

Glowing Plants: Natural Lighting with no Electricity or CO2 - technotony
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plants-natural-lighting-with-no-electricit

======
jacquesm
This is one along the lines of 'wouldn't it be nice if'. Yes, it would be. You
can get an idea of how effective this will be if you paint a good sized chunk
of wall with <http://glonation.com/> glow in the dark paint. The paint will
likely have a much higher density than any plant based set-up will be.

This may be useful as emergency lighting in a jungle but I highly doubt that
we'll be replacing LEDs, fluorescent or even incandescents with this
technique.

Apologies for being terribly pessimistic but even if the project gets funded
_and_ the goal is successfully achieved I can't see the utility.

Has there been any work done on an estimate of efficiency, some sort of
modelling about what reasonable expectations are with respect to output?

It's a super presentation complete with HN voting ring, congratulations on
successfully gaming the system. If they are just as good at the execution then
this can't fail.

edit: after reading the risks and challenges section:

"We hope to have a plant which you can visibly see in the dark (like glow in
the dark paint) but don't expect to replace your light bulbs with version
1.0."

So that was pretty much spot on. Then:

"The more money we raise, the more we can refine our designs and the stronger
the effect we will get so please tell all your friends about the project."

That's not very honest, there is no way there is a direct relationship between
the money they raise and the effect produced, these things typically follow a
saturation curve with the upper limit being pretty hard and rather low
compared to other ways of generating light.

~~~
technotony
There is an assessment of the energy efficiency here:
<http://2010.igem.org/Team:Cambridge/Tools/Lighting>

~~~
ars
In this article they assume plants can use about 3% to 6% of the light, but
actually they can use about 0.1% - 0.2%. So instead of 60 W/m^2 you have 1
W/m^2.

Meaning you need to dedicate 1% of the tree's energy to light, not 0.02%.

They also use a 210 lumen bulb to compare with - but 210 lumens is very very
dim. Assuming each tree is planted 20 meters apart, each tree needs to
illuminate 400 m^2 of area, which would be 0.5 lux.

For comparison that's about as much light as the full moon provides.

For normal street lighting you want about 18 lux, meaning you actually need a
7000 lumen bulb.

So, now we need 35% of the trees energy delivered as light. But of course half
of the light will be emitted upward, so we really need 70% of the trees
energy.

Good luck with that.

And we haven't even touched on the fact that the light is not created on the
surface of the plant, but rather throughout the tissue, so a lot of it will be
lost internally.

------
mootothemax
Why are there so many short-but-positive comments from new accounts?

Is HN being rather unsubtly gamed?

Doesn't give me much confidence if so.

~~~
pyre
At least 4 of the comments are by the same account: sinbal22. Looks like
someone may be trying to game HN.

Edit: Maybe it's comment spam in an attempt to push this to the front page. As
I understand it, stuff that hits the front page of HN isn't just a function
upvotes. # of comments, and the time over which the upvotes and the comments
accrued are also accounted for.

~~~
technotony
Hi I'm one of the project creators and I posted the link on my facebook page
asking for the discussion to happen here instead of there. I think the
comments are from some of my more enthusiastic friends who are new here!

~~~
pyre
Maybe I should have put 'someone' in quotes, because I literally meant someone
and not "someone with heavy implicit leanings towards the project creators."

------
error54
Not that this project isn't on the up and up but all these new shill accounts
"praising" a project always make me suspicious. Nevertheless, I think this
might be the first Kickstarter I actually invest in.

------
ChuckMcM
"Inject 30 characters into the DNA of the plant" - what could possibly go
wrong with that? :-)

(And no, its not subtle (the gaming), analytics show that Kickstarters that
make the front page get more $$ so its part of the marketing campaign no
doubt)

~~~
fghh45sdfhr3
_what could possibly go wrong with that?_

Yes, what? If you think about it like a SciFy movie, it is guaranteed to
result in a gigantic, walking plant, smarter than a human, which wants to
destroy us all. Also ghosts some how.

If you _actually_ think about it, than the chances of those 30 characters,
being something which will help the plant survive and thrive in the wild, are
tiny. Virtually non existent.

Any one currently thriving wild plant has a better chance of mutating itself
in that way. Any current wild plant could become an invasive species by
sticking one of its seeds the the shoe of a human getting on a plane.

People way overestimate the chances of bio-engineering to create anything
truly dangerous. And people way underestimate the chances of the regular old
all natural flu to kill a huge percentage of humanity in any given year.

~~~
ChuckMcM
[Random note, I certainly hope the password for your HN account is something
like "johnsmith" :-)]

I was joking of course, I love biot's comment about overwriting the call stack
and taking over the genome. And no doubt these world class geneticists
wouldn't actually insert what looks like a garbage string of characters if the
DNA they coded matched up some sort of virus or something. Of course
"Copyright CEM rights reserved" is 30 chars too :-) which would make for a
weird legal thing where you argued the Kickstarter was a 'work for hire' and
you've got the copyright to prove it yadda yadda.

------
comex
I thought the video was pretty terrible - strange special effects and fairly
vague - but the project sounds awesome. Backed.

edit: I'd sure like an explanation for the gaming, though.

------
whatshisface
I've never seen a bright chemical reaction that wasn't really hot. Can a
practical level of light even come out of a test tube?

Edit: Also, just hit me: How in the world would a potted plant in my living
room absorb collect even 20 watts of energy? This would need you to seriously
redesign almost everything about the modern house if you wanted to use it.

~~~
technotony
Check out these guys glowing bacteria which were the inspiration for the
project: <http://2010.igem.org/Team:Cambridge>

~~~
whatshisface
I understand that stuff can glow, but notice that those pictures don't even
have things visible 5 feet away.

~~~
jws
There are orders of magnitude power differences between "glow" and
"illuminate".

First, your eye has a logarithmic response to light intensity, which is great,
it gives you nice dynamic range. But if you are judging photons/second, you
are going to do a terrible job. It doesn't take many photons for your to
perceive dim light, particularly when you are dark adapted.

Looking from the other direction, say that plant has about a 10cm x 10cm total
leaf area. It gets the equivalent of 4 hours a day of sunlight at 1000
watts/sq meter (typical of earth). So 40 watt hours of energy per day hits it.
Wikipedia says 3-6% efficient for photosynthesis, that gets us down to 2 watt
hours per day. That gives it 100mW to live on. If it put _all_ of that into
glowing and were as efficient at making light as an LED it would make about
the amount of light of an indicator LED that says something is on, but isn't
silly bright. I think that is still orders of magnitude high. The plant still
needs to use energy on growing, and the biological light making process is
probably not as efficient as an LED.

~~~
wcoenen
> _and the biological light making process is probably not as efficient as an
> LED_

Interestingly enough, the luciferase reaction is actually more efficient than
LED.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luciferase#Mechanism_of_reacti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luciferase#Mechanism_of_reaction)

------
corwinbad
Love this!

See <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLhU1RGTHN4> and
[http://downtownproject.com/2013/dr-omri-avirav-drory-
democra...](http://downtownproject.com/2013/dr-omri-avirav-drory-
democratizing-the-tools-creation/) to learn more about this amazing project!

~~~
crusso
This is where things are headed. DIY biology is going to explode as GATC
printing comes down in price the way that DNA reading has.

Those of us who got started in the early hacking days of computers should see
the parallels in this new wave. As cool as computer hacking has been, the
potentials of biological hacking - particularly with respect to being able to
hack our own DNA is mind boggling (and scary at the same time).

------
btr41n
As always, I'm a bit skeptical. Not that it can't be done, but how effective
can these actually be? How many lumens will it produce? How long will the
plants live? Will they produce more seeds? Is bioluminescence a dominant
trait? Or will future generations of my night light glow dimmer? Oh the
botany!

~~~
fghh45sdfhr3
I do not believe this can be something which you could use to read by. Light
takes a lot of energy and biology does not waste energy. And plants don't even
have the metabolism of a fly. This is very neat. I'll probably donate enough
to get seeds. But I do not believe it is a light bulb replacement.

------
the_cat_kittles
I would love to see what it looks like when its glowing? Have they not grown
any yet?

~~~
technotony
The kickstarter funds will be used to synthesize the DNA and make the actual
glowing plant. We have a florescent prototype which glows under UV and will
post pictures of that in a few weeks when it's bigger.

------
drMalcom
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Don't you see the danger, John, inherent in what you're doing
here? Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet's ever seen, but you
wield it like a kid that's found his dad's gun. Donald Gennaro: It's hardly
appropriate to start hurling generalizations... Dr. Ian Malcolm: If I may...
Um, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using
here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had
done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves,
so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of
geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even
knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a
plastic lunchbox, and now [bangs on the table] Dr. Ian Malcolm: you're selling
it, you wanna sell it. Well... John Hammond: I don't think you're giving us
our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody's ever done
before... Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied
with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.

------
justinsb
I backed this project. This is exactly the sort of blue-sky experimentation I
think crowd-funding can enable, that otherwise likely wouldn't be economically
feasible and/or fundable.

I think I backed it as much for its ambition and vision as for the actual
reward!

~~~
ars
I hope you backed it with your eyes open. It can't work. They might be able to
make it glow i.e. you can see light if you look at it, but there is no way
they could make it bright enough to illuminate anything even 1 foot away.

As long as you know you are making a decoration, not a lamp replacement then
cool.

They really should be clearer to backers letting them know it can't work as a
light replacement.

~~~
itwasgood
Granted the title "Glowing Plants: Natural Lighting with no Electricity or
CO2" could potentially be misconstrued but anybody considering investing would
be reading the rest of the materials, especially the risks and challenges
section.

"We hope to have a plant which you can visibly see in the dark (like glow in
the dark paint) but don't expect to replace your light bulbs with version
1.0."

~~~
ars
That implies it will be possible with version 2. It won't.

------
kurt_
Interresting project but i'm wondering how can we keep control of these plants
and prevent them to reproduce themselves (or infect other plants) ? (Yes I
don't know that much about biology)

~~~
Pwnguinz
Plants don't just "reproduce themselves". Nor do they "infect" other plants.
This is not a "infectious" trait. If you cross pollinate (a.k.a. 'breeding
plants'), the active genes responsible for glowing in the dark may or may not
even be passed down.

Though your concerns are well noted--see Monsanto's 'terminator' crops cross
pollinating with neighboring 'normal' crops and making their seeds also
sterile.

------
deathcakes
But how can you turn it off?

~~~
astrodust
Stop watering it.

------
microbiologist
the thing is, this is truly an incredibly feat of technology where we are at
the point in history that we can actually control life, that is program cells
to do what we want. It's incredibly innovative, and immensely powerful.
Software ain't crap compared to biological programming.

Also the _reason_ it takes (relatively) longer than electronic computer
circuits are because there are biological machines, enzymatic 'robots' if you
will, of polymerase enzymes binding to DNA and RNA and so forth. And that, my
friends, is the beauty and wonder of this campaign.

------
anonymous
Too bad they don't ship outside the US.

------
desireco42
This is kind of project for which KickStarter was invented for... unlike some
others for small apps

~~~
technotony
Thanks. I think Kickstarter is going to change the way so many things are
funded, this project would never get off the ground without them.

------
ccarter84
Well...on the upside at least we're not making more mice glow in the dark

------
danielch
Amazing!

~~~
technotony
Thanks, this is the first ever synthetic biology kickstarter campaign! A sign
of things to come I hope

~~~
astrodust
It won't be long until the first accident involving a genetically modified
puppy that's so supernaturally cute it causes fatalities.

------
sinbal22
Wow!! Synthetic biology is so cool!!

