Dandelions and children go together. They both love to trespass on well-tended lawns. They pop up in places where you wish they wouldn’t. They are irrepressible.

And even though adults try to turn them against each other (I was paid per plant to destroy the so-called weeds, with a dandelion fork), come seed time, children can’t resist blowing on the silvery tufted heads of dandelions so they can continue to ruin the fine sod of grown-ups.

Everyone knows that the seeds, under silky, filamentous parachutes, ride the breeze far and wide. A mile is nothing — 60 miles or more is possible. But no one — that is to say, no scientists — had figured out the details of that flight.

This was just the kind of challenge to appeal to a group of researchers who set up a small wind tunnel, created model dandelion seeds, and recorded their flights in detail. They published their findings last week in the journal Nature.