Puzzled by plants ability to turn over 20 per cent of sun energy into electricity, Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists are working on a way to combine the solar genius of plants and the computational genius of computers

Researchers have extracted proteins from spinach cells that convert light to energy and squeeze them between two layers of conducting material to generate energy.

The trick was to “convince” the delicate spinach proteins to believe that they are still inside the mother plant and so shouldn’t immediately begin to decompose.

So far, the biobattery can generate current for only three weeks — and it is only 12-per-cent efficient.

From Globe & Mail and Science News for Kids.