exploring the inner workings of plants
Posted in Plant Development, Plant Signaling on Jul 3rd, 2010
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 table below. Briefly, the iPhone [...]
Posted in Plant Development, Plant Signaling on Jun 30th, 2010
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 I posed way back here, [...]
Posted in Plant Development, Plant Signaling on Jun 26th, 2010
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 (if it existed) in plants. [...]
Posted in Plant Development, Plant Signaling on Jun 26th, 2010
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? Last time, I started with [...]
Posted in Plant Development, Plant Signaling on Jun 21st, 2010
Is the New iPhone More Aware of It’s 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 his presentation.) About half way through his talk, Steve enumerates the sensors (see the list above) built into [...]
Posted in Plant Signaling, Plant Stress, Secondary Compounds on Apr 23rd, 2009
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 organisms (pathogens) such as viruses, [...]
Posted in Plant Signaling on Apr 12th, 2009
Electrical Signals in Plants? Do plants have a nervous system? Most scientists would certainly say: NO! (At least not the complex nervous system of animals.) But scientists have been able to detect transient electrical signals somewhat analogous to action potentials under certain situations in plants. Such situations involve the classic examples of thigmosnasty in plants, [...]
Posted in Plant Signaling on Apr 12th, 2009
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 time loathed this book. He [...]
HowPlantsWork Weblog
exploring the inner workings of plants
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