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 How Plants Tell Time To Saving The American Chestnut. Time seemed to be a recurring theme in the plant science news of August 2018…from how plants tell time to how long seeds have to successfully germinate. The future was also a theme…from the future of food production in the…
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…
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…
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 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…
“Double helix in the sky tonight Throw out the hardware Let’s do it right” – Steely Dan Here A CRISPR, There A CRISPR, Everywhere A CRISPR, CRISPR…. Yikes! You can hardly go through a week these days without reading some headline with “CRISPR” in the title. (Even in Time magazine!)…
Size Does Matter (If You’re Growing Giant Pumpkins) Since it’s that time of year, again, here’s an encore post originally published in 2015. Enjoy! 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…
Spraying RNAi To Silence Target Genes In Crops (And Insect Pests)… Many object to GMO crop plants, at least in part, because they contain foreign genes artificially – and permanently – inserted into the plant’s genome. But what if you could TEMPORARILY modifY plants (and even their insect pests) by…