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...
Author - Nigel Chaffey
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...
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...
Tiers for souvenirs?
News of a new-ish plant science journal now. The Open Access online Frontiers in Plant Science, which ‘welcomes outstanding contributions in any field of plant science from applied to basic research, from organismic to...
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...
Say it with… fungi?
I’ve often thought it must be great to be remembered in a scientific binomial (but, as a botanist, it has to be a suitable plant): for most of us that is probably the closest to immortality that we can probably achieve...
Genome jealousy
Image: Richard Wheeler/Wikimedia Commons. By way of a bit of an advertisement for the news site of another science organ – and to dispel any doubts that I am a complete techno-phobe – I’m happy to publicise information...
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...
