How’s this for a confusing circle: Plants use light to grow from soil, but now we can use soil to grow light. The chemical reaction of copper, zinc and the biological life in soil creates the energy that gives you the light by which to read John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener.

Speaking of books, this lamp is made for the book reader’s bedside table. It’s shaped suspiciously like a house in a preschooler’s drawing: A square with a perfect triangle on top, which becomes a bookrest, ensuring you never lose your spot when you hit the hay.

What’s more plentiful than soil? Gravity! This lamp doesn’t have batteries, just a bag hanging on string. Fill the bag with dirt or rocks, and lift it up. It slowly descends, winding the internal gears of GravityLight, which results in enough energy to light the room for about 25 minutes. It was created for developing countries in which electricity is a precious commodity, but it wouldn’t be out of place in an engineering major’s dorm room.

“Lit up” is an old expression describing someone’s who's drunk. It’s pretty fitting with this lamp. Just buy the wine. Take wine out of box. Drink wine while converting the wine box into a lamp, which is built-in. Toast to your new nifty lamp. Repeat, and you won’t be the only thing that’s “lit up.”

If this lamp looks like a pitcher, that’s because it is. Sort of. Only instead of storing that water for your hydration pleasure, it turns it into light. When you fill it with water, that H2O reacts with a carbon stick covered in magnesium powder that’s inside the lamp, which creates light. Walter White had to have something to do with this one — probably a Gray Matter Technologies creation.

Bored with the crazy lamps you’ve seen so far? Fine, then. Create your own with Thomas Hick’s origami-inspired lamp. It’s created from a pre-scored sheet of stainless steel, which you fold into whatever shape your heart desires. Just make sure you leave room for the light to shine through.

You may not speak French, but I’m sure you’ve figured out this is an incredibly impractical lamp made from chocolate. Like, the kind you eat. Created by Swedish artist Alexander Lervik, this lamp had the lifespan of a dayfly. But like a supernova, it remained dazzling (and delicious) for its existence in a Stockholm art museum. Light burst through the dark chocolate, imitating dawn. Check out the video here.

Mushrooms have a few different implications, some of a wink-wink nudge-nudge variety and some of an Italian-cooking variety. Now, they might refer to light. Mush-Lume’s lampshade, created by Danielle Trofe, is grown by taking agricultural byproducts — think corn stalks and such — then covering them in mushroom mycelium, which acts as a binding agent as it grows. It’s then heated and dried, ensuring that mushrooms won’t take over your living room. If you grow bored of it, just throw it away as it’ll biodegrade.

We certainly don’t condone violence, but folks are always talking about “punching” or “shooting” your lights out. What if you actually could? Bang! lets you do just that. The lamp comes with a plastic gun. Pull the trigger from across the room, and the lampshade falls over, turning the lights off immediately. Either the coolest lamp or the most boring virtual reality game ever.

Know how you always wanted a lamp powered by human blood? Oh yeah, no one does, not even Dracula. He likes blood, but not light. But that’s kind of the point. Designer and artist Mike Thompson created the aptly named Blood Lamp to point out that precious resources are, in fact, precious. Break the top off, cut your finger on the jagged glass and mix an included powder with your blood. It’ll create a glow, though Thompson’s never explained how. But that’s probably for the best.

Brave Little Toaster fans like me have been waiting for living furniture since we were in our single-digits, but the dream always seemed as dead as the air conditioning from the movie’s opening scene. Turns out, it’s not. Alvaro Cassinelli, a customer of Trossen Robotics, attached some Japanese garden lanterns to PhantomX Quadruped robots. Each is programmed differently and uses infrared rangefinders to “see” obstacles, which allows them to wander around the garden. Perfect for anyone who needs a conversation-starter for an upcoming BBQ. Check them out in action.