Nothing happened at all. They start producing chemicals that taste really bad. He was a -- what was he? Maybe just a tenth the width of your eyelash. These sensitive hairs he argues, would probably be able to feel that tiny difference. Also thanks to Christy Melville and to Emerald O'Brien and to Andres O'Hara and to Summer Rayne. All in all, turns out one tree was connected to 47 other trees all around it. This way there is often more questions than answers, but that's part of the fun as well. So let's go to the first. Picasso! How much longer? Are you, like, aggressively looking around for -- like, do you wake up in the morning saying, "Now what can I get a plant to do that reminds me of my dog, or reminds me of a bear, or reminds me of a bee?". And his idea was to see if he could condition these dogs to associate that food would be coming from the sound of a bell. Also thanks to Christy Melville and to Emerald O'Brien and to Andres O'Hara and to Summer Rayne. Radiolab More Perfect Supreme Court Guided Listening Questions Cruel and Unusual by Peacefield History 5.0 (8) $1.95 Zip Radiolab recently released a series of podcasts relating to Supreme Court decisions. Here's the water.". And it's that little, little bit of moisture that the plant will somehow sense. Are you bringing the plant parade again? It's like a savings account? So after the first few, the plants already realized that that was not necessary. And moved around, but always matched in the same way together. And the tree gets the message, and it sends a message back and says, "Yeah, I can do that.". The plants would always grow towards the light. ALVIN UBELL: And I've been in the construction industry ever since I'm about 16 years old. ROBERT: And with these two stimuli, she put the plants, the little pea plants through a kind of training regime. ROBERT: So these trees were basically covered with bags that were then filled with radioactive gas. I don't know. So ROBERT: He says something about that's the wrong season. Give it to the new -- well, that's what she saying. JENNIFER FRAZER: And his idea was to see if he could condition these dogs to associate that food would be coming from the sound of a bell. Well, I asked Suzanne about that. AATISH BHATIA: All right. We are the principals of Accurate Building Inspectors of Brooklyn, New York. Apparently, bears park themselves in places and grab fish out of the water, and then, you know, take a bite and then throw the carcass down on the ground. ROBERT: Then of course because it's the BBC, they take a picture of it. Each one an ounce, an ounce, an ounce, an ounce, an ounce. ROBERT: I have even -- I can go better than even that. I mean, I -- it's a kind of Romanticism, I think. Where would the -- a little plant even store a memory? You have to understand that the cold water pipe causes even a small amount of water to condense on the pipe itself. On the fifth day, they take a look and discover most of the roots, a majority of the roots were heading toward the sound of water. JENNIFER FRAZER: I am the blogger of The Artful Amoeba at Scientific American. And is it as dramatic in the opposite direction? And might as well start the story back when she was a little girl. ROBERT: What happened to you didn't happen to us. This is by the way, what her entire family had done, her dad and her grandparents. There's this whole other world right beneath my feet. But maybe it makes her sort of more open-minded than -- than someone who's just looking at a notebook. Like, they don't have ears or a brain or anything like, they couldn't hear like we hear. LARRY UBELL: I'm not giving my age. JENNIFER FRAZER: It's definitely crazy. The tree will wrap its roots around that pipe. Landing very comfortably onto a padded base made of foam. I'm gonna just go there. AATISH BHATIA: This feels one of those experiments where you just abort it on humanitarian grounds, you know? ROBERT: So she takes the plants, she puts them into the parachute drop, she drops them. All right, that's it, I think. He's the only springtail with a trench coat and a fedora. And if you go to too many rock concerts, you can break these hairs and that leads to permanent hearing loss, which is bad. Tagged #science #technology #philosophy #education #radiolab. Her use of metaphor. When I was a little kid, I would be in the forest and I'd just eat the forest floor. And so I don't have a problem with that. ROBERT: Remember I told you how trees make sugar? Connecting your house to the main city water line that's in the middle of the street. ROBERT: No, I -- we kept switching rooms because we weren't sure whether you want it to be in the high light or weak light or some light or no light. JENNIFER FRAZER: Apparently, she built some sort of apparatus. But we are in the home inspection business. His name is Roy Halling. It didn't seem to be learning anything. Imagine towering trees to your left and to your right. Is that what -- is that what this? ALVIN UBELL: They would have to have some ROBERT: Maybe there's some kind of signal? They're switched on. MONICA GAGLIANO: I remember going in at the uni on a Sunday afternoon. You should definitely go out and check out her blog, The Artful Amoeba, especially to the posts, the forlorn ones about plants. Nothing delicious at all.". ROBERT: And some of them, this is Lincoln Taiz LINCOLN TAIZ: I'm a professor emeritus of plant biology at UC Santa Cruz. ROBERT: So that voice belongs to Aatish Bhatia, who is with Princeton University's Council on Science and Technology. So you are related and you're both in the plumbing business? No boink anymore. ROBERT: No, no, no, no, no. ROBERT: That there was a kind of a moral objection to thinking this way. I mean, this is going places. It's like every time I close my eyes, you're coming at it from a different direction. There's -- they have found salmon in tree rings. But if you dig a little deeper, there's a hidden world beneath your feet as busy and complicated as a city at rush hour. And it was almost like, let's see how much I have to stretch it here before you forget. I don't know if that was the case for your plants. ROBERT: Yes, because she knew that scientists had proposed years before, that maybe there's an underground economy that exists among trees that we can't see. Like, I say, it's early in the season. Okay? MONICA GAGLIANO: I don't know. Big thanks to Aatish Bhatia, to Sharon De La Cruz and to Peter Landgren at Princeton University's Council on Science and Technology. And so the whole family and uncles and aunts and cousins, we all rush up there. ], [JENNIFER FRAZER: This is Jennifer Frazer, and I'm a freelance science writer and blogger of The Artful Amoeba at Scientific American. JENNIFER FRAZER: And his idea was to see if he could condition these dogs to associate that food would be coming from the sound of a bell. But also SUZANNE SIMARD: The other important thing we figured out is that, as those trees are injured and dying, they'll dump their carbon into their neighbors. And she goes on to argue that had we been a little bit more steady and a little bit more consistent, the plants would have learned and would have remembered the lesson. I'm just trying to make sure I understand, because I realize that none of these conversations are actually spoken. No, I guess that I feel kind of good to say this. Is it ROBERT: This is like metaphor is letting in the light as opposed to shutting down the blinds. JAD: So you couldn't replicate what she saw. And I remember it was Sunday, because I started screaming in my lab. Salmon consumption. We showed one of these plants to him and to a couple of his colleagues, Sharon De La Cruz Because we wanted them to help us recreate Monica's next experiment. No, I -- we kept switching rooms because we weren't sure whether you want it to be in the high light or weak light or some light or no light. And after not a whole lot of drops the plant, she noticed, stopped closing its leaves. JENNIFER FRAZER: So what do we have in our ears that we use to hear sound? We dropped. ROBERT: She determined that you can pick a little computer fan and blow it on a pea plant for pretty much ever and the pea plant would be utterly indifferent to the whole thing. Sugar. So these trees were basically covered with bags that were then filled with radioactive gas. ROBERT: We, as you know, built your elevator. SUZANNE SIMARD: He'd fallen in. And I'm wondering whether Monica is gonna run into, as she tries to make plants more animal-like, whether she's just going to run into this malice from the scientific -- I'm just wondering, do you share any of that? I don't think Monica knows the answer to that, but she does believe that, you know, that we humans We are a little obsessed with the brain. And then Monica would ROBERT: Just about, you know, seven or eight inches. ANNIE MCEWEN: What was your reaction when you saw this happen? And so now we're down there. So they followed the sound of the barking and it leads them to an outhouse. And so of course, that was only the beginning. And the salivation equivalent was the tilt of the plant? So today we have a triptych of experiments about plants. They still remembered. I'll put it down in my fungi. MONICA GAGLIANO: Exactly. It's like, no, no, I don't do that. So we are going to meet a beautiful little plant called a mimosa pudica, which is a perfectly symmetrical plant with leaves on either side of a central stem. ROBERT: And right in the middle of the yard is a tree. Truth is, I think on this point she's got a -- she's right. Peering down at the plants under the red glow of her headlamp. Why waste hot water? ROBERT: So what they're saying is even if she's totally sealed the pipe so there's no leak at all, the difference in temperature will create some condensation on the outside. SUZANNE SIMARD: And when I came on the scene in 19 -- the 1980s as a forester, we were into industrial, large-scale clear-cutting in western Canada. That's a parade I'll show up for. Me first. We were so inconsistent, so clumsy, that the plants were smart to keep playing it safe and closing themselves up. In 1997, a couple of scientists wrote a paper which describes how fungi JENNIFER FRAZER: Have developed a system for mining. ROBERT: Just for example. Enough of that! 2016. But the drop was just shocking and sudden enough for the little plant to Do its reflex defense thing. She went into the forest, got some trees. MONICA GAGLIANO: So, you know, I'm in the dark. But let me just -- let me give it a try. ROBERT: Okay. The part where the water pipe was, the pipe was on the outside of the pot? SUZANNE SIMARD: When I was a little kid, I would be in the forest and I'd just eat the forest floor. So, okay. Each one an ounce, an ounce, an ounce, an ounce, an ounce. And so I don't have a problem with that. The light and the fan were always coming from the same direction. And so why is that? Because the only reason why the experiment turned out to be 28 days is because I ran out of time. In this case, a little blue LED light. ALVIN UBELL: Testing one, two. I think there are some cases where romanticizing something could possibly lead you to some interesting results. One of the roots just happens to bump into a water pipe and says -- sends a signal to all the others, "Come over here. Today, Robert drags Jad along ona parade for the surprising feats of brainless plants. It'd be all random. Or even learn? Like, the plant is hunting? MONICA GAGLIANO: It's a very biased view that humans have in particular towards others. They may have this intelligence, maybe we're just not smart enough yet to figure it out. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. I mean the fungus is JENNIFER FRAZER: No, no, no. So I don't have a problem. The problem is is with plants. But she had a kind of, maybe call it a Jigs-ian recollection. I think there are some cases where romanticizing something could possibly lead you to some interesting results. JENNIFER FRAZER: One of the things they eat is fungus. JENNIFER FRAZER: So Pavlov started by getting some dogs and some meat and a bell. To remember? It's soaks in sunshine, and it takes CO2, carbon dioxide, and it's splits it in half. ], [ROY HALLING: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. And then I needed to -- the difficulty I guess, of the experiment was to find something that will be quite irrelevant and really meant nothing to the plant to start with. No, I actually, like even this morning it's already like poof! They designed from scratch a towering parachute drop in blue translucent Lego pieces. /locations/california/culver-city/5399-sepulveda-blvd-bank-atm/ Robert, I have -- you know what? I don't know. They can also send warning signals through the fungus. ALVIN UBELL: In a tangling of spaghetti-like, almost a -- and each one of those lines of spaghetti is squeezing a little bit. ROBERT: And I met a plant biologist who's gonna lead that parade. So, okay. Isn't that what you do? And if you don't have one, by default you can't do much in general. Exactly. MONICA GAGLIANO: Pretty much like the concept of Pavlov with his dog applied. Start of message. So the fungus is giving the tree the minerals. I mean, I -- it's a kind of Romanticism, I think. ROBERT: When you go into a forest, you see a tree, a tall tree. ROBERT: Connecting your house to the main city water line that's in the middle of the street. LATIF: It's like Snow White and The Seven Tubes or something. With when they actually saw and smelled and ate meat. My reaction was like, "Oh ****!" What's its job? There's not a leak in the glass. ROBERT: And we dropped it once and twice. ALVIN UBELL: How much longer? I mean again, it's a tree. Like, the tree was, like, already doing that stuff by itself, but it's the fungus that's doing that stuff? Well, I created these horrible contraptions. Me first. MONICA GAGLIANO: It's a very biased view that humans have in particular towards others. And it begins to look a lot like an airline flight map, but even more dense. I mean, you're out there in the forest and you see all these trees, and you think they're individuals just like animals, right? So if all a tree could do was split air to get carbon, you'd have a tree the size of a tulip. It's kind of like a cold glass sitting on your desk and there's always a puddle at the bottom. And again. ROBERT: She says one of the weirdest parts of this though, is when sick trees give up their food, the food doesn't usually go to their kids or even to trees of the same species. ROBERT: So if a beetle were to invade the forest, the trees tell the next tree over, "Here come the --" like Paul Revere, sort of? I don't want that.". MONICA GAGLIANO: Picasso! JENNIFER FRAZER: If you look at these particles under the microscope, you can see the little tunnels. They still did not close when she dropped them. Now, can you -- can you imagine what we did wrong? Plants are really underrated. So that's where these -- the scientists from Princeton come in: Peter, Sharon and Aatish. We showed one of these plants to him and to a couple of his colleagues, Sharon De La Cruz ROBERT: Because we wanted them to help us recreate Monica's next experiment. The fungus has this incredible network of tubes that it's able to send out through the soil, and draw up water and mineral nutrients that the tree needs. say they're very curious, but want to see these experiments repeated. They're one of our closest relatives, actually. And then I would cover them in plastic bags. Like, how can a plant -- how does a plant do that? I'm not making this up. Not close when she was a little blue LED light science and Technology eat the forest and 've. Like metaphor is letting in the middle of the fun as well start the radiolab smarty plants back she. Remember it was almost like, I have even -- I can go better than even that line 's. 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