We put The natural history of pollination and mating in bird-pollinated Babiana (Iridaceae) live on the Annals of Botany site this week. It’s been covered in the press, notably by the BBC, Plant has evolved a specialist bird perch, and the CBC, Bird perch helps plants have better sex. We’ve put out a press release, [...]

via iPhylo “The Plant List (http://www.theplantlist.org) has been released today, complete with glowing press releases. The list includes some 1,040,426 names. I eagerly looked for the Download button, but none is to be found. You can grab download individual search results (say, at family level), but not the whole data set. OK, so that makes [...]

Bora Zivkovic highlighted a post on readability and blogging yesterday on The Science of Blogging. This is a rework of a post on Colin Schultz’s site from earlier in the month, which is well worth a visit because of the comments on the post. Colin Schultz shows how you can use Google to get a [...]

Confession time: one of the main reasons why I chose to study ecology all those years ago was in order to avoid what, to me, were twin peaks of incomprehensibility – biochemistry and genetics. I liked to be able to see what was going on: a plant’s growth, a leaf’s reaction to drought, or stomatal [...]

Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire, shows the power of evolutionary explanations by taking a plant’s eye view of agriculture. It’s not just the content that I like, the presentation style is worth examining too. The talk is definitely more in the style of a naked Yoda than Darth Vader. It’s lacking details, [...]

No doubt this will horrify Pat, but this is one of my favourite YouTube videos. If you’ve ever expressed a doubt about something, only to be told it must be ok because it’s natural, this is the video for you. There’s a cheerful inanity about the video. Water is natural, a daily need and essential [...]

Alice Bell has written a couple of provocative posts on science communication at the Guardian and on her own blog recently. The spark is what the current science minister sees as the salvation of the sciences. Space and dinosaurs. A lot of people have agreed with him. Space and dinosaurs certainly work for me, but [...]