Wikimedia Commons. Plants supply us – and other organisms – with many solid resources, e.g. food, medicines, shelter, drinks. Something that is more intangible – but no less important for that – is the inspiration...
Tag - plants
Nigel Chaffey
…this month’s most tenuous plant link?
Warning for the zoophobic: this item is about Caenorhabditis elegans – a free-living, transparent nematode {‘roundworm’ –sometimes known as ‘the Arabidopsis of animal biology’ [that’s Arabidopsis (frequently described...
Bigging up botany
Scott Bauer, USDA ARS. It being such a rare TV event these days, I have to ensure that everybody is aware of the recent series on BBC4 (a digital channel from the UK’s British Broadcasting Corporation), Botany: A...
Jonathan Drori: The beautiful tricks of flowers
In this visually dazzling talk, Jonathan Drori shows the extraordinary ways flowering plants - over a quarter million species - have evolved to attract insects to spread their pollen: growing 'landing-strips' to guide...
annbot
Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany
Plants are people too? Well, before you put in the call to have me taken me away, let me explain where I’m coming from. Way back in 2003, when I was an undergraduate in plant science at the University of Edinburgh, one...
Matthew Hall
And the winner is…
… well, it’s not a plant! And how predictable! The Top 10 new species of 2010 includes no plants. However, before all readers of this column jointly and severally get incensed, we must ask the obvious question: were any...
iPhone 4 ID? OMG!
If you thought that acquiring the expertise to identify plants took many years of application, you’d be wrong. Now – apparently – it takes only one application (or ‘app’ in modern parlance). Or such seems to be the...
Date sex – XY marks the spot
Dates, the sticky, sweet fruits of the date palm (Phoenix dactylifera), are the product of sexual reproduction in that plant and borne on the female plants of this dioecious species. Globally, about 15 million metric...
Plant cell biology in the frame!
Notwithstanding the centuries we’ve spent peering at, poking, prodding and penetrating the inner workings of plant cells with various types of microscopes and decades undertaking investigations at the sub-cellular...
Plants on the prowl
Plants are not noted for their dynamic lifestyles. Indeed, rooted in the soil as they tend to be, they are usually written off as little more than ‘stick in the muds’. But their sedentary lifestyle is not always so...
Hay fever: another straw to clutch at?
As the northern hemisphere’s hay fever season gets into full swing, there is encouraging news from Mother Nature’s own medicine cabinet. Hay fever – ‘seasonal allergic rhinitis’ – is an allergic inflammation of the...
The ultimate packed lunch?
Image: Scott Camazine/Wikimedia Commons. Heterotrophy is so time-consuming: find prey, stalk prey, catch prey, consume prey… Preying all of the day and all of the night in some cases. How much more straightforward if...
Where have all the plants come from?
For many years it has been the considered view that land plants had evolved some 500 million years ago from stonewort-like algae, something like the extant genus Chara. In a timely re-evaluation of this notion, Sabina...
It’s not what you know, but who you know!
Whilst humankind often debates the benefits – or otherwise – of an individual’s advancement based on patronage rather than merit, it is interesting to note that the plant world has no such scruples. Well, at least that...
