Category: Plants

How I became a plant cell biologist

This is a transcript of my three minute presentation at Science Oxford’s closing down event  ‘Science Oxford versus the Rest of the World’. I drew the images with the iPad app ‘Paper by Fifty Three‘. Hello. I am a plant…

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Run, aphid, run!

I just stumbled across this nice video by Rothamsted Research. It’s used on their website to illustrate the research on genetically modified wheat by John Pickett et al. and shows how aphids react to injection of an alarm pheromone into…

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Happy Fascination of Plants Day!

Today is the first ever Fascination of Plants Day and I am very excited, as my Twitter friends will be able to testify (tweet ALL the plants!). All over the world there will be plant-related activities today, in Botanic Gardens,…

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Spring is here!

I love photography, and especially makro photography of flowers and other plants. Today was my first makro session of the year and I managed to get totally lost in the small world of flowers for over an hour. It’s fascinating…

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How much is that pet plant in the window?

I hadn’t realised that there was research on creating interactive pet plants that are able to display emotions! From the description of “My Green Pet” (Hwang et al. 2010): “The difficulty that children have in perceiving plants as living entities…

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I bet plants look good on the dancefloor

Plants don’t do much all day except sitting around and photosynthesising.Right? Wrong!! Plants move constantly, but much slower than animals. Therefore they manage to trick us by pretending to be really boring. But if you put up a hidden camera,…

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Why peanuts are a lie

The other day I was digging through my nut storage box (yes, we have enough nut varieties for cooking and baking to hand to give them their own box). I was looking for pine nuts to use in a pasta…

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When You Wish Upon a Star Anise

What spice represents Christmas for you? Ginger (Zingiber officinale) because of its importance in the international gingerbread house construction industry? Cinnamon, the dried bark of the Sri Lanka tree Cinnamomum verum, as an essential ingredient for Christmas candles, cookies and…

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