The Chugach people of southern Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula have picked berries for generations. Tart blueberries and sweet, raspberry-like salmonberries — an Alaska favorite — are baked into pies and boiled into jams. But in the summer of 2009, the bushes stayed brown and the berries never came. For three more years, harvests failed. “It hit the communities very hard,” says Nathan Lojewski, the forestry manager for Chugachmiut, a nonprofit tribal consortium for seven villages in the Chugach region.

In the mountainous cloud forests of Borneo, nothing goes to waste, and that includes waste itself. Here, the largest carnivorous plant on Earth has evolved to become a sort of customised outhouse for local tree shrews (Tupaia montana).

A phenomenon called "plant blindness" means we tend to underappreciate the flora around us. That can have disastrous consequences not only for the environment, but human health.

It’d be great if a burger-a-day diet was healthy. Don’t get me wrong—it’s not the worst. You’ve got protein in there and hopefully some veggies on top (and on the side) , and even some fiber from the roll (you used whole grain, right?). Unfortunately, study after study shows that meat as a protein source just isn’t that healthy. It’s far better to get that necessary protein from plants. But why?

Researchers may have found a way to protect Florida strawberries fields from mildew with ultraviolet light. The University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences teamed up with the Norway-based startup, Saga Robotics, to test out the autonomous robot, Thorvald. For several months, one night a week, students test drive the robot and document how the ultraviolet light eliminates mildew from strawberry fields on the Wimauma, Fla. Campus.

The shade of a single tree can provide welcome relief from the hot summer sun. But when that single tree is part of a small forest, it creates a profound cooling effect. According to a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, trees play a big role in keeping our towns and cities cool. According to the study, the right amount of tree cover can lower summer daytime temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit. And the effect is quite noticeable from neighborhood to neighborhood, even down to the scale of a single city block.

What started as a niche social media trend has spread to big brands like Walmart and Home Depot.

A plant virus distributes its genes into eight separate segments that can all reproduce, even if they infect different cells.

Plants convert sunlight into energy through photosynthesis; however, most crops on the planet are plagued by a photosynthetic glitch, and to deal with it, evolved an energy-expensive process called photorespiration that drastically suppresses their yield potential. Researchers from the University of Illinois and U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service report in the journal Science that crops engineered with a photorespiratory shortcut are 40 percent more productive in real-world agronomic conditions.

The BEST low light indoor plants and how to care for each of them! If you want unique and easy to care for low light plants, this is the ultimate list!

Genome editing has been used to destroy a virus that lurks inside many of the bananas grown in Africa. Other teams are trying to use it to make the Cavendish bananas sold in supermarkets worldwide resistant to a disease that threatens to make it impossible to grow this variety commercially in future.

The trees around my house all look pretty much the same right now.  They stand naked and sway back and forth in the icy wind that is blowing through a great deal of the country. Hopefully, when spr…

Plants can find it tough to get all the nitrogen they need, especially from Australian soils. But summer storms can provide an added boost.

The seeds, inside a sealed container, are the first plants ever grown on the Moon's surface.

In the 2015 blockbuster The Martian, Matt Damon plays an astronaut who gets stranded on Mars and survives by growing potatoes, producing enough food to last months. China’s lunar mission could bring that piece of science fiction a step closer to reality if it succeeds in growing the first flower on the moon in less than a hundred days’ time, an experiment that the China National Space Administration said it would soon broadcast.

And they react to the buzzing of pollinators by sweetening their nectar.

Fresh greens in space? Recent research has looked into how plants respond to low levels of gravity and a particular hormone which can help plants grow in challenging space conditions. Now, new research has succeeded in growing plants in high-tech planters which use artificial soil made from lava rock.

Scientists have genetically engineered plants so they grow up to 40 per cent larger by tweaking the process they use to turn sunlight into food. Photosynthesis allows plants to harvest the sun’s energy and produces vital oxygen as a by-product, fuelling the rich array of life on Earth. However, this mechanism is hampered by an energy intensive process called photorespiration, which plants have evolved to work around an inefficiency present in regular photosynthesis.

In this research, the group of scholars examined plants and showed that leaves can produce electricity when they get involved or touched by a distinct material or by the breeze. Sustainable sources of energy, which are pollution free and eco-friendly, are one of the significant challenges for the forthcoming generation of the world. A research group of scholars(biologists & robotics) which is based at Center for Micro-Bio Robotics (CMBR) of IIT in Pontedera (Pisa, Italy).

Find out how we keep our famous yew tumps in tip-top condition at Powis Castle. It’s a huge task for us to get all the trimming done. Two gardeners spend six weeks trimming the box hedge and two more spend 12 weeks working on the yew. One gardener spends about 10 weeks in the air on this hydraulic cherry-picker getting all the high trimming done.