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…
Plants on Stilts Because plants are “rooted” to the place where they germinate, they don’t move. Indeed, it’s become almost a cliche to describe plants as displaying a “sessile life-style”, especially when contrasting them to animals. But are all plants necessarily sessile organisms, never moving from the spot where they…
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…
When A Blink Takes A Minute Does it take you two hours to tie your shoes? Do you enjoy a Beethoven symphony played over the course of 24 hours ? If so, you may be living on “plant time”. As we saw in a previous post, there are many examples…
Did That Plant Just Move? To our frame of time, plants are sessile organisms, that is, they don’t move. The idea of moving plants is so strange to us that it typically exists only within the realms of science fiction and fantasy. As previously mentioned, there are very unusual plants…
“Springing the Trap” In the previous post I suggested that the Venus flytrap works something like a mousetrap. And I described how the “trap” is hydraulically set. (For a more thorough explanation of how the Venus flytrap snaps, please see this PDF file). But how do the trigger-hairs on the…
Do Plants Have a Nervous System? Back in the heady (hazy?) days of the early 1970’s, a book was making the rounds on college campuses that suggested plants possessed a sort of sentience. This book was The Secret Life of Plants. The professor teaching my Introductory Botany class at the…