Going back almost as far you can with higher plants, we now have a remarkable use of plant-derived exudates that represents the phytopalaentological equivalent of looking for a needle in haystack. But one which has – coincidentally and inadvertently – created a new fledgling branch of botany. This is the revelation that has the fossil [...]

In biology, matters are rarely either good or bad; oftentimes they may be both at once (albeit usually for different organisms). Take for instance hydrogen cyanide, which is widely regarded to be rather bad since it is a potent poison that can kill most living things by ‘interfering’ (that’s a euphemism!) with respiration. However, it [...]

These are links from our Scoop It page between January 18th and January 30th: Landscapes for People, Food and Nature: a new Blog from Bioversity, FAO, UNEP et al A new blog on Landscapes for People, Food and Nature is launched today. Fortunately, its just in time for a new University of Leicester undergraduate module [...]

If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to get more organised in 2012, here is advanced notice of two entries for your diary. First, the 18–19th of April (2012), the Inaugural Meeting of the UK Plant Science Federation ( sorry, RoW). Imaginatively entitled UK PlantSci 2012, this event takes place at the John Innes Centre in [...]

How often have you come across a new – to you, the reader, that is! – term in a botanical text and wondered what it meant? Well, OK, maybe not that often, but when you do, how frequently have you then looked up that term to be confronted with a word-only description and longed for [...]

As we start another new year people often resolve to do things better than in the old one. And as we continue to face global cash-strapped and financially-straitened times, one resolution for an under-valued botanist might be to make a bit more money. Well, phytological money-making ideas are often few and far between, but allow [...]

Anne Osterrieder has a new series on her blog called Faces of plant cell biologists, where we are asked a series of questions. So far, it has featured Charlotte Carroll (also an AoBBlog.com guest author here), Chris Hawes and Kentaro Tamura, who all answer Anne’s questions is surprisingly contrasting but  complementary ways. Today, I have been [...]

These are links from our Scoop It page between January 3rd and January 17th: The Archaeobotanist: African Archaeobotany 2011 A blog reviewing Dorian Fuller's archaeobotanical highlights of 2011. Africa, as a continent, remains one of the archaeobotanically least known and so it worth noting a number of contributions over the past year. One of the [...]

This videoblog from www.AoBBlog.com is about one of the Cell and Developmental Biology practicals that I run at the University of Leicester for course #BS1003. It involves infection of carrot root slices with three strains of Agrobacterium, two of which cause the plant cells to divide. An earlier video showed how we set up the [...]

Most international archaeological work in South America has concentrated on the Andes for various reasons. It’s more accessible, the ruins are more visible, there’s a better ethnohistorical record from the conquistadors, there’s variety over short distances because change in height makes vertical economies possible where different foods grow at different heights and they’re just the [...]