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(PhysOrg.com) -- Until a few years ago, photosynthesis seemed to be a straightforward and well-understood process in which plants and other organisms use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugars, with oxygen as a waste product. But recent research showing that the light energy entering these organisms’ light-absorbing chromophore molecules may exist in two places at once – as a quantum superposition – has raised a new question: what role, if any, do quantum effects play in the vastly important and widespread process of photosynthesis?

Image of organism fossil, once throught to be an ancient animal embryo; courtesy of Swedish Museum of Natural History The proverbial primordial soup from which our earliest, multi-cellular ancestors emerged was presumably seething with many much simpler, single-celled organisms. Finding the first indications of evolution into more advanced, embryonic development has proved difficult, however, both because of the organisms’ small size and soft structures

Polar bears draw most visitors to Spitsbergen, the largest island in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. For me, rocks were the allure.