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Celebrating Plants and People

  • Turning Plants Into Machines: Spinach Becomes Explosives Sensor

    Spinach is no longer just a superfood: By embedding leaves with carbon nanotubes, MIT engineers have transformed spinach plants into sensors that can detect explosives and wirelessly relay that information to a handheld device similar to a smartphone. This is one of the first demonstrations of engineering electronic systems into plants, an approach that the researchers call “plant nanobionics.” (Click on title for full story.)

  • GMOs May Not Be Harmful, But Are They Doing Any Good?

    The promise of genetic modification was twofold: By making crops immune to the effects of weedkillers and inherently resistant to many pests, they would grow so robustly that they would become indispensable to feeding the world’s growing population, while also requiring fewer applications of sprayed pesticides. Twenty years ago, Europe largely rejected genetic modification at the same time the United States and Canada were embracing it. Comparing results on the two continents, using independent data as well as academic and industry research, shows how the technology has fallen short of the promise. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Unwitting Gardeners? Arctic Foxes Create Tundra Garden Oases

    “These animals are fertilizing and basically growing a garden.” Gardens that create such a stark contrast on the tundra that scientists who recently published the first scientific study on the dens have dubbed the foxes “ecosystem engineers.” (Click on title for full story.)

  • Unfair! Invasive Plants Succeed By Inhibiting The Competition

    Allelochemicals, released from the roots, leaves, and/or other parts of a plant, can negatively impact neighboring species. The “novel weapons hypothesis” suggests that allelochemicals from invasive plants may have a negative effect on native plants because they have not yet been able to evolve tolerance or resistance to the chemicals . The effects of allelochemicals can be direct or indirect. For example, germination and/or growth may be directly affected. Indirect effects can also occur when allelochemicals modify interactions in the soil, including mycorrhizal associations. (Click on title for full story.)

  • How Fresher Supermarket Bananas Led To A Treatment For Doomed Bats

    I was standing there looking at a bucket of moldy bananas next to a bucket of bananas with no mold, If the bacterium could be so effective on fungi on bananas, could it have similar effects on fungus on bats? It was one of those leaps of thought in science that maybe only a grad student could make. (Click on title for full story.)

  • How Blue Is My Begonia? Iridescent Leaves And Survival In The Dark Explained

    Iridescent blue begonias show that plants can adapt to light levels with structural changes as well as chemical ones. This layering of iridoplasts causes the light that hits them to bend over and over again, creating a very dramatic sheen. More important, it enables the structure to absorb the types of light available in the dark landscape beneath the forest canopy — long wavelengths like red and green. Only blue light gets reflected back, and that’s what human admirers see.(Click on title for full story.)

  • Not All Pollinator Plantings Are Equally Useful To Pollinators

    Although many ‘pollinator-friendly’ seed mixes are available, the floral resources these provide to flower-visiting insects, and how these change through time, are largely unknown. Such data are necessary to compare the resources provided by alternative meadow seed mixes to each other and to other flowering habitats. We used quantitative surveys of over 2 million flowers to estimate the nectar and pollen resources offered by two exemplar commercial seed mixes. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Plants Can Direct Seeds To Suitable Sites Without Animal Assistance

    Plants cannot move to find new places to live in, but they can actively direct their seeds to new suitable places for plant development. This ‘directed dispersal’ had previously been shown only for plants with seeds that are transported by animals. Researchers have now shown that plants can also actively send their seeds towards suitable sites by way of wind or water.(Click on title for full story.)

  • How Do We Explain Sub-Arctic Giant Mega-Herbs? (Yes, It’s A Thing)

    High latitude and altitude floras are characterized by low-statured, small, wind-pollinated plants, which mainly reproduce by self-pollination or asexual reproduction. However, at odds with this are some sub-Antarctic islands that have plant species with giant growth forms and large, brightly coloured flowers which require insect visitation for pollination. The size, colour and shape of the inflorescences and leaves of these megaherbs suggest thermal benefits similar to giant tropical alpine plants of equatorial Africa, South America and Hawaii. We found that leaf and inflorescence temperatures of all megaherbs were higher than simultaneously measured ambient temperatures. Heating was highly correlated with brief, unpredictable periods of solar radiation, and occurred most rapidly in species with hairy, corrugated leaves and darkly pigmented, densely packed inflorescences. This is the first evidence that floral and leaf heating occurs in sub-Antarctic megaherbs, and suggests that leaf hairiness, flower colour and shape could provide thermal benefits like those seen in tropical alpine megaherbs. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Native Parasitic Plants Help Control Introduced Invasive Species

    A native parasitic plant found commonly throughout south-eastern Australia, is showing great promise as a potential biological control agent against introduced weeds that cost millions of dollars every year to control. (Click on title for full story.)