Science Explained — How Things Work

Photosynthesis

Almost every single bite of food you have ever eaten is actually just repackaged sunlight. Plants capture this wild cosmic energy to do something seemingly impossible: weave solid matter out of thin air and water. We call this miraculous process photosynthesis.

At its heart, the recipe is incredibly simple. A plant takes carbon dioxide from the air and water from the soil. Using sunlight as the power source, it rearranges these ingredients into sugar and releases oxygen as a leftover byproduct.

To see how this works, we have to zoom deep inside the leaf's cells. Here, we find tiny, green, football-shaped solar panels called chloroplasts. Inside them are stacks of membrane discs called thylakoids, which look like tiny green pancakes.