Or, rather, something to ponder as you finish your meal, maybe with a coffee. Whatever your food(s) of choice, you need the right equipment – e.g. teeth – to cope with it (unless it’s a liquid or intravenously...
Teeth are one source of evidence for food preferences [see previous course/post], but how can you be sure that what is found in the mouth is actually swallowed into the digestive tract proper? Arguably better is the...
Famously, humans will have a go at eating anything, which is why they’re considered to be omnivores, and they are therefore omnivorous *. However, information concerning how such dietary preferences came to be, and when...
What’s the one dietary fact everybody knows about sharks? Correct, they eat human beings – as graphically shown in the creature feature film sensation of 1975, the movie Jaws (and its various good, bad, and indifferent...
Plants provide animals [and it is acknowledged that the following listing is somewhat human-biased] with many things: e.g. medicines; building materials; oxygen; useful chemicals (e.g. dyes such as madder, essential...
The Overstory by Richard Powers, 2018. William Heinemann. As a would-be botanical educator who’s reviewed a lot of botany texts over the years, I don’t really have time to review – or just read – ‘novels’. But, having...
Weird Plants by Chris Thorogood, 2018. Kew Publishing. There is a view that plants are sufficiently amazing in their own right that they don’t need to be ‘sensationalised’ or over-hyped in order to make them...
What! That’s news?? Surely everybody knows that many plants are pollinated by bees? Hopefully, yes, but this item is not about that well-known plant-insect association. OK, but does it feature mammoths? No, but it does...
In the cell cycle, the G1 phase can be like a prison, where plant cells are arrested, unable to divide. These cells have been arrested for different reasons, serving sentences of different lengths. So how and why did...
Now that’s an eye-catching headline, isn’t it? The thought of mushrooms and toadstools – that famously don’t produce oxygen, unlike green plants with their oxygenic photosynthesis – adding oxygen to the planet’s...
It has been said that humans try to understand plants for two reasons: Either to kill them better – e.g. if they are considered to be weeds that compete for resources with our crop plants – or to exploit them for human...