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--- secret_life_of_plants [2011-04-10 17:10] – cocky
+++ secret_life_of_plants [2011-04-12 08:52] – cocky
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 ==== Introduction ====
- <html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/5603591016/" title="Picture 5 by _foam, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5150/5603591016_dd7d797391_s.jpg" width="75" height="75" alt="Picture 5"></a></html>---At the beginning of the twentieth century Viennese biologist
+ <html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/5603591016/" title="Picture 5 by _foam, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5150/5603591016_dd7d797391_s.jpg" width="50" height="50" alt="Picture 5"></a></html>---At the beginning of the twentieth century Viennese biologist
 Raoul Francé put forth the idea, shocking to contemporary natural philosophers, that plants move their bodies as freely, easily, and gracefully as the most skilled animal or human, and
 that the only reason we don't appreciate the fact is that plants do so at
@@ Line 85: / Line 85: @@
 not moved, either toward the plant or toward the recording machine.
 **Could the plant have been reading his mind**?
+//
+related libarynth topics://
+  * [[plant perception]]
+  * [[groworld HPI ii]]
 -------------------------------
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-==== ESP, or extrasensory perception ====
+==== ESP, extrasensory perception ====
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 ==== Latest Soviet Discoveries ====
-<html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/5603081691/" title="Picture 21 by _foam, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5228/5603081691_bd6820b484.jpg" width="73" height="110" alt="Picture 21"></a></html>---film by Panishkin "Are Plants Sentient?"
+<html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/5603081691/" title="Picture 21 by _foam, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5228/5603081691_bd6820b484.jpg" width="53" height="90" alt="Picture 21"></a></html>---film by Panishkin "Are Plants Sentient?"
 ---biologist Karamanov published "**The Application of Automation and Cybernetics to Plant Husbandry.**" He builded a.o. microthermistors, weight tensiometers, to register the temperature of plants, the flow rate of fluid in their stems
@@ Line 256: / Line 261: @@
 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 related libarint topic; [[http://libarynth.org/luminous]]/phoef#appropriating_pv_natural_dye_sensitized_solar_cells
+silicone solar batteries now being experimented with.  Pg 76
+//
+related topic//  [[luminous:phoef]]
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------
@@ Line 264: / Line 272: @@
-<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
+<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="55" 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
@@ Line 312: / Line 320: @@
----Bose experimented with heat and cold to ascertain the optimal condi-
+--- One day Bose found
-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
+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,
@@ Line 333: / Line 340: @@
 volumes in 1906 and 1907.  Pg 94
-Bose  devise a brand-new instrument, the crescograph. This  inven-
+Boses invention the crescograph not only produced a ten-thousand-fold magnification of movement,
-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-
+Bose showed the remarkable fact that in countless plants, **growth proceeds in rhythmic pulses.** each pulse exhibiting' a
-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-
+watching the progress of the movement on the chart Bose found that **growth in some plants could be retarded and even
-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
+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
+is known as its "thigmotropism." Pg 99.
+//
+related libarynth topic: //  [[plant movement]]
 ---Bose now in retirement summud his scientific philosophy:
@@ Line 358: / Line 365: @@
 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
+made to the plant itself and no evidence should be accepted unless **it bears
-the plant's own signature.
+the plant's own signature.**
+---------------
+==== The Metamorphosis of Plants ====
+<html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/5603665460/" title="Picture 18 by _foam, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4106/5603665460_73b35efe55.jpg" width="75" height="50" alt="Picture 18"></a></html>---Why botany, a potentially fascinating subject dealing with plants, living
+and extinct, their uses, classification, anatomy, physiology, geographical
+distribution, should have been from the beginning reduced to** a dull
+taxonomy, an endless Latin dirge**, in which progress is measured more
+by the number of corpses cataloged than by the number of blossoms
+cherished, is perhaps the greatest mystery in the study of plant life. Pg 104
+**The pollen of most plants has a highly inflammable character**; when
+thrown on a red-hot surface it will ignite as quickly as gunpowder.
+Artificial lightning was formerly produced on the theatrical stage by
+throwing the pollen grains of the Lycopodium or club mosses onto a hot
+shovel. In many plants the pollen diffuses an odor bearing the most
+striking resemblance to the seminal emission of animals and man.
+The spermatozoa of certain mosses carried in the morning dew in search of females, is guided by its taste for malic acid toward the delicate cups at the bottom of
+which lie moss eggs to be fertilized. **The spermatozoa of ferns**, on the
+other hand, liking sugar, **find their females in pools of sweetened water**. Pg 107
+---For years Goethe had been distressed by the limitations involved in a merely analytical and
+intellectual approach to the plant world, typified by **the cataloging mind
+of the eighteenth century**, and of a theory of physics, then triumphant,
+which submitted the world to blind laws of mechanics, to a "jeu de
+rouages et de ressorts sans vie."
+-------------------
+==== Plants Will Grow to Please ====
+<html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/5603665318/" title="Picture 15 by _foam, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5221/5603665318_63b05a2493.jpg" width="54" height="98" alt="Picture 15"></a></html>---Gustav Theodor Fechner (1839):  “Was it not one of the ultimate purposes of the human bodies to serve vegetal life, surrounding it by emitting carbon dioxide for the plants to breathe, and manuring them with human bodies after death? Did not flowers and
+trees finally consume man and, by combining his remains together with raw earth, water, air, and sunlight, transform and transmute human bodies into the most glorious forms and
+colors?
+----------
+==== Tuned to the Music of the Spheres ====
+//The Harmonics of  plants//
+<html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/5603081267/" title="Picture 14 by _foam, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4097/5603081267_92481df2e3_s.jpg" width="50" height="50" alt="Picture 14"></a></html>---In 1950 T. C. Singh, head of the department of botany at Annamalai University ,
+began wondering whether sound, properly prescribed, could spur field crops to greater yields. From 1960 to 1963 he piped the "Charukesi raga" on a **gramophone via a loud-
+speaker to paddy rice growing in
+the fields** of seven villages on the Bay of Bengal, and got harvests ranging consistently from
+to 60 percent higher than the regional average. He also was able
+musically to provoke peanuts and chewing tobacco into producing nearly
+percent more than normal. Singh further reported that merely by
+dancing the "Bharata-Natyam," India's most ancient dance style, with-
+out musical accompaniment and executed by **girls without trinkets on their ankles, the growth of Michaelmas daisies, marigolds, and petunias
+was very much accelerated**, causing them to flower as much as a fort-
+night earlier than controls, presumably because of the rhythm of the
+footwork transmitted through the earth.
+---
+In the mid-1960s two researchers at Canada's University of Ottawa, Mary
+Measures and Pearl Weinberger were conversant that ultrasonic frequencies markedly affect the germination and growth of
+barley, sunflower, spruce, Jack pine, Siberian pea tree, and other seeds
+and seedlings However, the very
+frequencies which stimulated some plant species inhibited others. They wondered whether specific audible frequencies in
+the sonic range would be as effective as music in enhancing the growth
+of wheat.
+In a series of experiments lasting more than four years, the two
+biologists exposed the grains and seedlings of spring Marquis and winter
+Rideau wheat to high-frequency vibrations. They found that, depending
+on how long the wheat seeds had been vernalized, **the plants responded
+best to a frequency of 5,000 cycles a second**.
+---1973 Dr. Weinberger said **basic farm equipment of the future will include an oscillator** for production
+of sound waves and a speaker." He set up large-scale tests to determine the practicability of their idea.
+they discovered that experimental "pink" noise, which, at 20 to 20,000 cycles per second and 100 decibels, sounds to the ear about the **same as the noise received 100 feet
+away from a 727 jet plane** about to take off, caused turnips to sprout much faster than those left silently in the ground. Pg 152
+---Allotting one chamber for a control group, Mrs. Dorothy Retallack, a Danish professional organist and mezzo soprano in 1968 used the
+same plants, as in the first experiment,
+setting them in identical soil and affording them equal amounts of water
+on schedule. Trying to pinpoint the musical note most conducive to
+survival, each day she tried an **F note, played unremittingly for eight
+hours in one chamber** and three hours intermittently in another. In the
+first chamber her plants were **stone dead within two weeks**. In the
+second chamber, the plants were much healthier than controls left in
+silence.
+---The cucurbits were hardly indifferent to the two musical forms: those
+exposed to Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and other eighteenth-
+and nineteenth-century European scores g**rew toward the transistor
+radio**, one of them even twining itself lovingly around it. The other
+squashes grew away from the rock broadcasts and even tried to climb
+the slippery walls of their glass cage. Pg 154
+The plants gave positive evidence of **liking Bach, since they leaned
+an unprecedented thirty-five degrees toward the preludes**. But even this
+affirmation was far exceeded by their reaction to Shankar: in their
+straining to reach the source of the classical Indian music they bent
+more than halfway to the horizontal, at angles in excess of sixty degrees,
+**the nearest one almost embracing the speaker**.
+--------------------------
+==== Plants and Electromagnetism ====
+<html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/5603665188/" title="Picture 13 by _foam, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5230/5603665188_f014029cea_s.jpg" width="50" height="50" alt="Picture 13"></a></html>---Just as plants respond to the wavelengths of music, so also are they
+continually being **affected by wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum**, from earth, moon, planets, cosmos and from a proliferation of
+man-made devices; only it remains to be established exactly which are
+beneficial and which are harmful. Pg 163
+---1747, Jean Antoine Nollet, a French abbot and physics tutor, was informed by a German physicist in Wittenberg that
+water, which normally issued drop by drop from a capillary tube, would
+run out in a constant stream if the tube was electrified. Nollet put several plants in metallic pots next to a conductor and was intrigued to note that the rate of their transpiration
+increased. In a long series of experiments, Nollet carefully weighed **not
+only daffodils but sparrows, pigeons, and cats** and found they **lost weight
+faster if electrified**.
+---Italian physicist, Giuseppe Toaldo reported that in a row of jasmine bushes the two which were next to a lightning conductor grew thirty feet tall whereas all the
+others attained only four feet. Pg 168
+---Bertholon, had a gardener stand on a slab of insulating material and sprinkle vegetables from
+an electrified watering can. He reported that his salads grew to an
+extraordinary size. He also invented what he called an **"electrovegetometer"** to collect atmospheric electricity by means ot an antenna, and pass
+it through plants growing in a field. "This instrument is
+applicable to all kinds of vegetal production, everywhere, in all weather.”
+--As it had been known that sharp points
+were especially attractive to atmospheric electricity, Finish scientist Lemstrom reasoned
+that "**the sharp points of plants acted like lightning rods to collect
+atmospheric electricity** and facilitate the exchange of charges of the air
+and the ground."  Pg 175
+---London Journal of the Horticultural Society published the "**Influence of Electricity on Vegetation**" by an agronomist, Edward Solly, who, suspended wires in the air over
+garden plots, and, tried burying them under the soil. But of
+Solly's seventy experiments with various grains, vegetables, and flowers,
+only nineteen were of any benefit, and nearly as many were harmful.
+The conflicting results of these researchers made it obvious that the
+amount, quality, and duration of electrical stimulation was of crucial
+importance to each form of vegetal life.  Pg 174
+---Lemstrom connected a series of flowers in metal pots to a static generator by an overhead network of wires sixteen inches above them and a
+pole set into the soil as a ground. Other pots he "left to nature." After
+eight weeks, the electrified plants, showed gains in weight of nearly 50
+percent over their electrically deprived neighbors. When he transferred
+his apparatus into a garden he not only more than doubled the yield of
+strawberries but found them to be much sweeter; his harvest from barley
+plants increased by one-third. He reported  his success in 1902 in a book //Electro Cultur// The English translation of Lemstrom's book, entitled //**Electricity in
+Agriculture and Horticulture**//.  Pg 176
+---------------------------
+==== Force Fields, Humans and Plants ====
+--- engineers, unlike
+researchers in pure science, are less concerned with why or how some-
+thing works than with whether it will work. This attitude can free them
+from the shackles of theory, which in the history of science has often
+caused pedants to disregard the brilliant new findings of geniuses be-
+cause there was no theoretical basis to support them.
+---Dr. George Starr White, pubished //Cosmoelectric Culture//, discovered that metals like iron and tin could facilitate
+plant growth if bright pieces were dangled from fruit trees.Where Hay attached metallic **Christmas tree
+balls to tomato plants**, they would bear their fruits earlier than normal.
+---electronic engineer James Lee Scribner believes that : it is the electron that is responsible before the photosynthesis can take
+place, for it is the electron that magnetizes the chlorophyll in the plant
+cell that makes it possible for the photon to assert itself and become a
+part of the plant in the form of solar energy. It is also this magnetism that
+draws the molecules of oxygen into the ever expanding chlorophyll cells
+of the plant, and so we must assume that moisture is in no way integrated into the plant through any absorption process whatsoever, for the integration of moisture is purely an electronic one. The so-called root pressure
+(moisture droplets) appearing on plant surfaces is not root pressure at all,
+but an abundance of electrons working with the rather excessive water
+energy in the bed.
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+-----------------------------
 === related libarynth topics ===