podcast

Hi! Would you like some cool plant facts? We have a fresh new paper about biofortified tomatoes that give you your daily dose of vitamin D, a new oldest tree and an explanation of why catnip likes to be a cat bed.

• Biofortified tomatoes provide a new route to vitamin D sufficiency | Nature Plants
• Epigenetic features drastically impact CRISPR-Cas9 efficacy in plants  
• New CRISPR-combo boosts genome editing power in plants — ScienceDaily
• ‘Hey, tree. You are my friend’: Assessing multiple values of nature through letters to trees
• Is this the oldest tree in the world?

Would you swap your cat for a praying mantis? What about a nice house plant? This week, we are asking the big questions. Also news from plant science, a new biggest plant has been found and more potent cannabis from Israel.… Read more

This week, we’re talking about a cool gene regulatory mechanism that keeps ribosomes busy, the truth behind French lillies and which plants best not to pick.

• Jérémie Makiese – Miss You – Belgium 🇧🇪 – Official Music Video – Eurovision 2022
• Noise reduction by upstream open reading frames | Nature Plants
• Wu, HW., Fajiculay, E., Wu, JF. et al. Noise reduction by upstream open reading frames. Nat. Plants (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-022-01136-8
• Upstream open reading frame – Wikipedia 
• Stop picking carnivorous penis plants, Cambodian environmental officials plead | Live Science 
• Fleur-de-lis – Wikipedia 
• Making New Climate Data from Old Timber | The New Yorker 
• A first: Scientists grow plants in soil from the Moon — ScienceDaily 
• Plant-inspired TransfOrigami microfluidics 
• The invaders destroyed the National Gene Bank of Plants of Ukraine | odessa-journal.com

It’s travel season here at Plants and Pipettes and so we thought we’d share some travel facts from the plant world! How do plants travel? Is collecting trees cool? How does humidity propel seeds forward? We have the answers.

• Martha Stewart just flew private with eight trees—see the photo to prove it
• A tree crosses the sea: how the richest man in Georgia buys and transports the bushes of the poorest farms – Kiratas
• Taming the Garden (2021) – IMDb
• Legends of the coco de mer – Wikipedia
• Long Distance Seed Dispersal by Forest Elephants | Ecology and Evolution
• Small mammal personalities generate context dependence in the seed dispersal mutualism | PNAS 
• Watch a bunchberry dogwood plant in action | Science News
• Hook-and-loop fastener – Wikipedia
• Cabbage Patch: Fifth Crop Harvested Aboard Space Station | NASA
• Travel in city road networks follows similar transport trade-off principles to neural and plant arbors | Journal of The Royal Society Interface
• Moon tree – Wikipedia
• other sticky plants: Ultimate Hitchhiker
• The walk and jump of horsetail spores (Equisetum) 
• Fastest Plant on Earth | Science News for Students
• Oilbirds disperse large seeds at longer distance than extinct megafauna | Scientific Reports
• China’s Moon Plants Are Dead | Space 
• China grows plants on the moon!

This week, we’re talking about the worst favourite plant ever, keystone genes and how surfers can be scientists. Also: your dog’s breed doesn’t mean what you think it means. … Read more

Mysteriously we came back yet again for more plant facts. This week, we’re checking a plant’s pores, take about unextinct flowers and why some plants eat the very insects that pollinate them. 

• Books — Information is Beautiful 
• Erik Nylund
• Incredible x-axis here. (twitter)  
• Beautiful News / Visualising Victorian News – The British Library
• Expression of a CO2-permeable aquaporin enhances mesophyll conductance in the C4 species Setaria viridis | eLife 
• The power of air: Airborne environmental DNA plant community monitoring
• Airborne environmental DNA metabarcoding detects more diversity, with less sampling effort, than a traditional plant community survey | BMC Ecology and Evolution
• High-quality genome assembly of a Pestalotiopsis fungus using DIY-friendly methods [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]
• Leonardo da Vinci’s rule for how trees branch was close, but wrong | Science News
• Physical Review E – Accepted Paper: Experimental evidence for logarithmic fractal structure of botanical trees
• Tree Branching: Leonardo da Vinci’s Rule versus Biomechanical Models – PMC
• We Just Found a Secret Trait That May Help Redwood Trees Survive Climate Change
• Lost South American Wildflower “Extinctus” Not Extinct After All – “Was It Really That Easy?”

It’s our belated easter episode! We talk about the Queen of Vegetables, the mighty eggplant. We filled almost an hour with eggplant facts, factoids and words that merely resemble a fact from a distance. … Read more

We finally found a way to market non-dairy milk as milk without upsetting any consumer or dairy company: cowpea milk. Plus: we discuss plantibodies, micronutrients and, weirdly enough, ocelot pee.… Read more

We begin this week with a looooong discussion about the movie “Little Joe”. It’s fun (talking about the movie, not the movie itself. Don’t watch it). Also we have new research about epimutagenesis, grain-free ice cream and the benefits of weeds. … Read more

Kat Austen is an artist and researcher based in Berlin. Kat was so kind to talk to us about her work about microplastics in trees, her view on science and art and her upcoming projects. Welcome to Plants and Pipettes: Kat Austen!… Read more