As any avid gardener will tell you, plants with sharp thorns and prickles can leave you looking like you’ve had a run-in with an angry cat. Wouldn’t it be nice to rid plants of their prickles entirely but keep the tasty fruits and beautiful flowers?
I’m a geneticist[1] who, along with my colleagues, recently discovered the gene that...
Kids born in 2020 worldwide will experience twice the number of wildfires[1] during their lifetimes compared with those born in 1960. In California and other western states, frequent wildfires have become as much a part of summer and fall as popsicles and Halloween candy.
Wildfires produce fine particulate matter, or PM₂.₅[2], that chokes...
Most of us aren’t spending our days watching our houseplants grow. We see their signs of life only occasionally – a new leaf unfurled, a stem leaning toward the window.
But in the summer of 1863, Charles Darwin lay ill in bed, with nothing to do but watch his plants so closely that he could detect their small movements to and fro....
Life and death are traditionally viewed as opposites. But the emergence of new multicellular life-forms from the cells of a dead organism introduces a “third state[1]” that lies beyond the traditional boundaries of life and death.
Usually, scientists consider death to be the irreversible halt of functioning of an organism[2] as a whole....