Sentences with phrase «said oxygen evolution»
Chen said oxygen evolution reactions often depend upon an electrocatalyst using a «noble metal» — iridium, platinum or ruthenium.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/ Not exact matches
«People previously thought that you needed some threshold level of oxygen for evolution to work really well,» says Carl Simpson, a paleobiologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder who was not involved in the work.
«If oxygen levels were 3 % and they rose past that 10 % threshold, that would have had a huge influence on early animal evolution,» he says.
Indeed, the «Cambrian explosion» — the burst of evolution about 540 million years ago that included the birth of most of the major animal groups we know today — was enabled by oxygen deprivation, the researchers say.
«That's what his advance is pointing towards,» he says, «finding an alternative catalyst that will allow us to do oxygen evolution (breaking the bonds of water or H2O and forming oxygen) in concert with hydrogen» on a grand scale.
Professor Andrew Scott, one of the lead authors, said: «High oxygen levels in the atmosphere at this time has been proposed for some time and may be why there were giant insects and arthropods at this time but our research indicates that there was a significant impact on the prevalence and scale of wildfires across the globe and this would have affected not only the ecology of the plants and animals but also their evolution.»
«We found a catalyst that is very good at driving both the opposing oxygen evolution reaction and the oxygen reduction reaction,» said senior author Ho Nyung Lee of ORNL's Materials Science and Technology Division.
If the enzyme is an evolutionary predecessor of Photosystem II, then evolution borrowed an enzyme that was originally used for chlorophyll synthesis and used it to evolve an enzyme that could produce oxygen, which ultimately led to changes in Earth's atmosphere,» said Bryant.
«The next logical step is to ask how this delayed the evolution of oxygen - demanding life forms,» says Swanner.
«Interactions between oxygen and iron dictate Earth's formation, differentiation — or the separation of the core and mantle — and the evolution of our atmosphere, so naturally we were curious to probe how such reactions would change under the high - pressure conditions of the deep Earth,» said Mao.
«There are not many known photocatalysts capable of oxygen evolution, and this work expands the space of such materials in non-incremental fashion,» Neaton says.