Plants

  1. Plants

    ‘Lab Girl’ invites readers into hidden world of plants

    In Lab Girl, geobiologist Hope Jahren reveals secret lives of plants — and scientists.

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  2. Life

    Cities create accidental experiments in plant, animal evolution

    To look for evolution in human-scale time, pick a city and watch a lizard. Or some clover.

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  3. Plants

    Scary tomato appears to bleed

    A new species of Australian bush tomato bleeds when injured and turns bony in old age.

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  4. Plants

    Venus flytraps use defensive genes for predation

    Genetic analysis suggests that Venus flytraps repurposed plant defenses against herbivores to live the carnivore life.

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  5. Plants

    Here’s what a leaf looks like during a fatal attack of bubbles

    Office equipment beats synchrotrons in showing how drought lets air bubbles kill the water-carrier network of veins in plant leaves.

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  6. Plants

    Nightshade plants bleed sugar as a call to ants for backup

    Bittersweet nightshade produces sugary wound goo to lure in ant protectors that eat herbivores, researchers have found.

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  7. Plants

    Prions may help plants remember

    A plant protein has passed lab tests for prionlike powers as molecular memory.

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  8. Plants

    Plants might remember with prions

    A plant protein has passed lab tests for prionlike powers as molecular memory.

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  9. Plants

    New species of tumbleweed is just as bad as its parents

    Two species of invasive tumbleweeds hybridized into a third. A new study finds it probably will be invasive, too.

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  10. Microbes

    Diverse yeasts make their home on coffee and cacao beans

    Yeasts in coffee and cacao are shaped by geography and human migration, genetic analysis finds.

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  11. Ecosystems

    Australian fairy circles first to be found outside Africa

    Strange patterns of grassland bald spots called fairy circles show up in Western Australia.

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  12. Plants

    How to keep seagrasses as happy as a clam

    Drought can do more damage to seagrass meadows if their partnership with clams break down.

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