away. -------------
- jshen 10y agoIf only HN had the features of this external tool
- ComputerGuru 10y agoIt's in the footer...
- headShrinker 10y agoIt should be noted that almost every previous article referencing "new leaf" ... "more efficient than natural photosynthesis", explains a process of slitting water to it's two atomic components. The leaf in this article implies a completely different product. Alcohol... It's quite a different track, and promising if true.
- mark-r 10y agoA promising side effect would be the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. Although burning the fuel probably returns it back, so it's only helpful inasmuch as it replaces other sources of fuel.
- azinman2 10y agoBetter to recycle the existing co2 than remove oil from the ground and put that into the air.
- Amygaz 10y agoYou still end-up with a by-product that you need to do something with. In this case burning it...
- azinman2 10y agoAlcohol on the ground causes less problems than excessive CO2 in the air, and still better to recycle the problematic CO2 in the air than increase its volume by burning oil from the ground.
- TheLarch 10y agoThere seems to be something about solar in particular that engenders overly optimistic claims. I've read several breathless stories over a span of decades about next-generation solar panels for instance, and yet we still have the same old ones, albeit manufactured more and more cheaply.
- SixSigma 10y agoIn a similar vein : urine into fuel https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=urine+fuel https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=urine+fuel Usually with a platinum catalyst or something rare & expensive "all we need to do is find a cheaper catalyst"
- ChuckMcM 10y agoThere has to be a science fiction story where the crew urinates on a platinum rich asteroid to generate enough fuel to get them out of some life threatening predicament.
- aedron 10y agoThis was actually how BMW created ultra-hardened combustion chambers. It was discovered that urinating on the engine block hardened the metal: http://www.autoevolution.com/news/turbocharged-engines-in-formula-one-18108.html http://www.autoevolution.com/news/turbocharged-engines-in-fo... Some of you might wonder how did the engine block resist to such immense detonation inside the combustion chamber. This may not be the answer you were looking for – and most of you might not believe it – but it seems BMW was in fact using seasoned inline 4 cylinder blocks – picked up from several junkyards – for their F1 operations. The interesting part about it was that the blocks were kept out in the cold and urinated upon in order to strengthen their composition.
- blawson 10y agoI just look at this as more proof that breakthroughs aren't nearly as "sudden" as it often seems. People will probably continue working on this for years and years before something, if anything, comes of it.
- mtgx 10y agoOne could say we're turning a new leaf in energy production.
- cmccart 10y agoThis got me thinking: how much CO2 is emitted by different energy sources in generating 1 kilowatt-hour? I came across this link: http://blueskymodel.org/kilowatt-hour http://blueskymodel.org/kilowatt-hour Seems like solar is more or less a break even, where nuclear /wind/geothermal/hydro are pure wins, which makes sense I suppose. Could you manufacture enough of these to consume 1 kilowatt-hour without generating more CO2 in the process than they would consume in their lifecycle?
- sevenless 10y agoI don't see any accounting for the cost of storing nuclear waste, long-term. (Nobody wants to do it; how do you even estimate that?)
- cmccart 10y agoOh, great point, I hadn't even considered that. I'm sure creating all those steel/concrete containers isn't the most CO2 friendly activity. AFAIK most plants store onsite so there's no transportation cost at least.
- unchocked 10y agoIt's easy, you take the cost of Yucca mountain depository (which is already sunk, btw), and amortize that over 10,000 years or so.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- omegaworks 10y agoSo easy! Watch how it's done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeVPMzJOFrQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeVPMzJOFrQ
- ChuckMcM 10y agoYou burn it as fuel[1]. More kilowatts for small (relatively) additional dollars. [1] http://terrapower.com/pages/technology http://terrapower.com/pages/technology
- matt4077 10y agoThis needs the additional information that photosynthesis is incredibly inefficient. It's <5% IIRC, so we already have solar panels almost a magnitude better than what nature did. (RuBisCO as the protein at the center of the process is also quite strange: it's huge and slow. As in 'this ain't funny any more, start working' slow with about a reaction per second.)
- jessriedel 10y agoDoes anyone know what the evolutionary bottlenecks/tradeoffs are for more efficient photosynthesis?
- chris_va 10y agoIt is a very very old protein, stuck in local maximum more than anything else.
- jessriedel 10y ago> stuck in local maximum more than anything else What's the argument that this is true, rather than it being better than more efficient proteins on some other metric?
- kibibyte 10y agoPlants in arid environments have evolved a more efficient carbon fixation process -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation -- in response to decreased water in the environment. Despite this, C3 plants still dominate the planet, so somehow selection pressure hasn't shifted strongly towards C4 plants in non-arid environments.
- jessriedel 10y agoAccording to the wikipedia page, C4 is more efficient in water usage, but less efficient than C3 in energy production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation
- Animats 10y agoThe article seems to indicate this is electrically powered, not powered by light. Where's the photosynthesis? First they make electricity, then they crack water into oxygen and hydrogen, then they combine the hydrogen and C02 to make hydrocarbons. If you've got electricity, why make fuel? That's wasteful.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> If you've got electricity, why make fuel? Because fuel is in lots of cases a better way to store (and transport) energy to be used later and a different time and potentially place.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- swiley 10y agoFuel is a very dense way to store energy.
- Amygaz 10y agoNot only that, but if you read the paper, their system is not sustainable, the components break down pretty fast. Then there is this little detail that IPA is not really a useful fuel. So a lot of PR, but not that much to show for. And my read from the first version of that "leaf", which isn't a leaf at all, is that the original goal was to go after hydrogen generation, but since the hydrogen economy is not trendy anymore,then have a new twist on it... Science journal is now more about how many clicks they are getting than the actual quality and novelty of the work.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoI am surprised no one has mentioned replacing the adsorption CO2 scrubbers on space craft[1] with something that is powered by electricity. The article claims 130 grams of CO2 removed from the air per kilowatt-hour. Astronauts might expel 40 - 50 grams of CO2 per hour into the air, so 500wHrs of power keeps the air breathable forever? That is a good deal. For reference the ISS has a crew of 6 and has 84 - 120kW of power capacity [2]. [1] Study problem on CO2 removal from NASA -- https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/519338main_AP_ED_Chem_CO2Removal_Stoich%2012-20-10.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/519338main_AP_ED_Chem_CO2Removal_St... [2] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/elements/solar_arrays.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/element...
- praxulus 10y agoNit: I believe you meant 500W. 500wHrs would only keep the air breathable for an hour. Doesn't change your conclusion though!
- ChuckMcM 10y agoYou are correct, 500W for 1 hour (.5kWh) would completely counter the breathing of one crew member for that 1 hour.
- CalRobert 10y agoA rule of thumb for remembering whether you want to say "power" or "energy". If you could replace "power" with "horsepower", you're on the right track! If you could say "gallons of gas" instead of "power", you mean energy! wHrs is energy (and kind of a dumb unit. Watts is already joules per second, so you're saying (joules/second)*hours. It would make more sense to just say joules.
- pavanky 10y agoThis leaf isn't generating oxygen though. It's generating alcohols. I wonder what it would take to generate oxygen out of the alcohol.
- 10y ago
- lechevalierd3on 10y agoI was expecting some crazy analogy between the a Nissan Leaf and natural photosynthesis.
- sanoy 10y agoThis is insanely cool.
- taneq 10y agoIt seems disingenuous to say this is "more efficient than natural photosynthesis" when it's a bioreactor using photosynthesizing microbes (and thus presumably use the same chlorophyll-based chemistry as natural photosynthesis). On the other hand, I wonder about the potential for evolution to occur inside reactors like these, essentially self-optimising them over time.
- eggy 10y agoVery cool. I thought it was going to be more 'biological' i.e. less about finding a catalyst, and more about microbes and chlorophyll somehow. I think technology creates things, sometimes problems, and then newer technology sometimes addresses these problems. I like the concept of all of these CO2 extraction-for-energy technologies that seem to be popping up lately. Now, let's hope they can scrub some CO2 from the atmosphere, but not too much! After all, the climate models have been proven to be underestimating the rise of temperature, so the models are deemed not reliable for prediction or forecasting. Take too much CO2 out, and we're in for a Global Winter. Sort of like the old Twilight Zone episode on TV (Ok, I'm old) where a guy is feverish, and in the background the Earth is getting too hot because of the sun getting closer? He then wakes up and it is snowing outside, and just when you think it is fine and dandy, it is the beginning of an Apocalyptic Winter!
- fernly 10y agoFound the paper: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6290/1210 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6290/1210 Found a nice quote in the LA Times coverage: http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-bionic-leaf-photosynthesis-20160603-snap-story.html http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-bionic-l... “Stay tuned because Pam and I are on a path to do nitrogen fixation in the same sort of way we’ve just done water splitting,” [Nocera said]
- davidf18 10y agoThank you for finding the article.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- fsiefken 10y agoSo if you replace standard solar panels with this and you burn the alcohol in an engine each hour, does it produce more or less electricity each hour if we know it's 10x more efficient then natural photosynthesis?
- sleepychu 10y agoI read science fiction story where they're on a colony on venus where the big problem is "how do we do make artificial photosynthesis? Plants are rubbish." but it was a free self-published novel and I now cannot find it. Anyone else read it?
- Kurtz79 10y agoMight it be this one ? http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8065404-containment http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8065404-containment (Fifth google result searching "photosynthesis venus novel")
- sleepychu 10y agoYes! Thank you. I'm sure I've searched similar things in the past but maybe I was too focused on the fact that it was self-published.
- _pmf_ 10y agoI cannot fathom why we have large scale, highly efficient meat production facilities (remember: animal rights are only relevant to hippie tree huggers), yet there's virtually no commercial efforts to harness plants. The technology exists [0]; I don't understand what the practical or political problems are. I think small scale plant reactors have the potential of being able to be manufactured very cheaply; maintenance is probably the issue, but I'd like to hear from an expert in the field. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_bioreactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_bioreactor
- lwis 10y agoDoes this present any potential improvements to solar panel efficiency?
- mtgx 10y agoThe question is if this is more efficient than just using solar panels + batteries to power something up. My guess is it's not, probably not even close. But perhaps there can be some niche uses for it where this system complexity and lower efficiency still makes more sense than using batteries.
- frgewut 10y agoDoes anyone know how does the efficiency of an entire tree compare (i.e a single leaf reflects some light, which then is absorbed by another leaf)? I would guess that number should be higher than simple "photosynthesis efficiency".
- naasking 10y agoVery neat technology for a possibly carbon neutral fossil fuel economy.