DNA testing is an important part of our life now – as we have seen with proving that a skeleton in Leicester comes from the body of the last Plantagenet King Richard III, and not a mediaeval Monk, or with the implications of finding horse meat in a lot of beef products. I’ve just done an [...]

In trees, bud development is driven by endogenous and exogenous factors such as species and climate, respectively. Alla et al. study bud enlargement and secondary growth at seasonal (3 years) and inter-annual (15 years) scales in two oak species, Quercus ilex (evergreen) and Q. faginea (deciduous), coexisting in north-east Spain. They find that the maximum enlargement [...]