Stephen Long, the Director of Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) located in the University of Illinois Research Park as well as a professor of plant biology and crop sciences at the University of Illinois was featured in an article of the New Yorker.

”This story begins about two billion years ago, when the world, if not young, exactly, was a lot more impressionable. The planet spun faster, so the sun rose every twenty-one hours. The earliest continents were forming—Arctica, for instance, which persists as bits and pieces of Siberia. Most of the globe was given over to oceans, and the oceans teemed with microbes…” To read the complete article from The New Yorker click here.