Category: Plants & People
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Fourteenth-century Murder Mystery Solved! The Plant Did It
It is still possible that Cangrande’s consumption of foxglove was a terrible mistake, Fornaciari and his colleagues wrote. But if the nobleman was intentionally poisoned with foxglove — perhaps disguised in a mixture of chamomile and black mulberry — there are a few likely suspects. Rival seats of power in the region, including the Republic of Venice or Ducate of Milan, may have been behind the murder. Or perhaps Cangrande was killed by someone even closer to him: Mastino II della Scala, his ambitious nephew and successor.
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Frankincense Farming A Ticket To Prosperity
The Ethiopian researchers did a detailed analysis of the costs and revenue of the tree resins and other non-timber forest products (like honey, firewood and grazing) and compared it to the value of nearby crops of sesame and cotton. They found that while farmers can make a living with the crops, the forest products are actually more reliably profitable, year after year.
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Herbarium Specimens Help Document Increasing Air Polution
From this study, we can conclude that urban activities in Valencia have substantially raised levels of Cr, Ni and Cd in the urban atmosphere, which consequently increased atmospheric deposition due to changes in human activities over more than 70years of urban growth
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Is China’s Great Green Wall Of Trees Stopping The Desert?
Vegetation has improved and dust storms have decreased significantly in the Great Green Wall region, compared with other areas
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What Plants Taught Darwin
Most popular narratives of Darwin and the Galapagos concentrate on the far more celebrated finches or the giant tortoises. Yet when he finally published On the Origin of Species almost 25 years later, Darwin made no mention of these creatures. In his discussion of the Galapagos, he dwelt almost exclusively on the islands’ plants.
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African Slaves Applied Plant Knowledge To New Surroundings
Our study confirms the role of Africans as significant agents of environmental knowledge in the New World.
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Obscure Andean Crop That Provokes Theft, Larceny and More
The precious stuff that has provoked sudden larceny and luxury here is not drugs, gems or precious metals. It is a pungent, turnip-like vegetable called maca, heralded as a cancer-fighting superfood and sold on the shelves of supermarkets like Whole Foods.
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Did Fermenting Alcoholic Fruit Save Mankind?
There are hypotheses that the reason humans consume ethanol is because of our recent transition to farming, and how we learned how to ferment grains or fruit, maybe because we wanted to escape consciousness,” he says. “But my study shows that maybe it has its roots in our ancient history as [fruit eaters].”
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Santa And Flying Reindeer: The Magic Mushroom Connection
It seems quite possible that the traditional image of Father Christmas, described in Livingston’s poem and universalised by the Coca Cola Company during the 1930s, has its real origins in shamanistic rituals involving the red and white fly agaric toadstool. (Click on image or title for full story.)
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How Trees Are Saving Lions
A modern twist on a traditional structure in Tanzania has proved successful in preventing African lion attacks on livestock and retaliatory killing of lions, according to a new report.