People tend to think that plants don’t do much from day to day – certainly when I asked my first-year students at the start of the course, they were far more interested in animals than in plants. Poor plants! But then, to the casual eye I guess they’re fairly static creatures 🙂 However, it turns […]
Continue readingCategory: plant responses to the environment
appeal to antiquity? appeal to nature? bingo!
I was idly skimming the Herald's website when I came across an article with the headline "Is plant medicine really that effective?" Since the article appears to be in the nature of an advertorial, the answer is, it depends on who you ask. Unlike man-made chemical drugs that have been developed as novel medicines from the 19th […]
Continue readingno, we have no GM tomatoes
EDIT (11 Feb): it seems that the writer of the ‘we’re eating poison’ piece has decided to remove that page from their site. Which I guess is an improvement over the original. However, the good people over at Metabunk provided some useful links to the past, and this site appears to be the source used […]
Continue readingmost excellent epiphytes
A couple of years ago I spent a lovely afternoon in the huge domed glasshouses of Singapore's "Gardens on the Bay". The 'cloud forest' was my favourite – both for the concept & for the wonderful range of epiphytes on show there. So you'll understand that I enjoyed reading about it again on this blog, […]
Continue readingpresenting on plants at WCeLfest
For the last few years our Centre for e-Learning has run WCeLfest – a day of presentations & discussion around using various technology tools to enhance teaching & learning. I always find these sessions very valuable as there are a lot of people doing some really interesting things in their classrooms, & there's always something […]
Continue readingfirst supertrees – now super domes
After goggling (a mixture of gobsmacked & ogling) the supertrees, our little party of escapees from the day’s official IBO program made our way into the Flower Dome, the first of the two great conservatories in Singapore’s Gardens in the Bay. Cue more ‘oh, wow!’ moments as the scale of the building became apparent – […]
Continue readingplants – more than you expect (again)
I often think it’s a real pity that so many students seem to actively dislike learning about plants. Why is this? Is it because plants don’t seem to ‘do’ anything interesting? I used some of the information described here in a test question this year – the results were a salutory reminder to spend more […]
Continue readingAlgae & isopods – a unique symbiosis
When I set essays for my first-year students to write during the semester, I try to give them a scientific paper on each topic to start them off. This means that I need to do some extra bedtime reading as I need to select those papers carefully. Today’s post is based on one of those: […]
Continue readingcaterpillar drool enhances plants’ calls for help
A while ago now I discussed how some plants are able to warn others when they’re under attack by grazing animals. Now it seems that these responses and interactions are even more subtle – a new paper describes how signalling chemicals in tobacco plants can be altered by the grazers’ saliva (Allmann & Baldwin, 2010). […]
Continue readinghow a fungus avoids a plant’s immune system
Your immune system is a wonderful, complex, multipartite mechanism that usually allows you to fight off the attentions of the various pathogenic organisms (bacterial, fungal, and viral) that you’ll meet during your life. I say ‘usually’ because it’s not always successful on its own, and even where it is, you can be laid low for […]
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