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In the produce section of a grocery store, the cucumber is mundane. But in the nursery section of a hardware store, says Shazed Aziz, the cucumber plant is a marvel.
A couple of years ago, Aziz strode through Bunnings Warehouse, an Australian hardware chain, making a beeline for a particular cucumber plant. The day before, he had noticed its peculiar tendrils—thin stems that jut out from the plant in coils of various sizes and that cucumber vines use to reach toward surfaces and pull themselves up to access more sunlight. On his first visit, those helix-like curls were long and loose. “When I returned to the store the next day, they were contracted,” says Aziz, a materials engineering postdoc at the University of Queensland.
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