Name: Maize or Corn Scientific name: Zea mays Known for: Food of the Gods (or Blasphemy against them when in Corn Dogs) Record broken: Yields I expect most of you have limited direct experience with many of our other...
Category - Life
Editor Pat Heslop-Harrison
Plant Records: Don’t judge ryegrass by its looks
Name: Perennial ryegrass Scientific name: Lolium perenne L. Known for: Being a super yummy forage grass for grazing ruminants and liked as turf for sports people in temperate climates of the world Record broken: Two...
Susanne Barth
Plant Records: The Plant that Fooled Millions
Name: Baniwi (Banana Kiwi) plant Scientific name: N/A Known for: Fooling millions and millions of people Record broken: Going viral on the internet At AoBBlog, we like graphs and data. Therefore, I decided to approach...
Anne Osterrieder
Plant Records: The (Almost) Invisible Giant
Name: Tiama African Mahogany Scientific name: Entandrophragma excelsum Known for: Being freakishly good at hiding despite its size Record broken: Height There was a surprising article in Biodiversity and Conservation...
Alun Salt
Cryopreservation on the farm and in the news
Almost all the milk we drink will come from cows whose father’s sperm was frozen. It is quite likely that their father himself was an embryo transfer bull, who started ‘life’ in frozen in liquid...
Why do leaves change colour?
We know a lot about the chemical processes of changing leaf colour, but scientists are still debating why it happens.
What does it take to run a botanical society?
What does it take to run a botanical society? We asked Shamma Rattan, president of the Oxford Brookes Botanical Society and the committee (Preena Patel, vice president; Alex Payne, treasurer; Adam Hall, social...
Brookes Botanical
From plants to patients and back: An interview with Dr Kate Castleden
Career paths are a mysterious thing. As they rarely are linear, it helps to pick up miscellaneous transferable skills on the way, and spot new opportunities as they arise. We hope to feature many different career paths...
NQFF the last
What have you been sharing on Twitter this week? Sadly the death of Roger Tsien, but also some other links you found useful.
NQFF: Moss, moving and Madagascar
The second week of the trial run for NQFF. Are the lists of followers helpful, or are you just interested in the stories? I ask as the lists of twitter accounts take far longer to format than the stories. The reason...
#NQFF: A Serious Look At Seed-Free Plants, Remediation and Knowing Yourself
#FF is a common tag on Twitter. It means FollowFriday. The idea is that you tweet the handles of a few people that you thing others should follow. We’re doing something a bit different. We follow a lot of accounts...
How does a mistake happen, and how do you stop it happening again?
Last week I made a mistake, and quite a few people picked it up. I put an image of a lily where an orchid should have been. It seems a basic mistake so how did it happen? Every post on this blog now should have an image...
Botany needs more rap songs
You might be used to writing scientific abstracts and reports – but have you ever tried to put your research into a rap? A few weeks ago, we received a not-so-usual press release: Four eighth grade students from...
On recent events
We have tended to keep to botany here, or at least things directly relevant to botanical researchers. I’ll admit this might come as a surprise to one or two people so here’s why some non-botanical material might be...
