Category: Plants & People

Doctors prescribe fewer antidepressants in urban areas with more trees on the street, according to recent UK research. The study examined the link between mental health and wellbeing and the presence of trees in London neighbourhoods. Its findings support the idea that maintaining a link to nature, even in an urban area, may help provide a healthy living environment.

Wealthier neighborhoods are more likely to have more and denser trees.

Carnivorous plants in Sweden are so stuffed on nitrogen pollution that they’re able to eat fewer bugs—and that may not be a good thing for the plants, a new study says.

The low-calorie and fat-free drink – described as ‘sweet and clean’ tasting – could be on the shelves in North America in June

When we mapped the patterns of boab gene flow and the movement of boab words between Aboriginal languages of the Kimberley, we were amazed by how closely they corresponded with each other. The overlap between the two was strong enough to prove that humans were the main agents responsible for dispersing the boab in northwest Australia.

Australian scientists say an often-told tourist story about how an iconic Central Australia palm came to be is nothing but a lovely myth.

Ethiopians have been growing and obsessing about teff for millennia, and it may be set to be become the new “super grain” of choice in Europe and North America, overtaking the likes of quinoa and spelt.

When we started walking through these areas we were just stunned by the scale of illegal cocoa production. It is now the major cause of deforestation in these parks, There are parks in Ivory Coast with no forests and no primates, but a sea of cocoa plants.

Until very recently it has been impossible to prove that poisons extracted from plants were used by early societies. Now a specialist in Palaeolithic hunting weapons believes that she is on the brink of being able to prove that our ancestors used poisons as far back as 30,000 years ago.