Traditionally, 14th February – Saint Valentine’s Day – is the day when lovers bear their souls and declare their love for one another, often accompanied by gifts (‘inducements’, bribes…?) of flowers, chocolates, maybe even jewellery. However, such is the power of plants, oftentimes you can probably ‘get away’ with just flowers (after all, rose is an [...]

This column is always fascinated by the way new insights arise when different disciplines are brought together to tackle an ostensibly botanical problem. So, too, is the UK’s Royal Society, hence its august organ entitled Journal of the Royal Society Interface, a ‘cross-disciplinary publication promoting research at the interface between the physical and life sciences’ [...]

It must be terribly depressing if you don’t have plants in your life to give you purpose and a reason to get up in the morning, put digit to keyboard, or whatever. Still, for those who are intellectually botanically bereft, there is always one plant-derived stimulant or another to fill the void. And most of [...]

Relatively new to me – so maybe new to some of my devoted legion of readers (many of whom may be involved in teaching science, plant or otherwise) and therefore worthy of sharing – is news of the Understanding Science teaching resource. Yes, it’s ‘American’. So, you might be annoyed by the idiosyncratic spellings. And [...]

I’m sure that many of us in our teaching have demonstrated the transfer of light energy between adjacent accessory pigment molecules during the light-dependent stages of photosynthesis using the so-called Newton’s cradle. Perhaps more famous as a stress-relieving ‘toy’ for over-worked ‘executives’, the apparatus visually – and usually quite dramatically and memorably – demonstrates the [...]