Do Plants Grow More During The Day Or At Night? A silly question? Whenever I posed this question in my plant science classes, most students thought I was joking. They presumed that plants grow only during the daytime, when the plants are photosynthesizing. If you’re like them, then it may…
Feelin’ No Pain? An amazing short story, entitled “The Sound Machine”, by the British writer Roald Dahl was first published in the September 17, 1949 issue of the New Yorker. In this story, “A man named Klausner invents a machine that can hear sound the human ear cannot hear. It…
“On Thursday, Dr. Kent Brantly thought he was going to die. It was the ninth day since the American missionary worker came down sick with Ebola in Liberia. His condition worsening by the minute, Brantly called his wife to say goodbye. Thankfully, the call was premature.Brantly is back on his…
New Meanings For “Medicinal Plants”? Plants have been used by humans for thousands of years as a source of medicines, some effective, many not so much (except perhaps as placebos). The first botanists were likely shaman herbalists who possessed the knowledge of which plants would kill and which plants would…
To make complex organisms takes specialized cells. Animals and flowering plants require specialized cells with distinct abilities in order to accomplish higher order functions – such as vision or flowering. It’s somewhat like a symphony orchestra. The orchestra integrates different musicians playing different instruments. The characteristic sounds of the instruments…
Last time we had a taste of HOW plants tell time. But what, if any, are the adaptive advantages to plants for doing so? It has long been presumed that the ability to anticipate day/night cycles gives organisms a fitness advantage. For instance, this would allow plants to anticipate daylight…
How Do We Know Plants Can Tell Time? The daily opening and closing of flowers and the rhythmic leaf movement of some plants suggests, even to the casual observer, that plants have an internal clock. To more careful observers, such as Carl Linnaeus and Charles Darwin, the evidence was clear…
A Brief Stroll Down Memory Lane Previously, we delved into the subject of “long-term” (weeks to months) plant “memory” by exploring what’s new on the subject of vernalization, that is, how some plants “remember” that they have experienced winter. In this case, a “cold” treatment of some plant species over…
Cellular Turbulence One of the fun things to observe using a light microscope is the movement of chloroplasts around the cell, especially in the plant Elodea. This movement is referred to as cyclosis or cytoplasmic streaming. Though you can’t easily see them using a light microscope, other organelles such as…