ANDREW PORTERFIELD, - Science
Stephan: Little by little we are slowly learning that the network of life is far subtler and more complex than we have ever understood. Personally I think this idea of nanoscale sound waves is unlikely to be true. Conceptually it is preposterous. At nano scale a grain of sand would be like a mountain. It is very hard to see how the level of possible sound propagation a plant could achieve could get through the ground. I think some kind of nonlocal linkage is more likely but we will see.
The word in the garden is that basil is good to have around. Plants are known to communicate with each other via shade, aromatic chemicals, and physical touch, promoting processes such as growth and defense against disease, as well as attraction of bees and other pollinators.
Now, online today inBMC Ecology, researchers report a new type of mechanism that some plants use to communicate. The team planted common chili pepper seeds (Capsicum annuum, pictured) near a basil plant, with barriers that prevented the basil from deploying its usual growth-promoting tricks. Despite the separation, chili seeds germinated faster when basil was a neighbor, suggesting that a message was getting through.
Because light, touch, and chemical ‘smell’ were ruled out, the team proposes that the finding points to a new type of communication between plants, possibly involving nanoscale sound waves, traveling through the dirt to bring encouraging ‘words’ to the growing seeds. Understanding this novel communication could help growers boost crop yields and increase global food supplies. How neighborly.
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DANIELLE DOUGLAS, - The Washington Post
Stephan: This is some good news. Thanks to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman we may finally see at least some modest accountability of those banks that caused the mortgage meltdown financial crash.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman on Monday threatened to sue Bank of America and Wells Fargo for allegedly failing to help struggling homeowners under the $25 billion national mortgage settlement.
Schneiderman was one of 49 attorneys general to negotiate the sweeping deal with the nation’s five largest mortgage servicers over foreclosure abuses last year. If the banks do not comply, Schneiderman said, he will file suit and ask for a court injunction.
New York’s top prosecutor said he received 339 complaints that the behemoth banks were dragging their feet in processing requests from homeowners to have their loan payments lowered - a direct violation of the settlement. The banks allegedly failed to respond to requests from borrowers to have their mortgage balance or interest rates reduced within the 30 days allotted in the settlement, and some borrowers weren’t allowed to submit missing documentation.
‘Wells Fargo and Bank of America have flagrantly violated those obligations, putting hundreds of homeowners across New York at greater risk of foreclosure,
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SUE STURGIS, Editorial Director at the Institute for Southern Studies - Truthout
Stephan: This is what is happening all over the country wherever the Theocratic Right is in control, and knowingly, or unknowingly, working in the service of the Uber rich, and old energy special interests. It is also another data point in the Great Schism Trend.
Clean energy opponents turned to dirty tactics this week at the North Carolina legislature to advance a bill repealing the state’s groundbreaking renewable power program.
In a contested vote that led to an outcry from Democrats, the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday advanced a measure to roll back the 2007 state law requiring electric utilities to generate a modest amount of energy from renewable sources including solar, wind, and livestock methane — 12.5 percent of total retail sales by 2021 and thereafter.
The vote brought back to life a bill that appeared near death in the House last week, when the Public Utilities Committee rejected companion legislation sponsored by its own chair, Republican Rep. Mike Hager of Rutherford County, in a bipartisan vote of 18-13.
Though Hager said he would keep bringing up his bill for re-votes in his committee, he didn’t this week, leading observers to assume he still doesn’t have support for passage. But the Senate version of the legislation, SB 365, was taken up later that day in the Finance Committee, whose members include Republican Sen. Andrew Brock of a Mocksville, a political consultant who is the bill’s sole sponsor.
The measure advanced — but there are questions about whether the […]
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NATALIE WOLCHOVER, - Simons Foundation Science News
Stephan: If this holds up, as it seems likely to do, it represents a genuinely new way of looking at the world, one of those insights from physics that changes everything.
In February 2012, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek decided to go public with a strange and, he worried, somewhat embarrassing idea. Impossible as it seemed, Wilczek had developed an apparent proof of ‘time crystals
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TIA GHOSE, Staff Writer - Live Science
Stephan: Another chapter of the past opens. This is such an exciting time, so much is happening to reveal our history. New technologies allow us to see what was formerly almost impossible to perceive. They are coming on line one after another.
The ancestors of people from across Europe and Asia may have spoken a common language about 15,000 years ago, new research suggests.
Now, researchers have reconstructed words, such as ‘mother,’ ‘to pull’ and ‘man,’ which would have been spoken by ancient hunter-gatherers, possibly in an area such as the Caucusus. The word list, detailed today (May 6) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help researchers retrace the history of ancient migrations and contacts between prehistoric cultures.
‘We can trace echoes of language back 15,000 years to a time that corresponds to about the end of the last ice age,’ said study co-author Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.
Tower of Babel
The idea of a universal human language goes back at least to the Bible, in which humanity spoke a common tongue, but were punished with mutual unintelligibility after trying to build the Tower of Babel all the way to heaven. [Image Gallery: Ancient Middle-Eastern Texts]
But not all linguists believe in a single common origin of language, and trying to reconstruct that language seemed impossible. Most researchers thought they could only trace a language’s roots back 3,000 to 4,000 years. (Even […]
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