Cahill said of Novoplansky’s criticism, “He puts forward logical alternative hypotheses.” “The original work should have tested between many different hypotheses rather than focusing on one explanation. This, to some extent, makes it a pseudoscience and worldview promotion.”
granted, “[p]Lants have extensive and well-established mechanisms of communication, of which volatiles are the best studied and understood.” He added, ”There is also increasing recognition that root exudates play a role in root-plant interactions, although this is only now being investigated in depth. Nothing else, except communication through mycorrhizae, has escaped independent investigation.
Chiolario and Gagliano stand by their research and say they have always acknowledged the preliminary nature of their results. “We measured [weather-related elements like] Temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, and daily solar radiation,” Chiolario told Ars. “None of these show a strong relationship with the electronegativity transient during the eclipse. However, we did not measure environmental electric fields; Therefore, I cannot exclude effects induced by nearby lightning. We didn’t have gravity probes, we didn’t probe neutrinos, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, etc.
“I’m not going to debate any unpublished criticism in the media, but I can explain my position,” Gagliano told Ars. “Our [2025] The paper reports an empirical electrophysiological/synchrony pattern in the eclipse window, including changes starting before maximum latency, and we have discussed candidate signals explicitly as hypotheses rather than as demonstrated causes. Describing weather/lightning as ‘more generous’ is not evidence of causation. Regional lightning strike counts and other proxies may motivate a competing hypothesis, but they do not establish causality without site-resolved, time-aligned field measurements at the recording site. Without those measurements, the lightning/weather account remains a hypothesis among other possibilities rather than a supported or default explanation for the signals we recorded.
Gagliano said, “We acknowledged the limited sample size and described the work as a preliminary field report; follow-up work is ongoing and will be reported through peer-reviewed channels.” As for the pseudoscience suggestion, “I won’t get attached to labels; Scientific disagreements should be resolved with transparent methods, data, and discriminatory tests.
“It seems that the public appeal is particularly painful for colleagues who have published their opinions on Trends in Plant Science,” Chiolario said. “We didn’t care about public appeal, we wanted to share as widely as possible the results of years of hard work that yielded interesting data.”
DOI: Trends in Plant Sciences, 2026. 10.1016/j.tplants.2025.12.001 (about DOI).
DOI: A. Chiolario et al., Royal Society Open Science, 2025. 10.1098/rsos.241786 (About DOI).
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