Posts tagged with ‘plants’

Plants apparently communicate with each other through clicking sounds

It’s been known for a while that plants can communicate chemically with each other, but now it also appears that on occasion, they can also communicate through noises, by using tiny clicking sounds. Yes, plants talk.

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Life will find a way: Scientists and tourists put Antarctica at risk for biological invasion

Life has an incredible knack for finding niches in which to thrive. And in Antarctica, with no permanent human population and only a very small and controlled number of tourists and scientists visiting each year, life has managed to hitch a ride to the most inhospitable continent on Earth in the form of tiny seeds attached to shoes, clothing and bags.

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Thirty two thousand year old Arctic plant brought back to life

While everyone likes to talk about bringing woolly mammoths or dinosaurs back to life, sometimes you have to start small. Like a tiny Arctic flower that’s been extinct for over 32,000 years. Russian scientists have apparently brought back the narrow-leafed campion, after finding a seed in an ancient rodent’s burrow.

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How the first plant came into existence

It was an incredibly long and complex journey for life to go from chains of proteins, to single-celled organisms to things like dinosaurs and plants and people and pandas. But as far as plants, scientists feel certain they have an idea of how single celled life started creating energy via photosynthesis to become plants.

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Planets with two suns may have plants that are black, not green

On Earth, most plants take on a mostly green hue, due to the fact that green is the color that absorbs the most light from our yellow sun that plants crave. But on other planets that might have foliage, green might not be the dominant color. In fact, on a planet with two suns, the color that could be most advantageous could be black. Black plants. That doesn’t sound appetizing.

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Science creates the first artificial leaf that’s 10 times more efficient in creating energy from photosynthesis

A scientist at MIT (the wacky mad scientist looking guy above) claims that he’s reached one of the “Holy Grails of science”… creating an artificial leaf that can create energy from nothing but water and sunlight at a much higher efficiency than the real thing.

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Five Plant Defense Mechanisms (That Backfired)

You should avoid doing drugs as much as possible (usually).

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The smell of freshly cut grass is actually a plant distress call

Picture unrelated.

With summer almost gone here in the far superior northern hemisphere leaves with it the smell of freshly cut grass. But what we find a pleasant and refreshing smell is actually the smell of thousands of blades of grass panicking and sending out chemicals that attract insects that are supposed to come to the aid of the plant that assumes it’s being eaten by other insects.

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