Flower

For the first time, scientists have grown plants in soil from the moon collected by NASA's Apollo astronauts.

Machine learning programs that can classify leaves and place them in biological families may unlock new clues about the evolution of plant life, but only if scientists understand what the computers are seeing. A team led by Penn State scientists combined a machine learning approach and traditional botanical language to find and describe new features for fossil identification.

A pair of University of Michigan researchers are putting the "pee" in peony.

What will happen to the world's forests in a warming world? Will increased atmospheric carbon dioxide help trees grow? Or will extremes in temperature and precipitation hold growth back? That all depends on whether tree growth is more limited by the amount of photosynthesis or by the environmental conditions that affect tree cell growth—a fundamental question in tree biology, and one for which the answer wasn't well understood, until now.

Biologist Xinnian Dong says her "best Christmas gift ever" arrived in the form of a phone call. The call was from her longtime friend and collaborator at Duke University, Pei Zhou, who rang with long-awaited news: they had finally solved the structure of the plant protein NPR1.

The grain called finger millet may not be well-known outside of Africa, but it is an important crop to the region. Finger millet has been farmed in eastern Africa for thousands of years. However, breeding the crop for better traits has been difficult for local farmers.

About 75% of food crops and more than 80% of wild plants require pollination by insects. The value of crop pollination alone is estimated at up to 577 billion US dollars per year worldwide. The best-known pollinators are bees, but these are by no means the only insects that provide this service for humans and nature—flies, wasps, beetles, butterflies and moths also play important roles.

New Mexico and Arizona are facing a dangerously early fire season. It has left neighborhoods in ashes and is having such devastating effects that the governor of New Mexico on May 3, 2022, urged President Joe Biden to issue a disaster declaration. Over 600 fires had broken out in the two states by early May, and large wildfires had burned through hundreds of homes near Ruidoso and Las Vegas, New Mexico, and Flagstaff, Arizona.

Scientists have found that a key modern group of reptiles that includes lizards and snakes—known as squamates—diverged in the Jurassic period, 50 million years earlier than previously thought.

Two-pore channels (TPCs) are ancient ion channels present in the cells of both animals and plants. In animals, including humans, these ion channels play important roles in biological activities in various tissues, such as in the brain and nervous system. All land plant species contain TPC genes; in many higher vascular plants such as Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis) and Oryza sativa (rice), a single TPC gene is involved in the activity of slow vacuolar (SV) channels (voltage-dependent cation […]