Radio Controlled Plants

Winged Cat writes: "BusinessWeek has a story on plants that can transmit and react to radio signals, to act as remote sensors and actuators (say, to report degraded soil conditions and/or prepare for a cold snap). ObComments: if they could also do some computation, you could grow your own Beowulf cluster; and I wonder if you could enter this into Robot Wars?"

Comments

Re:But what to call it?

[Winged Cat]

Well, you're probably spot-on with -phyte, but it's not technically a computer (yet, despite my crack in the posting), so cyber- is inaccurate (even if marketing-friendly). Robo- is probably better, because these plants do stuff in response to signals received and report back sensor data. They are, literally, robotic plants, no?

Re:Isn't this a little overly optomistic?

[Throw Away Account]

Besides, I don't really want to eat genetically altered corn, made by engineers.

You know that corn you buy in the supermarket or as part of another foodstuff? If it isn't labeled "organic", it's probably a product of genetic engineering. If it is labeled "organic", it's probably a human-created hybrid with ancestors that were randomly mutated by deliberate by use of mutagenic compounds and artificial radiation. And if it happens to be in the tiny percentage of worldwide corn production that is neither of those, it's a human created hybrid whose ancestors were randomly mutated by radiation from the largest nuclear reactor in the solar system.