According to British media reported on June 23th, British scientists found by experiments that plants was born with the ability to do math. This ability can help them effectively plan their needed food reserve at night.

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By doing many studies, British scientists finds that biosphere actually be able to do a complex mathematical abilities. Mathematical models in the experiments shows that plant can calculate the amount of starch consumed overnight by division in a process involving leaf chemical. A research team of the John Innes Centre in the recent "eLife" journals has published this finding.

Scientists selected Arabidopsis as the experimental plants. This plant is widely considered as the "model plant" for experiment. Plants feed themselves during the day by using energy from the sun to convert carbon dioxide into sugars and starch. Overnight, when the plant cannot convert carbon dioxide into sugars and starches by photosynthesis, they must regulate its starch reserves to ensure they have enough energy to last until dawn.

The experiments show that plants can make precise adjustments to their rate of starch consumption. This phenomenon can only be explained by one reason that is the plant must complete a math calculation, which is division.

Professor Alison Smith who is responsible for this research says the calculation made by plants is junior high school level math. The scientists also used mathematical modeling to investigate how such a division calculation can be carried out inside a plant.

They proposed that information about the size of the starch store and the time until dawn is encoded in the concentrations of two kinds of molecules, which are S for starch and T for time. If the S molecules stimulate starch consumption, while the T molecules prevent starch been used up, then the rate of starch consumption is set by the ratio of S molecules to T molecules, in other words S divided by T. Professor Martin Howard from this research center says that this is the powerful prove for plant's ability on math.