Wind up

[Paulottie]

'let's twist again?'

[rustylady]

what about pasta?

Has anyone noticed that fusilli only ever twists one way?

That's because it's made by machines

[SunnyD]

what about pasta?

Has anyone noticed that fusilli only ever twists one way?

Something tells me you have way too much free time

[snohare]

Sorry to be the boring one here, but now that I've bought and paid for twenty five years worth of New Scientist I'm damned if I'm not going to take this once in a lifetime chance to show off ! (Imagine gleeful rubbing of hands emoticon)
The Coriolis effect only works on really large areas of water or gas, and with a certain depth. This is because it is dependent on drag/viscosity altering the effects of speed of planetary rotation which only vary significantly over large distances....if I remember correctly from doing a zoology question on it once.
The reason that plants twist in such odd ways is due to chirality. This word comes from the Greek word meaning..."twist". (Clever bods, these scientists.) In essence, many chemicals and physical structures in nature are either left handed or right handed, because they are asymmetric. (This is as result of Bernouilli numbers, if I remember the name correctly; some posh kind of mathematical law, anyway, which governs spirals at all levels.) Proteins and sugars are examples of this; dextrose is a right handed sugar (named after the Latin for "right" ), and there is another one which is a left handed version of glucose whose name escapes me (sucrose?), but is popular with dieters because the body cannot digest it the same as a right handed sugar, but it still tastes as sweet. As with that sugar, so with many of the other building blocks of life; life on planet Earth is generally just not set up to use the left handed versions, and so if a plant is using only right handed versions of a protein as microscopic scaffolding for building new cells onto a stem tip, then you get a twist. In this way, you end up with trees for example, that have a pronounced twist in the trunks, because the vessels that carry water and nutrients corkscrew around the trunk as they grow upwards. (Sycamores are particularly noticeable.) Just to complicate matters, you get left handed trees, and of course left handed proteins which may cause all sorts of conniptions in the brain and body...think mad cow disease and you will see how small changes in a protein's shape can make big differences.
That's my theory, and I'm sticking to it...until next week's New Scientist's Letters Page blows holes in this weeks article !
As for the French beans being contrary TPeers, don't worry - they're just being gauche....

[TPeers]

Thank you sooo much.......!

And the fact that I am a left hander........

[Flummery]

Fibonacci? Sequences, spirals etc?

[snohare]

(Imagine finger clicking/vigorous headnodding emoticon)That's the ones ! Knew it was one a' thim furriners...
TPeers, we learn more from the contrary than we do from the common... This is how I excuse my eccentricities.

[Paulottie]

Fibonacci series was the sum of the previous two wasn't it?: 1,1,2,3,5,8,13...Many leaves arranged on stems thus but not connected to spirals that I can see. Is this a refering to a different spiral theory proposed by another mathamatician.

Interesting, I had never heard of sugars being handed. Certainly sounds plausible enough, (from 'dextrose'- although I can't think of the 'sinester sugar') Aren't fruit sugars 'fructose' and are these those found in bean plants? and if french beans spiral in the opposite direction and contain the same sugars..? is the theory starting to come apart? I remain unconvinced .

[TPeers]

There are definately left handed sugars, some of which occure naturally and some of which are created in a lab - just look at a bag of silver spoon!

The taste sensors in our mouths and so on 'click' to both left and righ handed sugars and so recognise 'sweet' but our digestive system can't break down the left handers! Useful to know if you want to loose weight or are diabetic.

[Paulottie]

My climbing french seem to be winding against the sun as well as runners!....but what is more of a worry is runners quite yellow after those cold easterlies last week.