Ferns came along more than 200 million years before the dinosaurs walked the Earth. They were food for plant-eating dinosaurs and they’re really great survivors. Heather, age 8, wants to know more.
If you want to live on Mars, you’re going to need to grow food. Seeds are naturally equipped to handle challenging Earth environments, but how well can they survive what they’ll encounter off-planet?
Inserting a random DNA mishmash into a plant or bacterium directs it to make a novel protein. Sifting through the resulting molecules, researchers may find ones have medical or agricultural uses.
Australia’s herbaria are a priceless repository, holding around 8 million samples that map historical and current distributions of native and introduced plant species in Australia.
American ginseng, a slow-growing native plant long used in traditional medicine, was abundant in colonial times. Now illegal harvesting and other stresses are pushing it close to extinction.
Pollen is all around us, is extremely durable and can provide clues about where someone’s been. A new genetic technique will make it easier to use pollen evidence in criminal investigations.
When botany and linguistics collide: pumpkins are fruits and there’s technically no such thing as a vegetable. But try telling that to a five-year-old and see how far you get.
Modern agriculture is synonymous with monoculture. That lack of diversity is bad news for plants’ natural immune defenses. Researchers are figuring out how to help plants fend off microbes – without pesticides.
The fossilized plant Montsechia relied on water to disseminate its genetic material and may rewrite the book on when and how the first flowering plants evolved.
OK, it doesn’t smell great. But skunk cabbage has a unique secret weapon to help it be one of the first plants to emerge from the snow at the end of winter.
Indigenous Australian practices, honed over thousands of years, weave science with storytelling. In this Indigenous science series, we look at different aspects of First Australians’ traditional life and…
One of nature’s most spectacular events occurs every autumn, when the leaves of hardwood trees burst into brilliant color before falling to the ground. These autumnal displays in the eastern United States…
A little item buried on the inside pages of newspapers recently caused a small stir. Latin plant names, it was claimed, were “in danger of dying out”, following a decision by the International Botanical…