Members of the plankton are so-called because they don’t have the ability to move against modest currents in the water bodies they inhabit, i.e. they ‘wander’ or ‘drift’ (as in the meaning of the Greek word from which...
Category - Plant Cuttings
Nigel Chaffey
Houseplants as human health monitors
Plants provide humans with many products and services that are not only important but essential to our existence. We don’t have space to catalogue all of those bountiful botanical benefits here (although we have done...
Man’s best friend now plant’s best friend too?
For thousands of years, dogs (domesticated descendants of wolves) have been considered to be man’s best friend. One of the ways that friendship has been manifested is the use of the dog’s highly-developed sense of smell...
Tanks, Zika and ornamental plants
The plant group known as bromeliads famously includes the commercially important pineapple. However, that ground-growing member of the Bromeliaceae (the more formal name for the pineapple family of flowering plants) is...
Making soy better
Avid readers of the Botany One blog will no doubt be aware of The Story of Soy. Written by Christine du Bois it makes the compelling case for the global importance of that crop plant. But, as productive and globally...
Algal research that has its ups and downs…
Every so often you chance upon a scientific study that makes you think “What? That’s new or worthy of study (and publication…)?” I had that reaction when I saw the paper entitled, “Photosynthesis and circadian rhythms...
Bread’s birth bested by 4400 years
Like many of you reading this item I suspect, I was taught that agriculture was ‘invented’ about 10,000 years ago in the so-called Fertile Crescent, an ancient territory that corresponds to much of the modern-day Middle...
Mosses monitor polystyrene plastic pollution
Discarded plastic* is a major source of this planet’s pollution (“the action or process of making land, water, air, etc., dirty and not safe or suitable to use”), and which is worldwide – whether on land or on, and in...
Moths go batty
By way of introducing some mirth* to the otherwise rather doom-and-gloom-laden previous news item (A heart(wood)-warming tale of methanogens), this zoo-centric tree-based story caught my eye. Andrei Sourakov (of the...
A heart(wood)-warming tale of methanogens
Mention of cave-dwelling plants living in extremis [see Uncovering underground Botany] brings to mind the real extremophiles of planet Earth, known – unsurprisingly! – as extremophiles. Although organisms in that...
Hospital procedure harms patients…
What would you think if you saw that as a headline? You’d rightly be concerned. After all, you’d assume it was about human patients and, being a human, you’d understandably want to be (re)assured that any procedure...
Uncovering underground Botany
Hidden in the shadows, plants have survived catastrophic deforestation by taking refuge in caves.
Genomes galore!
We’re not usually that big on plant genomes (“the complete set of genetic information in an organism”) in Cuttings items. We know what they are, and appreciate their importance, but until those genomes are translated...
Moringa! More than meets the eye
We rightly ponder the problem of future food security – in which plants, plant science, and plant scientists (in the broadest sense of that term) have a big part to play. However, just as pressing is concern over...
