The January 2011 Annals of Botany is out and I had hoped to put together a press release for one of the papers. Seeds of alpine plants are short lived: implications for long-term conservation by Mondoni et al is one of...
Author - Alun Salt
Alun Salt
Astrobotany on the web
A couple of Astrobotanical stories have caught my eye in the past week. I renewed my subscription to SciAm Digital today and read the story Black Plants and Twilight Zones. It’s subscription only, but if you read...
Global Crop Diversity Trust to store wild relatives of food crops
The BBC reports on a plan to collect and store the wild plant relatives of essential food crops, including wheat, rice, and potatoes by the Global Crop Diversity Trust. There is a link over to the right of the page to...
I’m stealing this presentation
The social web isn’t just limited to blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Slideshare is a great place to look for presentations on all sorts of things. I’ve been particularly impressed by this presentation about how...
The origin of modern Botany and the Infinite Monkey Cage
Some ideas work and some ideas don’t. Sticking Prof Brian Cox and Robin Ince together for half an hour each week works. The Infinite Monkey Cage is their weekly show on Radio 4 (available worldwide as a podcast)...
RockMelt: First Thoughts
I use different browsers for different things. My online banking is through Safari. My work is increasingly on Chrome, though I also use Camino for AoBBlog. Opera is the browser I use for home, but not for Facebook...
PhD Tales visits NMSU
Clearly I haven’t been procrastinating as much as I should as I’ve only just caught up with PhD Tales. It turns out that Jorge has been visiting the Chile Pepper Institute at NMSU. Both videos are...
The secret escapes, Botany is interesting
The Phytophactor has a post on the appeal of Botany, and it’s something that needs saying. Plants are interesting, but your typical school student has little way of finding that out. He does point to a solution...
Blogger goes bananas (in a good way)
I’m just writing a quick post here to point to another blog post at Vaviblog by Jeremy Cherfas on the recent paper Did backcrossing contribute to the origin of hybrid edible bananas?. Banana domestication...
In defence of weeds
Richard Mabey has a piece for his new book on weeds in the BBC’s Magazine. Mabey argues that weeds show the reslience of nature. Is Japanese Knotweed just “a plant whose virtues have not yet been...
Will the first artificial intelligence by inspired by plants?
I didn’t pick this up straight away from TED as I hadn’t watched it. I’ve not heard of plant neurobiology before.* After the… umm… enthusiastic reporting on the BBC of plants’ ability...
Are there online communities?
There’s thoughtful post up at Civil War Memory by Kevin Levin, Can You Afford Not To Use Social Media? Some of his thoughts are similar to discussions we had about what would be possible with AoB Blog. Some less...
New botanic initiative is the ‘Size of Wales’
An interesting twist on an old cliché has been launched at the National Botanic Garden of Wales. In the UK the size of Wales has long been recognised as a useful measure of any disaster area (earthquakes, combat zones...
How old is my meadow?
I was a bit fed up after hearing the UK government announce further cutbacks to the science budget today, so I thought I’d delve into the recent Free Access issue of Annals of Botany from Sept 2009 to see...
