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Plants can detect sound

economist.com

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Re: Plants can detect sound

#61

Post by memen »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #40
magicalhippo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Touch is measuring motion or sustained pressure. Taste doesn't care about how hard the molecules hit your taste receptors, only if they bind to the taste receptors or not. Our eyes don't measure the photon pressure[1], the photons react with the atoms in our photoreceptor cells[2] triggering an electrochemical process. Our sense of hearing is the closest to touch. We have hairs on our body which is part of our sense…

If you're going to categorise senses into the usual five, which is what seems to be going on here, then hot, cold and pain are going to count as "touch" too. Those aren't about measuring motion so this explanation doesn't seem to work.

> Although in some cultures five human senses were traditionally identified as such (namely sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing), it is now recognized that there are many more.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense

Re: Plants can detect sound

#62

Post by pvaldes »

pseudoscience, unability to apply the most basic self-criticism [1], and low quality papermills churning turd-ticles in action.

[1] Stop reading at "Plants living near a busy road have their grow stunt because noise", that is just the dumbest explanation available in the bag. Do they noticed that those areas are typically contaminated with heavy metals?

Re: Plants can detect sound

#63

Post by user_7832 »

addaon wrote: post #13
borissk wrote: post #7

I won't be surprised if single cell organisms, even prokaryotes can detect and react to sound - just a matter of more research to find out how.

> I won't be surprised if single cell organisms, even prokaryotes can detect and react to sound It would have to be pretty insanely high in the ultrasound. A 30 kHz (above the top of usual audible sound range) wave is around 10 mm (10000 µm) in wavelength; a typical prokaryote is of order 1 µm. While there are some uses for MHz-scale ultrasound, the attenuation starts getting pretty insane -- there's just not much en…

Why would you assume that the order of magnitude of the animal is similar to the wavelength? Elephants can communicate with as low as 1hz. The wavelength of that is over 300m.

If the amplitude is high enough, human too can comfortably “feel” infrasonic.

Re: Plants can detect sound

#64

Post by tsimionescu »

robertlagrant wrote: post #52
tsimionescu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say Annihilation is in any way a remake of Stalker, shameless or not. It is clearly inspired by it a bit in terms of setting, but it has a very different message to say. Stalker was essentially a movie about faith. Annihilation is a movie about self-destruction, both in the destructive sense, but also as a necessary step to building a new self. The concept of a special zone where things are not the same as…

I think the setting is a pretty big part of Annihilation. The "about" is something that's shared by many different works, but the setting is a bit more unusual. So while I don't agree that it's a shameless remake, I would say the most distinctive thing about it is the setting, and so to some extent it's a fair cop.

If we go into details about the setting, it is still vastly different from Stalker. The Zone in Stalker is only vaguely and mysteriously abnormal, in a subtle, mostly faith-based kind of way.

By contrast, the Zone in Annihilation is very overtly supernatural, and in very specific ways that are important to the point it's trying to make - merging and recombining humans and the problems that face them, and manifesting internal struggles externally. To be fair, the Zone in Roadside Picnic, the novel Stalker adapts, is also more overtly supernatural, but still in a very different way.

I really don't think it's fair to consider Stalker or Roadside Picnic anything more than inspiration for Annihilation.

Re: Plants can detect sound

#65

Post by Ensorceled »

pvaldes wrote: post #62

pseudoscience, unability to apply the most basic self-criticism [1], and low quality papermills churning turd-ticles in action. [1] Stop reading at "Plants living near a busy road have their grow stunt because noise", that is just the dumbest explanation available in the bag. Do they noticed that those areas are typically contaminated with heavy metals?

> pseudoscience, unability to apply the most basic self-criticism [1], and low quality papermills churning turd-ticles in action.

This eloquently and entirely refutes all the claims, excellent work.

Re: Plants can detect sound

#67

Post by gavinmckenzie »

kilolima wrote: post #38
patrickscoleman wrote: post #29

Just read “The Day of the Triffids” by John Wyndham (1951)[1]. It’s a great, classic horror sci-fi novel where plants can hear and talk to each other. Big influence for “Annihilation” and “28 Days Later.” Gotta love it when some crazy fictional idea turns out to have some factual (?) basis. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids

I think Annihilation is more a shameless remake of Stalker, as far as going into a "Zone" where an alien influence has changed the nature of reality.

I thought the accepted explanation of Annihilation was a metaphor for cancer. The slow seemingly unstoppable spread. Mutations creating new things that mimic the familiar but in often grotesque ways, mechanistically expanding to destructively consume everything in its path into a new form of life.

Re: Plants can detect sound

#68

Post by Ensorceled »

noman-land wrote: post #14

This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch? Molecules touch your tongue and you taste things. Molecules touch your nose and you smell things. Air vibrates your inner ear hairs and you hear things. Photons hit your eyes and you see things (not sure if this counts but it seems like it could).

> This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch?

It is a dumb question. How would categorizing all our senses as "sense of touch" be in anyway useful? Why would we categorize obviously different things that work entirely differently as the same because, "at the end of the day, everything is atoms"

"Did you lose both your sense of touch and your sense of touch when you got COVID?"

"No, I thankfully, I only lost my sense of touch."

Re: Plants can detect sound

#69

Post by dotnet00 »

noman-land wrote: post #14

This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just considered touch? Molecules touch your tongue and you taste things. Molecules touch your nose and you smell things. Air vibrates your inner ear hairs and you hear things. Photons hit your eyes and you see things (not sure if this counts but it seems like it could).

Sort of reminds me of the argument that nothing can be artificial because we, as natural beings are making said things and thus following the chain, everything is technically originated from nature.

It's technically correct and does highlight that calling something artificial doesn't make it inherently inferior to something natural, but if we extended the meaning of natural like that, the term artificial would become meaningless while the need to distinguish between the "naturalness" of a CPU vs a plant would remain.

Re: Plants can detect sound

#70

Post by yojo »

pvaldes wrote: post #62

pseudoscience, unability to apply the most basic self-criticism [1], and low quality papermills churning turd-ticles in action. [1] Stop reading at "Plants living near a busy road have their grow stunt because noise", that is just the dumbest explanation available in the bag. Do they noticed that those areas are typically contaminated with heavy metals?

That’s not what the article said. Verbatim quote (emphasis mine):

“…marigolds and sage plants exposed to the noise of traffic from a busy motorway suffered stunted growth”

There’s a link in the article with more details on the experimental design:

“The plants were grown from seed and allowed to mature for two months in the same space before they were divided into two groups. One group was exposed to 73 decibels of traffic noise recorded from a busy motorway in Tehran for 16 hours a day. The other group was left to grow in silence. After 15 days had passed, samples were taken from the youngest fully expanded leaves on every plant in the experiment and studied.”

The plants were exposed to sound in a lab, with a control group. They were not actually next to a motorway.

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