Augmented Trees

I am starting my morning this Sunday like I start most of my Sunday mornings. I get up and stretch and then clean up the mess I might have left the previous night. I start to cook some nine-grain dry cereal which can be bought for $2 per pound at the local Berkeley Bowl grocery store. I put peanut butter and agave syrup in the cereal and warm up some coffee that my roommate might have left earlier in the morning. I turn on my computer and some kind of minimalist classical-style modern composer starts playing over the speakers from the Phillip Glass channel on Pandora. I eat as I type and I write about whatever is on my mind. Today it is my routine, obviously, and I will be meeting with my Landlord and his wife for the first time since moving in early last month tomorrow. I intend to write about this meeting should it be outstanding. Last night, I went to see a Phish concert playing at the Greek theatre, a colleseum-style concert hall open to the outside. It is located on the side of a fairly steep hill behind UC Berkeley campus. The great thing about this theatre is the >100 number of people which congregate outside, behind and above the theatre to observe, listen and enjoy the music which permeates through the crowd, the air, and upwards toward the back of the parking lot which houses a burm which can be comfortably sat or camped upon. Even better are the trees which line the back fence of the parking lot which have in store a wonderful lofty view of the concert stage. If one can navigate steep terrain like a mountain goat then one is in for an experience which is hard to compare to anything else other than monkey's sitting in a familial tree observing the African savanna. I found myself up high in a tree which was large enough to house four homo sapiens comfortably and more had someone else been brave enough to join our family. With me was my friend Mark Lipke who is a graduate student in the lab I work in now. He is a self-proclaimed odd person with interests in skateboarding, longboarding, homemade fireworks, improvisational music jams, and illuminated aluminum foil art among many other things I am sure. Mark has an older out-of-tune piano which I fantasize about being able to tune and play beautifully someday. It was Mark's great idea to hang out and watch the Phish concert from the parking-lot trees and I was happy to join him. Our other companion was Allegra Liberman-Martin, she is an incoming graduate student like I working in the same lab and shares a similar interest in new music.

The coffee this morning is delicious. I woke up with the thought, wow I am waking up late again. I particularly remember getting up to shut off my alarm clock and climbing back into my bed. Oh my bed, a 4-inch thick Posture-Pedic foam pad placed directly on the floor with an added sleeping bag for additional padding. I am not in a hurry to replace it because I am tight on money this month and probably the next month too. I will mention the ideas I had about trees yesterday. One was developed last night with the fourth member of our homo sapien family while lounging high in a great tree. We all know how strong and large trees can be and we all know about tree forts and some of us even know about tree homes, but what about a super post-modern tree that can be fitted with high-tech light weight materials to make beds, flooring, walls, ceilings, sinks, counter-tops, toilets, tables, chairs, etc. Materials like kevlar, carbon fiber, carbon nanotubes, and recycled polymers are already very strong and could do this job well in the near future. I know there are lots of loose ends to innovate like a plumbing system, electricity, and running water. However, electricity could be created using a modified natural tree similar to the palm trees which line the west bay of San Francisco sidewalks. These tall and thick trees have lights and electrical boxes strapped to their trunks to illuminate sidewalks and they truly inspire my future direction of research. Modified chlorophyll, Magnesium- and Zinc-chelating cyclical carbon-, nitrogen-, oxygen-, and potentially other element-based molecules. These molecular systems which convert light into chemical energy in the form of sugar for trees, plants and bacteria are the source of my second idea. By using genetically modified tree proteins, which will anabolize diverse augmented chlorophyll molecules, their leaves could capture more sunlight and potentially convert it into sugar, electricity and light. The leaves of these artificial arbors would be black since they would absorb the entire visible spectrum of light. Besides having chlorophyll which would generate the glucose for the tree to survive, there would be chlorophyll designed to convert photons, or light quanta, into electricity by a process similar in modern organic dye-sensitized solar cells. Successful implementation of chlorophyll augmentation could also give trees the ability to glow and produce interior and exterior lighting by induced photon emittance from stored energy in Cellulose--polymerized sugar molecules analogous to human liver-based glycogen storage. This phenomena is known as chemiluminescence and has been observed in shore-line chemiluminescent jelly fish and forest fungi around the world. The process has been narrowed down to a group of proteins and small molecules called Luciferase and luciferin, respectively. Thus, trees would again become our source of light, energy, shelter, comfort and home.