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Toyota Develops New Plant Species
oznigot writes "Yes, that's Toyota, the car company. In what appears to be a publicity stunt to promote their hybrid vehicle technology Toyota has developed a new species of plant. Of the Cherry Sage shrub family, the new plant absorbs nitrogen oxide and other substances from the air better than the original Cherry Sage." Update: 10/16 00:01 GMT by Z : Original link removed.
How long before we have giant hydroponic farms full of these plants just cleaning the air?
Maybe this will minimize the "smells like ass in here" comments i always get in my car...
Insinct is stronger than Upbringing - Irish Proverb
Toyota!
> the new plant absorbs nitrogen oxide and other substances from the air better than the original Cherry Sage.
But unfortunately releases them again when you smoke it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
start to develope plants as well. Can you recall a tree for safety problems?
Sometimes I doubt Toyota's commitment to CherrySage.
Not anymore! Kudos for playing God.
I want to see a giant venus fly trap that eats kittens instead
We should plant a bunch of these near a city to absorb the pollution and so that we can cut them all down to build new developments! Fun!
Of the Cherry Sage shrub family, the new plant absorbs nitrogen oxide and other substances from the air better than the original Cherry Sage.
Does this mean that the famed "intelligent designer" is really Toyota?
I welcome our new Cherry Sage developing Japanese overlords.
It should be noted that the car division of Toyota did not create this plant, but rather a company they own: "Toyota Roof Garden Co". Not sure why it is such great news that a gardening company made a plant..
Netcraft confirms it: Toyota taking over the world, one pot at a time.
"We need a way to promote our new hybrid."
"Recycling campaign?"
"Nah, we need something different..."
"How about a tree..."
"What? Plant a tree?"
"No... We make a new one!"
"But we make automobiles..."
"Exactly, no one will see it coming!"
"How many botanists do we have on staff again? Oh, that's right, NONE!"
"Relax, I'm sure a few guys on the line do it as a hobby."
ok, so this new GE plant absorbs more stuff from the air.... where does this go? What does the plant do with it? Does it release the same amount of stuff that it absorbed when it dies? Does it turn it into something else?
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
In the other news GM said it has developed a new species of "Chevy" Sage Shrub family. The new "Chevy" will be sold for $350 per "pot". People can smoke this "Pot" and absorb all the oxides like nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide that are good for the health.
....losing one's cherry in the back of a car
Outside of the fact that this is a publicity stunt, I think this is really cool. The notion of creating plants that better handle the crap in the air is pretty ingenius. I guess with all the focus on reducing fossil fuel consumption and making more efficient fossil fuel burners I never considered the role that "super plants" could play in offsetting pollution. Could these plants and others like them REALLY be be utilized in a way that would put a noticeable dent in reducing air contaminants, or is this just a gimmick?
With the rise of larger and larger vehicles, and the questions that have arisen regarding their impact, most of the attention has been focused squarely on the fuel economy issues. Now, I will be the first one to admit that the matter of gas consumption needs to be taken seriously and many vehicles out there are a simply irresponsible purchase with gas prices being what they are, even if the people buying them can afford to fill them. The rise in demand is increasing prices for everyone.
So, hybrids are being rushed onto the scene as fast as possible. Great, eh?
Not quite.
By addressing the fuel economy problem and thinking that it is the end of the concerns with the larger vechicles on the road, we are ignoring the most important of them all, which is the danger they pose on the road to other drivers.
Link
Yes, the site is biased, but their sources are another matter.
It's ironic to think that with the introduction of more hybrids, we will see more SUVs on the road, which will increase the death rate for drivers all across the U.S.
It's a Pequenino in its third life.
Can you recall a tree for safety problems?
No, but you can recall corn.
So they're trying to genetically engineer some plants that will better absorb the toxins that are emitted by their cars. How about eliminating the emission of toxins in the first place. Imagine if a company sold you some software that damages your computer, only to then sell you some more software to repair those damages. Oh, wait...
End transmission.
"the new species does so 1.3 times more effectively"
Why doesn't Toyota just spend the time and money cultivating the natural species, increasing its biomass by 30%? Maybe by planting it all around their car factories, to compensate for the vast pollution their machines spew into the sky every day. Without tinkering with yet another complex global ecosystem they don't understand?
--
make install -not war
It's nothing new to have subsidaries, get over it.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
You can't have a recall, but you could use a RoundUp.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
They'd accompish more simply improving mileage. The fact that an electrical engineer on his own with a few grand worth of batteries and adding a recharging feature improved gas mileage to 200mpg just proves that there is resistence to improving mileage. Not to sound star chamber but the only thing that makes sense is the car and gas companies are working together on this one. The hybrides all originally came out of Japan because american oil companies have less influence there. With the amount of driving I do a 200 mpg hybride would mean I could get by on filling up about 3X a year. Considering most of my driving is less than 5 or 10 miles a trip I might actually do much better. Would I pay an extra $5,000 for a 200mpg car, absolutely. In case of emergency, gas shortages, I could run a long time on a five gallon can of gas.
...evolutionarily speaking, then, the result and eventual solution will be a hardwired genetic predisposition for everybody to drive SUVs.
Whoops, didn't see THAT coming, huh, mister bicycle man?
Nice.... the main article now links to the goatse man. Some guy playing with his redirecting no doubt. Mind you, it does kinda look like some flesh eating virus/plant thing. Great for work.
I.O.U One Sig.
Am I the only one who followed the link and got redirected to goatse?
The link redirects to http://goatse.ca/
If you can't find a way, make one!
If there's anyone left on slashdot who hasn't seen goatse, they've just had their innocence shattered.
come and wave her wand, and solve all of our problems with her magic?
Do you not know that thousands of people are working on the very thing you suggest, including numerous people at Toyota?
Either someone is very a quick hacker, or this was a pre-planned exploit, but the article redirects to goatse. Now lets watch Slashdot's finest (the so-called editors) take a couple of hours to correct this.
WATCH OUT there is a goatse.ca redirect on that page
I, for one, welcome our new cherry sage overlords.
idiots
The page died before I could continue loading; my WiFi is bad in my room. But FF told me that the link to goatse.ca died...
Look at the source of the page.
" Japan Today - News - Toyota devises shrub to purify, cool airwindow.location="http://goatse.ca/""
Someone hacked the page to redirect to the Goatse.
Due to financial difficulties, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.
Of the Cherry Sage shrub family, the new plant absorbs nitrogen oxide and other substances from the air better than the original Cherry Sage.
Nitrogen oxide? Just say NO!
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Looks to be javascript in the article itself somewhere.
c ript) - Japan's Leading International News Network:
The title for the article has been somehow changed to be the following:
Japan Today - News - Toyota devises shrub to purify, cool air(script)window.location="http://goatse.ca/"(/s
Wonder if it was an inside job or if their server has been hacked?!?!?
Not that anyone really cares but that stunt ends my ever looking at /. again. Not only has this made the entire site no longer work friendly but I would not dare think of ever clicking a link around my children. So long and thanks for all the fish.
Awesome, some jackass got into their db and changed the title slightly:
3 99' -O - | grep title
$ wget 'http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&id=351
<title>Japan Today - News - Toyota devises shrub to purify, cool air<script>window.location="http://goatse.ca/" </script> - Japan's Leading International News Network</title>
Vans
Family cars
Classic cars
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Greenpeace Crolis?
(This ain't offtopic or a troll... old school Anime fans might know why I say that, lol!)
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Toyota devises shrub to purify, cool air
Friday, October 7, 2005 at 05:00 JST
NAGOYA -- Toyota Motor Corp said Thursday it has developed a new
species of the Cherry Sage shrub family that effectively absorbs
harmful substances in the air.
The new species, called Kirsch Pink, will be sold for 380 yen per pot
through Toyota Roof Garden Co, a Toyota Motor subsidiary, from March
next year. While Cherry Sage plants are known to absorb nitrogen
oxide, sulfur dioxide and other harmful substances in the air, the new
species does so 1.3 times more effectively, the automaker said.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Thanks for the goatse link.
Hey, most plant companies make plants -- but not ones that reduce pollution. As an organic gardener amongst other things, I like it that I can get pretty much what I want in certain areas -- and I only mildly complain that some of it is hybrid and won't breed true so I can save seeds. That's a lot of bother that's rarely worth it. But this is a new thing, and a good direction, assuming it's truly an improvement. As a sometimes "farmer" I never thought oxides of nitrogen raining down on my garden were a bad thing, since otherwise I'd have to pay for them as fertilizer in some form, whether compost or chemical. But I live in the sticks, too, where pollution isn't yet a problem. We are in fact already paying to reduce nitrogen oxides, as our auto engines are mandated to be low compression, which means lower thermodynamic efficiency (poorer gas milage) to reduce nitrogen oxides in the first place. Although I'm dreaming here, it would seem a good thing for the planet to solve this in some way that didn't mandate greater use of fossil fuel. Hope this is the first of many. After all, plants can make more plants without our help, they have a lot of gain in effort over machines that don't self replicate.
It really does "smells like ass in here" now that the article has been hacked to redirect to goatse.ca!
:-)
Seriously When posting this comment I got: "please type the word in this page spurted " - man how %$^%^'d up is that for a coincidence....
Today would be the day I actually try to RTFA.... *shudder*
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
(yes, I realise it wasn't necessarily the article submitter who did it, but whoever hacked the remote site deserves troll of the year :D)
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Fuck you slashdot. I really DID NOT want to see that fucking picture. Arse Holes.
Very good point - compact cars have become very compact, and the safest cars on the road are still the heavier ones.
However, grandparent is a good example of putting blame on the companies. At the end of the day, there is no substitute for just watching what the fuck you are doing when driving. Lets face it, the majority of road accidents are due to people not paying attention, or misjudging the conditions ("What you mean I won't stop in time doing 80mph in the rain?").
I swear we should be allowed to give mod points to sigs... "-1, Offtopic"
Toyota Motor Corp. said it has developed a new species of shrub that absorbs harmful substances in the air. The Kirsch Pink, related to the Cherry Sage shrub, will be sold for 380 yen each by Toyota Roof Garden Co., a Toyota Motor subsidiary, beginning next March. First-year sales are targeted at 10,000 plants. The Kirsch Pink is the same as the Cherry Sage, absorbing nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and other air pollutants, but the new shrub is 1.3 times more effective, the automaker said. The new plant, which bears pink flowers between May and November, also diminishes the urban heat-island effect 1.3 times more than the Cherry Sage, it said.
Source
Right now all over the world thousands of slashdot readers are still busy wondering if you can recall a link for safety reasons..... :-)
Damnit, my kid just saw that. *ALL CAPS*
NAGOYA; Toyota Motor Corp said Thursday it has developed a new species of the Cherry Sage shrub family that effectively absorbs harmful substances in the air. The new species, called Kirsch Pink, will be sold for 380 yen per pot through Toyota Roof Garden Co, a Toyota Motor subsidiary, from March next year. While Cherry Sage plants are known to absorb nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and other harmful substances in the air, the new species does so 1.3 times more effectively, the automaker said.
Is the offending code that did the redirect
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Getting the NOX out of the air is a good thing. Hopefully the plants can be used for some other purpose (shade? power production? General catalytic conversion?) but unfortunately the article is now the goatse guy.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Is this a new species or a new variety?
Different species cannot interbreed, but different varieties can.
If this is a new species, then this is much more than a publicity stunt. Toyota may have done what few others have, and in doing so, has shown that macroevolution does indeed occur, protestations from worshippers of His Noodly Appendage notwithstanding.
But how has this been achieved? A new species, not just a new variety?
Evolutionary biologists will be jumping with joy as actual speciation has not been observed very often in the wild. Doing it in the lab/greenhouse is a very big feat, if this is not just a journalist with intelligence on par with their html injection security?
One definition of 'species' is that it can not reproduce with another species. If it is still able to reproduce with the parent species, it is not a separate species but a variety. Seedgrowers create new varieties (with desirable traits) but never create new species.
As for the OP's [stupid] question: Never, it will prove to be much more economic just to produce cars that pollute less. If this really true it is nothing more than a token gesture. 'Buy one of these silly plants and you can drive a SUV to get your groceries with a clear conscience'.
It would be much more environmentally friendly if the car came with a folding bike in the boot and occasionally refused to start to force the Fat American Mom to do some physical exercise. (except that healthy american moms live longer, which is actually worse for the environment. In that vein, A SUV with a pinto-quality fueltank and a boot full of 'killing you softly' cigarettes would be much more beneficial for the environment
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
How exactly is this a new species? A genetically modified plant does not a new species make... The thousands of different little packets of gm corn/tobacco/arabidopsis seed with various genes that I have at work do not each represent a new species... It's just a new variety of the cherry sage.
Better still, if crash your car into one of their trees, can you sue Toyota? Sounds stupid, but with the lawsuits that have been won in the US....
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
And a slightly longer version, just in case a) you care and b) you've seen enough Goatse already.
Big red shiny asshole notwithstanding, was anyone else reminded of Creative Labs, with their patent on that dynamic shadowing algorithm they used to extort id Software into getting EAX tech in Doom 3, despite the fact that Creative Labs is not really a company that specializes in, nor has really historically contributed much to, computer graphics?
It just seems a bit of a waste of time and money for Toyota to do this, especially if it was merely a publicity stunt. I don't think marketers of any company understand that just because an idea sounds fun and catchy, doesn't mean it's necessarily pragmatic.
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
If there's anyone left on slashdot who hasn't seen goatse, they've just had their innocence shattered.
It's ok - if they are reading slashdot they lost their innocence long ago!!!!
Here's what the source code shows, with s transposed to brackets to allow posting:
c ript] - Japan's Leading International News Network[/title] [link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/includes/jt.css"] [SCRIPT src="/includes/scripts.js" type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript"][/script]
[title]Japan Today - News - Toyota devises shrub to purify, cool air[script]window.location="http://goatse.ca/"[/s
This is the second time a Slashdot story has linked to JapanToday and been redirected to Goatsecx. Either there are some interesting trolls out there or the Japan Today admins think they're clever.
Ah... sweet memories of my first Goatse refreshed. :)
:)
Thank you Slashdot.
Very impressive troll (whoever did it)
...goatse! Of course, the real question is, for the love of god, WHY???
Bloody hell. Here I thought I was going to see a picture of some "new species" of plant, and all I get is a picture of a plain old tulip. Nothing new to see here. Move along...
I would create a sig, if only something of value could be said with just 120 chars.
That's all well and good, but does it have a hemi?
RTFA people take note. This is an example of why we, the /. cognesenti, never ever RTFA.
Interesting. With the Goatse man in the link it suddenly seems like everyone actually tried to read the fine article.
A SHUBBERY!!!!!
One that looks nice and is not too expensive. Ideally, there'd be a second one as well, slightly higher than the first, creating a two-tier effect. With a path in the middle.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Here is a non-goatsed version of the article.
The main reason Toyota Roof Garden was founded was to mitigate the urban heat island effect, which is becoming a real problem in densely populated areas in Japan. By using green roofs the amount of vegetation in cities can be increased, which reduces the UHI effect.
They have simply taken an existing Toyota product and increased it's efficiency by 30%. It has nothing at all to do with hybrids.
I thought Toyota would work on a hybrid, it only makes sense.
What doesn't make sense is why they'd try to make a car run on Goatse guy's leavings.
Please Slashdot, don't get hacked/fooled again. Too many eyes are counting on you to keep us pure.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
If I had to recall 75,000 hybrids I'd make a fake plant to divert people's attention too.
...how Cherry Sage compares to other non-Cherry Sage plants at absorbing these things. I mean, so what if the new variety absorbs 1.3X better than the normal variety if the normal variety is 0.5X efficient at absorbing these things as other available plants.
Perhaps Toyota is gived undue credit, but they haven't created these plants all by themselves if I recall the latest issue of "Ny Teknik" correctly. They do, however, make the development very possible by adding their own techical expertise and economical funds to the idea.
:)
Not a bad idea either.
They already have the Hybrid engine... why not create something that may help cleaning out the allready polluted air then?
Plant these flowers along the city roads and they will have quite an amount of various toxins to play around with. Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
The article also doesn't mention how this shrub stacks up against, oh... trees in absorbing pollutants, although I suppose it would be less hazardous to grow shrubs than trees in rooftop gardens.
I'd love to know what your solution is. We cannot produce a viable (by which I mean big enough, safe enough, and powerful enough to attract significant customers) that does not produce NOx, at any price.
In many cases, it is easier to pollute and clean than not pollute.
Case in point. It is much cheaper to plant a tree to soak up the CO2 you breathe out than it is to waste society's investment in you by putting a bullet in your brain.
It absorbs it, but where does it go?
It is nice to have a genetically engineered plant but what about it's natural predators? Every form of life on Earth has one or more of them. You can't just go around growing this plant all around the world without first doing research on how it effects the environment. Many places around the world are suffering because some idiot introduced a plant or animal to the area. An example is Hawaii. Hawaii has to deal with early developments of mudslides because a foreign plant is over shadowing a plant that used to keep the soil in place. Just something to think about.
\
We all know that these cloned trees will not have souls, quite unlike real trees which do, umm... I guess those don't have souls, either. Well. If you eat these trees you will get cancer, only natural food is, umm, who'd want to eat this tree anyway? Damn, back to drawing boards. Boo cloning!
welcome our Protoculture-Growing, giant robot overlords.
I was surfing the net at a place that had no firewall and out manager didn't care.
So there were lke 7 of us surfing some site, (steakandcheese.com i think) and we're all going through the funny pics and videos. Then the guy next to goes "OH GOD!" and he closes his window and clears his cache. We all looked at him and were like "WTF?". He's like, "that was a the WORST thing I've ever seen". He doesn't remember the name of the picture, and he cleared his history also, so we can't look at hi list of visited links.
Then I hit it, and i'm like "OH MY GOD!" and i freak out and clear my temp files too. Over the next half hour, there were 5 other screams of "OH MY GOD!"
We all felt violated. Until someone pointed out that he's wearing a wedding ring. And he's not the one holding the camera. Then we all felt violated again.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
You were one of the most prolific users on this site, Anonymous Coward. It will really be a different place without you. Best of luck.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Where would you put a hemi on a plant? I know, we could shove it up its ass.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Toyota has root access.
No doubt about it.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
"A new tree built by my company grows somewhere at 60cm per year. The rear bark breaks up. The tree falls over and burns, killing everyone underneath. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of trees in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
"Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?"
"You wouldn't believe."
"Which tree company do you work for?"
"A major one."
This is just one of the reasons you should TURN OFF JAVASCRIPT. It is so very, very rarely used productively, in ways that HTML/CSS can't be used instead.
So do you think all web applications that use AJAX (script + DOM + XMLHttpRequest) techniques could be better implemented with pure HTML and CSS? Would you rather sit through loading a whole new page instead of rewriting the current page? Or do you still think AJAX apps are "very, very rare"?
Um... tee hee!
Think of all the confused environmentalists. You can't get rid of pollution with this thing around. It's a crime against nature maaaaaan!
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Sheesh! Step out your door for a second. The sky isn't falling down. Meanwhile trillions are viruses are busy snipping bits of DNA and transferring them from host to host across species like they've been doing for billions of years. Just like the doomsayers have been preaching the end of the world since 30AD and before. You ever heard the story about the boy who cried "Wolf!"?