Celebrating Plants and People
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Social Media Creates A Floral Wonder. Social Media Destroys It.
“The people are nice — except when they’re fighting about poppies.”(Click on title for full story.)
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Using Thoreau To Predict Climate Change Effects On Woodland Wildflowers
The combined analysis shows that wildflowers and trees differ in the way their leaf-out patterns respond to climate change, and those differences could already be hindering wildflower abundance and flowering, with greater effects in coming years. As the climate warms, the window of time between wildflower emergence and tree leaf-out will likely shorten further, leaving wildflowers less time to photosynthesize in the spring. (Click on title for full story.)
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Why Plants Won’t Take Over: They Can’t Grow Where Symbiotic Fungus Is Absent
For example, in the colonization of islands by plant species, it isn’t just factors like island size, isolation and geological development that play an important role, but also the interactions between species. The scientists found that the symbiosis of plant and fungus — the mycorrhiza — is of particular importance. (Click on title for full story.)
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“Resurrection” Plants Are Amazing, But How Do They Manage It?
This research showed for the first time that the structure of water, not its content, is what matters to the survival of the organism. When people think about life, we often associate dynamic features with the processes in living systems. And yet, in this peculiar plant, in the absence of visible signs of ongoing metabolism, achieving a specific water structure was its survival tool. (CLick on title for full story.)
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A New Approach To Evaluating Which Old Growth Forests Have Highest Conservation Value
“If we think of the landscape as a patchwork quilt of different types of forests of different ages, some of those patches of forest will stick around for a long time, while others might wink in and out over different time frames. Our approach lets us identify which patch has been a forest for the longest period of time, even if it’s not the one with the oldest trees.” (Click on title for full story.)
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Sometimes Old Wives Tales Are True: Researchers Unlock Marigolds’ Protective Shield For Tomato Pests
All it takes to deter the whiteflies is interspersing marigolds in tomato plots, or hang little pots of limonene in among the tomato plants so that the smell can disperse out into the tomato foliage. (Click on title for full story.)
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Pueblo People Were Using Cactus Spines To Tattoo Themselves 2,000 Years Ago
Previously, bundled and hafted, or handled, cactus spine tattoo tools from Arizona and New Mexico provided the best archaeological examples of early tattoo implements from the Southwest. The earliest of these have been dated to between AD 1100-1280. (Click on title for full story.)
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How An Apple Tree Revealed A Horrifying Nematode Dissolving Bacterium
What she saw, though, was a massacre. Dead nematodes’ bodies were strewn everywhere. What’s more, bacteria inside the worms seemed to be eating their hosts inside out. Over the course of several days, she saw the worms’ corpses disappear, literally dissolving before her eyes. (Click on title for full story.)
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Retreating Glaciers Reveal Long Buried Plant Communities
The retreat of Arctic glaciers is exposing landscapes that haven’t seen the sun for nearly 120,000 years. (Click on title for full story.)
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What Doesn’t Kill Us: Plants Are Strengthened By Stress
The exact mechanism a plant deploys to produce metabolic resources for temporary GLV defense during an attack is still not known. Nevertheless, a plant’s ability to quickly recoup growth after deploying GLV offers a clue about plant resiliency. (Click on title for full story.)