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The humble house plant could soon start earning its keep by lighting up a room, if new research from MIT pans out. Engineers have hacked watercress plants to make them glow for a few hours at a time, and while it’s currently only about as bright as those old stars you might have stuck to your ceiling as a kid, the long-term plan is to develop plants that you could read by to reduce the need for electric lighting.

The idea of a glowing plant is not particularly new. They’ve been promised by Kickstarter campaigns for years, including the likes of Bioglow and Glowing Plants, but those startups have since gone bust. Although we’re not going to pretend that this new project is immune from meeting the same fate, having the backing of MIT scientists gives us a little more hope that the glowing plants might eventually bear fruit.

The work comes from the same “plant nanobionics” team that recently designed explosive-detecting spinach and leaf sensors that can alert farmers at the first sign of thirsty crops. In this case, the researchers wanted to tackle lighting, which accounts for about 20 percent of energy consumption worldwide.

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A new story on my work out from Bodyhacks. (Please remember I don’t write these stories nor pick the photos, but I’m honored people I don’t know choose to cover my work and #libertairan governor campaign however they wish): http://bodyhacks.com/zoltan-istvan-libertarian-transhumanist…alifornia/ #transhumanism


On the 2018 California ballot, the good people of California will have a chance to vote not only for a candidate who stands for a unique political agenda but one who stands for an equally unique non-political ideology. Zoltan Istvan [real name] will run on the Libertarian party’s platform, but with a transhumanist agenda.

He’s not the first transhumanist to run. In Australia, Meow Meow Ludo Disco Gamma [also real name] ran for office on a science platform last year, but that was way down under. This is ‘Merica, and it’s not the first time Istvan has run either. He put his name in the hat with Hilary and Donald in the last presidential election. [Psst, he didn’t win.]

Zoltan is not only a transhumanist in philosophy, he’s a practicing preacher. He even wrote a best-selling book, The Transhumanist Wager, to back up his beliefs.

Istvan believes humanity stands on the precipice of transhumanism as a normal state of affairs. Technology, he sees as a way to level the playing field of inequality. But, does anyone take him seriously?

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I’m interviewed in the documentary (which I appear in but haven’t seen yet). Naturally, I support creating super people with science & technology (a main goal of #transhumanism), just not using unethical or exclusionary methods to do so. http://www.wavelength-entertainment.com/genius-factory/ #GeniusFactory

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Lots of futurists are in it. A 5-min section on my #transhumanism work, including the Transhumanist Bill of Rights (image of me below writing the first version on steps of US Supreme Court), is in the doc. My section starts about 45:30, and there are some YouTube versions out there too now (google the title Cyborgs Entre Nosotros) if there are issues to watch outside Spain: http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/la-noche-tematica/noche-t…s/4341838/

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The show Robosapiens (about #robots) aired last night and had about a 5 minute section on my #transhumanism work. The footage is from a while back but just aired yesterday. My part is in English:


“Liever een computer die de nucleaire codes heeft dan Trump? Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan is ervan overtuigd dat kunstmatige intelligentie politici ooit zal kunnen vervangen. Meer in Robo sapiens, vanavond om 20.15u @NPO2

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Some anniversary info from the Transhumanist Party, which I founded a few years back. This growing political party—under new leadership now—continues to prove important and inspiring. Congratulations to all those who have helped it forward! http://transhumanist-party.org/2017/11/25/ustp-chairman-anniversary/ #transhumanism


Gennady Stolyarov II

On November 17, 2016, I became the Chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party. It was a turbulent era in American politics, although it now appears to me to have been a distinct prior epoch. The offer of Chairmanship from Zoltan Istvan came at exactly the right time. I was seriously considering emigrating from the United States, which would have been a mistake. For this role, however, an expatriate Chairman would not do; Zoltan asked me to remain for at least six months – hopefully a year – and then re-assess the situation. One does not get handed leadership of a political party often (or virtually ever), so this was a unique opportunity to make a difference in American politics in a constructive way, with instant gains in prominence, and without the distasteful maneuvering that many conventional political figures feel compelled to engage in to attain a comparable position.

It has been a year, and I am staying. I have indeed reassessed the situation, or perhaps the situation has been transformed so considerably than the already transitional interpretive framework of late 2016 can no longer adequately describe our present political reality. Whereas then the tumult seemed to have stemmed from a single source, we now inhabit a distinctly different sort of chaotic era, in which the chaos emanates from virtually all partisan factions espousing conventional political ideologies. The United States has not, despite my fears at the time, succumbed to dictatorship or totalitarianism – and, despite some ill-advised policy decisions and unfortunate increases in certain forms of intolerance and hatred (on both the right and the left), there are no waves of nativist “ethnic cleansing”; there are, thankfully and for now, no massive riots in the vast majority of cities, the vast majority of the time.

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In this new Business Insider article, my ideas on peak labor and Universal Basic Income are pitted against MIT scientist Andrew McAfee. I’m excited to see my government shrinking Federal Land Dividend proposal getting out there. Story by journalist Dylan Love: http://www.businessinsider.com/will-universal-basic-income-s…?r=UK&IR=T #transhumanism #libertarian


Does free money change nothing or everything?

Universal basic income (UBI) is the hottest idea in social security since Franklin Roosevelt signed the New Deal in 1935, and it is fairly understood as free money given to citizens by their government. Though the idea traces its roots back to the 16th century as a “cure for theft,” UBI has gained new consideration and momentum these days, as high-profile techno-doomsayers like SpaceX founder Elon Musk point to it as an economic solution for big problems predicted to arrive soon.

The future is coming, Musk and his ilk warn, and it’s bringing increased automation and intelligent technologies with it that will eventually overtake the human capacity for work. All-capable robots will cause widespread human unemployment, goes the thinking, plaguing our income and livelihood for generations.

If the “robots are stealing jobs” on the level that the party line portends, then UBI presents itself as a compelling solution to this unusual, hypothetical problem. There’s already some real-world precedent for it: a UBI pilot program in Finland sees the government send a small amount of money to 2,000 unemployed Finns each month, and the initial results are quite positive.

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