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 Very, Very Old Plants To New Uses For Plants It’s been an unusually cold winter here in the upper left-hand corner of the USA, so it’s pleasant to recall the warm days of June 2016. That month, the plant news topics ranged from ancient plants to new, exciting uses …
From The Current State of The World’s Plants To How Plants Conquered The Land May 2016 was an especially rich month for fascinating reports about plant research. So, let’s get on with it…. What is the current state of plants…on a global scale? A major report regarding this question was …
From Cancer-Fighting Plants To Cadmium-Sniffing Moss Sadly, those who teach classes about plant physiology often feel the need to justify why plants are important. That’s how I usually began the first lecture in my Botany and Plant Physiology courses back in the day when I was boring undergraduate students. Most …
From Blocking Pollen To Blocking Disease If there was a recurring theme in the March 2016 plant news it may have been plant defense. Defense against foreign genes, defense against herbivores, and defense against disease all made an appearance. “Contamination of organic corn by genetically modified pollen is a major …
From Glowing Plants to “Talking” Plants As usual, the plant news of February 2016, ranged from the molecular level to ecosystem level, from single plant cells to whole plants. And since I can’t discern any common themes, I’ll go with the stories that I “tweeted” during February of last year …
Happy New Year! Since 2012, here at the “How Plants Work” blog, I’ve ended the year by taking a look back at the plant-research news from my HPW Twitter feed over the past twelve months, and then sharing a few of the “tastier” tidbits, month-by-month. So, welcome to the fifth-annual …
numb (adjective): “devoid of sensation; insensible” Pain in the Ash? In the previous post, I posed the question whether or not plants experienced something analogous to pain when physically wounded. I concluded that they did….depending on how one defines “pain”. At the present time, when even academic biologists are expanding …
Feelin’ No Pain? An amazing short story, entitled “The Sound Machine”, by the British writer Roald Dahl was first published in the September 17, 1949 issue of the New Yorker. In this story, “A man named Klausner invents a machine that can hear sound the human ear cannot hear. It …