Plants can grow quickly or accurately, but not both | Hacker News Reader

Plants can grow quickly or accurately, but not both

massivesci.com

179 pointselorant39 comments

> How are plants, with no advanced nervous system, able to gather information about their environment to guide their behavior, planning and flexibly executing movement? Sound, maybe. Or chemoreception. Possibly even eye-like structures.

'eye-like structures'?!

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tplants.2016.07.008: Although plants are sessile organisms, almost all of their organs move in space and thus require plant-specific senses to find their proper place with respect to their neighbours. Here we discuss recent studies suggesting that plants are able to sense shapes and colours via plant-specific ocelli.

Cannot access the study but this sounds fascinating!

Here you go: https://sci-hub.se/https://www.cell.com/trends/plant-science...

Not sure if others have the same problem, but where I live (Spain), sci-hub.se is unavailable. sci-hub.st still works though, so mirror is here: https://sci-hub.st/https://www.cell.com/trends/plant-science...

sci-hub.se works here (France), however sci-hub.tw does not load anymore.

I'll say that if neither sci-hub.se nor sci-hub.st load on your connection, they are probably blocked for legal reasons at your place and you should of course neither attempt to switch to another DNS server nor put the following text in your /etc/hosts file to make them resolve:

    186.2.163.219   sci-hub.se
    186.2.163.201   sci-hub.st

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20606718 for more information.

Wow, thanks!

No prob. Scihub opens a whole new world.

I always wished Scihub had a browse feature

It relies on knowing what paywall I want to circumvent with some paper's ID

When really I just want to browse

I'm not in academia and I feel like everyone salivating over Scihub don't realize this use case, because they already know what publications they don't have access to

Since its almost 10 years after Scihub launched, is there a chrome extension or other wrapper for to make browsing easy on it, or some app that indexes newly released papers from a variety of journals and auto generates the scihub link equivalent?

I use Google scholar to find interesting papers and scihub to read them.

I had the same response when I first got started with it. Thing is, that's not what it was designed for. There's tons of other resources to use when actually researching; scihub just makes sure that what you find, you can access.

I’ve seen more contrived services that combine two or three things for more convenience

Would be surprising for someone not to do this with scihub yet

I think you can browse the papers via the libgen interface: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/

So even there I don’t know what I want to read or search

I just want to browse a catalogue

I would say “like Netflix” but even SSRN has this basic idea as a first class feature

prueba

Considering that they photosynthesize, photosensitivity doesn't seem like that much of a leap.

If you have photosynthesis, you already have photosensitivity. The process of photosynthesis will cause chemical gradients in the reaction's inputs and outputs (and those of secondary reactions) that indicate where the plant senses light.

Exactly how those are leveraged, I don't know, but based on hanging out with folks who study this for a few years, I'm going to bet it's very complicated and somehow involves auxin.

An overview of some plant growth influences and auxin: https://www.biologyonline.com/tutorials/plant-auxins-phototr...

Plant physiology is a branch of biology that studies this, and have developed clear and reasonable explanations. Some that don't involve having parts of animals scattered in plants.

Should I make the "potatoes have eyes" comment? Hmm, guess I just did.

"Generally, our actions are subject to a speed-accuracy trade-off: the faster you do something, the less accurate you tend to be"

And interesting edge-case where that isn't true are professional athletes.

Maybe in the plant world the equivalent would be kudzu [0]. It has the speed thing down without issue, and as for accuracy... well, you grow like it does, you're hitting every target. It's about as close to a sci-fi gray goo scenario as we get, or the monster movie "The Blob", and one of the the prescribed methods of dealing with it is actually "kill it with fire!"

[0] https://www.appalachiabare.com/when-stephen-king-turned-into...

I don't know if athletes fit. They spend their whole day in training to stay accurate.

And thanks for the cool kudzu article!

They spend their whole day in training to stay accurate

That's what I mean-- for some, there's a way to overcome the speed-accuracy trade-off with extreme effort.

And yeah, kudzu is crazy. I remember seeing it in the south (US) when I had family there as a kid and thinking "wow, that place must have been abandoned like 50 years ago". Then I found out about kudzu not long ago & was amazed.

Kudzu is certainly incredible, but other invasive species in the southeast US (where I live ) are nearly as impressive. Wisteria comes to mind; it's not as obvious until it's in bloom. Other honorable mentions: Chinese privet, Asian Bittersweet, elaeagnus, and English Ivy. All of the aforementioned grow in my yard and their aggressive growth is unbelievable (especially elaeagnus... It's a shrub that can climb like a vine!).

I think the more interesting thing in this article is about how plants can somehow decide whether to grow faster or slower depending if they’re trying to reach a certain type of support, without having a central nervous system.

Interestingly, the same is true for mammals.

Mammalian cells have contingencies to maintain the growth/accuracy balance, but sometimes the accelerator is hit so hard that it blows through the checks and balances and becomes a tumour. The further the checks and balances are corrupted, the more likely that organism is likely to become a malignant cancer.

Equal peas with all the kingdom plantae leads to this misunderstandings.

Plants can grow fast AND accurately. Ask a bamboo, or a grass

What about bamboo? Grows fast grows straight.

- There are bound to be exceptions until a more general rule is found, or

- this is slow speed for bamboo, so it can be sped up even more (at loss of accuracy), or

- some combination of both

For bamboo you see the fast part, but not the slow part. The shoots are prepared over a number of months where all the nodes are made underground. Then when it is ready the space between the nodes is added causing the very fast telescoping action.

Your description makes bamboo sound like some kind of fascinating alien technology/ organism, I love it.

Japan agrees! (or at least their folktale story does) [1]

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Bamboo_Cutte...

Same with the Empress Tree.

I love my empress tree! Once the roots were established the thing grows beautifully.

It blew over this year (3 years worth of growth). Several of the shoots also blew over. Finally one shoot survived the harsh winds we get occasionally and it’s already ~7-8 feet tall.

and the leaves. They look like something from Jurassic park. They’re HUGE!

It's not really a fair comparison since it doesn't need anything to grow on to and growing straight up isn't that hard.

The most fascinating plant for me is forced rhubarb - it grows so quickly when it only has a candle light, that you can hear it growing: http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20190424-the-english-vegetab...

Interesting. They're kind of like code in that sense.

Organic

I once planted a bean a put a webvam taking a timelapse video. Its amazing how much a plant can move in 1hr!

So, the pea grew faster towards a thinner support, but why does that mean it grew less accurate?

I think the argument was that it’s easier to grasp a thin support, so the pea needs less accuracy.

It wasn’t spelled out in the article or its reference, from what I could tell.

Flora uncertainty principle

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