Celebrating Plants and People
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Your Trendy Rayon Clothes Are Made Of Stolen Rainforest
“We would love to see a world where we don’t destroy any forests for fabric.”
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How The Heck Do You Pollinate This Thing? A New Plant Strategy!
The observation offers the first evidence of a pollination system in which plants have overcome floral architecture constraints on pollen placement by twisting their nectar spurs, according to the researchers. It is also an example of how evolution sometimes comes up with elegant and unexpected solutions, they say.
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Michael Pollan On The Intelligence Of Plants
Plants hold the key to a future that will be organized around systems and technologies that are networked, decentralized, modular, reiterated, redundant—and green, able to nourish themselves on light. “Plants are the great symbol of modernity.” Or should be: their brainlessness turns out to be their strength, and perhaps the most valuable inspiration we can take from them.
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Endangered Plants In War Zones: Conservation Must Go On
Wild species related to our crops which are crucial as potential future food resources have been identified by University of Birmingham scientists, however, a significant proportion are found in conflict zones in the Middle East, where their conservation is increasingly comprised. It is illegal to sell prescription medicines without india viagra a prescription issued by […]
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Saving Pollinators That Live In Cities (Like The Rest Of Us)
Although urban areas are expanding, outside urban nature reserves they offer little formal protection for biodiversity. Urban habitats have the potential to provide excellent conditions for pollinators. For example, half of Germany’s entire bee fauna have been found in Berlin, 35% of British hoverfly species were sampled in a single Leicester garden and honey bees produce more honey in urban Birmingham than in the surrounding countryside
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Water From A Stone? This Plant Can!
Plant physiologists have discovered that the shallow rooted plant Helianthemum squamatum, derives up to 90% of its fluid requirements from crystallization water trapped in gypsum rock. The finding represents a completely new kind of water source for life.
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Mapping The Trees For The Forest
The work we’re doing can help put an economic value on forests. Policymakers and economists want to know forest carbon stocks at very fine spatial scales, and countries naturally need to improve their assessment of stocks to participate in a forest carbon market. This is a high-stakes game in the policy realm.
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Human Relationship With Peaches Goes Back 8000 years
This paper presents the first detailed quantitative and qualitative examination of tree fruit domestication in China by providing a comparative analysis of archaeological peach stones from five sites in the lower Yangzi valley and examines when, where, and under what circumstances peach began its close relationship with people.
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Global War On Trees: Report From The Front
“The war on trees is alive and well unfortunately, but in some countries we are winning battles against the war on trees … I think it is the beginning of the end. There are countries where forests are actually regrowing, including Europe, the US, India, China and Vietnam, and even some in Africa.”
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Do Bromeliads Help Protect Host Trees From Predators?
Stereotyped as parasites by most people and treated as impartial hitchhikers in ecology textbooks, epiphytes turn out to be all these and mutualistic too.