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The maximum theoretical net efficiency of photosynthesis (after subtracting all respiration losses) is about four per cent of insolation, but this rate can be approached only during brief periods and in the presence of adequate water and nutrients. Intensively tended (irrigated, fertilized) crops can average two per cent efficiency during their growing season; the most productive temperate and tropical forests approach 1.5%. The global continental average is only 0.33%, and, because oceanic phytoplankton convert less than 0.1% of insolation into new aquatic phytomass, the average for the entire biosphere is less than 0.2%. To put it differently, the energy of only one in 500 photons which reach the planet’s ice-free surface gets converted into new phytomass.
At the level of the family, the ideal of marriage as a union that must be preserved through thick and thin is being undermined by a view that marriage is an economic contract that sets out the expectations of the parties involved and can be readily annulled if either party does not feel it is getting its expected returns from the exchange.
Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices
Paul R. Lawrence; Nitin Nohria
To an unnecessary extent, the prolonged fight was driven by emotions and resentments. Instead, Doudna and Zhang could have followed the example of Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Intel who, after five years of wrangling, agreed to share the patent rights for the microchip by cross-licensing their intellectual property to each other and splitting the royalties, which helped the microchip business grow exponentially and define a new age of technology. Unlike the CRISPR contestants, Noyce and Kilby obeyed an all-important business maxim: *Don’t fight over divvying up the proceeds until you finish robbing the stagecoach*.
The Code Breaker
Walter Isaacson
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