I grow marijuana and chillies from time to time. I got good at it. I will say that plants are malleable in untold ways and so I find this article to be unsurprising.
Plants will do what they need to do in the end. I've done stuff like co2 bombing, and increasing nutrients to the point to where I get a whole new ecosystem of insects and an entirely new situation.
It is such fascinating stuff that it's actually the life I want to live. I'm a computer scientist but now I yearn for the botanical sciences.
I highly recommend checking out defoliation strategies and low-stress training methods for anyone interested. Plants are not dumb creatures. The results you can get from them are astonishing and the science of what plants actually are becomes more profound by the day.
Anyone who sees that a giant trees leaves aren't dried out should find it unsurprising.
With a lot of software getting eaten up I’m increasingly interested in biology. Seems like one of the later frontiers that could have massive benefits, and AI is really well suited to help us understand it.
There is apparently such a thing as "Computational Botany", where you model virtual plants.
Have you considered computational biology? They are always looking for people. Knuth said a while back that biology has tons of open and useful problems left to be solved.
one time, while communing with Nature, I looked up at the transpiring coastal tree line flexing in the wind and I uttered, "pumps."
My hunch is that torsion, flex and their effect on the capillary structures are at play, but I haven't been able to step away from CS myself.
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I'm studying for a bachelor's degree in horticulture part-time through a distance-learning university. If you're more interested in growing plants, I'd say horticulture is a better fit than botany. If you're more interested in understanding how plants work, botany is probably the better choice. That said, you'll still learn a lot of botany in a horticulture degree as well obviously