It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
suggests what microscopic parts would have been present in this common ancestor based on findings by Dana Price of Rutgers University and his colleagues, who examined the genome of a freshwater microscopic algae and determined that it showed that algae and plants are derived from one common ancestor. This ancestor formed from a merger between some protozoan-like host and cyanobacterium, a kind of bacteria that use photosynthesis to make energy, that "moved in" and became the chloroplast of this first alga. ...
These plants have no vascular tissue, so the plants cannot retain water or deliver it to other parts of the plant body ...
I have just read Ball’s Essay. It is pretty bold. The rapid development as far as we can judge of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery. Certainly it would be a great step if we could believe that the higher plants at first could live only at a high level; but until it is experimentally [proved] that Cycadeae, ferns, etc., can withstand much more carbonic acid than the higher plants, the hypothesis seems to me far too rash. Saporta believes that there was an astonishingly rapid development of the high plants, as soon [as] flower-frequenting insects were developed and favoured intercrossing. I shd like to see this whole problem solved. I have fancied that perhaps there was during long ages a small isolated continent in the S. hemisphere which served as the birthplace of the higher plants—but this is a wretchedly poor conjecture. —Excerpt of a letter written by Charles Darwin on 22 July 1879 to Joseph Hooker ...
The Amborella plant, found in the rain forests of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, has a unique way of forming eggs that may represent a critical link between the remarkably diverse flowering plants, known as angiosperms, and their yet to be identified extinct ancestors, said CU-Boulder Professor William "Ned" Friedman. Angiosperms are thought to have diverged from gymnosperms -- the dominant land plants when dinosaurs reigned in the Cretaceous and Jurassic periods -- roughly 130 million years ago and have become the dominant plants on Earth today. ...
In the Netherlands, in 1634, a collector paid 1,000 pounds of cheese, four oxen, eight pigs, 12 sheep, a bed, and a suit of clothes for a single bulb of the Viceroy tulip.
Drs. Jana Vamosi and Steven Vamosi of the Department of Biological Sciences have found through extensive statistical analysis that the size of the geographical area is the most important factor when it comes to biodiversity of a particular flowering plant family.
The researchers were looking at the underlying forces at work spurring diversity -- such as why there could be 22,000 varieties of some families of flowers, orchids for example, while there could be only forty species of others, like the buffaloberry family. In other words, what factors have produced today's biodiversity?
"Our research found that the most important factor is available area. The number of species in a lineage is most keenly determined by the size of the continent (or continents) that it occupies," says Jana Vamosi. ...
The first angiosperms must have evolved from one of the gymnosperm species that dominated the world at the time. The Amborella genome suggests that the first angiosperms probably appeared when the ancestral gymnosperm underwent a 'whole genome doubling' event about 200 million years ago.
Genome doubling occurs when an organism mistakenly gains an extra copy of every one of its genes during the cell division that occurs as part of sexual reproduction. The extra genetic material gives genome doubled organisms the potential to evolve new traits that can provide a competitive advantage. In the case of the earliest angiosperms, the additional genetic material gave the plants the potential to evolve new, never-before-seen structures – like flowers. The world's flora would never be the same again....
The team set out to identify the effects that the first land plants had on the climate during the Ordovician Period, which ended 444 million years ago. During this period the climate gradually cooled, leading to a series of 'ice ages'. This global cooling was caused by a dramatic reduction in atmospheric carbon, which this research now suggests was triggered by the arrival of plants.
Among the first plants to grow on land were the ancestors of mosses that grow today. This study shows that they extracted minerals such as calcium, magnesium, phosphorus and iron from rocks in order to grow. In so doing, they caused chemical weathering of Earth's surface. This had a dramatic impact on the global carbon cycle and subsequently on the climate. It could also have led to a mass extinction of marine life.
The research suggests that the first plants caused the weathering of calcium and magnesium ions from silicate rocks, such as granite, in a process that removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, forming new carbonate rocks in the ocean. This cooled global temperatures by around five degrees Celsius.
In addition, by weathering the nutrients phosphorus and iron from rocks, the first plants increased the quantities of both these nutrients going into the oceans, fuelling productivity there and causing organic carbon burial. This removed yet more carbon from the atmosphere, further cooling the climate by another two to three degrees Celsius. It could also have had a devastating impact on marine life, leading to a mass extinction that has puzzled scientists. ...
Human civilization happened because something reversed a cooling trend about 20,000 years ago.
A new study, published today in Nature Geoscience, has a hypothesis what that something was: plants. Or, more specifically, a complicated process in which plants wear down certain kinds of rocks, and how those rocks remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they wear down—leaving just enough CO2 out there to trap solar warmth, and gradually bring summer back.
Attached to the roots of many plants are microscopic fungi called mycorrhizae that, among other things, help increase the rate at which silicate rocks weather. When the weather gets cold, the plants die off, the fungi do less weathering—the weather itself stops raining so much—and the levels of CO2stay stable.
But wait, there’s more. Another type of microscopic ocean critter called phytoplankton absorb CO2 at the ocean surface and sock it away in the deep ocean when they die and sink. Although today there is plenty of CO2 available at the surface, when CO2 was extremely low these little guys would have grown more slowly. As a result, less sinking of dead little critters into the deeps would have left more CO2 at the ocean surface where it could, wave by wave, flush back into the atmosphere. And unlike the extremely slow plant-weathering process Pagani suggested, changes in phytoplankton could happen in the geological blink of an eye—only a few hundred years. ...
Researchers are finding that kelp, eelgrass, and other vegetation can effectively absorb CO2 and reduce acidity in the ocean. Growing these plants in local waters, scientists say, could help mitigate the damaging impacts of acidification on marine life.
New research shows that seasonal plants can adapt quickly--even genetically--to changing climate conditions and reveals various mechanisms by which they control their growing response when the weather shifts. The studies suggest, however, that longer-lived plants have a tougher time going with the flow.
Other research in Europe has shown that plants can shift another mechanism that controls their response to climate: vernalization, or the length of the cold snap required before a plant will respond to a warm spell as a growth signal. Caroline Dean of the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England, and her colleagues studied this response in the ubiquitous Arabidopsis thaliana, or thale cress. Such plants in Sweden require nearly four times as long a winter as their counterparts in England--14 weeks versus four, respectively--before they will interpret warmth as a signal to grow. ...
He found that the albino needles were saturated with what should have been a deadly cocktail of cadmium, copper and nickel. On average, white needles contained twice as many parts per million of these noxious heavy metals as their green counterparts; some had enough metals to kill them ten times over. Moore thinks faulty stomata — the pores through which plants exhale water — are responsible: plants that lose liquid faster must also drink more, meaning that the albino trees have twice as much metal-laden water running through their systems.
“It seems like the albino trees are just sucking these heavy metals up out of the soil,” Moore said. “They're basically poisoning themselves.”
Moore's theory — which he presented at a redwood conference last month and hopes to publish next year — is that albino redwoods are in a symbiotic relationship with their healthy brethren. They may act as a reservoir for poison in exchange for the sugar they need to survive.
...
“Plant growth can have a considerable effect on the climate,” says Wolfgang Buermann, a geographer at Boston University. He explains that there are several ways in which plants can alter the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere. Through the process of photosynthesis, plants use energy from the sun to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then use it to create the carbohydrates they need to grow. Since carbon dioxide is one of the most abundant greenhouse gases, the removal of the gas from the atmosphere may temper the warming of our planet as a whole.
Plants also cool the landscape directly through the process known as transpiration. When the surrounding atmosphere heats up, plants will often release excess water into the air from their leaves. By releasing evaporated water, plants cool themselves and the surrounding environment. “It’s like sweating. When you sweat you cool the surface of your skin,” says Buermann. Over a forest canopy or a vast expanse of grassland, large amounts of transpiration can markedly increase water vapor in the atmosphere, causing more precipitation and cloud cover in an area. The additional cloud cover often reinforces the cooling by blocking sunlight.
Because of these processes, many researchers believe plants may have a sizable impact on global climate in the future. As humans continue to generate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the Earth’s surface will likely warm at a faster rate than it has in a thousand years. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Earth is likely to warm another 1.4 degrees to 5.8 degrees by the end of this century (IPCC 2001). Needless to say, such big changes in the climate would likely alter vegetation growth all over the world.
...
Varieties of Mediterranean thyme (Thymus vulgaris) produce oils with different chemical compositions, and the ones with stronger smelling compounds like phenols are more effective at deterring herbivores. Producing phenols typically comes at a cost, though, as these plants are more sensitive to freezing. But in southern France’s Saint-Martin-de-Londres basin, winters are getting warmer. Since the 1970s, the basin has seen fewer freezing nights during the cold season.
Looking at 24 populations across the basin in 1974 versus 2010, one study found an increase in the proportion of plants that produce phenolic compounds. These plants are even popping up in areas where they didn’t grow in the 1970s. Since the plant’s genes determine the chemical composition of its oils, it’s likely that genetic changes are behind wild thyme’s response to warmer winters ...
There are historic sites in Iraq that show Neanderthals used yarrow, marsh mallow, and other herbs more than 60,000 years ago. Our ancestors noticed that animals were using herbs when they were ill. These uses were observed closely. Later they were incorporated into prehistoric shamanism, and then into medicine....
The oldest written evidence of medicinal plants’ usage for preparation of drugs has been found on a Sumerian clay slab from Nagpur, approximately 5000 years old. It comprised 12 recipes for drug preparation referring to over 250 various plants, some of them alkaloid such as poppy, henbane, and mandrake....
Reuters, which reviewed the new paper, reported that “drug discovery hit a 24-year low in 2004, with just 25 unique compounds known as new chemical entities introduced that year.” Lead author, David Newman of the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s natural products branch, said the advent of new drug discovery techniques in recent years diverted pharmaceutical company resources away from natural sources of new drug compounds.
“Chemists started making libraries of hundreds of thousands to millions of compounds. But they were simple compounds,” Reuters quoted Newman as saying via telephone. “Mother Nature doesn’t make simple compounds. Mother Nature wants compounds that fit into particular places.” ...
Overall, say the researchers, “half of all anti-cancer drugs introduced since the 1940s are either natural products or medicines derived directly from natural products.”
For all of these reasons, the study and conservation of medicinal plant (and animal) species has become increasingly urgent. The accelerating loss of species and habitat worldwide adds to this urgency. Already, about 15,000 medicinal plant species may be threatened with extinction worldwide. Experts estimate that the Earth is losing at least one potential major drug every two years. ...
Depth analysis of plant consciousness since the turn of the (new) millennium is finding that their brain capacity is much larger than previously supposed, that their neural systems are highly developed—in many instances as much as that of humans, and that they make and utilize neurotransmitters identical to our own. It is beginning to seem that plants are highly intelligent, feeling beings—perhaps as much or even more so than humans in some instances. (They can even perform sophisticated mathematical computations and make future plans based on extrapolations of current conditions. The mayapple, for instance, plans its growth two years in advance based on weather patterns....
While humans and many other animals, for example, have a specific organ, the brain, which houses its neuronal tree, plants use the soil as the stratum for the neural net; they have no need for a specific organ to house their neuronal system. The numerous root apices act as one whole, synchronized, self-organized system, much as the neurons in our brains do. Our brain matter is, in fact, merely the soil that contains the neural net we use to process and store information. Plants consciously use the soil itself to house their neuronal nets. This allows the root system to continue to expand outward, adding new neural extensions for as long as the plant grows.
In addition, the leaf canopy also acts as a synchronized, self-organized perceptual organ, which is highly attuned to electromagnetic fields. It can be viewed, in fact, as a crucial subcortical portion of the plant brain.
For their neural networks to function and demonstrate consciousness, plants use virtually the same neurotransmitters we do, including the two most important: glutamate and GABA (gamma aminobutyric acid). They also utilize, as do we, acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin, melatonin, epinephrine, norepinephrine, levodopa, indole-3-acetic acid, 5-hydroxyindole acetic acid, testosterone (and other androgens), estradiol (and other estrogens), nicotine, and a number of other neuroactive compounds. They also make use of their plant-specific neurotransmitter, auxin, which, like serotonin, for example, is synthesized from tryptophan. These plant intelligence transmitters are used, as they are in us, for communication within the plant organism and to enhance brain function.
The similarity of human and plant neural systems and the presence of identical chemical messengers within them illustrate just why the same molecular structures (e.g., morphine, coc aine, alcohol) that affect our neural nets also affect plant consciousness. Jagadis Bose, who developed some of the earliest work on plant neurobiology and plant intelligence in the early 1900s, treated plants with a wide variety of chemicals to see what would happen. In one instance, he covered large, mature trees with a tent, then chloroformed them. (The plants breathed in the chloroform through their stomata, just as they would normally breathe in air.) Once anesthetized, the trees could be uprooted and moved without going into shock—the pain perception of the plants diminished. He found that morphine had the same effects on plant consciousness as that of humans, reducing the plant pain perception and pulse proportionally to the dose given. Too much took the plant to the point of death, but the administration of atropine, as it would in humans, revived it. Alcohol, he found, did indeed get a plant drunk. It, as in us, induced a state of high excitation early on, but as intake progressed the plant began to get depressed, and with too much it passed out. The plant felt drunk.
Irrespective of the chemical he used, Bose found that the plant responded identically to the human; the chemicals had the same effect on the plant’s consciousness and nervous system as it did the human. ...
Scientists have known for the past two decades that many wild and agricultural plants launch an immune-like chemical defense when attacked by insects. That chemical resistance response can make the plant a poorer food for the insect and it may send out an aromatic SOS that hails the insect's natural enemies.
One of the tomato's common pests is the beet armyworm, a greenish 1-inch-long caterpillar that feeds on tomato leaves and fruit. Thaler was curious how effective the tomato plant's resistance response was in defending the plant by calling in the beet armyworm's natural enemy, a tiny parasitic wasp.
The chemical resistance response in a plant is technically known as the "octadecanoid pathway," a complex chemical chain-reaction that is triggered when an insect feeds on the plant. A wound from the insect signals the plant to produce a chemical known as "jasmonic acid," which in turn causes increased production of chemicals responsible for the leafy green odors of plants.
"Wasps can smell those compounds through their antennae and can more easily find the caterpillars when the caterpillars are less than 1 centimeter long," Thaler said. "The plants are essentially sending up a chemical 'smoke-signal' to attract the wasps." ...
In a study of more than 3,000 mustard seedlings, scientists discovered that the young plants recognize their siblings — other plants grown from the seeds of the same momma plant — using chemical cues given off during root growth. And it turns out mustard plants won’t compete with their brethren the way they will with strangers: Instead of rapidly growing roots to suck up as much water and minerals as possible, plants who sensed nearby siblings developed a shallower root system and more intertwined leaves. ...
When we think about plants, we don't often associate a term like "behavior" with them, but experimental plant ecologist JC Cahill wants to change that. The University of Alberta professor maintains that plants do behave and lead anything but solitary and sedentary lives. What Plants Talk About teaches us all that plants are smarter and much more interactive than we thought!
It is not the texture of the bark, shape of the tree, or even the fact that it could live up to 500 years old, that makes the Dragon’s Blood Tree so famous though, it is the blood red sap that oozes out of it when it is cut.
Now you may be saying to yourself “trees don’t have circulatory systems and blood, what are you talking about trees bleeding?” and you would be partially right. Trees don't have blood cells or veins like animals, but they do have vascular systems made of xylem and phloem which carry nutrients and water throughout the plant. In sap bearing trees like D. Cinnabari , the carbohydrates transformed by the photosynthetic process are goopy and are transported through the xylem. Simply put the reasons why the sap is red is rooted in the nutrients taken in from the soil and air and the enzymes created because of those nutrients. ...
Scientifically known as hydnellum peckii, the young bleeding tooth fungus’s thick red fluid oozes through its tiny pores, creating the appearance of blood....
Carnivorous plants come in all sizes and the largest ones. Some, shaped like giant pitchers with a lid covered with the plant’s sweet syrupy secretion, are found on the island of Borneo. They are so big, that they can hold two liters of water when filled to the brim, and were thought to catch rodents! But no rat or rat-like creature has ever been found inside one of these pitchers. Why then do they have these shapes and what is it for? Scientists studying these fascinating plants have recently come to a very strange conclusion.
These plants don’t catch rodents -- they eat their poop! And how do we know? Well, look at the evidence. These giant pitcher plants grow under certain trees. The size of the pitcher-lip matches the exact size of the tree shrew (small mammals that resemble squirrels) that lives on the trees. Yet, no shrew has ever been found inside the pitcher. ...
Several types of figs (Ficus spp.) are called "stranglers" because they grow on host trees, which they slowly choke to death.
Once established, the young strangler figs begin sending aerial roots down to the ground, where they quickly dive into the soil and anchor themselves. The roots may dangle from the host tree's canopy or creep down its trunk. Once in contact with the ground, the fig enters a growth spurt, plundering moisture and nutrients that the host tree needs. The strangler fig's roots encircle the host tree's roots, cutting off its supply of food and water, ultimately killing the host tree. Meanwhile, back at the epiphyte, the strangler fig is busy producing new leaves and shoots that soon become large enough to overshadow the host tree's foliage, stealing sunlight and rainfall from the host canopy. By the time the host tree is dead, the strangler fig is large and strong enough to stand on its own, usually encircling the lifeless, often hollow body of the host tree. ...
Closely related to poison hemlock (the plant that famously killed Socrates), water hemlock has been deemed "the most violently toxic plant in North America." A large wildflower in the carrot family, water hemlock resembles Queen Anne’s lace and is sometimes confused with edible parsnips or celery. However, water hemlock is infused with deadly cicutoxin, especially in its roots, and will rapidly generate potentially fatal symptoms in anyone unlucky enough to eat it. Painful convulsions, abdominal cramps, nausea, and death are common, and those who survive are often afflicted with amnesia or lasting tremors.