Do Plants Talk about Sex?

There’s something fishy going on in the Czech Republic, where CrowdScience listener Ian lives. He keeps tropical fish, and he’s noticed that when he adds new ones to his tank, they swim with others of the same breed. He wants to know how they recognise each other. Do they know wh ...  Show more

Is silence blood-curdling or blissful? CrowdScience listener Ziqi finds it intolerable and thinks that there’s a good reason for it – silence is so rare in nature that it could be a signal for danger. Presenter Marnie Chesterton is on a mission to test Ziqi’s theory, starting wit ...  Show more

En mars 2023, des chercheurs de l’université de Tel Aviv ont pu enregistrer des sons émis par des plantes. En effet, cela fait 10 ans que des études montrent que les végétaux dégagent des vibrations mais c’est la première fois que des audios sont captés. Bien que les sons n’aien ...  Show more

Qui n’a pas été interpellé en rayon par la couverture du best-seller «La vie secrète des arbres» ou de son rival «La révolution des plantes»? Leurs auteurs Peter Wohlleben et Stefano Mancuso appellent à la reconnaissance d’une troisième forme d’intelligence, après celle du règne ...  Show more

Vision without eyes? Intelligence without a brain? Are plants more akin to us than we have been prepared to acknowledge? Or are they different in ways we will forever strain to imagine? One way or another, a vine with some unusual abilities is shaking the field of botany to its f ...  Show more

The second instalment in our double bill on the science of sex, answering this question from Robert Turner, a Curio from Leeds: "Why do we only have two sexes?"Drs Rutherford and Fry look for anomalies in the animal kingdom that go beyond the traditional mechanics of human reprod ...  Show more