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--- secret_life_of_plants [2011-04-12 08:52] – cocky
+++ secret_life_of_plants [2011-04-12 09:06] – cocky
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 energy in the bed.
+---Because, of all living things, they seemed the most enduring and the
+least moble, Burr charted the life fields of trees on the Yale campus and
+at his laboratory in Connecticut, over nearly two decades.
+He found that recordings related not only to the lunar cycle and to
+sunspots, whIch flare up at intervals with many years between them, but
+revealed cycles recurring every three and six months that were beyond
+his explanabon. His conclusions seemed to make less suspect the long-
+mocked practices of generations of gardeners who claimed that their
+crops should be planted according to the **phases of the moon**.
+---The experimenters placed identical tissue cultures in two hermetically
+sealed vessels separated by a wall of glass, then introduced a lethal virus
+in one of the chambers which killed the colony of cells inside it. The
+second colony remained wholly unaffected. However, when they re-
+placed the glass divider with a sheet of quartz glass and again introduced
+killing viruses to one of the colonies, the Soviet scientists were astonished to see that the second colony also met the same fate as the first,
+even though the viruses could not possibly have penetrated the barrier.
+Other first and second colonies of cells, separated by the quartz glass,
+both perished when only the first colony was murdered with chemical
+poisons or lethal radiation and the second left unexposed. What killed
+the second colony in each case?
+Since **ordinary glass does not permit ultraviolet rays to pass but quartz
+glass does**, it seemed to the Soviet scientists that here was a key to the
+mystery. They recalled that Gurwitsch had theorized that onion cells
+could emit ultraviolet rays, and they resurrected his ideas from the limbo
+to which they had been consigned in the 1930s. Working with an
+electronic eye amplified by a photomultiplier and registered by a self-
+recorder which traced a graph marking the energy levels on a moving
+tape, they found that when life processes in the tissue cultures remained
+nonnal, the ultraviolet glow, invisible to the human eye but detectable
+as oscillations on the tape, remained stable. As soon as the affected
+colony began to battle against its infection, the radiation intensified.
+Reports on this work in Moscow newspapers disclosed that, however
+fantastic it might seem, the ultraviolet radiation from the affiicted cells
+carried in/onnation encoded in the fluctuation in intensity which was
+somehow received by the second colony, just as words are transmitted
+and received in dots and dashes in the Morse code.
+Since the second colony seemed in each case to die in exactly the same
+way as the first, the Soviets realized that it was as dangerous for healthy
+cells to be exposed to the transmitted signal of dying cells as it was for
+them to be exposed to viruses, poisons, and lethal radiation. It appeared
+that the second colony upon receiving the alarm signal from th dying
+first colony began to mobilize for resistance and its very "restructuring for war" against a nonexistent enemy proved as fatal as if it had
+it had indeed been attacked.