The Universities of St. Andrews and Aberdeen have put out a Call for Papers for the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity 2011. It looks like they have a lot that’s relevant to botanists and usefully they have sessions organised by theme to draw disciplines together. You can get more details on their website.

AoB Blog was offline this afternoon. The reason was that I tried to install a new back up plugin, in case anything went horrifically wrong with the site. Unfortunately, despite testing, the module was not happy and something went horrifically wrong with the site. The site has been fixed by deleting WordPress and then re-installing [...]

Work by Rebecca Tashiro et al. (Crop Science 50: 1260–1268, 2010), which identifies a gene that converts 3-leaved white clover (Trifolium repens) into 4-leafed versions, reminds me of comments by Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift (1667–1745). In his book Gulliver’s Travels he writes, ‘And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears [...]