Glowing Plants and Glow-in-the-dark Trees

This is such a cool subject. I've had plenty of disagreements with certain aspects of genetic engineering over the years, but this one sounds innovative in a good way. One of their campaign slogans from the research group is "use trees to light our streets instead of electric street lamps." However, this isn't exactly a new idea. During the '80s, a group of scientists used firefly genes with tobacco plants to genetically engineer glow-in-the-dark plants.

Of course, trees take a long time to grow, which makes the idea of replacing street lights with glowing trees a bit futuristic, to say the least. They'll need lots of funds to get the ball rolling, too. Their "Glowing Plant Project" video was their initial fundraiser, found here: www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plants-natural-lighting-with-no-electricit

It appears that they have raised more than enough money to get this thing started, going by the figures found on their video page. Even if the trees weren't very successful, the smaller plants could still replace nightlights, I suppose. Well, instead of reading about what I think of this nifty project, if interested, read more about it, here: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/creating-a-new-kind-of-night-light-glow-in-the-dark-trees-9600277/

Image Credit: Already provided within the post.

Update: I was going over traffic stats today for this blog and I was surprised by how this post hasn't received many hits when compared to a lot of the others on here.  Maybe the majority of people are not into the whole GMO thing, but these trees & plants are genetically modified for something else besides consumption, so I'm not sure what harm that would do. Other than the fact that I don't like night lights and prefer to keep my room really dark when trying to sleep, I definitely don't see anything ethically wrong with glowing foliage, to say the least.  I mean, we got people in underground labs making all kinds of freaky hybrids with animals that would definitely cause some questions if it was ethical or not. If you don't believe me, you should check out the bottom, updated section of this post, here:  Satyrs & Centaurs - Mythical Hybrids 

Perhaps, though, it was simply because it was such a short post and it doesn't rank very well in the search engines.  Either way, some subjects I don't elaborate on as much because I feel that the resource links within the post would be of more value. ---End of Update

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