A VENUS flytrap snaps shut faster than you can blink. And now we know why. Whereas our sluggish movements are the result of muscles contracting, the plant snaps shut in the way that a torn tennis ball flips inside out.
When Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan of Harvard University and his colleagues used a high-speed camera to film the leaves closing, they noticed that the curvature of the leaves flipped from convex to concave as the trap closes. The transformation takes just one-tenth of a second. They reasoned that the leaves were snapping from one stable shape to another – a movement that…
