energy extraction

The lifetime of the entangled triplet pair in the protein is about 60 picoseconds, which is eight times longer than in solution. Sunlight is like a continuous stream of balls flying at a wall.

A protein chain folds into a working tool in a fraction of a second, and almost never makes a mistake. For a long time, it was thought that evolution specifically polishes amino acid sequences so that a protein not only works but also easily finds its unique shape. New work turns this idea on its head.

Imagine an artist whose canvas is an entire planet, and whose palette is molecules drinking starlight. His brush is billions of years of evolution, and his painting is a spectral portrait visible even from another star system.

A living organism is a machine that constantly channels energy through itself and converts it into heat. This internal cycle is called internal entropy production (a measure of energy dissipation). But about 2.5 million years ago, our ancestors switched on a second loop — an external one. They picked up a sharpened stone, and then a burning branch.

Billions of tiny motors hum inside every living creature. Cells ceaselessly pump substances, burn sugar, and build new proteins, and all this invisible motion warms us from within. To maintain order, life must dissipate heat into the environment, like a stove that never goes out. The power of this internal heating is almost independent of size.

Conventional solar panels convert light into electricity, but here light splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen is a clean fuel, but the process is slow. To speed it up, helper substances that donate electrons are added. Often this is alcohol, but it's a shame to waste it.

Microbial communities are like a noisy orchestra: thousands of instruments, and it's hard to tell who's playing the lead. In the gut, ocean, or soil, millions of bacterial species live, and scientists need to figure out which ones truly matter for human health or soil fertility. The new approach works like smart laundry sorting.

Oxygenic photosynthesis requires splitting water. It's kind of like a water wheel: to make it spin, you need a strong current. Light acts as the current, and light particles are the streams. For red dwarfs, the most common stars, the light is "cool" and weak — the streams barely move the wheel.

When a sunbeam hits a leaf, a relay race begins inside it. The energy of light passes from one chlorophyll molecule to the next until it reaches the reaction center — the place where the chemistry of life kicks off. This relay runs with astonishing accuracy: nearly every quantum of light finds its way.

Light from an ordinary bulb is a stream of individual photons, like drops from a faucet. But there is also light where photons come in pairs, like twins walking together. Such grouped light has long been desired for measuring distances and imaging objects hidden around corners. But sources of this light were either too dim, or their flashes too short for ordinary detectors to catch.

A heart cell in a Petri dish contracts, and at that moment, an electrical wave sweeps across its surface. Previously, to catch that wave, you had to poke the cell with an ultra-fine electrode needle. Now, you just look at it under a microscope. The method is called electrochromic recording.

In every leaf, in the light, a factory works that splits water into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen goes into the air we breathe, and the plant uses the hydrogen for food. The heart of this factory is a protein complex with four manganese atoms and one calcium atom.

A few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the universe resembled an endless dark ocean, shrouded in a thick fog of neutral (non-ionized) hydrogen. Then something dispersed the gloom: ultraviolet radiation knocked electrons out of atoms, making the gas as transparent as pure water.

On the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1, oxygenic photosynthesis, the process by which light energy is converted into chemical energy with oxygen as a byproduct, is losing the race for survival. This M-dwarf star emits mostly in the infrared, not in the visible range like the Sun.

Life began with molecules akin to natural sunscreen — based on carbon, they soaked up the mild ultraviolet of the young Sun and turned it into heat. This way of dissipating energy wasn’t just heating: it made molecules self-organize, like chefs kneading structured dough out of a chaos of ingredients. But ultraviolet is a finicky tool.

Living cells continuously exchange light signals — a billion times fainter than daylight. It's like a whisper picked up by ultra-sensitive instruments. A healthy cell whispers rhythmically, a cancerous one — haltingly, but with a long memory of previous flashes.