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Science & Cooking: A Companion to the Harvard Course – Michael P. Brenner, Pia M. Sörensen & David A. Weitz

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Science & Cooking: A Companion to the Harvard Course

Michael P. Brenner, Pia M. Sörensen & David A. Weitz

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $9.99

Publish Date: June 14, 2015

Publisher: Science and Cooking, Harvard

Seller: Michael Brenner


This book is based on, and meant to serve as a companion to, the Harvard course Science and Cooking: from Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science , which aims to teach physics and chemistry through examples of food and cooking. The course features world-renowned chefs explaining the remarkable creations from their kitchens paired with explanations of the underlying science in everyday cooking and haute cuisine. This book focuses on conveying the scientific information in the course, with the order and content of the chapters closely following how the concepts would ordinarily be explained in the class. It additionally contains graphics, sample calculations, and short videos illustrating key concepts.  Topics include soft matter materials, such as emulsions and foams, illustrated by aioli and ice cream; diffusion and heat transfer, exemplified by the cooking of a steak and the culinary phenomenon spherification; as well as phase transitions, elasticity, viscosity, and the science underlying fermentation.  It is our hope that this book is a helpful supplement to students taking the course, either on campus or online. It should also be a useful resource for other courses and initiatives aiming to teach physics and chemistry through food and cooking, as well as to any curious reader with an interest in how recipes work on a scientific level.

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Science & Cooking: A Companion to the Harvard Course – Michael P. Brenner, Pia M. Sörensen & David A. Weitz

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Miss Leavitt’s Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe (Great Discoveries) – George Johnson

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Miss Leavitt’s Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe (Great Discoveries)

George Johnson

Genre: Physics

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: June 17, 2006

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


"A short, excellent account of [Leavitt’s] extraordinary life and achievements." —Simon Singh, New York Times Book Review George Johnson brings to life Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who found the key to the vastness of the universe—in the form of a “yardstick” suitable for measuring it. Unknown in our day, Leavitt was no more recognized in her own: despite her enormous achievement, she was employed by the Harvard Observatory as a mere number-cruncher, at a wage not dissimilar from that of workers in the nearby textile mills. Miss Leavitt’s Stars uncovers her neglected history.

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Miss Leavitt’s Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe (Great Discoveries) – George Johnson

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The Glass Universe – Dava Sobel

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The Glass Universe
How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars
Dava Sobel

Genre: History

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: December 6, 2016

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Seller: PENGUIN GROUP USA, INC.


From #1 New York Times bestselling author Dava Sobel, t he “inspiring” ( People ), little-known true story of women’s landmark contributions to astronomy A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 Named one of the best books of the year by NPR,  The   Economist, Smithsonian, Nature,  and NPR’s   Science Friday Nominated for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award “A joy to read.” — The Wall Street Journal In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or “human computers,” to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but soon the female corps included graduates of the new women’s colleges—Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned from computation to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates. The “glass universe” of half a million plates that Harvard amassed over the ensuing decades—through the generous support of Mrs. Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of a pioneer in stellar photography—enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight. Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars; Annie Jump Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers the world over and is still in use; and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard—and Harvard’s first female department chair. Elegantly written and enriched by excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, The Glass Universe  is the hidden history of the women whose contributions to the burgeoning field of astronomy forever changed our understanding of the stars and our place in the universe.

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The Glass Universe – Dava Sobel

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Blueprint – Robert Plomin

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Blueprint
How DNA Makes Us Who We Are
Robert Plomin

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $27.99

Publish Date: November 13, 2018

Publisher: The MIT Press

Seller: The MIT Press


A top behavioral geneticist makes the case that DNA inherited from our parents at the moment of conception can predict our psychological strengths and weaknesses. In Blueprint , behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin describes how the DNA revolution has made DNA personal by giving us the power to predict our psychological strengths and weaknesses from birth. A century of genetic research shows that DNA differences inherited from our parents are the consistent life-long sources of our psychological individuality—the blueprint that makes us who we are. This, says Plomin, is a game changer. Plomin has been working on these issues for almost fifty years, conducting longitudinal studies of twins and adoptees. He reports that genetics explains more of the psychological differences among people than all other factors combined. Genetics accounts for fifty percent of psychological differences—not just mental health and school achievement but all psychological traits, from personality to intellectual abilities. Nature, not nurture is what makes us who we are. Plomin explores the implications of this, drawing some provocative conclusions—among them that parenting styles don’t really affect children’s outcomes once genetics is taken into effect. Neither tiger mothers nor attachment parenting affects children’s ability to get into Harvard. After describing why DNA matters, Plomin explains what DNA does, offering readers a unique insider’s view of the exciting synergies that came from combining genetics and psychology.

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Blueprint – Robert Plomin

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How Harvard’s investments exacerbate global land and water conflicts

In late May, an open letter appeared on Medium penned by Kat Taylor, an overseer of Harvard’s investment fund. Taylor was resigning her position in protest because portions of the university’s multi-billion-dollar endowment have gone to “land purchases that may not respect indigenous rights” and “water holdings that threaten the human right to water.”

“We should and would be horrified to find out that Harvard investments are actually funding some of the pernicious activities against which our standout academic leadership rails,” she wrote.

A similar letter appeared in 2014, this time written by an international group of leaders from civil society organizations, like the Croatan Institute and the Global Forest Coalition. “Four decades ago, Harvard was in fact a leader in the movement for more responsible institutional investment,” the coalition wrote. “Today Harvard can no longer claim to play such a role.”

Harvard began investing in farmland in the aftermath of the world food price crisis in 2007, which made agricultural land desirable, and the financial crisis in 2008, which increased the appeal of more tangible assets. In the subsequent decade, the Harvard Management Company, as the school’s investment arm is known, has purchased large swaths of farmland in Brazil, South Africa, Russia, the Ukraine, New Zealand, Australia, and the U.S.

The elite university has quietly become one of the largest owners of farmland in the world, according to a new report by GRAIN, an international nonprofit supporting small farmers, and Brazil-based Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos (Social Network for Justice and Human Rights). The investigation found that Harvard’s estimated 1 billion dollars of investments are often made without due diligence or respect for the people who have lived for generations on the land it acquired.

“This is a really tough document to read about essentially how Harvard has blood on its hands,” says Keisha-Khan Perry, a professor of Africana studies at Brown whose research focuses on black social movements and land rights within the Americas.

The report extensively documents many Harvard-financed land acquisitions that directly led to the devastation of indigenous peoples, the creation of internal refugees, and the destruction of sacred and ecologically important areas. Among numerous examples: Harvard’s investors acquired several South African farms. Post-apartheid land reforms had granted property rights to black workers who once worked the land and their families. After taking over these parcels in 2011, Harvard put in place farm managers who restricted those families’ rights, including for grazing their cattle and accessing family burial sites. The managers also imposed a system of penalties that could result in the expulsion of a family if any of its members disobeyed the restrictions.

Perry notes that the school’s large-scale investments in indigenous land — which she says is part of a broader phenomenon known as “land grabbing” — can contribute to ecological degradation, land conflicts, and even warfare. “It’s almost like investing in gold in Sierra Leone, or oil in Nigeria, or diamonds on South Africa,” she explains.

A Harvard Management Company spokesperson, Patrick McKiernan, pushed back against characterizations like the ones made by Perry and the new report. “Harvard Management Company focuses on environmental, social, and governance matters for all of its investments, to ensure long-term value for both the asset and the communities in which we invest,” he wrote to Grist. “This commitment to responsible investing involves working with relevant constituents, including local authorities, to address any issues that arise during our investment, even if they predate HMC’s involvement.”

Harvard’s most extensive and conflict-ridden land acquisitions have occurred in Brazil. The university acquired nearly 300,000 hectares of land in the Cerrado, the world’s most biodiverse savannah that’s home to 80 different indigenous ethnicities. The area has become a “new frontier,” as the report notes, for soy, sugarcane, and large-scale monoculture commodities — which makes it a safe investment.

The investigation documents what happened in Baixão Fechado, one village that was impacted by these investments. Activities on two farms Harvard acquired have resulted in mass deforestation and the diversion of water used by the local community for agricultural irrigation. “[Residents say] the large amounts of water the farms use for irrigation, have badly affected their access to water which was previously plentiful and of good quality,” the report notes. “The situation has become so bad that the village has had to start bringing in water by trucks.”

Further, pesticides used on the Harvard-owned land have also contributed to health problems, the contamination of fishing grounds, and the destruction of crops, all of which disrupted the local community’s “way of life,” according to Perry.

In the northeastern part of the Cerrado, there’s a widespread practice of falsifying property titles to legitimize the occupation of public lands — a form of land grabbing. As the report explains, the lands are fenced to give the appearance of a farm and the fraudulent titles are then sold to companies often connected to foreign investors. The report notes that Harvard channeled funds through three different business groups in this region and acquired land from a Brazilian businessman well-known for this scheme.

It’s this deliberate or neglectful disregard of the region’s sociopolitical context and history that Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos’ Maria Mendonca, one of the authors of the report, finds highly troubling.

“Any casual look into what’s happening in that part of Brazil should have set off alarm bells,” she explains. “If they just looked into the historical records of these land areas, they would have been able to see that there are existing land conflicts, and they should have stayed away from that.”

There’s a better way to invest in the region, Mendonca says: Harvard and others could promote organic agriculture and invest in the region’s hundreds of small farming communities who have worked the land for generations.

“That’s not what they’re doing,” Mendonca says. “They fence the area, they displace people, and then they pollute the water, the soil, the land.”

Institutions are actually attracted to Brazil in part because of the country’s history of violent land grabs, says Madeleine Fairbairn, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies agriculture systems and land rights. That’s because Brazil’s land is concentrated among relatively few owners so institutional investors can acquire large swaths of property with very few transactions, she says

Even so, Fairbairn notes, that’s no excuse for not performing due diligence on investments. “Unfortunately, many investors fail to ask the difficult questions about how the previous owner came to control such a great big expanse of Brazilian savannah in the first place,” she explains. By naming subsidiaries that Harvard Management Company used to acquire farms, as well as tracking where the properties were located, Fairbairn says GRAIN and Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos are “pulling back the veil that shields institutional investors from public scrutiny.”

It’s not only Harvard and other universities that are invested in this farmland. Professors and other employees are passive participants, as well: Their retirement plans are often managed by the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association. The association, as the reports shows, acquired more farmland than any other pension fund. “We cannot continue to say that we do not know where our money is being invested,” says Perry, the professor at Brown, a university that has a $3.5 billion endowment. “At some point, as faculty, as the report urged, we need to figure out how to make a case for divestment.”

In her resignation letter, Kat Taylor — the former overseer of Harvard’s investment fund — says she made that same case for years, but her “soft power approach” failed to move the needle. Left with no other recourse, she felt that resigning publicly was the only card she could play — a last-ditch effort to get Harvard to rid itself of these controversial investments. (The decision was largely a symbolic gesture, given that her six-year term was to conclude the next day.)

“For Harvard to continue to profit from activities that might and likely do accelerate us toward climate disaster, enslave millions to unfair labor practices, or proliferate more and more weapons in society that threaten especially young lives is unconscionable,” she wrote. “I fervently hope that all of you will demand accountable financial transactions on behalf of us all as I have tried to do.”

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How Harvard’s investments exacerbate global land and water conflicts

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Many Republicans are afraid to back climate policy. This one isn’t.

Just before Kiera O’Brien departed for college, the ocean surrounding her Alaskan hometown turned a bright shade of Caribbean blue. It was the result of an algal bloom fed by sweltering temperatures — something Alaska has seen a lot more of recently.

But it wasn’t until she left for Boston that O’Brien started to think of climate change as a formidable problem. “I moved to a place that has so much pollution,” she says. “That’s when I really started getting concerned.”

O’Brien isn’t your typical environmentalist. She’s a registered member of the Alaska Republican Party and the president of the Harvard Republican Club. “Growing up far away from centers of federal power led me to favor state and local solutions, because frequently those were the only forms of government responsive to the needs of rural communities like my own,” she says.

At Harvard, O’Brien wasted no time in championing her particular conservative approach to environmentalism: She helped form Students for Carbon Dividends earlier this year — a bipartisan coalition of college students pushing for a revenue-neutral carbon tax. That’s a rising price on fossil fuels that gets returned to consumers in the form of a check every year. It’s the first time a piece of climate policy has meshed with O’Brien’s worldview. “There is a conservative solution,” she says.

What O’Brien is doing — going against her party’s grain — takes guts. For most Republican leaders, climate action is a political non-starter.

A recent study in Perspectives on Psychological Science shows that the American political scene is a lot like a middle school playground: Many Republicans do actually agree that climate change is worth addressing, but they don’t want to oppose their peers by coming out in support of climate policy — an issue that’s perceived as belonging to Democrats.

The study’s lead authors penned an op-ed in the New York Times driving home the biggest takeaway: “[T]he problem is not so much that Republicans are skeptical about climate change, but that Republicans are skeptical of Democrats — and that Democrats are skeptical of Republicans.”

O’Brien’s willingness to challenge the status quo, and the fact that only three out of the 125 Harvard Republican Club members have vocally opposed her decision to champion a carbon tax, is encouraging. Sure, whipping votes at Harvard, where students are primed to learn from one another, is a lot different than whipping votes on the House floor, where politicians are primed to fight. (House Republicans just passed a resolution with almost unanimous support that rejected the very idea of a carbon tax.)

But O’Brien’s experience doesn’t reflect the kind of political pettiness exhibited on Capitol Hill or seen in the study. She says her interactions with fellow Republican students about the issue have been relatively frictionless — “phenomenal,” rather. It all comes down to talking about climate solutions in concrete terms: “We’re talking about a problem that is affecting real people, the economy, and our way of life,” she says.

“I have had so many of my peers come up to me and say, ‘I have cared about this issue for such a long time, and I never had policy I could actually back,’” O’Brien adds.

In general, millennials are becoming more engaged when it comes to climate change — perhaps another reason why O’Brien’s fellow Republicans support her carbon tax initiative. A recent poll shows a majority of young Republicans say they are concerned about air pollution and climate change. And just last week, a youth-led climate march descended on D.C. to demand action from politicians.

O’Brien’s level-headed approach has helped her turn wary conservatives into allies. When talking about a carbon tax with Republicans from West Virginia, for example, she likes to present her plan as a kind of insurance policy.

“One of us is probably wrong,” she tells climate deniers. “If I’m wrong, we’ve improved our economy and our environment. If you’re wrong, we have a big problem.”

Continued:

Many Republicans are afraid to back climate policy. This one isn’t.

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Hurricane season starts today, and Trump still hasn’t learned from his deadliest blunder — Hurricane Maria

It wasn’t until five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall that President Trump tweeted about the devastation. FEMA administrator Brock Long arrived in Puerto Rico that same day — he was among the first Trump officials to get to the battered U.S. territory.

This week, a Harvard study revealed that the September 2017 storm is likely the deadliest disaster in modern U.S. history — with more casualties than Hurricane Katrina and the 9/11 attacks combined. The analysis places Puerto Rico’s death toll at somewhere between 4,645 and 5,740 people, 90 times more dead than the government’s widely disputed official death toll.

The president has yet to offer any public condolences on the death count in the new study. He has, however, tweeted vigorously in the wake of Roseanne Barr being fired to Disney CEO Bob Iger demanding an apology for “HORRIBLE” statements made about him on ABC.

“What if 5,000 people in any US state died because of a natural disaster? It would be 24/7 news. Well, that happened in #PuertoRico as a result of #HurricaneMaría, and we are now talking about a mediocre sitcom being cancelled,” tweeted journalist Julio Ricardo Varela.

Writing in an opinion piece for NBC news, Varela continued: “Puerto Ricans are not suddenly shocked by the Harvard study … because the proof was already there months ago. But almost nobody else wanted to look for it.”

Trump’s only visit to the island after the storm — when he said that Maria wasn’t a “real” tragedy like Hurricane Katrina — Varela writes, “served to highlight the late response and federal neglect to Puerto Rico’s catastrophe.”

The president’s inattention, critics argue, contributed to a disaster response that was slow, meager, and ripe with allegations of misconduct and corruption. And rather than drive compassion for fellow Americans, his priorities have helped shift attention elsewhere. Cable news dedicated more than 16 times more airtime to the Roseanne controversy than it did to the Puerto Rico death toll.

Because of the silence, Refinery 29 journalist Andrea González-Ramírez has started a viral thread on Twitter in an effort to remember and name the dead:

“This should be a day of collective mourning in Puerto Rico. Thousands dead because of administrations that could not get the job done,” San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz tweeted on Tuesday. “These deaths & the negligence that contributed to them cannot be forgotten. This was, & continues to be, a violation of our human rights.”

And with Hurricane Season 2018 beginning today, there’s still uncertainty about how prepared this administration is for another storm. Puerto Rico’s power authority announced yesterday that it may take another two months to get power back completely on the island, and officials say it’s likely that the electrical grid will crash again with the next hurricane.

On top of that, FEMA is going through a “reorganization,” Bloomberg reported last week, and several key leadership roles are still vacant or temporarily filled.

“What the impacts from the 2017 disasters show is that there is also still work to do in order to build a culture of preparedness across the country at all levels of government, including improved resilience among our critical infrastructure,” FEMA wrote to Grist in an email.

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Hurricane season starts today, and Trump still hasn’t learned from his deadliest blunder — Hurricane Maria

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ERP Blogstorm Part 2: Education

Mother Jones

Part two of our series of charts from the Economic Report of the President is all about higher education. First off, here’s the college premium over time:

When I graduated from my local state university in 1981, I had no debt because attending public universities was practically free. On the other hand, my earning prospects were only about 20 percent higher than a non-college grad. Today, college grads often have tens of thousands of dollars in debt, but their earning prospects are 70 percent higher than non-college grads. So who got the better deal? That’s not entirely obvious.

Next up is a different measure of the value of a college education:

This helps answer the question, “How high can university costs go?” The answer is, “Pretty high.” Even with higher tuition, college is still a great deal. A bachelor’s degree, on average, pays off nearly 10:1. That means there’s a lot of room to raise tuition and still provide enough of a bargain that anyone who’s qualified will be willing to pay. Treating higher education this way may be a bad idea, but nevertheless, this chart suggests that states can continue to raise prices if they want to.

The first two charts have been all about nonprofit schools: community colleges, state universities, and private universities like Harvard and Morehouse. But for-profit institutions—which are typically trade schools—have exploded over the past three decades:

The number of trade schools has skyrocketed since 1987, from about 300 to well over a thousand. And that brings us to our final chart:

At first glance, this chart seems odd: the students with the smallest debt have the highest chance of defaulting. There are multiple things going on here, but the biggest one is that a lot of these students attended trade schools for a semester or a year and then dropped out. Their debts aren’t the biggest, but with not even a trade school certificate they can only get low-paying jobs that make it very hard to pay back their loans.

Too often, for-profit schools cajole people into signing up with promises that the government will pay for everything. Unfortunately, a lot of their students just aren’t suited for further schooling, so they drop out and end up with less than nothing: no certificate, and a big chunk of debt. The trade schools themselves don’t care much, since they get paid whether anyone graduates or not, but it’s a helluva bad deal for the students who end up broke. This is why President Obama’s recent crackdown on the worst offenders among for-profit trade schools is so welcome.

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ERP Blogstorm Part 2: Education

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Friday Cat, Squirrel, and Fundraising Blogging – 30 September 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Our squirrel made an appearance this morning, hopping from tree to tree and catching the attention of our two furballs—who were predictably entranced. They both wanted to climb up the nearest tree and go squirrel hunting, but Hilbert could only look up longingly. Hopper, however, could do more than that: she could climb up the tree and look into the neighboring tree longingly. You can see the mighty huntress on the prowl below. For those of you who worry about such things, I can assure you that our squirrel was entirely safe the whole time. I think you’d probably have to break all four of its legs before either of our cats would have a 50-50 chance of catching it.

In other cat news, a recently completed study has “sequenced DNA from 209 cats that lived between 15,000 and 300 years ago.” Researchers discovered that after being domesticated and exalted by the Egyptians, there was a second big wave of cat expansion a couple thousand years ago, “attributed to ancient sea-faring people — farmers, sailors, and Vikings — because the cats were likely encouraged to stay on board to keep their rodent problem in check.” Response was immediate: “I didn’t even know there were Viking cats,” Pontus Skoglund, a population geneticist from Harvard Medical School, told Nature.

Finally, in fundraising news, our cats urge you once more to sign up as a Mother Jones sustaining donor. We’re close to our $30,000 goal, but not quite there yet. You can do it by credit card here. If you prefer PayPal, you can give monthly here—just be sure to check the box next to your gift amount.

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Friday Cat, Squirrel, and Fundraising Blogging – 30 September 2016

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Sorry, leaves — we figured out a way to do photosynthesis better than you

Sorry, leaves — we figured out a way to do photosynthesis better than you

By on Jun 6, 2016Share

Trees, be warned: the process of photosynthesis — once the exclusive domain of nature — has just been not only co-opted but upgraded by Harvard scientists.

The team, lead by professor of energy Daniel Nocera, has created a new-and-improved version of a system that converts solar energy into fuel at a rate 10 times more efficient than the fastest-growing plants. It is called the “Bionic Leaf 2.0.”

The “leaf” uses solar energy to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, explains Nocera. Engineered microbes eat the hydrogen to convert carbon dioxide into liquid fuel for transportation or conversion into more mainstream fuels.

In 2015, Nocera and Pamela Silver, professor of biochemistry and systems biology at Harvard Medical School, debuted the first bionic leaf. Though it successfully converted sunlight into liquid fuel (aka isopropanol, for you nerds out there), that version used a hydrogen-making catalyst that also ended up screwing with the microbes’ DNA. The result: a much less impressive conversion rate of CO2 to energy.

“[The Bionic Leaf 2.0] is an important discovery,” Nocera said in a press release. “It says we can do better than photosynthesis.”

So much better, in fact, that the team believes that its new invention can already be considered for commercial use. Nocera plans to look for ways to use it in developing countries as a cheap source of clean energy.

A future full of robot trees that create fuel for everyone? Doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world.

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Sorry, leaves — we figured out a way to do photosynthesis better than you

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