Botany

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,…

by Manasvi Verma Ynés Mexía 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…

Could our streets be illuminated by the trees themselves someday? With the help of a mushroom, researchers make a breakthrough in engineering glow-in-the-dark plants. So, maybe someday is sooner than we think. Learn more about the science behind…

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…

Using fossil fuels has led to climate change; however, trees can erase some damage. By maximizing forest coverage on Earth, scientists predict that the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could be reduced by a quarter—back to levels from a hundred…

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…

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…

My name is Ian Hill. I am from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where I was born and raised.  My passion for biology began in the gardens of my family members. My grandmother was a passionate flower gardener, the head of a local garden club, and my dad…

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…

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…