Plant physiology Julius von Sachs unified the pieces of plant physiology and put them together as a discipline. His "Lehrbuch der Botanik" was the plant physiology bible of its time. Researchers discovered in the 1800s that plants absorb essential mineral nutrients as inorganic ions in water. In natural conditions, soil acts as a mineral nutrient reservoir but the soil itself is not essential to plant growth. When the mineral nutrients in the soil are dissolved in water, plant roots absorb nutrients readily, soil is no longer required for the plant to thrive. This observation is the basis for hydroponics, the growing of
Natural computing understand the essential properties of life organisms by building, within electronic computers or other artificial media, "ab initio" systems that exhibit properties normally associated only with living organisms. Early examples include Lindenmayer systems (L-systems), that have been used to model plant growth and development. An L-system is a parallel rewriting system that starts with an initial word, and applies its rewriting rules in parallel to all letters of the word. Pioneering experiments in artificial life included the design of evolving "virtual block creatures" acting in simulated environments with realistic features such as kinetics, dynamics, gravity, collision, and friction. These artificial