In 2006, a provocative article in Trends in Plant Science claimed plants handle information in ways that resemble sophisticated animal nervous systems, even though they don't have brains.

Sorry vegans, you are eating another form of sentient life, creatures that can feel happiness or sorrow or pain, make decisions and even possess consciousness.

But the chances of that are “effectively nil,” retired plant biologist Lincoln Taiz and colleagues write in an a Cell article.

“There’s nothing in the plant remotely comparable to the complexity of the animal brain. Nothing," Taiz says. "And I’m a plant biologist. I love plants” — not because plants think like humans, he says, but for “how they live their plant lives.”