"Plants smell," says botanist David Chamovitz. Yes, they give off odors, but that's not what Chamovitz means. He means plants can smell other plants. "Plants know when their fruit is ripe, when their [plant] neighbor has been cut by a gardener's shears, or when their neighbor is being eaten by a ravenous bug; they smell it," he writes in his new book, What a Plant Knows. They don't have noses or a nervous system, but they still have an olfactory sense, and they can differentiate. He says there's a vine that can smell the difference between a tomato and a stalk of wheat. It will choose one over the other, based on...smell! In a moment I'll show you how.

This talented plant is commonly known as the dodder vine. It's a parasite; tomato gardeners know it and hate it.

Here it is at Penn State University — look for the stringy, wiggly thing on the left — sniffing. Notice as it grows from a seedling, it moves in small, lazy circles, like hands groping in the dark, and then, gradually, it leans toward the stalk of the tomato plant — which it then entwines, gouges, sucks and strangles.

Ewww, you say. (I am assuming you are pro-tomato). But how do we know the vine is "smelling" that tomato plant? Enter Dr. Consuelo De Moraes, a biologist at Penn State. With her colleagues, she put the dodder plant to the test.

Every so often, the Internet astonishes. Things I wouldn't, couldn't, shouldn't expect, sometimes happen. Take this, for example:

Enlarge YouTube

YouTube

On April 25, somewhere in the ocean off Great Britain, a remotely operated video camera near a deep sea oil rig caught a glimpse — at first it was just a glimpse — of an astonishing looking sea creature. It was a green-gray blob of gelatinous muscle, covered with a finely mesh-like textured skin, no eyes, no tentacles, no front, no back. It moved constantly, floating up to the camera, then it backed off and disappeared. The camera operator tried to find it, and then, suddenly, out of the darkness, back it came.

What was this thing?

Who's John Baldessari? To judge from this wonderfully mischievous video commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Baldessari is a hugely — and I mean hugely — successful conceptual artist, whose work has appeared in hundreds of gallery shows, major museum exhibitions. You name it, he's done it.

YouTube

And yet — in the hands of filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (whose movie, Catfish was about hustling on the Internet), as narrated by Tom Waits, script by Gabriel Nussbaum — there is something of the flimflam man in John Baldessari. His work, says Wikipedia, combines "the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language" — which means — I don't know what.

'I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art'

His works include people with colored dots on their heads, oddly composed photographs, large trumpet sculptures. Some of his pieces feature him promising, "I will not make any more boring art, I will not make any more boring art," which suggests that he often thinks he is making boring art, and that maybe he's a little bit amazed that people want to buy and buy and buy what he's making.

That is why I liked this video: it's commissioned by a museum to proclaim a great talent, but watching it, I have this sense that instead Mr. Baldessari & Co. are slyly winking at us, saying, (as he does at the end) that if you've got some ability and you're crazy enough to put in the hours, what an artist really needs is "to be at the right place at the right time." In other words, art is a business like any other, and the key is timing, to hit the market when the market is ripe.

If Baldessari weren't such a charmer, if the edits weren't so pitch perfect, if Tom Waits didn't have the best gravelly-wonderful voice in the world, I wouldn't be recommending this film.

But I am. It's an homage to art or to commerce or to mischief, I don't know which. And it's short. So take a look and decide for yourself.

Here it is, in a nutshell: The logic of science boiled down to one, essential idea. It comes from Richard Feynman, one of the great scientists of the 20th century, who wrote it on the blackboard during a class at Cornell in 1964.

Think about what he's saying. Science is our way of describing — as best we can — how the world works. The world, it is presumed, works perfectly well without us. Our thinking about it makes no important difference. It is out there, being the world. We are locked in, busy in our minds. And when our minds make a guess about what's happening out there, if we put our guess to the test, and we don't get the results we expect, as Feynman says, there can be only one conclusion: we're wrong.

The world knows. Our minds guess. In any contest between the two, The World Out There wins. It doesn't matter, Feynman tells the class, "how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is, if it disagrees with the experiment, it is wrong."

Enlarge Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Yes, there are more and more people on the planet, and yes, there are fewer and fewer fish in the sea, but do we really notice? After all, fish live in water and we live on land; so we don't mingle that much. If fish were sparrows, we might see a dramatic decline, but who misses what they don't see in the first place?

Resetting What's "Normal"

Second, and this is the more subtle point, if animals are disappearing slowly, we are wired not to see the extent of the decline. People think "normal" or "natural" is what they saw when they were kids. If there were lots of bees in your neighborhood when you were 8 years old, that's the number of bees you expect to see when you're 68. If your grandma saw double that number 60 years earlier, her baseline is erased when she dies. Your experience becomes the new normal. When you die, "normal" resets and becomes whatever your daughter saw when she was 8.

Meantime, almost without realizing it, the "normal" number of bees keeps getting lower and lower.

Source: Information is Beautiful

Credit: David McCandless

That's why this graph of fish in the sea is so revealing. Based on a study by Dr. Villy Christensen and colleagues at the University of British Columbia, it shows population (biomass) changes of various fish in the Atlantic over several human generations — from 1900 to 2000.

YouTube

I don't know what kind of nerve, ferocity and stubbornness got 86-year-old Brendon Grimshaw to buy an island in the Indian Ocean, replant it with 16,000 trees, grasses and then lure a bunch of giant tortoises — big galumphing ones and itty-bitty ones — to live with him (one gets born in his bedroom). But he did it, and when he takes reporter Simon Reeve on a tour, he seems so shy and gentle. But I bet he's not. My guess is Brendon is next to impossible to live with, unless you're too big, too slow and too reptilian to care. Take a look.

Simon Reeve, the reporter, has spent the past few years wandering the world for the BBC. A decade ago, he was an investigative reporter covering arms dealing and nuclear smuggling. His book about how al-Qaida was planning attacks on the West, The New Jackals; Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism, became a New York Times best-seller. But these days, he practices the more delicate art of wandering the world in search of situations he describes as "frightening, uplifting, exhausting, upsetting, challenging and surprising."

I can think of puns. Or I can show you puns. Let me show you Gemma's.

Most punsters play with the sound of words, but Gemma Correll does it with pen on paper.

She's an illustrator, or as she puts it, "a comic-making person," and she has this habit of thinking about things a beat too long, which gets her in happy trouble.

A hundred years ago — and that's when this picture was taken, in 1912 — men didn't leave home without a hat. Boys wore caps. This is a socialist political rally in Union Square in Manhattan. There may be a bare head or two in this crowd, but I think those heads are women's.

The Library of Congress/via flickr

Here's another rally, Union Square again. This time it's an Occupy Wall Street demonstration. A hundred years have passed. Same place. Same kind of crowd. But this time: hardly a hat.

Allison Joyce/Getty Images

Flip back one more time. We're back, I think, in Union Square, with Emma Goldman arriving by car. She's another socialist (this isn't an essay about lefties, it's about hats) and there she is, the only woman in a sea of men wearing a sea of hats.

Wikimedia Commons

So what happened? Why did guys stop wearing headgear in midcentury America?

There you are, inside the placenta, all cozy and wrapped; mommy all around you — this is nice.

Except for the occasional leak.

Steven O'Connor, M.D.

Six years ago I reported on Morning Edition that whenever a woman gets pregnant, some of the baby's cells slip through the placental wall into the mother's blood and settle down for a while — outside the placenta.

Then, when the baby is born (or fails to be born), most of those cells disappear. After all, the baby's DNA is different; it's a combination of mom and dad. So in the genetic sense it's a foreigner and doesn't belong in mom any more. "One would expect [fetal cells] to be attacked fairly rapidly," said Dr. Kirby Johnson of Tufts University.

But here's the surprise: some of those fetal cells stay.

And stay.

And stay.

Dr. Johnson says cells from fetal boys and girls have been found in mothers "four to five decades following the last pregnancy." That fetus may have grown into a middle aged pharmacist, and still his cells are inside his mother. Cells wouldn't persist in foreign body for NO reason. They must be doing something, but what?