Celebrating Plants and People
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Should This Endangered Plant Get In The Way Of Our Electric Cars And Cell Phones?
A botanist hired by a company planning to mine one of the most promising deposits of lithium in the world believes a rare desert wildflower at the Nevada site should be protected under the Endangered Species Act, a move that could jeopardize the project, new documents show. (Click on title for full story)
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Tree Planting Schemes Must Not Sacrifice Ancient Grasslands
“We are particularly concerned that recent research and emerging land-use policies, both meant to promote tree planting for carbon sequestration, are a threat to undervalued grassland biodiversity and ecosystem services. Fundamental to these afforestation efforts has been the assumption that old-growth grasslands that occur where climate-vegetation models suggest forest as the potential vegetation must be degraded. Our analysis shows that the reality on the ground is much more complicated. (Click on title for full story)
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Are Millennial Trees Immortal?
Ageing, as part of life, can indeed be considered a sort of stress from which neither we, nor any organisms, can ultimately escape. (Click on title for full story.)
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Common North American Shrub Holds Promise For Fighting Superbug (MRSA)
Scientists discovered a compound in the leaves of a common shrub, the American beautyberry, that boosts an antibiotic’s activity against antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria. Laboratory experiments showed that the plant compound works in combination with oxacillin to knock down the resistance to the drug of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. (Click on title for full story)
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Insect vs. Plant vs. Insect vs. Plant … Outsmarting The Other Side
Our previous research showed that goldenrod plants have evolved to ‘eavesdrop’ on the sexual communications of their gall fly herbivores — specifically, the sex pheromones used by males to attract females. Our new research suggests that the plants respond to this ‘intelligence’ by strengthening, also known as ‘priming,’ chemical defenses to prevent females from laying eggs and inducing gall formation.” (Click on title for full story.)
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What Were They Smoking? New Research Reveals Surprising Mix Used By Early Indigenous People
Until now, the use of specific smoking plant mixtures by ancient people in the American Northwest had only been speculated about. (Click on title for full story.)
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Will Your COVID19 Vaccine Be Consumed In A Salad?
“Plant-based vaccines are better for the developing world. They’re cheaper to produce. They don’t need … to be refrigerated for long periods of time.” (Click on title for full story.)
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Plants Are Chemical Geniuses Creating New Chemicals To Meet New Challenges
It’s a known fact that the same chemical (for instance, caffeine, or crocin) can appear again and again in distant plant species,” One outstanding question was: How do the genes involved in the biosynthesis of such chemicals appear all at once in these different species? The work we published not only describes for the first time the complete pathway to crocin biosynthesis in any plant, but also shows that the pathway evolved in gardenias through the appearance of just one gene that acts early in the pathway, while the later ones were pre-existing, and were hitchhiked for making crocin. This is an elegant demonstration, at the biochemical level, of how nature reuses and adapts pre-existing mechanisms, rather than creating completely novel ones.” (Click on title for full story)
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Giant Sequoia Bark Protects Trees And May Teach Engineers How To Design For Earthquakes
Due to this structure, the bark of the sequoia tree behaves like an open-pored foam similar to the foam used in the construction of cars and houses, for example. On the basis of their findings, the researchers are, among others, to develop with colleagues from the University of Stuttgart a new type of light weight concrete with bundles of hollow fibers, which could be used to insulate and to better protect buildings against earthquakes, for example. (Click on title for full story)
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When The Bees Are Gone, Soap Bubbles Could Pollinate Orchards
Declines in the number of global pollinator insects, the heavy labor of conducting artificial pollination manually, and the rising cost of pollen grains are considered to be significant worldwide problems. Here we show that chemically functionalized soap bubbles exhibit effective and convenient delivery of pollen grains to the targeted flowers thanks to their stickiness, softness, high flexibility, and enhancement of pollen activity. (Click on title for full story.)