A particular detail has always stuck with me from The BFG, Roald Dahl’s dark-as-hell children’s book that’s actually about giants snatching kids from their bedrooms. The one good, non-kid-eating giant tells his friend about superhuman hearing: "if I is twisting the stem of the flower till it breaks, then the plant is screaming. I can hear it screaming and screaming very clear."
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Potatoes grow underground. Tomatoes grow above the ground. The TomTato plant grows both potatoes underground and tomatoes above ground… at the same time!
I don’t know what the folks over at British horticultural firm Thompson and Morgan were thinking, but they managed to turn a far-off idea into reality. It took them ten years, but they finally figured out how to make a plant grow potatoes and tomatoes without genetically modifying it.
The process involved grafting, more grafting, and even more grafting before the team achieved success. Incredibly, the plants were combined without genetic modification.
Thompson and Morgan director Paul Hansord explains: “It has been very difficult to achieve because the tomato stem and the potato stem have to be the same thickness for the graft to work… It is a very highly skilled operation. We have seen similar products. However, on closer inspection the potato is planted in a pot with a tomato planted in the same pot – our plant is one plant and produces no potato foliage.”
Pretty weird, but still amazing, isn’t it?
Plants are beautiful. But up close, they’re inspiring, terrifying, and, well, just quite large.
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We’ve been using nitrogen fertilizers to bolster crop growth since the neolithic era. But producing enough food for nearly seven billion mouths requires intensive farming practices that demand heavy applications of fertilizers. And their overuse is taking a heavy toll on the environment—an estimated $91 billion to $428 billion worth of damage in Europe alone.
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Plants grown and sustain themselves through photosynthesis—a seemingly invisible process that converts sunlight into energy. Now, NASA scientists have developed a way to measure photosynthesis from satellites with unprecedented detail.
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Last week, we looked at bugs. This week, I’m sending you back into the bush to catch more of nature’s nuance on the macro level. For this week’s Shooting Challenge, photograph the wonder of plants.
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It’s easy to forget plants are "alive" because they hardly move on their own. No more. This timelapse of plants growing and blooming and shooting up and blossoming shows plants move like aliens. Every time you see a new plant, you think it’s a new species from outer space. It’s not until you see the familiar green, that you become calm.
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University of Ohio’s Central Chiller Plant is chill because it has to be—it supplies water and emergency power to the university’s medical district. But thanks to its facade covered in prismatic fins, it’s also chill in the non-literal sense of the word.
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Do you love plants. No, I mean really love plants. We’re talking "I want sapling inside me" love. Like, "literally all I want is to birth a small but hearty tomato plant" love. Well we’ve got a gift for all three(?) of you: maternity vests for plant pregnancy.
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Shapeways seller OliveBird is slowly becoming the single best endorsement for 3D printers. First, they brilliantly upgraded the lowly button
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
