New carnivorous plant discovered in Pacific Northwest
npr.org
npr.org
"Graham's team was doing an unrelated project on plant genetics and noticed that the western false asphodel had a genetic deletion that's sometimes seen in carnivorous plants. The researchers started to think about the fact that this flower grew in the kind of environment that's home to various other insect-eating plants.
"And then they have these sticky stems," Graham says. "So, you know, it was kind of like, hmm, I wonder if this could be a sign that this might be carnivorous."
The real procedure that we should teach kids is: collect data, ask questions about it, hypothesize some answers, and only then do a experiment to test your theory. The question formulation, based on observational evidence, is where all of the interesting science really happens.
I think that focusing on either side alone can lead to biases and problematic science, and focusing on both is actually the most "fun"
You can't see what do you don't look for.
In this respect I think GP's comment is admirable - it means teaching kids to use their experiences to formulate hypotheses, rather than forcing them to guess what you want them to formulate.
(As an aside, I set out to comment here because I tire of the point that XYZ can be done incorrectly... Everything can be - it's not very interesting - I wish we could discuss less about that, more about new things to do correctly.)
It can help focus the data gathering phase, and you get two results: you can ignore your first hypothesis from now on, and you have further data to look at to formulate a decent hypothesis to expand on.
Isn't all our knowledge little knowledge - even if it seems like a lot? Wouldn't your advice apply equally as well to your most knowledgable topic?
The hard part isn't having knowledge, it's finding the hypothesis to show how your knowledge is little knowledge.
(Aside: I would love to hear the experiences you are forming your comment around! I'm sure there's a lot of interesting stuff there.)
For the background of these, on a professional level I try to sell the experiments with some angle, whatever it is, even if it is intuitively wrong.
An exemple of that was a discussion around wording for a relatively delicate part of our site. We didn’t know how to approach it, and it hasn’t been touch for a very long time. So, the random hypothesis taken was that nobody reads the text anyway. We set hooks and tracking in and out of the sections to have a decent view of what’s happening, and we got enough data to come with new insights and propositions; Next phase was AB testing two changes, with expectations to have positive effect, and the tracking we set in place was to validate it went as planned. This also didn’t go fully as expected, but not that far from the mark, and we iterated.
In hindsight we could surely have just done the data collection and make hypothesis from it, but I feel the data would have been more vague and less exploitable. I don‘t trust “let’s just collect data” approaches much.
Apparently lots of interesting discoveries have followed the formula of "get drunk with other PhD students, wait for someone to ask "what if...", do experiment, pretend idea wasn't suggested in a bar at conference"
The boogeyman of confirmation bias paralyzes researchers.
Outside of the hard sciences, your procedure could make more sense. We do this in business consulting (not always a science but it can be if you do it well) by looking through financial, operational and HR data and asking questions or trying to draw out interesting relationships that can lead to hypothesis for deeper examination. I would expect the same is true in lots of health science as well or any empirical field where we have data on outcomes and the characteristics that may influence then. Even in these fields though, it doesn't preclude starting with a causal mechanism based on underlying theory and then devising data collection and experiments to go out and conform or refute your hypothesis.
Personally, I've seen lots of cases where people are quick to rely on statistics and empirical studies, without looking for the mechanism that must exist behind the relationship they're claiming. Such findings are much weaker than results that may have less data or a bigger p-value but are grounded in actual theory and not just reporting a model-free relationship.
So to summarize, there is certainly a place for the order you suggest, but if done right, a stronger formulation can be made based on what you call the American school system method.
Our biggest issue in general scientific literacy is in people being convinced by quacks, charlatans, and well intentioned incompetence.
I'll use examples to demonstrate the fix.
Let's start with a recent bogus claim: "vaccine causes biomagnetism"
The experiment people use is to stick a smooth magnetic object on their oily skin.
Let's see if this works using what we teach people
"collect data, ask questions about it, hypothesize some answers"
Those could lead people to conclude the biomagnetism theory. That's the problem.
Instead, scientific literacy needs to focus on scrutiny. Karl Popper style testing, verifying, falsifying, validating.
For example: trying to stick magnets to unvaccinated people or similar shaped non-magnets to either group, see if they respond to a compass, or use a piece of paper in between the skin and the magnet, or some talc to smooth the skin (Randi debunked human magnetism with this).
But instead, there's hundreds of videos of the smooth object on oily skin test followed by the conclusion that vaccines cause biomagnetism.
A friend of mine showed me an hour compilation of countless people repeating the same flawed experiment as if a larger quantity was a valid refutation of my methodological objections.
I watched it regardless. The same flawed experiment repeated. A large stream of commenters claimed this is what convinced them.
Why? What we teach in school won't help us identify how this is wrong. In fact, they're taught that repeatability is good, and it is, but it doesn't necessarily support a hypothesis without sufficient variation. That's Robert Boyle, 1600s.
That's why instead students should poke holes (or support) in increasingly difficult arguments as they progress through school.
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Second example, let's stick with vaccines because why not.
The hogwash: vaccines cause X.
The graphs are pretty convincing until you ask how things are defined, detected and the frequency of testing. Then everything is easily explained.
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Third example: homoeopaths. They pass all the current methods taught in school.
That's the reason medicine invented double blind studies, to show homoeopaths were nonsense. (See the salt tests of 1835 https://www.jameslindlibrary.org/articles/inventing-the-rand...)
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If students learned valid scrutiny and real scientific skepticism (not the sloppy hand waving nonsense that climate denying propagandists put out for instance) we'd have addressed climate change.
We'd have more effective social programs, better economic policy, not be wasteful as a society and not have half the people getting boondoggled by grifters and charlatans.
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Let me belabor the point with one final example. The extremely dangerous advice given by Norman Vincent Peale in his famous 1952 text, "The power of positive thinking". He uses the word "scientific" 40 times and produces exactly zero science beyond unverifiable anecdotes.
Some of his uses of "scientific" include "scientific use of prayer" and "spiritually scientific principles (used 3 times)".
He makes remarkable and totally unsubstantiated claims throughout the book on things such as clairvoyance, ESP, and just straight up magic such as miraculous healings and physically impossible events.
His techniques have actually led to severe psychological illness and many suicides. Translated into 42 languages, sold 15 million copies.
People seem to be on board, just like they kill their children with homeopaths and themselves because they refuse to take a vaccine that will supposedly make them magnetic.
What they've been taught is science backs them up on every one of these beliefs.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a problem here.
It's okay to prefix this with an explicit "observe" step but the absence of that step in teaching doesn't mean we haven't already spent time observing.
> It is often said that science rests on two pillars, experiment and theory. Which has lead some to propose one or two additional pillars for the computing age: simulation and data analysis. However, the real two pillars of science are observations and models. Observations are the input to science, in the form of numerous but incomplete and imperfect views on reality. Models are the inner state of science. They represent our current understanding of reality, which is necessarily incomplete and imperfect, but understandable and applicable. Simulation and data analysis are tools for interfacing and thus comparing observations and models. They don’t add new pillars, but transforms both of them.
However, modern/computational linguistics has started asking new questions that were simply not considered in traditional linguistics: why and how do the rules of grammar arise? How are they learned by infants? Why do human beings use language at all? How are human languages different from animal communication?
For many such questions, looking at hundreds of regional variations of certain words or grammar rules is not particularly helpful, unfortunately, though there is some work that was done based on that as well.
If it absorbs half it's nitrogen from insects that get stuck to the stem…
Their spines all point towards the base of the plant, where, in a mature specimen, there’s usually a hollow without thorns.
Thing is, if you’re a furry or woolly animal, like a sheep, and you get caught in the thorns, your struggles bring you into the centre of the plant, where you’re thoroughly trapped, and you die of exhaustion.
Then you decompose, and the bramble gets fed.
I’ve seen this happen to sheep, and here, while clearing huge swathes of giant brambles, it’s not uncommon to find a skull or a few bits of bone around the bottom of a plant.
The plant in the article is less ambiguous: they detected a digestive enzyme in the sticky stalks which is common to other carnivorous plants, and means the plant digests the insects directly.
A bramble consumes unlucky mammals with the help of mycorrhisae in the soil, rather doing so directly. Is this more like the bacteria which help ruminants digest cellulose (no one would say that cows don't eat grass!) or is it more like saying that vegans are carnivores because organic fertilizers have blood and fish meal in them?
For all our knowledge, there really is so much about all the other life around us we just don't understand.
Based on us routinely finding new organs within the human body, I would say there is a ton about our own biology that we just don't understand. I would go further and just accept that humans know or understand very few things indeed.
This is a pretty interesting closing idea. From the article it seems they were originally flagged to this by a genomic commonality with other carnivorous plants. What percentage of plant genomes are sequenced that could be searched for this similar deletion?
Though as long as insects are the primary target I'm prepared to entertain the option of a cautious cold war rather than all-out destruction.
There was a whole 2nd graph talking about consideration of how a kill-it-with-fire decision would affect other living things, non-human even. Clearly more thought than a reddit post would have given. Seeing how reddit is deem such low class on this esteemed and high class board.
Have you happened to read the recent sequel, and if so how was it? I was kind of put off of Crichton by his later works after the original Jurassic Park (as usual, better than the movie)
I know the sequel was not completely Crighton's own work, but I did mostly enjoy Robopocalypse, so I'm wondering if it's worth my time ( and money: I mostly do audiobooks these days, which are a lot more expensive)
However, since this is carneverous plant stuff, if they start getting too big for their britches, we can use dandruff shampoo according to sily scifi plot lines instead of fire. That way it won't get out of control. The lastly, since we're not sure the effect of fire, it might be best to just take off and nuke it from orbit.
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Of the later works, Dragon Teeth (posthumously published) is worth checking out - no high tech but more a scientific western story.
> "We had no idea it was carnivorous," says Sean Graham, a botanist with the University of British Columbia. "This was not found in some exotic tropical location, but really right on our doorstep in Vancouver. You could literally walk out from Vancouver to this field site."
to this:
> Fewer than 1,000 plant species are carnivorous
4000 years of Botanical research since egyptians, duh...
The question we must ask ourselves is who were the true heros of those games? The plants that had developed to the point of nearly nuclear destructive capabilities? Or humanity, which may have had few options except for adopting the resilience of the undead to have any chance at survival against the Green Menace?
This is probably exactly what the plant is betting on. It's a nice perceptive check on our own individual intelligence as humans.
> intelligence
thats not how natural selection works
some mutant blew its load into the wind and the mutant spawns survived, thats the whole story until we find a communication or same generation reaction mechanism that leads to different future adaptations
> mutant spawn survived
>leads to different future adaptations
Now we just need to bio-engineer them to ...
Somehow I'm sensing the onset of something that might have once been the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster.... or an episode of Doctor Who.
It takes a lot of effort and expense to achieve mildly promising results, and any given project is much more likely to break out in tumors or be outcompeted by existing strains than it is to evolve into something unexpectedly fit. Yes, poorly-engineered plants can grow tumors...or at least odd growths that sap their energy and nutrients.
If you enjoy learning more about carnivorous plants, I highly recommend 'Plants Behaving Badly' on PBS[1].
Fun fact: Venus fly traps are native to the Carolinas. Carnivorous plants are everywhere!
I expect they’re eventually going to disable the text.npr.org domain.
Having looked into carnivorous plants for a while, I am so glad they never grew significantly bigger...
Considering that we believe prehistoric times were incredibly lush with vegetation you may be right. The plants of your nightmares are likely to thrive in the future though when we have depleted the nutrients from our soil. As someone else mentioned, nature finds a way. It’s easy to forget that being at the top of the food chain puts us at the mercy of everything beneath… and when it comes time for Mother Nature to choose, she will likely begin culling from the top.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27876588
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
So I guess that explains what happened to all the Tree Octopi.
-Audry II
Get vaccinated y'all
to be extinct in a decade because no one is taking fresh IPCC report, AR6 WP1, seriously. and not giving long to endemic plants in this context.
"New carnivorous attribute of known plant discovered in Pacific Northwest", perhaps?
I don’t understand why not just say it — it sounds pretty exciting to me.
So I would say that I'm a little skeptical, but hopeful. The deletion in the genome could have other parallel causes also (adaptation to the same very acid soils were carnivorous plants live would be my first candidate).
Very interesting idea in any case.