Rhodium, a metal made inside of a star billions of years ago, may help feed a growing population here on Earth, while helping to slow or reverse climate change in the process! And it's all kind of by accident.
With great complexity, we manufacture things like jet airplanes, interplanetary probes, medical tools, and microprocessors. We build with a top-down approach, starting with a big picture concept which we then design and assemble in pieces.
Duke University professor of computer sciences, Dr. John Reif, notes that nature works from the bottom up to assemble complex structures in three dimensions. He and his lab are working on that.
To make enough of the elements to support the chemical complexity of biology, we need an enormously old universe. Stars truly are the factories of life. But for you or your cat to exist, several generations of stars need to have come and gone - each born from the atoms of previous generations, like the babies of the Orion Nebula.
