Plants

  1. Plants

    World’s fastest plant explodes with pollen

    A high-speed camera has revealed the explosive pollen launches of bunchberry dogwood flowers as the fastest plant motion known.

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  2. Plants

    Built-in bird perch spreads the pollen

    Tests confirm the idea that a plant benefits from growing a bird perch to let pollinators get the best angle for reaching the flowers.

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  3. Plants

    In a Snap: Leaf geometry drives Venus flytrap’s bite

    Behind a Venus flytrap's rapid snap lies an extraordinary shape-changing mechanism.

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  4. Plants

    Botany under the Mistletoe

    Twisters, spitters, and other flowery thoughts for romantic moments.

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  5. Plants

    Give and Take: Plant parasites dole out genes while stealing nutrients

    New evidence suggests that parasitic plants can transfer their own genes into host plants.

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  6. Plants

    Green Red-Alert: Plant fights invaders with animal-like trick

    Mustard plants' immune systems can react to traces of bacteria with a burst of nitric oxide, much as an animal's immune system does.

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  7. Plants

    Morphinefree Mutant Poppies: Novel plants make pharmaceutical starter

    A Tasmanian company has developed a poppy that produces a commercially useful drug precursor instead of full-fledged morphine, and a research team now reports how the plant does it.

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  8. Plants

    A new, slimy method of self-pollination

    When all else fails for pollination, a Chinese herb in the ginger family resorts to something botanists say they haven't seen before: a do-it-yourself oil slick.

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  9. Plants

    Smokey the Gardener

    Wildfire smoke by itself, without help from heat, can trigger germination in certain seeds, but just what the vital compound in that smoke might be has kept biologists busy for years.

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  10. Plants

    Lowering lilies on the tree of life

    Water lilies may belong on the lowest branch of the family tree of flowering plants, along with a shrub called Amborella.

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  11. Plants

    Rewriting the Nitrogen Story: Plant cycles nutrient forward and backward

    For the first time, a green plant has been found to break down nitrogen-containing compounds into the readily usable form of nitrates, a job usually done by microbes.

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  12. Plants

    Wind Highways: Mosses, lichens travel along aerial paths

    Invisible freeways of wind may account for the similarity of plant species on islands that lie thousands of kilometers apart.

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