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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
"...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.
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)
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.
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