Ask crop scientist Michael Neff about plant growth, and he won’t talk about rainfall or fertilizer. He’ll talk about what the plants see.
“What I’ve been interested in forever is how plants use light as a source of information,” says Neff. “Plants have photoreceptors that are completely independent of photosynthesis and chloroplasts, that read their environment and say, ‘I am in full sunlight, I’m in the shade of another plant, I’ve got plants that are growing too close to me,’” and so on. The photoreceptors then trigger a host of hormonal reactions that influence how tall the plant will grow.
Neff thinks it’s possible to … » More …
There’s a limit to how small a piece of chocolate chip cookie you can have. At some point, you’ll either have a piece of chocolate or a piece of cookie, but not a piece of chocolate chip cookie.
You run into the same problem if you’re trying to make smaller silicon processor chips, says Kerry W. Hipps, professor of chemistry and materials science. Eventually the chip gets too small to function as a processor.
The processor is the brain in your computer. It makes the decisions about what data should go where, including how to route input like keyboard strokes, and how to route output … » More …