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Gardeners and Nature lovers already appreciate the botanical wonders around us, but plants are more than floral beauties. We owe the air we breathe to them, all of our food, and most of our medicine, chemicals and housing. Animals from elephants to ants depend on plant-life. And the world's flora has an equally intimate relationship with the birds, insects, mammals and humans around them.
Explore these relationships and find the latest botany discoveries through the links below.
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- Testing Botanical Intelligence
- "If you define intelligence as the capacity to solve problems, plants have a lot to teach us… Not only are they 'smart' in how they grow, adapt and thrive, they do it without neuroses. Intelligence isn't only about having a brain."
- If Flowers Lost Their Pollinators
- "A rare 'live' study looking at what happens when you deprive plants of pollinators shows that evolution can step in to help them cope. But don’t get the champagne out just yet."
- Let Slime Mold Design The Railroad
- "Physarum polycephalum had not simply created the shortest possible network that could connect all the cities, but had also included redundant connections that allow the creature (and the real rail network) to have resilience to the accidental breakage of any part of it."
- When Flowering Plants Re-Made The World
- "The flowers' secret… was to exploit a change in soil fertility, and create a feedback loop that allowed new flowers to feed off dead ones."
- Desperate Measures To Save Wetlands
- "The most effective tool for cleaning up the oil working its way into southern Louisiana wetlands may, in the end, be the equivalent of a box of kitchen matches."
Copyright © 2010 Rob Halpern. All rights reserved.
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