Some years ago, I found myself making my way up the narrow stairs of a Learjet on a sultry runway in a deserted airport near the South Africa-Mozambique border. The humidity was there to taste—the air thick with it.
Environment
13 hours ago
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22
Bren Smith and his GreenWave organization are helping lay the foundations for a generation of seaweed-growing farmers in the United States, while working to build a network of producers and buyers.
Agriculture
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1
With cloud seeding, it may rain, but it doesn't really pour or flood—at least nothing like what drenched the United Arab Emirates and paralyzed Dubai, meteorologists said.
Environment
Apr 18, 2024
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37
New research from the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich illustrates a critical barrier to natural regeneration of tropical forests. Their models—from ground-based data gathered in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil—show that when ...
Plants & Animals
Apr 15, 2024
1
256
Black-capped chickadees have extraordinary memories that can recall the locations of thousands of morsels of food to help them survive the winter. Now scientists at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute have discovered how the chickadees ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 29, 2024
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295
Seeds remain in a dormant state, waiting for the right environmental conditions to germinate, thus increasing the probability of fragile seedling survival. The transition from a dry seed to a vegetative seedling is an irreversible ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Mar 20, 2024
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8
A new study published in Nature Plants has found that the summer solstice acts as a "starting gun" to synchronize beech tree reproduction across vast distances in Europe, affecting ecosystem functions.
Plants & Animals
Mar 13, 2024
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111
Fonio (Digitaria exilis), a type of millet, is the oldest indigenous crop in West Africa and one of the fastest-maturing cereals. Despite its low yield, the combination of quick maturation and drought tolerance and its ability ...
Cell & Microbiology
Feb 29, 2024
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80
In a recent study published in Molecular Plant, researchers have elucidated the mechanism underlying the increased susceptibility to necrotrophs during fruit ripening and have developed a rapid strategy to improve tomato ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Feb 28, 2024
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11
Hairy bittercress is one of those plants that hurl their seeds in all directions to spread them effectively. A research team has now discovered that to do this, the plant uses a previously unknown mechanism that makes the ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 15, 2024
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17
A seed ( /ˈsiːd/ (help·info)), referred to as a kernel in some plants, is a small embryonic plant enclosed in a covering called the seed coat, usually with some stored food. It is the product of the ripened ovule of gymnosperm and angiosperm plants which occurs after fertilization and some growth within the mother plant. The formation of the seed completes the process of reproduction in seed plants (started with the development of flowers and pollination), with the embryo developed from the zygote and the seed coat from the integuments of the ovule.
Seeds have been an important development in the reproduction and spread of flowering plants, relative to more primitive plants like mosses, ferns and liverworts, which do not have seeds and use other means to propagate themselves. This can be seen by the success of seed plants (both gymnosperms and angiosperms) in dominating biological niches on land, from forests to grasslands both in hot and cold climates.
The term seed also has a general meaning that predates the above — anything that can be sown i.e. "seed" potatoes, "seeds" of corn or sunflower "seeds". In the case of sunflower and corn "seeds", what is sown is the seed enclosed in a shell or hull, and the potato is a tuber.
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