Why the change in the title? It is not the original and there is nothing clikbaity about it. Is HN now editorializing the Economist?
Concision?
Plants can detect sound
51–60 of 118 posts
Re: Plants can detect sound
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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.
Re: Plants can detect sound
#53"Plants don't have ears." - Learn something new every day.
Don't trust everything on the internet. At least some plants have ears. [1]
Re: Plants can detect sound
#54Boquila trifoliolata appears to mimic surrounding leaves and the mechanism is currently unknown. One (controversial) hypothesis is that it has some sort of vision.
Re: Plants can detect sound
#55I 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…
Imagine an elevator that moves up and down its shaft with a sinusoidal elevation over time. Riding in that elevator, one could detect frequencies with quite long wavelengths compared to the size of a person.
A less abstract example is a boat at sea.
Re: Plants can detect sound
#56Just 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.
Annihilation reminded me of Ballard’s The Crystal World in which all living things are slowly but surely being consumed.
Re: Plants can detect sound
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Hot and cold do measure motion, if we want to be very technical (since temperature is just a measure of the average momentum of molecules). Pain should probably be considered a separate sense indeed, though it can also be argued it is something different from the senses themselves, since it is fully internal, it doesn't reveal some fact about the outside world.
Trigger warning: description of medical procedure.
Yes pain seems more like the interpretation of sense data, like if something sounds nice or tastes good?
When I had an operation under local anesthetic I still felt the knife cutting into me, but was able to interpret it as not painful? This is how opiates (for pain relief) have been described to me -- still allowing you to feel the sensations but allowing you to not 'feel' the pain.
Perhaps seeing with human biology knowledge can tell me why this is wrong!?
Re: Plants can detect sound
#58In my studies, we place EEG electrode on them, they produce different amount of electrical signals in different conditions too.
Piezoelectric sensors can hear! /s
Re: Plants can detect sound
#59Boquila trifoliolata appears to mimic surrounding leaves and the mechanism is currently unknown. One (controversial) hypothesis is that it has some sort of vision. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boquila
> One hypothesis is that volatile organic compounds emitted from host plant leaves induce a phenotypic change in nearby B. trifoliolata leaves. By receiving different host signals into its system, it is able to create specific signals and hormones in its tissues to regulate gene transcription of leaf morphology and developmental pathways for leaf differentiation.[12] The other hypothesis is that there could be horizontal gene transfer between the host and B. trifoliolata. A separate study also conducted by Gianoli et al. suggests that bacterial agents, which could mediate a horizontal gene transfer, may play a role in leaf mimicry by B. trifoliolata.
See, here are two perfectly reasonable explanations for the mimicry that don't involve "seeing" anything.
> A 2021 paper suggested that the plant has some sort of vision using ocelli. This hypothesis was presented on the basis of experiments in which the vine appeared to mimic plastic vines and artificial plants.
Plastic vines and artificial plants too!? There go those two theories.
Re: Plants can detect sound
#60This 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).
Because all those things feel different to touch