sometimes ago um broing a very hold magazine I found this observation test about the story of the Hark and the artist that Drew this observation test did some errors some mistakes are more or less 12 mistakes some of them are very easy there is a funel naral part lamp and Clockwork key on the arc some of them are about the animals the number but there is a much more fundamental mistakes in the overall story of the arcs that is not it's not reported here and this problem is where are the plants so now we have
God that is going to submerge heart permanently or at least for a very long period and no one is taking taking care of plants no need to take two of every kind of bird of every kind of animal of every kind of creature that moves but no mention about plants why in another part of the same story all the living creature are just the living creature that came out from the ark so Birds livestock and white animal plants are not living creature this is the point is a point that is not coming out out from
the Bible but it's something that it's really accompanied the humanity let's have a look at this nice code that is coming from a Renaissance book here we have the description of the order of nature it's a nice description because it's starting from left you have the stones immediately after the stones the plants that are just able to live we have the animals that are able to live and to sense and on the top of the pyramide there is the man it's not the common man it's the almost studiosus the studying man this is quite comforting
for a people like me I'm a professor and to be over there on the top of a creation but it's something completely wrong and do you know very well about Professor but it's also wrong about plants because plants are not just able to live they are able to sense and they are much more sophisticated in sensing than animals just to give you an example every single root Apex it's able to detect and to monitor concurrently and continuously at least 15 different chemical and physical parameters and they are also able to show and to exhibit such
a wonderful and complex behavior that can be described just with the term of intelligence well but this is something this underestimation of plants is something that it's always with us let's have a look at this short movie now we have David attenberg now David attenberg is really a plant Lover he did some of the most beautiful movie about plant Behavior now when you speak about plants everything is correct when you speak about animal tend to remove the fact that plants exist the blue well the biggest creature that exist on the planet that is wrong completely
wrong the blue well it's a dwarf if compared with the real biggest creature that exist on the planet that is this wonderful egg magnificent seend gigantum and this is a living organism that have a mass of at least 2,000 tons now the story that plants are some lowlevel organisms has been formalized very in many times Ago by Aristotle that in the the anima that it's a very influential book for the western civilization wrote that the plants are on the edge between living and non living they have just a kind of very lowlevel Soul it's called
the vegetative soul and because they lack movement and so they don't need to sense let's see this is okay some of the movement of the plants are very well known this is a very fast movement this is a diona a Venus flight trap hunting has Nails sorry for this nail this has been something that has been refused for centuries despite the evidence no one can say that the plants was able to eat an animals because it was against the order of nature but plants are also able to to show a a lot of movement some
of them are very well known like the flowering it's just a question to to use some techniques like the time lapse some of them are much more sophisticated look at these young beans that it's moving to catch the Light every time and it's really So Graceful it's like a dancing Angel they are also able to play they are really playing these are young sunflowers and what they are doing is they cannot be described with any other terms are playing they are training themsel like as many young animals do to the adult life where they will
be called to track the sun all the day they are able to respond to gravity of course so the shoots are growing against the vector of gravity and the roots to the vector of gravity but they are also able to sleep this is when am Mimosa Pika so during the night it they call the leaves and reduce the movements and during the day you have the opening of the leaves and much more movements and this is interesting because this sleeping Machinery it's perfectly conserved it's the same in plants in insect in then animals and so
if you need to study sleeping problem it's much more easy to study on plants for example and that in animals and it's much more easy even ethically it's a kind of vegetarian uh experimentation plants are even able to communicate they are extraordinary communicators they communicate with other plants they are able to distinguish keen and nonen they communicate with plants of other species and they communicate with animals by producing chemical volatiles for example during the pollination now the pollination is a very serious issue for plants because they need to move the pollen from one flower to
the other and they cannot move from one flower to the other so they need a vector and this Vector is normally an animal main insects has been used by plants as Vector for the transport of the pollination but not just insect even birds reptiles and mamals like bats and rats are normally used for the transportation of the pollen this is a serious business business we have the plants that are giving to the animals a kind of sweing sweet substance very energizing having in change this transportation of the pollen but some plants are manipulating animals like
in the case of Oris that promise sex and nectar and giving change nothing for the transportation of the pollen now there is a big problem behind all this behavior that we we have seen how is possible to do this without a brain we need to wait until 1880 when this big man Charles Darwin published a wonderful astonishing book that it's a revolution the title is the power of movement in Plants no one was allowed to speak about movement in Plants before Charles Darwin in this book assisted by his son Francis that was the first professor
of plant physiology in the world in Cambridge they took in consideration every single movement for 500 pages and in the last paragraph of the book that it's a kind of sistic Mark because normally Charles Darwin stored in the last paragraph of of a book the most important message he wrote that it's hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radical acts like the brain of one of the lower animal this is not a metaphor he wrote some very interesting letter to one of his friend that was JD at that time president of the
Royal Society so the maximum scientific Authority in Britain speaking about the brain in the plants now this is a root Apex growing against a slope so you can recognize this kind of movement the same movement that wors snake and every animals that are moving on the ground without legs it's able to display and it's not an easy movement because to have this kind of movement you need to move different region of the roots and to synchronize this different region without having a brain so we studied the root Apex and we found that there is a
specific region that it's here depicted in blue that is called the transition zone and this region it's a very small region it's less than 1 mm and in this small region you have the highest consumption of oxygen in the plants and more important you have this kind of signals here the signals that you are seeing here are action potential are the same signals that the neurons of my brain of our brain is used to to exchange information now we know that a root Apex have just a few hundred cells that show this kind of feature
but we know how big is the root apparatus of a small plant like a plant of Ry we have almost 14 million of roots we have almost 11 and a half million of root Apex and a total length of 600 and more kilometers and a very high surface area now let's image that each single root Apex is working network with all the others here we have on the left internet and on the right the root apparatus they work in the same way are network of small Computing machine working in networks and why they are so
similar because they evolved for the same reason to survive predation it's the same they work in the same way so you can remove 90% of the root apparatus and the plants follow to work you can remove 90% of the internet and it is work following to work so a suggestion for the people working with networks plants have is able plants are able to give you good suggestion about to evolve networks and another possibility is a technological possibility let's image that we can build robot and robot that are inspired by plants until now the man was
inspired just by the man or by the animals in producing an robots we have the animalid are the normal robots inspired by by an animals insectoid and so on we have the Androids that are inspired by by the man but why we have not any plantoid well if you want to fly it's good that you look at the bird and to be inspired by bird but if you want to explore soils or if you want to colonize um new territory the best thing that you can do is to be inspired by plants that are master
in doing this we have another possibility we are working in our lab is to build hybrids it's much more easy to build hybrids hybrids means something that is half living and half machine it's much more easy to work with plants that with animals they have computing power they have electrical signals the connection with the machine is much more easy much more even ethically uh possible and this is these are three possibility that we are uh working on to build a a hybrids driven by algae or by the leaves and at The Hand by the most
powerful part of the plants by The Roots well thank you for your attention and before finish I would like to rest sure that no snails were hered in making this presentation thank you
