Plants are able to keep growing indefinitely because they have tissues made of meristems—plant stem cells—which have the unique ability to transform themselves into the various specialized cells that make up the plant, ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 08, 2020
0
143
Many of us have heard about inflammatory bowel disease, a debilitating condition that is associated with an abnormal collection of microbes in the human gut—known as the gut microbiome. My lab recently found that, like ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 31, 2020
0
19
In the plant kingdom, the sexual organ of a male pollen grain grows up to a thousand times its own length as it sniffs its way forth to a female egg cell to deliver its two sperm cells. Now researchers at the University of ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 15, 2020
0
31
With their rich repertoire of anti-infective substances, medicinal plants have always been key in the human fight to survive pathogens and parasites. The search for herbal drugs with novel structures and effects is still ...
Ecology
May 12, 2020
0
254
The first Earth Day protests, which took place on April 22, 1970 brought 20 million Americans—10% of the U.S. population at the time—into the streets. Recognizing the power of this growing movement, President Richard ...
Environment
Apr 17, 2020
0
12
Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have found a way to turn pollen, one of the hardest materials in the plant kingdom, into a soft and flexible material, with the potential to serve ...
Materials Science
Mar 19, 2020
0
17
Humans, the latest tally suggests, have approximately 21,000 genes in our genome, the set of genetic information in an organism. But do we really need every gene we have? What if we lost three or four? What if we lost 3,000 ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 28, 2019
0
5
Scientists at Utrecht University have discovered how some plants can quickly detect that they are under water when flooded, and initiate processes that prevents them from drowning. Floods cause widespread yield losses annually ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 05, 2019
0
51
Over-fertilization of agricultural fields is a huge environmental problem. Excess phosphorus from fertilized cropland frequently finds its way into nearby rivers and lakes. A resulting boom of aquatic plant growth can cause ...
Biotechnology
Sep 02, 2019
0
247
Highly developed seed plants evolved deep root systems that are able to sense Earth's gravity. The how and when of this evolutionary step has, until now, remained unknown. Plant biologists at the Institute of Science and ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 02, 2019
3
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