There’s an article about a company (SolarBotanic) which is modeling fake trees that will harvest energy from the sun and wind via nano leaves. I’m not sure what they mean by modeling but it sounds like something which is more concept than anything else.  The article that appears to be the original source for the information is here.

The artificial tree story in conjunction with this item, Teaching Ethics to Robo Warriors, in Fast Company has got me wondering how we’re going to deal with quasi-life. For example, we may have ‘trees’ that function a bit like real trees and we may be teaching ethics to robots. So then, what is nature? What is it to be human? I’ve been thinking about those things a lot lately as I keep gathering information about the technological changes that are coming our way.

As for yesterday’s sniffing phone article, I think the application might be more useful for sniffing out toxic gases or detecting bombs if you have security concerns.