Plants’ ability to survive and thrive on a simple diet of
sunlight and water can seem sort of miraculous, especially to we
animals who have to go through the indignity of eating other
living things, pleasant as that may be at times. Wouldn’t it be
great to be able to harness the Earth’s abundant supply of
sunlight and water for our own power needs? A newly designed
revision of the artificial leaf might let us do that on a wide
scale, not for food of course, but for electricity. The
artificial leaf is a pretty simple device, in theory. Ideally,
you’d want it to behave mostly like a normal leaf, except
instead of generating sugars through its process of
photosynthesis, you’d want it to stop short at separating water
into hydrogen and oxygen, using the hydrogen in a fuel cell and
then getting electricity. In fact, previous versions of the
artifical leaf were able to do just that. Drop them in some
water and throw it in some sunlight and it would start bubbling
up hydrogen. The problem was that these leaves relie