There’s an effort to make street lighting more eco-friendly.
In fact, these lights don’t use any electricity at all.
This is a project from the startup Glowee, and it’s in the French community of Rambouillet, near Paris.
Glowee is developing street lights there that are bioluminescent.
Their system uses tubes filled with a marine bacteria found off the coast that gives off a natural blue light.
They add nutrients to the tubes when needed, and there’s also a system that introduces oxygen into the tubes, which helps the bacteria give off light.
When it’s time for the lights to go off, they close off the oxygen.
It’s a carbon neutral lighting system that requires fewer resources to produce than even the most energy efficient LED bulbs.
Of course, it’s still early days for this process.
Right now the tubes give off about 15 lumens at full strength, and the European Union requires street lights to be much brighter.
And some scientists aren’t sure whether the system will work as well in, say, winter, as it does in warmer weather.
Glowee officials are convinced they can overcome these challenges.
Though if they get inspired, would you call it a lightbulb over the head moment, or a glowing-bacteria-tube over the head moment?
It was around this time in 1965 that a woman in Connecticut, Bernice Wyszynski, saw a great deal.
An ad said she could buy a 1962 Pontiac Tempest for just 1,395 bananas.
The ad meant bananas as a slang reference to dollars, but since there was no dollar sign, Wyszynski showed up at the dealer with actual bananas.
When the dealer said no, she filed a complaint of false advertising.
The United Fruit Company brokered a deal: they gave Wyszynski enough fruit to cover the actual cost of her car, and the dealer donated the bananas to a children’s hospital.
Sounds like an ap-peel-ing agreement.
French Town to Light its Streets With Bacteria Luminescence That Needs No Electricity (Good News Network)
Car sold for 1395 bananas (Weird Universe)