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…
The First Flower? How did flowering plants (angiosperms) evolve from non-flowering seed plants (gymnosperms)? Or did they? When did the first flowers appear on this planet? And where on Earth did it occur? These are some of the most hotly-debated questions among botanists today, partly because some of the fossil-based…
Back in 2007, when I was boring undergraduates at Montana State University, I read a brilliant book by David Beerling called The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth’s History. I was recently reminded of this book by Nigel Chaffey’s “Plant Cuttings” article in the March 2012 issue of Annals of…
Moving Genes Around A recent report that a species of aphid can make carotene thanks to a gene it apparently acquired from a fungus got me to thinking about whether genes can flow between different plant species. When an organism incorporates genetic material from another organism without being the offspring…
