plants
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Critical List: Other countries manage to pass climate change laws; Greenpeace is busy
Plants are freaking out about climate change: Their timing for flowering and leafing is even more off than climate models predicted. Also, species extinction could be a major driver of climate change and keep the environment from producing awesome resources like … food. South Korea’s parliament approved a cap-and-trade plan. Kenya and Peru are also […]
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Meatpacking plant turns into net-zero-energy vertical farm
Soon, a former meatpacking plant in Chicago will replace carcasses and rendering vats with bakers and brewers and fish farmers and mushroom growers. The Plant (ho ho, a double meaning!) is gathering together a bunch of food-makers to create a self-sustaining system in the 93,500-square-foot abandoned space. As Fast Company reports, a former meatpacking plant […]
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Plants are secret geniuses
Annalee Newitz at io9 has collected 10 pieces of evidence that plants are smarter than you think, and it might make you look at your potted ficus in a new light. It turns out there’s reason to believe that plants can communicate, remember, recognize related plants, and measure time. Let’s hope nobody finds out they […]
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Watch plants swallow up tiny houses in this weird living artwork
Artist Rob Carter is interested in the relationship between the built environment and nature, and his newest exhibition, which opens tomorrow in New York City, features mini replicas of three homesteads — Charles Darwin’s, Henry David Thoreau’s, and Sir John Bennet Lawes’. The miniatures live in a garden of dandelions, bush beans, and corn, which […]
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Dude singlehandedly finds homes for 500 unwanted trees
Meet a Seattle resident who digs up and replants unwanted trees -- including arboreal monsters weighing up to 400 pounds.
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Scientists resurrect 30,000-year-old plants — and they can still bear fruit
Man, I can barely raise a plant from a seedling without killing it, and scientists have managed to grow viable plants out of seeds from 29,000 B.C.? So unfair.
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Cacti can clean up poisonous soils
Here are a few things you do with a prickly pear cactus: Get poked. Turn its fruit into jam. Use it to clean up dangerous concentrations of selenium in arid California lands. In California’s San Joaquin Valley, a long history of artificial irrigation has impregnated the soil with selenium. In small quantities, selenium is beneficial […]