Artificial leaves to produce fuel on Earth and, one day, Mars

With the right technology, the gas station of the future will make its own fuel directly from sunlight, in the process sucking up carbon and producing oxygen. Decades into the future, the same technology could provide fuel and oxygen for the first Martians, and could even be tweaked to produce fertilizer. Peidong Yang is at work on technology, what he refers to as artificial photosynthesis.