How many plants would you need to generate oxygen for yourself in an airlock? Unlocking the fractal patterns in cauliflower. Lettuce-Bot can kill weeds with 98% accuracy. Humans have a pesky way of increasing in number no matter what we do. All those people also consume resources, and the strain on global food supplies will only increase in the future. As everyone scrambles to find a solution to this problem, we come back to one of our favorite problem-solvers: robots. A startup called Blue River Technology has been funded to continue development of its Lettuce-Bot, which is much, much cooler than it sounds. Angel investors have opted to put $3.1 million on the table to move development of the Lettuce-Bot forward. Lettuce-Bot does this by taking advantage of recent advancements in computer vision systems. The Lettuce-Bot is not a miracle machine, though. Blue River, via Future Timeline. Flowers in Ultra-Violet. The compilation of species will continue to be updated at irregular intervals.
All species listed here have been documented, and links are added whenever I can find spare time for updating. These images are made for illustrative purposes, not as artistic statements per se. However, there are lots of food for thought in the convoluted ways Nature expresses itself, so for once the artist can step backand let the subjects speak for themselves. "Das Ding an Sich" to paraphrase Kant, or Eigenvalue of Nature. If you are unfamiliar with the botany, just select any species indicated as having a "strong" response to learn how this looks. However, not all species have the typical bull's-eye UV pattern, which may be confined to symmetrical flowers. The UV range of the spectrum has no predefined colours, so we are free to assign any colour we like.
UV fluorescence may be a common trait to most flowers, but might be of temporary occurrence for parts of the flower. Mediadesk - New fossils push the origin of flowering plants back by 100 million years to the early Triassic. News release, October 01, 2013 Drilling cores from Switzerland have revealed the oldest known fossils of direct ancestors of flowering plants. These beautifully preserved 240-million-year-old pollen grains are evidence that flowering plants evolved 100 million years earlier than previously thought, according to Rsearchers from the University of Zurich. Flowering plants evolved from extinct plants related to conifers, ginkgos, cycads, and seed ferns. The oldest known fossils from flowering plants are pollen grains. These are small, robust and numerous and therefore fossilize more easily than leaves and flowers.
An uninterrupted sequence of fossilized pollen from flowers begins in the Early Cretaceous, approximately 140 million years ago, and it is generally assumed that flowering plants first evolved around that time. Many studies have tried to estimate the age of flowering plants from molecular data, but so far no consensus has been reached. Literature: Peter A. Flowers Communicate with Electricity. Electricity from the marshes.
An unexpected source of new, clean energy has been found: the Plant-Microbial Fuel Cell that can generate electricity from the natural interaction between living plant roots and soil bacteria. The technique already works on a small scale and will soon be applied in larger marshland areas throughout the world. On 23 November, researcher Marjolein Helder will defend her PhD research on generating electricity via plants at Wageningen University, part of Wageningen UR. She has also founded a spin-off company called Plant-e with her colleague David Strik. The Plant-Microbial Fuel Cell draws electricity from the soil while the plants continue to grow. Plants produce organic material via photosynthesis.
The Plant-Microbial Fuel Cell can currently generate 0.4 Watt per square metre of plant growth. Marshlands Plant-Microbial Fuel Cells can be used on various scales. Biologists learn how plants synthesize their growth hormone auxin. Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have succeeded in unraveling, for the first time, the complete chain of biochemical reactions that controls the synthesis of auxin, the hormone that regulates nearly all aspects of plant growth and development. Their discovery, detailed in a paper in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, will allow agricultural scientists to develop new ways to enhance or manipulate auxin production to improve the growth and yield of crops and other plants. More than a century ago, Charles Darwin noticed that plants produced a substance that made them bend toward light, a hormone called auxin that biologists have since found to be essential not only in regulating plant growth but also in patterning their development.
In 2006, a team of San Diego researchers headed by Yunde Zhao, an associate professor of biology at UC San Diego, discovered a family of 11 genes involved in the synthesis of auxin. Inside Insides. What do fruits and vegetables look like inside an MRI? Short answer: "Whoa.". Scientists invent transparent soil to reveal the secret life of plants. Lettuce grown in transparent soil developed by researchers at the James Hutton Institute and the University of Abertay Dundee in Scotland Most people’s image of plants is actually upside down.
For most of our photosynthetic friends, the majority of the plant is underground in the form of an intricate system of roots. The bit that sticks up is almost an afterthought. That’s a problem for scientists trying to study plants because growing them in media that allow you to see the roots, such as hydroponics, doesn't mimic real soil very well. Now, a team of researchers at the James Hutton Institute and the University of Abertay Dundee in Scotland has developed an artificial transparent soil that allows scientists to make detailed studies of root structures and subterranean soil ecology on a microscopic level.
It’s made from granules of Nafion, which is a lot easier than calling it a sulfonated tetrafluoroethylene based fluoropolymer-copolymer. Source: James Hutton Institute About the Author. Plants and fungi play the 'underground market' Science 12 Aug 11 Micrograph of fungi colonising roots of plant host, Medicago truncatula. Image: Jan Jansa Plants and fungi co-operate and trade with each other on a biological ‘underground market’, changing their trading partners if they don’t get a fair deal. The finding was made by an international team, including Oxford University scientists, examining how plants trade energy-rich carbohydrate they make using photosynthesis for phosphorus fungi collect from the soil. A report of the research is published in this week’s Science.
‘This is one of the first recorded examples of a ‘biological market’ operating in which both partners reward fair trading rather than one partner having the advantage and exploiting the other,’ said Professor Stuart West of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, an author of the paper. Plants may be able to 'hear' others - life - 08 June 2012. THEY can "smell" chemicals and respond to light, but can plants hear sounds? It seems chilli seeds can sense neighbouring plants even if those neighbours are sealed in a box, suggesting plants have a hitherto-unrecognised sense. Plants are known to have many of the senses we do: they can sense changes in light level, "smell" chemicals in the air and "taste" them in the soil (New Scientist, 26 September 1998, p 24).
They even have a sense of touch that detects buffeting from strong winds. The most controversial claim is that plants can hear, an idea that dates back to the 19th century. Since then a few studies have suggested that plants respond to sound, prompting somewhat spurious suggestions that talking to plants can help them grow. A team led by Monica Gagliano at the University of Western Australia in Crawley placed the seeds of chilli peppers (Capsicum annuum) into eight Petri dishes arranged in a circle around a potted sweet fennel plant (Foeniculum vulgare). More From New Scientist. Harnessing Plant-Invading Fungi for Fuel | Behind the Scenes. This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation. As gas prices rise around the world, researchers are seeking a potential solution from endophytic fungi — fungi that live inside plants.
While conducting a study on endophytes and their unique products, Gary Strobel of Montana State University and his fellow researchers made a discovery that could very well change our future fuel sourcing. In a recent study, published in the journal Microbial Ecology, Strobel and his team looked closely at an endophyte known as Hypoxylon, identifying the volatile organic compounds that it produces as well as its antimicrobial activity and genetic makeup. Hypoxylon and similar fungi are common in tropical and semitropical plants and the volatile organic compounds they produce may be useable as fuels or fuel additives. Living inside plants Endophytes are able to live in plant tissues without causing any apparent harm. Strange compounds. Researchers trick plants into growing without sunlight. You’re probably aware that plants rely on the sun to power photosynthesis and supply the plant with energy.
The other side of that is that plants have evolved to control their development steps based on exposure to sunlight. Knowing this, researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have taken the first steps toward controlling plant development and creating plants that can grow in the dark. Plants rely on photoreceptors to trigger various stages of growth. Everything from germination, to leaf production, to flowering is triggered by photoreceptors. Most plants use a molecule called phytochromobilin that changes its shape when exposed to light. This is what triggers the biochemical cascade that leads to plant growth, and scientists have managed to short circuit this mechanism. By feeding plants with a synthetic compound called 15Ea-phycocyanobilin, they were able to make the plants behave as if they had been exposed to light. Plantcell.org via Gizmodo UK. Logy Magazine. Atmospheric oxygen really took off on our planet about 2.4 billion years ago during the Great Oxygenation Event.
At this key juncture of our planet’s evolution, species had either to learn to cope with this poison that was produced by photosynthesizing cyanobacteria or they went extinct. It now seems strange to think that the gas that sustains much of modern life had such a distasteful beginning. So how and when did the ability to produce oxygen by harnessing sunlight enter the eukaryotic domain, that includes humans, plants, and most recognizable, multicellular life forms?
One of the fundamental steps in the evolution of our planet was the development of photosynthesis in eukaryotes through the process of endosymbiosis. This crucial step forward occurred about 1.6 billion years ago when a single-celled protist captured and retained a formerly free-living cyanobacterium. Bhattacharya leads the Rutgers Genome Cooperative that has spread the use of genome methods among university faculty. How the first plant came to be. The genome of provides essential clues to the origin of photosynthesis in algae and plants. Science/AAAS Earth is the planet of the plants — and it all can be traced back to one green cell. The world's lush profusion of photosynthesizers — from towering redwoods to ubiquitous diatoms — owe their existence to a tiny alga eons ago that swallowed a cyanobacteria and turned it into an internal solar power plant.
By studying the genetics of a "glaucophyte" — one of a group of just 13 unique microscopic freshwater blue-green algae, sometimes called "living fossils" — an international consortium of scientists led by molecular bioscientist Dana Price of the University of Queensland, Brisbane, has elucidated the evolutionary history of plants. The glaucophyte still retains a less domesticated version of this original cyanobacteria than most other plants. The remaining question is why this complex union took place roughly 1.6 billion years ago. Plants that shut out bacterial invaders | Lab Rat. I have a soft-spot for plant biology. In my final year at university, having exhausted all of the bacteria-related biochemistry lectures, I took a bacteria-related lecture course with the plants department.
It was a smaller department, and seemed a lot friendlier and nicer. Also the biscuits in the tea-room were cheaper. So I do like to write about plants every now and again, and it isn’t a very difficult task because like every other multicellular organism on the planet, plants also suffer from bacterial infections. Unlike humans, they don’t have a blood stream to carry immune cells around, so they instead rely on bombarding bacteria with nasty chemicals , quickly killing off any parts of the plant that get infected and acquiring a kind of plant resistance to stop attacks occurring again. (The three links are to a mini-series on plant immunology on my old blog.) A stoma! Figure from ref. 1 Ref 2: Nicaise, V., Roux, M., & Zipfel, C. (2009). Credit for image 1. Plants Use Body Clocks to Prepare for Battle | Wired Science. By Olivia Solon, Wired UK Biologists at Rice University have discovered that while plants might look fairly inactive in the day, they are surreptitiously preparing for battle with hungry insects.
[partner id="wireduk"]“When you walk past plants, they don’t look like they’re doing anything,” said Janet Braam, one of the investigators on a new study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It’s intriguing to see all of this activity down at the genetic level. It’s like watching a besieged fortress go on full alert.” Biologists have long known that plants have an internal clock that lets them measure the passing of time regardless of the light conditions.
Some plants move their leaves to follow the Sun during the day but then “reset” their leaves at night and move them back toward the east in anticipation of the sunrise. In order to test this theory, graduate biochemistry and cell biology student Danielle Goodspeed designed an experiment. Source: Wired.co.uk. Steroids control gas exchange in plants. Public release date: 5-Feb-2012 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Zhiyong Wang zywang24@stanford.edu Carnegie Institution Stanford, CA— Plants leaves are sealed with a gas-tight wax layer to prevent water loss.
Plants breathe through microscopic pores called stomata (Greek for mouths) on the surfaces of leaves. The mechanisms for such regulation have remained elusive. Brassinosteroids are found throughout the plant kingdom and regulate many aspects of growth and development, including inhibition of photosynthetic genes when there is insufficient light for photosynthesis. Wang, lead author Kim and their colleagues Marta Michniewicz and Bergmann set out to determine brassinosteroid's role in stomatal development.
Wang and his colleagues had previously determined that when brassinosteroid binds to a receptor on the surface of a plant cell, it initiates a chain of signal transduction that results in certain genes being turned on or off within the cell's nucleus. MIT creates solar cell from grass clippings. Amazonian Mushroom Eats Indestructible Plastics. First plants caused ice ages, new research reveals. Lichens. Nitrogen fertilizers' impact on lawn soils. Nitrogen Fixation | Oscillator. All he is saying, is give pee a chance. Earliest known bug-repellant plant bedding found at South African rock shelter. Are the tables turning in the war between pests and genetically modified crops?
Pests Are Developing Resistance to Monsanto's Engineered Supercorn. Breaking News: Monsanto To Face Biopiracy Charges In India. The ISME Journal - Endogeic earthworms shape bacterial functional communities and affect organic matter mineralization in a tropical soil. Honeybee deaths linked to seed insecticide exposure. Plants create a water reserve in the soil. No sun, no problem: scientists discover dark secrets of the plant world. If plants generate magnetic fields, they’re not sayin’ Leafy social network: Scientists study how stomata communicate. Plants Clean Up More Air Pollution Than Previously Thought. Newly Discovered Plant Bows Down and Buries Its Own Seeds | 80beats.
Scientists Discover First Night-Flowering Orchid : The Two-Way. Do Plants Have Minds? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture. Key mechanism that regulates shape and growth of plants discovered. Tiny protein helps bacteria 'talk' and triggers defensive response in plants. Manipulating plants' circadian clock may make all-season crops possible. Discovery on how sugars are moved throughout a plant. Agriculture. What You Eat Affects Your Genes: RNA from Rice Can Survive Digestion and Alter Gene Expression | 80beats. Home Page: NCAT Sustainable Agriculture Project.
Digital inventory of medicinal plants underway in Pune - Mumbai. Organisms. Urban Physic Garden. Guide to Common Edible Wild Plants. Experimental Recipes with Azolla, Super Plant (and Future Space Food?) 7 Edible Weeds - Article :: Networx. Strawberries Protect The Stomach From Alcohol. 5 Ridiculous Myths People Use to Trash Local Food -- And Why They're Wrong. Plant Teacher - Entheogens and Healing Herbs. Dutch PlantLab Revolutionizes Farming: No Sunlight, No Windows, Less Water, Better Food. PlantLab. Purple lights and math help PlantLab grow food more efficiently. Horticulture Discotech: LED Grow Lights Power Sustainable Farming. Why the hottest chilies grow in the wettest places. Why Do Some Like It Hot? | Anthropology in Practice. Tip of the Tongue: The 7 (Other) Flavors Humans May Taste | Kokumi, Piquance & Coolness | Metallicity, Fat & Carbon Dioxide | Human Senses & Taste Buds.