Mess with plants and they remember

Plants are reviving after a long winter, helped along by warming temperatures and increased light. But do plants also "remember" what to do?

Maybe so. In 2014, Dr. Monica Gagliano and colleagues at the University of Florence in Italy decided to see whether they could train a plant to change behavior. The researchers chose Mimosa pudica, the so-called sensitive plant, which curls up its leaves in response to physical stimulation. Test plants in their pots were dropped onto foam from a height of about 6 inches to elicit the flinching response.

After repeated exposure with no major harm, the plants no longer recoiled. Even after a month, the plants "remembered" the falls weren't harmful and ignored them. But a review in Science Advances suggests that plants are rather adept at forgetting. Peter Crisp, a molecular plant biologist at Australian National University and author on the review, said forgetting allows plants to save energy.

7M are vulnerable to man-made quakes

Earthquakes are a natural hazard — except when they're man-made. The oil and gas industry has aggressively adopted the technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to shatter subsurface shale rock and liberate the oil and gas lurking there. But the process results in tremendous amounts of chemical-laden wastewater, which the industry disposes of by pumping into deep wells.

The U.S. Geological Survey published for the first time an earthquake hazard map covering both natural and "induced" quakes. Some 7 million people live in places vulnerable to these induced tremors, the USGS concluded. The list of places at highest risk of man-made earthquakes includes Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio and Alabama. There are also states with wastewater-disposal wells but no record of recent natural earthquakes, suggesting that the practice of injecting wastewater deep into the Earth can be done more safely in some places than in others.

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