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 8 green seeds DHJanzen100317.jpg high resolution
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The solar panel begins tightly packed in a seed, shrink wrapped in the seed coat. This Mediterranean carob bean seed (Fabaceae) in a carob fruit is dormant and if you split the hard dry seed on the broken end of the dry fruit, it is white and certainly non-photosynthetic. The solar panel is not plugged in. Contrast that with the next species of legume fruit below (DHJanzen100318.jpg). Incidentally, while we have this seed on the screen, look hard at it. It is the origin of the carat. One carob bean seed weighs one carat. Well, I once spent several hours in a boring conference collecting carob bean seeds from the courtyard, brought them back to the US, weighed each one carefully and discovered what ever merchant knew. There were some a bit heavier and some a bit lighter. You can imagine which ones were used as weights on the balance in which transactions. |
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