LEDs obsolete?

[harryagain]

[Martin Brown]

Unusual for the Daily Wail to have a positive story, but they are wildly optimistic about the power of bioluminesence. You might just about get enough light to see by when fully dark adapted but you are not going to replace streetlamps or even notice them in moonlight.

Fireflies have special organs to concentrate the active ingredients and none of the luminescent biomarkers are remotely as good. They are used in genetic modification to tag and mark sequences that are switched on.

I knew someone who worked on glowing potatoes a long while back.

[Brian Gaff]

Gawd help us all.

So maybe we could glow ourselves? One issue with this is that the eneergy usage of any organism with a useful light output has to go up over its dark relatives, so how efficient is this and how do we propose to feed them what they need? I can recall a similar discussion many years ago about substances that absorb full spectrum light in the day and emit it at a narrow band during the dark. Obviously there has to be a limit to the storage and how can it know that its dark to emit it? Brian