
Living Plants That Glow Like a Lamp (2018) - tim333
https://www.physics-astronomy.org/2018/11/mit-just-created-living-plants-that.html
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closetohome
I signed up for the original Kickstarter version of this, which failed
spectacularly when it turned out genetic engineering was slightly beyond the
capabilities of the college kids who started it.

Eventually an actual scientist (one of the originators of the technology)
started his own glowing plant company, and they actually delivered. I had a
real live glowing tobacco plant that lived for about three years.

It was dim enough that to view it, you had to go into a completely dark room
and let your eyes adjust for about ten minutes.

Pretty cool though.

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ianai
What was the name of the company that delivered? Any chance they’re making
progress on better output?

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closetohome
Gleaux. Their website appears to be down though, so it's possible they went
under at some point.

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tomcam
> Michael Strano, professor of chemical engineering at MIT and the senior
> author of the study, said: 'The vision is to make a plant that will function
> as a desk lamp — a lamp that you don't have to plug in. The light is
> ultimately powered by the energy metabolism of the plant itself. Our work
> very seriously opens up the doorway to streetlamps that are nothing but
> treated trees, and to indirect lighting around homes.'

Someone help me... I can’t make the numbers work. How can you create plants
with enough energy to provide light to read or make your neighborhood safer
without sharply increasing their food supply & metabolism? They’d have to
photosynthesize vastly more than they do already.

Also those pictures, if genuine (and I don’t think the picture of the tree is)
are definitely long exposures.

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gus_massa
Sunlight is about 1000W/m^2. The efficiency of photosynthesis is about 0.2%
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency)

So assuming a 100% efficiency in the conversion of the products of the
photosynthesis to light, a 12h+12h light/dark cicle, 100% canopy coverage,
ignoring the branches, ignoring that plants need energy for other activities
and ignoring that the plant will release 1/2 of the light to the sky instead
of to the floor, we get 2W/m^2 for illumination at night.

For a 3mx3m room (10ftx10ft), I'm happy with a 18W LED lamp, and streets are
usually darker. (I can't find the official recommendation.)

I'm ignoring a lot of inefficiency sources, so assuming a 100% efficiency
after photosynthesis is too optimistic. Organic reactions are usually far from
100% efficiency. I think that a 10% is still optimistic, but it's difficult to
give an accurate estimation.

So I think it's not ruled out by the laws of physics, but I don't expect it to
be viable as a street illumination method. (On the scale from 1 to Nessie, I'd
rate it as Yeti.)

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ianai
That sounds like a figure that reflects how little energy a plant needs.
Becoming an active light source requires more energy than the evolved
requirements of plant life. So you have to engineer the whole cycle into the
plant.

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yohann305
This reminds me of the $40 I gave to a kickstarter project 6 years ago to get
seeds for a glowing plant made by a team of researcher at Stanford. I'm still
waiting for my seeds, i believe the team has been disbanded since...

Here is the kickstarter project:
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-
pla...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plants-
natural-lighting-with-no-electricit)

ps: t

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gus_massa
At least in they project the plant would glow forever. In this project they
add the reactives submerging the leaves in a liquid with nanoparticles that
have the reactives, so it locks like they will glow only once.

Also, in spite of the photoshoped tree and the photo that has the brightness
so high that the noise level is evident

> _The light generated by one ten centimetre (four inch) watercress seedling
> is currently about one-thousandth of the amount needed to properly read by,
> but it was enough to illuminate the words on a page of John Milton 's
> Paradise Lost._

this generates a tiny amount of light, don't expect to use it to illuminate
the streets like they hope in the article.

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idreyn
header photo: blindingly bright tree, woe betide those who look directly upon
it

first paragraph: trees will someday light our highways

halfway down the article: okay, a book being lit by a plant, cool

near the end: "The light generated [...] is currently about one-thousandth of
the amount needed to properly read by"

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lurquer
If you inject glowing nanoparticles into a watercress, the glowing
nanoparticles will continue to glow.

You can also inject them into hotdogs. Or, for that matter, just about
anything.

Am I missing something?

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mmmrtl
A little bit. Your hotdog would have to be alive. These nanoparticles are the
enzymes and substrates for a luciferin reaction, which uses the plant's energy
in the form of ATP to power the reaction, giving off light.

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zzz95
This is definitely cool, but If every tree were to glow, there is a
possibility of interfering with nocturnal habits of birds and other animals.

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jolmg
That first picture seems misleading. At risk of stating the obvious, it seems
to have a lamp shining on the tree from behind. I mean, the tree has a shadow
going towards the camera...

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folli
Off topic: this website is unreadable without ad-block

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alentodorov
Yes. Just about to say the same thing. I just clicked back and came to the
comments hoping someone would explain what the content is all about.

