The Weirdest Shit Out of Silicon Valley
The Weirdest Shit Out of Silicon Valley is a series from The Bold Italic documenting the bizarre news, gadgets, and developments in the tech world.
The food space has been increasingly innovative of late; tearless onions are now a thing, not to mention the burgeoning plant-based and lab-grown meat industry. But the newest kid at the table blows all of these out of the water. We’re talking A.I. spinach that can send emails. Yep.
“Plant nanobionics” essentially means integrating electronic systems into plants — and that essentially means playing plant god by giving them extra abilities and then harnessing them. It makes sense when you think about it: Plants already receive a bunch of data every day — water levels, temperature, soil quality — just by existing. Getting access to their feed of intel would allow scientists and agriculturists to optimize the plants’ growth and environment.
MIT scientists have been working in this space since 2014. In 2016, they published a paper detailing their spinach-based success, reports EuroNews. The researchers engineered spinach plants with carbon nanotubes, which are able to detect certain types of compounds in groundwater commonly found in explosives like land mines. When detected, near-infrared fluorescent nanosensors in the plant’s leaves emit a signal, which is then read by an infrared camera and generates an auto-email response to a scientist’s smartphone.
Hence, spinach sending emails.
In late 2020, the MIT researchers announced they had refined their nanobionic optical sensor to detect and measure, in real time, arsenic — a contaminant often found in rice and spinach.
Looking forward, the applications for this type of tech are huge—for example, monitoring pollutants and alerting authorities when unhealthy levels are reached. At scale, this could make environments healthier and target climate change, as well as help scientists develop more targeted crop varieties, such as drought-resistant plants. “The tech can tap into signals that we’ve never had access to before,” says lead scientist Michael Strano.
Forget entering dystopia—it’s already here.
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