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- 2041 - Discovering the power of plants and dirt. To learn how plants can turn sunlight into chemical energy. The payoff would be to provide the world with an unlimited source of clean power. It is not just the plants we should also learn how to get the microbes in the soil working for us. The microbes could be doing the same thing, removing carbon from the atmosphere and sequestering it underground.
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- For five years I worked in Palo Alto and drove highway 280 to work. The highway passed over the SLAC linear accelerator. This laser tube ran for 2 miles from Stanford University under the highway and into the western foothills. I visited the facility several times in 1969 to 1970. Today there are a whole new set of experiments going on..
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- The tube was outfitted with the world’s most powerful X-ray laser that could accelerate electrons up to nearly the speed of light. They would smash the beam into crystals of a protein.
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- Why? To study plant photosynthesis. To learn how plants can turn sunlight into chemical energy. The payoff would be to provide the world with an unlimited source of clean power.
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- The experiment uses visible light simulating sunlight on a leaf, the leaf would spur proteins to begin photosynthesis. The powerful x-ray laser would take snapshots of the changes in the proteins in the fractions of a second before they were destroyed.
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- The photo process took five steps: Hundreds of thousands of light responsive protein crystals were sent through an injector. Pulses of green light simulating sunlight were aimed at the nano crystals. The first steps of photosynthesis occurs in just femtoseconds. The crystals are then hit with an X-ray pulse creating a snapshot of the molecule structure. This is done repeatedly to produce frames in a movie.
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- The X-ray pulse lasts just 50 femtoseconds. The experiment produces thousands of 2-D snapshots that can be spliced together in a computer to create a 3-D view of the protein’s structure. Enough snapshots and the sequence could produce a movie of the whole process. Each frame in femtoseconds. Femtoseconds are to one second as one second is to 30 million years.
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- We are able to see the moving atoms and molecules within living things at these speeds. We can learn how medicines affect diseased cells. How chemical reactions convert energy in to different forms. How drugs regulate blood pressure. How photosynthesis splits water into hydrogen and oxygen.
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- The answers can revolutionize medicine and create an unlimited power source.
Many innovations had to be made for this experiment to work. The nano crystals are too small to see under a microscope. The solution was to convert two pulses of infrared light into one green photon of light. This lit up the crystals like fireflies in the night.
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- Firing a stream of nano-crystals across an x- ray beam used a technology developed for inkjet printing. A stream of helium gas was used to focus the stream of crystals to a stream the size of a fraction of a human hair.
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- After all this a single experiment had to handle 100 terabytes of data needed to create the 3-D view. The data had to merge thousands of snapshots. Software had to convert all this into an accurate image of a individual molecule.
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- Plants can split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. Plants use sunlight and some minerals from the soil. If we could do that we could supply the world with cheap, clean burning hydrogen fuel for cars and power generators. We could have the dream of an renewable energy economy.
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- These fast speed cameras may show us the details needed to learn the processes occurring at the atomic level and to discover the secrets the plants have in photosynthesis.
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- The high speed cameras could allow us to design the drugs to treat high blood pressure. These molecular movies could allow us to learn how the eyes can see. Bacteria have light sensitive proteins that are precursors to our own vision. An ultra-slow motion video of extremely rapid events could reveal how a protein in bacteria senses and responds to light.
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- Crystallized protein reacts to light in increments of less than a trillionth of a second. This discovery would be fundamental to all light perception in all living organism, plants and animals. It is the first event in our own human vision.
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- The process is known as protein crystallography soon to be 3-D movies and the pathway to many new discoveries.
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- It is not just plants the dirt itself could save the Earth! The amazing power of dirt, and, we could also say the amazing power of plants, that make the dirt. Really, if we went back to farming and understood the genetics of plants and the microbes in the soil we could solve the Global Warming problems the natural way. No government mandates needed, just education.
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- Plants love CO2. Plants breath CO2 and exhale the “O” that we need to breath. They keep the “C“ and put it in the soil. We get the Oxygen and the dirt gets the Carbon. If science would focus on this part of our environment we could be taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and sequestering it underground, nature’s way.
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- One of the obvious problems is that most of the plants farming has developed are “annuals”. They are food crops that have to be planted every year. What we need is a “ perennial “ version of corn and wheat. With perennial crops yields on farming in the world’s most desperately poor places could soar. At the same time these plants would soak up the excess carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere and put it back in to the soil.
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- With perennials crops we would not be replanting each year. Their deep roots would prevent soil erosion. The soil would hold minerals and require less fertilizer and less water. Perennials do not require tilling so the land would remain a carbon sink.
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- Adopting perennials to agricultural crops is a significant scientific and cultural change effort. The genomes of plants must be analyzed for desirable traits associated between genes. Then we need to analyze the microbes in the soil that break down the carbon left by the plants.
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- Perennial root systems sequester an amount of carbon equal to 1% of a cubic meter of topsoil. Replacing only 2% of the world’s annual crops would remove enough carbon to halt any increase in carbon dioxide in the world today. If all plants were converted to perennials it would reduce the world’s atmosphere by 118 parts per million CO2. That would take us back to pre-industrial historical levels. Today we are at 389 parts per million CO2. Before industrialization in the 19th century we were at 275 parts per million.
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- Even without the genetics in the picture farmers in Malawe in southeast Africa are planting rows of perennial pigeon peas in between rows of corn. The peas are a much needed source of protein for the farmer while the legumes increase soil waste retention and double soil carbon and nitrogen content without reducing yields on their money crop, corn. The next step would be to plant perennial corn. Why not ?
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- It is not just the plants we should also learn how to get the microbes in the soil working for us. The microbes could be doing the same thing, removing carbon from the atmosphere and sequestering it underground.
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- Soil is not just top soil that is tilled. Rich brown and black dirt can be 2 to 10 feet down. This is decayed organic matter derived from plants that thrives all the way down to the bedrock.
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- Soil organic material is about 60% carbon. Soil holds more than 3 times as much carbon as all the amount of carbon found above the ground. Carbon exist in the living roots, in the microbes themselves, in worms. in fungi and in other organisms as well as the generations that have passed before them.
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- The secret lies in the soil microbes that decompose this material. Science has categorized over 15 different types of soil around the globe. Each soil type has its own family of living microbes. One gram of soil can contain 1,000,000,000 individual microbial cells. The number of different species can vary from 10,000 to 1,000,000 species in that single gram of dirt.
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- These soil types are not just in our traditional farmlands. The permafrost in the Arctic likely contains half of all the soil carbon on the planet. Permafrost melts could be a serious rapid decomposition of carbon rich soil releasing it into the atmosphere. We need to understand the microbes involved in this process. How do they react to temperature changes?
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- Some microbes are “ methanogens”. The exude as waste methane gas.
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- Some microbes are “ methanotrophs” that actually consume the gas.
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- Developing the balance in nature will take an intimate understanding of microbe cultures and communities. Let’s get with it. If we can do DNA on a chip we should be able to tell what species of microbe is in a sample of soil. Besides it is fun to play in the dirt. We should learn how photosynthesis releases this oxygen into the atmosphere and create this carbon rich soil in the first place. Let’s get back to earth.
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------------------------- Saturday, March 17, 2018 --------------------------------
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