New method reveals chemical signs of early microbial life in ancient Earth rocks, showing photosynthesis evolved much earlier ...

Researchers find that the earliest bacteria had the tools to perform a crucial step in photosynthesis, changing how we think life evolved on Earth. Researchers find that the earliest bacteria had the ...

Humans can do lots of things that plants can’t do. We can walk around, we can talk, we can hear and see and touch. But plants have one major advantage over humans: They can make energy directly from ...

Unlike us, plants don't need pantries full of food to stay alive; the Sun is their pantry. But, like us, they require fairly regular sustenance, which they create via photosynthesis. This seemingly ...

In the damp understory of forests in Taiwan, mainland Japan, and Okinawa, a plant called Balanophora can fool you at first glance. Its knobby flower stalks look more like a mushroom than a flowering ...

Most modern bacteria descended from ancestors who could convert the Sun's energy to fuel more than 3.5 billion years ago. Photosynthesis is the process by which plants, algae and cyanobacteria use the ...

How does one improve the amount of food a crop yields? Speed up the way that plant eats. A new study published last week in the journal Nature details a group of scientists that were able to ...

Not content with using hybrid artificial photosynthesis to turn CO2 emissions into plastics and biofuel, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) now claim to have ...

Toyota Central R&D Labs is scaling up an efficient system that uses sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to produce important carbon compounds, paving a path to the practical use of artificial ...

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates another important figure in the history of science: Jan Ingenhousz, the 18th century Dutch chemist who “sprouted a flowering understanding of the secret life of plants ...