Marcela Mendoza-Suárez and colleagues have a new tool to turbocharge legumes.
Category - Featured
Liam Elliott
Males become female when striped maples take a health hit
Above a certain trauma threshold, male trees had a high probability of becoming female, possibly in a bid to better their chances at reproduction.
Erin Zimmerman
Aluminium-silicon interactions in higher plants: a brief personal history
How aluminium, silicon and two researchers are connected.
Martin Hodson
The Chemical Tools of Carnivorous Plants
Carnivorous plants need to manufacture a variety of specialised chemicals to lure, trap and digest prey.
Fi Gennu
Every little helps…
Each year International Women’s Day is celebrated on 8th March. This year’s theme is “collective individualism – how our individual actions, conversations, behaviours and mind-sets can have an impact on our larger...
Anne Osterrieder
Does Viagra really help preserve flowers?
It is said that sildenafil citrate can help preserve flowers. Here's an experiment that you could do at home, but probably shouldn't, to find out.
Alun Salt
The Next Generation of Natural Historians
The Linnean Society held its second student conference last Friday, Student Spotlights 2020: Discover the next generation of natural historians. I had hoped to go to last year’s event, but that was squashed by a sudden...
Plant blindness in smartphone identification applications – are we passing on our biases to our helpful apps?
It is well-known that people are better at identifying animals than plants and this relative inability of people to identify plants is increasingly termed “plant blindness”. Recent research has identified links between...
Karen L Bacon
Julie Peacock
A new whole-plant framework simulates realistic water and carbon flow
CPlantBox generates a variety of 3D full plant architectures and accurately simulates water and carbon flow in the full plant.
Rachel Shekar
Resource allocation trade-offs in a mast-seeding conifer
Three key functions are required for the long-term persistence of tree populations in a landscape. Broadly speaking, trees must acquire and allocate resources to maintain or increase their biomass, to tolerate or resist...
William Salter
How does partnership work for a lichen in the Antarctic?
Lichens are partnerships between algae and fungi. In the Antarctic Lichens offer algae shelter against the cold, but also an uncertain future.
Guillaume Lobet
How important is meat to a curious carnivorous plant?
Drosophyllum lusitanicum, also known as the Portuguese sundew or dewy pine, is unusual even for carnivorous plants in that it lives in dry environments. Typically, carnivorous plants live in nutrient-poor wetlands, so...
Tackling plant blindness: Botany by stealth…
School lessons devoted to plants may be off-putting to those students who are already plant-averse. So, why not smuggle bits of plant information into lessons on topics as diverse as Geography, History, Art &...
Nigel Chaffey