News
Sunflowers make small moves to maximize their Sun exposure – physicists can model them to predict how they grow
Charles Darwin’s detailed observations of plant movements, such as sunflower circumnutation and self-organization, reveal how randomness helps plants optimize growth and adapt to their environments. Sunflowers!
Last Updated on March 6, 2026 by Daily News Staff
Chantal Nguyen, University of Colorado Boulder
Sunflowers make small moves to maximize their Sun exposure – physicists can model them to predict how they grow
Most of us aren’t spending our days watching our houseplants grow. We see their signs of life only occasionally – a new leaf unfurled, a stem leaning toward the window.
But in the summer of 1863, Charles Darwin lay ill in bed, with nothing to do but watch his plants so closely that he could detect their small movements to and fro. The tendrils from his cucumber plants swept in circles until they encountered a stick, which they proceeded to twine around.
“I am getting very much amused by my tendrils,” he wrote.
This amusement blossomed into a decadeslong fascination with the little-noticed world of plant movements. He compiled his detailed observations and experiments in a 1880 book called “The Power of Movement in Plants.”
In one study, he traced the motion of a carnation leaf every few hours over the course of three days, revealing an irregular looping, jagged path. The swoops of cucumber tendrils and the zags of carnation leaves are examples of inherent, ubiquitous plant movements called circumnutations – from the Latin circum, meaning circle, and nutare, meaning to nod.
Circumnutations vary in size, regularity and timescale across plant species. But their exact function remains unclear.
I’m a physicist interested in understanding collective behavior in living systems. Like Darwin, I’m captivated by circumnutations, since they may underlie more complex phenomena in groups of plants.
Sunflower patterns
A 2017 study revealed a fascinating observation that got my colleagues and me wondering about the role circumnutations could play in plant growth patterns. In this study, researchers found that sunflowers grown in a dense row naturally formed a near-perfect zigzag pattern, with each plant leaning away from the row in alternating directions.
This pattern allowed the plants to avoid shade from their neighbors and maximize their exposure to sunlight. These sunflowers flourished.
Researchers then planted some plants at the same density but constrained them so that they could grow only upright without leaning. These constrained plants produced less oil than the plants that could lean and get the maximum amount of sun.
While farmers can’t grow their sunflowers quite this close together due to the potential for disease spread, in the future they may be able to use these patterns to come up with new planting strategies.
Self-organization and randomness
This spontaneous pattern formation is a neat example of self-organization in nature. Self-organization refers to when initially disordered systems, such as a jungle of plants or a swarm of bees, achieve order without anything controlling them. Order emerges from the interactions between individual members of the system and their interactions with the environment.
Somewhat counterintuitively, noise – also called randomness – facilitates self-organization. Consider a colony of ants.
Ants secrete pheromones behind them as they crawl toward a food source. Other ants find this food source by following the pheromone trails, and they further reinforce the trail they took by secreting their own pheromones in turn. Over time, the ants converge on the best path to the food, and a single trail prevails.
But if a shorter path were to become possible, the ants would not necessarily find this path just by following the existing trail.
If a few ants were to randomly deviate from the trail, though, they might stumble onto the shorter path and create a new trail. So this randomness injects a spontaneous change into the ants’ system that allows them to explore alternative scenarios.
Eventually, more ants would follow the new trail, and soon the shorter path would prevail. This randomness helps the ants adapt to changes in the environment, as a few ants spontaneously seek out more direct ways to their food source.
In biology, self-organized systems can be found at a range of scales, from the patterns of proteins inside cells to the socially complex colonies of honeybees that collectively build nests and forage for nectar.
Randomness in sunflower self-organization
So, could random, irregular circumnutations underpin the sunflowers’ self-organization?
My colleagues and I set out to explore this question by following the growth of young sunflowers we planted in the lab. Using cameras that imaged the plants every five minutes, we tracked the movement of the plants to see their circumnutatory paths.
We saw some loops and spirals, and lots of jagged movements. These ultimately appeared largely random, much like Darwin’s carnation. But when we placed the plants together in rows, they began to move away from one another, forming the same zigzag configurations that we’d seen in the previous study.
We analyzed the plants’ circumnutations and found that at any given time, the direction of the plant’s motion appeared completely independent of how it was moving about half an hour earlier. If you measured a plant’s motion once every 30 minutes, it would appear to be moving in a completely random way.
We also measured how much the plant’s leaves grew over the course of two weeks. By putting all of these results together, we sketched a picture of how a plant moved and grew on its own. This information allowed us to computationally model a sunflower and simulate how it behaves over the course of its growth.
A sunflower model
We modeled each plant simply as a circular crown on a stem, with the crown expanding according to the growth rate we measured experimentally. The simulated plant moved in a completely random way, taking a “step” every half hour.
We created the model sunflowers with circumnutations of lower or higher intensity by tweaking the step sizes. At one end of the spectrum, sunflowers were much more likely to take tiny steps than big ones, leading to slow, minimal movement on average. At the other end were sunflowers that are equally as likely to take large steps as small steps, resulting in highly irregular movement. The real sunflowers we observed in our experiment were somewhere in the middle.
Plants require light to grow and have evolved the ability to detect shade and alter the direction of their growth in response.
We wanted our model sunflowers to do the same thing. So, we made it so that two plants that get too close to each other’s shade begin to lean away in opposite directions.
Finally, we wanted to see whether we could replicate the zigzag pattern we’d observed with the real sunflowers in our model.
First, we set the model sunflowers to make small circumnutations. Their shade avoidance responses pushed them away from each other, but that wasn’t enough to produce the zigzag – the model plants stayed stuck in a line. In physics, we would call this a “frustrated” system.
Then, we set the plants to make large circumnutations. The plants started moving in random patterns that often brought the plants closer together rather than farther apart. Again, no zigzag pattern like we’d seen in the field.
But when we set the model plants to make moderately large movements, similar to our experimental measurements, the plants could self-organize into a zigzag pattern that gave each sunflower optimal exposure to light.
So, we showed that these random, irregular movements helped the plants explore their surroundings to find desirable arrangements that benefited their growth.
Plants are much more dynamic than people give them credit for. By taking the time to follow them, scientists and farmers can unlock their secrets and use plants’ movement to their advantage.
Chantal Nguyen, Postdoctoral Associate at the BioFrontiers Institute, University of Colorado Boulder
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
STM Daily News is a vibrant news blog dedicated to sharing the brighter side of human experiences. Emphasizing positive, uplifting stories, the site focuses on delivering inspiring, informative, and well-researched content. With a commitment to accurate, fair, and responsible journalism, STM Daily News aims to foster a community of readers passionate about positive change and engaged in meaningful conversations. Join the movement and explore stories that celebrate the positive impacts shaping our world.
https://stmdailynews.com/category/stories-this-moment
Author
The Knowledge
Artemis II’s long countdown – a space historian explains why it has taken over 50 years to return to the Moon
Why has it taken 50+ years to return to the Moon? A space historian explains the technical, political, and financial complexities behind Artemis II’s long journey.
Last Updated on April 10, 2026 by Daily News Staff
Emily A. Margolis, Smithsonian Institution
While I was leading a tour of the National Air and Space Museum in January 2026, a visitor posed this insightful question: “Why has it taken so long to return to the Moon?”
After all, NASA had the know-how and technology to send humans to the lunar surface more than 50 years ago as part of the Apollo program. And, as another tour guest reminded us, computers today can do so much more than they could back then, as evidenced by the smartphones most of us carry in our pockets. Shouldn’t it be easier to get to the Moon than ever before?
The truth is that sending humans into space safely continues to be difficult, especially as missions increase in complexity.
New technologies require years of study, development and testing before they can be certified for flight. And even then, systems and materials can behave in ways that surprise and worry engineers and mission planners; look no further than Boeing’s Starliner CFT mission or the performance of the Orion heat shield on Artemis I.
Issues with Starliner’s thrusters led NASA to return the spacecraft from the International Space Station without its crew. Unanticipated chipping of the Orion heat shield resulted in years of research, culminating in NASA altering the atmospheric reentry plans for the Artemis II mission.
NASA’s programs also require sustained political will and financial support across multiple presidential administrations, Congresses and fiscal years. As a historian of human spaceflight, I have studied the space agency’s efforts to engage the broader public to convince American taxpayers that their programs hold value for the nation.
NASA is now on the eve of the first crewed flight to the Moon since the Apollo era: Artemis II. A crew of four will conduct a lunar flyby, laying the groundwork, the agency hopes, for a landing on the Artemis IV mission.
The story of NASA’s effort to return humans to the Moon is long and winding, demonstrating the complexities of turning grand ambitions into real missions.
Post-Apollo
In early 1970, with two successful Moon landings on the books, President Richard Nixon sought to reduce NASA’s budget to better align with his administration’s priorities. This decision put the space agency in a difficult position, which ultimately led to the cancellation of three planned Apollo missions to conserve funding for its plans for long-term human activity in low Earth orbit.
NASA repurposed the third stage of a Saturn V rocket to create the first U.S. space station, Skylab, which operated from 1973 to 1974. The space agency used leftover Saturn IB rockets and Apollo command and service modules to send crews to the station.
Over the next three decades, NASA developed and operated the space shuttle. The fleet of space shuttle orbiters supported satellite deployment and microgravity research on orbital missions of up to 17 days. This work was meant to enable future long-duration human missions and provide benefits to people on Earth. For example, data from protein crystal growth experiments have informed the development of medicines.
The space shuttle program facilitated the construction, maintenance and staffing of a continuously inhabited research platform in orbit, the International Space Station. The first modules launched in late 1998.
Where to next?
As the new millennium approached, the Clinton administration tasked NASA to think beyond the space station. What could robots and humans do next in space? And where could they do it? Notably, the White House expressed an interest in locations beyond low Earth orbit.
NASA, it turned out, was well positioned to meet the administration’s request. NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin was already thinking about preparing proposals for the next presidential administration and had recently sponsored a human lunar return study. In 1999, he established a team to investigate new technologies, missions and destinations for the 21st century.
This work took on new significance following the tragic loss of the space shuttle Columbia crew in February 2003. Many people, including those in the new George W. Bush White House, wondered whether the human spaceflight program should continue – and, if so, how.
Administration discussions culminated in Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration in 2004, which directed NASA to retire the space shuttle after the completion of the space station. It called for returning humans to the Moon on a crew exploration vehicle designed for destinations beyond low Earth orbit.
It also called for continuing robotic exploration of Mars and engaging companies and international partners in space. Fifteen years earlier, President George H. W. Bush had also announced a Moon and Mars exploration program, but congressional concerns about cost kept space travelers close to home.
The Constellation program’s legacy
In December 2004, NASA began the process of finding a manufacturer for the crew exploration vehicle. By August 2006, the space agency awarded Lockheed Martin the contract to build the capsule, which it had named Orion – the same Orion planned to carry Artemis astronauts to the Moon.
Years of research, development and testing followed for Orion as well as the Ares I crew and Ares V cargo launch vehicles. Together, these technologies made up the Constellation program.
Constellation had two primary objectives: in the near term, to help transport crew to and from the space station after the space shuttle program ended; in the long term, to enable human lunar exploration.
Building systems that could work in both Earth orbit and around the Moon was supposed to save the time and cost of developing two vehicles. Similarly, adapting space shuttle program hardware could supposedly cut costs.
During the first months of Barack Obama’s presidency in 2009, the administration initiated an independent review of NASA’s human spaceflight plans. The Augustine Committee, chaired by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine, found that the agency’s ambitions outstripped its limited budget, leading to significant delays. The first Orion spacecraft was likely to arrive after the space station ceased operations.
The committee proposed several paths forward at the current funding level, which prioritized space shuttle and space station programs. An additional annual investment of US$3 billion would allow for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit.
Ultimately, the Obama administration canceled Constellation, but two of its technologies lived on, thanks to U.S. senators from states that would have been affected by cuts.
The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 funded Orion’s continued development, shifting responsibility for space station crew transportation to commercial vehicles. It also directed NASA to develop the space launch system, a redesigned Ares V heavy booster, to send Orion to the Moon. The technical strategy had political benefits, too, preserving jobs in numerous congressional districts by providing continuity for aerospace contractors.
In December 2014, a Delta IV heavy rocket launched the first Orion capsule on a test flight, providing engineers with data on spacecraft systems and the heat shield. By October 2015, the space launch system had completed a critical design review, the last step before manufacturing could begin.
Introducing Artemis
In December 2017, the new Trump administration issued a policy directive shifting the focus of NASA’s human spaceflight program back to the Moon. The space agency would use Orion and the space launch system in a race to meet an ambitious 2024 landing date. NASA officially named the program Artemis in May 2019.
The 25-day Artemis I mission, launched in November 2022, was a major milestone for the program. This uncrewed flight was the first flight of the space launch system and the first to integrate SLS and Orion. It laid the groundwork for Artemis II, which will be the first crewed flight of the SLS.
Over more than 50 years, each new presidential administration has reassessed the place of spaceflight among its priorities, either encouraging or curtailing NASA’s efforts to return humans to the lunar surface.
Each crewed flight requires the alignment of technical expertise, political will and financial support over years if not decades. For the space fans who plan to watch the Artemis II launch, the wait for countdown may feel long. But it’s just a blink in NASA’s long journey back to the Moon.
Emily A. Margolis, Curator of Contemporary Spaceflight, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Dive into “The Knowledge,” where curiosity meets clarity. This playlist, in collaboration with STMDailyNews.com, is designed for viewers who value historical accuracy and insightful learning. Our short videos, ranging from 30 seconds to a minute and a half, make complex subjects easy to grasp in no time. Covering everything from historical events to contemporary processes and entertainment, “The Knowledge” bridges the past with the present. In a world where information is abundant yet often misused, our series aims to guide you through the noise, preserving vital knowledge and truths that shape our lives today. Perfect for curious minds eager to discover the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of everything around us. Subscribe and join in as we explore the facts that matter. https://stmdailynews.com/the-knowledge/
Economy
Feeding the Economy Report Says U.S. Food, Agriculture Add $10.4 Trillion
The 2026 Feeding the Economy report says U.S. food and agriculture industries generate $10.4 trillion in economic value and support 48.7 million jobs.
New Feeding the Economy Report Highlights Food, Agriculture Industry Strength
America’s food and agriculture industries generated more than $10.4 trillion in economic value in 2026, accounting for nearly 20% of the U.S. economy, according to the 10th annual Feeding the Economy report released by 35 food and agriculture groups. The new farm-to-fork study also found the sector supports 48.7 million jobs nationwide, including 24.3 million direct jobs across farming, food manufacturing, processing, distribution, retail, and foodservice.
The report points to continued resilience despite inflation, trade uncertainty, and ongoing pressure on farmers and producers. It found food and agriculture generate more than $3 trillion in wages and $1.35 trillion in tax revenue, while U.S. exports totaled $177.3 billion. At the same time, the study flagged softer areas to watch, including flat direct employment in production agriculture and food manufacturing, along with a year-over-year decline in exports. For the food and beverage industry, the report reinforces just how deeply agriculture remains tied to jobs, supply chains, and broader economic stability.
Source:
Tenth Annual “Feeding the Economy” Report Demonstrates Strength and Resilience of the American Food and Agriculture Industries Amid Ongoing Economic Pressures — Feeding the Economy via PR Newswire
Further information:
Feeding the Economy
View the original press release on PR Newswire
STM Daily News is a vibrant news blog dedicated to sharing the brighter side of human experiences. Emphasizing positive, uplifting stories, the site focuses on delivering inspiring, informative, and well-researched content. With a commitment to accurate, fair, and responsible journalism, STM Daily News aims to foster a community of readers passionate about positive change and engaged in meaningful conversations. Join the movement and explore stories that celebrate the positive impacts shaping our world.
Artemis II Astronauts Capture First Moon Flyby Images from Lunar Far Side
April 7, 2026 — NASA has released the first breathtaking images from the historic Artemis II mission, offering humanity a rare look at the Moon’s far side—including views never before seen by human eyes.
Captured during a seven-hour lunar flyby on April 6, the images were taken by astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft as part of NASA’s first crewed mission to the Moon in more than 50 years.
🌕 A Historic View of the Moon
The newly released images reveal stunning details of the lunar surface, including impact craters, ancient lava flows, and fractured terrain that scientists will use to better understand the Moon’s geologic history.
Among the most remarkable visuals is a rare solar eclipse seen from space, where the Moon passes in front of the Sun, revealing the Sun’s outer corona. The images also captured an “earthset” and “earthrise”—moments where Earth appears to set and rise over the Moon’s horizon.
In one striking image, the Moon is backlit by the Sun, with Earth glowing at its edge, while distant planets like Saturn and Mars appear as bright points in the background.
📸 Thousands of Images, New Discoveries
The Artemis II crew—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen—used a range of cameras to capture thousands of high-resolution images during the flyby.
In addition to photography, the astronauts reported observing six meteoroid impact flashes on the Moon’s surface, offering scientists a rare opportunity to study active lunar events in real time.
Researchers are now analyzing the images, audio, and telemetry data to refine their understanding of the Moon’s surface and compare findings with observations from Earth-based astronomers.
🔬 Science That Shapes the Future
According to NASA officials, the data collected during Artemis II will play a critical role in shaping future missions, including plans to establish a long-term human presence on the Moon.
“These images are not only visually stunning, but they are brimming with scientific value that will inspire generations to come,” said Dr. Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
The mission also provides astronauts with a unique advantage—human observation. With four trained sets of eyes, the crew is able to analyze subtle differences in color, brightness, and texture across the lunar surface in ways robotic systems cannot.
🚀 More Than Halfway Home
Now more than halfway through its 10-day journey, Artemis II is heading back toward Earth. NASA is targeting a splashdown at 8:07 p.m. EDT on April 10 off the coast of San Diego.
Live coverage of the return will begin at 6:30 p.m. EDT on NASA+, with recovery teams ready to retrieve the crew and spacecraft following reentry.
🌍 A New Era of Exploration
The Artemis II mission marks a major step forward in NASA’s long-term vision of returning humans to the Moon and eventually sending astronauts to Mars.
With each image and data point sent back to Earth, the mission is not only rewriting the record books—but also expanding humanity’s understanding of our closest celestial neighbor.
Official Artemis II images are available through NASA’s digital platforms, including the Artemis Image Gallery and NASA Image and Video Library.
🔗 Related External Links
Explore official NASA resources and view the latest Artemis II Moon flyby images:
- NASA: Artemis II Mission Overview
- NASA Artemis Program (Return to the Moon)
- NASA Image and Video Library (Artemis II Photos)
- Artemis Image Gallery
- Orion Spacecraft Details
- Apollo 13 Mission History (Previous Distance Record)
Source: NASA Official Release – Artemis II Moon Flyby Images
Dive into “The Knowledge,” where curiosity meets clarity. This playlist, in collaboration with STMDailyNews.com, is designed for viewers who value historical accuracy and insightful learning. Our short videos, ranging from 30 seconds to a minute and a half, make complex subjects easy to grasp in no time. Covering everything from historical events to contemporary processes and entertainment, “The Knowledge” bridges the past with the present. In a world where information is abundant yet often misused, our series aims to guide you through the noise, preserving vital knowledge and truths that shape our lives today. Perfect for curious minds eager to discover the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of everything around us. Subscribe and join in as we explore the facts that matter. https://stmdailynews.com/the-knowledge/
