Category: Plants & Technology
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Scientists Look To Plants For Self-Repairing Solar Cells
What our paper is good for is starting to think about device lifetime and borrowing concepts from nature. Can we make cells that have an infinite lifetime?
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Algae Cleans Waste Site, Producing Biofuel
If successful, the scientists believe the technology could be used to treat many forms of environmental pollution. The team has just received funding to take its work to Vietnam, where it will examine whether algae can be used to treat industrial effluent. A cheap, efficient way of cleaning up old mines would be eagerly sought by countries around the world.
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How Ben Franklin Used An Herb To Thwart Counterfeiters
Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia printing shop made plaster molds from pressed sage leaves to create metal stamps for marking foliage patterns on Colonial currency. The distinctive contours of leaf spines, stems and veins were meant to thwart counterfeiters, and Franklin’s workers managed to keep the casting technique a secret that has puzzled modern scholars, too.
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Plugging Into Plants: New Technology Harnesses Photosynthsis
Although the idea of using plants and photosynthesis to extract energy is not a new one—for decades middle schoolers have been engineering clocks made from potatoes, which run on a similar principle—Plant-e’s technology is the first to produce electricity from plants without damaging them.
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Plant-based gel can stop traumatic bleeding in seconds
Like Lego building blocks for the body. The building blocks in this case are plant-based polymers pulled from the cell walls of a plant that basically reassemble onto whatever you put them next to (skin, for example), which helps clot blood in seconds.
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Do Plants Have Rights?
So the question that emerges is this: How can we ethically justify, promote, and financially subsidize the use of plants in the context of plant biotechnology and bioengineering, when the premises of this scientific endeavor are rooted in the erroneous view of plants as insensitive objectified organisms?
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Greenhouse Revolution: A tomato plant that can tolerate continuous light
It could be a tomato game-changer: Scientists have discovered a gene that would allow commercial tomato plants to tolerate 24 hours of light a day. In theory, more light exposure means more energy production for the plant, so the discovery could lead to tomato plants that yield up to 26% more tomatoes compared with plants that are given 18 hours of light in a greenhouse setting
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Drones Made Of Fungus Dissolve When No Longer Needed
The drone’s chassis was made of mycelium, a fungal material that can be grown into specific shapes, from packaging to surfboard cores. That mycelium was given a covering of cellulose “leather” sheets grown by bacteria, before being coated in the same proteins paper wasps use to coat their nests, cloned from the insects saliva.
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Plant-Based Construction Materials: Building Our Way Out Of Climate Change
If we can convert plants into building materials, we are in a win-win situation. Plants use the energy of the sun to convert atmospheric CO2 and water into hydrocarbons – the material from which plants are made.
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Plant Science In Space!
Part of the impetus for plant biology experiments in space was the realization that plants could be important parts of bioregenerative life support on long missions, recycling water, air, and nutrients for the human crew. However, a large part of the impetus was that the Space Shuttle enabled fundamental plant science essentially in a microgravity environment. Experiments during the Space Shuttle era produced key science insights on biological adaptation to spaceflight and especially plant growth and tropisms.