A glowing plant as a lamp in your room

For us this will be the ideal answer to curtail our ever increasing electricity bill.

A glowing plant to replace the electric lamp in your living room! There are many animals and plants that glow, but none of them can be used in your living room as a lamp.

Starlight Avatar is the world's first genetically engineered plant that can be used as light source for your home.

It is developed by Missouri-based Bioglow, a company that has worked on light-producing plants for a number of years.

The natural phenomenon of bioluminescence, the biological mechanisms found in nature that produce light, have fascinated Bioglow's founder Dr. Alexander Krichevsky for many years.

Dr. Krichevsky studied both bioluminescence of marine bacteria and molecular biology of plants, and at the intersection of these two disciplines the idea of a glowing plant has emerged.

Convinced that glowing plants will be a striking horticultural innovation that could lead to cleaner and more sustainable light, Dr. Krichevsky set out of turn his vision to reality.

The Starlight Avatar plant was made by taking an ornamental Nicotiana alata plant and introducing the light-emitting pathway from marine bacteria into its chloroplast genome.

The genetically modified plant then glows a soft blue-green in the dark and could be used for decorative purposes, but is hardly bright enough to read with.

According to Dr. Krichevsky: 'There are no naturally occurring glowing/bioluminescent plants in nature.

While there are a number of various glowing species-fireflies, glow-worms, glowing fish etc. there are no glowing plants. Starlight Avatar is the first one.'

The plants will come in their own cultivation boxes and are expected to produce light for 2-3 months. Bioglow hopes to improve on the technology creating a plant that emits light for a longer period of time.

Starlight Avatar might be the first step toward a world in which one day our highways and homes will be illuminated not with electricity, but with the luminescent glow of plant life. It seems synthetic biology is already transforming our lives.

Catch a falling star

He may not have heard Perry Como singing the famous and popular song Catch a Falling Star but a line in that melody has turned true to Christopher Strickland, 19, who was on his first job at the Anchorage Home Depot in Alaska recently.

This particular line in that song says 'For love may come and tap you on the shoulder,' but it was not love but fame that came and tapped him on the shoulder.

Chris became a hero overnight when he caught a baby girl in mid-air after having rolled out of a shopping cart at the Home Depot.

The incident was caught on the Home Depot surveillance camera and found its way onto the Internet.

The 19-year-old only graduated from Grace Christian School in the spring and has been working at Home Depot, his first job, for just three months.

Chris said he was hanging around the cashier area waiting for a customer when he noticed a baby loose balanced atop an orange shopping cart.

‘I thought I'd keep an eye on it, in case something happened,’ he said.

The baby began to tip out of the cart and Chris rushed towards it and caught the baby in mid-air and cradled it. If he hadn't been there, she would have hit the concrete floor with a thud.

Chris then handed the child to the father, who had been distracted at the cash register. The man thanked him repeatedly before leaving.

Three days later Chris’ brother, Dale, put it on YouTube, titling it ‘Chris to the rescue,’ and adding the description ‘my brother saving a baby falling off a cart at home depot’.

Although the photo is not much clear Chris’ heroic act has been frozen for posterity.

Forty years in a cage for his own protection

We have heard many inhuman and cruel stories about old men and women kept in chains for long years and unwanted children caged. But this is the first time we hear of a man caged for 40 years for his own protection. The person who caged him was his mother.

For four decades, 48-year-old Weiqing Peng has been locked inside a cage in his home in Zhengzhou, Henan Province’s capital, in central China.

His mother, Waimei Peng, said that at age six, her son suffered a high fever followed by damage to his brain, which subsequently altered his behaviour. Then the young Weiqing would suffer epileptic episodes. Amid fears that the boy would hurt himself, and with minimal resources to afford him the much-needed medical treatment, Mrs. Peng, together with her late husband, enclosed her son in a cage; its bars were fixed and expanded as the boy grew.

Mrs. Peng recalling her son’s behaviour that led her to cage him for 40 years said: “There were times when he would cut himself with a knife and glass debris, and fall down and hit his face and make it bleed.”

Today, as she feeds him through the bars, Mrs. Peng, now age 80, is worried that there will be no one to take care of him when she dies.

Ironically, the very cage that his parents thought would protect him has now turned futile and useless, isolating him from possibilities that would have helped him gain even a shred of independence.

What will be his fate after the death of his only protector - his mother?