Scientists Have Taught Spinach To Send Emails (euronews.com) 83
An anonymous reader shares a report: 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.
Spinach does not worry me - yoghurt does... (Score:2)
The Supox (Score:2)
The Captain: "C'mon, plants can't be intelligent! Our top scientists and science fiction writers have proved it!"
Ala-la'la: "Yes. This has been confirmed by our people as well. Strange, is it not? Many of our people regard this inconsistency as proof of our divine origin."
— Toys for Bob. Star Control 2. Accolade. PC. November 1992.
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Wasn't this group also working on a way to extract sunlight from cucumbers?
This Explains A Lot (Score:3)
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Those penis enlargement emails weren't sent by spinach... they were sent by your ex.
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Those penis enlargement emails weren't sent by spinach... they were sent by your ex.
...and boy does my ex need them!
But... too little, too late.
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Not to mention certain tweets.
Bullshit title (Score:5, Informative)
This signal is then read by an infrared camera, sending an email alert to the scientists.
Why is this misleading title allowed?
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No kidding. This is the kind of shit you expect from vacuous click-bait sites or someone like Alex Jones.
WTF Slashdot?
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It's certainly an ambiguous title. I read it and was wondering if they had taught the spinach English or SMTP.
Re:Bullshit title (Score:5, Insightful)
This signal is then read by an infrared camera, sending an email alert to the scientists.
Why is this misleading title allowed?
Because 21st Century "journalists" are all given the same book to read; The Art of the Clickbait.
That's why.
(Sadly, it's not safe to assume that Slashdot editors are "better than that.")
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Because 21st Century "journalists" are all given the same book to read; The Art of the Clickbait.
Riiight, because "creative" titles for newspaper articles is a new thing.
Creative titles of yesteryear were at least reserved for the idiocy that was The Weekly World News, back when it was easy to separate facts from bullshit.
Today, CNN will lie through their teeth, and then have the balls to call you the liar when you fact-check them.
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Today, CNN will lie through their teeth, and then have the balls to call you the liar when you fact-check them.
Wow, fascinating. Could you give us an example? Preferably one related to the topic of this thread?
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Today, CNN will lie through their teeth, and then have the balls to call you the liar when you fact-check them.
Wow, fascinating. Could you give us an example? Preferably one related to the topic of this thread?
We're hanging out on the end of a tangent limb here rambling on about clickbait titles, and you're seeking relevance when discussing "talking" spinach? I'd prefer we simply drop this sub-discussion altogether. Besides, I'd be here all day listing countless examples of blatant bias, lies, and purposeful lack of reporting coming from the bought-and-paid-for MSM. Also known as the Democratic party marketing department.
You'll get more viable reporting from plants.
Re:Bullshit title (Score:5, Informative)
The paper was published over 4 years ago, so someone just dug it up recently.
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Re:Bullshit title (Score:4, Insightful)
"Scientists Have Taught Spinach To Detect Explosives" is a more accurate headline. And to me at least, more impressive.
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"Scientists teach computers to email."
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Agreed. If my experience working in offices has taught me anything, it's that vegetables have been writing emails and replying to all for a long time now.
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Yeah, the amazing thing is that the spinach has been taught to respond to the presence of explosives. That's the technical achievement! That they've written a script to send an email when their camera detects a signal is not a technical achievement. Bummer that's what grabbed the headline.
Instead of sending an email, they could have made the script play Beethoven's 5th. Would that have meant that they had taught spinach to play Beethoven's 5th?
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Because it's amusing. It sorta has relevance to what's going on (the spinach 'composes' the signal of the email, which is read by cameras, and that is then emailed off), and it gives someone who reads these journals a bit of a snicker as they go through them.
The core of the entire thing is that spinach has been engineered to detect specifics of the environment (which it's very good at doing in many other situations) and then bridge the communication gap to having this used actively as a trigger to notifyi
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This signal is then read by an infrared camera, sending an email alert to the scientists.
Why is this misleading title allowed?
Because bullshit is the new "accurate". This is an extreme case, but it nicely shows the actual value that can often be observed with today's "stories".
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I was wondering why SPAM has become so boring (Score:2)
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Spinach is relatively benign, it just gets on with the job of being spinach. Fear the day they teach Kale to email, and you'll never hear the end of incessant nagging!
Spinach doesn't send emails (Score:3)
The computer monitoring the condition of the Spinach has been programmed to send an email when a a condition has been made.
I have a program that monitors a database table, and sends an email if someone who isn't suppose to have access to it changes the table. It isn't the person who broke the allowed access (due to stupid vendor) who sent the email, nor is it the Application it self, it is the program that I have on a different computer to monitor that table and send an email if it goes wrong.
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But the program is absolutely useless if there's no signal to receive to detect a condition.
In this case, it's the carbon nanotubes which interface with the spinach which are 'read' by the IR detectors, which trigger the sending of the email, but those are all manufactured constructs which translate the initial discovery that has been made by the spinach.
This does come back to a more philosophical question that it's being given credit for in a lot of places, as the intent and content of the is not triggered
New Sanity Test (Score:4, Funny)
(Nano-Plant Owner) "My plants are speaking to me."
(Average Human) "Uh, no they're not. And I think you need a mental evaluation."
(Nano-Plant Owner) "Wanna see the email they sent me?"
Average Human) "Wait, what?"
Re:New Sanity Test (Score:5, Funny)
TO: geekmux
Subject: Craving electrolytes
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Help!
A terrorist is dangling me over boiling water!
She intends to hide the crime by forcing little terrorists to eat my corpse, but they seem to be unwilling participants.
Send help fast!
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If you've spent enough time outside on acid, you would really know something about the language of plants. Mushrooms teach us a bit more.
They live surprisingly dramatic lives.
Unrelated yet On-Topic [the-scientist.com]
Some asterisks (Score:4, Informative)
Scientists Have Taught* Spinach To Send** Emails***
* Engineered
** Produce a measurable chemical reaction when encountering certain compounds
*** Which can be detected by an external monitoring system, which then sends an email
Re:Some asterisks (Score:5, Insightful)
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That actually would've been a lot funnier, so I think we should go with that.
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The spinach is the part that actively does the detecting (via analytical chemistry). The nanotubes are what interfaces to the spinach to allow the biochemical markers the spinach uses to affect its own behaviour and transmits that onwards The explosives are passive in this chain. They only detect pressure, and send a very forceful flame when that happens.
Stop the madness!!! (Score:2)
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They taught a potato to write news articles too! (Score:2)
Whoever wrote this, would have to upgrade, to be in the same league as Ralph Wiggum.
I am waiting for the advancement to come to. (Score:2)
This reminds me... (Score:2)
When the kale starts sending email (Score:2)
it will change everything.
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The toughest part (Score:2)
Turns out the hardest part of teaching spinach to send emails, is the separation the concept of BCC vs CC, since the spinach leaves act in unison as a collective to the notion that some leaves would not know what messages had been sent to others is quite literally unthinkable.
First message (Score:1)
Last I checked, most of my email is like that (Score:2)
more capable (Score:2)
Confirmation that Spinach is more capable than half of my coworkers.
Common Use Case (Score:2)
2) This special type of spinach is planted in said field with appropriate sensors to email detection of landmine chemical signatures.
3) **Alert - Race Condition** Who will find the landmines first?
Children/locals harvesting spinach crop - or - agencies on receiving end of email alerts.
By that reasoning, the scientists also taught... (Score:1)
By that reasoning, the scientists also taught...
* dogs to send email (camera watches for food bowl to be empty, triggering an email)
* cats to send email (sensor attached to fluffy feather at end of pole triggers and sends and email)
* rocks to send email (rock falls on a scale, exceeding min weight, sending email)
* air to send an email (wind sensor sends the email when it gets above certain kmph)
Now, to be fair our glorious editors only copied the headline from the clickbait wizards at euronews. The origina
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Dogs to send email wouldn't be a trigger of an empty bowl.. It would be a trigger that the dog was actually hungry enough to need food, and there wasn't any.
The key to all this is that there's an interface to a biochemical signal in an organism that is used to make decisions for that organism, which is now being transmitted through a technology chain.
I can't wait (Score:2)
To get dressing recipes emailed to my from my salad!
Message boards too (Score:2)
Really?? (Score:1)
Seems a bit excessive (Score:1)
You hear a boom, go over to the crater/blood puddle and then note it's coordinates on the map.
Didn't we have... (Score:1)
...enough retards online these days?
Big deal (Score:3)
All they ever say is "I am Groot".
Geez, really? (Score:2)
WOW /. has hit a new low for inaccurate headlines. They didn't teach any spinach, and spinach doesn't send emails. In fact everything about that headline was wrong. I guess maybe an accurate headline like "Scientists engineer spinach to trigger a change in heat signature when exposed to specific chemical compounds" might have been a little unwieldy, but even !!SPINACH BOMB DETECTORS!!! would have been more accurate than what they ran with.
Maybe this is what happens when you train keyboard monkeys on the Y
That's not an email (Score:2)
That's a Popeyegram.
That doesn't sound too hard (Score:2)
I mean, everyone knows that Soylent Green is people so...
Obligatory... (Score:3)
Old news. (Score:2)
Plants proved to be sentient (Score:1)
OH the pain, the pain... (Score:2)
Ohwait, I am thinking of broccoli.
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Vegetables taught nothing (Score:2)
Yes, I'm saying whatever idiot wrote that headline is braindead.
Plant spinach to hide landmines (Score:2)
What a fantastic idea. When harvested, farmers will lose limbs.
Zawinski's Law strikes again (Score:2)
Figures this happened at MIT which is so very fond of adding email capabilities to every bit of software.
I think I saw this movie. (Score:1)
I believe the contents of the email read "Feed me Seymor".
Oh FFS don't write 'headlines' like this. (Score:2)
Crap like this is in part why people don't trust science. FFS just write boring headlines that are factual, mmkay?
Could 1 Million Spinach Plants... (Score:1)
eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare?
Popeye (Score:2)
5G (Score:1)
What this really means is... (Score:1)
Also: other than the involvement of "nanotubes" creepily introduced into the unfortunate spinach, the rest of the operation sounds like it could be achieved by a hobbyist using a raspberry pi.
Wow! (Score:1)
i am what i am... (Score:1)