Zen cabbage!

From a recent Physics News Update:

Scientists at the Iwate University in Japan have shown that the skunk cabbage---a species of arum lily and whose Japanese name, Zazen-sou, means Zen meditation plant---can maintain its own internal temperature at about 20 C, even on a freezing day. Unlike the case of mammals, which maintain their body temperature by constant metabolism in cells all over the body, heat in the skunk cabbage is produced chiefly in the spadix, the plant's central spike-like flowering stalk through chemical reactions in the cells' mitochondria. According to one of the authors of the new study, Takanori Ito, only one other plant species, the Asian sacred lotus, is homeothermic, that is, able to maintain its own body temperature at a certain level. [...]

Moreover, the researchers, studying subtle oscillations in the plant's internal temperature, claim that the thermo-regulation process is chaotic and that this represents the first evidence for deterministic chaos among the higher plants. The resultant trajectory in the abstract phase space (where, typically, one plots the plant's temperature at one time versus the temperature at another time) is a strange attractor, which the authors refer to as a Zazen attractor, a "Zen meditation" attractor.

(This paper appeared in Physical Review E, November 2005.)

I love this because one goal/result of meditation practice is to become centered in one's own being, such that outside perturbations are not disturbing (think of making your heart the calm eye of the storm). These plants-- appropriately associated with meditation-- maintain a constantly warm heart despite the surrounding cold and storms and other inclement weather.