blogs

Do Plants Feel Pain?

Palm Jungle - Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden
Photo by: brewbooks

What is ‘sentience’? When a person or animal is injured they react by experiencing pain, marshalling the body’s defense systems to repair the damage and begin the process of recovery. The question, surely, is whether we know enough about sentience to be quite certain that plant life does not have it.
 
Every ecologist out there, and even amateur gardeners, have been known to swear that plants, too, ‘feel’ things, but it is only recent research that has demonstrated just how ‘intelligent’ they really are. Plant life has a heritage far older than mankind, and in some respects, it makes we humans seem inadequate! Is it not about time to take more notice?

Read more of Tony Leather's 'Do Plants Feel Pain?'

the Cloud Project

the Cloud Project by Zoe Papadopoulou and Cathrine Kramer

the Cloud Project Van

Developments in nanotechnology and planetary-scale engineering point to new possibilities for us to conform the global environment to our needs. These advances combined with a dream to make clouds snow ice cream have inspired a series of experiments that look at ways to alter the composition of clouds to make new and delicious sensory experiences. Using ice-cream as a catalyst for interesting dialogue, the project’s focus is to welcome people into a mobile space that sits outside institutions, letting new audiences experience and imagine emerging scientific developments and their consequences.

the Cloud Project Van byline
the Cloud Project Van byline

(Via BLDGBLOG)

Radionic Socks

Radionic socks are available again from manufacturer Ozone Socks.

THE HEALING RADIONIC SOCK WITH TATTOOS
Radionics is a universally accepted term for an alternative technology used to cure or prevent disease. The Radionic circuit on our healing sock was devised by Duncan Laurie from alternative technology that has been in use for over 100 years. The tattoos should be placed on the body and rubbed until a connection occurs. Instructions included.
Ozone makes no medical claim in connection with the Healing Radionic Sock. Let us know how you make out.

Music from a Bonsai

Music from a Bonsai

I always liked bonsai trees, and I was curious to try the approach I used for "Music from a Tree" on a smaller scale, so I bought a bonsai and recorded this little experimental piece.

To determine the key I used the lowest note I could play and recorded the rest around it. Besides playing the leaves, I used bows of different sizes, a piano hammer and a paint brush.

As far as microphones I used my Røde NT6, a customized stethoscope and tiny MEAS piezo transducers.

Lots of other interesting projects Diego's site.

(Via swissmiss & Music of Sound)

Bark beetles' song could save forests

Bark beetles' song could save forests

Researchers at Northern Arizona University think they may have found an environmentally safe and readily available weapon against the tree-eating armies of bark beetles.

...the beetles were exposed to digitally altered recordings of their own calls, the sounds they make to attract or repel other beetles. The response was immediate. The beetles stopped mating or burrowing. Some fled, helter-skelter. Some violently attacked each other.

Our interest is to use acoustic sounds, specific only to each species, that make beetles uncomfortable and not want to be in that environment.
— NAU Forest Entomology Professor Dr. Richard Hofstetter.

(Via BLDGBLOG)