Nothing's Impossible: Google Tulip
Talk to your plants without looking crazy! Happy April Fool's Day! Today, I was introduced to Google's clever April Fool's Day joke on the R-Bioinformatic's Slack channel. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the fictional Google Home application dealt with translating plant signaling and communication to human-speak. A combination of natural language processing, signal processing, and some good, old-fashioned biomedical engineering. The advertisement tapped into a long-forgotten dream. A dream that exploited this inherent interconnectedness of the world. That somehow, at the basal level, we are all able to understand each other. I remember the awe I had as a junior in high school learning about the different ways that plants communicated with each other. Whether it was via the small nodules on the roots or the hormones they released into the air, plants have this secret, untapped language we are only beginning to decipher....
