After harvest, products like lettuce can quickly lose their looks and crunch. Now, research shows that a short spell of high light before the harvest can help greens stay fresher and more nutritious.… Read more
Roses are Red
Delphinium is Blue
It might look quite lovely
But it’s poisonous too!
In honour of the recent Valentine’s day, and the recording of our soon-to-be-released Plant Book Club episode on Plants that Kill*.… Read more
Observations of Brazilian monkeys shows once again that humans aren’t the only ones to use plants as medicine.… Read more
Change is a good thing but it can lead to problems. Like when you change your greenhouse to a nicer one – what if your plants don’t like it? Or worse, what if they like it so much that they don’t behave like you’re used to? Researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, made that experience and used it to uncover a mysterious molecular sunscreen. … Read more
The crested rat chews the poison arrow plant, extracting a deadly plant poison that is then smeared on its fur for defence.… Read more
During these cold winter months I long for the sensation of biting into a ripe peach or a deliciously soft strawberry. It is possible to get my hands on some fruit now, however, they are certainly not as mouth-watering as in summer. They are hard, and sour and make me miserable. … Read more
A new machine-learning based pipeline that could help phenotype plants en masse, might just break a major bottleneck in the process of understanding what plant genes really do.… Read more
While the rest of us were distracted by the events of 2020, a desert plant quietly announced itself as a new cousin to the plant lab rat, Arabidopsis.… Read more
Agathis trees have survived since dinosaurs roamed the earth, but throughout the ages, tiny burrowing insects have made their life hard.… Read more
Scientists, ultimately, want to understand things. And while true understanding, often comes through patience and skill – months or years of careful observation and measured experimentation – a lot of the time, the fastest way to understand something, is to F*** that something up.… Read more