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secret_life_of_plants [2011-04-12 08:52] – cocky | secret_life_of_plants [2011-04-12 09:12] – cocky | ||
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energy in the bed. | 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, | ||
+ | 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 replaced 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 selfrecorder which traced a graph marking the energy levels on a moving | ||
+ | tape, they found that when life processes in the tissue cultures remained | ||
+ | //normal//, 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 information// | ||
+ | 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 " | ||
+ | it had indeed been attacked. | ||