“Plants’ solutions to life’s challenges are as ingenious and manipulative as any animal’s. Innovative time-lapse photography opens up a parallel world where plants act like fly-paper, or spring-loaded traps, to catch insects. Vines develop suckers and claws to haul themselves into the rainforest canopy. Every peculiar shape proves to have a clever purpose. The dragon’s […]

Like a microscopic (and monochromatic) version of Tetris, Merismopedia cells form square-packed colonies. These cyanobacteria, plucked from a New England salt marsh, were flooded with ultraviolet light that was later filtered out of the image to reveal a red hue produced by chlorophyll molecules inside the cells. –National Geographic Merismopedia (from the Greek merismos (division) […]

-article via fractal ontology. Process In Mechanism and Biological Explanation [Maturana 1970], Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela argue that machines and biological forms are very closely related — so closely, in fact, that biologists can reasonably claim living systems are machines. This is not meant merely as a pedagogical metaphor, but rather as a rigorous […]