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Published online 21 January 2004 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news040119-5
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Do plants act like computers?
Leaves appear to regulate their 'breathing' by conducting simple calculations.
Plants appear to 'think', according to US researchers, who say that green plants engage in a form of problem-solving computation.
David Peak and co-workers at Utah State University in Logan say that plants may regulate their uptake and loss of gases by 'distributed computation' - a kind of information processing that involves communication between many interacting units1.
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