H20 Cooler Genius: Everyone has heard of photosynthesis – a process used by green plants to convert sunlight into electrochemical energy at an efficiency of nearly 100%. Although the overall pathway and major players are known for this process, the nitty-gritty details have eluded scientists, until now. Physical chemists at UC Berkeley observed ‘entanglement’ (a distinctive property of quantum mechanical systems) in the light harvesting complex in plants. Importance: huge step towards developing (a) artificial photosynthesis systems as renewable, non-polluting electrical energy sources and (b) quantum-based technologies e.g. quantum computers which are potentially thousands of times faster than conventional computers.
