We saw some of these ideas in one of our posts on the French tech scene. More after the jump.
From TimeOut, June 16:
Scientists across the Channel think living organisms may hold the future of street lighting
In the picturesque French town of Rambouillet, south west of Paris, a series of cylindrical tubes illuminate a path with soft turquoise light. It’s pretty, but maybe won’t strike you as a bold experiment in the future of street lighting. But it is. Because the path is alight thanks not to electricity, but to bacteria.
The phenomenon is known as bioluminescence – light produced and emitted by living organisms. Fireflies, fungi and deep-sea creatures use it to find mates and confuse predators, but now one company has found a way of harnessing it to illuminate our cities.
French start-up Glowee, which is behind the project in Rambouillet, collects a bacteria called Aliivibrio fischeri and stores it in tubes filled with saltwater. Recharging them simply requires occasionally feeding the bacteria a mixture of basic nutrients and oxygen. ‘Instead of replacing the bulbs in street lamps, we created a whole new approach,’ says Sandra Rey, who founded Glowee in 2014. ‘With this new approach, we found the solution we have today.’....
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Here's Glowee's home page.
And a repost from August 2016:
How Scientists Plan To Grow Cities Out Of Living Organisms
Imagine a future where there is no need to cut down a tree and reshape that raw material into a chair or table. Instead, we could grow our furniture by custom-engineering moss or mushrooms. Perhaps glowing bacteria will light our cities, and we’ll be able to bring back extinct species, or wipe out Lyme disease — or maybe even terraform Mars. Synthetic biology could help us accomplish all that.
The promise of synthetic biology: Paris-based startup Glowee wants to tweak genes of common bacteria so that they are bioluminescent, thereby creating a potential alternative light source for future cities. (Image: Glowee)
That’s the message of the latest video in a new mini-documentary Web series called Explorations, focusing on potentially transformative areas of scientific research: Genomics, artificial intelligence, neurobiology, transportation, space exploration and synthetic biology. It’s a passion project of entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, founder of OS Fund and the payments processing company Braintree.
There’s a good selection of featured voices in the video. You’ve got pioneers like Harvard’s George Church and Drew Endy of Stanford University mixed in with visionaries like Rehma Shetty of Ginkgo Bioworks (which designs custom microbes, like yeast that smells like grapes, and dreams of building furniture from genetically tailored fungi); the folks at Paris-based startup Glowee (who think bioluminescence is the future of lighting); and artist/designer Daisy Ginsberg, who weaves synthetic biology into her creative projects to reimagine systems design.
“The most stunning and consequential development of our time is this: We have built tools of creation that increasingly have the power to literally code any kind of world we imagine,” Johnson wrote earlier this year at the Daily Dot about his conception of the series. “Synthetic biology allows us to program organisms to grow objects. Genomics is starting to allow us to program our bodies. AI allows us to build new forms of intelligence.” He hopes the series will inspire young people in particular to build that visionary future world.
Not everyone is as big a fan as Johnson of synthetic biology and these other cutting-edge fields. Progress brings both promise and potential peril, after all. In 2012, more than 100 environmental groups issued a manifesto calling for a global ban on the use of synthetic organisms commercially until better regulations and safety measures are in place. And a new Pew Research Center poll released last week found that most Americans remain fearful of so-called “designer babies“, implanted brain chips and other biological enhancements....MORE
Somewhat related:
And Now a Brief Intermission: Dolphins Swimming in Bioluminescence
In May 6ths And Now a Brief Intermission: "Bioluminescent waves in San Diego, Red Tide Blue Waves" I mentioned:
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Photo courtesy of Paul Wilson at http://www.oceanfrontphotos.com
Well, he's come back with a different video, of dolphins off Newport
Beach California (nice hood) which causes me to wonder what the
dolphins, who in their own way are supposed to be very intelligent, what
they are thinking when they see each other illuminated.
Duuuude! (surfer dolphin lingo)
Via the YouTube channel of Patrickc_la:
