Can you identify these common plants and animals? A study shows that increasingly, 9- to 11-year-old children can't. Quoth David Attenborough: "The wild world is becoming so remote to children that they miss out, and an interest in the natural world doesn't grow as it should. Nobody is going protect the natural world unless they understand it."
posted on Aug 1, 2008 - View this thread

NewCROP index part of the Center for New Crops & Plant Products, at Purdue University is an amazing collection of commercial plant information. From Macadamia nuts and qinghao to Tumbleweed and Sweetgrass a broad range of plants are detailed. The information that is included for each ranges from a single paragraph for Quackgrass to dozens of internal and external links for Soybeans. Crops are listed both alphabetically by genus and common name. Warning: Web .95 navigation
posted on Sep 15, 2006 - View this thread

Seeds of Imagination operates on the premise that talking (er, typing) to your plants encourages interesting growth. Try: sun, water, love, happy, fruit, etc. If a word is recognized, you will see it float up toward your plant. If not, it just disappears without a trace. You may also change the color of parts of the plant by typing in colors. (note: Flash, subtle ad)
posted on Apr 10, 2006 - View this thread

The little coffee plant that almost died. A fascinating and inspiring radio piece detailing the story of the wild coffee plant, "cafe marron," that almost disappeared from the one island where it grew, Rodrigues, in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
posted on Mar 29, 2006 - View this thread

If you play a plant constant rock music, it will die. In the 1970s, Dorothy Retallack conducted a series of experiments to discover the effect certain types of music had on plants. The results might surprise you.
posted on Mar 3, 2006 - View this thread

Nature's Control: Hired Thugs Bugs to police your garden. "If desired, you can keep ladybug adults from flying by "gluing" their wings shut, temporarily, with a sugar-water solution. Half water and half sugared pop (Coke, Pepsi, etc.), in a spray bottle, works fine."
posted on Feb 21, 2006 - View this thread

"Lost World" found in Indonesian Papua (with audio)
posted on Feb 7, 2006 - View this thread

Where do you hide your nasty-ass toilet plunger so the house guests won't see it? Under an attention-getting, gawdy as hell fake plant - duh.
posted on Mar 29, 2005 - View this thread

(A)bort, (I)gnore, (R)evert to Grandma's DNA A jaw-dropping revision to Mendelian inheritance: bad genes can be replaced from a secret ancestral stash. (The same researchers have previously mentioned other ways to get around Mendel.) Also, DNA gets a fake fifth letter.
posted on Mar 23, 2005 - View this thread