Pollution Eating Trees

It has been a grey, rainy day over here, and I needed a little sci-tech to brighten my day up. So, in a bow to people working in the other cool technology, I figured this would be an interesting subject. A group of scientists have breed hybrid poplar trees that essentially suck heavy metals and other such goodies out of the earth, using phytoremediation. The poplar stores the pollutants in the cellular strucute, metabolizes it to something less toxic, and releases it into the air. The gene to handle all of this was originally taken from a strain of bacteria. Mmm...gene splicing.