Researchers Create Plant-Circuit Hybrid (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: Researchers have crafted flexible electronic circuits inside a rose. Eventually such circuitry may help farmers eavesdrop on their crops and even control when they ripen. The advance may even allow people to harness energy from trees and shrubs not by cutting them down and using them for fuel, but by plugging directly into their photosynthesis machinery. The researchers used "an organic electronic building block called PEDOT-S:H. Each of these building blocks consists of a short, repeating chain of a conductive organic molecule with short arms coming off each link of the chain. Each of the arms sports a sulfur-containing group linked to a hydrogen atom. Berggren's group found that when they placed them in the water, the rose stems readily pulled the short polymer chains up the xylem channels (abstract). ... The upshot was that the myriad short polymer chains quickly linked themselves together into continuous strings as long as 10 centimeters. The researchers then added electronic probes to opposite ends of these strings, and found that they were, in fact, wires, conducting electricity all down the line."

Comments

Sci-Fi Reality

[xdor]

Thought of this as a science-fiction premise about 8 years ago. A world where one would literally grow a cell-phone -- completely biodegradable.

At this rate we'll have silly elf-leaves growing around our ears that allow us to communicate with each other -- having all the appearance of telepathy but all the boring reality of CDMA