From science to fuel!

What is science? Finding communicable patterns in a huge amount of data that itself is smaller than the data because of the limited amount of brain capacity we have. So this means that science is as old as human communication. But why do we need science? I will explain through my own research how science helps us to live better.

What I do in the span of one or two years with other scientists from other fields to tackle a problem like fuel shortage is as follows: I am a Biophysicist, so I can use computers to imitate real-life situations and study them. In the case of my specific research over the past few years, I have studied some bacteria which were collected from environments with high concentrations of salts like the Dead sea. My experimental colleagues then use their highly accurate instruments to take detailed images of the inside of the bacterial cells. I then reproduce the cells in my computer and study them.

The goal of my study was to use some parts of these bacteria so we can facilitate the process of producing fuels from plants, i.e. biofuels. To do that, we need to change some of these parts of bacteria to be appropriate for the environments in which the fuel production take place, and my research was focused on the nuances of these changes.