Plant Cuttings
The good side to UV
David Shankbone/Wikimedia Commons. Exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation is generally regarded to be deleterious to biological systems; however – like many potentially bad things – in small
Plant Cuttings
The real butterfly effect
In Chaos Theory, the butterfly effect refers to the notion that a small change at one place can result in much larger differences to a later
Plant Cuttings
Kingdom-blurring discovery
This column is always interested in cross-Kingdom co-operation (especially if it involves plants!), but some ‘associations’ go too far, and often in weirdly and
Plant Cuttings
Prof. in a box
In the good old days of the late 18th Century in England it was considered the height of scientific enquiry for a polymath cleric to put
Plant Cuttings
The high life
In the plant kingdom, great size doesn’t always guarantee ‘success’. Take for instance trees: for all their wonderfulness and huge size, they don’t always
Plant Cuttings
Black is the new… er… green?
What colour are plants? No, not a stupid question, but I bet you were tempted to answer ‘green’? Which is fair enough; chlorophyll is the major
Plant Cuttings
Rocks versus Clocks
What happened 670 million years ago? Can’t remember? Doesn’t matter, that’s why we have palaeobotanists. Palaeobotanists that is whose science it seems has
Plant Cuttings
Questions, questions, questions!
If science is about anything it is about asking questions. But these days it seems that it’s not enough for each individual white-coated, ivory-
Plant Cuttings
Rules are made to be broken, but not that one!
Whilst physicists try to understand the implications of, and undo any harm done by, the announcement that certain particles can travel faster than the speed of
Plant Cuttings
Facing the music
Plants are daily subjected to myriad biotic and abiotic factors and have to respond appropriately to them or suffer the consequences. However, one factor they’ve
Plant Cuttings
Latin is dead (Official!)
It’s been a feature of botany that ever since the language of Ancient Rome became the lingua franca of the educated classes, descriptions of new
Plant Cuttings
The voice of sanity (finally!)
How many times have you tried to understand a sentence from a scientific article only to give up thinking it was written in a foreign language?