Okay, so you have a glowing patunia.

It was very thrilling to me because I got the first full-size patunia ever.

I beat the influencers.

I got it like a three weeks early, organized a little exclusive on the patunia.

And the scientist who crafted the technology that made this

possible hand delivered it to our offices. Oh my God. Wow. And so I just met him

on the sidewalk and I rushed up to our office to the darkest part of our office

with this plant, which is the podcast recording studio,

turn out all the lights and waited.

And then slowly my eyes adjusted.

It does take a minute for your eyes to you know our eyes are like cameras the aperture has to sort of open to take in that low level of light but once it did you know stunning experience to suddenly see her first glowing plant outside of a lab.

This is staff writer Zoe Schlinger and what she's describing is a real plant, the first commercially available house plant that glows in the dark.

It glows in this very subdued sort of matte way. There's no other way to describe it. It's a bit like

moonlight. It's very contained. You really have the sense that it's glowing from

within. Which technically it is.

Scientists, including the one who delivered that plant to Zoe,

borrowed a cluster of five genes, some from a bioluminescent fungus,

and these genes somehow reroute the plant's metabolism through a process that emits light.

The company that developed the plants sold out of their first run of 50,000 petunias and probably many of those will show up on

your favorite Instagram feeds any minute. But Zoe was not doing it for the gram.

She's interested because she believes that the glowing

patunias offer the first chance at breaking through a deep human bias.

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