161–170 of 188 posts
Does this throw out the whole moral panic about animal welfare? If plants suffer too, isn't it wrong to eat them as well? Or there should be real focus in humane treatment and harvesting them?
I refuse to believe this isn't a troll comment.
Vegans are going to have to re-evaluate their life choices. It might be much more cruel to harvest a field of soybeans than it is to kill a cow.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you break a branch, the sound of it breaking informs you that you have broken a branch.
If a branch falls in the forest and there is no-one there to hear it, does it make a sound? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest#:~... . "... majority view of the quantum mechanics community then and arguably to this day is that existence in the absence of an observer is at best a conjecture"
To wit, yes, the tree makes a sound because the tree is there to hear it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you break a branch, the sound of it breaking informs you that you have broken a branch.
If a branch falls in the forest and there is no-one there to hear it, does it make a sound? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest#:~... . "... majority view of the quantum mechanics community then and arguably to this day is that existence in the absence of an observer is at best a conjecture"
I am astounded that no one has mentioned "The Sound Machine" by Roald Dahl (1949), in which a scientist invents a machine that makes ultrasonic sounds audible to humans. He discovers that plants scream when cut. You can read it at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/09/17/the-sound-mach...
I wonder if this is the source of a Jack Handey joke: "If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the signal is being sent, you can be pretty sure that due to the intrinsic efficiency-maximization that biological systems perform then most likely the mechanism for detecting and acting upon it has been evolved by other organisms, especially for something as fitness-critical as stress.
Sometimes signal is just there regardless. If you hit your tissue hard enough, it becomes blueish for a while (a bruise, a hemorrhage). It may benefit something by accident, but a bruise just can’t stay as pink as the rest of you, due to the physics of the process. (From tfa) Plants exposed to drought stress have been shown to experience cavitation – a process where air bubbles form, expand and collapse in the xylem,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the signal is being sent, you can be pretty sure that due to the intrinsic efficiency-maximization that biological systems perform then most likely the mechanism for detecting and acting upon it has been evolved by other organisms, especially for something as fitness-critical as stress.
Sometimes signal is just there regardless. If you hit your tissue hard enough, it becomes blueish for a while (a bruise, a hemorrhage). It may benefit something by accident, but a bruise just can’t stay as pink as the rest of you, due to the physics of the process. (From tfa) Plants exposed to drought stress have been shown to experience cavitation – a process where air bubbles form, expand and collapse in the xylem,…
> In other words, dry wood cracks.
I don't think it's saying that at all