Glowing Plants: Natural Lighting with no Electricity or CO2
kickstarter.com
kickstarter.com
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.
I know some of the guys behind it. And making growing plants is only a way to show off, what they're working on that is much bigger. Creating custom dna sequences is a pretty tough challenge.
Sorry, no. When asking for people to back a project with cash to a maximum of $10K my sense of humour rapidly diminishes.
I do technical due diligence for a living and this raises a ton of red flags. So many promises made for a project that amounts to basic research is a bit much.
> Creating custom dna sequences is a pretty tough challenge.
My point exactly.
The effective output level would have to be sized in such a way that even at the maximum time from the last illumination you're still above some minimum acceptable level which would mean that you'd have to be putting out a much larger amount of light than required early on.
Here is a similar (concept as far as I know) based on a hollow wall with a bacterial soup:
http://www.design.philips.com/philips/sites/philipsdesign/ab...
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.
Is HN being rather unsubtly gamed?
Doesn't give me much confidence if so.
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.
(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)
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.
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.
In 30 characters you can encode the ADN for very small proteins. Many of them are interesting [1]. For example, oxitocyn has only 9 aminoacids [2]. Each aminoacid is encoded in a 3-base codon [3], and most of the codons can be tranlated to an ASCII letter [4]. (You must choose carefully the aminoacid->codon translation to get printable characters.)
But you will need also at least a starting and ending signal, so in total you will need 11 characters. But it's not enough to have the information there, the cell will not produce the associated protein unless it is in some bigger regulatory structure. For example, it needs to be part of an operon [5] that is a much bigger ADN sequence. (I couldn't find the minimal size.)
I think that not even the 140 characters are enough to destroy the word or create a drug producing plant. But IANAMB.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin#Structure_and_relation...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code
[4] http://www.righto.com/2010/06/using-arc-to-decode-venters-se...
edit: I'd sure like an explanation for the gaming, though.
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.
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.
Interestingly enough, the luciferase reaction is actually more efficient than LED.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luciferase#Mechanism_of_reacti...
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLhU1RGTHN4 and http://downtownproject.com/2013/dr-omri-avirav-drory-democra... to learn more about this amazing project!
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).
I think I backed it as much for its ambition and vision as for the actual reward!
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.
"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."
Though your concerns are well noted--see Monsanto's 'terminator' crops cross pollinating with neighboring 'normal' crops and making their seeds also sterile.
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.