Signals

An Early Step on the Long, Strange Road to Photosynthesis

An ancient lineage of cyanobacteria is helping biologists uncover an early evolutionary stage of the mind-boggling process that turns light into life.

The most fundamental energy conversion process on Earth took hundreds of millions of years to evolve — and we are still mapping its early stages. Deep time as the normal context for complexity.
Source: https://www.quantamagazine.org/an-early-step-on-the-long-strange-road-to-photosynthesis-20260610/

Every second, trillions of watts of solar energy — more than 10,000 times the energy used by modern humans — blast the Earth’s surface. Around 2.4 billion years ago, life took an evolutionary leap when bacteria learned to harness these photons to break apart water molecules and stitch carbon atoms into sugars. Along the way, they flooded Earth’s atmosphere with oxygen and rewrote the rules of life.

Source

Original author: Carrie Arnold

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