Mind-bending botany

Fly orchid.

People who fixate on deep space and other planets for inspirational organisms really haven't been paying enough attention closer to home. We already have the most bizarre life forms imaginable, right under our noses...

Plants.

"Plants? Plants are boring!" you say.

Or not. Here are 10 amazing things about plants that will break your disbelieving little brain. You can't make this stuff up:

1. Plants can swim! Some single-celled green algae (and other plants, like euglenids and dinoflagellates) have flagella they use to swim from place to place for their entire life, not just as gametes. How do they know where they want to go? Well...
2. Plants can see! Yep, that's what I said. Some plants have an eye spot that can perceive light and tell the flagellum to whip them to a better location. So much for the Creationist's "half an eye is no use" hypothesis.
3. Plants hunt! Many dinoflagellate species are photosynthetic, but most of those are actually mixotrophic--that is, they both make their own food, and eat prey. Noctiluca even eats fish eggs! And speaking of amazing dinoflagellates, these tiny plants are responsible for stunning bioluminescent tides.
4. Plants are made of glass! Diatoms are tiny golden-brown algae that consist of about 98% silicon: almost pure glass. These plants have a bit of squishy genetic material sandwiched

   

   Naked Man orchid

   between two nesting valves that look like glass petri dishes. Typically, they reproduce asexually, with the squishy stuff dividing, and each half taking one of the valves and regrowing the other. The problem is that they always regrow the nested valve, so some of the diatoms get smaller every generation until they finally have to have sex to reset the size. Billions of dead diatoms ultimately fall to the sea floor--forming layers up to hundreds of meters deep--and eventually become compressed into fine-grained stone called chert. 
5. Plants have alternating generations! Okay, this one is hard to conceptualize. Imagine that you are human, but when you have a child, it will be a cheetah. And your parents were

   

   Flying Egret orchid

   earthworms. Your grandkids will be earthworms again. That's kind of how alternating generations work in some plants (well, ignoring that humans, cheetahs and earthworms don't have the same DNA). In many cases, they are so different that we thought for a long time that these stages were actually different species. The king of complex life histories is the wheat leaf rust, which goes through 5 different spores, living in 2 host plant species along the way. 
6. Flowers and fruit invented beauty! Before flowers came along, plants reproduced many inefficient ways; sometimes with spores, like ferns and fungi do; or by broadcasting incredible volumes of pollen to the wind, like pine trees do. Either way, you're just kind of throwing a Hail Mary and hoping it hits something useful. Works, but it's pretty random; and you certainly don't need to advertise, explaining why mushrooms are so cryptic (and often toxic). Flowers and fruits figured out that if they looked

   

   Hooker's lips

   pretty enough (and tasted nice), they could lure unsuspecting animals into disseminating their genetic material for them. Clever. Which leads us to...
7. Plants train humans! Thank Michael Pollan for this one. He wrote an entire (excellent) book about it.
8. Some single-celled plants can work together to form larger creatures with specialized organs! Slime molds consist of perfectly functional single-celled protists that sometimes come together to get things done as a big, sticky puddle. For instance, and without any top-down management, some of these cells will choose to gang up to hunt (see #3), or to form fruiting bodies to produce spores.
9. Some single-celled plants can work together to process information...without a brain! Remember I just mentioned that slime molds can organize without anyone telling them what to do? Well, they can also problem-solve without a brain.
10. And last, but hardly least, Plants create chemical energy from sunlight, and build their bodies from air! If you didn't know this from almost your first memory, you would be

    

    Flying Duck orchid

    flabbergasted. That the solid body of a Giant Sequoia is built from little more than the same gaseous carbon dioxide you exhale with every breath is astounding. And that photosynthesis changes sunlight into sugar is mysterious alchemy of the highest order. It's so familiar that it's hard to understand just how bizarre and rare it actually is. In point of fact, only 5% or less of all species on Earth are autotrophs. Everybody else eats. And of those measly 5%, all of them use chlorophyll to accomplish their magic. Chlorophyll is found in the chloroplast, an organelle that probably originated as an independent unicellular blue-green algae that was co-opted by other cells for their own use. Other organelles are thought to have originated like this, too: the mitochondria, for instance, which is like a little power generator (we know this because these organelles have their own unique DNA, and cannot be made by their host cell, but must be inherited during cell division). So, life on earth is dependent upon the strange occurrence of an organism that figured out how to eat sunshine, and the fact that other organisms thought it was such a good idea that they adopted that other living organism into their own cell structure. This is weird. In evolution, a good idea usually pops up many times: even eyes evolved independently 50-100 times (depending on how you define "eye"). 

So, if your life is lacking in awe, spend a few moments meditating on this...then go have a salad!

Photo source.

GoPro as scientific instrument?

Yes, it's probably the most ridiculously narcissistic device ever invented. Without doubt, more information coding and storage has been wasted on self-aggrandizement with this little camera than in the entire previous history of egomania.

But like many scientific sensors and instruments of the past--like the telescope, microscope, oscilloscope, geiger counter, IR and X-ray film, EEG, even the scientific method itself--the inexpensive, yet incredibly capable GoPro camera platform is providing a new sensory organ that allows people to see and interact with both the familiar world and its hidden (to us) aspects in ways no one ever has before.

Seeing outside of the expected and familiar is the first step in the creation of new knowledge whether created by art, or by science. 

Here are a few of the most thought-provoking GoPro videos I've seen. Post others in the comments...

Home-grown spaceflight:



Knee replacement surgery:



Marlin deciding whether to eat:



Inside a dishwasher:


On a hubcap:

Non-traditional electronics

Calculation doesn't have to be done with silicon transistors.

You can use jelly...


NOISY JELLY from Raphaël Pluvinage on Vimeo.

or marbles...



or Legos...



or bronze gears...



or DNA (okay, this is just digital storage)...



so, how about this?...



...or there's water. Kudos to this guy for programming his fluidic logic gate simulation with a crappy video game!

A little machine music...

What is it about House of the Rising Sun?...

Artificial leaves.

Organ culture

After his aviation career, Lucky Lindy was a medical pioneer in organ culture back in the 1930's? Wow.

And as if 3-D printing of plastics wasn't cool enough already...

Wah!

javascript:void(0)

Swimming fish cause ocean currents!

This is a pretty incredible twist on the whole ocean current/climate change story: turns out that the motion of the ocean can't be entirely accounted for by weather. What's the missing energy input? Swimming fish & other sea creatures.

"If swimming generates tide-scale forces, then 'it has an impact on global climate'. This is a rather novel twist to the whole climate story,” said William Dewar, a Florida State University oceanographer.

So, apparently overfishing causes climate change in addition to its other issues.

Do we own our thoughts?

Helen Keller was not born deaf & blind, but became so at the age of about 1-1/2 years after a bout of meningitis. At the age of 7, she was freed by a teacher who was able to help her connect sign language to concepts representing reality.

Keller says of that experience that it was like an awakening. "Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten--a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me." Before this, her world seems to have been a swirl of thoughtless emotion, "This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure."

Hm. No thoughts without words? Then whose words create our thoughts?

Soon after her release from permanent isolation, Helen Keller wrote a story called "The Frost King" for one of her mentors, in appreciation for his efforts to reach out to her.

Unfortunately, the story was discovered to have much in common with a previously published story. Helen was so mortified by the unconscious plagiarism [cryptomnesia] that she never wrote fiction again. Her writings suggest that she never again really trusted her thoughts to be her own, either.

Helen is not alone--there are many examples of apparently innocent cryptomnesia in the field of intellectual property, including incidents involving George Harrison & Vladimir Nabokov.

Keller was a ravenous reader & catching up for lost time quickly, but she simply didn't have as much background to draw on & mix together, so the story similarities leaped right out.

But do any of us actually own our thoughts?

While clearly a "forbidden experiment", social isolation appears to result in psychosis, while language deprivation experiments seem to lead inevitably to muteness. Although problematic to interpret, so called, "wild children", who are raised apart from human contact do not develop normal mental lives.

Even when doing science, the most objective activity humans are capable of,

We are all a part of a cultural matrix, which, even if unconsciously, affects the way we think. As Schiebinger puts it "We cannot free ourselves of cultural influence; we cannot think or act outside a culture. Language shapes even as it articulates thought."

Some scientists have proposed--as in the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis--that "different language patterns yield different patterns of thought. This idea challenges the possibility of perfectly representing the world with language, because it implies that the mechanisms of any language condition the thoughts of its speaker community."

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached ... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. (Sapir, 1958 [1929], p. 69)

And in less objective activities, language is even more influential. Culture wars erupt over language used to oppress social factions. The never-ending flap over "political correctness" demonstrates this, even though PC itself originated as an overdue response to suppression of women & minorities through language. The irony is usually lost in the heat of battle.

So how, specifically, can words influence thought? Well, here's a way: "indirect relationships between unrelated concepts can be inadvertently triggered by a 'bridge' through a phonetic relationship", a process called homophone priming. So what might be the effect in a culture, say, whose word for "war" sounds similar to the word for "children"?

Certainly, manipulation of language is a common political tool used to exert control over populations. And its overwhelmingly effective use in advertising goes strangely unquestioned by its victims. Phillip K. Dick once said, “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words."

But those are topics for a new post :)

Is it really that simple?

A mathematician has overturned numerous complex models of child word acquisition using a simple spreadsheet.

Apparently, it's just a simple bell-curve. Despite the miraculous sudden appearance of an avalanche of words out of the mouths of two-year-olds, toddler brains don't have magical powers.

Like filling a jar with jelly beans, we gotta hear a word a certain number of times before we own it, & the bigger the word, the more jelly beans it takes. Toddlers just have all the low-hanging fruit to learn first.

This is good news for adults trying to learn a new language :)

It's not efficiency, it's ADHD.

I knew it!

Twitchy multi-tasking isn't just annoying to everyone nearby, it's bogus.

Surgical checklists prove amazingly effective.

Wow!

A recent study by the World Health Organization & Harvard Public Health demonstrated that using simple checklists in surgery can reduce the rate of complications & death by almost a third.

Singing Mice!

Mouse researchers at Hastings Reserve in Carmel Valley, CA decided to deploy bat sensors to see what sort of sounds were occurring while the mice are about.

They discovered that the mice actually sing complex songs!

HIV cure?

Wow! Clinicians treating a man for leukemia may have accidentally cured his HIV.

Lack of control = delusions?

Seems the more powerless we feel, the more likely we are to see patterns where none exist. This has obvious pertinence to many social issues: law, politics, medicine, religion, psychology.

One group that seems to be feeling especially powerless these days is the Literati. Apparently, the internet is beginning to change the way we think, & also the way we read. "It makes it harder even when we're offline to read books, as skimming takes over and displaces our modes of reading," says Nicholas Carr.

In a longer article, he compares the internet--& Google in particular--to time-&-motion studies that transformed productivity in the industrial revolution, becoming & remaining "the ethic of industrial manufacturing" at the cost of human job satisfaction. Carr provocatively suggests that Google's information management efforts are new oppressive time-&-motion algorithms for intellectual thought & knowledge work. He worries about the loss of deep thinking associated with the loss of deep reading in favor of the internet's hyperactive skimming.

But I wonder if all that deep reading wasn't at least partially because we were getting that information from a single author, & we needed to subconsciously assess the validity of the claims? We were also pretty much forced to wade through a lot of extraneous information to get to the meat of it, & then ultimately take or reject what we were given. Hopefully we could then tie what we kept to other reading, but no one can read everything--I think the last true "Renaissance Man" who actually held a good percentage of the knowledge of his time was probably Jefferson.

The internet helps resolve these issues, streamlining the process of information acquisition & interconnecting information to supporting & refuting arguments in a way no print source ever could. While much has been made of the dubious credibility of internet authors, is the situation really that different for printed authors, or are we assigning them more trust than perhaps we should due to the authority inherent in having access to esoteric means of distribution not available to everyone?

The internet--as all new technology tends to do--is certainly upsetting the applecart & redistributing power within society. Those who produce books seem to be one of the losers in this new arrangement.

So, is Nicholas Carr's fear grounded, or is he feeling powerless & seeing patterns where none exist?

Put a cow in your tank!

Methane produced by livestock waste is a serious greenhouse gas--much stronger than CO2--that makes a big contribution to global warming. Cattle-rearing alone creates more greenhouse gas than cars!

But methane is great fuel. Hm [scratches head]. What to do?

Apparently, it's really easy to capture biogas & put it to immediate use on very small scales--you don't need massive plants & storage facilities...just a rubber inner tube.



And while you're at it, why stop with animals? I once suggested this self-supplied fuel source to an arctic explorer, but he didn't seem too enthused.

The "String Revolution".

Nothing like a fresh pair of eyes to bore through groundless stereotypes. In this case, it's another example of interdisciplinary crossover providing a radically different perspective: Dr. Olga Soffer was in the fashion business before becoming an archaeologist.

"One of the most common reactions we heard was, 'How could we have missed that stuff all these years?'"

Take a look at this guy. He represents our standard story about what early humans were like. But apparently, we're projecting again.

"Because many of the items that have endured over the millennia are things like arrowheads and spear points, archaeologists studying the Paleolithic era have generally focused on the ways and means of that noble savage, a-k-a Man the Hunter, to the exclusion of other members of the tribe."

"To this day, in Paleolithic studies we hear about Man the Hunter doing such bloody wonderful things as thrusting spears into woolly mammoths, or battling it out with other men," Dr. Adovasio said. "We've emphasized the activities of a small segment of the population—-healthy young men—-at the total absence of females, old people of either sex and children. We've glorified one aspect of Paleolithic life ways at the expense of all the other things that made that life way successful."

"We're reconstructing the past based on 5 percent of what was used."

So, it turns out that the invention of string was arguably more important to human development than stone tools, & truly a remarkable leap of imaginative spatial reasoning.

Think about it: with string, suddenly you are mobile since you can carry a baby or quantities of food & tools. You can make nets & snares to catch fish & game remotely, build a raft, constrain livestock, link varied materials into compound tools, twist a bow string for driving fire drills or arrows, magnify human physical power output by harnessing mechanical advantage...and weave elaborate clothing with targeted functional AND symbolic import.

Or would you rather have a sharp rock?

So how did they figure it out? Take a look at this girl's hat--ever noticed it before?...It's not an abstraction. It's a "radially sewn piece of headgear with vertical stem stitches" carved by someone who was very familiar with weaving.

There are also rare confirmations of this idea of paleolithic textiles in ice-age fabric samples & clay impressions, as well as recent DNA work that determined that clothing-dependent lice evolved from head lice roughly 70,000 years ago when clothing must have come on the scene as a new habitat.

More...

• Post Gazette
• New York Times
• Hakai Magazine

Dandelion rubber.

Wow! Rubber from pesky lawn weeds.

"Ohio State University's Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) and the Ohio BioProducts Innovation Center (OBIC) recently received a $3 million grant to design and build a processing plant that would turn sticky white dandelion root sap into quality rubber for less money than current methods."

And apparently, it isn't new. It started it in World War II, when the Americans, Germans and Soviets made [dandelion]-based tires.

More info.

Here's another interesting tire.

Kitchen microwave science!

Have fun learning about science while creating opportunities for lucrative insurance claims!

Ever wonder what would happen if you put a __ in the microwave? This site will help you find out without even pissing off your domestic companions or lighting the kitchen on fire.

More of a hands-on kind of guy? Why not measure the speed of light in your microwave?

And who says you need the heat & pressure of a star to create the 4th state of matter?

Digital animations prefer peace.

In the epic motion pictures "Lord of the Rings", the programmer/animators used cellular automata in the crowd scenes to make things look more real. Basically, they allowed each character to make its own decisions.

And guess what? "For the first two years, the biggest problem we had was soldiers fleeing the field of battle".

"We could not make their computers stupid enough to not run away."