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Toyota Develops New Flower Species To Reduce Pollution
teko_teko writes "Toyota has created two flower species that absorb nitrogen oxides and take heat out of the atmosphere. The flowers, derivatives of the cherry sage plant and the gardenia, were specially developed for the grounds of Toyota's Prius plant in Toyota City, Japan. The sage derivative's leaves have unique characteristics that absorb harmful gases, while the gardenia's leaves create water vapour in the air, reducing the surface temperature of the factory surrounds and, therefore, reducing the energy needed for cooling, in turn producing less carbon dioxide."
That's great but it may be a surprise to some people to learn that cherry sages do eventually die, and decompose and thus re-release that which they have absorbed.
Carbon offset, one of the greatest scams in history. Pay us to plant some trees, which we can later cut down and sell.
"while the gardenia's leaves create water vapour in the air, reducing the surface temperature of the factory surrounds and, therefore, reducing the energy needed for cooling"
Doesn't pretty much every plant with leaves do that? Hence the need for watering...
...And then you can dry it and brew tea!
thereby reducing the surrounding temperature, don't they? Gardenias do smell nice though.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Almost sounds like pets, doesn't it?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Lots of bad science reporting there, just what you would expect from a motor journalist talking about botany. New species??? All plants absorb gases, including any nitrogen compounds in the air. Any nitrous oxides would be absorbed within the leaf, since they are nutrients and plants have an ability to absorb nutrients through the leaves (foliar feeding). All plants give off water vapour. I suspect most trees would be better at cooling the factory surrounds than gardenia plants, since by their size and nature they are faster growers and thus can transpire more water, and (for most species) they have more leaf area per unit of ground area.
Let's cross breed with kudzu! We can always just pull it up. I mean, Kudzu is so easy to get rid of, right?
whatcouldpossiblygrowwrong
Why don't they stop making cars?
Kumbaya my Lord, kumbaya...
I'm amazed that I survived
An airbag saved my life
Too abstract?....
Ignoring naysayers for now, and assuming this plant is the benefit the article claims: What about me?
Does Toyota plan to release these plants for sale at my local garden store?
Can I get a nice slow-growing lawn that I don't have to mow?
Can I get some extra-cold flower gardens?
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Umbrella Corporation (from the Resident Evil series) cultivated some funky flowers in Africa which led to their biological weapon development... zombies, Majini, etc. were the result.
Whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Feed me, Seymour... :-/
This is all obviously for attention and is merely a token to the public of Toyota's commitment for being 'green'. The actual 'good' done by planting even an infinite number of flowers around their manufacturer facility is infinitely negligible even on a regional scale.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
I'm finalizing work on a new species of cow that eats unnecessary grass that has been dried. It then produces plenty of methane and CO2 to feed these plants.
Reduce pollination? What, on earth, does plant birth control have to do with toyota? Unless they're going for umbrella corporation status, that sort of thing would be way outside their usual line of business. Of course, if they ARE...
Oh wait. Pollution.
...but they all look alike and they're not very good at city driving.
Plants cannot metabolize nitrogen directly. You need some nitrogenated molecules to allow them to absorb the nitrogen. This job is typically done by bacterias in the soil. Why do you think you put nitrogen fertilizers to plants, if the atmosphere is > 70% nitrogen?
While I agree that it does seem like this will do little, from the article you posted, it sounds like nitrogen can normally only be absorbed by the roots of plants, and only by means of nitrifying bacteria. The article says the plants can absorb nitrogen oxides directly through the leaves. I'm no botanist, but I think that's the key to the article, not that they can metabolize nitrogen.
What are the long term plans for the foliage disposal?
Once those leaves will be stuffed with the bad gases, they will die. And then?
Back to the soil and the athmosphere?
Nice solution then!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
You insensitive clod!
Having said which, you are totally right. Lawns belong in places where the climate is suitable and they are a cheap, low-maintenance,environmentally friendly surface cover. But most places in the world are not Southern England.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Water vapor is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Talk about feel good marketing ploys!
That's what happens when you are too stressed at work to properly read. You develop faux dyslexia. So that headline read:
And then I run around claiming that everything I know I've learnt from /. headlines.... Scary.
(* = National Dyslexia Association, for those who've never heard the old joke.)
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Plants cannot metabolize nitrogen directly.
You are correct. However, the article talks about nitrogen oxides, not molecular nitrogen. The nitrogen in nitrogen oxides is already "fixed" and can be absorbed by many different kinds of plants.
Why do you think you put nitrogen fertilizers to plants, if the atmosphere is > 70% nitrogen?
As you probably know, we'd all be dead if the atmosphere were ~70% nitrogen oxides.
I have had visions of society using the tools that were given to us. We CAN find solutions, if we only try. We have to identify the problems accurately first, and then instead of excuses, seek the answer.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
School's been a while back, but if I remember correctly, water vapor is a by-product of photosynthesis?
You don't necessarily want to be making more of it in large quantities, although presumably as 7/10ths of the planet is covered by water, the amount generated by some flowers won't be terribly significant.
On the other hand, the forthcoming fuel cell cars should really include condensers so the water coming out the tailpipe is liquid rather than gaseous. One downside: the roads will ALWAYS be wet. We can presumably expect a certain increase in accident deaths from that cause, although it will be offset by the reduction in lung diseases.
I piss off bigots.
This is as bogus as the whole "clean" concept of the Toyota Pious. These cars are dirty as hell to make, dirty as hell to recycle, and only provide real benefit for city driving. VW and Audi have done much more important work with their "clean diesel" engines that get mileage similar to that of the hybrids without massive dirty batteries, and those cars get high mileage on long haul trips and long country roads like we have here in the US.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
It is a load of shameless and deceptive nonsense; and does make it better that it is wrapped up in florid language, if you will excuse the pun, hur, hur. "Create a new species"? Even highly educated plant breeders haven't been able to do that, but a car manufacturer manages to do it with a gesture and a lorry-load of hype?
For a plant species to work well as carbon-capturer, it ought to grow fast (thus producing large quantities of biomass) and it should break down slowly, so the CO2 isn't released quickly again. Gardenias and sages don't really fit the bill - grasses might, some trees might and green algae, perhaps. But I understand, of course - surrounding the offices with a few hectares of slimy ponds isn't as pretty.
The real mystery is - how on Earth did this make it as far as being mentioned here?
According to treehuger.com the flowers are genetically engineered. It's a danger unparallelled in human history, we're destroying the millenia old single lifeline there is, the genetical code.
And when the GMOs contaminate natural plants, one would expect the company making them be sued out of business but what actually has happened is the company goes suing the farmer for using their intellectual property! This model encourages careless handling of the GMO seeds and even intentional contamination. The human greed is boundless and shows no mercy.
Shame on Toyota, I for one certainly will not buy their products after this. I bet many people (especially in the EU) feel likewise.
Trees that absorb polutants and release water vapor. Oh my God! Tell everyone what an amazing discovery!
Oh yeah wait a minute we've known this for like the last 100 years.
The best way to lower your carbon footprint is to stop breathing, feel free to do so at any time.
You are right, but as a good HHGG follower, I don't use swear words on Slashdot.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
...with virtually no impact on environment!* * except for huge fields of Toyota Gardenia (TM), and who doesn't like gardenias?
While I agree that it does seem like this will do little, from the article you posted, it sounds like nitrogen can normally only be absorbed by the roots of plants, and only by means of nitrifying bacteria.
Certain plants form nodules on their roots which contain bacterial symbiotes which "fix" nitrogen. This arrangement being of mutual benefit to both the plant and the bacteria.
I really hope someone did some pretty heavy analysis on this. The atmosphere is a big and complicated place.
Seems to me like we wouldn't have evolved the way we did if the atmosphere was primarily Nitrogen Oxides, but something would be there!
Dubious claims that sound scientific, but not made in a scientific journal, not peer reviewed and making 1st grade biology errors in the title, and you still think there is some truth in that article?
'Species' is a fundamental term in biology. For instance evolution depends on the definition of a species. If they would have truly created a new species of plant (utilising a different nice and unable to interbreed) then that would be news. Making a cultivar and planting that on a factory grounds is just not that.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
However, the article talks about nitrogen oxides, not molecular nitrogen. The nitrogen in nitrogen oxides is already "fixed" and can be absorbed by many different kinds of plants.
This the question becomes "Are these plants significently better at adsorbing the oxide mix produced in vehicle exhausts compared with other plants?"
Mutated plants with wheels ... I swear I've seen this somewhere before, but I thought it came out of France.
It's a rather radical solution.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
You see, actually that's an open question. There are several other alternatives that might have lead to the creation of oil, the most promising being underground bacteria that live from geothermal and radioactive food sources (yes there are bacteria that "eat" radioactivity).
I doubt you're entirely correct about coal either. After all, coal is pretty much pure carbon, it does not have to be biological in origin.
The problem is, if you're right, oil would be found where the ground first went down at least several miles and then came back up again, over the course of at most a few 100 million years (and less than a billion years). However in reality oil (and coal) is found where the ground has been rising slowly since long before the advent of plants. So there are lots of large oilfields and coal mines that just couldn't possibly ever have been plants.
The only research that we have found that it is possible to create oil from plants. That does not mean that that has to be what happened. It is the accepted "explanation" for oil in popular scientific journals, but it is most likely not correct.
And btw, the largest storehouse of carbon is not the ground, but the ocean. In reality > 95% of the co2 increase in the athmosphere originated in the ocean, and not in some factory or car. The AGW theory is that the co2 release from factories triggered a tiny increase in temperature, resulting in much co2 release from the ocean, which resulted in tiny increase, ... The theory behind AGW is not that humans are themselves responsible for co2 rise, they only claim that's a tiny part of it, the theory is that 19th century factories tripped a feedback loop resulting in warming. That feedback loop was already feeding back on itself, even before those factories, but at a slower rate. Reducing human co2 output, even by 100%, will therefore not result in cooling, merely in slower warming. Until we get to a point where co2 increase will not further warm the earth and the feedback loop will reverse direction, resulting in a 16 degree drop in average temperature in less than 1000 years, resulting in permanent ice sheets reaching the outskirts of paris and New York. The point where the balance tips seems to be (given historical data) about 2-3 degrees warmer than today.
And it also means that if anything, we or some volcano or weather pattern, somehow succeed in creating a short term cooling, even a single degree, that will reverse the long term temperature gradient (even if we keep pumping co2 in the athmosphere, because we'll never beat the re-absorption of the oceans). That means removing a massive amount of energy from the athmosphere, but there have been eruptions and events that came close.
Or, of course, it could have been God. I doubt anyone outside of the madhouses ("mosques") of saudi arabia believes that, though. Of course, in that country, stating that it probably wasn't allah can get you your head chopped off. You see, if it wasn't allah, that would mean they have some 10-20 years to get a working economy going, one that can survive without oil. And ... progress in that regard has been ... less than stellar.
Toyota is clearly making an effort to appear eco-friendly, but examine their claims closely. I heard squirrels are unharmed when run over by a Prius. As a Prius owner, I tell you that is not true. They pop like furry little grapes.
Have they conducted tests on how this affects insects? When bees and the likes come to feed of the flower, and then have the harmful components accumulate in the higher foodchains? Like they teach you in biology?
Dubious claims that sound scientific, but not made in a scientific journal, not peer reviewed and making 1st grade biology errors in the title, and you still think there is some truth in that article?
And to make it even sillier, the article is illustrated by a face (female, of course) sniffing three flowers from the Compositae family. The Sage (genus Salvia in the family Lamiaceae) and gardenia (genus Gardenia, family Rubiaceae) have flowers that are radically different from composite flowers.
I did especially like the claim that the gardenia "creates water vapor". Ex nihilo? If they release water vapor, that's pretty much what all leafy plants do as part of their normal metabolism. Of course, some are more wasteful of water than others, so maybe this gardenia has been selected to really squander its water. But, strictly speaking, the water vapor doesn't cool anything. The cooling happens when the water is converted to vapor, in or at the surface of the leaf. Anything else is cooled by the mixing of the air at the cool leaf surface with other air; entrained water vapor has no real effect on this. It might actually have the opposite effect, if the air is sufficiently moist to produce condensation, which will release a "heat of condensation" into whatever surface it condenses on, but this is generally a minor effect compared to the cooling from the leaf surfaces.
I'd wonder if there is a better description anywhere of what (if anything) they've developed. The story sounds like a typical mangling of a scientific report by publicists who don't understand any of the words. The fact that they'd illustrate it with flowers from a different family supports that inference.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
All plants release water vapor, which is, by far, the number one greenhouse gas.
First of all, what do you think releases more heat through its metabolism. A meadow or an automobile factory?
As for the effect these bio-engineered flowers have...
Think sprinklers. That require no power source but the water they are fed and ground they are planted into. Plus, they look like pretty flowers.
Did that help?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
This sort of thing is generally attacked by the eco movements, so I wonder what their reply will be?
I thought it was bad form or just plain dangerous to mess with Mother Gaia's design? Isn't modified plants against some natural law or something? What if pollen from these flowers drift into someone else's garden? Where's the boatload of decent, thinking, people ready to stamp out these horrors of science?
#-#
Ad Astra Per Aspera
A rough road leads to the stars
Some company like Monsanto will come up with plants like these (available only from them, of course) and patent the whole idea just so they can make a buck off of saving the planet.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Stop buying Toyota cars. Toyota is into flowers now!
"How do you like GMO's now?"
The flower department... why?
Heh, makes me laugh, but good for Toyota all the same!
I guess plant genetics draws attention away from Toyota's auto-motivations. How about a plant that would grow from a car? Each plant type would absorb something from the car like the car's Iron, or Copper, or Aluminum? The metal could be "stored" as a nodule that then could be "harvested" for future requirements. Wrecking Yards would be handled like farms.
I'm kinda working on a similiar project, however, my product is a flower that when in bloom, produces particles of 'nectar' with about 82% concentrations of nitrogen dioxide NO2, when the glucose in the nectar dissolves from a (secret) catalyst reaction and breaks down into water we get Nitric Acid. Meaning it's pretty good at metabolizing!!
My next step is to include a process for producing cyanides and then make the reaction into a big schwwoooomba.
A flower as beautiful as it is lethal. HahahAHAHahAHaHAhahAahahhaaa
So they can claim to be "green" while still producing 4Runners and worse. Assholes.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
I think that depends on *which* nitrogen oxide. I think 70% NO is breathable, provided the rest isn't oxygen. (That would make it too rich.)
P.S.: It might be breathable, but you wouldn't be exactly conscious. NO is the safest of the anesthetics, and is sometimes called "laughing gas".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Not only that, but water vapor is a much stronger greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide. Is the overall net effect from substituting X tons of water vapor emissions for X+N tons of carbon dioxide emissions worse? Panicky science-challenged AGW morons want to know!!
Carbon offsets == Ecomasturbation. You can feel good about yourself without actually having accomplished anything productive.
Would we be dead? Or would we have never existed? Or perhaps our soul would be embodied in a different evolved specie adapted for 70% nitrogen oxide.
Um, Water vapor is the #1 greenhouse gas, far beyond CO2.. Kinda defeats the point right?
... I think 70% NO is breathable, ... NO is the safest of the anesthetics, and is sometimes called "laughing gas".
You meant N20, nitrous oxide. OTOH, as a previous replier has also pointed out, life almost certainly could have evolved to use either NO or N2O as the primary oxidizing agent if it, instead of oxygen, had been what was available (considering the wide range of what various weird bacteria manage to use).
Yes, but at least we'd all die laughing
Genetically modifying plants is not good for the enviorment at all. Research how they do it and how it affects the enviorment. A great documentary "The Future of Food" illustrates many of these points.