Trees Infused With Glowing Nanoparticles Could Replace Streetlights

This was my idea. x) I suggested they do what they did with that tobacco plant when someone input firefly genes into it and it provided light.

wouldn't the gold nanoparticles have to be applied every spring unless trees can now grow gold

so in the fall/winter my lawn is going to light up?

surely gold couldn't be more expensive and limited than phosphorous powder... especially if the world's cities start coating all their trees in it.

So let me get this straight..... money does grow on trees???? I don't get it, all those years my parents use to tell me it didn't. I should slap them.

REminded me of Avatar...

That's sorta stupid. Anyone caught plucking the leaves from the trees would then be arrested, and when they fall in the autumn, it'd be a free-for all. How about varieties of trees instead are genetically engineered to be bioliuminescent? You get enough of these things glowing together, and you'd have a pretty amazing little project lighting your city streets. And, in the long run it'd be less of a waste of precious metals and less costly.
Geez, Taiwan.

Where does the energy come from? If they're giving off light, it must be coming from somewhere.

If they actually give off enough light to see clearly by on the streets, that's a lot of energy, and it seems like it would be drawn from the tree's energy reserves, which could kill it.

Or if the gold nanoparticles themselves glow, wouldn't a cheaper solution be to just paint the streets and buildings with glow-in-the-dark paint?

Nonetheless, a fun idea - imagine what our Christmas trees would look like . . .

This sounds too good to be true let alone ever going to happen. Seriously doubt it.

IRL AVATAR

re: falling leaves, most trees in Taiwan don't shed their leaves during the fall/winter. I guess it'd work all right here, but not in countries that actually have four distinct seasons.

I wonder if they could use evergreens so the leaves wouldn't fall every year.

You need to read the article SteelyJoe22.

Greg_NJ . . . thank you for the constructive feedback. Could you please clarify where you think I did not read the article?

It would be better to put the gold or other cheaper reflective material in the roads themselves, and sidewalks. leaves are seasonal.

Anyone know if this is true: If you took all of the gold on Earth it would fit into a standard size football stadium.

@SteelyJoe22, when you asked where the energy is coming from to give off the glow.

"The gold nanoparticles, shaped like sea urchins, put into the leaves of Bacopa caroliniana plants cause chlorophyll to produce the reddish luminescence.

In an added bonus, the luminescence will cause the leaves’ chloroplasts to photosynthesize, which will result in more carbon being captured from the air while the streets are lit. The next steps are to improve the efficiency of the bioluminescence and apply the technology to other biomolecules."

I'm assuming that the natural chemical reactions in the tree itself with the addition of the gold particles creates a chemical reaction that produces bio-luminescence much like deep sea creatures that produce light from their own bodies in an area where there is none.

A tree is a living organism and must be capable of similar processes with the help of the gold...

If the leaves photosynthesized 24/7 while never getting any rest, they would die.

Interesting concept, barely.

I'm with Steelyjoe22, if its making light by reacting with the chlorophyll, then the plant must be loosing energy and a lot of it. Cant be good for the plant.

Thank you Vega_Obscura - you're right; I had missed that.

To tack on to what kickbush is saying, I think we have a better change of bioengineering plants to give off light than to force it via this spray.

actually doing this could take a LOOOOOOOOONG time.

In the linked article, they stated that the nanoparticles produce fluorescence under ultraviolet light. If you have to set up UV lights under every tree, there will be no electricity savings compared to using regular lights. The particles will glow for a little while after the sun sets, but then artificial UV sources must be brought in, or the street will go dark.

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Reminds me of a song ... ' goes ...

... Pic-ture your-self, on a boat, on a river, with ...

Wait. So gold+chlorophyll=red bioluminescence? does it only glow when under UV light? Or does the UV light just trigger it, then it becomes self-sustaining?

So many questions. I really wish PopSci was a little more in-depth with their articles. If they're worried about scaring off some of their less-informed readers, perhaps they could implement, on the site only (obviously), a "More Detail" feature that when clicked adds technical details to each appropriate article?

-IMP ;) :)

Not a good idea. What do you do in the winter time when there are no leaves on the trees?

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My next kid is gonna be "in vitro" ...

... He's gonna be a boy ... blonde ... blue eyes and oh, yeah, ... He's gonna glow in the dark ! ...

... Poor kid is gonna get creamed, in Laser Tag, tho.

Although the idea of glowing trees sounds cool, the idea of having to implant gold nano particles into the leaves sounds like an incredible waste of time and money. I would think trying to engineer a tree that is bio-luminescent would be cheaper and easier.

hmmm..... seems like a good idea, but who on earth would want to sit there and inject nanoparticles into each and every leaf on a tree?? We need to come up with a geneticly engineered bioluminescent breed of tree. If we did that, we could plant these things left and right around trafic and whatnot, and i'd plant'um all over my yard. It would be good for the envirenment, save energy, and... well it would just be plain AWESOME! I hope that someone with the knoledge and equipment to do this decides to.

hmm will there be heavy metal poisoning effects if those trees were ingested? will it accumulate in food chain through time?

The gold nanoparticles wouldn't be as expensive as they seem because they are nanoparticle. Nano means 1/1000000000. So these are really small particles. I wish popsci gave more information.

I can imagine that would have some serious environmental ramifications. The birds and insects might steer clear from it, like they do to non-native plants, not to mention how it might affect the trees themselves (it's a foreign invasive object--just like implants or any other invaders in us make our bodies try to eject them), and it would appear that you could only put them in evergreens, lest it be a waste of time when the leaves fall.

The linked article also says that the nanoparticles stimulate the red glow from the trees under ultraviolet light. First: how is setting up Black Lights for this more Sustainable than regular street lamps? How is a red glow going to be safer than focused beam lighting on streets at night? Finally, are the photos you're seeing actually from the experiment, or is it just a pretty photo from sometime during the day...that doesn't look like a red glow! And instead of that golden glow, it would be red in the cities...sounds like Nightmare on Elm Street.

www.skamid.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/a-nightmare-on-elm-street.jpg

According to gardeners who have done it, black lights result in plants that are leggy and have no blooms. Having no blooms = bad for trees.

"UV light, particularly UVB, can cause DNA mutations called thymine dimers. This is reversible damage to DNA that is usually automatically corrected in the presence of white light. Growing plants under black lights without white light there may be harmful to the plants."

Read more: The Effect of Black Light on Plants www.ehow.com/about_6540574_effect-black-light-plants.html#ixzz15CU7lztu

Plants use different light wavelengths to figure out when to produce different hormones so shading plants with certain colors can affect the way they grow.

You have to ask: what are the effects of having a plant reach for an artificial light during the night and also exposed to natural light during the day?

From the fact that more than 97 percent of all UV light is filtered out naturally in the upper atmosphere before it reaches Earth, and almost all of the UV light that reaches Earth is UVA, we can know that having trees under artificial UV light would damage the DNA without providing the energy from the sun that it seeks.

"All types of UV radiation are known to damage various plant processes."

www.plantcell.org/cgi/reprint/4/11/1353.pdf

If you love trees, I don't think you'd ask for artificial UV lit trees at night. And again: it would be a red glow, as the article states, and not a golden one as the photo misleads one to believe it will be.

There is evidence of toxic effects of nanoparticles in plants.
Nanoparticles can have damaging effects on plant life by interfering with plant growth.

ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/newsalert/pdf/12na1.pdf

these trees are achieving over-unity, this can't be! ::confiscates trees::

I have a one word wrench (or sabot) to throw at this idea:

FALL

This is not going to work. Trees and other plants that use the natural sunlight need downtime to "sleep" in essence. Plants rely on a carotenoid to protect themselves from overexposure to light.

Plants protect themselves from excess light, which can lead to oxidative damage to chlorophyll and other key photosynthetic pigments

Zeaxanthin, a carotenoid known to be produced by plants in response to bright sunlight, is responsible for the protective effect.

Exposing spinach leaves to intense light triggers the formation of zeaxanthin cation radicals. These cation radicals form when zeaxanthin binds to potentially dangerous photoexcited chlorophyll molecules. The zeaxanthin gives up an electron to the excited chlorophyll, yielding a chlorophyll anion radical and a zeaxanthin cation radical. These products subsequently undergo charge recombination, allowing the excited-state energy of chlorophyll to be safely dissipated as heat.

This process is known as de-excitation.

There are a number of people throwing up objections to how this couldn't possibly work.

However, there's a big difference between saying:

- Bioluminesence could be engineered into trees, AND
- These engineered trees could reduce energy usage in public lighting, AND
- These engineered trees could replace electric public lighting

The first is, well, demonstrably just been demonstrated, and therefore true :-)

The third is almost certainly false - it's hard to see how, at current levels of biotech, we're going to get free light for ever out of bioluminescence.

However, the second is possible. There are three main objections being raised:

- Trees lose their leaves.
--- Use evergreen trees.

- The gold will be stolen.
--- By vandals, yes... But not by people who actually understand how little gold is involved in a nanoparticle, or people who have stolen once and failed to sell their leaf. But in any case, street lights are vandalised now.

- The bioluminescence can't generate enough light, because it requires a source of UV.
--- Here's the subtle part. In most parts of the world, street lights come on when a certain light level threshold is reached, and turn off at a set time of night. (Street lights that are on all through the night aren't actually THAT common outside of North America - which is, statistically, where most street lights AREN'T).
--- Suppose, therefore that the average streetlight is on for 6 hours a day (less in summer, more in winter). If a bioluminescent tree could provide lighting for, say, 2 hours a day based on its ability to store energy, this would reduce the need for electric lighting to 4 hours per day... reducing energy by 1/3

The question is, as ever, one of economics. Once you can buy these trees for a few pounds / dollars / yuan each, then firstly businesses and then public sector organisations are going to start using them because the payback will be "enough". It won't replace electric light, though...

This is the type of "science" and "science reporting" that makes the general public laugh at scientists. What is everyone smoking? It was like pop wanna-be-scientists claiming 30-40 years ago that we would have flying cars now and would commute to work from moon.

The effect is an interesting sidenote, but has *NO* feasible application whatsoever as stated. It's so overall ridiculous that I have a hard time to pick a starting point. Even if there were a practical way to get gold into the leaves, and even if we ignore the environmental ramifications, does anyone seriously entertain the thought of city workers fertilizing the city streets with gold? OK, forget the ridiculousness of that proposition, but luminescing UV light (assuming we replaced all our streetlight infrastructure with UV bulbs, and that it inself did not cost us a penny) off of leaves would have the efficiency of, what, 0.001% on the best of days under the best of circumstance (that is, if we uprooted all decidious trees, again, to no detrimental effect to the environment, and replaced them by evergreens, which takes us to yet another level of ridiculousness).

Please, PopSci, don't damage the reputataion of science further by feeding us such sensationalized, hyped up, pie in the sky stories.

JasonQWE: No, seriously, read the RSC article. Folks, if you haven't figured out that you need to read the source article before anything on PopSci makes scientific sense, then I have no hope nor sympathy for you.

The particles convert UV to visible light - that's all they do. Plants *naturally glow in UV* because of what the clorophyll is doing on its down time. The particles make that light visible.

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I wonder what the manufacturing process is, yeah? I really wonder whether this is financially doable. The nanoparticles would be worth well more than their weight in gold, so to speak. = )

First of all, high wavelength means low energy. The sun produce plenty of UVA which have the highest wavelength of them all. No artificial source is mentioned in the actual implementation, because one may not be needed.

Secondly, the quantity of nano particle required may be really small, since nano-urchins are said to intensify light 3000-fold. So unless they are trying to blind people, they will be using it sparingly. I am afraid that criminals will have to stick to robbing jewelry stores.

Finally, before pointing out other people's unethical treatment of plants, let us remind ourselves that we eat at wooden tables, sit in wooden chairs, walk on wooden floors and live in wooden houses.

The short-coming of this new technology is, as stated in the original story, that the trees do not shine bright enough. They think the problem can be fixed, weather you believe them or not is entirely up to you.

Lovely. Yet another lame-brained way of introducing light pollution into the environment. Glowing trees will throw most light they produce up into sky rather than on the ground where it's not really needed anyway. Goodbye, urban astronomy.

I live in a city where there aren't many streetlights and everyone gets along just fine. No gets run down, and the streets are chock-full of people walking or on bicycles. Studies and interviews show that criminals use streetlights to size-up potential victims, (Yikes! That's Chuck Norris!), and whether that's the reason or not, we don't have much crime here, even with all the transients and tourists.

But if it's really, really dark and you need to see, I have a better idea: It's called a flashlight. Solar-charged or hand-cranked, they work pretty well, and they don't cause the city to glow like Dresden after the bombing.

Hey, take it up a notch. Implant 'em into humans, and have the battery companies be upset at you! LOL!

Hey check out the Asian trading operation that highjacked this webpost! Probably trading gold nano particles which will then cause a gold nano particle bubble as people rush to inject their trees and beat the high cost of street lighting. Then that bubble bursts and the collateral financial impact is to reduce the cost/demand for gold, thus strengthening the dollar, which makes regular street lighting in the US cheap again.

People: Please chill out. Take this for what it is. This is a new discovery with unknown potential. Let's celebrate the ingenuity of our fellow humans and hope this leads to cheaper energy that is not as detrimental to the environment as our current solutions.

it could actually work. the statement about the chemical reactions are accurate. only one problem. isnt the worlds gold owned by about 12 men?