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--- secret_life_of_plants [2011-04-10 11:58] – 203.117.66.237
+++ secret_life_of_plants [2011-04-10 17:10] – cocky
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 that in the next quarter century such photoelements could be manufac·
 tured on an industrial scale and would be a hundred times cheaper than
-silicone solar batteries now being experimented with.  Pg 76
+silicone solar batteries now being experimented with.  Pg 76 related libarint topic; [[http://libarynth.org/luminous]]/phoef#appropriating_pv_natural_dye_sensitized_solar_cells
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-<html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/5603665558/" title="Picture 19 by _foam, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5107/5603665558_842f68afa0.jpg" width="73" height="49" alt="Picture 19"></a></html>
+<html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/5603665558/" title="Picture 19 by _foam, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5107/5603665558_842f68afa0.jpg" width="73" height="49" alt="Picture 19"></a></html>---the Bengali Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose  in 1899 betook himself to his greengrocer and purchased a bag
+of carrots and turnips, which, of all vegetables, appeared to him the most
+stolidly nonsentient, and found them to be highly sensitive. When he
+chloroformed plants, Bose discovered that they were as successfully
+anesthetized as animals, and that when the narcotic vapor was blown
+away by fresh air like animals they revived. **Using chloroform to tranquilize a huge pine tree,** Bose was able to uproot it and transplant it without
+the usually fatal shock of such operations. Pg 87
+---Since Bose knew that in plants there was respiration without gills or lungs,
+digestion without a stomach, and movements without muscles, it
+seemed plausible to him that there could be the same kind of excitation
+as in higher animals but without a complicated nervous system.
+Bose concluded that the only way to find out about the unseen
+changes which take place in plants and **tell if they were excited or
+depressed** would be to measure visually their responses to what he
+called "definite testing blows" or shocks. "In order to succeed in this, we have to discover some compulsive force which will make
+the plant give an answering signal. Secondly, we have to supply the
+means for an automatic conversion of these signals into an intelligent
+script. And, last of all, we have ourselves to learn the nature of these
+hieroglyphics."   Pg 92
+---Bose was able to show how the skins
+of lizards, tortoises, and frogs as well as those of grapes, tomatoes behaved similarly. He found that the vegetal
+digestive organs in insectivorous plants, from the tentacle of a sundew
+to the hair-lined flap of a pitcher plant, were analogous to animal stom-
+achs. He discovered close parallels between the response to light in
+leaves and in the retinas of animal eyes. With his magnifier he proved
+that plants become as fatigued by continuous stimulation as animal
+muscles, whether they were **hypersensitive mimosas or undemonstrative
+radishes**.
+---Working with the **Desmodium gyrans, a species whose continuously
+oscillating leaves recall the motion of semaphore flags** and led to its
+common appellation, telegraph plant, Bose found that the poison which
+could stop its automatic ceaseless pulsation would also stop an animal
+heart and that the antidote for this poison could bring both organisms
+back to life. Pg 92
+In Desmodium gyrans, or the telegraph plant, Bose found that if the
+cut end of a detached leaflet was dipped in water in a bent glass tube
+it r**ecovered from the shock of its amputation and began to pulsate anew**.
+Was this not like an excised animal heart which can be kept beating in
+Ringer's solution? Just as the heart stops beating when blood pressure
+is lowered and starts again when pressure is raised, Bose found the same
+was true for the pulsation of the Desmodium when the sap pressure was
+increased or decreased.
+---Bose experimented with heat and cold to ascertain the optimal condi-
+tions under which plant movement was best elicited. One day he found
+that when all motion stopped in his plant, it suddenly shuddered in a
+way reminiscent of the death spasm in animals. To determine exactly
+the critical temperature at which death occurred, he invented a **moro-
+graph, or death recorder.** While many plants met their end at sixty
+degrees Centigrade, individual plants exhibited variations depending on
+their previous histories and ages. If their power of resistance was artificially depressed by fatigue, or poison, the death spasm would take place
+with temperatures as low as twenty-three degrees Centigrade. At death,
+the plant threw off a huge electrical force. **Five hundred green peas
+could develop five hundred volts,** said Bose, **enough to fulminate a cook
+but for the fact that peas are seldom connected in series.**
+Though it had been thought that plants liked unlimited quantities of
+carbon dioxide, Bose found that too much of this gas could suffocate
+them, but that they could then be revived, just like animals, with oxygen.
+Like human beings, **plants became intoxicated when given shots of
+whiskey or gin,** swayed like any barroom drunkard, passed out, and
+eventually revived, with definite signs of a hangover. These findings
+together with hundreds of other data were published in two massive
+volumes in 1906 and 1907.  Pg 94
+Bose  devise a brand-new instrument, the crescograph. This  inven-
+tion not only produced a ten-thousand-fold magnification of movement,
+far beyond the powers of the strongest microscope, but could automati-
+cally record the rate of growth of plants and their changes in a period
+as short as a minute.
+With this instrument Bose showed the remarkable fact that in count-
+less plants, **growth proceeds in rhythmic pulses.** each pulse exhibiting' a
+rapid uplift and then a slower partial recoil of about a fourth the distance
+gained. The pulses in Calcutta averaged about three per minute. By
+watching the progress of the movement on the chart of his new inven-
+tion, Bose found that growth in some plants could be retarded and to be five feet.
+halted by merely touching them, and that in others rough handling
+stimulated growth, especially if they were sluggish and morose. Pg 99
+---The roots of plants are called "geotropic," because they burrow into
+the soil. Leaves turn to light because they are "heliotropic" or "phototropic." Roots questing water are described as "hydrotropic," and those
+bending against the flow of a stream "rheatropic." The tendril's touch
+is known as its "thigmotropism." Pg 99
+---Bose now in retirement summud his scientific philosophy:
+“Is there any possible relation between our own life and that of the plant
+world? The question is not one of speculation but of actual demonstration
+by some method that is unimpeachable. This means that we should
+abandon all our preconceptions, most of which are afterward found to be
+absolutely groundless and contrary to facts. The final appeal must be
+made to the plant itself and no evidence should be accepted unless it bears
+the plant's own signature.