Cartoons: well, don't that beat all.

My regard for America and thinking that it's the best country in the world has taken a pretty serious beating in the last five, ten years. And things just seem to get worse.

The aptly-named Patriots cheat at football.

***

Rick McKee, The Week

***

The Republicans spent millions of dollars to take control Congress and they can't find a presidential candidate who has national appeal.

***

Bill Schorr, The Week

***

The rich just keep getting richer, and have the Supreme Court's sanction (see Citizen's United) to buy anything American they want.

***

Chan Lowe, The Week

***

And the British in the form of BP (British Petroleum) are still treating us like the Colonies.

***

Walt Handelsman, The Week

***

Sorry for the dark, sort of snarky, viewpoint--today's just a don't-that-beat-all day. Maybe it's time to stop watching the news again.

-- Marge

What's happening in artificial photosynthesis

Enough of politics...how about a little science for today?

With the promise of gas prices rising again and a depletable supply of oil, the time to start developing alternate sources of energy is long past. One promising field is artificial photosynthesis.  The sun pumps out an amazing amount of energy, but solar panels can only capture about 30% of it, although they're getting better all the time.

While the main purpose of natural photosynthesis is to nourish the plant (and, in the larger scale of nature, cleanses the air), the purposes of artificial photosynthesis are different, more specific to whether the output is carbon or oxygen. These purposes include splitting water to produce hydrogen for fuel cells and carbon fixation for biofuels.

The article "How Artificial Photosynthesis Works" from How Stuff works by Julia Layton explains the process. There is now a Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP), established in 2010 as a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Innovation Hub. An article, dated April of 2012, at Science Daily reports "Artificial Photosynthesis Breakthrough: Fast Molecular Catalyzer."

Details of the photosynthesic process are amazingly complex, so I opted for a much-simplified diagram from Estrella Mountain Community College's page on photosynthesis.

***

***

I've long thought that artificial photosynthesis would lend itself to developing a battery.  Apparently so do two chemists at the University of Texas -- Christopher Bielawski and Jonathan Sessler. Their work is detailed in the article, dated September 2010, "Electron Switch Between Molecules Points Way to New High-Powered Organic Batteries."

Note: this post was updated in May, 2016. And there's a lot more information on this topic out there.

-- Marge