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NASA Wants To Invade Mars With Glowing JellyPlants
namespan writes: "NASA and university researchers are looking into creating plants that emit a jellyfish-like glow as a signal of trouble, say, not enough water or oxygen or nutrients in the soil, say. The idea: send them to Mars and have them glow feedback at us about how they're faring on the red planet. They will, of course, have to compete with the radio-controlled plants mentined in an earlier slashdot story. And the Triffids." We've done several stories on glowing plants and animals in the past, but this seems to be a bit more useful and detailed.
Seriously, has there been any convention on what is appropriate/inappropriate to do to Mars? Once it's infected, begins an unstoppable course if interferring with another world's development (or maybe they tried something like Chiu's magnetic rings and this is what happened to to their once lush planet, what with over population and all...) is there a RL Prime Directive?
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
How in hell can sending glowing jellyfish to Mars have any possible payoff. Are these guys on crack ?
Well let's see. Such research could be used to produce crops on earth too. If they can engineer a plant that can live on mars it surely can live in the Sudan. Plants that glow when they are stressed, yep usefull in agriculture, let's you know when to water or whatever
Do the Americans think they OWN Mars ? Surely Mars is owned by the United Nations who entrust that nobody destroys it.
Nope, they don't thing they own mars, they think nobody owns mars. So who will stop them. According to UN treaty no govenrment body can own any other planet or moon
Finally is it just me who is struck by the sheer outrageous obscenity and waste - all this money spent on throwing things at Mars when there are many problems on Earth that are far more pressing: AIDS, War, Famine, lack of gun control in our inner cities, etc etc etc.
I wish this argument would go away. but here goes the counter
War: Nope, our tax dollars won't prevent that
Famine: Yep, spending money on genitically enginering these plants ccould sure benifit the worlds food supply
AIDS: Maybe more money could be spend on AIDS research, but it is very well funded probably to the point of diminisheing returns
Lack of gun control: Nope, NASA's money isn't going to make the legislative process any smarter
Its about time the USA stopped funding NASA and Astrology altogether.
That's Astronomy not Astrology
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
Well this is certainly an interesting idea, and the greenhouse plan sounds fine, but if you want to grow plants on the martian surface you've got a LOT of problems to overcome (nearly zero air pressure, dry-ice cold temperatures, hardly any water, no magnetosphere to protect against cosmic rays, high UV, etc) No fancy reporter system is going to fix that. Try growing plants in antartica first.
One issue I had: the reporter gene is presumably GFP. GFP doesn't actually glow, it flouresces. If coupled to luciferase it could glow, but then you wouldn't actually need GFP because the luciferase itself produces light. Of course you could always just light them yourself with external UV, or the natural UV on mars may be enough on its own (during the day, anyway). Also, there are many variants of GFP that glow in different colors besides green, so you could use those to offer a richer set of reporter genes.
cryptochrome
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?