We tend to think of plants as helpless, passive green blobs, but a fascinating new study, in which scientists used fluorescent light to visualize alarm signals within plants, shows how our photosynthesizing friends are able to mobilize their defenses.
Since the dawn of time, human beings have been covering their naughty bits with flora—or at least that’s what the classicist motif of putting fig leaves over nudity would have you believe. This age-old practice recently saw a social media resurgence, with dozens of Facebook users posting their own semi-nude plant…
Amber fossils containing bugs are nothing new, but the discovery of a beautifully preserved Cretaceous Period beetle with bits of pollen still around it is changing what we know about the planet’s earliest pollinating insects.
A towering invasive plant capable of scarring anyone unlucky enough to touch its toxic sap is cropping back up in the U.S. And for the first time ever, it’s been spotted in the state of Virginia.
Wyatt Little has designed the first computer that performs much better with Windows—and lots of sunlight. In many ways, this Little Computer Planter is vastly superior to your laptop. There’s no email to deal with, no internet, no Twitter, and it will turn the CO2 you exhale with every saddened sigh into life-giving…
Animal rights activists have done stellar work in foregrounding the question of creature-consciousness: no meat-eater is now ignorant of the fact that their food once lived, breathed, maybe nuzzled its kin in a blood-soaked slaughterhouse. Environmentalists have a harder go of it. Fracking footage will always be less…
Plants don’t like to be touched. For these immobile organisms, it means they’re likely growing too close to a neighboring plant, and that their access to available sunlight is under threat. New research shows that touch-sensitive plants can communicate a warning message to their related neighbors, advising them to…
Mistletoe might be a nice yuletide decoration, but it’s also a nefarious, parasitic badass that preys upon a series of hosts. Apparently one species has decided it no longer needs a protein that every other multicellular organism on Earth requires to live.
There’s a reason that many natural things look unbelievably cool: Evolution. Given the stresses of existing on this turbulent spinning orb, some organisms must adapt in literally dazzling ways. Like this alga, which is basically a living opal.
For hundreds of millions of years, life on Earth was a purely aquatic phenomenon. The jump from the oceans to the continents was a monumental event, one that would irrevocably change the face of our plant. A new study suggests the first plants to make this evolutionary leap appeared much earlier than we thought.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And where there’s a repetitive job no human wants to do, there’s also a machine we’ve invented to do the work for us. Like the hyper-specific RAP 10 trimmer from Orlandi, the sole function of which is to trim tiny shrubs into perfect, aesthetically-pleasing spheres. Why can’t I…
The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants to bioengineer plants so that the military can turn foliage into spies.
Moss, in case you were not already aware, is a pretty freaking amazing plant. It does not have roots, allowing it to grow in unlikely places like bits of rock at the top of a glacier or on lifeless, barren fields of lava. It provides a habitat for an entire community of microscopic critters. Its leaves are only one…
The feds began monitoring the potency of the nation’s pot supply in the ‘70s by drawing samples from stashes seized by law enforcement, and boy was it schwag. The percentage of THC—the main psychoactive component in cannabis—averaged from less than 1% in 1975 to just under 3% a decade later, according to the data.…
Reading science news all day can be real grim. Animals are dying, the climate is changing, the nuke’s a coming, yadda yadda. But sometimes (in fact, often) scientists do something that’s just neat, important, and won’t keep you up at night—that is, if you’re cool with photosynthesizing cyborg bacteria.
On Monday, the USDA brought us some much needed good news, when it reported data suggesting that honeybees might finally be bouncing back from colony collapse disorder. Today, a team of scientists countered with some seriously bummer pollinator news. A new study published in the journal Nature indicates that…
In nature, blue is much rarer than you might think. Sure, the sky is blue when the weather’s nice, and so is the ocean. But the vast majority of plants and animals are incapable of making blue pigment. Brilliantly-colored peacocks appear blue not because their feathers are colored that way, but because of how they…
Designing simpler spacecraft is what helped us finally put rovers on Mars and start exploring the Red Planet. Embracing simplicity might also give us simple, inexpensive robots that thrive doing very specific tasks, instead of multi-million dollar humanoids that have trouble just staying on their feet.
In the caterpillar-versus-plant fight, the winner might seem obvious. One side sits motionless in the sun, while the other feasts on it. But the tomato plant has a nefarious defense strategy. In some encounters with herbivores, it winds up relatively unscathed, while the caterpillars wind up eating each other.
Telling time seems easy enough—just look at a clock, dummy! Not so easy if you’re a plant without any eyes or ears, though.
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