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...
Tag - Plant Biology
Nigel Chaffey
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...
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...
Prof. on the box
After his phytophyllic antics were revealed to the world last year, serial seriously scientific stuntsman Iain Stewart – our original ‘Prof. in a box’ – has done it again. Not content to use contemporaneously generated...
Botanical terms – in words and pictures
How often have you come across a new – to you, the reader, that is! – term in a botanical text and wondered what it meant? Well, OK, maybe not that often, but when you do, how frequently have you then looked...
Innovate to accumulate!
As we start another new year people often resolve to do things better than in the old one. And as we continue to face global cash-strapped and financially-straitened times, one resolution for an under-valued botanist...
The high life
In the plant kingdom, great size doesn’t always guarantee ‘success’. Take for instance trees: for all their wonderfulness and huge size, they don’t always scale the heights their stature might aspire to; they are held...
Hot Bot…
Botany is officially ‘hot’ (or even ‘really cool’…), according to no less a publication than the FT (Financial Times) Magazine, where Clive Cookson lists ‘plants to feed the world’ amongst his ‘Science’s 10 hottest...
PlantingScience.org
PlantingScience is a learning and research resource, bringing together students, plant scientists, and teachers from across the nation. Students engage in hands-on plant investigations, working with peers and scientist...
annbot
Charles Darwin and the Origins of Plant Evolutionary Developmental Biology
I often quote the last paragraph of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species: “It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds … and to reflect that these elaborately...
Editor Pat Heslop-Harrison
What’s next for AoB Blog? 2011
New year greetings and a look forward to plans for the coming year.
AJ Cann
You can look but not touch
via iPhylo “The Plant List () has been released today, complete with glowing press releases. The list includes some 1,040,426 names. I eagerly looked for the Download button, but none is to be found. You can grab...
Plant biology: Growth industry
To learn the chemical language of plants, Ian Baldwin has built up a German research empire that engineers seeds and a field station in the Utah wilderness to grow them.
Plant reproduction in the Central Amazonian floodplains
The Amazon is the greatest river system on the planet. Twenty per cent of the world’s freshwater enters the oceans through the river basin. It’s an immense amount of water, but the flow isn’t constant...
Alun Salt
