Presenting at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, MIT’s Daniel Nocera, PhD, announced the first practical artificial leaf.

“A practical artificial leaf has been one of the Holy Grails of science for decades,” said Dr. Nocera, who led the research team. “We believe we have done it. The artificial leaf shows particular promise as an inexpensive source of electricity for homes of the poor in developing countries. Our goal is to make each home its own power station,” he said. “One can envision villages in India and Africa not long from now purchasing an affordable basic power system based on this technology.”

About the shape of a poker card but thinner, the device is fashioned from silicon, electronics and catalysts, substances that accelerate chemical reactions that otherwise would not occur, or would run slowly. Placed in a single gallon of water in bright sunlight, the device could produce enough electricity to supply a house in a developing country with electricity for a day. It does so by splitting water into its two components, hydrogen and oxygen. These two gases would then be stored in an electricity-producing fuel cell located either on top of the house or beside it.

Right now, the artificial leaf is about 10 times more efficient at carrying out photosynthesis than a natural leaf. However, Nocera is optimistic that he can boost the efficiency of the artificial leaf much higher in the future.

And that’s not all. Science Now reports:

The new catalyst also appears highly stable. Nocera says his team has been operating the device for a week, using water from the nearby Charles River in Cambridge, without any drop in efficiency. The next step is to find out whether the device works equally well in seawater. If so, it could dramatically lower the cost of producing hydrogen fuel.

Use in the real world is not so far in the future, according to Discover’s 80beats blog:

Tata Group, an Indian conglomerate, plans on creating a power plant based on this research within the next year and a half.

“Nature is powered by photosynthesis, and I think that the future world will be powered by photosynthesis as well in the form of this artificial leaf,” said Nocera.

Deal me in!

Image courtesy of Wikimedia

Earth

The Gulf oil spill—the number of gallons spilled and the controversy surrounding the damage seems to top many lists this year. Nature even named Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, its newsmaker of the year for how she handled the crisis.

Natural disasters often took the front page in 2010 with the Haitian earthquake and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull topping many lists. The hard-to-pronounce Icelandic volcano also made many of the best science images of the year lists.

DiscoveryNews ends the year on a positive note with “How Humans Helped the Earth in 2010,” a slide show with text concerning recent strides in alternative energy, species and habitat conservation efforts and individual efforts to go green (electric cars, white roofs and saving energy).

For more environmental news of the year, New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science has a great review and the Nature Conservancy has a best/worst list on its site.

Life

Teeny, modified life stole the spotlight this year—the J. Craig Venter Institute’s so-called “synthetic cell” and GFAJ-1—the bacteria that incorporates arsenic into its DNA—or so NASA scientists claimed.  Science writer Carl Zimmer discredited the arsenic bacteria paper on Slate; NASA author Felisa Wolfe-Simon defended herself in Science. Fun stuff!

The spread of pesky bedbugs was number six in Discover’s “Top 100 Science Stories of 2010.”

Nature’s great article this past summer on eradicating mosquitoes was among its readers’ top choices of the year.

Looking for something a little bigger and less controversial? New Scientist has “The coolest animals of 2010,” which includes a scorpion-eating bat and a fly thought to be extinct for over 160 years!

NPR found it was a very good year for Neanderthals—their genome was sequenced, brain examined and diet expanded.

Remarkably, the Census of Marine Life tops the BP oil spill in the Deep Type Flow blog’s biggest marine science stories of the year for its sheer numbers:

…over 500 research expeditions covering every ocean, over 2,500 scientists and the discovery of over 6,000 species new to science and published in over 2600 peer-reviewed papers.

Space

ScienceNow’s most popular story of all time, not just 2010, was “Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?” A wonderful theory that we also covered last spring.

Exoplanets, in part thanks to the Kepler mission, were all over the news this year—whether it had to do with size, atmosphere or number within a star system. Discover’s interview with local exoplanet hunter (and California Academy of Sciences Fellow) Geoff Marcy made number 11(!) on their 100 top stories list.

A little closer to home, Jupiter’s missing stripe and Neptune’s tale of cannibalism are included in New Scientist’s most popular space stories of 2010.

Our Moon and Saturn’s moons made news throughout the year and the top lists on Universe Today and Wired this week.

Universe Today also included SDO’s new views of the sun in their top stories list. Stunning!

Hubble celebrated its 20^th year in space this year by taking even more beautiful images. Several are included in Bad Astronomy’s “Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010.”

Technology

Electric cars and NASA’s new foray into commercial spacecraft are included in Scientific American’s top ten stories of the year.

The Large Hadron Collider was very busy this year, and topped many lists. Another machine at CERN made news (and also topped Nature’s readers’ choice list) when it was able to capture antimatter for a sixth of a second!

Graphene not only garnered a Nobel Prize this year, the material (and it’s potential) also made news and top science lists of the year.

DiscoveryNews put plastics on their 2010 list—whether its finding new ways of removing plastic from the oceans or engineering smarter plastics.

What was your favorite science story of the year? Share with us by adding it to the comment section below!

Image by Les Stone, International Bird Rescue Research Center/Wikipedia

The chlorophyll was found in cyanobacteria that live on stramatolites in Australia’s Shark Bay. According to New Scientist,

Min Chen of the University of Sydney in Australia, and her colleagues, went looking for interesting chlorophyll in the stromatolites there because the water in which they live – and the trapped sediment that bulks them out – filter out much of the visible light reaching the stromatolitic cyanobacteria. The team suspected that the cyanobacteria might therefore be better-than-average at absorbing the infrared radiation that makes it through.

The new chlorophyll can essentially allow cyanobacteria living deep within stromatolites to photosynthesise using low-energy infrared light. And, Chen says in Scientific American,

“That means that organisms that have this chlorophyll inside can extend their photosynthetic range for maximum use of solar energy.”

This is good news for solar cells. New Scientist reports that:

Because over half of the light from the sun comes in at infrared wavelengths, the makers of photovoltaic panels have been working on ways to extend the section of the spectrum that solar cells can absorb to beyond red.

Maybe this chlorophyll could hold the key to extending that range for solar cells.

There was even more good news for efficient solar energy this week. Scientists are developing self-cleaning solar panels, based on NASA Mars and Moon rovers, to clean the dust off of the panels. According to the BBC,

Dust deposits can reduce the efficiency of electricity generating solar panels by as much as 80%.

This will allow solar to go in dry deserts and other dusty places. Go, Solar! (or Go Solar!)

Auroras

National Geographic had some great images of the auroras that came out of the solar activity on August 1st.

WISE Losing its Cool

Universe Today reported this week that the WISE satellite only has a few more months of operation:

The spacecraft is running out of the frozen coolant needed to keep its heat-sensitive instrument chilled, and will only be in operation for 2-3 more months. While the spacecraft was designed to be rather short-lived – 7 to 10 months — it still is sad to see the mission winding down.

Alternative Energy Bonanza

We reported on renewable energy in the news earlier this week, and today, Science magazine devotes an entire special issue to clean energy. Even if you don’t have a subscription, you can download the entire section for free before the end of the month.

Frog Hunt

Earlier this week, news outlets reported a new search for amphibians, organized by Conservation International, that will take place over the next two months. From Wired:

Scientists in 14 countries on five continents are teaming up to hunt for as many as 100 species of amphibians that are thought to possibly be extinct, but may be surviving in remote corners.

We’ll stay tuned to see what they discover…

Climate

Climate was covered in many news items from the floods in Pakistan to the fires in Russia to the all-time heat records worldwide to the iceberg that broke away from Greenland. From the Huffington Post:

No one knows for sure whether any of these natural disasters — with the possible exception of the floating iceberg — are directly traceable to climate change, but they are certainly consistent with climate change forecasts. And, if they are, they clearly suggest that more records and more disasters are on the horizon.

What did you find interesting in science news this week? Why? Share with us.

California seems to lead the charge here in the US. Many of the stories are developing right here. KQED Quest has an entire series on renewables called 33×20—named for California’s goal to have 33% of our electricity come from renewables by 2020.

Earlier this week, the program had a great radio story about wind and solar energy development on Indian land. They site two examples in southern California, but there are several more. According to reporter Amy Standen,

Over the last two years, the pot of federal aid for Indian energy development has doubled to about $7 million a year. Tribes are also eligible for stimulus grants.

The people of the Campo Kumeyaay Nation have found a great way to use land that’s otherwise unusable:

This project… is an enormous source of pride for the Campo people, in part because it makes use of a resource that until recently, didn’t seem to offer a lot of options.

MONIQUE LACHAPPA: Look where we’re located. We’re out here in the middle of nowhere. It makes it difficult for anybody who wants to be able to do more for their family, or send their kids to college.

The New York Times tackles unusable California land—salty or dry earth previously used for agriculture—in their recent article “Recycling Land for Green Energy Ideas”. In the San Joaquin Valley, a large project is underway to bring solar to 30,000 acres of land too salty from years of irrigation to support agriculture any longer. And it’s a win-win situation: landowners and regulators are on board as well as environmentalists:

Unlike some renewable energy projects blocked by objections that they would despoil the landscape, this one has the support of environmentalists.

The project helps ease ever-present drought conditions for farmers, as well:

For Westlands farmers, the promise of the solar project is not clean electricity, but the additional water allocations they will get if some land is no longer used for farming.

With water deliveries slashed because of drought and environmental disputes, he [Mark Shannon] could plant only 20 percent of his property with irrigated crops this year.

“Come hell or high water, there just is not enough water to farm this whole district,” Mr. Shannon, 41, said. “If I lease my land for solar, we can farm elsewhere.”

Finally, in another article, The New York Times looks at Portugal’s aggressive development of clean energy. This year, that country will get 45% of their electricity from renewables—solar, wind and more (Science In Action’s “Wave Power” story included many images from operations in Portugal). By 2011, there will be a national network in place for charging electric cars.

There’s a reason for this forward thinking:

Portugal’s venture was driven by necessity. With a rising standard of living and no fossil fuel of its own, the cost of energy imports — principally oil and gas — doubled in the last decade, accounting for 50 percent of the country’s trade deficit, and was highly volatile.

We can learn a lot of lessons from what they’ve done in such a short time, the article states. The country has developed new skills for new technologies, and they grab power from even the smallest producers—residential solar roof panels, for example. But there are drawbacks, too.

While Portugal’s experience shows that rapid progress is achievable, it also highlights the price of such a transition. Portuguese households have long paid about twice what Americans pay for electricity, and prices have risen 15 percent in the last five years, probably partly because of the renewable energy program, the International Energy Agency says.

Although a 2009 report by the agency called Portugal’s renewable energy transition a “remarkable success,” it added, “It is not fully clear that their costs, both financial and economic, as well as their impact on final consumer energy prices, are well understood and appreciated.”

Only time will tell how it all plays out on our soil. Let’s just hope the process of converting to cleaner energy continues to move swiftly forward.

Creative Commons image by Ceinturion

Originally, it was estimated that 1,000 barrels (42,000 gallons) of oil per day were leaking. But because the depth of the leak made the oil difficult to detect, yesterday NOAA revised the amount to 5,000 barrels per day. Today, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano declared the spill to be of National Significance (meaning federal monies and assets can be used). Tomorrow, the spill is projected to reach the coast of Louisiana.

The situation has been going from bad to worse in less than a week and a half. And it’s likely to continue in that direction. The slick is now estimated to be 100 miles long and 30 miles wide.

Robots have been deployed to try and fix the leaks, so far with no luck. Cleanup crews have set fire to small portions of the spill, but with the winds and water-oil concentration, even this less-than-ideal solution cannot be used in full force. Other possibilities—a domed container to control the spill or a new rig to re-direct the oil—would not be in place for a few weeks.

According to Scientific American, “The area contains key wildlife habitats in the Pass-A-Loutre Wildlife Management Area and Breton National Wildlife Refuge on the Louisiana coast, which are teeming with nesting birds… The spill could be devastating for fishermen and oystermen who rely on estuaries and swamps along the Mississippi River for their livelihood.”

A spill like this one reminds us why alternatives to oil are needed. “This disaster should be a wake-up call to citizens and policy makers alike that the benefits of offshore increased oil drilling are far outweighed by the costs. We must move towards to 21st century solutions, increasing energy efficiency in every sector and transitioning to renewable energy,” according to Aaron Pope, the Academy’s Manager of Sustainability Programs.