Saturday, December 11, 2010

I've Seen the Future: Glowing Trees





Scientists in Taiwan believe they may have discovered a way to turn ordinary trees into streetlamps. Injecting gold nanoparticles into their leaves could make entire trees glow red. And no electricity would be consumed!

Read more here.

10 comments:

Hana said...

That's fantastic (:
Is it a bright red glow, though? Might be kind of odd.

Some Lost Melody said...

That's freakin AWESOME :D

Reel Dancer said...

cool freakin beans!!! I hate street lights. :)

Some Lost Melody said...

lol Maybe in 20 years all our trees will be glowing WHO KNOWS?

Anonymous said...

This could make some nature trails fun at night. Unfortunately, it might lead to night-time cyclocross racing, which is tough enough on the poor trees during the daytime.

But even for bike racers, cyclocross is considered weird. What other group of racers, in any sport, would favor brakes made by a company called "Spooky"?

At least, unlike the best in the world, I've never crashed into a race official.

Robert in San Diego

MushroomCloud said...

awesome... what about during the day?

anonymous science-fiction writer24495 said...

Interesting. This is one science that's really advanced in a really short amount of time. Anyone else think this will be one of the first trees on Mars? After the pine trees and other terraforming stuff of course...

Alli The Totally Wicked Novelist said...

If they could find a way to inject it into the root system, this might actually work, but otherwise gold nanoparticles would have to be injected every spring. Sounds expensive. It's a great idea and a fascinating discovery though, especially since as of light I've been complaining about all the streetlights. There's an unnecessary number out there.

Anonymous said...

wouldn't that be bad for the trees?

42 said...

Yes, that's amazing, and very efficient, but how long will it last?