Is the New iPhone More Aware of Its Environment Than a Typical Flowering Plant? Today I was watching a bit of Steve Jobs’ recent WWDC keynote address introducing the newest iPhone. (Click on image below to view part of his presentation.) About half way through his talk, Steve enumerates the…
Life Without Phytochromes? What would happen if you deprived a plant of most of its ability to sense the environmental information provided by light? That’s the question scientists were attempting to answer by genetically removing all the genes coding for the plant photoreceptor phytochrome. In a recent report (see Ref.…
Does the Moon’s Gravity Affect Trees? To me this sounds like a silly question. Why? Because I’d no more expect the moon’s gravity to affect trees than it affects the water in a pond or swimming pool. If the moon doesn’t elicit tidal effects in such small bodies of water,…
The Biology of Moonlight? The moon may have effects on animal behavior (see here for example), but does it affect plants? Last time I introduced the scientific literature on the subject by referring to a 1946 paper by Beeson (see ref. 1 below) published in the journal Nature. In this…
Walking on the Moon (Updated) On July 20, 1969 Apollo 11 crew members Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first humans to walk on the moon. Since the 50th anniversary of this first moon landing will occur in 2019 (get your commemorative T-Shirt here), I think it would be…
The Power of Movement in Plants Most of a flowering plant’s development and physiology is regulated by plant hormones. The first of these chemical signals to be isolated and characterized was auxin. In the 1930’s, after the initial discovery of auxin by Frits Went in 1928, he, Kenneth Thimann, and…