I changed the title to better reflect the aspirations of the Smithsonian. Because some people might take "plants" to mean "chemical plants" :)

In clearly better faith, there was a HN submission this week finding cryptic isoprene emission in soybean (3pts). The crop that's Taleb-famous for the GM in GMO. Title & theme of that paper seemed to have bounced off the enthusiasts here..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44377401

(Maybe yours is a bit long,maybe not, but imho we're a bit closer than only "understanding".)