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 Development on Mar 17th, 2010
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. 1 below), Barbara Strasser and [...]
Posted in Plant Development on Aug 16th, 2009
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, then why would it’s gravity [...]
Posted in Plant Biological Clock, Plant Development on Jul 25th, 2009
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 paper Dr. Beeson divided the [...]
Posted in Plant Development on Jul 20th, 2009
Walking on the Moon On July 20, 1969 Apollo 11 crew members Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first humans to walk on the moon. With the 40th anniversary of this first moon landing currently in news, I thought it would be interesting to investigate what’s known about the effects, if any, of the [...]
Posted in Flowering, Plant Development on May 30th, 2009
Getting a Grip Ever wonder how a bee or a butterfly can land on a flower and not fall off? Me neither. But thanks to researchers in the UK, we now have another reason why flowers are so marvelous. Flowering plants have evolved chemical signals to attract pollinators to their flowers. Such signals include volatile [...]
HowPlantsWork Weblog
exploring the inner workings of plants
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