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Gold Nanoparticles Turn Trees Into Streetlights
An anonymous reader writes "Street lights are an important part of our urban infrastructure — they light our way home and make the roads safe at night. But what if we could create natural street lights that don't need electricity to power them? A group of scientists in Taiwan recently discovered that placing gold nanoparticles within the leaves of trees causes them to give off a luminous reddish glow. The idea of using trees to replace street lights is an ingenious one — not only would it save on electricity costs and cut CO2 emissions, but it could also greatly reduce light pollution in major cities."
Yeah because mining gold and refining it and the turning it into nano-particles takes zero energy....
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'd be chopping down trees everywhere!!!!
Nah, I know the particles are so small it would make the effort a waste of time. That aside, on a serious note, what happens to the "streetlights" when the Fall comes each year?
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
The nice thing about street lights, though, is that they don't fall off every autumn.
When I was a kid, sprinkling heavy metals around was considered a bad thing.
My, how times change.
-Peter
I can see at least one problem with this idea...
Necron69
> but it could also greatly reduce light pollution in major cities.
By replacing street lights with a different kind of street light? One without an apparent "off" switch?
It would seem to make more sense to just reduce the number of lights, or make them smart enough to be on-demand.
Log in or piss off.
"...not only would it save on electricity costs and cut CO2 emissions, but it could also greatly reduce light pollution in major cities."
What a stupid thing to say. If they provide enough light to replace street lights, then they contribute just as much to light pollution as the street lights do.
Why not go all the way and genetically modify infants to have cat like night vision? Think of how much energy we would save!!!
Mushrooms are fungi and trees are plants... you may as well try and cross a dog with a sunflower.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology)
aren't there some kinds of mushrooms and other flora that glow in the dark?
Yeah, but they're not quite as ubiquitous along paths you'd like to light up as -trees- are. They also don't seem to be bright enough.
Why not just splice that plant with a tree
There's the issue of releasing genetically engineered organisms into the environment. If they were spending significant amounts of energy glowing at night, they might not grow as well as normal trees, if you spliced something in to make them artificially competitive you'd worry about that leaking out into other plants.
First of all, they're shining high wavelength ultraviolet light at the chlorophyll in the leaves (useless in New England this time of year). This is not an advance in passive lighting but basically a molecular version of putting florescent paint on plants. It is a conversion of projected light. Secondly, the article doesn't state how much UV light is required so there's no way to know whether this is even a reasonable replacement in terms of energy savings (to say nothing of how hard it is to set up gold-leaf trees instead of street lights). That this is even considered a replacement for real streetlights here on Slashdot is a pure flight of fantasy. You might as well talk about how Unicorns will replace chicken as a primary protein source for Americans.
They've crossed corn with jelly fish. I don't see how this would be any different, fundamentally.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Nothing to see here, move on.
Furthermore, if this isn't immediately obvious to anyone, the photos in TFA are not of the fluorescence. Some of them are near-infrared photos of trees, and the others look like a tree illuminated at night by conventional lighting.
Definitely nothing to see here.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Guess what, those of us out in the rural areas do fine without any street lights. Without so much light pollution your eyes get better and you see in the dim light. We get up early, do our chores in the rising light and come in with the night fall. The problem isn't the dark, the problem is urbanism. Cure the cities.
Yeah, but they'll have the last laugh when the Ent army rends you limb from limb.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
How does the tree feel about all this?
Seriously, is this healthy for the tree? More to the point, can you get the tree to grow with this feature as a natural part of it's genetic makeup?
Sorry to sound cynical but this sounds like another one of those "news" stories that exist solely to get attention, not because it's about anything really practical.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The electric company has no problem dealing with low total loads. The only problem is when the load is unpredictable or changes quickly. The biggest generators take a while to spin up/down. Night time tends to be a fairly predictable change though so city lights aren't really burning "free" electricity.
No, That would be fungus. We Americans are mushrooms.
Our corporate media keeps us in the dark and feeds us pure bullshit.
Congratulations: you combined both a straw man and a false dilemma in one fallacious statement.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Infinity isn't a number.
Right
If anything, the concept represents a "really really big positive number" in this context, in which case, yes, if you add something greater than 0 to that really really big number, then you will have an even bigger number.
If I remember, and understood, my college math properly:
In mathematics, k+inf. is inf. but you wouldn't represent it that way. It would probably be a limit. So the limit of a+k as a approaches infinity is infinity. Are they the same?
You could consider the limit of (a+k)/a as a approaches infinity, this limit is 1 so it would appear to be the same.
If you consider the limit of (a+k)-a as a approaches infinity then the limit is k so it would appear that they are different.
So I don't think you can say whether they are the same or not but, within some contexts, you could consider them to be the same or different based on that context.
IANAM