These are links from our Scoop It page between October 9th and October 16th: Trees ‘boost African crop yields’ Planting trees that improve soil quality can help boost crop yields for African farmers and improve food security, an assessment shows.   The results appear in the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability. Source: www.bbc.co.uk Plant light [...]

You might put together a salad from what you’ve grown in your back garden, but it’s a surprisingly cosmopolitan meal. Tomatoes came from Mesoamerica and if you have potato salad, then you have the Incas of South American to thank. Recent research by Jules Janick and Harry Paris, Medieval Herbal Iconography and Lexicography of Cucumis [...]

These are links from our Scoop It page between September 30th and October 8th: Plant genomes may help next generation respond to climate change In the face of climate change, animals have an advantage over plants: They can move. But a new study led by Brown University researchers shows that plants may have some tricks [...]

Botany Photo of the Day is a fabulous teaching resource from the UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research. The images and text are licensed for non-commercial use with attribution under a Creative Commons License. Attribution of UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research images should preferentially credit UBC Botanical Garden and the [...]

These are links from our Scoop It page between September 21st and September 30th: How to Grow a Beautiful But Deadly Garden From hemlock through castor bean to nightshade and monkshood … while “most of the plants you’d find in a garden are harmless beauties, not all are so innocent and a few can even [...]

These are links from our Scoop It page between September 3rd and September 17th: Man-in-a-box lives off plants In the 1770s, Joseph Priestly put a mouse in a jar with some plants. It lived for several days, much longer than one without plants. He recognised that plants were allowing us to breathe, and called them [...]

The Springer-published, peer-reviewed, economically entitled research journal Rice, which is devoted to… err… rice, has received its first Impact Factor (a metric by which journals are evaluated and ranked – rightly or wrongly!) for 2010 of 2.9. However, Rice, which offers ‘the world’s only high-quality serial [not cereal? – Ed.] publication for reporting current advances [...]

These are links from our Scoop It page between August 8th and September 3rd: Rye-wheat introgression & alien translocations Rolf Schlegel has put together an extensive list of all wheat varieties containing the 1RS.1BL translocation and recently updated his website at http://www.rye-gene-map.de/rye-introgression/. Recent surveys show that more than 45 % of breeding material may contain those [...]

No, this has nothing to do with whales (they’re fish-like denizens of the deep, and has probably already been done by some countries under the guise of ‘scientific whaling’ anyway…). Nor is it a strange and unusual instruction to implant microchips into the natives of that principality within the Untied Kingdom. It’s not even a [...]

Elegant research should always be applauded (or publicised, which is what I’m doing here!). And they don’t come more elegant than David Greene and Mauricio Quesada’s seminal study entitled ‘The differential effect of updrafts, downdrafts and horizontal winds on the seed abscission of Tragopogon dubius’ (Functional Ecology 25: 468–472, 2010). Acknowledging that many plant species [...]