Articles about 'plant'

An investigation into the local histories of saffron in Cambridgeshire.

Walking at ‘botanist pace’ on Mount Terror in South Africa, Dr Ángela Cano likes to stop and smell the succulents. She then measures, photographs, presses specimens and gathers seeds. Her work is helping to safeguard some of the rarest plants on Earth.

Researchers have found that a common plant owes the dazzling blue colour of its fruit to fat in its cellular structure, the first time this type of colour production has been observed in nature.

A movement is under way that will fast-forward the design of new plant traits. It takes inspiration from engineering and the software industry, and is being underpinned in Cambridge and Norwich by an initiative called OpenPlant.

Scientists have, for the first time, discovered a gene that contributes to the ‘coppicing response’ of willows - the ability to make new growth when cut back to their base or stump.

Plants use sugars to tell the time of day, according to research published in Nature today.

A breakthrough in understanding the evolutionary pathways along which some crops have become significantly more productive than others may help scientists boost yields of some staple foodstuffs.

A Cambridge Science Festival lecture on Wednesday (13 March 2013) will look at how plants grow through repeating patterns and discuss what we can learn from them in developing smart materials.  

Quantum scale photosynthesis in biological systems which inhabit extreme environments could hold key to new designs for solar energy and nanoscale devices.

A Venezuelan pitcher plant uses wettable hairs to make insects slip into its deadly traps.