Category: Plants
Researchers clearly observe quantum effects in photosynthesis
| May 22, 2018 | Posted by News under Physics, Plants |
From Bill Andrews at Discover: In particular, according to a study released Monday in Nature Chemistry, an international team of scientists showed that molecules involved in photosynthesis display quantum mechanical behavior. Even though we’d suspected as much before, this is the first time we’ve seen quantum effects in living systems. … With a technique called […]
Phylogenetics of plants is a mess
| May 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Genomics, Intelligent Design, Plants, Tree of life |
From Douglas E. Soltis, Michael J. Moore, Emily B. Sessa, Stephen A. Smith, and Pamela S. Soltis, Using and navigating the plant tree of life, at Amerian Journal of Botany 7 April 2018 https://doi.org/10.1002/ajb2.1071 (open access) : The “tree of life” has become a metaphor for the interconnectivity and breadth of all life on Earth. […]
Researcher: Mathematics sheds light on “unfathomably complex” cellular thinking
| May 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From ScienceDaily: Queensland University of Technology (QUT) researcher Dr Robyn Araujo has developed new mathematics to solve a longstanding mystery of how the incredibly complex biological networks within cells can adapt and reset themselves after exposure to a new stimulus. … “Proteins form unfathomably complex networks of chemical reactions that allow cells to communicate and […]
Did sweet potatoes cross the Pacific without humans 100 kya?
| April 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From Dan Garisto at Science News: New genetic evidence instead suggests that wild precursors to sweet potatoes reached Polynesia at least 100,000 years ago — long before humans inhabited the South Pacific islands, researchers report April 12 in Current Biology. If true, it could also challenge the idea that Polynesian seafarers reached the Americas around […]
Researcher: Best educated guesses fail with plant evolution
| March 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From at ScienceDaily: Ancient microbes may have been producing oxygen through photosynthesis a billion years earlier than we thought, which means oxygen was available for living organisms very close to the origin of life on earth. In a new article in Heliyon, a researcher from Imperial College London studied the molecular machines responsible for photosynthesis […]
Researchers: Plants colonized Earth 100 mya earlier than thought
| February 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Plants, stasis |
From ScienceDaily: For the first four billion years of Earth’s history, our planet’s continents would have been devoid of all life except microbes. All of this changed with the origin of land plants from their pond scum relatives, greening the continents and creating habitats that animals would later invade. The timing of this episode has […]
Researchers: Over one hundred million-year gap between accounts of when flowers originated – “false precision”
| February 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Plants |
When it’s this imprecise, is it still science? From ScienceDaily: Flowering plants likely originated between 149 and 256 million years ago according to new UCL-led research. The study, published today in New Phytologist by researchers from the UK and China, shows that flowering plants are neither as old as suggested by previous molecular studies, nor […]
Researchers: Cross-species gene regulation observed for the first time
| January 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Genetics, Genomics, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From ScienceDaily: Dodder, a parasitic plant that causes major damage to crops in the US and worldwide every year, can silence the expression of genes in the host plants from which it obtains water and nutrients. This cross-species gene regulation, which includes genes that contribute to the host plant’s defense against parasites, has never before […]
New hypothesis as to why flowering plants predominate
| January 15, 2018 | Posted by News under 'Junk DNA', Evolution, Genetics, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From ScienceDaily: Scientists have found an explanation for how flowering plants became dominant so rapidly in ecosystems across the world — a problem that Charles Darwin called an ‘abominable mystery’. In a study publishing on January 11 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, Kevin Simonin and Adam Roddy, from San Francisco State University and […]
Researchers: Plants can choose how to respond to competitors. Do they think?
| December 30, 2017 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Intelligent Design, Mind, Minds, Naturalism, Plants |
From ScienceDaily: Biologists from the University of Tübingen have demonstrated that plants can choose between alternative competitive responses according to the stature and densities of their opponents. A new study by researchers from the Institute of Evolution and Ecology reveals that plants can evaluate the competitive ability of their neighbors and optimally match their responses […]
Plant studies: Intelligence does not require a brain or nervous system
| December 16, 2017 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Information, Intelligent Design, Mind, Minds, Plants |
From philosopher Laura Ruggles at Aeon: What does it even mean to say that a mallow can learn and remember the location of the sunrise? The idea that plants can behave intelligently, let alone learn or form memories, was a fringe notion until quite recently. Memories are thought to be so fundamentally cognitive that some […]
Agriculture: Article presents results of conscious human selection as if humans are an unconscious natural force
| November 27, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism, Plants |
From ScienceDaily: Professor Robin Allaby, in Warwick’s School of Life Sciences, has discovered that human crop gathering was so extensive, as long ago as the last Ice Age, that it started to have an effect on the evolution of rice, wheat and barley — triggering the process which turned these plants from wild to domesticated. […]
Plant biologist offers evidence to falsify Darwinism – the backstory
| October 27, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From Granville Sewell at Evolution News & Views: Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, who studied mutations for 25 years as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Köln, Germany, is now retired but still writes often on the topic of Darwinism and intelligent design. He is one of those old-school scientists who […]
From The Scientist: How first and “very, very complex” trees got to be so big 420 million to 359 mya
| October 26, 2017 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From Shawna Williams at The Scientist: Ancient fossils reveal how woodless trees got so big: by continuously ripping apart their xylem and knitting it back together. The trees’ woody fibers—namely, xylem, which carries water up the trunk—formed rings in the outer part of the trunk and connected to one another by horizontal strands, says Berry. […]
Researchers: Earth’s first trees were also “most complex”
| October 25, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Plants |
From Cardiff University: Fossils from a 374-million-year-old tree found in north-west China have revealed an interconnected web of woody strands within the trunk of the tree that is much more intricate than that of the trees we see around us today. The strands, known as xylem, are responsible for conducting water from a tree’s roots […]
Epigenetics: Understanding how plants can remember things
| September 9, 2017 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Epigenetics, Plants |
From Sarah Laskow at Atlas Obscura: Of the possible plant talents that have gone under-recognized, memory is one of the most intriguing. Some plants live their whole lives in one season, while others grow for hundreds of years. Either way, it has not been obvious to us that any of them hold on to past […]
Photosynthesis genes source still unclear
| June 15, 2017 | Posted by News under News, Plants |
From Charles Q. Choi at Inside Science: However, much remains unknown about when and how cyanobacteria evolved oxygenic photosynthesis. “The whole question of the origin of cyanobacteria has long been a mystery because they kind of just appeared out of the tree of life with this very advanced capability to do oxygenic photosynthesis without any […]
Naked mole rats, short of breath, act like plants to survive
| April 21, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From ScienceDaily: Deprived of oxygen, naked mole-rats can survive by metabolizing fructose just as plants do, researchers report this week in the journal Science. … “This is just the latest remarkable discovery about the naked mole-rat — a cold-blooded mammal that lives decades longer than other rodents, rarely gets cancer, and doesn’t feel many types […]
Can we pinpoint the origin of oxygen photosynthesis?
| April 11, 2017 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Evolution, Intelligent Design, News, Plants |
From ScienceDaily: The ability to generate oxygen through photosynthesis — that helpful service performed by plants and algae, making life possible for humans and animals on Earth — evolved just once, roughly 2.3 billion years ago, in certain types of cyanobacteria. This planet-changing biological invention has never been duplicated, as far as anyone can tell. […]
From the ivied halls: Attack on human “privilege” in relation to plant life
| March 29, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism, Plants |
From William Nardi at The College Fix: The latest “privilege” identified within the hallowed halls of higher education appears to be human privilege. This year, the Modern Language Association of America has put out a call for papers on “critical plant studies,” seeking papers addressing the “vitality, agency, sentience, and/or emotional life of plants.” Critical […]
