Category: Plants & Medicine
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Product claims to freeze aging skin
Plants that survive and flourish in the harshest weather conditions are the basis of a new line of anti-aging treatments.
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Fish oil extracted from plant seeds
It is hoped that the transgenic plants will provide a more environmentally friendly source of the oil.
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Ants Taking Our Cocoa Plantings
The ants shepherd and protect the mealybugs so they can ‘milk‘ the sugary nutritious fluids in their waste. The bugs used to drink primarily from local rainforest trees, but when humans started clearing the forest to make way for cocoa, the ants adapted, by driving their livestock into the fresh cocoa pastures. (Click on image or headline for full story)
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Newly Discovered Plant Might Help Save The Amazon Forest
The two men saw a plant they did not recognize. Its plump, green seed pods resembled those of a family of plants known in Peru as sacha inchi, which produce oil rich in omega-3 fatty acids. But (they) had stumbled on a species unknown to science. Now, they hope to transform it into a ‘conservation crop‘ that can be raised commercially in the shade beneath the Amazon‘s forest canopy, without cutting down any trees.
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Loss Of Urban Forest Killing Us?
In an analysis of 18 years of data from 1,296 counties in 15 states, researchers found that Americans living in areas infested by the emerald ash borer, a beetle that kills ash trees, suffered from an additional 15,000 deaths from cardiovascular disease and 6,000 more deaths from lower respiratory disease when compared to uninfected areas.
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Mistletoe Could Be Better Than Chemotherapy
One of the mistletoe extracts — from a species known as Fraxini (which grows on ash trees) — was highly effective against colon cancer cells in cell culture and was gentler on healthy intestinal cells compared with chemotherapy.
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Coconut Oil Might Save Your Teeth
Scientists found that coconut oil which had been treated with enzymes stopped the growth of Streptococcus bacteria – a major cause of tooth decay.
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Spice It Up! Black Pepper Fights Fat
A new study provides a long-sought explanation for the beneficial fat-fighting effects of black pepper.
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Flowers Inspire Approach To More Effective Drug Therapy
Their team have developed a “metabolite timetable” that plots how dozens of molecules rise and fall in relation to one another. With this timetable, they could accurately read a person's internal clock with just two blood samples, taken 12 hours apart. It was inspired by flowers.
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Ancient Giant Trees No Match For Modern Threats
Long-term studies in Amazonia, Africa and central America show that while these botanical behemoths may have adapted successfully to centuries of storms, pests and short-term climatic extremes, they are counterintuitively more vulnerable than other trees to today's threats.