The first man-made biological leaf turns lights and water into oxygen

Source Gizmodo
Source Cnet

The leaf consists of chloroplasts --the part of a plant cell where photosynthesis happens -- suspended in body made of silk protein.

"This material has an amazing property of stabilizing (the chloroplast) organelles," Melchiorri says in the video below. "As an outcome I have the first photosynthetic material that is living and breathing as a leaf does."

In addition to its potential value to space travel, Melchiorri also imagines the technology literally providing a breath of fresh air to indoor and outdoor spaces here on Earth. The facades of buildings and lampshades could be made to exhale fresh air with just a thin coating of the leaf material.

But perhaps best of all, a man-made breathing leaf could be the key to not just space travel but space colonization. No need to figure out how to till that dry, red Martian dirt to get some nice leafy trees to grow; we could just slap them on the inside of the colony's dome and puff away.

(Via Gizmodo)

Dee

This is the next step in totally synthetic advanced life. if they combine this with solar power technology or those electron eating bacteria we might be in business for space travel to the outer solar system with current technology

a reply to: dashen

The artificial leaves feature chloroplasts extracted from actual plant cells that are suspended in a material made from silk protein.

Not so man-made after all... The part that does all the hard work was created by nature.

a reply to: WeAre0ne

Absolutely amazing! This basically solves in one fell swoop, the complicated nature of building ways to get oxygen to explorers in outer space, and to colonize planets that do not have oxygen themselves. In fact, on a massive scale, could this not be the first step to a form of terraforming? Imagine vast stretches of this material on Mars...would it completely change the entire planet?!

Very cool!

a reply to: dashen

This could really help if it works exactly like a plant,; cleaning the surrounding air. Many countries' dirty air problems could well be on their way to being solved.

As for space... I think we still have other obstacles to overcome, such as radiation, but this is definitely a wonderful advancement.

Fake plant? Sure, no problems with that. At the rate we are destroying this planet, this may become our saviour.

I thinks it's very plausible and needed research.

I had a vision once where I saw a world with huge cities and no trees. It was a technological paradise (unless you miss the days when we had trees). It was interesting. Not saying that's the road I would like to go down, but I did see how the way the world is going took us there- to the world of only humans.

placed on the sides of building, we could convert the rising co2 into o2, and hold the co2 constant