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.

SONG: “Particle.” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant (with apologies to Antonio Vivaldi).

SOURCE: Based on “How Fungi Create the Amazon’s Clouds”, Time, 5 September 2012, as used in the post “Mushrooms that make the weather.”

ABSTRACT: Unlike the last few songs, this one has nothing to do with a SongFu prompt; we’d [...]

Time travels to the Amazon to reveal the fungi that creates the clouds:

The clouds in the Amazon, just like everywhere else, consist of water vapor clinging to tiny clumps of carbon compounds. In forested areas, the carbon compounds are byproducts of plants’ metabolism; in populated areas, they are often from human pollution. Most of the time, atmospheric chemists [...]

Cambridge researchers have determined that an iridescent berry is the brightest thing in nature:

The ‘brightest’ thing in nature, the Pollia condensata fruit, does not get its blue colour from pigment but instead uses structural colour – a method of reflecting light of particular wavelengths- new research reveals. The study was published today in the journal PNAS.

…

Dr Beverley Glover [...]