I previously posted the first episode of Growing Better staring Dr. Chris Martine. He's made a new episode about serotiny in jack pines. If you don't know what serotiny is, the video will teach you all about it. Keep 'em coming Martine!
Showing posts with label plants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label plants. Show all posts
18 March 2009
Growing Better - Serotiny
27 January 2009
Trapa necklace
I just came across this necklace on Ikyoto's Etsy shop called the 'Devil Nut Necklace'.
It's a photo of a seed of the plant genus Trapa. One species, Trapa natans, is an invasive aquatic plant in North America (it's native to Eurasia). It grows as a floating whorl of leaves on the surface of water and has seeds with 4 horns (a nice photo of the seeds can be seen here).
This plant is commonly called water chestnut but it isn't the same water chestnut you eat in stir fry dishes (those come from species of Eleocharis instead).
I always thought the seeds look like Dobby the house elf from Harry Potter, but I can also see the devil in these.
10 November 2008
NIghtshade Family
"Members of the NIghtshade Family" by Drew at Toothpaste for Dinner.
It's true, the Nightshade family (Solanaceae) contains several economically important species, although its doubtful Steve is one of them. Members of the Solanaceae make a number of different alkaloids (nicotine for example) - some toxic, desirable, or both.
Within the family, the genus Solanum include species that provide us eggplants, potatoes, and tomatoes. Nicotiana is tobacco, Capsicum give us bell peppers and chili peppers, Petunia is often cultivated for their flowers, and Atropa belladonna is belladonna.
28 October 2008
Stomate Costume
Halloween is almost here! And if you're planning on going to a costume party this year its not too late to start crafting a costume.
I decided to look for cute science and biological costume ideas, but I can't seem to find many pictures. Black cats and and bats are animals its true, but it's much harder to find things not generally associated with Halloween decor.
By happy accident, I just finished grading a huge stack of lab reports on transpiration (the loss of water by plants). Then I found this photo on Flickr of someone dressed up as a plant stomate! Stomata are pores on the surface of leaves on plants, and they open and close to regulate the intake of carbon dioxide into the plant and the release water and oxygen into the atmosphere. Actually, this costume is part of a whole set of photos of students dressed up as their favorite adaptation. What a great costume party theme for nerdy graduate students or any group of science enthusiasts.
If you have pictures of people dressed up in biological or science finery, post links in the comments below!
16 October 2008
Carnivorous plant calendar
A Print A Day has a calendar template, beautifully illustrated with carnivorous plants, available for download (via Craft).
Carnivorous plants are those that attract, trap, and digest insects and other small prey. They live in nutrient poor areas and so they utilize the nutrients from their prey, especially nitrogen, to grow.
July features a venus fly trap (Dionaea muscipula) and August has flowers from a bladderwort (Utricularia). September looks like cobra lilies (Darlingtonia californica), October features a dutchman's pipe, Aristolochia, and December are sundews (Drosera).
26 September 2008
Plant cell cross stitch
I had an entry a while back about a plant cell pattern I designed, cross stitched, and turned into a pin. Looks like I wasn't the only person to think of recreating plant cell diagrams using cross stitch. Double X Geek has a more detailed design, complete with labels for the organelles! (via Craft)
28 August 2008
Why Study Plants?
I previously linked to an old educational video about why we should study science. For your viewing pleasure, here's a much more modern video about why we should study plants, or at least why plants are so important. I especially liked the part about how plants are portrayed in film.
(via the Botanical Society of America)
26 August 2008
Growing Better
I had to share this video as it stars a former grad student in my department, Chris Martine, who's now a professor at SUNY Plattsburgh. I thought this was a great introduction to oak identification with humor that reminds me of Alton Brown. Give it a watch.
(Martine, if you're reading this I want more of these!)
21 August 2008
Moss Ring
I'm going to steal this one before Jessica at Moss Plants and More blogs about it. AdornJewelry on Etsy is selling rings that you can grow moss in and wear. This shop also features rings with faux moss and bird collage pendants. The rings do not come with growing tips or moss, but that way you can select your favorite local species.
(Via Craft)
27 May 2008
House plants vs. toxins
Good Magazine has published a chart outlining common sources for 3 household chemical compounds (trichloroethylene, formaldehyde, benzene) and the houseplants that naturally detoxify them from the air.
I'm not sure how each plant species actually accomplishes this detoxification (perhaps I should hunt down their vague sources) but I love the graphic design of this chart. I also think that maybe I should move the Philodendron from my bedroom to my living room that contains several IKEA particle board containing furniture pieces.
(Via Boing Boing)
18 May 2008
On a rainy Sunday afternoon
Here are two things to check out on this gloomy Sunday courtesy of the Craft Magazine Blog.
Fold away your troubles and make a origami lily, the step by step directions can be found here.
Also take a look at these neat robot animals made from recycled electronic parts. The artist, Ann Smith, has a whole gallery of animals over on her website.
07 May 2008
Plant cell brooch
I've been browsing Etsy a lot lately, and it inspired me to craft a few projects myself. My first project was making a cross stitch brooch of a stylized plant cell (of my own design). Here are the labeled parts and organelles, with links to descriptions from Cells Alive:
A. Vacuole
B. Chloroplast
C. Nucleus
D. Endoplasmic reticulum
E. Mitochondria
F. Lysosome and Peroxisome
G. Golgi apparatus
H. Cell wall (tan) and plasma membrane (green)
02 May 2008
Banana podcast
I blogged earlier about bananas when they were the topic of a show on Good Eats. And now Scientific American had a very interesting podcast this past week on bananas, as part of their weekly "Science Talk". In just under 25 minutes, you can learn a little about the biology of the banana, the history of bananas (including what the term banana republic really means, besides being an upscale Gap), and take a audio tour of how bananas are grown on plantations. You can listen to it here.
05 April 2008
Leaves in clay
Browsing on Etsy, I found these clay pieces that are imprinted with leaves from plants growing in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina where the artist, leavesofclay, lives. 
The descriptions list the common names of the leaves used on each piece.
07 March 2008
Grow your own Lotus
I just saw this product over at Urban Oufitters, a "Grow Your Own Lily Pad" kit from DuneCraft. The product description is as follows:
"Grow your own giant flowering lily pad! Truly amazing, this type of lily pad can grow in up to four feet of water, can spread to take up large amounts of a shallow pond, and each pad can grow as large as two feet wide! This fantastic plant also has the largest flower of any plant in North America! The light yellow flowers even smell good! Plants sprout and grow in water! Just drop your seeds in the included bowl (supply your own water...) and watch in awe as they sprout in less than two weeks! Roots will start forming a couple of weeks later, and before you know it, you will see your own Lily Pads popping out!"
Based on the description of having light yellow flowers and looking at the seeds, this has to be seeds of Nelumbo lutea, the American lotus. The picture to the left is a close up of the inside of a N. lutea flower I saw while in Florida.Lotus leaves are easily distinguished from other water lilies because they are entirely circular and do not have a notch where the petiole attaches (so the drawing on the box is not accurate). They do have large flowers, about 6" wide, but I have no idea if this is actually North America's largest flower like they claim (I did find one site that claims this).
...
(Left: Nelumbo leaves, Right: Nymphaea leaves)
I'm tempted to buy one just to see if this is easy as they claim, especially just using the supplied blue decorative rocks and no soil.
04 March 2008
Botanical Pillows
18 February 2008
Venus Flytrap
I saw an interesting toy at Target the other day, Backyard Safari's Venus Fly Trap. Sadly, the toy wasn't made because Venus Flytraps are cool plants, but is instead an interesting looking insect catcher. Supposedly you place bait in the bottom and insects fly in, and some sort of motion sensor closes the trap.
In actual Venus flytrap plants (Dionaea muscipula), the traps are modified leaves. They know to close and catch their insect prey by trigger hairs (trichomes) on the inside of the traps. Not just one touch will do it, to distinguish living prey the trichomes must be touched in succession before the trap actually closes. Carnivorous plants in general catch insects because they live in nutrient poor locations, like bogs. The insects they catch and digest provided them with much needed nitrogen. The animated gif to the left (that I found on wikipedia) shows a developing trap in time lapse (click to watch).
Oh, and while I'm on the topic, it appears there is also a Pokémon modeled after a Venus Flytrap, Carnivine. According to the Pokémon website, Carnivine "attracts prey with its sweet-smelling saliva, then chomps down".
01 February 2008
Airborne Liverwort Sperm
Here I go again, stealing parts of others' blog entries. I just saw a very impresive video that shows airborne sperm dispersal in a liverwort, Conocephalum conicum. For why this is important ecologically, I will direct you over to the blog Moss Plants and More.
So, our video of the week, which was submitted as part of paper:
Shimamura, M., Yamaguchi, T. & Deguchi, H. 2008. Airborne sperm of Conocephalum conicum (Conocephalaceae). J. Plant Res. 121: 69-71.
07 December 2007
Haiku Phylogeny
I like it when people are encouraged to be creative with science - which is the aim over at The Science Creative Quarterly. It looks like they are trying to set up a phylogeny of life based on haiku poems. So, pick your favorite organisms and start writing haiku (3 lines with 5, then 7, then 5 syllables). Then of course submit them to SCQ and feel free to leave them here too via comments.
WATERLILIES
floating on water
Nymphaea blooms in splendid
color. Monet paints.
children sit upon,
water gardens cultivate,
massive floating leaves.
27 November 2007
All hail the banana
So, I've been getting the most visits to my blog via people searching for Alton Brown and Good Eats. So, it seems only fair to my "fans" to talk about an episode I saw recently - Top Banana.
One thing I love about Good Eats is that they always tell you about the history of food - in this case did you know slipping on banana peels isn't just a cartoon standby?:
"About a decade after they [bananas] came into this country, they became very popular street foods. Since there were very few trash cans in urban areas, most people just gave them a fling. [flings skin off camera, we hear a man slip, yell, and fall] So many city dwellers were either injured or killed in banana related accidents that the peel became the poster child for the growing litter problem in America. Ironic, don't you think?"(Transcript courtesy of the Good Eats Fan Page)
And unlike avocados that I blogged about previously, I also learned that bananas are one of the few fruits always picked green and allowed to ripen off of the "tree" (banana plants might look like trees but have no woody tissue and are therefore just large herbs). They actually taste best that way.
For more history of the banana, you can watch the first 10 minutes of the episode below - if you don't mind that the sound is slightly out of sync that is.
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