PLANTS CAN ‘THINK’ AND ‘REMEMBER’

PLANTS CAN ‘THINK’ AND ‘REMEMBER’.

Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose 1859-1937

 

 

TOUCH ME NOT……(Mimosa Pudica) Yes, it is the name of the plant, it is also called chueemuee is a sensitive plant. The moment you touch it its leaves they almost instantaneously fold together and the leaf stalk droops. This sometimes sets off a chain of reactions, with several leaf stalks falling on top of one another. This touch-induced movement of leaves is known scientifically as thigmonasty, and is thought to be a defensive mechanism against grazers. At night, the leaves will also fold and bend in movements known as nyctonastic movements (reaction to absence of light). Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose, generally known as J C Bose was an Indian scientist who discovered and proved in the world that plants also have life. They consume food and sleep during nights, and wake up early in the mornings. Pain and pleasures are there for plants too. They also have birth, growth and death, as human beings. These are the discoveries of J. C. Bose.

Mimosa Pudica

 

 

I remember, during my college i had demonstrated one of the experiments of Dr. J. C Bose. How the plants(Mimosa Pudica) responded to touch. He demonstrated that plants are also sensitive to heat, cold, light, noise and various other external stimuli. Bose contrived a very sophisticated instrument called Crescograph which could record and observe the minute responses because of external stimulants. It was capable of magnifying the motion of plant tissues to about 10,000 times of their actual size, which found many similarities between plants and other living organisms.

 

 

Arabidopsis plants

 

 

Jagdish Chandra Bose was an Indian Physicist who pioneerd the investigation of radio and microwave optics. He took interest in Botany and Zoology too. J C Bose wrote on 1) The Nervous mechanism of plants.2) Response in the living and the non living. These books were world world famous. Plants, scientists say, transmit information about light intensity and quality from leaf to leaf in a very similar way to our own nervous systems. These “electro-chemical signals” are carried by cells that act as “nerves” of the plant .

Florescence Imaginging

 

 

Plants can ‘think’ and ‘remember’ Plants are able to “remember” and “react” to information contained in light, according to researchers. The researchers used fluorescence imaging to watch the plants respond In their experiment, the scientists showed that light shone on to one leaf caused the whole plant to respond. The plant] has a specific memory for the light which builds its immunity against pathogens, and it can adjust to varying light conditions.

chemical reactions in leaves not exposed to light

 

 

“So the plants perform a sort of biological light computation, using information contained in the light to immunise themselves against diseases that are prevalent during that season.” 

 

 

 

GALAXIES

Sombrero Galaxy

A galaxy is an enormous collection of a few million to trillions of stars, gas, and dust held together by gravity. They can be several thousand to hundreds of thousands of light-years across. Galaxies with less than a billion stars are considered “small galaxies.” In our own galaxy, the sun is just one of about 100 billion stars. Galaxy Origins Most astronomers suggest that galaxies formed shortly after a cosmic “big bang” that began the universe some 10 billion to 20 billion years ago. In the milliseconds following this explosion, clouds of gases began to coalesce, collapse, and compress under gravity to form the building blocks of galaxies. Scientists are divided on just how galaxies first formed. Some believe that smaller clusters of about one million stars, known as globular clusters, formed first and later gathered into galaxies. Others believe that galaxies formed first and that only later did the stars within them begin to gather into smaller clusters..

Andromeda galaxy

Galaxies are classified into three main types: spiral galaxies, elliptical galaxies, and irregular galaxies. Spiral galaxies, such as the Milky Way, consist of a flat disk with a bulging center and surrounding spiral arms. The galaxy’s disk includes stars, planets, dust, and gas—all of which rotate around the galactic center in a regular manner. This spinning motion, at speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second, may cause matter in the disk to take on a distinctive spiral shape like a cosmic pinwheel. Some spiral galaxies obtain even more interesting shapes that earn them descriptive names, such as sombrero galaxies…

 Ring galaxy

Older stars reside in the bulge at the center of the galactic disk. Many new stars also form in spiral systems, and their disks are surrounded by a halo, which scientists believe is rich with mysterious dark matter. Elliptical galaxies are shaped as their name suggests. They are generally round but stretch longer along one axis than along the other. Elliptical galaxies contain many older stars, up to one trillion, but little dust and other interstellar matter. Their stars orbit the galactic center, like those in the disks of spiral galaxies, but they do so in more random directions. ….

Tadpole Galaxy

The universe’s largest known galaxies are giant elliptical galaxies, which may be as much as two million light-years long. Elliptical galaxies may also be small, in which case they are dubbed dwarf elliptical galaxies. NGC 5866, an example of a lenticular galaxy Peculiar galaxies are galactic formations that develop unusual properties due to tidal interactions with other galaxies. An example of this is the ring galaxy, which possesses a ring-like structure of stars and interstellar medium surrounding a bare core. A ring galaxy is thought to occur when a smaller galaxy passes through the core of a spiral galaxySuch an event may have affected theAndromeda Galaxy, as it displays a multi-ring-like structure when viewed in infrared radiation. A lenticular galaxy is an intermediate form that has properties of both elliptical and spiral galaxies. These are categorized as Hubble type S0, and they possess ill-defined spiral arms with an elliptical halo of stars.Barred lenticular galaxies receive Hubble classification SB0.) I Galaxies that are not spiral or elliptical are called irregular galaxies. Irregular galaxies appear misshapen and lack a distinct form, often because they are within the gravitational influence of other galaxies close by…. Today we classify galaxies mainly into two major groups following Hubble’s examples. Elliptical galaxies range from round shapes (E0) to oval shapes (E7). Spiral galaxies have a pinwheel shape and are classified according to their bulge, as well as how tightly their arms are wrapped around the bulge. They range from Sa, which has a large bulge and tight, smooth arms, to Sc, which has a small bulge and loose, lumpy arms. Barred spiral galaxies classified as SB are pinwheel-shaped and have a distinct “bar” of stars, dust and gas across their bulge.

Antennae galaxy

They range from an SBa, which has a bar across its large bulge and tight, smooth arms, to an SBc, which has a bar across its small bulge and loose, lumpy arms. Irregular galaxies have no definite shape but still contain new stars, gas, and dust. The closest spiral galaxy is Andromeda, a galaxy much like our own Milky Way. It is 2.2 million light years away from us. Andromeda is approaching our galaxy at a rate of 670,000 miles per hour. Five billion years from now it may even collide with our Milky Way galaxy. I

Fork

Hubbles classification of galaxies.

Pinwheel galaxy

Its a Spiral galaxy.

Lenticular galaxy.

Its also known as NGC 5866

HUMAN EVOLUTION

November 12, 2013 by dighe31

Evolution

 The term human in human evolution refers to genus Homo. This genus diverged from the Australopithecines about 2 million years ago in Africa. Scientists have estimated that humans deviated from their common ancestor chimpanzees about 5 to 7 million years ago. Due to the morphological and anatomical similarities between the apes and humans, scientists believed that the great apes were the closest biological relatives of human beings.

HOMO

Homo is the genus which includes modern man and its close relatives. It is about 2.5 million years old and evolved with the Homo habilis species. Its appearance coincides with the evidence of stone tools and the beginning of the Lower Paleolithic Age. Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo antecessor, Homo cepranensis, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo georgicus, Homo ergaster, Homo rhodesiensis, Homo sapiens andHomo floresiensis were the species from the genus homo. Except Homo sapiens, all species have become extinct.

 Neanderthral

Homo neanderthalensis and Homo floresiensis who were the last surviving species, disappeared around 12,000 to 24,000 years ago respectively. Humans first evolved in Africa, and much of human evolution occurred on that continent. The fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago come entirely from Africa.

Jumpstyle Evolution

Early humans first migrated out of Africa into Asia probably between 2 million and 1.8 million years ago. They entered Europe somewhat later, between 1.5 million and 1 million years. Species of modern humans populated many parts of the world much later. For instance, people first came to Australia probably within the past 60,000 years and to the Americas within the past 30,000 years or so. The beginnings of agriculture and the rise of the first civilizations occurred within the past 12,000 years.

Lucy

Early human fossils and archeological remains offer the most important clues about this ancient past. These remains include bones, tools and any other evidence (such as footprints, evidence of hearths, or butchery marks on animal bones) left by earlier people. Usually, the remains were buried and preserved naturally.

Ape Skeletons

Onefossil discovery above all has transformed views of how we became human. But who was Lucy, and why is she so important to human evolution? Lucy was discovered in 1974 by anthropologist Professor Donald Johanson and his student Tom Gray in a maze of ravines at Hadar in northern Ethiopia. Johanson and Gray were out searching the scorched terrain for animal bones in the sand, ash and silt when they spotted a tiny fragment of arm bone.

Hall of Human Origin

Discovery of a lifetime Johanson immediately recognised it as belonging to a hominid. As they looked up the slope, they saw more bone fragments: ribs, vertebrae, thighbones and a partial jawbone. They eventually unearthed 47 bones of a skeleton – nearly 40% of a hominid, or humanlike creature, that lived around 3.2 million years ago. Based on its small size, and pelvic shape, they concluded it was female and named it ‘Lucy’ after ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, the Beatles song playing on the radio when Johanson and his team were celebrating the discovery back at camp.

Homo Sapiens

The rare laughing species The humans are known to possess a rare quality that distinguishes them from the rest of the animals: smile and laughter!