5 ms·

I would love to see some numbers and comparisons. As I said in a reply below, I suspect this is functionally ineffectual and that 30x the air cleaning of a regu

I would love to see some numbers and comparisons. As I said in a reply below, I suspect this is functionally ineffectual and that 30x the air cleaning of a regular plant is like saying 30x the intelligence of a regular plant. I suspect this is functioning as a shiny, attractive prototype to fund further research to develop a 300x or 3000x plant or something in that neighbourhood. No judgment from me for that, prototype funding a bigger plan is a cool business model. I'd just love to get some absolute data. EDIT: Reading a little bit about the NASA plant study[0] that I saw in the comments below. It says that it determined that you'd need 10-1000 plants per square meter (I don't understand this measurement? Wouldn't it be cubic meter?) to get the equivalent of outdoor-indoor air exchange. That's a really wide range, but does this mean you'd need 0.33...-33.33... of these neoplants to have the same impact? That's a lot of plants, but another 10x or 100x and you're actually getting somewhere in the range of reasonable. Counterpoint, I don't know what I'm talking about. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study

bilsbie 4y ago
I thought I saw snake plants could do way better than that.
- agilob 4y ago
  In real life snake plant wins, because it's the easier in maintenance. A common saying about it is "it thrives on neglect". I propagate them (have about 120 at my home right now, I even produced my own hybrid that's almost completely yellow) and give as gifts to many people, those who never had plants before and those who go for 2 months long holidays, so far no reports of any dead one. It's resistant to drought and overwatering, nothing bad happens when it has too much sunlight or not enough. Having 10 of them at home is work free, stress free compared to having 1 peace lily or other dracaenas.
  - Nathanael_M 4y ago
    You produced your own snake plant hybrid... That's got to be one of the most fascinating conversation starters I've ever heard. Do you think there's any merit in this concept of air cleaning super plants?
    - agilob 4y ago
      >Do you think there's any merit in this concept of air cleaning super plants? Snake plants and some aloe are quite easy to mutate at random. We're seeing more and more of them every year. I know I have 2 aloe hybrids that didn't exist 5 years ago, got them on ebay. This year, all supermarkets in UK and Poland are full of them, on social media and plantnet [1] we're arguing on what they should be called as each distributor gives them different names. 100s of photos are misidentified, which... kinda isn't uncommon and hard to blame anyone for it. I also have at least 20 subspecies of snake plants, 12 of them live in a single pot. The yellow one managed to create 3 individual offsprings, if they give yellow offspring again, I'm calling it a win and a new subspecies I _could potentnially_ sell. This is where things go hard. Snakeplant is hard to propagate a subspecies at scale. Fastest way is to cut a leaf and stick in water with any rooting hormone, but it doesn't keep mutations. Water propagation "reverts" mutations and produces the original specie. So, if you have a moonshine [2], cut a leaf and propagate in water, there are very high chances you end up with native [3], almost certain this will happen. You need at least 3-5 generations made in soil with identical mutation to make it more reproducible [4], that's a few years of waiting. Like this guy on reddit, had the plant for +10 years and spent 18 months propagating in water. Pothos, which the article is about, are a lot different, you can create a subspecies quite efficiently and make it a reproducible process. Even without any gardening knowledge you can learn about it from youtube or reddit comments. Pothos grows really fast and offspring created from a branch is identical to parent (some people have different experience that it reverts to the original variation - jade pothos, but it doesn't seem to be the rule?), so propagation is drastically easier. My guess it that's why the company mutated/fed pothos not snakeplants or peace lily. The most difficult answer is, how to make it mutate to be a more effective air cleaning plant and how to maintain it when the plant grows and hits our homes. Neo P1 achieved that by making the plant to work with additional 3rd party microbiome, which is a bit cheating, but not uncommon [5-6] for humans to manipulate how plants feed. I should be clear at the beginning, I propagate and create hybrids plants for fun, but know nothing about chemistry and genetics :) [1] https://plantnet.org/en/ https://plantnet.org/en/ [2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=moonshire+snake+plant https://duckduckgo.com/?q=moonshire+snake+plant [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracaena_trifasciata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracaena_trifasciata [4] https://old.reddit.com/r/proplifting/comments/uzn9xj/be_careful_what_you_prop_18m_of_work_and_i_dont/ https://old.reddit.com/r/proplifting/comments/uzn9xj/be_care... [5] https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/plants-repeatedly-got-rid-of-their-ability-to-obtain-their-own-nitrogen/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/plants-repeatedly-go... [6] https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/2013/july/world-changing-technology-enables-crops-to-take-nitrogen-from-the-air-.aspx https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/2013/july/wo...
  - throwawaymaths 4y ago
    I must be some special kind of strange.. my roommate left me with some low maintenance plants on his way out and the snake plant is the only one I've managed to kill
sandworm101 4y ago
Passing air through/over baking soda also works faster/better than plants per square meter, particularly when dealing with VOCs.
- hammock 4y ago
  How to do this?
  - VectorLock 4y ago
    Stick a box of Arm & Hammer in your central air ducts.
    - hammock 4y ago
      How does the air get into the box?
      - thomaslangston 4y ago
        They make A&H boxes that are designed to have sections torn off to let air through but not spill the baking soda.
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    It is why a small box of baking soda has a pull-off side revealing a permeable membrane. You put it in the refrigerator to absorb odors, aka volatile organic compounds. Baking soda is alkaline, so it neutralizes acids. As most volatile organic compounds form acids in water, they are essentially absorbed by the baking soda in a moist environment. https://www.armandhammer.com/for-everything-soda/air-freshener-soda https://www.armandhammer.com/for-everything-soda/air-freshen...
- schainks 4y ago
  Citation needed. This sounds interesting, though!
- eric-hu 4y ago
layer8 4y ago
See also https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-019-0175-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-019-0175-9.
Kon-Peki 4y ago
Ugh, the famous NASA study that everyone loves to quotes and nobody ever reads :) It’s freely available from the NASA website, and it looks like that Wikipedia page includes a link in the footnotes. At the very least, skim through it: they chose the plants to test based on what they could find at a random garden shop in Mississippi. They didn’t use pots filled with dirt - they built their own pots that had electrically powered fans and ducts. There’s a drawing in the report, you can make your own! It’s definitely good to have houseplants; the more the better! But this report isn’t really of much value to the average homeowner.
- Nathanael_M 4y ago
  Especially because the average homeowner can’t afford 10-1000 plants per square foot of flooring. If you have helpful data, please share. I was just skimming as you kindly pointed out and would love some concrete numbers other than holistic senses of the goodwill of houseplants, $150 houseplants or others. Actually, the only other study I’ve seen says that houseplants are of zero benefit in regards to VOC purification, but I doubt a startup would invest this much into fraud.
- sagebird 4y ago
  Wouldn’t be surprised if houseplants often introduce problems - mold, that could at times be worse than no plant at all. The benefit of outside air is that it is averaged and that open spaces reach more stable equilibriums than artificial spaces.
Patrick-T 4y ago
Hi Nathanael, Patrick here, CTO of Neoplants, thanks you so much for spending the time learning about what we’ve built. TLDR: we’ve put together a white paper explaining the technology behind what we do, as well as the performance data we’ve accumulated so far: https://bit.ly/3hjMqsB https://bit.ly/3hjMqsB As you pointed out, the range given by the Nasa study covers 2 orders of magnitude, this reflects the difficulty to extrapolate from their data to real life situations. Even though our first product, Neo P1, is “only” 30x better than normal indoor plants, it’s already a great improvement over anything that’s been done in the scientific literature to date (usually improving phytoremediation by 2 or 3x) , and this is just the start of the adventure. As you said, we expect to continue to leverage our metabolism and microbiome engineering technologies to have even more performant plants every year.

bilsbie 4y ago

I thought I saw snake plants could do way better than that.

agilob 4y ago
In real life snake plant wins, because it's the easier in maintenance. A common saying about it is "it thrives on neglect". I propagate them (have about 120 at my home right now, I even produced my own hybrid that's almost completely yellow) and give as gifts to many people, those who never had plants before and those who go for 2 months long holidays, so far no reports of any dead one. It's resistant to drought and overwatering, nothing bad happens when it has too much sunlight or not enough. Having 10 of them at home is work free, stress free compared to having 1 peace lily or other dracaenas.
- Nathanael_M 4y ago
  You produced your own snake plant hybrid... That's got to be one of the most fascinating conversation starters I've ever heard. Do you think there's any merit in this concept of air cleaning super plants?
  - agilob 4y ago
    >Do you think there's any merit in this concept of air cleaning super plants? Snake plants and some aloe are quite easy to mutate at random. We're seeing more and more of them every year. I know I have 2 aloe hybrids that didn't exist 5 years ago, got them on ebay. This year, all supermarkets in UK and Poland are full of them, on social media and plantnet [1] we're arguing on what they should be called as each distributor gives them different names. 100s of photos are misidentified, which... kinda isn't uncommon and hard to blame anyone for it. I also have at least 20 subspecies of snake plants, 12 of them live in a single pot. The yellow one managed to create 3 individual offsprings, if they give yellow offspring again, I'm calling it a win and a new subspecies I _could potentnially_ sell. This is where things go hard. Snakeplant is hard to propagate a subspecies at scale. Fastest way is to cut a leaf and stick in water with any rooting hormone, but it doesn't keep mutations. Water propagation "reverts" mutations and produces the original specie. So, if you have a moonshine [2], cut a leaf and propagate in water, there are very high chances you end up with native [3], almost certain this will happen. You need at least 3-5 generations made in soil with identical mutation to make it more reproducible [4], that's a few years of waiting. Like this guy on reddit, had the plant for +10 years and spent 18 months propagating in water. Pothos, which the article is about, are a lot different, you can create a subspecies quite efficiently and make it a reproducible process. Even without any gardening knowledge you can learn about it from youtube or reddit comments. Pothos grows really fast and offspring created from a branch is identical to parent (some people have different experience that it reverts to the original variation - jade pothos, but it doesn't seem to be the rule?), so propagation is drastically easier. My guess it that's why the company mutated/fed pothos not snakeplants or peace lily. The most difficult answer is, how to make it mutate to be a more effective air cleaning plant and how to maintain it when the plant grows and hits our homes. Neo P1 achieved that by making the plant to work with additional 3rd party microbiome, which is a bit cheating, but not uncommon [5-6] for humans to manipulate how plants feed. I should be clear at the beginning, I propagate and create hybrids plants for fun, but know nothing about chemistry and genetics :) [1] https://plantnet.org/en/ https://plantnet.org/en/ [2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=moonshire+snake+plant https://duckduckgo.com/?q=moonshire+snake+plant [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracaena_trifasciata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracaena_trifasciata [4] https://old.reddit.com/r/proplifting/comments/uzn9xj/be_careful_what_you_prop_18m_of_work_and_i_dont/ https://old.reddit.com/r/proplifting/comments/uzn9xj/be_care... [5] https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/plants-repeatedly-got-rid-of-their-ability-to-obtain-their-own-nitrogen/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/plants-repeatedly-go... [6] https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/2013/july/world-changing-technology-enables-crops-to-take-nitrogen-from-the-air-.aspx https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/2013/july/wo...
- throwawaymaths 4y ago
  I must be some special kind of strange.. my roommate left me with some low maintenance plants on his way out and the snake plant is the only one I've managed to kill

sandworm101 4y ago

Passing air through/over baking soda also works faster/better than plants per square meter, particularly when dealing with VOCs.

hammock 4y ago
How to do this?
- VectorLock 4y ago
  Stick a box of Arm & Hammer in your central air ducts.
  - hammock 4y ago
    How does the air get into the box?
    - thomaslangston 4y ago
      They make A&H boxes that are designed to have sections torn off to let air through but not spill the baking soda.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  It is why a small box of baking soda has a pull-off side revealing a permeable membrane. You put it in the refrigerator to absorb odors, aka volatile organic compounds. Baking soda is alkaline, so it neutralizes acids. As most volatile organic compounds form acids in water, they are essentially absorbed by the baking soda in a moist environment. https://www.armandhammer.com/for-everything-soda/air-freshener-soda https://www.armandhammer.com/for-everything-soda/air-freshen...
schainks 4y ago
Citation needed. This sounds interesting, though!
eric-hu 4y ago

layer8 4y ago

See also https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-019-0175-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-019-0175-9.

Kon-Peki 4y ago

Ugh, the famous NASA study that everyone loves to quotes and nobody ever reads :) It’s freely available from the NASA website, and it looks like that Wikipedia page includes a link in the footnotes. At the very least, skim through it: they chose the plants to test based on what they could find at a random garden shop in Mississippi. They didn’t use pots filled with dirt - they built their own pots that had electrically powered fans and ducts. There’s a drawing in the report, you can make your own! It’s definitely good to have houseplants; the more the better! But this report isn’t really of much value to the average homeowner.

Nathanael_M 4y ago
Especially because the average homeowner can’t afford 10-1000 plants per square foot of flooring. If you have helpful data, please share. I was just skimming as you kindly pointed out and would love some concrete numbers other than holistic senses of the goodwill of houseplants, $150 houseplants or others. Actually, the only other study I’ve seen says that houseplants are of zero benefit in regards to VOC purification, but I doubt a startup would invest this much into fraud.
sagebird 4y ago
Wouldn’t be surprised if houseplants often introduce problems - mold, that could at times be worse than no plant at all. The benefit of outside air is that it is averaged and that open spaces reach more stable equilibriums than artificial spaces.

Patrick-T 4y ago

Hi Nathanael, Patrick here, CTO of Neoplants, thanks you so much for spending the time learning about what we’ve built. TLDR: we’ve put together a white paper explaining the technology behind what we do, as well as the performance data we’ve accumulated so far: https://bit.ly/3hjMqsB https://bit.ly/3hjMqsB As you pointed out, the range given by the Nasa study covers 2 orders of magnitude, this reflects the difficulty to extrapolate from their data to real life situations. Even though our first product, Neo P1, is “only” 30x better than normal indoor plants, it’s already a great improvement over anything that’s been done in the scientific literature to date (usually improving phytoremediation by 2 or 3x) , and this is just the start of the adventure. As you said, we expect to continue to leverage our metabolism and microbiome engineering technologies to have even more performant plants every year.