Celebrating Plants and People
-
Civil War Compendium Of Medicinal Plants Studied For New Insights Into Medicinal Value Of Plants
During the height of the Civil War, the Confederate Surgeon General commissioned a guide to traditional plant remedies of the South, as battlefield physicians faced high rates of infections among the wounded and shortages of conventional medicines. A new study of three of the plants from this guide — the white oak, the tulip poplar and the devil’s walking stick — finds that they have antiseptic properties. (Click on title for full story.)
-
Plants Are The Dominant Earth Life Form (In Total Biomass, Anyway)
Plants pack more heft than any other kingdom of life on the planet, making up 80% of all the carbon stored in living creatures. That’s just one surprise in a comprehensive new survey of Earth’s biomass, which finds that groups with the greatest number of species—such as arthropods—aren’t necessarily the heaviest. (Click on title for full story.)
-
Your Parents Were Right To Make You Eat Your Sprouts (According To Research)
New research has linked a compound found in Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and other cruciferous vegetables to one of the body’s most potent tumor-suppressing genes. (Click on title for full story)
-
Ants Protect Trees From Elephants Only When It Suits Them
“Employing ants is a great defensive strategy for a plant, since ants can attack enemies both large and small, But our study points out a really important caveat, since the activity of ants is tied to environmental temperature. So when it’s cold out, these plants are basically sitting ducks for herbivores, which is a pretty significant cost for this plant defense strategy.” (Click on title for full story.)
-
Tomato Flavor Has Been Bred Out Of Modern Tomatoes (Big Surprise!)
“During the domestication and improvement of the tomato, people mostly focused on traits that would increase production, like fruit size and shelf-life, Some genes involved in other important fruit quality traits and stress tolerance were lost during this process.” (Click on title for full story.)
-
Can Broccoli Prevent Schizophrenia?
Researchers say they have further characterized a set of chemical imbalances in the brains of people with schizophrenia related to the chemical glutamate. And they figured out how to tweak the level using a compound derived from broccoli sprouts. They say the results advance the hope that supplementing with broccoli sprout extract, which contains high levels of the chemical sulforaphane, may someday provide a way to lower the doses of traditional antipsychotic medicines needed to manage schizophrenia symptoms, thus reducing unwanted side effects of the medicines. (Click on title for full story.)
-
Forests Cleared Of Invasive Shrubs May Heal Themselves
Surprisingly, this natural regeneration exceeded the growth of native cover in unmanaged control plots – even those where no invasive shrubs were found. (Click on title for full story.)
-
Oldest Stand Of Trees In Eastern N. America May Reveal Climate Clues
In addition to their age, the trees are a scientifically valuable means of reconstructing ancient climate conditions. The oldest trees in the preserve extend the paleoclimate record in the southeast United States by 900 years, and show evidence of droughts and flooding during colonial and pre-colonial times that exceed any measured in modern times. (Click on title for full story.)
-
Perhaps The Biggest Medical Story Of The Year And It Began As Something Growing On A Rotting Eggplant
In 2010, when Lilly Holst scraped a lump of soil from the underside of a rotting eggplant, she had no idea that this act would help to save the life of a British teenager, eight years later and 6,000 miles away. (Click on title for full story.)
-
Are Urban Forests Really Helpful For Curbing Climate Change? Maybe Not.
However, mortality rates of street trees are more than double those in rural forests, with young and very large trees most at risk. The findings have implications for urban greening programs, suggesting that planting initiatives alone are insufficient to meet municipal carbon storage, canopy cover and biomass goals. (Click on title for full story.)