Category: Plants & People
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Physicists Conclude Destruction Of Earth’s Plants Puts Life On Earth At Risk
“You can think of the Earth like a battery that has been charged very slowly over billions of years. The sun’s energy is stored in plants and fossil fuels, but humans are draining energy much faster than it can be replenished.”
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Walks In Nature Shown To Be Essential To Mental Health
Through a controlled experiment, we investigated whether nature experience would influence rumination (repetitive thought focused on negative aspects of the self), a known risk factor for mental illness. Participants who went on a 90-min walk through a natural environment reported lower levels of rumination and showed reduced neural activity in an area of the brain linked to risk for mental illness compared with those who walked through an urban environment. These results suggest that accessible natural areas may be vital for mental health in our rapidly urbanizing world.
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Thank Caterpillars For Pushing Plants To Be Spicy
The next time you slather mustard on your hotdog or horseradish on your bun, thank caterpillars and brassica for that extra flavor. While these condiments might be tasty to you, the mustard oils that create their flavors are the result of millions of years of plants playing defense against pests. But at the same time, clever insects like cabbage butterflies worked to counter these defenses, which then started an arms race between the plants and insects.
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Is Traditional Agriculture The Best Way To Restore This Reef?
To restore the reef and provide habitat, we turned to an agricultural system that is resistant to climate impacts including flooding and sea level rise
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Native Americans Managed Landscape For Food Production And Fire Suppression
The findings of the new research — more fire-tolerant, large-nut-bearing trees than expected within about 15 kilometers of village sites — suggest that Native American communities in the study area modified the forest in ways that favored those species,
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Botanists Are The Latest Endangered Species
The teeming plant world could become a virtual mystery in the coming decades as college students increasingly shy away from studying botany and universities across the U.S. shutter their long-standing herbaria.
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Healthy Forests Essential For Food Security
New research has shown that even deforestation could make things worse, as forests have proven themselves to be more important to global food security than previously thought.
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Once the King of American Hardwoods, Now Treated As A Weed
As the strongest timber in North America, black locust helped build Jamestown and hardened the navy that decided the War of 1812, yet today few Americans have heard of it. The nation’s taste in ornamental trees has changed fairly dramatically since the first street plantings were made in Williamsburg, Virginia, in the 1730s.
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Naturalistic Exhibits More Effective Than Traditional Exhibits at Improving Zoo-Visitor Attitudes toward Apes
To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that a naturalistic exhibit may elicit zoo-visitor interest in free-ranging or wild counterparts of the species on display.
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Can Community Managed Forests Save Biodiversity And Alleviate Poverty in Nepal?
Climate change, deforestation and land grabbing don’t only threaten Nepal’s rich biodiversity, but the economic wellbeing of millions of its citizens. Could community-managed forests hold the key?