No smartphone, no problem: Plants have their own built-in 'Season-Meter'

You may check your phone before deciding what to wear tomorrow. Plants do something similar: they carry an internal gadget called a "Season-Meter" that tracks temperatures over the preceding weeks or months to help determine when to flower. By comparing two wild perennial plant species over two years, researchers from the University of Tsukuba found that each of the three genes in this Season-Meter operates over a different timescale, ranging from days to nearly five months, and that together they reliably forecast all four seasons of the year. The research is published in PLOS One.

≈