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Call me a cynic, but I think it wouldn't be long until those trees were chopped down by someone wanting to extract the gold to sell it (a bit like how people steal cable from construction sites, or even old church roofs for the metal value).

The thought made me a bit sad since the idea of magical glowing trees lining our streets was so beatiful. Hm. I guess that at least means I'm not as cynic as I thought, which is good, I guess. :)

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Happily there are too many people that haven't heard that things cannot be done, so they attempt... and do them.

To me this seems more like a proof of concept article, yet, it opens an area of research which may in fact succeed after some time. And there are a so many easy ways to make something like this hard to steal- I won't go into details because this is not the important here.

or you could just use flourescent proteins instead of gold. The project seems more like a solution looking for an answer, honestly.

Nanoparticles of gold aren't going to make you a millionaire unless you knock down a rainforest the size of South America.

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