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Celebrating Plants and People

  • Pea Plants Shown To Make Adaptive Choices About Risk

    “To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of an adaptive response to risk in an organism without a nervous system. We do not conclude that plants are intelligent in the sense used for humans or other animals, but rather that complex and interesting behaviours can theoretically be predicted as biological adaptations – and executed by organisms – on the basis of processes evolved to exploit natural opportunities efficiently.” (Click on title for full story.)

  • Roses Teach Engineers How To Improve Solar Cells

    A team led by engineers has taken its cue from the botanical world, and incorporated transparent replicas of a rose petal’s epidermal cells into an organic photovoltaic structure. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Bio-pharming: Getting Plants To Produce Human Pharmaceuticals Isn’t Easy

    Bio-pharming uses genetic modification to introduce genes coding for pharmaceutical proteins (e.g. antibodies, or when produced in plants; ‘plantibodies’) into plants, the plant will then produce these proteins as if they were its own – essentially acting as a protein factory. The plants are harvested, the pharma-protein extracted and purified to a level comparable to any other medicinal protein. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Planet To Plant: Every Plant Is Built From The Whole Planet

    And now, entirely by chance, they find themselves plucked from the moving air and strung together in a conga line made by a baby maple in a North American garden, hanging at the far end of a freshly growing twig. And there they will stay for, well, maybe 100, 150 years, surrounded by more plucked atoms, stuck in place as the branch of a maple tree, until one day, the tree topples over or the branch drops to the ground, the beetles and fungi move in and munch those atoms apart so they become soil or beetle droppings and then, after a long while, take to the air again. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Take Two Peonies And Call Me In The Morning

    It has long been called the “King of Flowers” in China but now the tree peony could rule the waves as an alternative to fish oil. The native Chinese plant has seeds that can be squeezed to make the healthiest kind of cooking oil, according to a new study by Chinese scientists. (Click on title for full story.)

  • First Proof Of Batesian Mimicry in Two Plant Species!

    The data are consistent with Batesian mimicry, wherein the conspicuous characteristic of a defended model is replicated by an undefended mimic across its entire growing range. Our study provides the first detailed and powerful quantitative leaf shape evidence of leaf shape being matched between an undefended plant species to a chemically defended unrelated species across a shared growing range, and highlights the importance of using a spatially explicit morphometric method when investigating leaf shape, especially in relation to plant mimicry. (Click on title for full story)

  • Forests Upwind Affect Cities’ Ozone Pollution

    The way that isoprene, a natural hydrocarbon compound emitted from broadleaf deciduous trees, such as oak, is processed in the atmosphere at night can have a big impact on the ozone in the atmosphere the next day. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Trees May Actually Instigate Rain

    Since the experiment showed molecules of pinene naturally combining with one another when subjected to conditions that resembled those in the upper atmosphere, and since pinene is itself built of stuck-together isoprenes, it’s possible that the specific structure of the molecules isn’t as important as their general chemical makeup, consisting of multiple carbon atoms linked together into a long hydrocarbon. If so, this would be enormously significant—roughly 600 million tons of isoprene are released into the atmosphere each year by trees and shrubs. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Someday Sunscreen May Contain Trees

    The researchers showed that out of five types of lignin tested, organosolv lignin improved the sun protection factor (SPF) of sunblock the most. Sunscreen containing just one percent of this compound had double the lotion’s original SPF — it went from 15 to 30. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Tree Planting In Flood Plains Can Reduce Flooding Down Stream

    Planting trees on the flood plain and increasing the number of logjams across just 10-5% of the total river length was found to be able to reduce the peak height of a potential flood in the town by 6% once the trees had grown for 25 years. More extensive river restoration, for example in 20-25% of the total river length, resulted in a reduction in flood peak height of up to 20%. (Click on title for full story)