In Boston, engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created light-emitting, rechargeable plants that are ten times brighter than the light-emitting, rechargeable plants they created in 2017. The researchers say the outside-the-box solution to home lighting could lower your electricity bills, as well as your carbon footprint.
“We wanted to create a light-emitting plant with particles that will absorb light, store some of it, and emit it gradually,” Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the work, said in a press statement release. “This is a big step toward plant-based lighting.”
The process involves infusing nanometer-scale particles into the plant. Then, with just ten seconds of exposure to a light-emitting diode, the plant glowed for several minutes. “Once the experiments were over, the researchers were able to extract about 60% of the phosphors from plants and reuse them in another plant,” researchers said in a release.