Celebrating Plants and People
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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…
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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…
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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.)
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.)