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,…
Since the daffodils are out in full force here in the upper left-hand corner of the U.S., I decided to revisit this post from 2013 and revise it a bit. Hope you enjoy it (again?)…. Doesn’t the Scientific Study of Flower Development Ruin the Aesthetic Beauty of Flowers? Here’s the…
News “Roundup®” This has not been a good month for the herbicide Roundup®. (You can read a brief introduction to Roundup® here.) Both the New York Times and Science magazine featured news articles about this widely-used herbicide (see References below), and the news isn’t good. Briefly, the NY Times article…
na.ked [nay-kid] adj.- “exposed to view or plainly revealed“ Good Times For Tomato Science The tomato (a.k.a., Solanum lycopersicum). What are the chemicals that make most homegrown tomatoes taste so good? What is the genome sequence of the domesticated tomato? And how is it related to wild relatives, and even…
“Back To The Future.” A while back on this blog, I spent a bit of time exploring how some herbicides kill plants. The focus was primarily on auxin-based herbicides such as 2,4-D (one of the herbicides in the notorious Agent Orange) and glyphosate, commonly known as Roundup®. The former kills…