and Flora (CITES) which is an international treaty to protect endangered plants and animals. In Images:
Is a Walking, Talking Plant-Person Possible? Lumbering around on his barky limbs sprouting flowers
and even dancing in a pot one of the stars of the film Guardians of the Galaxy bizarrely blends the plant and animal kingdoms.
but how outlandish is the idea of a plant-animal hybrid? Plants that can smell and animals that regenerate show that animal and vegetable kingdoms may not be as far apart as they first appear.
Some scientists even say Earth's biology suggests the possibility of thinking plants somewhere in the universe.
Here experts tell how Groot-like blending could occur and some reasons it couldn't. Science Fact or Fiction?
The Plausibility of 10 Sci-fi Concepts Plant sight plant hearing In the film Groot clearly hears sees feels and talks (albeit only three words
and sensing plants is not at all outlandish Danny Chamovitz director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at Tel aviv University and author of
What a Plant Knows (Scientific American 2012) told Live Science. In fact plants have a much richer more dynamic life than most people give the leafy beings credit for Chamovitz said.
We think of plants as un-living because they're unmoving Chamovitz said. The strong scientific evidence is that plants have every sense familiar in animals except hearing.
They respond to chemicals with lock -and-key mechanisms that resemble how animals smell. Plants have specific photoreceptors
which are proteins that respond to different wavelengths of light. They know when they're being touched Simon Gilroy a professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told Live Science.
Plants also have proprioception or a sense of their location in space Chamovitz said which is why they can tell
when they're planted upside-down. Some plants can even hear able to distinguish the vibration patterns made by different chewing caterpillars according to a study detailed this summer in the journal Oecologia Gilroy said.
Decades-old claims that plants can hear music however have little to no scientific support he added.)
This plant sensing may not seem evident after all plants don't scream in pain or comment on Van gogh's use of color.
But senses serve the same function in plants as they do in animals: Plants take in information
which travels through the plant body and causes some sort of response Chamovitz said. In Photos:
Animals That Mimic Plants The familiar phenomenon of houseplants growing toward the window for example shows how plants sense
and respond to light. When part of a plant gets eaten that causes distress chemicals to propagate through the plant
which responds with chemical changes to make itself less tasty to the predator Gilroy said. Not only can plants send signals within their own bodies
but those signals can also influence other plants. In other words they communicate Chamovitz said. A disease or pest infestation in a neighboring plant sends out chemical signals that cause nearby plants to respond.
They can smell when neighbors are said sick Chamovitz. It gives off a chemical so the plant defends itself.
Researchers have shown also corn seedlings lean toward sounds with a 220-Hertz frequency the same tune emitted by the plants'roots
and chili seedlings grow quicker when they sense a fennel plant is growing nearby. Moving#but slowly Groot does more than just sense
and communicate though. He also moves around. This woody best friend to a talking raccoon shifts around on mobile stumps and lifts alien bullies up by their nostrils.
Thinking about it the feature that really isn't plantlike about Groot is speed the of the movement Gilroy said.
Plants for the most part simply can't move that fast. Animals have squishy cells that can move past one another making muscles feasible Gilroy said.
Things like muscles are impossible with how plants are said set up he. Moreover a plant's entire body-plan centers upon staying put
so they can maximize photosynthesis with networks of branches and roots. Chamovitz calls rootedness the primary principle of plant biology.
Plants do make movements however they just do it by growing Gilroy said. For example they move toward the sunlight by elongating cells on the dark side of the stem.
Plants grow through the environment Gilroy said. Due to some clever mechanisms a few notable species buck the rule of the slow-moving plant.
The famous Venus flytrap shuts its jaws rapidly by essentially growing them shut Gilroy said.
Acid released at the flytrap's hinge softens cell walls and makes them expand quickly. Image Gallery:
Carnivorous plants Finally plants have to stay put because movement burns so much energy photosynthesis simply can't power animal-style activity
which is why animals eat plants and other animals. To move around like Groot does on screen such a tree creature would have to eat other things too Gilroy said.
Clearly the movie speeds up such vegetable growth but real-life plants can indeed keep growing in ways animals can't Ed Rayburn an extension specialist
Those plant species capable of unlimited growth can keep going and going for what to humans seems like forever he said.
And plants commonly regenerate lost limbs. Those abilities derive from the way plants are structured and their access to stem cells.
Arranged in modular body plans plants can grow limbs in different directions and add secondary limbs in a fractal pattern.
Animals by contrast grow to a predetermined size and shape and much of that happens in the womb Gilroy said.
But since plants can't run and so will inevitably suffer damage they have to keep growing throughout life he said.
and root tips these plant stem cells are pluripotent meaning they can develop into any type of plant cell.
After injury any plant cell can revert to similar pluripotency. Animals by contrast lack meristems and stem cells are much harder to come by as shown by the difficulties faced by cloning efforts Rayburn said.
Intelligent plants? Plant communication even has some researchers in the new field of plant neurobiology considering the potential for leafy intelligence.
Alien worlds some scientists say could theoretically birth sentient plants. But Chamovitz said such green thinkers would have to change the core trait of plants their rootedness.
Animals developed thought because of their searching strategy for finding food he told Forbes. Alien tree-thinkers would have to incorporate movement perhaps with some type of root system that can push itself out of the ground take three steps forward
and then re-root he told Forbes. As for creating plant-animal hybrids here On earth that's most likely to happen in a geneticist's lab. It's theoretically possible given the right gene transfers to give people a coating of green photosynthetic skin.
To actually make much use of such a feature however people would have to grow a canopy of leaves.
and managing forests to make way for food-bearing plants as early as 11000 years ago soon after the end of the last ice age a new study suggests.
Earth's Plant life from Space in Photos Hunt added that these changes in vegetation do not coincide with any known period of climate change
Hunt also pointed to evidence that the New guinea sago palm a plant that yields the starchy staple food sago first appeared over 10000 years ago along Borneo's coastline.
Apart from the presence of macrofossil remains of plants with these mind-altering properties there are artistic depictions of opium poppies for instance
macrofossil remains of psychoactive plants residues from fermented alcoholic drinks psychoactive alkaloids (chemical compounds) on artifacts and skeletal remains and artistic depictions of psychoactive plants and drinking scenes.
Widespread use In prehistoric sites throughout Europe archaeologists have found the remains of numerous psychoactive plant
For instance at a Neanderthal burial cave at Shanidar in northern Iraq dating to around 60000 B c. researchers discovered the remains of many medical plant species suggesting the grave belonged to a shaman.
But other scientists argue that a gerbil-like rodent called the Persian jird may have brought the plants into the cave after the Neanderthal there had died.
In particular at an archaeological site near Bucharest Romania scientists found charred Cannabis seeds from plants in some tombs.
which is most abundant in the female plants (Cannabis plants are typically either male or female with male plants producing pollen that pollinates the seed-producing flowers of the female plant).
The presence of burnt seeds in these tombs proves that the prehistoric societies of Eastern europe were aware of this
and consequently they burnt female plants Guerra-Doce told Live Science. Image Gallery: 7 Potent Medicinal Plants Alcoholic residues suggest many prehistoric Eurasians drank fruit wines mead beer (from barley
and wheat) and fermented drinks made from dairy products. The discovery of alcoholic fermentation appears to date back to about 7000 B c. in China.
Similarly a luxurious tomb in another area of Spain contained evidence of the hallucinogenic alkaloid hyoscyamine which comes from the nightshade family of plants.
and they played a similar role as drug plants Guerra-Doce said. After large-scale production became possible alcohol likely became available to many people (not just elites)
Drug plants on the other hand were cultivated never on a large scale. And though they were consumed also eventually for hedonistic purposes this use is difficult to observe in the archaeological record Guerra-Doce said.
Interestingly the common names of some of these plants refer to madness to evil spirits to harmful effects
which means they like to eat plants and meat. Squirrels mainly eat fungi seeds nuts and fruits but they will also munch on eggs small insects caterpillars small animals and even young snakes.
This means that they eat meat and plant-based foods. Most monkeys eat nuts fruits seeds and flowers.
and incentives offered by many utilities for water-efficient upgrades like water-smart shower heads or even landscaping with drought-tolerant plants.
while you wait for the shower to warm up by collecting it in a bucket use it for watering plants.
If you plan to reuse soapy water in your garden make sure your soap is safe for plants.
and composition of the different plant types that make up the forest and it has thermal detectors that can examine surface temperature
Saturated fat Saturated fat is found mostly in foods from animals and some plants. Foods from animals include meats and dairy products.
They're found mainly in many fish nuts seeds and oils from plants. Some examples of foods that contain these fats are salmon trout herring avocados olives walnuts and liquid vegetable oils such as soybean corn safflower canola olive and sunflower.
and all by following the trail of a plant biologist who had collected maple branches there more than 40 years ago during the height of the Nixon administration and the Vietnam war.
I became extremely grateful to scores of plant biologists like the one who archived a foot-long maple twig from Hill Forest in 1971.
These historical plant specimens are stored in collections known as herbaria where they are affixed to stiff pieces of paperboard labeled
Thanks to the careful records of those past plant collectors I was able to track down 20 of the forest sites across North carolina where red maple branches were collected in the#70s#80s and#90s (and only put the truck in a ditch at one of them.
Researchers have found a virus that typically infects plants has been systemically infecting honeybees in the United states and China.
the scientists found a viral pathogen that typically infects plants spreading inside the bees. The detection of this virus (the Tobacco Ringspot Virus or TRSV) could help explain the decline of honeybees
whether this plant-infecting virus could also cause systemic infection in the bees said Yan Ping Chen a study author who works at ARS.
and are for this reason prime suspects as potential sources of host-jumping species (jumping from one species plants to another species honeybees).
because it lacks an internal genomic process that edits out errors in replicated genomes meaning that TRSV can generate all sorts of variant error-filled copies with lots of different infection characteristics that cannot be defended easily once they jump from plants to honeybees and spread throughout the hives.
when it jumps from plants to bees. Viruses such as TRSV once they jump species are a likely source of emerging
Some ranchers plow under the native savannas and plant exotic grasses that can support denser stocking.
which the plants soon to be subject to new EPA emissions rules pollute the local atmospere.
Both plants together release about 30 megatons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year making the area ravaged by climate change-influenced drought the largest point-source of pollution in both North america and South america.
The U s. Environmental protection agency is releasing a proposed rule on June 2 that is expected to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal-fired power plants including the two New mexico plants included in the Los alamos study.
The recommendations which appear in the June 30 issue of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition were spearheaded by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) a Washington D c.-based nonprofit group known for its advocacy of plant-based diets
Perhaps not surprising for an organization that encourages plant-based diets the advice highlighted the benefits of fruits and vegetables and recommended limited consumption of meat.
albeit cherry-picked to highlight the advantages of a plant-based diet. The recommendations are to eat more fresh vegetables and fruits;
or fried meats. 10 New Ways to Eat Well The overall recommendation is to favor plant-based foods said lead author Joseph Gonzales a registered dietician with the PCRM.
Plants are rich in protective compounds and help consumers avoid the cancer-causing substances found in animal products.
It is an incontrovertible fact that a plant-based diet lowers your risk of cancer
Chillier temperatures and shorter days cause leaves to quit producing chlorophyll the green-tinted pigment that allows plants to capture sunlight
As climate change stresses ecosystems already rare plant species could sadly go extinct. One solution is to collect plant
As a computational biologist I work in several fields of life science primarily in ecology and genetics and particularly with plants.
As for the topic I've been enamored increasingly with plants over the years. How fascinating it is to learn how these mostly stationary organisms obtain nutrients grow toward light find a mate produce
There are a few hundred thousand plant species and they all do it a little bit differently! What has been your most discouraging professional moment
and natural history of four plant species. Pollan doesn't just describe the utility of plants he explores how humans
and plants have changed each other especially how plants changed society. His way of teaching botany history cuisine and evolutionary relationships is exciting and
and pecans they're part of the legume family of plants which includes beans lentils peas and other familiar foods.
When planted peanut seeds (kernels) grow into small 18-inch plants with oval-shaped leaves. The peanut plant appears unremarkable at first glance
but unlike most other plants its flowers bloom above ground while its fruits (peanuts) develop below ground.
To start the small yellow flowers grow around the lower portion of the plant and only last for about a day.
After self-pollination the flowers lose their petals as the fertilized ovaries in the center of the flowers begin to enlarge.
The plant's pedicels stalks connecting to the ovaries curve downward pointing the budding ovaries toward the ground.
Over its lifetime the peanut plant will produce about 40 peanut pods before dying. Follow Joseph Castro on Twitter.
Contrary to what some people think pineapples don't grow on trees they grow out of the ground from a leafy plant.
The plant consists of stocky leaves whorled around a central stem. In a healthy pineapple plant the tapered swordlike leaves can grow up to about 5 feet (1. 5 meters) long.
Common commercial varieties of pineapples are self-incompatible meaning that the plants'pollen cannot fertilize members of the same variety.
and flower simultaneously the plant will produce a seedless fruit that develops without fertilization. When removed the crown of the pineapple fruit contains small roots.
(or a pot) a new fruit-producing plant will grow. Additionally the plant's suckers (side shoots that grow in between the leaves of the main stem)
and slips (tiny plantlets that grow out from the base of the pineapple fruit) can produce new plants
when replanted. Follow Joseph Castro on Twitter. Follow us@livescience Facebook & Google+e
#Can Men Lactate? Unlike female nipples male nipples appear to be purely decorative. But can they also be functional
They can live on desert mountains as high as 4000 feet (1200 m). They get most of their water from eating plants to survive according to the Natural history Museum of Los angeles. Rams are herbivores.
They typically eat seeds grass and plants. One swallow of food isn't enough for these animals.
Many aspects of Earth including plants animals and clouds fascinate Blorbians; they including Plum have been longing to experience nature On earth.
causing erosion, threatening the survival of rare plants and trees and competing with native fauna, such as giant tortoises.
the plant life on Santiago bounced back, including some invasive plants such as blackberry (Rubus niveus). Control efforts are weed under way to them out.
Meanwhile, native plants are also flourishing, and birds, such as the Galapagos rail (Laterallus spilonotus) have returned as well.
The project is among the most spectacular of a new wave of very ambitious island eradications.
Plants with waxy coatings on their leaves reflect more sunlight than their plainer-surfaced relatives.
Ridgwell and his colleagues would now like to do some practical research on the albedos of various varieties of crop plant,
Switzerland, looked at changing the albedo of Earth's grasslands by encouraging plants with particular leaf geometries3.
Study fails to catch plants making methane: Nature Newsplants cannot make methane, say researchers seeking to resolve a mystery that has puzzled biologists for several years.
plants simply take up the gas dissolved in water from the soil, and pass it back out through their leaves.
when grown in the lab. Nor do these plants seem to have any way of making methane.
A search of plant genome databases found them to contain no genes comparable to those of certain bacteria known to make the gas.
plants do produce small amounts of methane. But Nisbet's team believes that rather than being a result of plant metabolism,
this gas is a by-product of the breakdown of cell material. People hadn't realized that
and by plants, says Euan Nisbet, an Earth scientist at Royal Holloway, University of London,
We certainly don't need to rewrite the plant textbooks. Satellite observations of large methane concentrations above tropical rain forests,
are too inaccurate to prove that plants are a major source of the global methane budget,
Frank Keppler of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, a co-author on the original report on plant methane emissions,
Keppler's group is doing experiments to establish how stress causes plants to produce methane.
which has a collection of 11,700 plant species, is the Chinese Academy of Sciences'flagship institute for conservation research.
In winter, a dense fog of water vapour trapped beneath the rainforest canopy keeps the myriad plant species alive.
The nonnative plants, known as'water pumps'by the locals suck up water and cause more surface runoff.
The results are welcome news as plant pathologists race to arm themselves against an ongoing epidemic of stem rust (P. graminis) caused by a recently emerged fungus called Ug99 (see'Wheat fungus spreads out of Africa'.
says Jorge Dubcovsky, a plant geneticist at the University of California, Davis, who led one of the studies.
says James Kolmer, a plant pathologist at the US Department of agriculture in St paul, Minnesota. It has been exposed to so many rusts in many different environments for a long period of time,
or by the plant soon after it becomes infected3. Neither Yr36 nor Lr34 can fully protect wheat against infection.
But in plants with both genes, only 5%of the leaf bore the fungus. Dubcovsky has bred already lines that carry both genes
Although Lr34 alone does not render plants resistant to the fungus, researchers have found that the gene can enhance the resistance found in some varieties4.
or near the root zone of plants, drop by drop, through an extensive web of tubing.
plants become less efficient at taking up nitrogen and more nitrogen is lost into the environment. The team tracked the fate of fertilizer nitrogen
and can provide nutrients for fresh plant growth, for example. Most trees and tall vegetation can survive normal bushfires,
Increased fire frequency could lead to vegetation changes that would reduce plant growth, decreasing the amount of carbon that plants remove from the atmosphere further exacerbating greenhouse warming by carbon dioxide.
How will we mitigate against such fires in the future? A forest-management method called prescribed burning is already being tested in Australia, California and Portugal.
to find the best strategy that causes the least damage to plants. Probably the best ways to adapt to increased wildfire risk include sensible urban planning
what plants were experiencing just a century or so ago. Plants may have benefited from the availability of extra CO2,
which they convert, through photosynthesis, into biomass. But plant growth benefits from elevated CO2 levels only up to a point,
and more negative aspects of climate warming may still be ahead. The biggest worry is drought.
Plants genes get fine tailoring: Nature Newsafter decades of searching, plant biologists have found a way to selectively snip out one gene
and replace it with another. The method promises to be a boon to both basic research
'Now that technique has been expanded to include plants. In papers published online today By nature, two independent groups of researchers report that the technique can also be used to engineer herbicide-resistant corn and tobacco1,
says David Ow, a plant biologist at the US Department of agriculture Plant Gene expression Center in Albany, California.
Plant biologists have long been frustrated by the lack of a simple method for either deleting a specific gene from the genome or replacing it with another gene.
the fast-growing weed with a small genome favoured by many plant biologists as a model system,
says Joseph Ecker, a plant biologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La jolla, California.
Sporadic reports of plant gene-replacement strategies have come and gone, but none has been versatile
In 1997, a Nature paper reporting targeted gene disruption in Arabidopsis raised the hopes of many plant researchers3.
One problem is that plants tend to have big, complex genomes, chock full of large families of genes with very similar DNA sequences,
The challenges associated with any kind of sequence-specific modification in plants are profound, she says.
Meanwhile, the other study1 is the work of a research team led by Daniel Voytas, a plant biologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and a member of the Zinc Finger Consortium,
a plant biologist at Karlsruhe University in Germany who is developing zinc-finger nucleases for use in Arabidopsis.
when we create transgenic plants, we insert the transgene somewhere in the genome, and we don't know exactly where it happens to insert,
says Wilhelm Gruissem, a plant biologist at The swiss Federal Institute of technology in Zurich. Now you can target the transgene to a specific location.
They found that countries with some of these important varieties have the poorest conservation of plant genetic resources
Emile Frison, director-general of Bioversity International, a not-for-profit research organization in Rome, says the study clearly demonstrates the interdependence of countries regarding plant genetic resources.
Sexual gene shuffling suppressed in plants: Nature Newsusing a combination of three genetic mutations, plant researchers have disrupted the usual process of genetic shuffling during the formation of reproductive cells male pollen and female ova.
These triple mutant plants instead produce pollen and ova genetically identical to the cells of the parent plant by simple mitotic cell division.
The results, published today in PLOS Biology could bring plant breeders a step closer to generating crops that produce their seeds completely asexually a process called apomixis1.
Such crops have long been sought because harnessing apomixis would dramatically accelerate plant breeding. The hybrid offspring of crosses between two different cultivars of a crop plant often tend to produce higher yields.
But when hybrids are allowed to self-fertilize to produce the next generation of seeds, the intricate genetic networks that brought about this'hybrid vigor'are shuffled,
Some plants, such as grape vines, can be propagated asexually using cuttings but not crops such as corn or wheat.
For plant breeders, it would be much simpler and cheaper if the hybrids could simply clone themselves in large numbers by apomixis.
or particular mutations will be needed to engineer an apomictic crop plant. The new work, by Rapha  l Mercier of The french National Institute for Agricultural Research in Versailles and his colleagues, addresses one important hurdle in apomixis research:
the need to engineer plants that generate their reproductive cells by mitosis rather than by meiosis, the form of cell division that shuffles the genome and passes different selections of genes into each reproductive cell.
says plant geneticist Peter Van dijk of Keygene, a plant breeding company based in Wageningen, The netherlands.
I really think it's a breakthrough. Mercier and his colleagues searched for genes in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana that were likely to be associated with meiosis on the basis of where
and when the genes were expressed. They found one that they named omission of second division (OSD1)
because plants mutant for this gene lacked the second round of cell division that occurs during meiosis. When the researchers combined mutations in the OSD1 gene with mutations in two other genes that affect meiosis,
the resulting plants lacked meiosis altogether, and produced their reproductive cells by mitosis . Because they lack the reduction division of meiosis,
like the body cells of the plant, rather than haploid (containing one copy of the genome) like normal reproductive cells.
and his colleagues produced as many reproductive cells as normal Arabidopsis plants, and fertilization produced viable triploid and tetraploid seeds.
says Ueli Grossniklaus, a plant developmental biologist at the University of Zurich, but one practical limitation is the reliance upon mutations in three different genes.
Researchers must first find out how to engineer crop plants to produce viable seeds from diploid reproductive cells without fertilization a process called parthenogenesis.
mutants that produced endosperm the nutritive tissue that surrounds the plant embryo in the seed without first being fertilized3.
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