From How Plants Sense Temperature To A Plant-Robot Hybrid. The December 2018 plant science news certainly covered a mixed bag of topics…from how a plant senses how hot it is to a robo-plant that can drive toward the light. How Hot Is It?: “When it gets hot outside, humans and…
From “Friendly” Bacteria To Plants In The “Fast-Lane”. A key word in the plant science news of November 2018 appears to be “heat”…from how hot temperatures affects plant genetics to how hot (as in spicy) plants may be used for pain relief. Also featured in last November’s news was how…
From Camouflaged Plants To “Padlocked” Plant Genes. Plants and animals DO have many things in common, mostly at the cellular level. But sometimes similarities may occur at higher functional levels, such as body pigmentation. And a story published last June provides such an example. Other plant science news in June…
From What Makes Plants Flower To “Sleeping” Trees. The subject of trees seemed to received a lot of attention in the April 2018 plant science news. The stories ranged from what actually constitutes a “tree” to how tree canopies seem to move during the night. Also, new clues to what,…
A sampling of plant science news from 2018. For the past six years, I’ve started out the new year here at the How Plants Work blog by taking a look back at the previous year’s plant-related news from my HPW Twitter feed and sharing a few of the “tastier” tidbits,…
Finally, Is This Really “The Last Roundup®”? It’s been a pretty horrible year or so for herbicides. Last month there was a lot of bad news regarding the commonly-used herbicide Roundup® (glyphosate). A jury ordered Monsanto to pay $289 million to a cancer patient in a Roundup® lawsuit. (This led…
When No Really Means No (In Plants) When it comes to sexual reproduction, nearly half of all flowering plant species are self-incompatible. That is, the pollen (male parts of flowers) produced by an individual plant is somehow recognized by the plant and rendered ineffectual in self-fertilizing the ovules (female parts…
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War Who Are You? How do plants distinguish “unfriendly” (a.k.a., pathogenic) microbes from “friendly” microbes (with which to form mutually beneficial partnerships, e.g.)? How do flowering…
Looking Out For Number One In a previous post, way back last December, regarding the notion of plant “pain”, I acknowledged the subject of “damaged-self recognition” in plants, but I didn’t want to elaborate on it at that time. Well, it looks like now’s the time…. “Damaged-self recognition” in plants…
From Blocking Pollen To Blocking Disease If there was a recurring theme in the March 2016 plant news it may have been plant defense. Defense against foreign genes, defense against herbivores, and defense against disease all made an appearance. “Contamination of organic corn by genetically modified pollen is a major…