91av

Monday

RAIN clouds roll ominously overhead, the wind plasters my hair across my face and I wonder what I have done to deserve this. I am slowly sinking into a muddy field just outside the Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth. I have tied plastic bags round my feet to keep my shoes clean. I am cold, tired and, to be honest, a little bit bored. But that’s the point: this is the first stop in my quest to find the most boring thing on Earth.

From the warmth and comfort of the 91av office, it all sounded like a bit of light-hearted fun. Just how tedious is watching paint dry? Does ditchwater deserve its dreary reputation? How I laughed when some smarty-pants called it boringology. Little did I know that I would be the one to draw the short straw, but here I am, in a field at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research, watching grass grow.

As soon as Danny Thorogood, a turf-grass breeder at IGER, leads me into the middle of the field I realise that not all grass is equal. Stretching in front of us are rows of different grasses that Thorogood and his colleagues have bred to be more nutritious for cows, to resist droughts, or simply to stay green. In the distance I spot giant miscanthus waving in the wind, a hybrid grass whose dry, leafless stems are a promising biofuel. Miscanthus grows at the impressive rate of 4 metres a year. “You can even hear it growing,” says Mervyn Humphreys, a plant breeder at IGER. “It crackles.”

I don’t know what comes over me. Suddenly I am on my hands and knees stroking the plants, examining their length, texture and colour. The diversity is remarkable: the AberNile “stay green” grass is lush without the slightest hint of brown, while the bluegrass favoured by North American gardeners is dark green and bushy. “For parks and lawns, you want dense coverage that doesn’t grow too fast,” says Thorogood. “But for grazing, you want a grass that grows quickly.”

There are more than 9000 known species of grass, but they are united in one thing, Thorogood tells me: how they grow. Unlike many other plants that sprout new shoots from the tops of mature stems, grass grows from the bottom up. Grass’s growth happens near ground level in embryonic tissue called the meristem. As the plant absorbs nutrients and water, the meristematic cells divide and multiply. The cells expand as they mature, pushing older ones upwards like toothpaste squeezing out of a tube. That’s why mowing your lawn doesn’t stop it growing – unless you scalp it to within a centimetre high and damage the meristem.

Of course, none of that means that it’s interesting to watch grass grow. But I’m already suspecting that the people here really don’t find it dull. In fact, some of them have invented a way to measure just how fast the growth happens. “You can’t just lie in a field and measure it with a ruler,” says plant scientist Helen Ougham. “That would be silly.”

Nearly 20 years ago, Ougham and her colleagues at what was then the Welsh Plant Breeding Station needed a controlled way to study how cooling and heating the meristem affects growth. To do this, they plucked a grass seedling from the greenhouse and sandwiched its meristem between brass plates heated or cooled with ethanediol, otherwise known as ethylene glycol, an ingredient in antifreeze. Next they clamped the youngest leaves between the jaws of a crocodile clip attached to a string looped round a pulley. To keep the string taut, they tied a counterweight to the end of it.

In the warmth of the laboratory, I get the chance to try it out for myself with a darnel grass seedling. As the plant grows, the dangling counterweight descends an equivalent distance. To measure this fall, we tie an iron cylinder halfway along the string and place it inside a “displacement transducer” that converts imperceptible movements into voltages.

Then we wait. And wait. I stifle a yawn and glance surreptitiously at my watch. Surely nothing is going to happen. The darnel grass seedling has a different idea. Within minutes, the digital voltmeter flickers into life. Grass is growing in front of my very eyes.

Every hour, it grows another 3.5 millimetres. If the temperature stays steady, my seedling will be standing over 17 millimetres taller by the time I get home tonight. Bizarrely, I am brimming with pride.

Tuesday

Yesterday I spent 10 hours on a train, just for the chance to watch grass grow – and I don’t regret a moment. How can ditchwater measure up to that? At first, Jane Fisher is not very confident that it can. “Ditches are not very glamorous,” she admits.

I am at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford, near Oxford. Fisher, a freshwater ecologist and a specialist in algae, has already done the dirty work for me. She has filled two jars with water taken from ditches that run into the river Thames.

I begin to sense that Fisher is warming to the boringology challenge. The air is filled with the powerful stench of manure but that, she says, is partly what makes ditches so fascinating: nutrients from the fields leach into the water, making them a rich food source for all sorts of flora and fauna. “The diversity per millilitre is huge,” she enthuses.

And it turns out she’s right: I can already see movement in the first jar of ditchwater. Aside from a few roots and the odd dead leaf, the water is surprisingly clear. This water comes from a ditch that runs through woodlands, and trees soak up many of the nutrients. But there is still plenty of food left over for the “ditchlife”. A water snail inches up the side of the jar and a white streak zips past. It is probably a cyclops, a type of zooplankton. These strange creatures swim around grazing on green, soupy algae, removing nutrients and squirting out pellets of excrement that sink to the bottom of the ditch as sediment. Zooplankton are the reason the water is so clear.

I am really hoping to see a water bear, the toughest animal on earth. Water bears can withstand crushing pressures, shrug off lethal radiation and survive being boiled alive or chilled to near-absolute zero. They do this by completely shutting down their metabolism and then coming back to life. And I’ve heard that they look quite cute as they swim by, thrashing the water with their eight paws.

We place a droplet under the microscope and I peer into an alien world. Treading water is a Keratella rotifer, a transparent microscopic creature shaped like a rectangle with spiny corners. Its mouth is covered in rotating hairs called cilia that draw water in and strain it for algae. More than 2000 species of rotifer have been identified and they come in all shapes and sizes. But it’s not just their strange appearance that makes them so fascinating to biologists.

Most species are all-female. Bdelloid or “leech-like” rotifers give birth to their young without ever having sex, so they have no need for males in their lives. How rotifers have survived so long without sex has baffled evolutionary biologists: most species that spawn offspring that are clones of themselves become extinct within a few hundred thousand years, but rotifers have been around for 70 million years.

Watching the whirr of the rotifer’s cilia and seeing its internal organs is mesmerising. But my concentration is broken by blobs of algae that are bouncing around the field of view like manic ping-pong balls. These microscopic plants, Trachelomonas, are swimming around anxiously trying to move into the light to photosynthesise, Fisher tells me.

But to be honest, I’m not really listening. A nematode has just swum into view. This roundworm is less than a millimetre long and is feeding on invisible bacteria from rotting leaves. I shouldn’t be surprised to see one, apparently: nematodes turn up anywhere moist, and there is even a species that’s particularly fond of beer mats.

There’s no water bear, however, and I move on to the other jar of ditchwater. This one is much murkier and full of detritus. Under the microscope, Fisher points out the culprits, long strands of cyanobacteria and colonies of four green plant cells stuck together called Scenedesmus. They are there because the water has drained from a cow field, and is rich in nutrients. Not only do the cows’ hooves churn up the earth and release extra nutrients from the soil, but the cow dung is a rich source of phosphorus that seeps into the water.

The water is also full of diatoms, single-celled algae that convert light and nutrients into elaborate glassy shells. The ones I am staring at look like transparent coffee beans. Although they are plants, they move through the water by oozing slime from the slit in their shells. Next time you slip on a rock, you can blame it on diatoms’ shiny shells and excretions.

Thursday

When planning this week’s excursions, I gave myself a day off in the middle, just in case I needed to recover from the tedium. So far, however, boringology has failed to bore me.

That may be about to change. I’m heading for the Oxford office of Infinitesima, a company whose press releases exclaim, “We really can watch paint dry.” To me, that sounds like one long bore-fest. But when I told Celia Taylor of ICI Paints in Slough what I’m going to Oxford to do, she warned me to pay attention from the start. “Most of the exciting stuff is done in 20 minutes,” she says.

Exciting stuff? What she means by that is the process of forming a film. Emulsion paint, for instance, consists mainly of binder, millions upon millions of acrylic polymer particles dispersed in water. As the water evaporates, it makes the polymer particles merge, packing together like a stack of oranges on a fruit stall, with water filling the gaps. As the paint dries further, the particles squash together until they coalesce into a film.

Chemists like Taylor use all sorts of techniques to watch processes like these. They are always looking for ways to make paint tougher, more environmentally friendly and sport new finishes, and it all comes down to understanding paint chemistry and what happens when the water (or organic solvents, in the case of gloss paints) evaporate. Taylor’s toolkit includes mass spectrometers, which sniff the molecules given off as gloss dries, and magnetic resonance imaging, which measures the amount of water left in emulsion.

But to actually see the all-important paint surface, you need something special: an atomic force microscope (AFM). This works in much the same way that a record player’s needle runs along the grooves on a vinyl disc. The AFM builds up an image of individual molecules on a surface by feeling its way around with a sharp tip less than 10 nanometres wide. Making such images is a painstaking task, though. And I could miss some of the action in the minute or so it takes.

Which is why I’m here: Infinitesima’s VideoAFM works 1000 times faster than traditional machines, producing video images at 15 frames per second. Paint Drying: The movie may not be this year’s Christmas blockbuster, but plenty of people pay good money to watch it.

Sadly, though, when I arrive at Infinitesima, no one is watching paint dry. Instead, the VideoAFM is being used to study a molten polymer crystallising. But it gives me a flavour for what molecular-scale movies of paint drying would look like. Before my eyes, I see molecules creeping across the display. OK, so it isn’t Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and there’s not much more I can say about it. But I’m watching molecules move around on a surface, for crying out loud. That’s pretty cool.

Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but this really hasn’t been the dullest week of my life. In fact, I’m rather stimulated and looking forward to regaling my friends with fascinating facts this weekend. They’ll surely be mesmerised by the fact that cows fed on clover produce milk bursting with healthy polyunsaturated fats. And there’s a species of parasitic nematode that can grow over 10 metres long in sperm whales, while another species lives only in vinegar. And paint continues to harden for a whole week after it dries… Hang on, I’m not boring you, am I?