This is a secondary blog, inspired by Bengoldacre.posterous.com, where Ben Goldacre "witters on and on and on about things that are too long to post on twitter and not clever enough to post on [his] main blog at www.badscience.net". TALKING PLANTS TOO is a scrapbook of ideas for TALKING PLANTS proper and for other stuff … including direct reproduction of posts I just can't bear to not find again (with URL up front, hopefully sufficient attribution given the low readership of this blog...)
Anyone who ever grew Mimosa pudica knows that you can literally "piss off" the plant by repeatedly touching it, upon which it folds up its leaves - to the point where it drops them. Schildknecht in Heidelberg isolated two different "periodic leaf movement factors" & demonstrated their presence in numerous plants, all sensible to touch and / or photoperiodicism. And while we too enjoy a tickle once in a while we don't enjoy being fumbled around, too - plants are just human... 🙂🙃🙂
Anyone who ever grew Mimosa pudica knows that you can literally "piss off" the plant by repeatedly touching it, upon which it folds up its leaves - to the point where it drops them. Schildknecht in Heidelberg isolated two different "periodic leaf movement factors" & demonstrated their presence in numerous plants, all sensible to touch and / or photoperiodicism. And while we too enjoy a tickle once in a while we don't enjoy being fumbled around, too - plants are just human... 🙂🙃🙂
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