Plants
- 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.
- Plants
In a Snap: Leaf geometry drives Venus flytrap’s bite
Behind a Venus flytrap's rapid snap lies an extraordinary shape-changing mechanism.
- Plants
Botany under the Mistletoe
Twisters, spitters, and other flowery thoughts for romantic moments.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Plants
A Frond Fared Well: Genes hint that ferns proliferated in shade of flowering plants
Analyses of genetic material from a multitude of fern species suggest that much of that plant group branched out millions of years after flowering plants first appeared, a notion that contradicts many scientists' views of plant evolution.
