IN AN OLD SHOE FACTORY on the outskirts of Paris, new life is taking shape. A bank of PCR machines is multiplying plant DNA molecules by the hundreds of billions every few hours. Inside a gleaming white chamber, tiny emerald shoots are coaxed from single cells, unfurling in millimeters over a period of months.
It's a biologist's dream, says Patrick Torbey, CTO of Neoplants, a startup that's placing a multimillion-dollar bet on the air we breathe. Torbey grabs one of the clear plastic growing containers from the chamber and squints at his verdant creation: Nestled in a jelly-like growing medium called agar, it looks like a canapé-or, possibly, the future.
This is the Neo P1-a houseplant the firm genetically modified to help combat indoor air pollution. Pl is a tweaked form of golden pothos, commonly known as devil's ivy, one of the most ubiquitous and easy-going houseplants. Neoplants has engineered its DNA to boost its ability to sequester volatile organic compounds (VOCs)-formaldehyde, benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene-that are prevalent in the air inside homes and businesses.
The modifications also enable the plant to convert the VOCs into substances like sugar and CO₂ that it can use to grow. Once it has outgrown the agar, Pl will be planted in a pot designed to maximize airflow and sold with packs of bacteria that are added to the soil each month to help the plant metabolize VOCs. Due to hit stores later this year, Pl will retail for $179-roughly 10 times the cost of an ordinary golden pothos plant, and in the ballpark of a decent HEPA purifier.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة April 2023 من WIRED.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة April 2023 من WIRED.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
RUSSIAN, GO HOME
WHEN MY COUNTRY WENT TO WAR, I FACED A CHOICE: Flee to a world where the truth might kill me - or seek peace in censored oblivion.
The Fateful Eight
THE STORY BEHIND THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL TECHNOLOGICAL PAPER IN RECENT HISTORY.
Can the Internet's Greatest Authenticity Machine Survive Wall Street?
When thousands of subreddits went dark in protest last summer, it exposed the tension at the core of Reddit - on the eve of the company's IPO. Now that synthetic media is flooding the internet, does the web's most reliably human forum represent a gold mine for investors, or an old-fashioned dumpster fire?
The Unnerving Presence of Javier Bardem
He's known for playing fanatics and murderous psychopaths. In real life, he loves his wife (and Brad Pitt) and cries during E.T.
HAPPY HAUNTING
IN A CHARMING game called This Discord Has Ghosts in It, up to 15 participants at a time gather in a Discord server that has been reimagined as a haunted house. (Of course.) Inside lies a maze of (chat) rooms where each player takes the role of either an eponymous spirit or a paranormal investigator.
THE MYTH OF METAL
How I became a Python programmer - and learned to love our abstract world.
SO YOU WANT TO REWIRE BRAINS
There's a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIS help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs.
FOR GIANT LIZARDS, PLEASE HOLD
The sounds of Slack have a secret history.
WOMEN AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD
They go to Antarctica with dreams of studying the unknown. What they discover there is the stuff of nightmares.
THE NERD-KING VIBES OF JENSEN HUANG
The Nvidia CEO turned a graphics-card company into a trillion-dollar AI behemoth. Now he wants to transform the rest of the world-health care, robotics, autonomous driving, the works.