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…
I like this video review of the activities that happened during International Fascination of Plants Day 2012 at the John Innes Centre!
Would you like to know what’s currently going on in plant science and what research areas are out there? I am curating a list of plant scientists on Twitter – which without a doubt is not complete, so if you…
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…
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,…
Will humans one day live on other planets than on Earth? I don’t know the answer to that. But I know that if humans attempt to settle on extraterrestrial land, we will want to take plants with us to provide…
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…
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…
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,…
Happy Valentine’s Day! Looking for something more special than “just” a bunch of flowers? Read my post at the “Annals of Botany” blog to find out how to make rainbow roses. http://aobblog.com/2012/02/roses-are-red-but-they-dont-need-to-be-if-you-know-how-to-use-food-dyes-and-fibonacci/ A rainbow rose. Photo by Ryan Amos
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…
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…