Author Keith Seifert is a charming guide as he introduces us to a fungal world many of us are largely unaware of.
Tag - medicine
Nigel Chaffey
For fans of fungi – The magic of mushrooms
You can listen to an abridged version of this page as an audio file. The Magic of Mushrooms: Fungi in folklore, superstition and traditional medicine, Sandra Lawrence, 2022. Welbeck, in partnership with RBG Kew. How...
Plants that … CURE
Plants that cure: A natural history of the world’s most important medicinal plants* by Elizabeth A Dauncey and Melanie–Jayne R Howes, 2020. Kew Publishing. A few years ago Kew published a book about the deadly...
Does the Garden of Eden contain magic medicine trees?
The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative by Robert Voeks 2018. University of Chicago Press. I suspect that most of us who’ve tried to impress upon others the importance of plants have at one...
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...
How much do you know about … blowguns?
Not much I suspect. And it’s probably not that important that any of us do in the so-called developed world where we don’t need to hunt for meat using blowgun and poison-tipped darts. And it’s probably not as important...
Seaweeds for a “broken heart”
Seaweed protein in your food could help you to reduce your blood pressure and the risk to suffer heart attacks and other cardiovascular diseases.
Marco Garcia-Vaquero
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...
Editor Pat Heslop-Harrison
Cures: Ancient and Modern…
Ancient medical text books may hold the key to fighting many modern diseases.
Garlic and octopus battle tree disease
An allicin-based solution has been shown to treat trees infected with fungal diseases.
