Celebrating Plants and People
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Scale Of Alien Plants’ Invasions Greater Than Predicted
Citing a new global database, an international team of scientists wrote in the journal Nature that 13,168 plant species- 3.9% of the global total – “have become naturalised somewhere on the globe as a result of human activity“
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Tiny Plants On Ocean Surface Found To Affect Weather
Microscopic plants that grow on the thin surface of the ocean can influence cloud formation miles above. The discovery gives scientists a better understanding of how clouds are made in some parts of the world. It also could improve their forecasts of how global warming will affect cloud cover. (Click on title for full story.)
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A GMO Work Around For Rare Drugs From Critically Endangered Plants
The endangered plant, called the mayapple, produces a precursor chemical to the chemotherapy drug etoposide, which is used in many patients with lung cancer, testicular cancer, brain cancer, lymphoma, leukemia and other cancers. The researchers genetically engineered the easily grown laboratory plant Nicotiana benthamiana, a wild relative of tobacco, to make the chemical.
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Unprecedented Logging Of Africa’s Forests Devastates Bird Populations
Our most disturbing finding was that more than half of all understory birds had vanished in only 15 years,
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How Algae May Lead To A Cure For Blindness
The algae that could cure blindness doesn’t even see, technically. Chlamydomonas reinhardtii are simple, single-cell green algae that live in water and in dirt. They have a round body, two whip-like tails, and a single primitive eye—not even an eye, really, an eyespot—that they use to seek out sunlight for photosynthesis.
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Extracting Rare And Precious Soil Minerals Using Plants: Welcome To Phytomining.
In German we call it ‘mining with plants’. We want to bring elements that are present in the soil into the roots and shoots of the plants, harvest them and then extract these elements from the plants after they have been used for energy, that is to say fermented
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Plants Stress Just Like We Do. And That May Be A Good Thing To Know
Although plants do not have nervous systems, they respond to stress with chemical and electrical signals that are remarkably similar to those of animals, a new study has found.
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Flowers Become Hosts Of Bee Parasites
Diseased bees deposit parasites on to the flowers they visit. These parasites can then infect healthy bees visiting the same flowers, or be transported by an unsusceptible bee species to other flowers to reach their host species.
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How Endangered Are Plants? A New Global Assessment Weighs In
Thus the question ‘How threatened are plants?’ is still very difficult to answer accurately. While completing assessments for each species of plant remains a distant prospect, by assessing a randomly selected sample of species the Sampled Red List Index for Plants gives, for the first time, an accurate view of how threatened plants are across the world. It represents the first key phase of ongoing efforts to monitor the status of the world s’plants. More than 20% of plant species assessed are threatened with extinction,
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Firefly Genes Used To Help Scientists Study Plant Roots
The new technique enables scientists to grow genetically modified glowing plants in special vessels. The investigators can then observe roots growing under a variety of different circumstances.