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…
Recently I gave a workshop about online engagement and blogging in our Faculty. The result of this was a bunch of new tweeters and new science blogs on the block. To keep the momentum going, we started a “Breakfast Blogging…
“Don’t be afraid of hard work. Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Don’t let others discourage you or tell you that you can’t do it. In my day I was told women didn’t go into chemistry. I saw no reason why we…
This discovery by Nobel prize winner Dr. Osama Shimomura known as Green Fluorescent has revolutionized molecular biology. Movement of living molecules generally can be seen but the advent of GFP made the invisible visible. The protein, found in jellyfish helps…
Yesterday I came across this video that demonstrates how to make Glowing Sushi, using genetically modified zebrafish to produce a fluorescent “kryptonite roll”. When I first watched the video, my main question was: Why would you want to use fluorescent…
What did I do at work today? Shuttled DNA into bacteria. Dipped arabidopsis plants into bacteria. Meeting. Another meeting. Another meeting. Oh, and I made a balloon kebab! Why did I make one? Because I can! Just kidding. Because we…
I met Geraint Parry on Twitter, where he tweets under @LiverpoolPlants about his research. Fortunately, my colleagues were able to confirm that he indeed is real and a plant cell biologist studying the nuclear pore complex. He also scored 6 out…
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,…
