Glowing Trees instead of Streetlights?! It's coming.

Biologically based LEDs could be used to make trees illuminate sidewalks. Exciting and scary.Thought you might enjoy these breakthrough

The golden glow of street lights could soon be replaced by the green fluorescence of tree leaves. Scientists from the Academia Sinica and the National Cheng Kung University in Taipei and Tainan have implanted glowing, sea urchin shaped gold nanoparticles, known as bio light emitting diodes, or bio LEDs, inside the leaves of a plant.
The new nanoparticles could replace the electricity powered street light with biologically powered light that removes CO2 from the atmosphere 24 hours a days.
"In the future, bio-LED could be used to make roadside trees luminescent at night," said Yen-Hsun Su in an interview with Chemistry World. "This will save energy and absorb CO2 as the bio-LED luminescence will cause the chloroplast to conduct photosynthesis."

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Since it will only be used to light streets I don’t see any issue with this. It would replace the orange and yellow lighting of street lights with a more vibrant neon-green which appears quite intriguing to me. I would love to walk down a street and see a few trees with leaves that are shining bright.

Don’t expect this to come for the US too fast it would take many of years for this to be fully implemented and replace the street lights. As long as they leave the trees in the countryside and in the woods alone I have no problem with this.

I wonder if they will make glowing pets or even glowing people? I wouldn't mind having a glowing cat or dog. A glowing person would be weird, but probably someone would do it. People already can get glowing tattoos or other weird body modifications.

I'd like a nice glowing Christmas tree. They should make some glowing roses or other flowers, that would be pretty.

reply to post by jessieg


Here you go.

today.msnbc.msn.com...

It's troubling.

S&F from me, I think that this is a really interesting find. Kinda reminds me of scenes from Avatar where the plants in the jungle lit up as they walked down the paths. I guess that would be motion triggered bio luminescence.

Sometimes, when I'm fishing at night, I see a type of motion triggered bio luminescence when I drag my flounder gig in the water, on other nights it's not so prevalent.

reply to post by GrisGris


I bet this is another one of those technologies that will accused of being dangerous in some way. Think about it, the final outcome of something like this being implemented will be that someone will lose money. And if history has taught us anything, it is that anytime something new comes out that really could benefit society at the expense of CEO pay cuts, it either, never gets explored further, has some stupid ridiculously large price tag attached, or even gets labeled as dangerous (do we blame the gun or the person shooting it?)

Few examples?
Marijuana/Hemp
Thermal Energy
nuclear energy
hydrogen fuel cells
cars that wont break, ever...

See what I mean? Its not that we don't know these things can exist. But to do them ourselves is unreasonable, unless your sitting on some wealth. And eventually they get sent to the closet, where no one talks about them and they carry whatever label they were given for the time being until someone takes a second look.

That being said, this is really cool. First thing that came to mind is those plants in avatar that lit up when you touched them. Just imagine, our entire world illuminated by nature.

I would be against our meddling in this area.

We need to be very careful with the way we affect the balance of nature, as seen by the decline of the Honey Bee, now widely believed to be caused by insecticides that we use to kill off other pests.

And it isn't really needed either, is it? There are other avenues which we are further along (excuse the pun). Check out this video for example:
www.youtube.com.../u/0/8h-mb6bdXbk

Far less investment involved, far less risk to the natural balance, and far more visually pleasing.

reply to post by GrisGris


www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by jessieg


Yes, glowing pets are in the works. Fish have already been approved for sale.

Scientists have created the ultimate pet: genetically modified fish that glow in the dark. In future, there will be no need for aquarium lights - fluorescent fish will provide their own illumination.
And that is just the start. Scientists believe Night Pearl bio-fish represent the shape of pets to come. Our household animals will come with extra genes that will stop them shedding fur or triggering allergic reactions. And when one dies, its owner will simply clone it.

But the prospect of GM pets has outraged pet dealers. The nation's aquarium industry last week said it had backballed the Night Pearl. 'This is the thin end of the wedge,' said Keith Davenport, chief executive of the Ornamental Aquatic Trade Association. 'You could put all sorts of different genes in animals and do all sorts of damage.'

The Night Pearl began as a research tool created by HJ Tsai, a professor at National Taiwan University. He was looking for a way to make fish organs easier to see when studying them, and isolated a gene for a fluorescent protein that he had extracted from jellyfish and inserted it into the genome of a zebrafish. To his astonishment, the jellyfish gene made whole zebrafish glow.

Source

As well as the trees being very pretty and providing light, I'll bet they will also come equipped with CCTC (closed circuit tv). I do not trust all this new technology


Instead of having cameras that are seen by everyone....they will resort to stealth

Just putting that out there for you to chew on




res

I enjoy the quaint gaslights in my town.
injecting trees with glowing shiite just doesnt sound like a good idea to me.

reply to post by GrisGris


That would be sooo awesome, but when autumn comes wouldn't a majority of the leaves fall off and there wouldn't be much light left?

Does this remind anyone else of the movie avatar?

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/b2232a5642d8.jpg[/atsimg]

Cheers
Brady

Originally posted by GetRadNZ
reply to post by GrisGris

 

That would be sooo awesome, but when autumn comes wouldn't a majority of the leaves fall off and there wouldn't be much light left?

Does this remind anyone else of the movie avatar?

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/b2232a5642d8.jpg[/atsimg]

Cheers
Brady

Absolutely reminds me of Avatar! Maybe they plan on doing it to evergreens?

Originally posted by resistancia
As well as the trees being very pretty and providing light, I'll bet they will also come equipped with CCTC (closed circuit tv). I do not trust all this new technology


Instead of having cameras that are seen by everyone....they will resort to stealth

Just putting that out there for you to chew on

res

London has 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV cameras which cost £200 million, figures show today.

But an analysis of the publicly funded spy network, which is owned and controlled by local authorities and Transport for London, has cast doubt on its ability to help solve crime.

A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.

Source

I'm sure that is in the works or they will simply attach the current cameras to the lit trees

Not practical. This is supposed to be a cheaper alternative to street lights? I think not, it requires gold to work, and just look at the price of gold. Plus the gold goes into the leaves, which eventually fall off. It may be a cool thing to do is certain small areas, but it's not going to catch on.

Just when you think that MAYBE science is slowly, very slowly, catching up wth the actual needs of humans (and other species), something like this comes along.....

Personally not only do I not find cool or exciting, I think it's perverse and therefore downright ugly.
But I don't fear it, it's not like such a thing would ever be accepted, except in a world totally devoid of the last shred of common sense.

Light pollution is a MAJOR problem, and not just for stargazers. It messes with the natural circadian rhythms of birds and plants.

The really revolutionary thing would be to find a workable process to facilitate on-demand street lighting, perhaps with sensors that would light up a line of street lamps when sensors are activated.
It is perfectly possible to do, it only needs a workable system.

In the meantime, there is a solution that has been known for many years now, and that is street lamps that are shielded in such a way they only illuminate the actual walking/driving surface, not the space around and above the lamp.
It's very easy to do, very cost-effective, and would also save huge amounts of energy.

But I guess many scientists view this world as their private little Legoland....
Which is fine by me, but I don't see why they should get paid for it.

Originally posted by AdAstra


Just when you think that MAYBE science is slowly, very slowly, catching up wth the actual needs of humans (and other species), something like this comes along.....

Personally not only do I not find cool or exciting, I think it's perverse and therefore downright ugly.
But I don't fear it, it's not like such a thing would ever be accepted, except in a world totally devoid of the last shred of common sense.

But I guess many scientists view this world as their private little Legoland....
Which is fine by me, but I don't see why they should get paid for it.

Amazing reply. Really. I can see your point of view. While this is perfectly impractical now, I can see it being developed into something better. But glowing, lab created plants, raises my instincts.

GrisGris

I always wondered when we could start eliminating the wire and telephone pole pollution in our cities. Our skies look like a cob web of wires. I'm for anything that obstructs the view of nature. Glowing tree leaves sound pretty cool! Now you can rake leaves in the middle of the night! In the fall we would be entertained to a natural light show of falling leaves. Than winter comes and there goes are natural lighted street lights. I guess they will have to figure out a way to make the limbs and trunks glow too.

IMO I think this could revolutionize the need for large amounts of steel as construciton material for these lights and also reduce the amount of copper needed to make long drags from a high voltage source and to run light to light down the streets. it would also help ease the tension on the aging electrical grid. as long as they are not idiots and distribute this over the amazon i think this is a very good discovery.

Very interesting. Creating trees that are not only using light but generating it and at the same time uptaking more CO2 than the average tree.