Singing of Trees, Playing Ballard
The complete stories of J.G. Ballard (for reasons to be made clear below) By Péter MARTON ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** Click-baiting headlines happen in the world of science, too, unfortunately (or — these days — necessarily?). Whatever we make of it, this article , reporting on some recent research, is certainly interesting to read. As we are informed there, plants are found to emit sounds, picked up "on an ultrasonic sound range between 20 and 150 kHz", inaudible to the human ear. These sounds apparently reflect the conditions that the plant finds itself in: "Stressed plants were found to emit significantly more sounds than plants from the comfortable control group. Not only were they noisier, but the researchers claim that they gave off different sounds depending on what was happening." Of course, research into the subject is not exactly new. Here is this article from 2013 , which makes it clea...