there is enough suffering coming your way without you grabbing hold of every spiral your brain takes down. if you can’t feel hopeful, practice gentle curiosity. ask yourself, in what way is this thought pattern serving me? where did I learn to talk to myself this way? does this make me feel good?

Before we can change we have to realize that we even want to, & to peek through the fog at the possibility that we just may move in that direction, some day.

Because most of us spend the majority of our time indoors, NASA conducted a Clean Air Study to determine which common houseplants are the best for filtering harmful toxins like ammonia and formaldehyde from the air.  

**Please note: Several of these plants are known to be toxic to cats, dogs and other pets. If you are a pet owner, please do check the toxicity of plants before introducing them to your home.**

Cybernetics usually refers to humans enhancing themselves with robotic parts. Sometimes, we heard about animal-robot cyborgs, or insect-robotcyborgs. It’s not all that often that we hear about plant-robot cyborgs, because what’s a plant going to do with a robot, right? But you could argue that plants have the most to gain from robotic enhancements, because otherwise (with a few totally cool exceptions) plants aren’t capable of mobility or manipulation at all.

It’s straightforward to see how mobility and manipulation could be useful for plants, but the real question is, How do you get a plant to tell its robotic parts what to do? At the MIT Media Lab, Harpreet Sareen is trying to figure this out, and Elowan the mobile cybernetic plant is just the first in “a series of plant-electronic hybrid experiments.”

The difference between this plant-robot hybrid and others that we’ve seen in the past is that the plant is actually in control: The robotic base moves where the plant wants it to, to the extent that a.) plants want things and b.) the plant is able to communicate such, and c.) we’re able to correctly interpret it. So, it’s not just that the robot part is like, “Oh, there’s some light over there, plants like light, let’s go over to the light,” because that’d be completely independent of the plant itself. Instead, the system measures signals from the plant itself and takes direction from that. Whether it’s the right direction or not isn’t necessarily clear, but at least the plant is in the loop somewhere, rather than being just a passenger.

something different