Category: Amazing Plants
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Metal-Munching Plants Are Our Friends
Over 1,000 species of plants are known to gobble up and store heavy metals, including a host of toxic elements such as nickel, cadmium, zinc, arsenic, and selenium. There are even some plants that store gold. Some of these plants store enough metals to make them toxic to animals like cattle, and a few of them are even mined for the metals they contain.
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Do Sunflowers Track the sun or remember where it ought to be?
“It brings into question whether there’s some sort of memory that’s found within the plant that allows this regulation,”
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South American lichen found to have 126 different species of fungi
A team of researchers with members from the U.S. and several South American countries has found that a type of lichen that grows in several parts of Central and South America consists of at least 126 species of fungi and possibly as many as 400.
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Who Built The Mysterious Mima mounds? Could it be… PLANTS???
The plants don’t directly form the mounds, but they affect waterborne and windborne soil deposition and erosion, which can lead to mound formation
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The Greatest Seed Dispersion Story Ever Told: 18,000 kilometres!
In what is probably the farthest single dispersal event ever recorded, researchers have shown using genetic analysis that an acacia tree endemic to Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean is directly descended from a common Hawaiian tree known as the koa. In fact, these two trees on small specks of land on opposite sides of the globe turn out to be the same species.
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Watch Attenborough’s ‘Secret Life of Plants’
Six full-length on-line episodes of this wonderful documentary
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Island Life Does Strange Things To Seed Size
Just like some lizards and insects evolve to larger sizes on islands, a new study has found plant seeds do the same.
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Rare “Albino” Redwood May Hold Clues to the Super-Trees’ Longevity
Studying this unique tree could help researchers understand why albinism occurs in redwoods. Because albino and normal green needles occur on the same tree, botanists can study subtle differences between the white and the green tissue in a single specimen.
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Sea anemones: animal? or plant? Both!
Sea anemone shows a genomic landscape surprisingly similar to human genome, but also displays regulatory mechanisms similar to plants
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Frozen moss buried in Antarctica for more than 1,500 years starting to grow again
The moss last grew before the rise of the Roman Empire but its long period of being frozen solid in the ground did not appear to affect its ability to regenerate itself once it was defrosted, the researchers found.