Uh-oh, looks like John Wyndham was right about the Triffids after all.
Research just in to Weekender Towers indicates that plants actually can respond to physical stimuli. That’s the finding of Dr. Elizabeth Haswell, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
“It’s clear,” Haswell tells Science Daily, “that plants can respond to physical stimuli, such as gravity or touch. Roots grow down, a ‘sensitive plant’ folds its leaves, and a vine twines around a trellis. But we’re just beginning to find out how they do it.”
It’s all to do with mechanosensitive channels, she adds, which is the point where Weekender gets off the comprehension bus we’re afraid. Next step is finding out how Triffids make that weird clicking sound and manage to walk about, stinging people.
Flying circus
We always knew that pythons were cool (and in certain circumstances, funny) but we’re impressed that these guys manage to double their organs in size after a meal. A handy trick, and one that is sure to impress the object of your affections. We speak, of course, of the heart.
According to Leslie Leinwand of the University of Colorado, during a right good nosh pythons’ blood gets chockablock with milky triglyceride cholesterol. Whilst in you, me and little Johnny Two-Burgers over there, this would be deposited as fat in our heart muscles, pythons can process the fat as fuel with a very efficient and harmless bit of mad skillz. Apparently there’s a blend of particular fatty acids that triggers a load of heart-friendly protective enzymes. As ever, mice are the first beneficiaries of this process – it’s being tested on Mickey and his mates to see if it can halt or reverse heart damage. That’s some snake oil.
Move it, fatty
To ramp up the lardiness quotient a little more, we’ve also received a report from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. Apparently, people moving from low-income areas to those with fewer than 10 per cent living below the poverty line show reduced levels of obesity and diabetes.
They’re not sure why this should occur, but it’s posited that safer streets simply allow people to walk around more.
Lead researcher Jens Ludwig told Science Now that the effects were ‘pretty big’.
“[They are] comparable in size to the long-term effects on diabetes we see from targeted lifestyle interventions or from providing people with medication that can prevent the onset of diabetes,” he mused.
Meanwhile, in Europe a crack team of Italian, Serbian and Spanish researchers has proved that eating strawberries can reduce the harm alcohol does to the stomach mucus membrane. The effect was revealed through the action of specific compounds found within the fruit which were linked not only to antioxidant capacity but their effects on activation of the body’s own enzymes and stuff. We would go into more detail but we see that the dumb bus has reached the incomprehension stop again at this point. So we’re off. Cheers.
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