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Plants may not be getting enough credit. Not only do they remember when you touch them, it turns out that they can make risky decisions that are as sophisticated as those made by humans, all without brains or complex nervous systems. And they may even judge risks more efficiently than we do.

Researchers showed that when faced with the choice between a pot containing constant levels of nutrients or one with unpredictable levels, a plant will pick the mystery pot when conditions are sufficiently poor.

When nutrient levels were low, the plants laid more roots in the unpredictable pot. But when nutrients were abundant, they chose the one that always had the same amount. The plants somehow knew the best time to take risks.

Trees — and all plants, for that matter — feel nothing at all, because consciousness, emotions and cognition are hallmarks of animals alone, scientists recently reported in an opinion article.

Though plants lack brains, the firing of electrical signals in their stems and leaves nonetheless triggered responses that hinted at consciousness, researchers previously reported.

Beginning in 2006, some scientists have argued that plants possess neuron-like cells that interact with hormones and neurotransmitters, forming "a plant nervous system, analogous to that in animals

GRANITE CITY, Ill.—Ever since the layoffs a few years ago, many residents here had wondered when the local steel plant would again fire up its furnaces—or close forever.

Not only were hundreds of steelworkers left jobless when United States Steel Corp. X -1.49% scaled down its operations in Granite City, Ill., in 2015, but lunch deliveries to the plant vanished for a local diner while a shoe store’s work-boot sales plummeted. At least 26 businesses closed within a year, according to an area chamber of commerce.

The Granite City steel plant didn’t entirely close. Before the layoffs started, the plant employed 2,200, making it the town’s biggest employer, according to a securities filing. After layoffs of approximately 1,500 employees, some were eventually brought back, but the furnaces remained off.

Every living thing is a pulse. We quicken, then we fade. There is a deep beauty in this, but deeper down, inside every plant, every leaf, inside every living thing (us included) sits a secret.

Everything alive will eventually die, we know that, but now we can read the pattern and see death coming. We have recently learned its logic, which "You can put into mathematics," says physicist Geoffrey West. It shows up with "extraordinary regularity," not just in plants, but in all animals, from slugs to giraffes. Death, it seems, is intimately related to size.

Life is short for small creatures, longer in big ones.

The Perseverance of New York City’s Wildflowers

A park in Williamsburg awaits the miniature beauty of its spring blossoms.

In Williamsburg, on a seven-acre park by the East River, spring will soon unfurl in blue blossoms

Scientists have been stealing ideas from animals for years.

One industrial “nose job” later, the bullet train is far quieter and goes 10% faster on 15% less fuel.

There are countless examples of similar “biomimicry.” The velcro on your coat is based on those aggravating burrs that cling to your jeans after a hike. Scientists are developing painless hypodermic needles modeled on mosquito mouths that get your blood out without your even noticing.

ants create the largest colonies of any ant, with some comprising 8 million individuals. To sustain themselves, they march across the forest carrying vast quantities of leaves, piece by piece, in great green convoys, back to the nest. The ants use the leaves as fertilizer to cultivate gardens sown with bacteria and Leucoagaricus gongylophorous, a fungus that produces fruiting bodies packed with nutrients for the ants to feast on.

could also provide a model for the more efficient production of renewable biofuels.

confirmed that 145 lignocellulases were actually present. “That’s pretty definitive proof that the fungus is the primary driver of biomass breakdown,

If I were writing the dietary guidelines, I would give them a radical overhaul. I’d go so far as to radically overhaul the way we evaluate diet. Here’s why and how.

Lately, as scientists try, and fail, to reproduce results, all of science is taking a hard look at funding biases, statistical shenanigans and groupthink. All that criticism, and then some, applies to nutrition.

Prominent in the charge to change the way we do science is John Ioannidis, professor of health research and policy at Stanford University. In 2005, he published “Why Most Research Findings Are False” in the journal PLOS Medicin

Plants play an important role for most indigenous communities in South America, and not merely as a source of food. They also provide the raw material for building materials, tools, medicine, and much more. The extinction of a plant species therefore also endangers the very foundation of these people's way of life. advertisement

The problem is that this is not written down. Passed down as a cultural inheritance, it exists only in the minds of the people -- and could therefore vanish almost unnoticed. "Very little is known about how vulnerable this knowledge is in the context of current global change," says Jordi Bascompte, professor of ecology at the University of Zurich.

"There is therefore an urgent need to find out how biological and cultural factors interact with each other in determining the services provided by biodiversity.."

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Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.

Super Mario Run begins, as does almost every Super Mario title, with Princess Peach becoming a hostage who must be rescued by Mario. Just before her ritual kidnapping, Peach invites Mario to her castle and pledges to bake him a cake. Upon her rescue, she kisses Mario. The game also includes a second female character, Toadette, whose job is to wave a flag before and after a race, like a character from “Grease.”

But Super Mario Run relegates its female characters to positions of near helplessness. Peach and Toadette become playable only after you complete certain tasks, which makes the women in the game feel like prizes.

Still, lots of girls and women play video games. There are more women over 30 who play video games than boys under 18 who play, according to the industry’s lobbying arm, the Entertainment Software Association. A Pew Research Center survey published last year found that almost 60 percent of girls between the ages of 13 and 17 are gamers.

psychologist Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California–Irvine, has made her name working on false memory. She tells Alison George how recollections can be conjured up,

What exactly is going on when we retrieve a memory? EL: When we remember something, we're taking bits and pieces of experience—sometimes from different times and places—and bringing it all together to construct what might feel like a recollection but is actually a construction. The process of calling it into conscious awareness can change it, and now you're storing something that's different

The memory of witnesses to crimes and accidents was a natural place to go. In particular I looked at what happens when people are questioned about their experiences. I would ultimately see those questions as a means by which the memories got contaminated.

near brush with nuclear catastrophe, brought on by a single foraging bear, is an example of what sociologist Charles Perrow calls a “normal accident.” These frightening incidents are “normal” not because they happen often, but because they are almost certain to occur in any tightly connected complex system.

Perrow had a fairly simple solution for the problem. High-risk systems, such as nuclear power plants, should be built only as a last resort.

errow stresses the role that human error and mismanagement play in these scenarios. The important lesson: failures in complex systems are caused not only by the hardware and software problems but by people and their motivations.

it’s time to kill this mistaken idea once and for all. Basically everything in modern agriculture is unnatural. “The cereal crops we eat bear little resemblance to their naturally selected ancestors, and the environments in which we grow them are equally highly manipulated and engineered by us,” she writes. “We have, over the last 10,000 years, bred out of our main food plants all kinds of survival strategies that natural selection put in.”

“Agriculture is the invention of humans,” she adds. “It is the deliberate manipulation of plants (and animals) and the environment in which they grow to provide food for us. The imperative is not that we should stop interfering with nature, but that we should interfere in the best way possible to provide a reliable, sustainable, equitable supply of nutritious food.”

Special K for breakfast. Liverwurst and cheese for lunch. And I remember the song ‘You've Got Personality’ was playing as on the radio as I pulled up for work,” said Healy, one of 50 confirmed people in the United States with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, an uncanny ability to remember dates and events.

New research released this week has found that even people with phenomenal memory are susceptible to having “false memories,” suggesting that “memory distortions are basic and widespread in humans, and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune,” according to the authors of the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Professor Elizabeth Loftus, who has spent decades researching how memories can become contaminated with people remembering—sometimes quite vividly and confidently—events that never happened. Loftus has found that memories can be planted in someone’s mind if they are exposed to misinformation after an event, or if they are asked suggestive questions about the past

using business profits to increase productivity and output — doesn’t actually drive economic growth. Consumer debt and government spending do. Private investment isn’t even necessary to promote growth.

Economists will tell you that private business investment causes growth because it pays for the new plant or equipment that creates jobs, improves labor productivity and increases workers’ incomes. As a result, you’ll hear politicians insisting that more incentives for private investors — lower taxes on corporate profits — will lead to faster and better-balanced growth.

But history shows that this is wrong.

If you're going to use logic reversals in your favor, you need to be subtle.

offer the target a series of clues until the obvious conclusion is the one you want. The key is to be patient

another version of reverse psychology but at a less aggressive level

When a giant Chinese glassmaker arrived here in 2014 and began spending what would become more than a half-billion dollars to fix up an abandoned General Motors plant, it seemed like a tale from opposite land: The Chinese are supposedly stealing American jobs — as no less an authority than President Trump has pointed out.

But now the Chinese were suddenly creating them. More than 1,500 jobs, in fact.

At Fuyao, a major culture clash is playing out on the factory floor, with some workers questioning the company’s commitment to operating under American supervision and American norms.