Energy Post calls it “the BIGGEST BREAKTHROUGH EVER!” That seems a bit much, but it is interesting that a Boeing-sponsored group in Abu Dhabi has figured out how to make super-clean, super-cheap oil from salt-tolerant desert plants:

What researchers at the Masdar Institute have been studying is a category of plants called halophytes. These plants have naturally evolved to [...]

National Geographic reveals what really goes on in a plant’s… mind?… when sap-thirsty plant killers are on the prowl:

[University of Wisconsin researcher John] Orrock and botanist Simon Gilroy show that black mustard plants can “hear” the chemical signals of approaching plant-eaters—and prepare to fight back.

“One of the things that makes plants so ecologically interesting is that they can’t [...]

In the 11th century, this was the pinnacle of medical knowledge – a book called Kitab fi al-adwiyah al-mufradah compiled by an Andalusian scholar Abu Ja`far al-Ghafiqi.

It’s an illustrated guide to medicinal plants – a materia medica. Al-Ghafiqi, according to later historians, was “the greatest savant of medicinal plants, their names and their properties, and his work had no [...]

BBC opens the weird world of vegetable communication, revealing the fungal networks plants use to signal one another:

But below ground, most land plants are connected by fungi called mycorrhizae.

The new study, published in Ecology Letters, is the first to demonstrate these fungi also aid in communication.

Researchers from the University of Aberdeen, the James Hutton Institute and Rothamsted [...]

A hothouse flower, far from home.

Mr. Fitch drew this picture – one of an awful lot – for The Orchid Album: Comprised of Coloured Figures and Descriptions of New, Rare and Beautiful Orchidaceous Plants, a book published by B.S. Williams “at the Victoria and Paradise Nurseries, Upper Holloway, N.”

I found it in the Bio Diversity Library, which is [...]

Australian digital artist Russell Kightley does scientific visualization.

I found this particular vision on Scientific Illustration.

Laboratory Equipment plunges to the bottom of a pressing mystery – why the “king of fruits” packs such a pungent punch:

Martin Steinhaus, from the German Research Center for Food Chemistry, and colleagues … set out to identify the big chemical players in the durian’s odor signature.

In doing so, they pinpointed 41 highly odor-active compounds, 24 of which [...]

Science Tech Daily says in the parasite world, it’s turtles all the way down. No matter how much of a *parasite* you are… like the brain-eating cordyceps fungus, for example… there’s going to be some kind of fearsome parasite that feeds on you:

Ophiocordyceps fungi depend on ants to reproduce and spread. …Eventually, the ant will clamp down onto [...]

A black-and-white birth sequence.

From archive.org’s copy of “On Some Heterogenetic Modes of Origin of Flagellated Monads, Fungus-Germs, and Ciliated Infusoria”, by H. Bastian in the 1871 volume of Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.