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Glowing Plants: Natural Lighting with no Electricity or CO2
- corwinbad 13y agoLove this! See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLhU1RGTHN4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLhU1RGTHN4 and http://downtownproject.com/2013/dr-omri-avirav-drory-democratizing-the-tools-creation/ http://downtownproject.com/2013/dr-omri-avirav-drory-democra... to learn more about this amazing project!
- crusso 13y agoThis 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).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- danielch 13y agoAmazing!
- technotony 13y agoThanks, this is the first ever synthetic biology kickstarter campaign! A sign of things to come I hope
- astrodust 13y agoIt won't be long until the first accident involving a genetically modified puppy that's so supernaturally cute it causes fatalities.
- sinbal22 13y agoGenome Compiler's software rock!!
- ccarter84 13y agoWell...on the upside at least we're not making more mice glow in the dark
- matandro 13y agoGreen clean light
- Cambrian2 13y agoDNA Laser Printed Plants
- deathcakes 13y agoBut how can you turn it off?
- astrodust 13y agoStop watering it.
- sinbal22 13y agoHow cool!!
- sinbal22 13y agoWow!! Synthetic biology is so cool!!
- sinbal22 13y agoYes! Green clean light!!
- the_cat_kittles 13y agoI would love to see what it looks like when its glowing? Have they not grown any yet?
- technotony 13y agoThe 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.
- yarivb 13y agoFeels like the future is here :)
- mootothemax 13y agoWhy 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 13y agoAt 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.
- DanBC 13y agoThere are some anti-vote ring things too.
- technotony 13y agoHi 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 13y agoMaybe I should have put 'someone' in quotes, because I literally meant someone and not "someone with heavy implicit leanings towards the project creators."
- corwinbad 13y agoWe don't want any gaming - we think it's cool but hate if people would game the system and make us look bad..
- Camillo 13y agoHow can you say you don't want to look bad when you literally put "bad" at the end of your name?
- error54 13y agoNot 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 13y ago"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)
- biot 13y agoI plan to use Unicode plus carefully placed right-to-left marks to overwrite the plant's call stack and take control of the genome.
- fghh45sdfhr3 13y agowhat 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 13y ago[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.
- gus_massa 13y ago
- comex 13y agoI 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.
- desireco42 13y agoThis is kind of project for which KickStarter was invented for... unlike some others for small apps
- technotony 13y agoThanks. I think Kickstarter is going to change the way so many things are funded, this project would never get off the ground without them.
- max_power 13y agoAwesome!!
- whatshisface 13y agoI'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 13y agoCheck out these guys glowing bacteria which were the inspiration for the project: http://2010.igem.org/Team:Cambridge http://2010.igem.org/Team:Cambridge
- whatshisface 13y agoI understand that stuff can glow, but notice that those pictures don't even have things visible 5 feet away.
- technotony 13y agoThere's a discussion of the energy dynamics here: http://2010.igem.org/Team:Cambridge/Tools/Lighting http://2010.igem.org/Team:Cambridge/Tools/Lighting
- jws 13y agoThere 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.
- btr41n 13y agoAs 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 13y agoI 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.
- kurt_ 13y agoInterresting 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 13y agoPlants 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.
- justinsb 13y agoI 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 13y agoI 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 13y agoGranted 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."
- jacquesm 13y agoThis 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/ 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.
- lucasvo 13y agoI think you don't get the humour behind it. They're making glowing plants because, come on, who doesn't like to have a glowing plant?! 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.
- jacquesm 13y ago> I think you don't get the humour behind it. 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.
- anonymous 13y agoToo bad they don't ship outside the US.
- alonben 13y agoGreat initiative - I GLOWING PLANTS ROCK!
- the-kid 13y agoHow can I help? DIYbio sounds huge and looks like Genome Compiler is THE tool for it!
- drMalcom 13y agoDr. 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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- microbiologist 13y agothe 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.
- sinbal22 13y ago@pyre I'm no spam. I'm a badass Molecular Biologist and I just got a little excited ;) Genome Compiler is really that awesome. And I'm glad to see synthetic biology in the lights. This is all incredibly innovative.