Researchers at the Occidental Research Bureau has struggled for three decades to produce a man-made leaf able to absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere and convert it into chemical energy. Yet now it seems that they have at long last achieved their goal.

Researchers at the Occidental Research Bureau have struggled for three decades to produce an artificial leaf able to absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere and convert it into chemical energy. Yet now it seems that they have at long last achieved their goal.

Explanation:

The correct auxiliary in that sentence is have since it is referring to the researchers. In other words, it is a third person in the plural, so the correct auxiliary is have.

The term man-made is not wrong, but it would be better to use the word artificial, which means that nature did not create it.

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serve the people! ,” smoothly translated by julia lovell, offers an initial sample of yan lianke’s writing to an english-speaking audience. a bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable, it teases mao zedong by poking fun at a true believer who obeys the chairman’s precepts too literally. to a western sensibility, the broad strokes of yan lianke’s humor would seem to pose little risk of inciting rebellion, whether of the flesh or of the body politic. but then, part of the book’s attraction is that it doesn’t have a western sensibility. it lets the reader see — or rather, intuit — what jokes chinese officials don’t consider funny, and how very little it takes for a writer to be branded an incendiary in 21st-century china, more than three decades after the death of mao, a decade after the death of deng xiaoping and seven years since china entered the world trade organization, a move that would seem to signal a willingness (however wary) to mingle with the rest of the world.