Celebrating Plants and People
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How A Group Of Mushrooms Abandoned Rotting Plants To Partner With Live Ones
The evolution of Amanita inopinata —”the unexpected one,” in Latin—and the other Amanitas also seem to support a developing consensus that symbiosis, once thought to be exceptional, may actually be easy to evolve. The researchers didn’t find that Amanita needed to develop a new, complex suite of genes in order to start partnering with plants.…
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Will Planting Trees Around Schools Improve Students’ Academic Performance?
“Early math skills are one of the best predictors of later success, not just in math, but in school in general. So what we have here is a very exciting clue that maybe simply greening—planting trees in school yards—could potentially have a significant impact in math achievement and school success down the line for these…
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Why Is A Banana Yellow And An Apple Red? Ask The Animals
The team found that the fruit colors of closely related species are no more similar than expected by random chance. However, fruits that are mainly eaten by mammals such as monkeys and apes do indeed have higher reflectance in the green part of the spectrum, whereas fruits dispersed by birds reflect more in the red…
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Moths As Pollinators: Doing What No Bee Can
Our study highlights the fact that we need to think seriously about the benefits of moths to plants and agricultural systems. While bees are excellent pollinators, they will only travel within the local environment of the nest. Moths appear to complement the work of bees and can carry pollen over greater distances as they don’t…
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Which Approach Is Better For Limiting Climate Change: Switching To Biofuels Or Planting Forests?
They found that reforestation would sequester between two and nine times as much carbon over 30 years than would be saved by burning biofuels instead of gasoline (see bar chart, right). “You get far more carbon sequestered by planting forests than you avoid emissions by producing biofuels on the same land,” (Click on title for…
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Which Motivated The Birth Of Agriculture: Beer Or Bread?
The evidence of beer brewing at Raqefet Cave 13,000 years ago provides yet another example of the complex Natufian social and ritual realms. Beer brewing may have been, at least in part, an underlying motivation to cultivate cereals in the southern Levant, supporting the beer hypothesis proposed by archaeologists more than 60 years ago. (Click…
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Are Microbes The “Secret Sauce” To Save Endangered Plants And Feed The Hungry World?
While the restoration of a little flowering plant, or a few more bushels of soybeans, may seem like small victories, they could herald big things for plant microbiomes in conservation as well as agriculture. The farmers and conservationists of the future may find themselves seeding and tending not just plants, but their microscopic helpers, too.…
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New Birthplace Of Early Farming In The Americas Discovered
“Our findings may place the Atlantic Forest ‘on the map’ of early plant cultivation in the Americas. The Atlantic Forest coast has been largely peripheral in this narrative despite its unique plant biodiversity and archaeological record of dense human occupation. Our study challenges this traditional view. The high consumption of carbohydrate-rich food suggests that permanent…
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They Will Out-Eat US: Climate Change Is Causing Greater Insect Damage To Plants
The data also showed that insect damage was greater following warmer winters and at low latitudes, suggesting that the higher temperatures driven by climate change could be a factor driving insect damage. “The overwhelming pattern is that across these four different plant species, with different life histories, insect damage is increasing over time,” (Click on…
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Parasitic Plants Can Have Special Seed Dispersal Challenges. So Some Employ Surprising Seed Dispersers
Not only were Japanese camel crickets seen visiting the fruits often, mammal exclusion experiments demonstrated they were eating lots of it. They pooped hundreds of intact seeds. The seeds did not survive the same trip through ground beetles also seen eating the fruit. Studies of certain plant families show that many plants, not just parasites,…