From Trees That “Bleed” Metals To Visualizing Danger Signals In Plants. There was lots of unusual plant science news last September, from trees that apparently accumulate certain heavy metals, such as nickel, to plants that glow in the dark when wounded. Added to these September 2018 stories are reports ranging…
From Crowdfunded Plant Science to Bad Fertilizer. Citizen-funded scientific research is an interesting concept, made real by the internet. An example of how crowdfunded research paid off was reported last July. Also in the plant science news in July 2018 were articles regarding plant evolution, progress in engineering nitrogen-fixing bacteria…
From Plant Consciousness To A Bug-Eyed View of Flowers. Last February the plant science news ranged from the sedate to the ultraviolet. See, for example, below. Unconscious Plants?: “… a study published recently in Annals of Botany has shown that plants can be frozen in place with a range of…
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,…
Genes As Parasites? Yikes, has it really been over 40 years since the publication of The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins? Indeed it has! (Please see Ref. 1 below.) This landmark book was very controversial when it was first published because it depicted biological organisms basically as “vehicles” for the…
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…
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 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 A New Look At Lichens To A Moss Surprise July 2016 seemed to be a time to rethink several long-held presumptions about lichens and chloroplasts. A couple of plant research news reports changed the way we look at symbiotic plants and photosynthesis. “For over 140 years, lichens have been…
From Anthropocene To Eocene II? A mountainside near where I live gave way in January 2009 (as a result of torrential rains) resulting in Racehorse Creek rock slide. This landslide revealed a treasure-trove of fossils, mainly 55-million-year old fossils of plants that were alive during the Eocene. Most interestingly, perhaps,…