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Wisconsin Corpse Plant To Bloom Again
V_IL_Len writes "The University of Wisconsin's original Amorphophallus titanum, or 'corpse plant' known as Big Bucky is ready to bloom and emit its intensely malodorous stench. The plant only blooms a few times in its 40 year life span and each bloom lasts only 2-3 days. Its stench attracts carrion beetles and flesh flies to pollinate it. See this link for photos and live stream of the bloom."
Unfortunately the best i can do at home is A. Paeonifolius
Software Freedom Day!.
No really, I got them de-clawed.
This happens most every year.
I know I'm going to get modded to oblivion for it, but when I read "corpse plant", my first thought was Iraq.
Ok. Mod me down, go ahead.
Does the "It's funny, laugh" category on this one have anything to do with Amorphophallus meaning "malformed penis"? Penis... hehehehehehehehe.
never rezlied it was an actuall phenomona..
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
Now it'll be easier to hide that dead body in my garage.
Anybody care to guess at the Latin translation of this word?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
We've got something like that around the office. We call him Steve.
Nothing like a 6 foot tall flower that reeks like a rotting corpse!
..... I think the server and the plant are shortly going to compete to decide which of the two the worse stinking pile. ;)
It also attracts Nerds...
Slashdotted with a live video stream and an image gallery.
I spent an inordinate amount of time watching that live stream last time this thing was blooming.
3AM drunk frat boys trying to compare "equipment" with the flower is something that is burned into my brain forever.
And I love it!
We have a plant conservatory here in Cincinnati that has one of these (or something like it). It bloomed a few years ago. It was awful.
except that nothing related to reproduction goes on at such events.
- Violent Femmes :/ ) :)
- Steve Miller of the Steve Miller Band
- Summerfest
- Willem Dafoe (spelling?)
- Apostle Island National Lakeshore
- lots of beer & cheese
- polka music
- Green Bay Packers
- Ben Sheets
- 1st NBA pick
- lake effect snow
- UW halloween party
- Milwaukee Art Museum
- more lakes than Minnesota
- Bodeans (you know.. the Friends theme?
- me
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Hey, that guy doesn't even look like Mr. Wilson...
IMHO, corpse plant is the best argument against "intelligent design". :)
hehe
"Its stench attracts carrion beetles and flesh flies to pollinate it."
Funny, the same thing has been happening to my PPC Macintosh.
Sounds like the makings of a good horror flick to me. Someone, quick, call George Romero!
One of these just bloomed in SF - I wasn't able to make it, but apparently it was interesting (if you're into that sort of thing). Read about it here
ok a stinking plant, but thats the best streaming video I've seen over the internet in a long long time and I'm using the 384kbit/sec one. Very good quality video I'm seeing.
There's always ebaya tegory=42207&item=4386828334 a tegory=20524&item=4387196761
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&c
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&c
Software Freedom Day!.
(I had the "pleasure" of sitting next to him on a cross country flight; we had a great talk about sys admin stuff, but damn, it smelled like something crawled up his ass and died!)
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
An Amorphophallus titanum named "Tabitha the Titan" bloomed last August at University of California, Davis. Two more, "Ted" & "Tammy," are expected to bloom again this summer. That's a whole lot of stink.
Good Scientist:
Change the scent to a fragrant one and make it bloom more often.
Evil Scientist:
Cross it with a venus flytrap and consume the passersby too stupid to watch it bloom.
Instead of a body count and a titilating expose into Britney's Spears choice of toothpaste, THIS is what SHOULD make news! Imagine how cool it would be if we lived in a country full of intelligent, interesting people who thought that this was real news. That professor explaining the situation was awesome!!
That thing is straight out of nightmares. Seriously, it scares the fuck out of me... I want one.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
I don't think I geeky enough just yet to watch a live stream of a flower blooming. You may call me an insensitive clod now.
Any goombah knows to go to Jersey and plant 'em in the Meadowlands. They'll never friggin' "bloom" again.
Me watching a live feed of it on a Friday night, or people actually going there to see it..
http://www.fatkidsong.com/mash.htm/
Since when has slashdot just been about technology? Slashdot is about nerdy things, like science. This is a science thing.
Am I the only one who thinks of Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors ?
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
...14 or something???
There is a chemical in the plant odor that causes hallucinations. Two of them bloomed at the same time, and it caused some of my neighbors to seek psychological counsel because of hearing whispers and seeing shadows. I collected them full-grown when I was in Bio Tech school, about 3 years ago.
One neighbor I am a great friend with, said that whenever they bloom it releases demons looking for people that bet against John Carmack releasing Doom3 AFTER Duke Nukem Forever. Silly, good-hearted man, but it is a great stench to host a Doom3 LAN party with; the game of a lifetime -- You can smell the hell and see it on-screen and with Creative Labs 3D sound!
Lotsa streamin' videos... *clicky* *clicky*
Geez. All the effort of hype and PR, and these State-employed lifers can't open the greenhouse on a Saturday.
Curator of the Jefferson Computer Museum http://www.threedee.com/jcm
It's SCIENCE, you ASSHOLE. YOU KNOW, the STUFF that actually MATTERS in the BIG PICTURE?
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
So what! We had one in SF a few weeks back (technically on loan from Davis):r _050530.html
http://www.livescience.com/othernews/corpse_flowe
But then again, I guess this is a big deal in cow country....
It's simpler than that, this is a nerd thing, plant nerds rather than computer nerds, but still.
Software Freedom Day!.
But wow, check out the mullet on the guy here! :)
If you can think of a better way to produce corpses, I'd like to hear it.
--
RumorsDaily
for Aroma over IP
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
You'ld think some of these scientists were modest, but they named this plant "Amorphophallus", interpreted in English -- I think we can believe whatever we want to believe on this one. I'm not saying it. Obviously some people can be so deprived as to give out bad latin words for innocent plants, or maybe this does have a correlation with a certain odor... Take a shower, geeks! And take a cold shower, at that!
without prejudice
Of course, I'd rather all the attention be paid to this stinky plant, than have those same people paying attention to my young son's stinky gym shoes.
Such a plant could cease to exist and cause no crises whatsoever, just going to show, if something is rare enough, maybe nothing else will depend on it for food!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Several universities across the country have many of these plants - the University of Washington has several, such that there's a bloom at least every year or two.
I am at Univ. of Cal Davis and in plant bio where we've had a couple bloom the past two years at our conservatory (as is mentioned above).
The plant "Ted" bloomed a couple of years ago and rebloomed this year but was shipped to the Conservatory of Flowers in SF (as is also mentioned above).
Yeah, Amorphophallus does pertain to the shape of the flower as many have noted as it looks like large "junk". However, there are many great plant name that conjure funny thoughts. Probably my favorite is Rubus cockburnianus. Yep, it's a real plant. google it.
Also, this doesn't seem to have much to do with tech but there was also the recent story about the Mt. Diablo buckwheat (Eriogonum) that was thought extinct and found once more. You geeks have more appreciation than you realize for plants.
California buckeye
that stinks.
John Romero stinks so bad, that he causes harddrives to get bad sectors; and those bad sectors are then sold as a finished product and him the author.
Daikatan? KAHN!!!!
I have a small version of this plant in my backyard.
It looks very much like the one in the article, but it "blooms" every year, and stinks like rotting flesh, quite gross actually.
It popped up out of the bare ground after my first year here, and blooms, dies back to bare ground, and has been coming back for 7 years now.
In fact, it's just about to bloom in the next few days or so.
I never did find out what it is.
I call it the science fiction plant because it looks so otherworldly.
Informative???? The moderators do have sense of humor sometimes....
Virginia Tech has the same thing, and I'm sure many more do as well.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
But is it edible? mmmmm, salad!
C|N>K
after blooming the plant says in a baritone male voice "feed me, seymour, feed me!" and then goes to broadway to do a song and dance number and eat a dentist
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Feed Me, Seymour!
Funny how flowers are usually associated with female genitalia, but this one looks like a giant penis.
Any of Dubya's speeches, for example.
Ha, ha, ha, oh you slay me. What cutting edge liberal humor you have! Nobody on /. has ever posted anything like that before! You must be a genius!
Or, you could just be a typical liberal with nothing but whiny complaints and no real solutions.
I suspect the latter.
Yeah, I post anonymously. I don't want to be subjected to your lame-ass drivel the next time I log in.
And people complain that Marigolds stink.
Flare your nostrils in olfactory anticipation!
Have I said too much?
KOA
Giant Missile Defense Radar Sails
Namaste
I have this problem with every "streaming" video site. You click the link, and download it. It's a XML file with a URL for the actual content. You wget that, and you end up with a 4k file with lots of ASCII-encoded binary garbage. You have no way to watch the video.
I've got mplayer set up with all the right plugins to watch just about any sort of media file, but I can never figure out how to get the file *OFF* their servers and *ONTO* my desktop.
Is this just one of those ways I'm being punished for choosing Linux as my desktop operating system?
fifth sigma, inc.
A friend of mine in Oregon has voodoo lilies (Amorphophallus) bordering his driveway every spring and summer. Stinky, nasty skanky huge disgusting flowers. They serve a purpose, of course; they attract pollinators and deter varmints.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Its stench attracts carrion beetles and flesh flies to pollinate it.
Is this a plant or a politician?
If there weren't so many damn idiots in this world, I'd just be average.
YES!!!, I must grow one in my cubicle. Hmmm...I just need to be sure to take vacation right before it blooms.
Life is not for the lazy.
forward-looking article published friday.
does not compute.
sum.zero
The one in the Sydney Botanical Gardens already did this last year.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
While it is true that AN Amorphophallus titanum has bloomed every year or two at the UW for the last 10-15 years or so, Big Bucky, which is the big daddy of the collection, certainly does not.
They are hoping this one will claim the world record and that is why it really is "huge" news, at least for botany nerds.
After seeing far too many posts asking why this is news considering their local arboretum has had one bloom, too, and not seeing it properly explained in the links, I thought I'd explain.
Big Bucky is special because it may very well set a new world's record for largest flower (inflorescence, actually). When it last bloomed in 2001, it fell just a few inches shy of the then record which had stood since 1932 (though the record now is held by a 2003 plant in Bonn) and as of a week ago was well on its way to challenging the record.
So while it is true that a few bloom in the U.S. every year now since botanists have found them to really draw a crowd (and donations), that doesn't mean this one isn't special. The bottom line is that my corpse plant can beat up your corpse plant. So there!
From what? If these plants only bloom several times over decades then their sex life has to be worse than that of geeks given the likelihood of multiple simultaneous occurrances of this event.
uh, this has something to do with nanotechnology, right?
I saw a Titan Arum flower at the Sydney Botanic Gardens last year. The stench isn't what I'd describe as overpowering - it's actually a quite faint odour. I thought I reminiscent of old, dried-out roadkill.
The plant is quite weird. Even when not in flower, it looks strange - kindof fleshy and too symmetrical.
Once the flower opens, it fades very quickly, so you have to be quick.
Hey, thanks, now I know what it is.
I have a Dracunculus vulgaris in my back yard, it's a perfect match in the photos at the page bottom.
Mine is a larger specimin, and it almost always blooms with a center larger flower flanked between two smaller ones.
It seems to like living a half mile from the Pacific Ocean, in Northern California.
Thanks again.
or Italian Arum live in my Atlanta GA back yard. They have already bloomed, lost most of leaves, and are showing seeds. They make good winter foliage plants and do well in well drained rocky soil (old cementatious roofing shingles here). It will pretty much become invisible in another month and not show again until fall.
Wisconsin corpse-proccesing plant (as in factory) to start operating again?
the left attracts. Listen to your own friggin radio stations! Pacifica News, Air America, etc. They always talk total body count. USA + allies + others. Of course the intent is to inflame so they phrase the report to make it sound like USA only but what should we expect...Oh, Radio Canada too!
"insightful"? No, it's off topic. But it's on the left side of the fence. Should be modded TROLL.
(no/text)
You're right. In Vietnam, it took well over 10 years before we "declared victory" and slinked out. In Iraq, we'll probably "declare victory" and slip away in less than half that time.
In Vietnam, we achieved nothing, as the same communist government that would have been elected in 1956 took over anyway by 1975. In Iraq, we will have succeeded in bringing change, ultimately replacing a Stalinist totalitarian government with an Islamic fundamentalist totalitarian government.
I can't think of a better way to have spent several thousand dollars of my tax payments.
The 30 Mb Video Stream is intense! Wow. This really is a spectacutar sight to see. I wish that paint drying cam from last week was on a fast connection like this!
absolutely stunning... you guys have got to see this thing!
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
The tree is unfortunately a female one (yes, there are males too), so it produces fruit. The fruit smells like vomit, and in fact has the same "simpathy puking" effect on people as any normal pool of vomit would. The smell ginko fruit has made a number of students sick, and quite a few people actually avoid that area of campus when there's fruit on the ground--classes be damned.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
I can smell it over the internet, but it just smells like burning electroni.*##!_\";;..carrier lost.
But with a nick like yours...
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
Has there been any study of the molecules being emitted from this plant?
The infrared is sure interesting.
For those of you who can't stand your piddly little 384 kbps stream
...and are feeling unfulfilled by your 1.5 Mbps stream
...Don't worry. They have set up an experimental 30 Mbps DV multicast stream , complete with it's own free DVTS player so you can catch all this incredibly FAST paced action, as it happens!
There's a great picture of a corpse plant here. It's in 3D, so you'll need red/cyan glasses to view it. (Image was processed with the Callipygian 3D software that was featured on TechTV.
Best Buy can have you arrested
You know, I hate to say it, but even the 384kbps stream looks pretty damn good. I'm watching leaves fluttering around in the wind and it's not dropping any frames.
The graduate students explaining the environment the flower is found in, as well as the amazing way in which it attracts and traps flies/carrion beetles to reproduce and the 10-foot tall tree-like leaf (!) make me truly appreciate how amazing the spectrum of life we have here on Earth is. It's certainly above my head -- that's why I can stick to relatively simple things, like working on a plasma confinement device. ;)
No offense to the plant but it is like watching paint dry.
At first i wondered if the corpse plant was where they made soylent green...I need coffee...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
WHAT the F*** is THAT! I just wanted to know about the birds and the bees you blundering idiot!
Scientists now speculate the blooming of the plant is directly correlated to the farting of Saturn's moon Titan!
Thermal images.
http://webstreamer2.doit.wisc.edu/titan_arum/galle ry01/pages/4_full.htm
The boy in the back looks like someone's told him the truth about mammal decomposition.
Prepare your bladder for imminent release!
"Ted The Titan", an A. titanum grown by University of California at Davis, bloomed just a couple weeks ago. The UCD greenhouses were needed for coursework purposes, so they loaned "him" to the Conservatory of Flowers at the Golden Gate State Park in San Francisco. It only bloomed for a short two days or so. UCD seems to have one ready to bloom just about every year around May (they have a collection of them).
Odd... I've seen them in several locations in Kentucky including at my grandparents. Yes, the one on their property is male, but I'm suspecting they're not as rare as one might think.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.