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Comment by seu | Hacker News Reader

There's something I really, really don't understand.

> The fabricated leaves did snag the bugs, but they didn’t hinder the insects’ movements quite as effectively as the living plants. But the researchers are not deterred by these initial results. They plan to continue working on the problem and improving their product by more precisely incorporating the mechanical properties of the living trichomes.

Why not grow leaves and use those? Why do we need to make artificial replicas of the real thing, when we could grow the plant and A) get rid of bugs, B) Enjoy the beans and C) benefit from the nitrogen-fixing properties of the plant.

This obsession with creating artificial replicas of things that we know, because we want to have perfect, lab-conditions control of everything, is just crazy.

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Your idea is unfortunately less likely to move as much money for someone to create a startup and profit as much from it.

Leaves need to be replaced regularly. You'd have to transport them to places where you can't grow them. I'm not even sure it would be a benefit for the environment.

The market for fresh kidney bean leaves wouldn't be big enough to justify shops keeping them in stock, growing bean plants would take weeks and typically be impractical otherwise due to space and seasonality constraints, bean leaves dry out quickly so you would need a constant supply to fight an infestation, and given they are a discrete size and you have limited options for how and where place them versus a synthetic tape...

a) Making artificial replikas and testing them out lets us learn something new and it is an interesting area for research

b) Artificial leaves can be "painted" on continuous surfaces anywhere. E.g. on the foots of beds, inside the walls, doorstep, perhaps even luggage…

c) Artificial leaves require less care and maintenance than bean plants.

Come to think of it I don't understand at all how would you use actual live bean plants to protect a home from bedbugs.

b) Artificial leaves can be "painted" on continuous surfaces anywhere. E.g. on the foots of beds, inside the walls, doorstep, perhaps even luggage…

Mmmmhmmm.

It's basically like flypaper and they get stuck and die. Who would want products with the ability to kill bugs in a manner such that now they are permanently covered in dead bugs?

>Who would want products with the ability to kill bugs in a manner such that now they are permanently covered in dead bugs?

E.g. people who use flypaper.

People who use flypaper are using a disposable product that gets thrown out.

That's fundamentally different from "your bed or luggage now works like flypaper."

No, it's not?

Bedbugpaper can be just as disposable.

Yes, but bedbugpaper is not at all what you described.

It is, you would usually want to have this user replacable/washable (that's why I said less maintenance than plants, not no maintenance). Although e.g. during construction it might make sense to install it even permanently.

Anyway, my only point is that there might be possible applications where this technology fits better than the bean plants suggested by seu.

seu still has a good point. That there are mechanisms (like companies making more money via cheaper production/handling when scaling, or catering to careless customers) that lead us to use artificial products doesn't always (or even often?) mean that it's the better solution for us as a whole, long term. Because the drawbacks of artificial solutions may show up in places that the producers or consumers don't feel.

That's sometimes a good point. Doesn't seem to be a good point here unless you live next to a bean farmer. Coming up with a biomimicking synthetic makes plenty of sense in this instance.

A huge improvement over having alive bugs there.

that's a good problem to have, if you have bed bugs at all. Its like saying why would you have a crumpling car bumper that would be destroyed in a wreck and then he unsightly or need an expensive replacement.

I would happily have this stuff permanently painted on bed feet. If you have bed bugs to get attached id much rather have them impaled even if I had to refinish my beds legs (in reality you would just clean them off or replace the temporary flypaper)

You can’t patent leaves

And oil will not sell itself (those artificial ones are probably plastic)

Monsanto enters the chat, gets a judge to shut chat down.

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