State and federal authorities are investigating the mysterious loss of a significant swath of a rare desert wildflower that's being considered for federal protection at a contentious mine site in Nevada with some of the largest untapped lithium deposits in the world.

,Scientists Dr. Chris Thorogood at the University of Oxford Botanic Garden, and Dr. Fred Rumsey at London's Natural History Museum have just described a new form of a strange parasitic "vampire" plant known as "common broomrape."

One of nature's epic events is underway: Monarch butterflies' fall migration. Departing from all across the United States and Canada, the butterflies travel up to 2,500 miles to cluster at the same locations in Mexico or along the Pacific Coast where their great-grandparents spent the previous winter.

The stem cells tasked with creating and maintaining biological tissues have a difficult job. They have to precisely divide to form new specialized cells, which are destined to different fates even though they contain identical DNA. An obvious question then is: How do the cells divide in all the right ways to produce a healthy tissue? This was the grand motivating question for Andrew Muroyama, a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of Stanford University biologist Dominique Bergmann, as he monitored […]

If you want a dog to hunt something down, it helps to let them sniff an item to pick up the scent. Now, researchers reporting in Current Biology on September 17 have found that scent training honeybees in the hive might work in a similar way—and that this approach could make bees more efficient in pollinating a desired crop. The findings show that honeybees given food scented with odors that mimicked sunflowers supported a significant increase in sunflower crop production.

New findings about the building blocks of plant fibers open the door to advances in material engineering as well as food and agriculture, a Swedish-Australian research collaboration reported. The findings, published today in Nature Communications, identify the individual mechanical functions of wood hemicelluloses in plant cell walls for the first time.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Valencia (UV), the Valencian Institute of Agricultural Research (IVIA) and Rutgers University (RU) has just demonstrated that guttation, small watery drops exudated from the margins of plants leaves, is a nutrient-rich food source for beneficial insects (pollinators or those used for biological pest control). The study has been published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Hoya is a genus in the Asclepiadoideae, the milkweed subfamily of the flowering-plant family Apocynaceae. In the past decade, 15 new Hoya were reported in China. Together with the newly reported species and those recorded in the Flora of China, there are approximately 47 species and one variety of Hoya currently recognized in China.

Insect pollination is as important to Arctic plants as it is to plants further south. When flowers abound, the plants have to compete for pollinators. Researchers at the University of Helsinki reveal that higher temperatures cause the flowering periods of different plant species to pile up in time. As a consequence, climate change may affect the competitive relationships of plants.

The supply of smashed 'avo' is secure for generations after world-first research cryopreserved the tips of avocado shoots and then revived them to create healthy plants.