Despite its 500-million-year history, the plant-fungi alliance holds mysteries that, once unravelled, could revolutionise agriculture and ecosystem management.
Millions of years before dinosaur footsteps first set tremors through the Earth, this flowering plant family was already thriving – and you can still find them in gardens today.
Drinking a cup of coffee means ingesting a complex mixture of chemicals. Research has given us mixed messaging about whether coffee is beneficial or harmful.
Kevin Burns, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
A colony-building fern that grows in treetops on Lord Howe Island has adopted a lifestyle similar to social insects, turning our understanding of the evolution of biological complexity on its head.
Sometimes less can be more. Carnivorous pitcher plants from the tropical island of Borneo (Brunei) demonstrate this quite impressively. These plants use funnel-shaped pitfall traps, or pitchers, with slippery…
One hectare of land in a tropical forest can hold 650 tree species – more than in all of Canada and the continental US. This has left biologists baffled for decades. Now, with advances in data analysis…