INSIDE SCIENCE - Forget showing your true colors -- plants are green precisely because they don’t appreciate the type of energy that falls within the green spectrum.
Researchers have long understood that plants use sunlight to photosynthesize carbon dioxide and water into food. But they didn’t know exactly why photosynthesizing organisms such as plants appear green.
To investigate further, scientists moved outside the scope of biology and turned to physics, looking at how the individual colors that make up the full spectrum can answer these questions.
Nathaniel Gabor, a physicist at the University of California, Riverside and his co-authors of a study published today in Science built a model that reproduces the light harvesting by these organisms.