Adventure, Botany, & Conservation: The ABCs of Ynés Mexia

Manasvi Verma is a 2nd year PhD student in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences Program at Harvard Medical School studying host-microbiome interactions in the human gut. Corena Loeb is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Harvard-MIT program in Speech, Hearing, Bioscience and Technology. Cover image by Pexels from Pixabay. This biography is part of our “Picture a Scientist” initiative. To learn more about the amazing men … Continue reading Adventure, Botany, & Conservation: The ABCs of Ynés Mexia

Adventure, Botany, & Conservation: The ABCs of Ynés Mexia

by Manasvi Verma In all my travels I’ve never been attacked by a wild animal, lost my way or caught a disease… I don’t think there’s any place in the world where a woman can’t venture. – Ynés Mexía As the climate disaster becomes more imminent, environmental conservation is a pressing need. Recently at the forefront of public discourse, this movement has been simmering behind-the-scenes … Continue reading Adventure, Botany, & Conservation: The ABCs of Ynés Mexia

Global warming threatens most of the world’s wheat production, and the Paris Agreement cannot prevent it

Study predicts that global warming will affect 60% of the world’s wheat-growing areas by 2100, even if the Paris Agreement’s targets are met. Damage would be global but developing countries and low-income regions likely to suffer most as rising temperatures affect global food production.
Continue reading Global warming threatens most of the world’s wheat production, and the Paris Agreement cannot prevent it

Speedy Plants for Improving Food Production Efficiency

By introducing a tool commonly used to study brain function into the leaves of plants, researchers at the University of Glasgow have developed a technique that shows promise in improving the efficiency of food production by controlling how quickly plants respond to changing conditions. Not only does this method produce a more desirable solution to improving efficiency than previous methods, it also highlights the importance of employing tools in non-conventional scenarios to produce clever solutions to complex problems. Continue reading Speedy Plants for Improving Food Production Efficiency

Vines

Plants grow in interesting ways. You may have noticed that your houseplants “lean” towards the window, seeking the sunlight. This movement towards light is called phototropism. Tropism is a general term referring to any instance of growth or movement of an organism in response to the environment. Vines display another kind of tropism known as thigmotropism, meaning they respond to touch. In this set of … Continue reading Vines

Oak Wood Cross Section

Cross section of oak wood, showing every reason that made an oak tall and strong. The large pores are vessels that are responsible for transporting (more accurately, pumping/pushing) water from the root system to the tip of the tree. The densely packed purple dots are stained lignin in the cells walls. During early wood development, once lignin is deposited in the cell wall, these cells … Continue reading Oak Wood Cross Section

Holly Wood Tangential Section

Tangential section of wood of Chinese holly. This is how it looks like when you do a cut that’s perpendicular to the radius of the stem. The vertical lines are vessels transporting water from roots to leaves, while the circles are clustered ray cells that function to transport fluids and nutrients radially and laterally (perpendicular to the long axis) within a woody stem. Contributed by … Continue reading Holly Wood Tangential Section