When gardening, we’re sure many of you have used herbicides to kill weeds and other invasive plants. However, the thing about herbicides is that in order to kill weeds, they are often very toxic and affect everything from those using them to potentially the groundwater. To prevent any possible environmental damage with herbicides in the future, a team from the Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany have developed a hi-tech alternative: weed-killing lasers!
The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG); the Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG); The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG Kew); and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) have announced plans to develop the World Flora—the first modern, online catalog of the world’s plants—by the year 2020. This massive undertaking will include the compilation of information on up to 400,000 plant species worldwide. It will also achieve a primary target of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, an ambitious effort first adopted by the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity in 2002, to halt the continuing loss of plant biodiversity around the globe. Representatives of the four botanical gardens recently met to organize a framework to guide their efforts and respond to this need for a baseline survey of the plants of the world that has been called for by the international community. A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) detailing plans to create the World Flora was recently signed into effect by the four institutions.
Analyzing massive amounts of data officially became a national priority recently when the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced the Big Data Research and Development Initiative. A multi-disciplinary team of University of Missouri researchers rose to the big data challenge when they solved a major biological question by using a groundbreaking computer algorithm to find identical DNA sequences in different plant and animal species.
Last Autumn, websites like Inhabitat and TreeHugger reported about Stefano Boeri’s plans for a stunning vertical urban forest in Milan. A great and definitely inspiring idea! But don’t we often see these kinds of urban fantasies that never leave the drawing board? Not this time — construction has already started. This Big City has posted pictures of the first frameworks. That makes the project even more interesting, as we never before witnessed the building of a vertical forest. The Bosco Verticale will cost some 6 million euros. In fact the tower does not only accommodate trees, but also luxury apartments. Each apartment has a balcony designed to hold approximately 900 small trees and plants, making the facade look like an impressive forest.
A plant that was frozen in Siberian permafrost for about 30,000 years has been revived by a team of Russian scientists - and borne fruit, to boot.
Using tissue from immature fruits buried in fossil squirrel burrows some 90 feet below the surface, researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Pushchino managed to coax the frozen remains of a Silene stenophylla specimen into full flower, producing delicate white blooms and then fruit.
