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Magazine
In the May 11 & 25 SN: High-tech cricket farming, AI learns from Minecraft, looking for lithium, a new hominid species is named, signs of life in dead pig brains, Cherokee cave texts decoded, water molecules on the moon and more.
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News
Some plants use hairy roots and acid to access nutrients in rock
05/22/2019 - 07:00 Plants, EcologyNo soil? No problem. Some herbaceous shrubs living on rocky mountains in Brazil use roots equipped with fine hairs and acids to dissolve rocks and extract the key nutrient phosphorus. The discovery, published in the May Functional Ecology, helps explain how a variety of plants can survive in impoverished environments.
“While most people tend to view nutrient-poor environments as less...
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News
How allergens in pollen help plants do more than make you sneeze
05/19/2019 - 08:00 Health, Plants, Immune Science“Are plants trying to kill us?” allergy sufferers often ask Deborah Devis.
A plant molecular geneticist at the University of Adelaide’s Waite campus in Australia, Devis should know the answer better than most. She is chugging through the last few months of a Ph.D. that involves predicting how grasses use pollen proteins that make people sneeze, wheeze and weep for days on end.
What...
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News in Brief
An ancient pouch reveals the hallucinogen stash of an Andes shaman
05/06/2019 - 15:00 Archaeology, PlantsA leather bag stuffed with ritual items, found high in the Andes Mountains, has yielded rare clues to South American shamans’ hallucinatory visions around 1,000 years ago.
One artifact in the radiocarbon-dated bag, a pouch stitched out of three fox snouts, contains chemical traces of five mind-altering substances obtained from at least three plants, say bioarchaeologist Melanie Miller of...
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Feature
Climate change made the Arctic greener. Now parts of it are turning brown.
04/11/2019 - 07:00 Climate, Ecosystems, PlantsThe Chugach people of southern Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula have picked berries for generations. Tart blueberries and sweet, raspberry-like salmonberries — an Alaska favorite — are baked into pies and boiled into jams. But in the summer of 2009, the bushes stayed brown and the berries never came.
For three more years, harvests failed. “It hit the communities very hard,” says Nathan Lojewski...
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News
A major crop pest can make tomato plants lie to their neighbors
04/04/2019 - 06:00 Plants, Animals, AgricultureDon’t blame the tomato. Tiny pests called silverleaf whiteflies can make a tomato plant spread deceptive scents that leave its neighbors vulnerable to attach.
Sap-sucking Bemisia tabaci, an invasive menace to a wide range of crops, are definitely insects. Yet when they attack a tomato plant, prompting a silent shriek of scents, the plant starts smelling as if bacteria or fungi have...
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Letters to the Editor
Readers have questions about Ultima Thule, thirsty plants and vitamin D
Which way is up?03/07/2019 - 06:00 Astronomy, Plants, HealthInitial observations of the Kuiper Belt object MU69, nicknamed Ultima Thule, suggested it had a snowmanlike shape. Ultima Thule’s two lobes are connected by a narrow neck that appears brighter than the rest of the space rock’s surface, Lisa Grossman reported in “New Horizons shows Ultima Thule looks like a snowman, or maybe BB-8” (SN: 2/2/19, p. 7).
“The photo of...
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It's Alive
Shutdown aside, Joshua trees live an odd life
02/06/2019 - 08:00 Plants, Conservation, Science & SocietyA year when vandals trashed a Joshua tree in a national park during a U.S. government shutdown is a good time to talk about what’s so unusual about these iconic plants.
The trees’ chubby branches ending in rosettes of pointy green leaves add a touch of Dr. Seuss to the Mojave Desert in the U.S. Southwest. Its two species belong to the same family as agave and, believe it or not,...
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Science Visualized
How light-farming chloroplasts morph into defensive warriors
01/28/2019 - 08:00 Plants, Cells, Immune ScienceChloroplasts may seem like docile farmers of light. But inside these microscopic plant and algal cell structures lurks the spirit of a warrior.
When a pathogen attacks a plant, chloroplasts stop making food from sunlight and rush to the site of infection to help fend off the invader. Now, researchers have identified the protein that mobilizes these organelles into a defensive army.
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News
A new way to genetically tweak photosynthesis boosts plant growth
01/03/2019 - 14:00 Agriculture, Plants, GeneticsA genetic hack to make photosynthesis more efficient could be a boon for agricultural production, at least for some plants.
This feat of genetic engineering simplifies a complex, energy-expensive operation that many plants must perform during photosynthesis known as photorespiration. In field tests, genetically modifying tobacco in this way increased plant growth by over 40 percent. If...
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News
More plants survived the world’s greatest mass extinction than thought
12/20/2018 - 14:12 Paleontology, PlantsSome ancient plants were survivors.
A collection of roughly 255-million-year-old fossils suggests that three major plant groups existed earlier than previously thought, and made it through a mass extinction that wiped out more than 90 percent of Earth’s marine species and roughly 70 percent of land vertebrates.
The fossils, described in the Dec. 21 Science, push back the earliest...