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Plant Species Divisions Are As Distinct As Those of Animals
March 25, 2006
Plants were thought to speciate differently than animals.  Evolutionary taxonomists presumed that their species barriers were more fuzzy, with hybridization, polyploidy and other mechanisms blurring the lines between species.  Not so, claim three scientists from Indiana University writing in Nature.1  These perceptions may just be artifacts of the plants selected for study: Many botanists doubt […]
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Botany

Of Talking Trees and Plant Perfumes
February 21, 2006
It’s not just Middle Earth where the trees talk. The forests of Regular Earth have a language, too.
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Politics and Ethics

Plants Contribute to Global Warming?
January 12, 2006
If anyone needs a reminder that scientists still have a lot to learn, consider this major discovery of something right under their noses that caught them completely off guard.  Up to a third of methane in the atmosphere comes from plants.  This is not only a baffling puzzle about how or why plants would create […]
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Terrestrial Zoology

Evolutionary “Arms Race” – Is Coevolution Relentless?
December 29, 2005
Camellias and the weevils that attack their seeds seem locked in conflict.  The thicker a camellia grows its protective woody covering around its seeds, the longer the feeding tube on some weevil to break through and devour.  John R. Thompson talked about such “coevolutionary arms races” in Current Biology1 and asked whether such wars can […]
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Uncategorized

Evolution of the Christmas Tree:  Firs Tie Oaks in Fitness Race
December 24, 2005
In the struggle for existence, the conifers should have lost, because when angiosperms appeared, they had fancier valve jobs.  That’s the feeling of a story introduced by Elizabeth Pennisi on Science Now.  “Those of us who celebrate Christmas tend to take fir and spruce trees for granted around the holiday season,” she quipped, “But without […]
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Uncategorized

Plant Communication: How Leaf Calls Bud
August 12, 2005
Plants communicate with themselves in email (07/13/2001), and the messages are being hacked by scientists.  Miguel Blázquez, writing in Science,1 discussed three recent studies that help solve the problem of how a plant, without a nervous system, buds into flowers all at once.  Two of the studies describe a couple of proteins that, working in […]
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Uncategorized

A Day in the Life of an Evolutionary Biologist
July 21, 2005
Meet Dr. Judith X. Becerra.  She is an expert on plants of Mexico.  Her latest research strove to determine the rate of evolutionary diversification of a genus of trees with a name similar to her own surname: Bursera.  These trees inhabit a range of biomes in the tropical dry forests of Mexico and are well […]
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Uncategorized

Flower Sets Catapult Speed Record
May 11, 2005
An American team of two biologists and a physicist found that a common mountain flowering plant holds the plant acceleration record.  Reporting in Nature,1 they calculated that the bunchberry dogwood flower propels its pollen at speeds approaching 14 mph when the catapult-like petals explode open, accelerating at 24,000 meters per second squared within 0.3 second.  […]
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Uncategorized

Venus Flytrap Is Snappy-Fast
January 27, 2005
One tenth of a second is all the time the fly gets.  The traps of the Venus flytrap, an insectivorous plant Charles Darwin called “one of the most wonderful in the world,” somehow responds to stimuli quickly without muscles.  The entire mechanism is still largely unknown.  A team of French, UK and American scientists set […]
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Uncategorized

Spinach Leaf: “One of Nature’s supreme examples of nanoscale engineering”
January 24, 2005
Under the peaceful summer sun, plants deal with a life-or-death situation: too much sun.  Those of us with legs can take cover, but a poor spinach plant out in the furrow must deal with the excess energy or die.  Since it usually doesn’t die, what’s its secret?  A process called photosynthetic feedback de-excitation quenching, if […]
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Uncategorized

How To Make Instant Petrified Wood
January 24, 2005
“Want to petrify wood without waiting a few million years?  Try this,” EurekAlert teases.  The recipe: pick up some pine or poplar wood chips from your local lumber store, soak them in an acid bath for two days, then soak them in silica solution for two more.  Air dry, then put into argon-filled furnace at […]
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Dinosaurs

Cretaceous Temperature Estimates Point Out Flaws in Climate Models
December 15, 2004
Nature1 this week described evidence for high temperatures in the Arctic during the Cretaceous that it termed “astounding.”  Based on work by Jenkins et al. that Arctic waters were 15°C, as warm as modern coastal waters off France and Maryland. For a region blanketed in darkness for half of the year, the Arctic Ocean was […]
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Dumb Ideas

How Plants Wax Their Leaves
October 27, 2004
Plants have a waxy coating on their leaves, some more and some less, a fact many gardeners may notice without much thought.  A recent paper by two plant biologists in Science1 reveals that even this seemingly ordinary feature comes about only through a complex process in plant cells.  The waxy coating, called the cuticle, is […]
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Cell Biology

News Nuggets
October 12, 2004
Here’s a collection of news items that deserve quick notice: Mars Rumbles:  Mars still has minor earthquakes, says Space.com, That’s without plate tectonics, “But scientists don’t know exactly how Mars is constructed.”  The Mars Exploration Rovers, meanwhile, awaking from a winter’s nap, are still gathering science data long past their expected lifetime.  Evidence for past […]
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Amazing Facts

Biomimetics Dept: Wear a Pine Cone
October 5, 2004
EurekAlert says the British are developing new clothes using pine cone technology.  The fabric automatically adjusts to temperature by opening up or closing down, keeping the wearer comfortable in all environments.  “We’ve drawn upon nature,” said one designer of this “fundamental change in clothing.” Makes you wonder how a pine cone figured this out.  The […]
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