Flowers: What You See Versus What the Bees See

The eye of a honey bee (photo credits).
Flowers look very different to insect pollinators, such as honey bees, compared to what we mammals see.
As the photo on the left shows, bees have compound eyes.
How a bee sees patterns as a result of its compound eyes is wonderfully illustrated at Andy Giger’s B-Eye website.
Like humans, bees [...]

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Plant Gas – How Humans, Insects, and Other Plants May Be Affected

Can humans measure photosynthesis on a global scale?
Since plants consume CO2 during photosynthesis, one way is to measure the relative amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) using satellites (click on photo at left for more info).
But plants also release CO2 as a product of respiration. This has confounded efforts to accurately measure photosynthesis at ecosystem [...]

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Plant “RAM”? – Some Plants Can Record Environmental Experiences For Future Reference By Altering Their DNA

Plant memory?
Can some plants access past experiences so that this information can be incorporated into new responses, such as flowering?
The answer is yes! (as illustrated in the photo on the the left).
This picture shows a cabbage plant that was grown for five years in the laboratory of Dr. Rick Amasino. (For size comparison the [...]

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Self-Digesting Plants? – Potential Key to Biofuel Production from Plant Biomass

Remember the melting witch in The Wizard of Oz?
What if corn stalks, for instance, could be induced to “melt” from tough biomass into a sugary puddle? That is, to breakdown their cellulosic biomass into a solution of glucose and other sugars.
If so, it would be much more cost effective to use corn biomass as a [...]

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