Category Botany

WHAT IS PLANTONE SMART MINI INDOOR GARDEN DEVICE?

The Plantone Smart Mini Indoor Garden provides planting, lighting and watering in a single system that allows you to grow five different species of plants at a single time. You never have to worry about forgetting to water, overwatering, or moving your plants to get more light. Every plant requires a different amount of water, so Plantone waters each plant according to its requirements. The water tank below the pots can be filled to the top for upto 60 days of water. Using pressurized technology, the pots siphon water from the tank automatically. The retractable tower’s LEDs produce a balance of cool and warm light and turn off when natural light is detected. Control the intensity of the light and switch between different light cycles with the press of a button. The tower’s sensor package monitors temperature, humidity, light level and air quality. It has WiFi and Bluetooth as well as an internal real time clock to keep time for your custom light schedules. Plantone’s app lets you control watering and lighting remotely using your smartphone. The device is recyclable and uses repurposed materials.

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What is the oldest fossil flowering plant?

Researchers from Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS), have uncovered the earliest example of a flower bud in a 164 million-year-old plant fossil in China.

The fossil is 1.7 inches long and 0.8 inches wide. It contains a stem, a leafy branch, a bulbous fruit and a tiny flower bud around 3 sq mm in size. The researchers have named the new species Florigerminis jurassica.

There are two main types of plants: flowering plants (angiosperms) and non-flowering plants (gymnosperms). The flower bud and fruit in the fossil are clear indicators that F. jurassica was an angiosperm, the dominant plant type during the Jurassic period. Until now, fossil evidence showed that angiosperms did not arise until the Cretaceous period, between 66 million and 145 million years ago. The discovery firmly pushes back the emergence of flowering plants into the Jurassic period, between 145 million and 201 million years ago.

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Do Trees Die of Old Age?

While humans and animals stop producing new tissues over time – which is part of the ageing process – there’s no evidence to prove that this happens in trees. Due to this regenerative aspect, scientists believe trees actually have the ability to live indefinitely. But before that can happen, several external factors such as climate variation, storms, animal or insect attack, logging. accidents such as lightning, etc. cost them dearly. Despite these, some trees have managed to live for thousands of years. Among them is the Great Basin bristlecone pine tree in California, the U.S., which has celebrated about 5,000 birthdays!

When animals senesce, or grow older, their cells may cease to divide, or the division process may grow increasingly sloppy, leading to deleterious mistakes. On the outside, this aging process shows through cognitive decline, or wrinkles in humans. One animal in particular, the hydra, actually doesn’t seem to senesce. For all intents and purposes, it is biologically immortal.

While it’s not precisely known whether or not individual trees are biologically immortal in the same fashion, they definitely don’t grow old the same way animals do. Trees grow indeterminately, meaning that with the right conditions, they can grow and grow and grow, with only the laws of physics limiting their height. (There’s a certain point where a tree cannot send enough water from the roots to the top layer of leaves, preventing adequate photosynthesis.) Amazingly, once they hit that maximum height, instead of growing taller, they grow wider! And they do so at an ever-increasing rate! That’s right, trees actually grow faster as they age. Scientists reported this amazing finding in the journal Nature earlier this year, after examining the growth of over 700,000 trees worldwide.

While it’s not yet known precisely why trees grow faster as they age, the secret to their perpetual growth has already been revealed. Most plant cells are perpetually embryonic, meaning they can change into another cell type at any time.

Credit : Real Clear Science

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What is diamond planet?

Imagine walking on a planet that is full of diamond. Dubbed 55 Cancri e, an exoplanet twice the size of Earth, is composed of carbon mostly in the form of graphite and diamond. At least a third of the planet’s mass is likely diamond as a result of the temperatures and pressures in the planet’s interior. Further observations are necessary to confirm the nature of the planet. It orbits a Sun-like hot star called 55 Cancri A. Planets like this are vastly different from our Earth, which has relatively less carbon.

Astronomers discovered the planet in 2004 after looking at the spectrum of its parent star, 55 Cancri A, one of two stars in a binary system about 40 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cancer. There are at least four other planets in the same system, mostly discovered before 55 Cancri e. The team (led by the University of Texas at Austin’s Barbara McArthur) discovered subtle tugs on the parent star that could be explained by the presence of yet another planet. While the planet’s existence was challenged by a second research team in 2005, a separate team in 2006 confirmed it. 

Astronomers initially thought 55 Cancri e (abbreviated 55 Cnc e) had an orbital period of 2.8 days, but measurements in 2011 showed that the planet is much closer to its parent star. Observations with Canada’s MOST (Microvariability & Oscillations of STars) space telescope demonstrated an orbital period of less than 18 hours. Researchers estimated the surface temperature of 55 Cancri e could be as high as 4,892 F (2,700 C). 

Follow-up observations with the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2012 showed that 55 Cancri e is much weirder than anticipated. While original estimates said the planet was dense and rocky, Spitzer suggested the planet includes a healthy proportion of light elements and compounds (such as water). However, the planet’s high surface temperatures contribute to a “supercritical” fluid state, the researchers said, meaning that the gases are in a liquid-like state. 

Credit : Space.com

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WHEN DID PLANTS START TO GROW ON LAND?

The first land plants appeared during the Silurian period, around 440 million years ago. These simple plants reproduced by releasing spores. Plants produced oxygen and provided food for the first land animals – amphibians. Amphibians first developed in the Devonian period, 420 million years ago, from fish whose fins evolved into limbs.

Botanists now believe that plants evolved from the algae; the development of the plant kingdom may have resulted from evolutionary changes that occurred when photosynthetic multicellular organisms invaded the continents. The earliest fossil evidence for land plants consists of isolated spores, tracheid-like tubes, and sheets of cells found in Ordovician rocks. The abundance and diversity of these fossils increase into the Silurian Period (about 443.8 million to 419.2 million years ago), where the first macroscopic (megafossil) evidence for land plants has been found. These megafossils consist of slender forking axes that are only a few centimetres long. Some of the axes terminate in sporangia that bear trilete spores (i.e., spores that divide meiotically to form a tetrad). Because a trilete mark indicates that the spores are the product of meiosis, the fertile axes may be interpreted as the sporophyte phase of the life cycle.

Fossils of this type could represent either vascular plants or bryophytes. Another possibility is that they are neither but include ancestors of vascular plants, bryophytes, or both. The earliest fossils also include at least one or more additional plant groups that became extinct early in the colonization of the land and therefore have no living descendants. By the early Devonian Period (about 419.2 million to 393.3 million years ago), some of the fossils that consist of forking axes with terminal sporangia also produced a central strand of tracheids, the specialized water-conducting cells of the xylem. Tracheids are a diagnostic feature of vascular plants and are the basis for the division name, Tracheophyta.

Credit: Britannica

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