And tomato plants respond better to women than men, too

From Zay N. Smith's QT column this morning:

News Headline: "Plants capable of solving complex math equations"
And how many times have you, like QT, smiled and said, almost as a boast, "Oh, I'm no good at math"?

Well, a respected journalist like Mr. Smith would never make a headline up -- and a quick search of the Intertubes soon yielded an article duly entitled, "Plants capable of solving complex math equations," in a publication called the International Business Times.

Fiona Keating writes in the article of research showing how plants allocate starch to last through the night, "counting their starch and dividing it by the number of hours left until morning." Researchers from the John Innes Centre in Norwich discovered that Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant in the mustard family, "used their starch at a steady rate throughout the night, so that about 95% of their stock had been used up by dawn each day."

Stranger still, says Ms. Keating, "women gardeners' voices speed up growth of tomato plants much more than men's, according to a Royal Horticultural Study." Men reading to tomato plants actually slowed plant growth in some tests, according to the article, while tomato plants provided with female readers grew two inches taller.