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Category: Plants & People

  • Alan Turing First Describes mathematical theory of morphogenesis: the theory of biological growth

    Outline of the development of the daisy

  • Humans in Africa Grew & Valued Grains over 7,000 Years Ago

    The diversity of the diet was much greater than previously assumed. Moreover, the fact that grains were placed in the graves of the deceased implies that they had a special, symbolic meaning.

  • Himalayan Farmers partner with nonprofit to cultivate medicinal plants

    With the help of advisors from the Mountain Institute, Nepalese residents learn cultivation skills needed to move their medicinal plant enterprises from foraging to farming — an environmental and economic win-win.

  • How Barley Conquered The Himalayas

    The move to year-round lofty living coincided with a shift from farming frost-sensitive millet to frost-resistant barley, according to a study of plant remains, animal bones and artefacts from 53 archaeological sites across the north-eastern plateau.

  • How Farming Almost Destroyed Ancient Human Civilization

    In a sense, agriculture was a technology that came before human civilization was ready. It gave humans the means to grow into large settlements and proto-cities. But we’d spent tens of thousands of years as nomads before that, and weren’t yet ready to abandon our ancient beliefs that no family should ever accumulate more than its neighbors. As a result, our earliest experiment with urbanism ended in failure. When the going got rough, with bad harvests and disease, humans preferred to abandon their nascent urban creations because we had not yet developed a social structure that would allow us to cope with the difficulties of city life.

  • Do Plants Have Rights?

    So the question that emerges is this: How can we ethically justify, promote, and financially subsidize the use of plants in the context of plant biotechnology and bioengineering, when the premises of this scientific endeavor are rooted in the erroneous view of plants as insensitive objectified organisms?

  • The Case For Mangroves

    The Nature Conservancy and Wetlands International together with the University of Cambridge set out to map the current state of knowledge about the role of mangroves in coastal defence and put the different findings and views in perspective.

  • Can Seaweed Reduce West’s Meat Consumption?

    We are now seeing that this method [of meat as a source of protein] is no longer sustainable towards the ecological system. The population is growing and so is the demand for proteins, but the Earth remains the same size; so we need to look at other sources

  • Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine

    Ethnobiology and ethnomedicine are exciting and revolutionary multidisciplinary fields at the center of many current debates on culturally appropriate management of the biodiversity and the human and animal health. The Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine is a very timely initiative to foster a common platform devoted to scientists, practitioners, environmentalists, and policy makers for investigating cultural perceptions and cognition of the natural world and of disease and illness, as well as their meaning for comprehensive environmental and public health policies.”

  • Curing Plant Blindness By Not Focusing On Plants

    We discuss how perceptual and physiological constraints on visual processing may suggest useful strategies for characterizing and overcoming zoocentrism.