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

Watch the slow creep of spring as it pushes the cold hand of winter back to the frigid north … only to succumb again next year, of course. NASA’s MODIS imager senses Earth’s reflection of both visible and longer wavelength near-infrared light. Plants, full of chlorophyll, absorb most visible light (except for green, of course) and reflect near-infrared. By combining this with the reflection of snow, NASA can watch the yearly cycle of vegetation springing back and falling away. I made a higher-res GIF here, and you can watch the full three-year animation here.
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Watch the slow creep of spring as it pushes the cold hand of winter back to the frigid north … only to succumb again next year, of course.

NASA’s MODIS imager senses Earth’s reflection of both visible and longer wavelength near-infrared light. Plants, full of chlorophyll, absorb most visible light (except for green, of course) and reflect near-infrared. By combining this with the reflection of snow, NASA can watch the yearly cycle of vegetation springing back and falling away.

I made a higher-res GIF here, and you can watch the full three-year animation here.

Seeing (Infra)Red

I’m continually amazed at the added beauty of the world when we are allowed to view it from a point beyond our usual sensory range.

Do you know why plants are green? It’s because they reflect green light more intensely than other colors. If anything, that kind of makes them not green. If it doesn’t contribute to photosynthesis, they have no use for it. And although we can’t see it with our limited vision, they also eschew the infrared. 

Andrew Shurtleff has made a stunning time-lapse showcasing the world as viewed in near-infrared. The light-sensitive chips of digital cameras can sense these wavelengths outside human vision (near-infrared being about 800-2000 nm wavelengths compared to our 400-700 nm visual range). With the right kind of video editing, that infrared world comes alive like a planet painted from pure ice. The leafy material appears white due to its intense reflection of infrared light.

Holy wow.

Infrared photography has been used for decades to study vegetation. Kodak’s infrared-sensitive Aerochrome film paints the plant world in an eerie dusting of pink that you’ll have to see to believe. And NASA, whose scientists use the entirety of the electromagnetic spectrum to paint pictures of our world and others in Pepto-pink, create amazing works of Earth as art using infrared filters:

(via Bad Astronomy)

Source: Slate

brettkingery: Anatomy of plant cells I’m sort of blown away when I think about the fact that plants share so much of our basic molecular biology yet have evolved so independently as to have these completely alien structures. Plus, you know, photosynthesis, which is its own kind of biological magic. Plants, you’re pretty great.
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brettkingery: Anatomy of plant cells I’m sort of blown away when I think about the fact that plants share so much of our basic molecular biology yet have evolved so independently as to have these completely alien structures. Plus, you know, photosynthesis, which is its own kind of biological magic. Plants, you’re pretty great.
Zoom Info
brettkingery: Anatomy of plant cells I’m sort of blown away when I think about the fact that plants share so much of our basic molecular biology yet have evolved so independently as to have these completely alien structures. Plus, you know, photosynthesis, which is its own kind of biological magic. Plants, you’re pretty great.
Zoom Info
brettkingery: Anatomy of plant cells I’m sort of blown away when I think about the fact that plants share so much of our basic molecular biology yet have evolved so independently as to have these completely alien structures. Plus, you know, photosynthesis, which is its own kind of biological magic. Plants, you’re pretty great.
Zoom Info
brettkingery: Anatomy of plant cells I’m sort of blown away when I think about the fact that plants share so much of our basic molecular biology yet have evolved so independently as to have these completely alien structures. Plus, you know, photosynthesis, which is its own kind of biological magic. Plants, you’re pretty great.
Zoom Info
brettkingery: Anatomy of plant cells I’m sort of blown away when I think about the fact that plants share so much of our basic molecular biology yet have evolved so independently as to have these completely alien structures. Plus, you know, photosynthesis, which is its own kind of biological magic. Plants, you’re pretty great.
Zoom Info
brettkingery: Anatomy of plant cells I’m sort of blown away when I think about the fact that plants share so much of our basic molecular biology yet have evolved so independently as to have these completely alien structures. Plus, you know, photosynthesis, which is its own kind of biological magic. Plants, you’re pretty great.
Zoom Info

brettkingery:

Anatomy of plant cells

I’m sort of blown away when I think about the fact that plants share so much of our basic molecular biology yet have evolved so independently as to have these completely alien structures. Plus, you know, photosynthesis, which is its own kind of biological magic. Plants, you’re pretty great.

(via wnycradiolab)

Source: brettkingery

The Art of Pollen Analysis Today you’re going to learn a new word. That word is “palynology”, or the study of pollen. Gunnar Erdtman is credited with bringing this science to the world, and he did it through equal parts art and study, each informing the other. Goes nicely with these stunning photos of microscopic plant seeds. (via Among The Stately Trees)
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The Art of Pollen Analysis

Today you’re going to learn a new word. That word is “palynology”, or the study of pollen. Gunnar Erdtman is credited with bringing this science to the world, and he did it through equal parts art and study, each informing the other.

Goes nicely with these stunning photos of microscopic plant seeds.

(via Among The Stately Trees)

Source: amongthestatelytrees.wordpress.com

Can plants grow leaves up, roots down … in space? Some new space science is helping to answer that. A plant experiment recently done on the International Space Station showed that plants do not need gravity in order to grow normal root patterns and send their leaves up toward the light. They grow more slowly, but as long as they have a light source above them, they are able to orient their direction of growth just fine (contrary to previous research). We’ve all seen a houseplant grow toward the light, right? This is a phenomenon called positive phototropism. The microgravity experiment showed that when a plant senses light, it not only grows toward it but sends its roots the other way. The root effect is called negative phototropism, and it seems to be enough to get a normal looking plant in space. Of course it’s not that simple, right? Nope. On Earth, it turns out that gravity does help, and plant roots have these dense little “molecular weights” that are pulled down by gravity and help a new seed orient the roots downward. They’re really cool. So it looks like, for now, that Earth plants use a combination of gravity and light to orient upleaves from downroots, and space plants can do almost as gooda  job with light alone. Bring on the space gardens! Whole Foods Lunar Base by 2020!! Would that count as organic? (if you want to dig deep into the space plant biology, here’s the original paper)
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Can plants grow leaves up, roots down … in space?

Some new space science is helping to answer that. A plant experiment recently done on the International Space Station showed that plants do not need gravity in order to grow normal root patterns and send their leaves up toward the light. They grow more slowly, but as long as they have a light source above them, they are able to orient their direction of growth just fine (contrary to previous research).

We’ve all seen a houseplant grow toward the light, right? This is a phenomenon called positive phototropism. The microgravity experiment showed that when a plant senses light, it not only grows toward it but sends its roots the other way. The root effect is called negative phototropism, and it seems to be enough to get a normal looking plant in space.

Of course it’s not that simple, right? Nope. On Earth, it turns out that gravity does help, and plant roots have these dense little “molecular weights” that are pulled down by gravity and help a new seed orient the roots downward. They’re really cool. So it looks like, for now, that Earth plants use a combination of gravity and light to orient upleaves from downroots, and space plants can do almost as gooda  job with light alone.

Bring on the space gardens! Whole Foods Lunar Base by 2020!! Would that count as organic?

(if you want to dig deep into the space plant biology, here’s the original paper)

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

Derek from Veritasium (with help from many of our YouTube friends, including Hank Green) reminds us that Trees Are Freaking Awesome! 

Of course, we already knew that. As Richard Feynman reminded us, they (sort of) grow out of the air, and they feed off of the Sun. That’s a pretty cool trick. But do you know how they grow so tall? I mean, how exactly do they get water all the way from the ground up to their leaves, which can be 30+ meters above the roots?

If you guessed physics, you’d be right … but you’ll be amazed by exactly how they do it. Mother Nature is certainly the finest engineer on Earth.

Source: youtube.com