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Magazine
In the July 6 SN: Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, stone tool dates face scrutiny, ocean plastic goes deep, records of Inca taxation, erosion spurred plate tectonics and more.
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Science Stats
Planting trees could buy more time to fight climate change than thought
07/17/2019 - 09:02 Ecology, Plants, ClimateA whopping new estimate of the power of planting trees could rearrange to-do lists for fighting climate change.
Planting trees on 0.9 billion hectares of land could trap about two-thirds the amount of carbon released by human activities since the start of the Industrial Revolution, a new study finds. The planet has that much tree-friendly land available for use. Without knocking down...
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Reviews & Previews
‘Slime’ shows how algae have shaped our climate, evolution and daily lives
07/01/2019 - 07:00 Plants, Microbes, Science & SocietySlimeRuth KassingerHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, $26
A slew of popular-science books have set out to convince readers that some overlooked, obscure or generally disdained category of thing is actually wildly important, whether it’s salt, garbage or beavers (SN: 8/4/18, p. 28). Slime, all about algae, is one of those books.
If you’re skeptical that algae can sustain such an...
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News in Brief
‘Sneezing’ plants may spread pathogens to their neighbors
06/18/2019 - 19:01 Biophysics, Plants, FungiNext time you pass a wheat field on a dewy morning, you might want to say “gesundheit.”
That’s because some sick plants can “sneeze” — shooting out tiny water droplets laden with pathogens, scientists report June 19 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. In wheat plants infected with the fungus Puccinia triticina, coalescing dew droplets flew away from the leaves they were on and...
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News
People may have smoked marijuana in rituals 2,500 years ago in western China
06/12/2019 - 14:01 Archaeology, PlantsMourners gathered at a cemetery in what’s now western China around 2,500 years ago to inhale fumes of burning cannabis plants that wafted from small wooden containers. High levels of the psychoactive compound THC in those ignited plants, also known as marijuana, would have induced altered states of consciousness.
Evidence of this practice comes from Jirzankal Cemetery in Central Asia’s...
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News
Some fungi trade phosphorus with plants like savvy stockbrokers
06/10/2019 - 10:00 Fungi, Plants, EcologySome stringy fungi are tough negotiators, trading nutrients shrewdly with plants.
An advance in tracking the nutrient phosphorus has revealed new details of ancient trading networks between fungi and plants. Some fungal species grow what are called arbuscular mycorrhizal connections underground, reaching intimately into plant roots. These fungi pull phosphorus from the soil and trade it...
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News in Brief
How one fern hoards toxic arsenic in its fronds and doesn’t die
06/04/2019 - 09:00 Pollution, Ecosystems, PlantsThe Chinese brake fern looks unassuming. But Pteris vittata has a superpower: It sucks up arsenic, tucks the toxic metal away in its fronds and lives to tell the tale.
No other plants or animals are known to match its ability to hoard the heavy metal. Now researchers have identified three genes essential to how the fern accumulates arsenic, according to a study in the May 20 Current...
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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...