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Celebrating Plants and People

  • Trees That Withstand Forest Fires?

    Could the Mediterranean cypress help combat wildfires in other parts of the world, like California or the Patagonia in Chile and Argentina?

  • How Parasitic Plants Actively Hunt Hosts

    As parasitic plants evolved, some made extra copies of their gene for the karrikin receptor. Some of the extra copies gained the ability to detect strigolactones. (The process of evolution usually involves random changes to genes that will be passed onto future generations.)

  • Orchid Diversity Explained: They’re Really Really Old

    The new evolutionary timeline begins 112 million years ago, when the first orchids appeared. About 90 million years ago, the major living lineages started to split from each other. Then, sometime before 64 million years ago, a key innovation occurred: Orchids developed a way to lump their pollen into sticky balls, called pollinia, so that pollinators would not lose any grains before reaching other orchids. The

  • Looking To Tree Chemistry To Combat Emerald Ash Borer

    Scientists are scrambling to find ways to stop the beetle. Some are testing insecticides; others are trying to quarantine healthy forests. But recent research suggests the key may be found in the trees themselves, in the chemicals they use to battle insects.

  • Electricity From Moss To Power The World

    There’s also something beautiful about the idea of having to really care for your electricity generator and make sure you look after it properly.

  • The Secret To Artificial Muscles (For Robots If Not Us) May Be Onions

    The plant epidermal cells are cheap and easy to obtained, at no cost to the environment. Due to the diversity of plants and their cell structures, discovering the use of natural structures in engineering is of interest. Onion epidermal cell, for example, has a unique structure in that, when varying magnitudes of the applied voltage, it will bend in different directions due to electrostatic attraction.

  • Introducing (after a 130m year Absence) The Very First Flower

    This discovery raises significant questions about the early evolutionary history of flowering plants, as well as the role of these plants in the evolution of other plant and animal life

  • What Palm Oil Did To Asian Wildlife Is Coming Now To African Wildlife

    While the majority of plantations in West Africa are still in the early stages of development, several studies have suggested development on the scale seen in Asia would wipe out forests that are home to primates, posing a greater threat than mining or logging, which are more narrowly destructive.

  • Doing Plant Research On The Space Station? The Complete Guide

    This researcher’s guide is intended to help potential researchers plan experiments that would be exposed to the space environment, while externally attached to or deployed from the ISS. It covers all the pertinent aspects of the space environment, how to best translate ground research to flight results and lessons learned from previous experiments. It also details what power and data are available on the ISS in various external locations.

  • Traditional Oaxacan Herb Offers Hope Against Addiction

    Salvia alters dopamine levels in ancient parts of the brain responsible for motivation, reward, and the internal sense of what is going on in our bodies. The Mazatec use Salvia as part of a larger ritual and worldview that cannot be reduced to a single pharmacological mechanism. However, by studying Salvia, we may be able to better understand the addiction process in the brain and devise new treatments for stimulant-use disorders.