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Now Even Thirsty Houseplants Demand Attention With DIY Twitter Kit
Posted by Kit Eaton at 8:33 PM on October 29, 2008
Back in February we showed you a slightly botched-together system that lets your houseplants Twitter, but now there's a complete kit available. After soldering it together, you simply shove it deep into your plant's pot, connect it up to with an ethernet cable, and when its moisture sensors detect that you've been a bit lax in watering it'll Twitter with a "water me please" prompt. Ignoring it won't work as it'll step up the game with an urgent Tweet, and over-watering'll earn you a scolding. It's possibly the only way I'd remember to feed Reg, my sadly dessicated lemon tree...though at this rate of digitizing the average home is at risk of networking overload. Out now for $US99. [ via OhGizmo]
We all know that plants tend to grow towards the sunlight—but plants fixed with a set of these robotic legs would actually be able to walk around and find the light as it moves around the room. So, despite your best efforts to kill them, robo-plants will be stayin' alive (too bad there is no 
Oh, my, this is a sad robot. It's a robotic plant, and all it does is nod at you when you talk to it. Apparently designed for the loneliest people on the planet, it provides as much comfort as an inanimate object designed to move up and down automatically can provide. It makes me sad to even think about some poor shut-in using this. [
In yet another attempt to 
Sega Toys knows what Japanese people want: something to complain to that couldn't possibly think badly of you. It's called Pekoppa, and it's got a chip inside that will bend, stretch, and lean the plant according to how you speak to it. According to Sega it's "a good listener," will have 200,000 units floating around Japan come September. Do they have dogs in Japan, or have all the North Koreans abducted them all? [
A Japanese science and engineering team have created this crazy artificial houseplant with high-efficiency organic thin-film 
This is Digital Pot (no: not what you're thinking,) a concept from designer Junyi Heo that's a 21st Century plant pot. It's filled with sensors measuring temperature, soil moisture and the like. It lets you know the results on a display with a mix of emoticons and symbols, so your plants can tell you what they want (and no: they probably don't want you to smoke them.) It's even clever enough to drain itself if you're a chronic over-waterer like me, and charges via USB— also sending its data to your PC for your perusal. Just a concept, but a rather cute one, don't you think? [
Peter set up a robotic watering can to take directions from an iPhone. When Safari's screen state goes from horizontal to vertical, it sends a status update to a webserver via javascript that sets the watering can up or down. Pretty simple but clever setup. [
The moon is a nice place to visit, but you'd never want to live there. Because of the lack of breathable air? Nah. There are no flowers. But now, scientists have successfully grown marigolds in crushed anorthosite, a rocky Earth-based soil that is quite similar to the stuff we see on the moon.
We rarely get excited about seeds here on Giz, but the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway is a remarkably daunting structure that looks looks like the lair lovechild of Batman's cave and Superman's 
