Recent Posts

Can You Grow a Chewy-Ooey-Gooey-Chocolatey-Nutty Candy Bar?

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Candy in classrooms seems inevitable at certain times of the year. This simple handout offers a little food for thought so students can learn a few yummy morsels about the plants they are enjoying in every delicious bite. Note: The visuals are kid-friendly but some key vocabulary is not; primary students…

Fascination of Plants Day 2015 - SUCCESS STORIES

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Official SUCCESS STORIES Report for FoPD 2015 Thanks to the voluntary contributions and hard work of many people in the plant science community around the world the Fascination of Plants Day 2015 was a huge success.  This publication celebrates how so much diversity -  in terms of individual demographics,…

Build a Super Plant! Outreach activity

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This activity is meant to illustrate the concept of the “random” nature of allele inheritance and the resulting phenotypes. In this activity, colored balls that are selected randomly from a bingo cage represent the alleles.  These colors correspond with phenotypes for specific traits. This activity…

Plants release chemical weapons and deploy insect armies in their defence

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From The Conversation, by Angela White. Accessible article about how plants defend themselves from herbivore. View full article

Report: Millions at risk as severe drought hits Ethiopia (September 2015)

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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 citrus farmers pull up trees, dig reservoirs to survive drought (Sept 2015)

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"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…

As drought destroys maize, Zimbabwe tries out new staples

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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…

New York Times profile of Nobel Laureate Tu Youyou, discoverer of artemisinin

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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

Weed to Wonder: Teosinite to Corn (e-book/app)

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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…