Plants

5 articles
  • Singer_HERO

    Why Your Roses Smell Nice

    Hint—it’s mostly coincidence.
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    The Real Difference Between You and a Plant

    The best way to draw the line sounds less biological than poetic: What separates us is the “difference between staying and going,” as Hope Jahren, the geochemist and geobiologist, puts it.Vincent van Gogh / Wikicommons One way to rouse someone is to ask: “What makes you think you’re so different from a plant?” Several sensible […]
  •  Velasquez-Manoff_HERO-2

    Fruits and Vegetables Are Trying to Kill You

    Antioxidant vitamins don’t stress us like plants do—and don’t have their beneficial effect.
  • Preston_HERO

    Learning to Speak Shrub

    Using molecular codes, plants cry for help, ward off bugs, and save each other.
  • crop circle

    Unwinding the Mystery of Namibia’s Natural Crop Circles

    The Himba bushmen who inhabit the Namibian grasslands—a 1,200-mile-long swath of land running from Angola into South Africa—have come up with different stories over the years to explain the unusual circular bare patches, called “fairy circles,” dotted throughout the grassy expanse. These reddish-hued circles, sometimes several feet in diameter, are dubbed “footprints of the gods,” […]