Berry Go Round #62

This month MostlyScience is proud to host Berry Go Round #62. If you are unfamiliar with BGR, it is a blog carnival devoted to highlighting recent blogging on the science of plants.

Now on to the Carnival!

1) The Berry That Changed The World: Review

By: Kirsten Hostetler / Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog – Link
This first one I think hits close to home for many scientists of every discipline, a plant that fuels the very research world… Coffee! This excellent post by Kirsten is a review of the book Coffee: Its History and Also Its Remarkable Growth in the World of Commerce, which starts at the origins and legends and travels all the way to modern plantations that have engrained Coffee in Western culture.

2) The Ornaments of Life

By: Gary Krupnick / The Plant Press – Link
This post introduces and simplifies the ideas expressed in the upcoming publication “The Ornaments of Life: Coevolution and Conservation in the Tropics” (Fleming and Kress 2013) on recent research on the importance of functional and evolutionary tropical pollinators and frugivores in maintaining the balance and diversity of the thousands of species of plants and animals in the average kilometer of tropical rainforest.

3) Ivy and the Nanoparticles: The sticking power of Ivy

By: Tim Havenith / Notes of Nature – Link
A very short background on how Ivy is able to climb and stick to structures. One of those things you might notice but never really think ‘That is actually quite odd’. Observed in nature from as far back as Charles Darwin, only to be more recently fully understood.

4) Plants move water ‘the wrong way’ in tropical cloud forest

The New Phytologist Trust – Link
This post covers and reviews new research being published on trees and plants that are able to absorb water from clouds and fog. Not only that, they can move the water in a reverse direction to water their roots with the water from the clouds.

5) When McCarthyism Meets Science

By: Daniel Chamovitz / The Daily Plant – Link
I am ending with this blog post by Daniel Chamovitz from The Daily Plant which is more about a recent situation he was in than a particular piece of plant science. The other month he was removed as a guest from a show based on his scientific views on genetically modified foods even though the show topic was unrelated. This kind of censorship from the fundamentalist producers of the show is a major inhibitor of science literacy and communication, which of course is the main goal of MostlyScience to begin with. It’s an interesting read and worth the time.

Hope everyone enjoyed this Berry Go Round, we hope to host again in 2014 at some point. September’s BGR will be hosted by Plant Chaser.