In Europe, the tree leaves appearing during the Autumn season are predominantly yellow, whereas in America they are mostly red. Why? An article recently published in New Phytologist attempts to solve this mystery. The fact that plants produce anthocyanin, a pigment that causes leaves to appear red...
While we may not think about it, we all know how much barcodes at the supermarket save time by quickly identifying the item we’re buying.
Scientists too have long understood the importance of developing an efficient way to determine the species of an organism. Within the last few years,...
A team of lead scientists at the California Institute of Technology has unlocked a major piece of the pollution puzzle. Their research was focused on the process by which gases emitted from plants become aerosols, or airborne microscopic particles. Led by professors Paul Wennberg and John Seinfeld...
The state of Texas is currently experiencing its most enduring drought since the 1950’s, severely hurting its agricultural industry. Due to burned out crops, yields of Texas fields have been significantly reduced. With fewer crops, farms are unable to support their livestock. Agricultural losses...
America’s very own Yosemite National Park may not have escaped the ravages of global climate change. The famous park reserve is well known for its grand meadows, deep valleys and ancient giant sequoias, but it seems as though its illustrious charm may be declining.
A study conducted by United...
New Scientist Magazine recently published an article discussing the detrimental impacts of increased carbon dioxide emissions on the cassava plant. Cassava is known to be an important dietary component for over half a billion of the world’s impoverished population. It is especially popular in the...
Many of us use the word “hungry” to describe how we are feeling at least once a day. To some, “hungry” is the sensation felt ten minutes before their lunch break. To others, “hungry” is waiting thirty minutes at an upscale restaurant for an exotic dish. However, to 1.02 billion people...
Plants use a plethora of defense mechanisms to protect themselves from predators and harsh environmental conditions. They have hardwired physical and chemical defenses such as pointy leaves in cacti, thorns on rose bushes, and poisonous leaves on poison ivy. They also have adapted to include defenses...
In the plant world, It’s not all about size.
A breakthrough in plant research made at Queen’s University in Canada has nearly reversed the way that people view forest-dwelling plant’s hierarchies. Previously, scientists considered bigger trees to be more durable and more influential on...
At first glance, looking at a chart of worldwide agricultural production since the introduction of synthetic fertilizer would lead you to believe that our agricultural processes have never been more efficient, profitable, and positive. China’s grain yield per acre increased 98 percent in the 28...
In a world full of worry over food scarcity, energy shortages, and fading non-renewable resources, plant biologists continue to bring us hope. This time that hope comes in the form of salt-tolerant crops.
A team of researchers, let by professor Mark Tester at the University of Adelaide’s...
Commercially available green jet fuels are on the horizon. Professor David Shonnard, Robbins Chair Chemical Engineering professor, completed a thorough study on the use of the Camelina Sativa weed as a replacement for petroleum jet fuel.
This plant requires very little agricultural input to...
News Flash from plants’ photosynthetic cousins: Didymosphenia geminata, one of the fastest spreading single-celled algae strains in the world has struck again, this time in the waters of the Esopus Creek in Shandaken, New York.
Didymo, also known as Rock Snot, has been a growing concern for...
University of California at Davis professor Richard Karban has published his most recent research in the latest edition of Ecology Letters. His research has shown that plants can warn nearby “clones,” or genetically identical cuttings, of forthcoming danger.
Karban’s group found that...
….brought to you by Evolution
The C. Conorhiza plant lives high in the Caucasus Mountains, which are nestled between the Black and Caspian Seas. A recent study in “Ecology Letters” reveals how C. Conorhiza plants thrive in the Caucasus Mountains, despite freezing...
When I first learned about modifying genes in my high school biology class I found it a fascinating, yet scary concept. Learning about how DNA works allowed researchers to develop a method of inserting foreign DNA into organisms, a potential solution to many genetic problems. I remember when we inserted...
In a recent study performed at the University of Alberta, signs of increased plant activity were found in a variety of arctic lakes. In the study, six lakes were tested for chlorophyll-a content deep down in the sediment. Chlorophyll-a is a byproduct of the process of photosynthesis and thus, an...
The food chain can allow genes to be transferred from species to species across the planet. The consumption of many genes may not have any effect on us, but the consumption of say, an antibiotic-resistant bacterium, could potentially be very harmful. We are often notified of any outbreaks that could...
Recent developments at the University of Western Ontario have unearthed a new way to dig into the dirt of history and track the earth’s climate all the way back through the last three ice ages and the interglacial periods.
Zhenzhen Huang, an isotope chemist at the university, has pioneered...
The banana peel seems to have universal “appeal” in cartoon episodes. Whether a character slips and skids across the sidewalk or falls into the nearest trash can or mud puddle, loose banana peels somehow always lead to a cartoon character’s slippery demise. So in reality, where do all of the...
This week in science policy the American Electric Power Co. and Duke Energy Corp. came to an agreement regarding issues affecting rainforest deforestation. The two major agreements that the corporations made were the use of 5% of greenhouse gas emission allowances in accordance with a Read More
A note to start: the following isn’t a plant research article, it’s more of an opinion piece on a topic I feel is quite crucial for us, as consumers, to understand.
Earlier in the year we read about how easy it is to get tricked by fake organic milk. Recently I’ve noticed a higher surge...
The products at your local grocery store are deemed organic if they fulfill certain requirements, including no use of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and herbicides. So how exactly can organic plants remain organic if we use something to get rid of pesky weeds? The answer is to, quite simply, use...
For millions of years, plants have generated their own energy by means of photosynthesis. This mechanism of converting sunlight into power has proven to be very successful for plants, but for humans, employing the sun as a power source is not quite as simple. After extracting a photosynthetic protein...
Green is the new Black. With the slue of “green” products raining down on us these days we’ve discovered that anyone in almost any occupation can use an environmental upload. The latest development in greening our world is that farmers too, have found a way to green their routine.
Green...
Weedy, exotic plants have begun their invasion, but for some reason, our existing plants’ quality or quantity doesn’t seem to stop the plants from taking over. A study to understand why these exotic plants seem to outgrow and outlast our plants was undertaken. The researchers examined 243 European...
Recently, in my psychology class, I learned about different types of psychological disorders, including various types of depression. One of these really caught my attention, called SADD or Seasonal Affective Disorder Depression.
People who suffer from SADD become depressed when they don’t...
Cloudy, polluted skies may be just what the botanist ordered. A new discovery was made last week regarding the positive effect various atmospheric pollutants may have on global plant life. This study was published in Nature through the combined efforts of the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, the...
A few years ago when my parents were thinking about purchasing a new home, I remember sitting down with a home builder who was showing off some of the state-of-the-art custom features he had recently installed in a few of his latest projects. Among these features, the most interesting (and perhaps...
As we walk around the produce at a grocery store, we tend to forget how fortunate we are to live in a global society and how unusual it is to have access to exotic fruits and vegetables that grow halfway around the world. Globalization has not only brought animals and plants out of their local niches,...
A study conducted at the University of Groningen by Finn Danielson explored the impact of palm oil plantations on greenhouse gas emissions and their effects on biodiversity. The study was an extensive review of how carbon stock varies with changes in land use, compared to the reduction in carbon emissions...
This past weekend, I visited my older brother in New York and although I love the city for many reasons, perhaps my favorite part about the urban metropolis is the world famous 843 acres of lush landscape affectionately referred to by New Yorkers simply as, The Park. While strolling through Central...
Professor Pavlos Lagoudakis at the University of Southampton’s School of Physics and Astronomy has led a team to develop a new range of photovoltaic devices based on nanotechnology. Photovoltaic devices are designed to mimic the light-harvesting system found in plants and, thus far, have been gathering...
This week, I came across something a little bit different, and perhaps more important (given our planet’s current predicament), than the articles I normally discuss.
In a week where an ice shelf the size of Jamaica broke off from Antarctica, we now definitively know that the once debatable...
Gonzalo Oviedo, a senior advisor on social policy with the World Conservation Union, recently performed a compilation study based on various British and American sources on the agricultural state of affairs regarding the global food shortage. He analyzed the subject from the standpoint of environmental...
Given that 20% of the world’s population consists of smokers, cigarettes have become the single largest contributing factor to preventable and premature death around the world today. This is a fact that has been proven time and time again by numerous scientific studies, some of which have even been...
According to the Center for International Forestry Research a large amount of the deforestation occurring in the Brazilian rainforest is driven by the demand for Brazilian beef and the economic incentives therein.
“Probably 80 to 90 percent of all cleared land in the [Brazilian Amazon]...
Holly Gibbs, a research fellow at Stanford University presented the latest study on land use for biofuel production this Valentine’s Day at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
According to this study, the increased call for biofuels made from agricultural...
Since the Civil War in the latter half of the 19th century, some people in our nation have strongly pushed for diversity in the workforce and in schools. However, pushing for diversity was never really considered in modern agriculture, until recently, that is.
It is a widely known fact that...
Hearing the word coconut brings a variety images, scents and tastes to one’s mind. Some may recall their mother’s freshly baked coconut cookies or an oversized slice of coconut cream pie, while others remember the scent of their favorite body lotion or the taste of coconut water; but rarely do...
These days everyone and their Mothers claims to have a LEED certified building, but the committee has recently reconsidered its initial constraints about applying itself only to building structure. The new future of LEED certified buildings acknowledges the environmental impact of the specific natural...
[A continuation today on the tragic story of the west coast forests] A study of over 76 Forest plots along the United States west coast in Washington, California, Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Southwestern British Columbia showed that trees in the West Coast are dying at double the rate...
Just one week after his historic inauguration last week, President Obama is already making headway in the proposal of much needed new policies to assist with the global financial crisis we are experiencing in the world today. Running as a “green” candidate during the lead up to last year’s election,...
Have you ever worked outside in your flowerbed on a day when the sun never seems to disappear into the clouds? As you dig up old plants and replace the empty spots in the soil with fresh flowers you think to yourself, “If this shade tree wasn’t here, I might just pass out from exhaustion!”...
The rising atmospheric temperature that the world is currently experiencing may be offset by something as simple as increasing the number of “green spaces” present in our cities. The findings come from a study done at the University of Manchester lead by Dr Roland Ennos, a biomechanics expert...
Revegetation, currently a global concept, restores environmental niches destroyed by pollution or over-grazing. Although the type of area, body of water, forest, or environmental region may differ, the techniques used to revive natural life have consistently been the same. Biologists and scientists...
A 2006 issue of Nature named global warming to be a significant cause of the extinction of the Harlequin frogs. The study stated that rising atmospheric temperatures cause an increase in a specific species of fungus, the chytrid fungus, known to be deadly to amphibians. Today’s “amphibian crisis”...
The search for a replacement for oil-based plastics has unearthed a competitive alternative: sugarcane ethanol. Formally known as polyethylene it was first accidentally synthesized by German chemist, Hans von Pechmann in 1898. This malleable but incredibly strong polymer is found in everything from...
AgroParis Tech, a collection of French academic institutions, recently conducted a study looking at plant migration data from six major regions across Europe. The findings were that a whopping 118 out of the 171 plant species tracked have migrated northward and will probably continue to do so. As...
You may take a look at this title and see three horrendous things staring back at you. However, to the plant world, and partially our world, they might not actually be the worst things on the planet. As it turns out, global warming increases the length of the growth season of hardwood forests by...
We’ve all woken up in the morning having gotten more than the recommended 8 hours and yet somehow we feel more tired than the night before. The solution we often choose is more sleep, which sadly only perpetuates the cycle of grogginess. The environment suffers a similar issue, only instead of lethargy...
Harmful Algal Blooms are wreaking environmental havoc at an alarmingly high rate, costing the per annum loss of tens of millions of American dollars invested in fisheries, aquaculture sites and other bio-dependent industries. As a result, Professor Sinjie Lin, an Associate Professor of Molecular Ecology...
With their age-old abilities to clean pollutants and particles from our air, soil and water, trees with medicinal, environmental and nutritional benefits may be mother nature’s newest pitch for keeping families healthy and thriving. Sixty-three year old botanist Ms. Beresford-Kroeger introduces...
Professors Yoav Waisel and Amram Eshel from the University of Tel-Aviv discovered, along with their collaborative research partner Plantware, a specific species of trees that when grown in air, rather than soil and water, retain a soft root structure.
The lab, conducted at the Sarah Racine...
Gene that controls ozone resistance of plants could lead to drought-resistant crops...
Nitrogen Fixation Process in Plants to Combat Drought in Various Species of Legumes – Although nitrogen is abundant in soil, it is useless to plants unless it...
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Update from last week:
Short article about why 
