Plants

  1. Agriculture

    Bananas under attack: Understanding their foes

    Fungal blights threaten the world’s most popular fruit. But genetic studies hint at new ways to combat some of these diseases.

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  2. Ecosystems

    Earthworms: Can these gardeners’ friends actually become foes?

    Asian jumping worms can strip leaf litter from floor of U.S. forests, new data show. Many native plants need that leaf litter for their seeds to germinate.

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  3. Plants

    Scientists Say: Bromeliad

    Bromeliads are plants with long spiky leaves. They are common houseplants, and we even see one in the grocery store — the pineapple.

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  4. Plants

    Houseplants suck up air pollutants that can sicken people

    Certain indoor air pollutants can sicken people. But some houseplants can remove those chemicals from a room’s air, new data show.

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  5. Plants

    Scientists Say: Chlorophyll

    Plants can make energy out of sunlight, all thanks to a pigment called chlorophyll.

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  6. Agriculture

    Sneaky! Virus sickens plants, but helps them multiply

    The cucumber mosaic virus helps tomato plants lure pollinators. When the plants multiply, the virus now gets new hosts.

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  7. Plants

    Young sunflowers keep time

    The plants don’t just use light to follow the sun. An internal clock helps their stems bend as the sun moves across the sky.

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  8. Life

    Plants, animals adapt to city living

    Cities have turned into experiments in evolution for both plants and animals, from the taste of clover to the stickiness of lizards’ toes.

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  9. Plants

    Climate closing the gender gap for this mountain flower

    Among valerian plants, males like it hotter than the females do. So a warming climate has been speeding their migration up once-cool mountainsides.

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  10. Fossils

    Identifying ancient trees from their amber

    A Swedish teen’s analyses of a sample of amber may have uncovered a previously unknown type of ancient tree.

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  11. Plants

    New species of terrifying tomato appears to bleed

    A new species of Australian bush tomato bleeds when injured and turns bony in old age.

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  12. Health & Medicine

    Common plant could help fight Zika virus

    A teen discovered that extracts from leaves of the San Francisco plant (Codiaeum variegatum) kill larvae of the mosquito that helps spread the Zika and dengue fever viruses.

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