Plants
- Plants
How passion, luck and sweat saved some of North America’s rarest plants
As the list of plants no longer found in the wild grows, botanists and conservationists search for signs of hope — and sometimes get lucky.
- Plants
How Venus flytraps store short-term ‘memories’ of prey
Glowing Venus flytraps reveal how calcium buildup in the cells of leaves acts as a short-term “memory” that helps the plants identify prey.
- Life
This parasitic plant eavesdrops on its host to know when to flower
Dodder plants have no leaves to sense when to bloom, so the parasites rely on a chemical cue from their hosts instead.
- Plants
New Guinea has more known plant species than any island in the world
In the first verified count of plants on New Guinea, a team of 99 botany experts identified more than 13,600 species.
- Life
Wild bees add about $1.5 billion to yields for just six U.S. crops
Native bees help pollinate blueberries, cherries and other crops on commercial farms.
- Plants
This parasitic plant consists of just flashy flowers and creepy suckers
With only four known species, Langsdorffia are thieves stripped down to their essentials.
- Tech
Bubble-blowing drones may one day aid artificial pollination
Drones are too clumsy to rub pollen on flowers and not damage them. But blowing pollen-laden bubbles may help the machines be better pollinators.
- Life
Pollen-deprived bumblebees may speed up plant blooming by biting leaves
In a pollen shortage, some bees nick holes in tomato leaves that accelerate flowering, and pollen production, by weeks.
- Chemistry
Ancient recipes led scientists to a long-lost natural blue
Led by medieval texts, scientists hunted down a plant and extracted from its tiny fruits a blue watercolor whose origins had long been a mystery.
- Chemistry
Beets bleed red but a chemistry tweak can create a blue hue
A new blue dye derived from beet juice might prove an alternative to synthetic blue dyes in foods, cosmetics or fabrics.
- Climate
How Hurricane Maria’s heavy rains devastated Puerto Rico’s forests
Hurricane Maria wreaked havoc on Puerto Rican forests in some unexpected ways.
- Animals
A year of big numbers startled the world into talking about nature
One million species are at risk. Three billion birds have been lost. Plus surges in Amazon burning.
