Erosion is the most environmentally destructive process. Our videoblog shows planting and watering of Grevillea on hillsides in Ethiopia to control soil loss.
Category - News
Editor Pat Heslop-Harrison
Proof of phytological principle
Sadly, we don’t have time machines that would permit us to go back and see ancient evolution in action. So we have to make do with such devices and stratagems as inference, surmise, speculation, good honest-to-goodness...
Nigel Chaffey
Go Botany – Plant identification on a computer or tablet near you
Go Botany: the new site for New England Plant identification First came Flora Novae Angliae, the definitive manual for the identification of native and naturalized vascular plants of New England. Now comes the website...
Maize seed ‘Feed me’ gene identified
Unlike ‘Audrey 2’ – the plant which ate members of the cast from ‘The Little Shop of Horrors’ (botanically suspect but with some good songs) – the maize seed grows on the cob by extracting goodies from the...
annbot
Stochastic Modelling in Ecosystems
Predicting ecosystems responses under changing environment conditions is one of the major challenges in ecology. It is rendered more complex by the non-linear dynamics which characterise ecosystems and the partially...
Xuerong Mao
The answer is blowin’ in the wind…
How does a rooted-to-the-spot plant escape the attentions of would-be herbivores? Well, according to Kazuo Yamazaki in his review straightforwardly entitled ‘Gone with the wind: trembling leaves may deter herbivory’...
Tongue-tied? Let the flowers do the talking!
Traditionally, 14th February – Saint Valentine’s Day – is the day when lovers bear their souls and declare their love for one another, often accompanied by gifts (‘inducements’, bribes…?) of flowers, chocolates, maybe...
When physics meets botany…
This column is always fascinated by the way new insights arise when different disciplines are brought together to tackle an ostensibly botanical problem. So, too, is the UK’s Royal Society, hence its august organ...
Nicotine: an ancient addiction?
It must be terribly depressing if you don’t have plants in your life to give you purpose and a reason to get up in the morning, put digit to keyboard, or whatever. Still, for those who are intellectually botanically...
Science teaching resource
Relatively new to me – so maybe new to some of my devoted legion of readers (many of whom may be involved in teaching science, plant or otherwise) and therefore worthy of sharing – is news of the Understanding Science...
Rocking the photosynthetic cradle…
I’m sure that many of us in our teaching have demonstrated the transfer of light energy between adjacent accessory pigment molecules during the light-dependent stages of photosynthesis using the so-called Newton’s...
Multi-purpose leaves!
Surely, it is a truth universally acknowledged is that leaves are green?
Answer: Not Lamarck(!)
OK, that’s the answer, what was the question? Who invented the dichotomous key for identification? Well, as anybody who has taught students about keys and their use as tools for plant ID (or even for animals if you must...
Making plants work harder [or, Vorsprung durch Botanik]
Not content with just being grateful for all of the marvellous things that plants do and provide, we humans always seem to want them to do even more. Well, in that vein there has been a veritable avalanche of stories...
