The Journal of Experimental Botany has a special issue on vascular development that features several outstanding review and opinion articles. Topics include Evolution of Conducting Cells, Regulation of Vascular Cell Division, overviews of hormones, peptide signals, receptors and transcription factors…

The California drought gets headlines, but few in California will go hungry. There's a different situation in Ethiopia, also dealing with a severe drought. Source: Aljazeera, September 5, 2015 View full article

"California leads the nation in production of fruits and vegetables, its nearly 80,000 farms and ranches taking in total revenues of $46.4 billion in 2013, state data show. But the relatively dry parts of the state where much of its farming is rely on irrigation rather than rainwater, and environmental…

JAMBEZI, Zimbabwe, Sept 11 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - For more than 20 years, Dalarex Ncube grew maize in arid Jambezi District, one of Zimbabwe's driest regions, and his family ate maize porridge, the national staple. But seven years ago, he began switching to growing sorghum and millet - both…

What better advertisement for plant sciences than an important drug developed from plants, and recognition of that achievement by a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine? Source: New York Times, October 6, 2015 View full article

The story of how humans changed corn and how corn changed human history. Topics include domestication, hybrid vigor, genome sequencing, jumping genes, and biofortification. The Weed to Wonder site is a flexible "e-book" that can be viewed as a website, an app, or a printable PDF. The site features…

NPR (National Public Radio) story from 2012 discusses how drought kills trees. Read full article

In February 2016, Death Valley in California (the place where the hottest temperature ever was recorded) had a "superbloom" as millions of seeds of desert ephemeral plants germinated, leading to a massive floral bloom. See pictures and a video of this once-in-a-decade event. View full article