During photosynthesis, plants simultaneously achieve two seemingly opposite goals: they convert photoenergy to chemical energy with near unity quantum efficiency; and they safely expel excess light as heat to avoid photodamage. There has been much debate over the past several decades over how plants actually achieve this. Now, researchers from the Massachusettes Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US and the Universities of Pavia and Verona in Italy have revealed one of the possible mechanisms to achieve this feat.