MIT’s Caleb Harper is something of a Rappaccini, wildly experimenting with incubated plants in his lab, hoping to make urban farming bloom, so that a growing world population can be fed. From Kevin Gray at Wired UK:

“Even amid the creative genius and goofy playfulness of MIT’s Media Lab near Boston — where giant inflatable sharks dangle from ceilings, workbenches are populated by unblinking robot heads and skinny scientists with mutton chops and Hawaiian shirts pay rapt attention to indecipherable whiteboard scribbles — Caleb Harper is an oddball. While his coworkers develop artificial –intelligence, smart prosthetics, folding cars and 3D neural-imaging systems, Harper is growing lettuce. In the past year, he has transformed a small lounge outside his fifth-floor lab into a high-tech garden worthy of a sci-fi film. Species of lettuce — as well as broccoli, tomatoes and basil — grow in mid-air, bathed in blue and red LED lights, their ghostly white roots dangling like jellyfish. They are stacked in shelves on an exterior glass wall, seven metres long and 2.5 metres high, meant to resemble the exterior of an office building. If Harper and his team get their way, entire city districts will one day look like this, a living and edible garden.

‘I believe there’s the possibility that we can change the world and change the food system,’ says Harper, a tall and stocky 34-year-old in a blue shirt and cowboy boots. ‘The potential for urban farming is huge. And it’s not all bullshit.’ Urban farming has begun to shift from its look-what-we-can-do phase of growing salads and vegetables on industrial rooftops and in empty city spaces, to a new wave of innovation that is being led by thinkers — and makers — like Harper. As founder of the year-old CityFARM project at MIT, Harper is figuring out how to use data science to optimise crop yields, deploy networked sensors to ‘listen’ to a plant’s water, nutrient and carbon needs, and deliver optimal light wavelengths — not just for photosynthesis but to change the flavour of foods. And he hopes to bolt his towering plantations on to the buildings in which we live and work.

His system promises to change the economics of industrial agriculture and to lessen its burden on the environment.”