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Celebrating Plants and People

  • Jet Fuel From Plants. Yes It’s A Thing. Almost.

    Making rocket fuel from plants is not rocket science. It is, however, a notoriously inefficient, multistep process, which has made it difficult to scale up to the level needed to compete with fossil fuels. But researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab think they’ve figured out how to cook it up in one go using genetically engineered bacteria. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Are Government Tree Planting Schemes Effective Or Just Green Washing?

    Successive governments have made popular pledges to plant large numbers of new trees. But do these trees ever actually get planted and, where they do, does it ever achieve anything useful? (Click on title for full story.)

  • Going On The Offense: Venus Flytraps’ Evolutionary Table-Turning

    Since the dawn of invertebrates, plants have had to defend themselves against hordes of nibblers. On at least a half-dozen occasions, however, plants turned the tables and became predators: the sundew with its sticky tentacles, pitcher plants with their beckoning pools of enzymes, and the flytrap with its swift clamp of death. These plants’ aggressive feeding habits help them survive in poor soil by giving them a new source of nitrogen and other nutrients. Many biologists suspect this predatory behavior evolved when ancestors of today’s carnivorous plants turned mechanisms that normally detect and defend against insect pests into offensive weapons. (Click on title for full story.)

  • We’ve Got Good News And Bad News: Global Assessment Of Flora

    Scientists have estimated that there are 390,900 plants known to science. The new tally is part of a report carried out by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. It is its first global assessment of the world’s flora. The study also found that 2,034 new plant species were discovered in 2015. However, the report warns that 21% of plants are at risk of extinction, with threats including climate change, habitat loss, disease and invasive species. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Mystery Algae Breaks The Rules And Rewrites History

    And Leliaert says that he’s wary of calling the seaweed “multicellular” because its cells are undifferentiated and suspended in a stiff gel. Still, he says, the whole plant has a distinct structure that includes a root-like holdfast, a stem, and blades. How the cells of the plant communicate with one another remains unknown. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Wine Grape Vineyards Benefit From Being Bird-Friendly

    Insectivorous cavity-nesting birds can be encouraged to occupy vineyards by giving them nest boxes. New research documents that these birds reciprocate by providing significant eco-friendly pest control services to winegrape growers. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Gran Canaria Island Was Forested Until Early Humans Arrived

    Thanks to the analysis of fossil pollen and charcoal remains, a team of scientists has been able to reconstruct the evolution of the vegetation from Gran Canaria between 4,500 and 1,500 years ago. The study reveals that the disappearance of forests in some parts of the island is in part due to the rise in fires and the cultivation of cereals. Both factors are closely related to the arrival of the first indigenous people to the island. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Dinosaur Reclassified As First Marine Vegetarian

    An ancient creature with a skull the shape of a vacuum attachment could have been one of the first plant-eating marine reptiles, researchers say. Dug up in Luoping County in the Yunnan province of China, the newly discovered fossils of the sea-dwelling creature Atopodentatus unicus, thought to have lived around 244 million years ago, suggest it had a “hammerhead” skull, with two very different sets of teeth that allowed it to feed on underwater plant matter. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Ice Cores Reveal 54million Years Of Antarctic Vegetation Transitions: From Palms To Ice

    Antarctica was once covered with tropical forests. Now researchers have fully charted the slow transition from tropical paradise to icy wasteland, thanks to a single marine sediment core. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Migrating Birds May Save Plants From Climate Change

    This mechanism of long-distance dispersion had not been confirmed until now, mainly due to the difficulty involved in sampling propagules transported by birds during their migratory flight. We were able to analyse it thanks to the hunting behaviour of Eleonora’s falcons. (Click on title for full story.)