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Celebrating Plants and People

  • Future Scientists Will Have New Way To Study Climate Change And Plants

    Project Baseline will allow scientists to grow stored seeds side by side with those from plants that were left to evolve, in identical conditions: any differences can then be attributed to evolution. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Farming On Mars Just Got Easier

    Tomatoes, peas, rye, garden rocket, radishes and garden cress were all successfully harvested from simulated Moon and Martian soil—and there was also one surprise in that harvest. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Paleobotany Revolution: Computer Identifies Leaves To Exact Species

    this current work is the first to analyze cleared leaves or leaf venation for thousands of species from around the world, to learn the traits of evolutionary groups above the species level such as plant families, or to directly visualize informative new characteristics. The variation among the hundreds to thousands of species in a family is many times greater than within a species, and yet, the computer algorithms could learn a set of features and apply it successfully. Because nearly all leaf fossils are of extinct species, family-level identification is usually the first target for paleobotanists. (Click on title for full story)

  • Before There Were Butterflies Or Were Flowers, There Were…. Butterflies?!?

    Details of kalligrammatid wing eyespots and their pigmentation, their wing scales, and their evolution of a long proboscis for siphoning nectar all bore close comparison with examples from the modern Lepidoptera. Both types of insect were making their living in a spookily similar way, despite enormous changes in the plant groups providing their habitat and diet during the Mesozoic Era. (Click on title for full story.)

  • The Little Known Importance Of Ducks As Seed Dispersers

    It can only be concluded that seed ingestion by dabbling ducks appears to be a major dispersal pathway for a far greater number of plant species than was previously thought. (Click on title of image for full story.)

  • What’s Special About The Smallest Of The Largest Flowers In The World?

    Two years ago one of Dr. Ong’s colleagues was walking through what was once a thriving tropical rain forest, north of Manila, that had since suffered heavy deforestation. When he looked down, after tripping over some decaying leaves, he uncovered the strange flower. (Click on title or image for full story.)

  • Why Isn’t Flower Iridescence Most Vivid? Ask The Bees.

    To our eyes most iridescent flowers don’t look particularly striking, and we had wondered whether this is simply because flowers aren’t very good at producing iridescence,” says Glover. “But we are not the intended target – bees are, and they see the world differently from humans. There are lots of optical effects in nature that we don’t yet understand. We tend to assume that colour is used for either camouflage or sexual signalling, but we are finding out that animals and plants have a lot more to say to the world and to each other. (Click on title or image for full story.)

  • How A 3D Printed Flower Solved An Orchid Pollination Mystery

    The artificial flowers—even those that were perfect mimics—attracted fewer flies than the real blooms. Only when the researchers applied scents from natural orchids were just as many flies attracted to the mimics as to the real flowers. Still, the fakes aren’t perfect, Policha says. Flies landed less often on these printed blossoms than on real flowers—they’d fly close, but veer away at the last second. (Click on title or image for full story.)

  • Why Are Tropical Forests So Diverse? Look To The Soil Fungi

    The types of beneficial fungi that associate with tree roots can alter the fate of a patch of tropical forest, boosting plant diversity or, conversely, giving one tree species a distinct advantage over many others, researchers report. (Click on title or image for full story.)

  • Trees In Space… Growing Satellites

    Barnhart now envisions a space platform not manufactured on Earth and then constructed in space but one that is grown in orbit with hybrid organic and man-made materials — using a genetically modified Australian eucalyptus tree altered to withstand freezing temperatures, for example. The idea combines various disciplines at the intersection of biology, mechanics and digital systems. (Click on title or image for full story.)