A few months ago, RadioLab had a similar story, but the trees were found to communicate and cooperate across species through a network of underground fungus tubes in what scientists named the wood wide web.<p><a href="http://www.radiolab.org/story/from-tree-to-shining-tree/" rel="nofollow">http://www.radiolab.org/story/from-tree-to-shining-tree/</a>
A bit off-topic, just an idea I got while reading the replies and thinking about our place in the Universe, food hierarchy and available time - isn't evolution as we currently understand it computationally too expensive? When we look at local adaptations, it seems to be indeed a fact we can observe; generations of life adjusting their "software" wrt environment, and I can imagine this happening in polynomial time. Now making a big jump from e.g. fish to a bird seems to me impossible in polynomial time (even in billion years); here I would think about evolution only as a hypothesis, not a fact. Is anybody tackling this (IMO computational) problem?
This was being written about in the '80s.<p>Anyway, I'm thinking farmers could run through fields abrading the leaves, to get the plants to make their own insecticide. Could be cheaper/more effective.
The whole idea of veganism is doing the less harm to our world as possible. That's what most people do not understand. It is the best rational decision.<p>When you go through all the fallacies meat-eaters throw at you, the only reason with "weight" is the taste.<p>With our current technology, enhanced food and other stuff, meat eating is just a luxury in most developed countries. You don't need it (unless you have a specific illness), but you eat it because it gives you 5 minutes of pleasure in your mouth.<p>In 2016, meat is the new diamond.