Celebrating Plants and People
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Who Needs Thorns When There Are Lions? Plant’s Security Strategy
The presence of carnivores helps plants without thorny defences thrive, a study of life on the savannah reveals.
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Hunting May Be Greatest Threat To Survival Of Forests
Hunting – driven by increasing human population, greater demand for wild meat and expanding wildlife trade networks – is the greatest threat to mammals and birds in tropical forests. Because it tends to target large species like primates and hoofed animals, particularly those that disperse tree seeds, hunting can prevent seed dispersal and the growth of new saplings. As large trees are lost, they are often replaced by plants like lianas (woody vines) whose seeds are dispersed by wind rather than animals. This changes forest composition over time, reducing the forest’s ability to sequester and store large quantities of carbon.
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Hope For The Future: Stressed Plants Produce More Resilient Offspring
Plants exposed to pests or disease can pass on their immunity to their seedlings, giving them an inherited advantage which can still be seen several generations down the line. This ability was particularly intriguing as the DNA sequence of the plants remained the same, yet a genetic ‘memory’ of how to cope with stressful conditions was passed down from one generation to the next.
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Where have all the flowers gone? A new report makes for troubling reading
These losses are troubling for a simple reason: once the common things start disappearing, everything is at risk.
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‘Resistance is futile.’ The Inevitability Of Invasive Species
Invasive plants, they found, were more likely to have evolved in habitats with a great diversity of competing species. Darwin was right: Some plants have evolved to be fighters.
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Ready. Aim? (Ballistic Seed Dispersal) Fire!
Of all the ingenious ways in which plants spread their seeds, ballistic dispersal is the most dramatic.
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Seed Size Bragging Rights? Can’t Go Wrong With Monocots
Both the species with the largest seeds (the double coconut palm, Lodoicea maldivica, family Arecaceae) and the species with the smallest seeds (various epiphytic orchids, Orchidaceae) in the world are monocots
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If We Supercharge Crop Plants, Should We Supercharge Wild Plants, Too?
t now seems certain that supercrops with “turbocharged photosynthesis” will be growing in our fields in a few decades, if not sooner. This seems like great news in a world where demand for food, biofuels and plant materials like cotton continues to increase, and where global warming will have an ever greater impact on crop production. More productive plants means greater yields. But there is a danger too.
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When You Mow The Lawn The Grass Gets Defensive
Yet a plant does “communicate” when attacked – whether by blade of a mower or jaws of a predatory insect – by producing defensive proteins and secondary metabolites either to repel the pest or make itself less appetizing, he said. What happens next is what scientists have been trying to figure out.
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Using Plants To Make Lithium-ion Batteries Sustainable
The battery is based on recovery and renewable biological material with an energy content corresponding to that of current lithium-ion batteries. Components of the battery are made of renewable organic biomaterials from alfalfa and pine resin, and can be recycled with a low energy input and non-hazardous chemicals, such as ethanol and water.