From Glowing Plants to “Talking” Plants As usual, the plant news of February 2016, ranged from the molecular level to ecosystem level, from single plant cells to whole plants. And since I can’t discern any common themes, I’ll go with the stories that I “tweeted” during February of last year…
Happy New Year! Since 2012, here at the “How Plants Work” blog, I’ve ended the year by taking a look back at the plant-research news from my HPW Twitter feed over the past twelve months, and then sharing a few of the “tastier” tidbits, month-by-month. So, welcome to the fifth-annual…
numb (adjective): “devoid of sensation; insensible” Pain in the Ash? In the previous post, I posed the question whether or not plants experienced something analogous to pain when physically wounded. I concluded that they did….depending on how one defines “pain”. At the present time, when even academic biologists are expanding…
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…
You Talkin’ To Me? Dodder (genus Cuscuta) is an example of a parasitic plant. That is, it derives some or all of its nutritional requirements from another living plant. In a previous post, we saw how dodder seedlings may “sniff out” their victims. But dodder seedlings may do much more…
Amazing, Amusing, & Surprizing A couple of weeks ago I was perusing the online edition of Wired magazine and spotted the following headline: “The Internet of Vegetables: How Cyborg Plants Can Monitor Our World”. With a title like this, how could I not click on the headline and read the…
Why decaf coffee? Have you ever had a cup of really good decaf coffee? Me neither. (Probably because the decaf coffee results from chemical processing of normal coffee beans.) But why would anyone want coffee without caffeine? As illustrated by the old Gary Larson cartoon on the left, sometimes you…
It Depends on How You Define “Immune System” Plants get sick. That is, they can be infected by pathogens. But after hundreds of millions of years of pathogen attacks, plants are still here. So, they must have ways to get well after being sick. Plants can defend themselves against disease-causing…