Plant memory? Can some plants access past experiences so that this information can be incorporated into new responses, such as flowering? The answer is: Yes! (as illustrated in the photo on the the left). This picture shows a cabbage plant that was grown for five years in the laboratory of…
Move It Or Lose It The past couple of posts have had to do with plant movements. A phototropic or heliotropic plant may grow toward or track the sun, respectively, so as not to lose optimal photosynthetic activity. And vining plants move up vertical supports so as not to lose…
And The Winner Is………. At the beginning of this series, I wondered if the impressive array of sensors in the new iPhone rendered it “smarter” than the average plant, at least when it came to sensing and responding to its surroundings. A summary of my comparison is shown in the…
Why They Call It A “Smartphone” Arguably, the new iPhone 4 is the most advanced smartphone currently available. But is the iPhone 4 so smart that it’s actually smarter than the average flowering plant? (At least when it comes to sensing and responding to its environment.) This is the question…
3D Motion Sensing – iPhone Versus Plant If an iPhone can sense its surroundings better than a plant can, does that make the iPhone more “intelligent”? To try to answer this question, in previous posts, I compared the iPhone’s light and proximity sensors and the geomagnetic sensor to the equivalent…
Is the iPhone 4 More Aware of Its Surroundings Than a Typical Plant? That’s the question that I posed in my previous post. Because of the array of sophisticated sensors included in the new iPhone, could this inanimate object actually be better at sensing its environment than a living plant?…
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…