The village of Gorak Shep. Photo: Frank Kehren

There is no plumbing on Mount Everest. When nature calls, climbers must use makeshift holes dug by sherpas, or use buckets as substitute toilets. With the ever-increasing number of climbers attempting to scale the mountain, containing all of that human waste is no small problem.

Currently, National Geographic reports, much of the excrement is carried in sealed containers on the backs of porters to the nearby village of Gorak Shep (which also lacks plumbing or sanitation facilities), where it is emptied into open pits. Up to 12 metric tons of the stuff can be hauled to Gorak Shep in a single year. But the village is running out of space for containing the mess, and last year researchers discovered that the refuse had contaminated one of the village’s two major water sources.  

Seattle climber and engineer Garry Porter witnessed the problem first hand when he attempted to scale Everest ten years ago. Since then, the image of all of that waste has stuck with him. ”I couldn’t shake the feeling that my final tribute to Nepal and the people of Everest was having my waste dumped in these open pits. It just didn’t seem right,” he told National Geographic.

Porter decided to found the Mount Everest Biogas Project as a potential fix, along with Everest guide Dan Mazur.

In biogas production, bacteria feed on organic waste (like feces) and produce several gases as a byproduct. One of these is methane, which is the primary component of natural gas and can be burned for heat and light, or converted to electricity. One cubic meter of biogas provides about two kilowatt-hours of useable energy. This is enough to power a 60-watt light bulb for more than a day, or an efficient 15-watt CFL bulb for nearly six days. A biogas reactor at Gorak Shep could address the fecal contamination problem while providing the perennially low-income community with a sustainable source of methane gas for energy, especially for cooking, Porter says.

The team plans to keep the biogas digester tanks warm (they stop working if temperatures drop below freezing) with solar panels.

In addition to getting rid of all the feces, the team hopes that the biogas project will relieve some of the pressure on Everest’s natural resources. All of those poop-producing climbers also need to eat, and cooking fuel often takes the form of native plants harvested around Everest, including an endangered species, the alpine juniper. If successful, the project will be the world’s highest elevation biogas reactor and could be introduced to other high altitude areas around the world.  

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Mount Everest Is Not Immune to Climate Change 
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The Kepler satellite’s first photo, captured on April 8, 2009. Photo: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

It’s been just over four years since NASA’s exoplanet-hunting Kepler satellite switched on and began staring unwaveringly at the same patch of the universe, watching for the subtle dips of light caused by a far-off planet passing in front of its star. Where the ancient Greeks knew of five planets besides our own Kepler gave us thousands. Extrapolations from this tiny patch of sky gave us hints of billions more.

Originally designed to run for three-and-a-half years, Kepler has pushed on. But the satellite’s quest may be at an end. Sad news came out from NASA yesterday that one of the satellite’s reaction wheels, a device that keeps Kepler’s eye steady, has failed. There may still be a way to fix the broken wheel or concoct some other strategy to keep Kepler shooting straight. But without a steady gaze the satellite can no longer carry out its mission.

In the science press, the obituaries are already rolling out. Though many scientific experiments teach us something new about the world, few have been able to so clearly redefine our place in the universe as Kepler. Decades ago, the planets in our solar system were all we knew. Now, we’re practically swimming in them.

Kepler may be down (but not “out”), but that doesn’t mean the discoveries will stop. It will take years to sort through and analyze all the data the mission has already collected. And, follow up research using other satellites on Kepler’s exoplanet “candidates” could still yet unveil the marvels of the universe.

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What if All 2,299 Exoplanets Orbited One Star?

Photo: dynna17

In elementary school, we learn that caterpillars turn into butterflies and moths through a process called metamorphosis. But what really goes on within the hardened chrysalis has continued to puzzle scientists. Now, computer tomography scans have allowed researchers to peep in on the caterpillar-to-butterfly action taking place inside the chrysalis, The Scientist reports.

Previously, researchers hoping to learn about metamorphosis had to dissect the chrysalis, which killed the developing insect inside. The key breakthrough about this new technique, they say, is that it allows them to study living tissue as it grows and changes.

Using series of dead individuals provides snapshots of presumably sequential development, but it can be unclear whether one insect’s third day in a chrysalis is really the same developmentally as another’s. CT scans can provide a more complete picture of how development proceeds.

In this new study, the team scanned nine painted lady chrysalises. Four of the insects died during the experiment while the other five hatched. In their results, the researchers focused on data derived from one of the insects in particular that provided the most detailed scans.

Here’s a video the researchers put together of their caterpillar’s gradual development into butterfly:

Rather than rewriting the story of butterfly development, the researchers told The Scientist, this experiment fills in missing details. For example, The Scientist describes:

The trachea did become visible surprisingly fast, within 12 hours after pupation, indicating that the structures either are more fully formed in caterpillars than previously thought or form very rapidly in pupae. While the trachea and the intestines showed up remarkably clearly, the “soft, gooey bits,” such as muscles and the central nervous system, were unfortunately invisible, Garwood said.

Lepidopterists, the scientists who study butterflies and moths, are not the only insect researchers who can benefit from CT scans. Many other arthropods—including beetles, flies, bees, wasps, ants and fleas—also go through metamorphosis.

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Photo: Racchio

The U.S. military has a non-lethal toy straight out of dystopian science fiction. It is, literally, a pain gun. Known as “Active Denial Technology,” the pain gun shoots extremely high frequency microwaves from a truck hundreds of meters away. When these waves hit your skin, you feel like you’re being cooked alive. Last year, Wired‘s Spencer Ackerman volunteered to get shot by the non-lethal weapon:

When the signal goes out over radio to shoot me, there’s no warning — no flash, no smell, no sound, no round. Suddenly my chest and neck feel like they’ve been exposed to a blast furnace, with a sting thrown in for good measure. I’m getting blasted with 12 joules of energy per square centimeter, in a fairly concentrated blast diameter. I last maybe two seconds of curiosity before my body takes the controls and yanks me out of the way of the beam.

Here’s what it looks like to get shot, as experienced by Ackerman:

Former Navy SEAL Richard Machowicz took a turn, too, for his Discovery Channel show Future Weapons. He didn’t like it much, either.

The Active Denial pain ray is big and scary, sure. But it’s also mounted on a huge expensive truck, and thus, unlike tasers or rubber bullets, is not a thing you’ll likely see in real life right now. But that may soon change. According to New Scientist, Raytheon, the defense contractor behind the pain gun, is working on a portable version:

Raytheon is now building smaller versions for law enforcement or commercial maritime use – designed to be placed inside buildings, such as prisons, or mounted on ships for defence against, say, pirates. And soon there could be handheld versions of the pain ray. Raytheon has developed small experimental prototypes, one of which is about the size of a heavy rifle and is intended for police use.

As a non-lethal weapon, the pain ray is actually incredibly effective. The weapon causes a burning sensation so strong that it triggers “reflexive ‘repel’ reactions.” People just want to get out of the way. And, from the testing done so far, the pain gun has a low chance of doing any real damage. So far, 11,000 people have been shot, and only eight of them got burned. But these were all under proper testing conditions, not out in the field in the middle of a riot.

But as a non-lethal weapon, the pain gun has something rubber bullets and tasers and tear gas do not: it is invisible—people being shot by it will likely have absolutely zero idea what is going on, and in most cases the gun leaves no physical wounds.

This distinction, says New Scientist, got a plan to use the portable version of the device in a California prison shut down.

On the eve of going live, the trial was cancelled. It was not over health concerns, explains Chris Tillery of the NIJ’s Office of Science and Technology… The test was shut down, he says, because of an unexpected outcry in the media and elsewhere about the potential for abuse of the technology.

And this goes to the heart of the moral dilemma raised by a technology that can induce pain invisibly. It may be medically safe if used properly, but in the wrong hands, it could also be a tool of oppression and torture.

For now, says New Scientist, the potential to use the weapon in law enforcement is under review by the National Institute of Justice.

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Dunwich beach, across which storms pulled the ancient city. Image: modagoo

In 1066, the town of Dunwich began its march into the sea. After storms swept the farmland out for twenty years, the houses and buildings went in 1328. By 1570, nearly a quarter of the town had been swallowed, and in 1919 the All Saints church disappeared over the cliff. Dunwich is often called Britain’s Atlantis, a medieval town accessible only to divers, sitting quietly at the bottom of the ocean off the British Coast.

Now, researchers have created a 3D visualization of Dunwich using acoustic imaging. David Sear, a professor at the University of Southampton, where the work was done, described the process:

Visibility under the water at Dunwich is very poor due to the muddy water. This has limited the exploration of the site. We have now dived on the site using high resolution DIDSON ™ acoustic imaging to examine the ruins on the seabed – a first use of this technology for non-wreck marine archaeology.

DIDSON technology is rather like shining a torch onto the seabed, only using sound instead of light. The data produced helps us to not only see the ruins, but also understand more about how they interact with the tidal currents and sea bed.

Using this technology gives them a good picture of what the town actually looks like. Ars Technica writes:

We can now see where the local churches stood, and crumbling walls pinpoint the ancient town’s remits. A one kilometer (0.6 mile) square stronghold stood in the center of the 1.8km2space (about 0.7 square miles), with what looks like the remains of Blackfriars Friary, three churches, and the Chapel of St Katherine standing within it. The northern region looks like the commercial hub with lots of smaller buildings largely made of wood. It’s thought that the stronghold, as well as its buildings and a possible town hall, may date back to Saxon times.

Professor Sears sees this project as not just one of historical and archaeological importance, but also as a forecast of the fate of seaside cities. “It is a sobering example of the relentless force of nature on our island coastline. It starkly demonstrates how rapidly the coast can change, even when protected by its inhabitants. Global climate change has made coastal erosion a topical issue in the 21st Century, but Dunwich demonstrates that it has happened before. The severe storms of the 13th and 14th Centuries coincided with a period of climate change, turning the warmer medieval climatic optimum into what we call the Little Ice Age.”

So, in a million years, when aliens come to look at our planet, it might look a lot like Dunwich.

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Image: Aurora Michele

Having a baby can mean thinking a lot about pee. You pee on a stick to see if you’re ovulating. You pee on a stick to check if you’re pregnant. And soon, you might be able to pee to check your baby’s health. Using urine samples collected from pregnant women, researchers have developed a test that found signs of serious medical issues in the still unborn baby, including Down syndrome, premature birth, brain damage and pre-eclampsia (a disorder that can cause a mother to have seizures).

The new research, conducted by a team of Portuguese researchers lead by Sílvia Diaz, is still in the early stages. But, if the technique bears out it could mean that checking for serious complications will be as easy as peeing in a cup—an alternative to the invasive techniques, like biopsies or umbilical cord blood tests, used today.

The researchers collected urine samples from 300 women who were in the second trimester of their pregnancies. They froze the samples and waited until the baby was born. Then, they combed through the urine with a sensitive analytical technique called nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy looking for chemicals that were related with the conditions of the babies. According to the researchers, they found chemicals that could be related to “central nervous system malformations, trisomy 21, preterm delivery, gestational diabetes, intrauterine growth restriction and preeclampsia.”

According to Chemical and Engineering News, the next step is to do bigger and better tests, looking at more mothers from a larger geographic area.

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Image: Harvard University

Robots get smaller, smarter and faster every day. Now that we can 3-D print the little devices, they’re also easier to make. In fact, they’re so easy to make that there’s one robot that can actually assemble itself.

Here it is, assembling its way to world supremacy:

The materials used here are shape memory polymers. They remember certain shapes and, when the right conditions are met, fold into those forms. This robot can bend itself from a flat sheet into a little worm-like thing. Here’s an explanation of how shape memory works from IEEE Spectrum:

Self-folding happens thanks to shape memory polymers that contract when heated. By printing these polymers on one side of a hinged substrate and then heating them, the hinge can be made to bend. The amount of bend is controlled by etching flexible connectors that connect both sides of the hinge, and with enough hinges heated in the right order, it’s possible to create fairly complex folded shapes, including things like interlocking structural elements.

The tricky part of the process is the folding of the robot itself: installing the battery and motor is trivial enough for a human to do, which means that a relatively simple pick and place robot should have no problems doing the same thing. This means that these robots have the potential to scale massively: they can be printed out of cheap materials, they fold themselves together, and another robot can plonk some hardware on them and they’re good to go.

Now, we’ve seen self assembling robots before. Like this one:

And we’ve seen robots that have been 3-D printed before. Like this one:

But this is the first robot to be both 3-D printed and have the ability to self assemble. Next step: teach them to solder.

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Map by Hatnote

Who are these people who edit Wikipedia, and where do they come from? The answer to this question matters: It was these editors who decided, for instance, to remove women from the “American novelists” category.

This real-time map gives some indication of who’s making these judgment calls. The map shows unregistered users making contributions to Wikipedia. The project creators explain:

When an unregistered user makes a contribution to Wikipedia, he or she is identified by his or her IP address. These IP addresses are translated to the contributor’s approximate geographic location. A study by Fabian Kaelin in 2011 noted that unregistered users make approximately 20% of the edits on English Wikipedia [edit: likely closer to 15%, according to more recent statistics], so Wikipedia’s stream of recent changes includes many other edits that are not shown on this map.

You can download more about how they built the map here at Github. Or you can just sit there and become totally mesmerized by the little dots that pop up as people all over the world add to, change, delete and edit one of the most commonly used works of reference in the world.

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Image: CarbonNYC

While blind people can’t enjoy photographs the same way sighted people do, that doesn’t mean they don’t want to take them. Or at least that’s the premise of this new app that helps blind people position their cameras better through sound cues.

Researchers recently asked blind and partially sighted people what the hardest part of getting a photo right was. Armed with the knowledge of exactly what their sampling of blind people wanted help with, the researchers made an app, which solves a few key problems that blind photographers have.

The first is locating the shutter button. In the app, there’s no button—an upward swiping motion on the screen takes a picture. The app also detects the number of faces it sees and speaks that number out loud. It also uses audio to help the photographer move the camera and get the subjects in focus.

To help photographers recognize the shots, the app records sound, too. New Scientist explains:

This is to help with photo organising and sharing – and is used as an aide-memoire as to who is in shot. The user can choose to save this sound file along with the time and date, and GPS data that is translated into audio giving the name of the neighbourhood, district or city the shot was taken in.

While sighted people might not understand why a blind person would want to take photographs, the results can be quite incredible. Take this gallery of photos taken by a blind woman. Sonia Sobertas, a blind woman who paints with light in her photographs, is part of the Seeing With Photography group of people who want to create images despite being blind. The New York Times explained Sobertas’s reason for taking photographs:

For seeing individuals, it may seem bizarre that Ms. Soberats dedicates so much time to an art she cannot fully appreciate. Why not a more tactile pursuit, like sculpting? But Ms. Soberats said she savored her work through the eyes of others.

“The more difficult the photo, the more interesting and the more rewarding when you complete it and it’s good,” she said. “To be able to realize and obtain something that at the end everybody praises, it’s very satisfactory.”

The researchers developing the app want to give their users that same experience and provide one more way for them to enjoy the same activities as everybody else.

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Image: Mark Strozier

The world’s first fully 3-D printed gun was fired this week, and Defense Distributed, the company behind the print-at-home weapon, wants to make the designs for this weapon available to all. But the State Department would rather they didn’t. In fact, the department asked Defense Distributed to pull down the blueprints, saying that the plans could incur arms trafficking violations. As a response, The Pirate Bay, a large bittorrent site, offered to host the plans on its site for anyone who wants them.

Here’s the gun being fired with a remote trigger:

The gun has had a short but steady history of being rejected. Thingiverse, a place for 3D printed blueprints, banned it in 2012. DEFCAD, a place where Thingverse-banned designs go, welcomed the gun. But the State Department Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance wrote a letter to Defense Distributed that read: “Until the Department provides Defense Distributed with final [commodity jurisdiction] determinations, Defense Distributed should treat the above technical data as ITAR-controlled.”

Cody Wilson, inventor of the gun and head of Defense Distributed, said they would comply. “We have to comply,” he told Forbes. “All such data should be removed from public access, the letter says. That might be an impossible standard. But we’ll do our part to remove it from our servers.”

Of course, the internet being what it is, just pulling the designs from DEFCAD is not at all the same from removing it from the web entirely. The plans had already been downloaded 100,000 times in the first two days the file was online. And the Pirate Bay says it won’t bend to any department. “TPB has for close to 10 years been operating without taking down one single torrent due to pressure from the outside. And it will never start doing that,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak. The insider says that he hopes hosting the plans will force America to reevaluate their stance on gun.

“We think that the good thing about the discussion about 3D printers and their gun laws might bring more focus on the double standards that the U.S. is having and hopefully – people will start printing signs to protest against the guns, the corruption and the threats against freedom of speech that the U.S. is pushing on us,” he told Torrent Freak.

The gun and TPB have something in common even—they’ve both been searching for a home recently. The torrent site recently had to move, after threats from local governments to shut them down. And Wilson isn’t totally content with the state departments demands, and hopes to get the plans up again. But at least the two can be nomads together.

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So long, World War II shooters! Hello, French Revolution simulator. Meet Disunion, a virtual-reality guillotine simulator—a goofy project built in just a couple days by three game developers.

In the video gaming world, virtual reality is set for a resurgence. With technology improving to the point where quality virtual reality is increasingly feasible, developers such as Oculus are hoping you’ll peer into a pair of goggles instead of a widescreen TV.

But the idea of being virtually beheaded, while strange, doesn’t seem like it would be all that scary, right? Like, how different would this even be than just watching a movie? In a feature story by science journalist Ed Yong for Nature a while back, we meet Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist whose work with virtual reality is showing just how lifelike these experiences can be.

Today, using little more than a video camera, goggles and two sticks, he has convinced me that I am floating a few metres behind my own body. As I see a knife plunging towards my virtual chest, I flinch. Two electrodes on my fingers record the sweat that automatically erupts on my skin, and a nearby laptop plots my spiking fear on a graph.

In the video above we see people playing Disunion watch their own beheading while a friend sharply thwaps them on the neck. Using that same combination of visual and tactile prodding, says Yong, Ehrsson can convince people of all sorts of things.

Out-of-body experiences are just part of Ehrsson’s repertoire. He has convinced people that they have swapped bodies with another person, gained a third arm, shrunk to the size of a doll or grown to giant proportions.

Ehrsson is trying to study how your brain understands its own body, but out of his work comes a tangential understanding of how virtual reality could work in video gaming—and a deeper understand of what people watching their virtual heads roll may be feeling.

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Over the past few decades Lake Urmia in Iran has steadily dried up. Photo: Google / Landsat 

Since 1972, the U.S. has flown a series of satellites known as the Landsat program, a fleet of Earth-observing satellites that were tasked with taking pictures from space. Landsat’s gorgeous photos have been a favorite of the Earth-as-art crowd, and the satellites’ observations have provided an absolutely critical long-term record of how our planet is changing.

The development of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Photo: Landsat / Google

Today, Google put out the Earth Engine, a fascinating tool that showcases a scrollable, zoomable time-lapse of the entire planet as seen by Landsat over the decades. The Landsat photos only go back to 1984, but they show the dramatic ways in which the planet has changed in such a brief period of time. To help you get started, Google pulled out some highlights to look at, such as the drying of the Aral Sea or the deforestation of the Amazon. But the tool does show the whole planet (just the land, not the oceans), and there are many more cool things to be seen.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has a more detailed look at this, the development of the oil sands project in Alberta, Canada. Photo: Landsat / Google

But don’t bother looking for Antarctica, because it’s not included. (Sad.)

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Dawn LeClair, member of the 1975 Wickenburg High School Math Club, sits in front of the paper clip computer. Image: Wickenburg High School

In the 1960s, some strange computers were being tinkered into existence. There was one that operated solely on rolling marbles and gates that flipped open and closed. And in 1967, the manual How to Build a Working Digital Computer—a book that explains just how to build a computer out of paper clips—came out.

Okay, so you need more than just paper clips. Evil Mad Scientist explains:

How to Build a Working Digital Computer is both an introduction to the “new and exciting field of digital computers” and a set of plans to build one.  What’s especially interesting is that the plans don’t call for any specialized electronic components, but instead show how to build everything from parts that you might find at a hardware store: items like paper clips, little light bulbs, thread spools, wire, screws, and switches (that can optionally be made from paper clips).

This isn’t your average paper-clip chain, though. One piece of the computer is made from a juice can and bent paper clips. It works kind of like those little music box rolls, where the cylinder rotates and the bumps on it are struck to make sounds. Except that the cylinder is a juice can and the heads are made of paper clips.

If this all sounds super weird, it is. But, like the very best super weird things, it also actually works. This guy made one:

Apparently so did a couple of 9th graders in Cleveland in 1972. They named their computer Emmerack. Mark Rosenstein, one of those kids, has some photographs of Emmerack that still survive. He writes:

In the summer between 8th and 9th grade, my friend Kenny Antonelli and I built an electro-mechanical computer. We had been lucky enough to use our high school’s HP2114B computer for a couple of weeks when it had been lent to our junior high school. The 2114B had a massive 8k words of core (yes magnetic donuts) memory, of which 4k was reserved for the Basic operating system, and the rest was available to the user via optical mark cards or by typing in via a teletype. The design of our computer was based on the book, “How to Build a Working Digital Computer” by Edward Alcosser, James P. Phillips and Allen M. Wolk. The book used paper clip switches, but we used our paper route money to purchase a zillion real slide switches from Radio Shack. We ganged the switches together by drilling a hole in each switch handle and inserting a metal rod through the holes of the switches that needed to be operated together.

Sadly, Emmerack was trashed when Rosenstein went to college. In 1975, the Wickenburg High School Math Club also built one of these home supply computers.

And if you want to try it, you can download the instructions from the Bitsavers.org archive. Mostly, you’ll need a lot of paper clips and a lot of patience.

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This… is my boomstick. Photo: Hjem

When you were a kid, perhaps you had a potato gun—a little plastic toy gun that, stabbed into a potato, creates little starch-based pellets. If you were more of a tinkering and engineering type, perhaps you built a potato cannon, a hollow cylinder stuffed with something flammable and a potato.

This was probably not a great idea. It turns out that potato cannons are incredibly dangerous. And, just because, Michael Courtney, a physicist trained at M.I.T and now at the Air Force academy in Colorado and a colleague have figured out how to make them even more so.

Even your standard potato cannon (usually fueled with hairspray, says MIT’s Technology Review) can be deadly. Recent research found that if you take a potato to the head you have way more than a “50% risk of skull fracture.” Even taking a body shot could do some serious damage and has a good chance of killing you. No bueno.

But that’s with a regular potato cannon, not the one that Courtney put together. In research published on the arXiv the other day, Courtney published a systematic study of which type of fuel packs the biggest potato punch. He tested acetylene, ethanol, methanol, propane and butane. None of these are fancy Air Force-style combustibles—you could theoretically get any of them around the house or at a hardware store. Then, Courtney and his associates used a high-speed camera to track how fast they could send their spuds flying. Propane clocked in at 62 miles per hour. Acetylene at 309 miles per hour.

Courtney doesn’t even try to come up with some heavy-handed justification for the research. He just wanted to see which fuel would make the best potato cannon. MIT:

The Courtneys make absolutely clear that this kind of cannon is extremely dangerous and potentially lethal. “Potatoes launched with acetylene were also destructive to wooden boards and plastic objects initially employed as backstops before transitioning to 6mm thick steel plate,” they say.

How about we all just agree now to cut off this produce-based arms race before it really gets going, deal?

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Right now, astronauts on the International Space Station live on periodic supply drops, but if we’re ever going to really live in space, with colonies on other planets or aboard interstellar transports, we’ve got to figure out the food situation. Plants have spent their entire history growing under Earth’s gravity, and biologists know that living in zero-G stresses them out. But to really figure out exactly how plants get stressed meant killing the plant and cutting it open—an herbal autopsy.

On the ISS, says NASA, researchers are growing a strain of genetically engineered plant that glows when and where it gets stressed. With this tool, researchers can track how these plants are affected by living in space without having to cut them down.  The researchers are using a heavily researched flowering plant called Arabidopsis thaliana, more commonly known as thale cress. According to NASA, the research is important for learning how plants can grow in preparation for “future long-duration exploration.”

Arabidopsis thaliana. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

But more than just being about growing plants in space, the scientists want to use the cress to understand the fundamentals of how stressed-out plants might adapt to climate change. So, they’re deliberately trying to stress the cress out, “exposing the plant to extremes of pressure, temperature, and drought.”

This isn’t the first thing we’ve genetically modified to glow-in-the-dark, either. In Japan, says David Biello, researchers used jellyfish genes to make glow-in-the-dark cats. We’ve also got glowing tobacco, that lets you know when it needs to be watered. And a still-ongoing Kickstarter campaign wants your help to grow glowing-plant technology, and they’ll give you a glowing arabidopsis to do so.

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