Plants

Plants

How a tomato plant foils a dreaded vampire vine

Tomatoes can foil a dodder plant attack by getting scared and scabbing over.

Plants

Sneaky virus helps plants multiply, creating more hosts

Plant virus makes hosts more attractive to pollinators, ensuring future virus-susceptible plants.

Plants

Internal clock helps young sunflowers follow the sun

A circadian clock helps sunflowers follow the sun’s daily path across the sky

Plants

Why a parasitic vine can’t take a bite out of tomatoes

Cultivated tomatoes fend off parasitic vines as they would microbes.

Animals

Organisms age in myriad ways — and some might not even bother

There is great variety in how animals and plants deteriorate (or don’t) over time.

Climate

Warming alters mountain plant’s sex ratios

Global warming has different effects on male and female plants. Tracking sex ratio shifts could be a fast signal of climate change, researchers say.

Plants

‘Lab Girl’ invites readers into hidden world of plants

In Lab Girl, geobiologist Hope Jahren reveals secret lives of plants — and scientists.

Life

Cities create accidental experiments in plant, animal evolution

To look for evolution in human-scale time, pick a city and watch a lizard. Or some clover.

Plants

Scary tomato appears to bleed

A new species of Australian bush tomato bleeds when injured and turns bony in old age.

Plants

Venus flytraps use defensive genes for predation

Genetic analysis suggests that Venus flytraps repurposed plant defenses against herbivores to live the carnivore life.

Plants

Here’s what a leaf looks like during a fatal attack of bubbles

Office equipment beats synchrotrons in showing how drought lets air bubbles kill the water-carrier network of veins in plant leaves.

Plants

Nightshade plants bleed sugar as a call to ants for backup

Bittersweet nightshade produces sugary wound goo to lure in ant protectors that eat herbivores, researchers have found.