BRAIN
WAKE-UPS
* Wake-up, Brain it's Monday again!
Join the best and brightest in the field of innovation at Convergence
2000: Odyssey into Innovation
http://www.thinksmart.com/convergence2000.html
** For your free, weekly brain wake-up message, send this request:
TO: majordomo@thinksmart.com
Message: Subscribe wake-up
Good Morning Thinkers!
Archive: February 28, 2000
Whyku
There is a theory that if we can identify a question, that question-energy will often pull an answer into existence. Perhaps it's true. Some time ago I developed a question/haiku hybrid I termed "whyku." One of the first whykus I wrote seems to have pulled an answer out of the Internet ether (with the help of Maria Thompson of Motorola who forwarded a very interesting science-in-brief newsletter).
The original whyku and the answer follow ... but, I would like to encourage you to create your own whykus. First think of a question that intrigues you and then come up with a three-line haiku-like poem (we're not sticklers about the seventeen-syllable rule). I'll give you a couple of examples and then you can send yours TO: why@thinksmart.com; SUBJECT: WHYKU
Examples:
In pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow,
Life comes to some a lot;
To some a little.
Why?
One woman; one man.
Four hundred and fifty channels.
One remote control.
Why?
Here's the whyku that prompted this message and the "answer."
That single cell-
Father of fish, fruit fly and me.
But what of the rose, radish and tree?
Why?
Mysteries of the New Tree of Life
BELIEVE it or not, man and mushroom now share the same branch on the tree of life. Until recently, biologists divided all living things into two kingdoms--plants and animals--but their new tree, based on DNA sequencing, starts with three big branches: bacteria, archaea, and eukaryea. The eukaryotes are divided into five smaller kingdoms: green plants, animals, fungi, red plants (mostly seaweed), and brown plants. For the last five years, 200 scientists from 12 nations have homed in on green plants, which account for one-sixth of all known species. Their revolutionary classification system, unveiled in August at the Botanical Congress in St. Louis, tells a story different from what we've ever known.
DNA analysis indicates that green plants, from the tiniest single-celled aquatic plants to the grandest redwoods, are related to one another. They all descended from a single ancestor a billion years ago: a sheet of green tissue the size of a pinhead, similar to the modern-day genus Coleochaete. Even more amazing, amborella, a little-known flowering shrub that grows only on the island of New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific, has turned out to be the closest surviving relative of the first flower, a living fossil from which all other flowers evolved. Scientists also learned that plants invaded land not from the sea, as originally thought, but from freshwater ponds, where they'd acclimated to the sometimes wet, sometimes dry environment. The wackiest finding: Fungi such as mushrooms have more in common with humans and animals than with the forest floors or the trees on which they grow.
-- from The Year in Science, 2000 Discover by Joseph D'Agnese