Getting emailed by spinach

[hitmouse]

I first saw this headline floating around as a screenshot and thought it must be some mad bit of spam clickbait, but apparently it's real: Scientists have taught spinach to send emails | Living

It may sound like something out of a futuristic science fiction film, but scientists have managed to engineer spinach plants which are capable of sending emails.

Through nanotechnology, engineers at MIT in the US have transformed spinach into sensors capable of detecting explosive materials. These plants are then able to wirelessly relay this information back to the scientists.

When the spinach roots detect the presence of nitroaromatics in groundwater, a compound often found in explosives like landmines, the carbon nanotubes within the plant leaves emit a signal. This signal is then read by an infrared camera, sending an email alert to the scientists.

This experiment is part of a wider field of research which involves engineering electronic components and systems into plants. The technology is known as “plant nanobionics”, and is effectively the process of giving plants new abilities.

“Plants are very good analytical chemists,” explains Professor Michael Strano who led the research. “They have an extensive root network in the soil, are constantly sampling groundwater, and have a way to self-power the transport of that water up into the leaves.”

“This is a novel demonstration of how we have overcome the plant/human communication barrier,” he adds.

 

[Pickman's model]

I first saw this headline floating around as a screenshot and thought it must be some mad bit of spam clickbait, but apparently it's real: Scientists have taught spinach to send emails | Living

it does seem one way, it's not like the boffins have let the spinach know how to avoid being spammed by fraudsters so keep an eye out for the follow-up story about how many spinach plants have handed over their banking details as they are naive in their use of the internet.

 

[DotCommunist]

So the plants are getting the nanotech upgrades before me, this is not how I imagined the uplift was going to be. Long live the New Veg

 

[tim]

As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

 

[prunus]

I for one etc.

 

[farmerbarleymow]

“This is a novel demonstration of how we have overcome the plant/human communication barrier,” he adds.

Have they done the important things of asking spinach plants what their favourite biscuits are, and whether it's beans or cheese first? And what they think of Popeye.

Impressive stuff though - this is a nice demonstration of what science can achieve.

 

[farmerbarleymow]

I for one etc.

I wilt in front of our new spinach overlords.

 

[WouldBe]

That would confuse e-mail filters if tinned meat gets this technology.

 

[farmerbarleymow]

That would confuse e-mail filters if tinned meat gets this technology.

They'd use their new found abilities to put humans in tins, to get revenge for being imprisoned themselves.

 

[danny la rouge]

I for one etc.

I’d change your name ASAP, though.

 

[strung out]

Based on the evidence from my last job, senior management have still not yet evolved past the point at which their emails can be told apart from the musings of a soggy bag of week-old spinach. Scientists have claimed that this could test the limits of human science in searching for a solution.

 

[WouldBe]

I first saw this headline floating around as a screenshot and thought it must be some mad bit of spam clickbait, but apparently it's real: Scientists have taught spinach to send emails | Living

The roots won't go that far so if the plants can detect landmines you'd be lucky to not set them off while planting the spinach plants.

 

[Maggot]

The thing about spinach emails is they initially appear to take up lots of space, but once you start opening them, they're actually pretty small.

 

[Yossarian]

The spinach email stuff was an early experiment from a few years back that went viral for some reason earlier this month - since then, they've moved on to projects including plants that can warn farmers about problems with their crops and light-emitting plants that could replace electric lighting.

“We started asking the question, can we make living plants to do some of the functions that humans do by stamping things out of plastic and circuit boards—things that go into landfills?” says Michael Strano, a chemical engineering professor at MIT.

The tech “can tap into signals that we’ve never had access to before,” he says. “We’ve never been able to see the internal communication of a plant. We’re making sensors for different plant hormones. There’s this very delicate language that’s inside the plant that we’re just learning about.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/90600720/scientists-have-turned-spinach-into-biological-sensors-that-email-environmental-alerts