Celebrating Plants and People
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Why Do Hummingbirds Do It The Hard Way?
This new high-speed video of feeding hummingbirds may help scientists understand why the birds almost always pollinate flowers that hang upside-down. upside-down.
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Climate Change, Bamboo and Pandas: A Depressing Intersection
A new study predicts that climate change is set to wipe out much of the bamboo on which the bears rely for food.
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Cacti Collect Fog Irrigation With Their Spines
The integration of the multiple functions within the spines and the trichomes, including water deposition, collection, transportation and absorption in the cactus, facilitated an efficient fog collection system.
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Buildings That "Green" Themselves (just add water)
They seek to produce a ceramic material that promotes plant growth on its surface whilst conserving a balance with the technical characteristics necessary for use in urban architectural applications.
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A Celebration Of The Oldest Living Thing
If global warming drives these trees to extinction it will signal an evolution in the technology of deforestation. In the past we have menaced trees with axes and torches, but now it will be the hot, aggregated exhaust of our civilisations. Deforestation once arose out of our animosity towards particular forests, those that stood in the way of our future homes and crops. But deforestation is becoming delocalised; it is becoming an unavoidable byproduct of our existence, a diffuse, Earth-spanning emanation no tree can escape – even those that take root at the far reaches of the bio-inhabitable world. (Click on title for full story.)
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Fossilized Kakapo Dung May Save Endangered Plant
A fossilized sample of thousand-year-old parrot dung has revealed a previously unknown ecological relationship that could help save a threatened parasitic plant from extinction.
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The New Mushroom House: Be Your Own Garden Gnome
Mycologist Philip Ross is seriously into mushrooms, but not as a food — instead, he uses fungi as a building material.
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Tropical Seed Dispersers Are Less Picky
Scientists have now analysed the “Who with whom?” in a worldwide study and have discovered that the specialization of pollinators and seed disperses on individual plant species decreases towards the equator.
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Plant Survival Game: Are You Smarter Than A Bean?
Play this game and find out what strategies you need to adopt to survive as a wild plant and how these strategies are different if you want to survive as a crop plant.
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The Most Shiny Living Thing Plays With Light
But Pollia fruits reflect more light than any bird or butterfly. Vignolini hasn't just found the first strong iridescent colours in a plant; she's found the strongest iridescent colours in nature. Or alternatively: 'Ooh, SHINY!'