The study of evolutionary history and how species have developed into the modern forms we know them for today has always been a continuing and ongoing process. As new knowledge on ancient and extinct species is unearthed and matched to their evolved living descendants, we are then able to further fill out the complicated pattern […]
Plant mimicry has always been a rather select field, both in nature and in scientific study, though not necessarily uncommon in the former. This selectivity is due to the fact that it serves no direct benefit in the battle between different plants for sunlight or other sorts of land superiority. Instead, before humans, mimicry of […]
The horrors of nematodes may never cease, but they can teach us some surprising things, including a method of plant control that may completely alter our approach in dealing with the nematodes themselves. Infestation and Takeover The first step to explaining this new insight is to break down how the nematodes infect plants in the […]
Plant growth is such that plants always strive to maximize the amount of sunlight, their energy source, that is hitting their leaves at all times. Due to the often dense growing of many types of plants, it is a constant battle between them to either grow higher to overshadow the rest or seek other methods […]
It has long been thought that fossils were a dead medium. There was no real way to obtain any sort of genetic material from them due to the vast time periods involved and so taxonomists and other researchers just had to do their best at fitting ancient creatures into the tree of life however they […]
Science in the field of biotechnology is changing rapidly and the effects of new technology is rippling out to affect many other parts of biology and medicine as a whole. It cannot be overstated how much of a revolution CRISPR tools have been and continue to be to dozens of scientific fields. While it may […]
The key to helping plants grow is to understand the mechanisms behind and inside their growth, to learn why they decided to sprout at one time over another and why flowering at one point happened and not at another time. Due to these processes being intrinsic to the life cycle of the plant, tied up […]
The modern world has a multitude of issues it is facing, most of which filter through and incorporate agriculture in some fashion. Whether speaking of climate change, overpopulation, deforestation, or any number of other topics, the food supply and how we produce it is involved. For a significant chunk of the countries in the world, […]
Genetics can get weird. Especially so in plants, which are more conducive to hybridization and duplications of their entire genome. Polyploidy, as such a duplication is called, is often rampant across ancestral lineages of plants and makes species classification taxing, to say the least. The Flowers and the Carnivores The flowering plants, also known as […]
Viruses have a variety of tactics they employ in their attacks on bacteria, plants, and animals like us. Their ultimate goal is to hijack the systems of the cell and convert them into producing more of themselves. Some viruses simply reconfigure construction molecules to directly make viral parts, others insert their own viral genes into […]