Plants talk. Using fungus-phones.
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 […]
botany
Science Art: Cattleya Maxima Backhousei by John Nugent Fitch, 1886
A hothouse flower, far from home. Mr. Fitch drew this picture – one of an awful lot – for The Orchid Album: Comprised of Coloured […]
Science Art: Plant Cell Structure, by Russell Kightley
Australian digital artist Russell Kightley does scientific visualization. I found this particular vision on Scientific Illustration.
Durian mystery revealed: why *does* it stink so deliciously?
Laboratory Equipment plunges to the bottom of a pressing mystery – why the “king of fruits” packs such a pungent punch: Martin Steinhaus, from the […]
What does the zombie-making fungus fear? Its own parasite.
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 […]
Science Art: Simplest Mode of Development of Monads and Fungi from the Pellicle, 1871.
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 […]
SONG: Particle
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”, […]
The mushrooms that make the weather.
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 […]
The shiniest living thing.
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 […]
Why don’t we know what blew up in 774?
Nature asks a question that gets more peculiar the more one considers it. A Japanese researcher looking at tree rings from two ancient cedars found […]
Science Art: Figure 1, “Biosystematic Studies in Papaver, Section Oxytona,” Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 1974
Click to embiggen Poppies. For Memorial Day. Funny how that saturated color automatically looks so 1970s now, when all they were trying to do was […]
Plastic-eating mushrooms clean us up.
TG Daily reports on a new hope for clearing up our old landfills – by feeding the plastic to a very special rain-forest mushroom: Pestalotiopsis […]
Blood rice.
Not rice the cost of which is blood (I mean, not as in “blood diamonds”) but rice that PopSci says actually grows human blood: HSA […]
Science Art: Hickory, Norway Spruce, Chestnut, and Red Cedar & Pitch Pine, L. Prang chromolithograph.
From the New York Public Library Digital Gallery. Best wishes for a well-garlanded Yuletide.
Science Art: Xylophylla, by Olof Swartz, 1791 (detail)
Click to embiggen From a page of botanical babies drawn by Swedish botanist Olof Swartz just before the dawn of the 19th century. Swartz was […]