Jagadish Chandra Bose (Boing Boing / Google Gemini) In August 1926, Jagadish Chandra Bose walked into an Oxford lecture hall carrying a snapdragon stem. He hooked it to one of his handmade instruments, told the audience they were watching the plant's heartbeat, and pointed to a tracing that rose and fell in rhythm. He soaked the stem in bromide — a sedative — and the line sagged; he held musk under it, and the line revived. The crowd, writes Ben Seal in Science History magazine, was "absorbed in the life-and-death struggle playing out before them." Bose — India's first science professor, the man who discovered microwaves and once sent them through three stone walls to fire a loaded pistol — was convinced plants had a nervous system. His Western peers were less convinced. In 1927, the Stanford physiologist George Peirce coined the labels "Bosephile" and "Bosephobe"; The Daily Mail proposed a "society for the preservation of cruelty to metals"; the Royal Society stopped publishing him for over a decade.…