Size Does Matter (If You’re Growing Giant Pumpkins) Since it’s that time of year again, here’s an updated post originally published in 2015. Question: What does a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle and the current World Record Giant Pumpkin have in common? Answer: They each weigh about 1 ton (US) or about…
Proprioception: sensing of the posture, shape and relative orientation of body parts Are Plants Self-Aware? No, I’m NOT referring to plant self-awareness as it relates to plant “consciousness”. (If you’re interested in such metaphysical aspects of plant physiology, please see here, for example.) What I’m referring to is the notion…
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…
From A Pumpkin Movie to Jimi Hendrix Yep, the plant news from last month was quite diverse. Let’s start with two movies – one happens over a time scale of months, and the other happens over a time scale of billionths of seconds. “Over the course of five months in…
From Where Potatoes Came From to Where Agriculture Is Going Last November the plant research news ranged from the past history of one of our most important crop plants to the future of agriculture in the 21st century. November is the month of Thanksgiving in the USA, and one common…
From Plant Secrets To Plant Antibiotics What were the five most re-tweeted and favorited plant news stories that I shared in September of last year? Well, here they are, in order of popularity, lowest to highest. “Scientists from the John Innes Centre have pioneered innovative new cell imaging techniques to…
From How Sunflowers Track The Sun To Where Strawberries Came From The eighth month of the year may be when many people are on holiday (at least in the Northern Hemisphere). But plant science news didn’t take a holiday. Indeed, there were so many popular reports published last August, it…
From The Current State of The World’s Plants To How Plants Conquered The Land May 2016 was an especially rich month for fascinating reports about plant research. So, let’s get on with it…. What is the current state of plants…on a global scale? A major report regarding this question was…
Feelin’ No Pain? An amazing short story, entitled “The Sound Machine”, by the British writer Roald Dahl was first published in the September 17, 1949 issue of the New Yorker. In this story, “A man named Klausner invents a machine that can hear sound the human ear cannot hear. It…
A Flowering Uber? Batman has the Batmobile. Dr. Who has the Tardis. Is it possible that the protein that triggers flowering in plants also has its own special transport vehicle? A paper from Prof. Hao Yu’s lab at National University of Singapore published in the 6 June 2016 issue of…