The Guardian recently carried an interesting interview with Andrew Rashbass, the chief executive of The Economist group. I’m a big fan of The Economist both in its online and print forms, but in this interview...
Tag - Plant Science
AJ Cann
Chips and the Washington Convention
CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora – apparently, also known as the Washington Convention) is a treaty whose aim is to ensure that international trade in specimens...
Nigel Chaffey
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 doses it may actually be...
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 state. The example used to illustrate this – and which gives the phenomenon...
Phenomics – technologies to relieve the phenotyping bottleneck
Global agriculture is facing major challenges to ensure global food security, such as the need to breed high-yielding crops adapted to future climates and the identification of dedicated feedstock crops for biofuel...
annbot
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 wonderfully unexpected covert ways and make you wonder...
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 pigment in plants and consequently they do tend to appear green. But! This...
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 been much under-appreciated amidst the high expectations, hope...
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-tower resident to pursue his (or her) own questions. Being a global...
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 light, others are capitalising upon this phenomenon, to the...
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 probably not been subjected to for much of their...
Open Access Plant Science – Every Week of the Year
You can afford to worry about medical research once you have enough food to eat.
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 plants were published in Latin. Sadly, new rules emanating from the august...
Botanical Word of the Day
Tony Foster who writes the Phytography blog has a nice idea going – botanical word of the day, building into an online glossary of botanical terms. If we weren’t such honest people here at AoB we’d be...
