Certain words might bug you, even if you’re perfectly fine with using them
Q. We all know pet owners who brag about how smart their dogs or cats are, but can plant owners get in on the act? A. Recent experiments by Australian biologist Monica Gagliano and colleagues challenge our animalcentric view of intelligent behavior, as detailed in “Scientific Reports.” In one study, she looked at whether pea plants could develop the classic conditioned response of dogsalivates-when-bell-rings. Each plant was housed in a Y-shaped container, forcing it to choose one of two directions to grow. Using timer-controlled fans and lights, she trained one group of plants to expect light to come from the same direction as an earlier breeze, and a second group to expect light to come from the opposite direction. Later, with only the breeze present, the plants grew in the direction for which they’d been trained, providing the first unequivocal demonstration of associative learning in plants.
From previous studies, it was known that plants can form stable memories and learn to ignore recurrent but unimportant stimuli in their environment. Says Gagliano, “Our results extend these findings by showing that plants are able to adapt quickly to changes in the environment and develop anticipatory behavior.” Q. When etymology meets entomology, some colorful words may emerge, such as “earwig,” “gadfly,” “puce,” and “ecdysis.” Can you define any of these? A. Word origins (etymology) derived from insects (entomology) include everyday words like “canopy,” from Greek “konops” for “mosquito” (literally, a bed with mosquito netting); and “pavilion,” from Latin “papillio” for butterfly (like a butterfly with its wings spread out), says Anu Garg on his “A.Word.A.Day” web site. “Earwig,” borrowed from an insect with a pair of pincers at the rear of the abdomen, means “to influence or bias a person by insinuations.” And one who persistently annoys might be labeled a “gadfly,” after various types of flies that annoy or bite livestock (earliest documented use 1626).
The color “puce” (pyoos) suggests dark reddish or brownish purple and derives from the French “puce” for “flea”; other related terms include “flea market” and “ukulele,” from Hawaiian, “literally ‘leaping flea,’ perhaps from the rapid motion of the fingers playing the instrument.” Finally, from molting insects comes “ecdysis” (EK-duh-sis), the shedding of an outer layer, literally or figuratively, as one casts off one or another career or self-image. Q. Researchers recently invented a pair of spectacles that enhance the number of colors a person can see. What’s the magic here? A. Normal human eyes have three different types of color receptors (cones), roughly corresponding to red, green and blue. Many animals, however, with more than three different receptors, can make out color differences in objects which appear identical to humans. A group of researchers spanning the disciplines of computer engineering, materials science, physiology, psychology and art (see Bradley Gundlachi et al. at arxiv. org), have now created a pair of spectacles that in effect endow the wearer with four distinct cones, with the blue cone divided into a short-wavelengthblue cone in one eye and a long-wavelength-blue cone in the other. Designed not to interfere with binocular vision and not to cause disorientation, the specs allow users to perceive color differences that normal humans cannot discern.
Conclude the researchers: Ultimately, “this technique … may have applications ranging from camouflage detection and anti-counterfeiting to art and data visualization.”