5 ms·
Plants do sums to get through the night, researchers show
- apalmer 13y agois this not basic metabolism regulation? really dont know kind of always assumed this just worked in living things
- anigbrowl 13y agoIf it was that simple you'd never be hungry or feel too full.
- personalcompute 13y agoSensationalist title. You could also argue that physics performs sophisticated calculus every moment to determine exactly where it should place your moving vehicle. Math was created to model the world - it does not create the world itself.
- rosser 13y agoThe difference is that this seems more predictive than merely descriptive. A more apt analogy might be a car that calculates the rate at which it must consume fuel in order to arrive at the next service station just as its tank empties.
- gaius 13y agoAs my friend Bazza said when he read this, in the same sense that the number of sheep in a field is determined by the field doing addition and subtraction.
- learc83 13y agoNo, it would be like the field forcing sheep to leave at a constant rate during the night so that it was very close to empty by (but not before) morning.
- esolyt 13y agoNon-mobile page: http://phys.org/news/2013-06-sums-night.html http://phys.org/news/2013-06-sums-night.html
- stiff 13y agoI would love to read a review of this article by the good old Djikstra...
- jbri 13y agoIt would seem to me that no explicit arithmetic is being done - it's simply a consequence of natural behaviour. Consider the case of a starch channel, the size of which is governed by two factors - the quantity of stored starch, and the time since nightfall. (Other factors may also affect the size, but are irrelevant to this discussion). This seems like a construct that could quite feasibly appear in a plant. No arithmetic is being performed by the plant, but simply these two factors working in concert cause the rate of starch consumption to appear to be based on whatever the starch level was when night fell. The fact that the observed rate of consumption is such that nearly all the starch is consumed by morning is easily explained by natural selection - plants that consume starch too fast obviously starve overnight, while plants that consume it too sparingly are using their resources inefficiently and so would tend to be out-competed by plants that make better use of them. Over many generations, the base rate of consumption would become tuned to how long nights last in that region.
- seanalltogether 13y ago> Over many generations, the base rate of consumption would become tuned to how long nights last in that region. From the article - "the starch store lasts until dawn even if the night comes unexpectedly early or the size of the starch store varies." The point is that the plants can handle 2 changing variables
- jbri 13y agoNight coming unexpectedly early is just one thing that could cause the amount of starch stored to vary. There's only factor changing here.