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Plant blindness is a pernicious force, even affecting the coming festive season. How can we increase the plant-based content of a well-known list of Christmas gifts?
The past month has seen a couple of significant dates in the science calendar: one an annual event, the other an anniversary. At least one of these has far less to do with plant research than perhaps it ought to.
In the Amazon basin, farmers and ranchers contest land use with environmental and indigenous groups. Does that make widespread fires the inevitable ‘new normal’?
Scientific journals are entirely dependent on the multitude of researchers prepared to spend precious time on peer review. Are we asking too much, especially when there is so much else they could be doing?
Literature is full of descriptions of future utopias and dystopias, but tomorrow’s tomorrows are too important to be left to fiction to consider. What qualities will be needed in plants in the coming decades?
In supporting the 1909 land reform bill, Winston Churchill called land “by far the greatest of monopolies”, being the source of all wealth, strictly limited and fixed. One hundred and ten years later, land usage is again under scrutiny.
Cryo-electron microscopy is currently one of the most productive structural techniques, especially for large protein complexes such as photosystems. This success is built on a very long history of technological advances.
In June 2019, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations will elect a new Director General, an individual who will be central to global development for the next decade.
Two recent Escherichia coli outbreaks, a United States government shutdown and the imminent departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union bring into focus the fragility of global food supply systems.
The belated arrival of the Antirrhinum genome sequence brings this classic model plant into the genomic age and opens up increased avenues for plant biology research.
We live in uncertain times, but the changing of the year provides a time not only to look back on the year that has passed, but also to look forward to what might happen in the year to come.
