Yesterday I suffered a mysterious blog FAIL around 1 or 2 pm eastern time. Half of my post about desmids — intricate, microscopic plants — vanished within an hour or so of publication. I didn’t realize it until around 6 pm, when I fixed it. So if you read my post yesterday but there weren’t [...]

Editor’s Note: Journalist and crew member Kathryn Eident and scientist Jeremy Jacquot are traveling on board the RV Atlantis on a monthlong voyage to sample and study nitrogen fixation in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, among other research projects. This is the first blog post detailing this ongoing voyage of discovery for Scientific American.com. 20 [...]

Photosynthesis is the single most important transformation on Earth. Using the energy in sunlight, all plants—from single-celled algae to towering redwoods—knit carbon dioxide and water into food and release oxygen as a byproduct. Every year, humanity uses up roughly 40 percent of the planet’s photosynthesis for our own purposes—from feeding a growing population to biofuels. [...]

Plants mastered chemistry a long time before humans, billions of years actually. In fact, we humans and most of the rest of the life on Earth can thank tiny cyanobacteria for mastering/evolving the molecule known as chlorophyll. Chlorophyll—a pigment that absorbs blue light—is the key to photosynthesis, and photosynthesis is the key to turning sunlight [...]

One drinking-water bottle could provide enough energy for an entire household in the developing world if Dan Nocera has his way. A chemist from M.I.T. and founder of the company Sun Catalytix, Nocera has developed a cobalt-based catalyst that allows him to store energy the same way plants do: by splitting water. "Almost all the [...]

“…Resources for colonies of bacteria to research a theory of everything, reconciling cosmic and quantum observations in their own bacterial way.” -Jonathon Keats Part of the Vast and Undetectable show at the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery is housing a unique school to study the universe.  Jonathon Keats has created the Microbial Academy of Sciences, [...]

Earlier this week we talked about how to use whale snot for science. I especially enjoyed blog bff Scicurious‘s take on the study: Budgetary requirement: $5000 for series of expensive remote control helicopters. Source: Toys R Us. Justification: Need something that can fly close to a whale and collect snot for measurement. Also, this is [...]