Little Shop of Horrors: 3D? Fly Inside Carnivorous Plants!!

Now you can fly inside some of the world’s most ferocious plants! Well, maybe ferocious isn’t the right word, but they are all certainly carnivorous.

This cool video comes from Enrico Coen at the John Innes Center. Their group is all about exploring unseen worlds using innovative imaging technologies. The plant video here uses a technique called optical projection tomography in order to reconstruct the inner workings of these arboreal killing chambers.

The evolution of carnivorous plants is a fascinating one. Each of the plants in this video evolved independently, meaning that nature adapted several different plant families (which pre-date animals and insects) to the same end: eating things other than sunlight. Out of the perhaps quarter million known flowering plants, only a few hundred are carnivorous. And like us, many of these plants don’t do all of their own digesting, instead calling upon bacteria to break down their prey and absorb the juicy nutrients.

Hey, wait a sec. Bacteria living inside something else and doing the host a favor? Sounds familiar!

(via PsiVid)

Source: blogs.scientificamerican.com

Wave Your Stamens in the Air Like Ya Just Don’t Care!

I feel like time travel, while perhaps scientifically infeasible, can be achieved technologically by manipulating the scale of time rather than our position along its arrow. This allows us to leave the present behind, and experience a sort of alternate reality.

Those alternate realties are places where flowers are not mere bee-buffets, decorative flourishes and aromatic embellishments. They are dynamic symbols of awakening, floral fireworks, like nature’s way of saying “Good morning! What do you have for me today!?”

I give you Flowers by Katka Pruskova, 730 hours of blooming buds condensed to mere minutes.

Wash it down with an animated version of Richard Feynman’s epic “Ode To A Flower”.

Source: vimeo.com

The Beauty Of Microscopic Plant Seeds Vincent Van Gogh painted sunflowers, and Claude Monet painted irises. Rob Kesseler paints seeds, only he uses electrons to do so. Working with the Millennium Seed Bank, Kesseler takes scanning electron microscope images of plant seeds on the microscopic scale. He digitally paints them in order to bring out their unique physical and biological traits: Leafy wings that evolved to carry them aloft on the wind, spikes to hitch a ride on an animal’s coat, or a burly coat to survive a trip through the digestive system of a herbivore. Check out more of his images at Co.Design or at his full Phytopic gallery.
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The Beauty Of Microscopic Plant Seeds

Vincent Van Gogh painted sunflowers, and Claude Monet painted irises. Rob Kesseler paints seeds, only he uses electrons to do so.

Working with the Millennium Seed Bank, Kesseler takes scanning electron microscope images of plant seeds on the microscopic scale. He digitally paints them in order to bring out their unique physical and biological traits: Leafy wings that evolved to carry them aloft on the wind, spikes to hitch a ride on an animal’s coat, or a burly coat to survive a trip through the digestive system of a herbivore.

Check out more of his images at Co.Design or at his full Phytopic gallery.

Source: fastcodesign.com

Seeding The Future

Can you imagine a world without plants? I can’t. Plants are our carpet, our ceiling, our walls, our food. From mankind’s point of view, they are something akin to nature’s architecture. Beyond their stationary, oft-overlooked physical forms, they are also a domain of life that we rely on to breathe and to eat.

As we continue to affect climate change and destroy huge swaths of green Earth, what will become of these species? The Kew Gardens, home of the world’s largest living plant collection, has now amassed mankind’s largest seed bank. It’s a botanical insurance policy for a future Earth, as well as a museum of visual wonders.

This video takes you through the project and features some of the collection’s most exotic seeds. The photomicroscopy is amazing, full of proof that nature’s functional forms can take on alien, exotic beauty.

As Wolfgang tells us in the video:

There’s no technological reason why any plant species should become extinct. We have every opportunity to pass on entire botanical heritage intact to future generations.

(↬ Brain Pickings)

Source: brainpickings.org