This hardy desert plant lives in the hostile Atacama Desert in Chile by sucking moisture out of passing fog. As water resources become ever more scarce, humans could follow suit.
Many living organisms generate and even detect static electricity in their natural environments. We must understand more to ensure we don’t disturb these delicate processes.
Plants support human health not only in terms of providing food, oxygen and shade. Our relationships with plants facilitate political decisions and actions that support health in the city.
An extract of a plant’s fruit in Nigeria could protect against seizure and prevent brain degeneration. It could therefore be studied further for the development of a new antiepileptic drug.
Many threatened plant species aren’t being targeted for conservation. Identifying which are closest to being lost forever is the first step to protect them.
Planting a garden for winter-active insects is a wonderful way to support local biodiversity. Your garden will thrive with the free pollination and pest control services the insects provide.
Seedkeeping can create a sense of home, reconnect communities with ancestral crops and preserve biodiversity and culturally significant crops for future generations.
We may think of plants as passive life forms, but they can cooperate, share resources, send one another warnings, and distance themselves from their communities when survival depends on it.
Trees and shrubs in cold-weather climates rely on certain signals, such as temperature and light, to know when to leaf out and bloom. Climate change is scrambling those signals.