What is the most important part of a scientific paper? Arguably, it’s the Results section– although there are those who might propose that it’s the authors (scientists after all are humans and appreciate having their names associated with the science – especially if it is deemed to be first-rate and published in a high impact […]

Science is one of the most important of human activities, and consequently it’s often funded by the public via their taxes. In order to inform the public of the ways their ‘tax dollars’ have been spent – as part ‘thank you’ for that past funding, and partly to encourage future funding(?) – there is a […]

When people mention plant blindness* they tend to focus on the ‘lack of appreciation of the role of plants in the world’ notion. That is important, but there has always been another side to plant blindness, people’s apparent inability to see plants in the natural world. That second issue is part of the inspiration for […]

Members of the plankton are so-called because they don’t have the ability to move against modest currents in the water bodies they inhabit, i.e. they ‘wander’ or ‘drift’ (as in the meaning of the Greek word from which they get their name). These organisms quite literally ‘go with the flow’. Plankton is broadly divided into […]

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 our best in this column over the years!). But we can showcase a new one, which may be a glimpse […]

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 to detect signs of disease in humans. Since this is usually possible long before any more obvious symptoms may […]

The plant group known as bromeliads famously includes the commercially important pineapple. However, that ground-growing member of the Bromeliaceae (the more formal name for the pineapple family of flowering plants) is rather atypical because many (most?) of the bromeliads are epiphytes (plants that grow on other plants). In the wild we may view bromeliads with […]

Avid readers of the Botany One blog will no doubt be aware of The Story of Soy. Written by Christine du Bois it makes the compelling case for the global importance of that crop plant. But, as productive and globally important as soy (Glycine max) is, it can always be improved. And that’s what Abraham […]

Every so often you chance upon a scientific study that makes you think “What? That’s new or worthy of study (and publication…)?” I had that reaction when I saw the paper entitled, “Photosynthesis and circadian rhythms regulate the buoyancy of marimo lake balls” by Dora Cano-Ramirez et al.. Marimo balls are spheres of Aegagropila linnaei […]

Like many of you reading this item I suspect, I was taught that agriculture was ‘invented’ about 10,000 years ago in the so-called Fertile Crescent, an ancient territory that corresponds to much of the modern-day Middle East. Also, and equally no doubt like many readers, I took that remarkably civilising innovation – when societies adopted […]

Discarded plastic* is a major source of this planet’s pollution (“the action or process of making land, water, air, etc., dirty and not safe or suitable to use”), and which is worldwide – whether on land or on, and in, the ocean. Seemingly, nowhere on Earth escapes this modern menace – plastics have even been […]

By way of introducing some mirth* to the otherwise rather doom-and-gloom-laden previous news item (A heart(wood)-warming tale of methanogens), this zoo-centric tree-based story caught my eye. Andrei Sourakov (of the rather impressively named McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity – at the University of Florida’s Florida Museum of Natural History, USA) reports the curious case […]