From Chronic Drought to the Shyness of Trees. Perhaps fitting with the month of August (in the northern hemisphere at least), a couple of the more popular plant news items four months ago had to do with how plants respond to drought. Other retweeted stories ranged from ancient algae to…
From Human Brains to Subway Systems. Several of the most popular plant-related news stories on my HPW Twitter feed in July 2017 couldn’t be much more diverse. Interestingly, these three stories are bracketed by reports regarding the nature of plant development, both from The Salk Institute. “Plants and brains are…
From Strangling Trees to Stressing Plants. The plant news items presented in June 2017 were quite varied, as exemplified in the list below of the most popular posts from my HPW Twitter feed. “Meet the strangler fig: a parasitic nightmare that lives on other tropical trees, stealing their soil nutrients,…
From Spinach to Tea. Plant molecular biology in general, and whole genome analysis in particular, made great progress in 2017, all around the world. This was evident in some of the favorite plant stories published last May. “I’m strong to the finich, ‘cause I eats me spinach!” said Popeye the…
Plant-Microbe Symbiosis – From Agriculture to Evolution. For April 2017, we apparently have another common theme among the most retweeted plant news stories, namely, plant-associated microorganisms. “‘While agriculture should certainly learn from nature, we mustn’t be fixated on it. After all, agriculture and nature are fundamentally different.’” Agriculture should not…
From RNA to DNA. Though plant molecular biology seems to be where most of the plant science action (and interest) is these days, some of the favorite plant science news stories in March 2017 included plant morphology, plant microscopy and plant archeology. But the most popular story had to do…
From “Heavy Metal” Plants to Plant Clocks. A common theme for the most popular plant news stories from my February, 2017 HPW Twitter feed appears to be evolution – from the genes involved in the evolution of parasitic plants to common evolutionary traits of carnivorous plants. And the most popular…
Happy New Year! And the Winners Are…. For the past five years, I’ve started 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, month-by-month. This…
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…
On Death and Dicamba. About a year ago the recent controversy over the increased spraying of the herbicide Dicamba on midwest U.S. farms took a turn for the worse. Unfortunately, it involved alleged murder. You can listen to an excellent account of the story here: …and/or read about the story…