Plant Science
Here I have a veriety of links to developing news and breakthroughs from plant sciences. Sep 6
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One other thing to consider is that plants respirate CO2 during the day and then switch to O2 at night. During the day they produce O2, and at night CO2, which if you have heavily planted fish tank without adequate PH buffering, can cause wild PH swings between night and day (possibly killing your fish). Plants also use O2 for basic functions, just that during daylight hours they produce more than they use. 10/26/12 9:46am <p style="text-align:right;color:#A8A8A8"></p>
How many plants would you need to generate oxygen for yourself in an airlock?
H umans have a pesky way of increasing in number no matter what we do.
Lettuce-Bot can kill weeds with 98% accuracy
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.
Flowers in Ultra-Violet
Nov. 23, 2012 — 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.
Electricity from the marshes
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.The sounds an MRI makes are the vibrations of its coils as the magnetic gradients flip around. MRIs contain various superconducting electromagnetic coils. These produce a static magnetic field (running down the middle of the "donut") that is high strength and contains very few perturbations. Then the main field is then "shaped" by gradient coils, which basically alters the main field over the x, y, and z axes, which allows for spatial encoding of the imaging information and also for various ways to highlight different tissues. Anyway, in the process of performing an MRI, the machine changes those magnetic gradients and switches them on and off at speeds measured in milliseconds. The sudden shifts in magnetic field causes vibrations in the coils, which you hear as the various loud knocks and buzzes. 10/04/12 6:03pm
What do fruits and vegetables look like inside an MRI? Short answer: "Whoa."
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.
Scientists invent transparent soil to reveal the secret life of plants
Science 12 Aug 11 Micrograph of fungi colonising roots of plant host, Medicago truncatula. Image: Jan Jansa
Plants and fungi play the 'underground market'
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) .
Plants may be able to 'hear' others - life - 08 June 2012
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.
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.
Researchers trick plants into growing without sunlight
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.
logy Magazine
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.
How the first plant came to be
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.