Deck the halls and snatch the gravy, it’s a Christmas episode of your favourite plant podcast that is hosted by Tegan and Joram! In this year’s final episode, we’re bringing you one last time in 2020 all the facts and bits of information you never knew you needed. Moth Cyborgs? Check. Zombees? Check. Way too much talking about Christmas music? CHECK. Please enjoy this episode, and have a wonderful winter break. Stay safe, stay healthy, stay happy, everyone!

• Peroxisomes are the next big plant organelle, we told you so
• Plants and Pipettes on Peroxisomes 
• Where’s wallaby? Using public records and media reports to describe the status of red‐necked wallabies in Britain 
• Endless forms most stupid, icky, and small: The preponderance of noncharismatic invertebrates as integral to a biologically sound view of life
• Smellicopter
• What is a Zombee? | Plants And Animals 
• HORRRRUUUUUSSSS!!!!!! 
• Tomato crop enriched with Parkinson’s disease drug created 
• Zoombees
• A list of cool plant podcasts by Awkward Botany
• Wie wachsen Erdnüsse? (Cool video about Peanuts with English subtitles)
• [2004.15011] TLDR: Extreme Summarization of Scientific Documents
• tl;dr: this AI sums up research papers in a sentence
• Flora L Design Advent Calendar
• Adorable, Remorseless Killing Machine Is World’s Deadliest Cat

Check out the Plant Book Club on Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart!

All views are our own. If you want to comment or correct anything we said, leave a comment under this post or reach out to us via twitter, facebook or instagram.

Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

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This week, we have a story about seed conservation in times of war and we discuss multiple aspects of machine learning in molecular biology. Plus cool plant facts and as always: cutting edge cat research. 

• Spoon Theory
• Paper of the week: Westengen, O.T., Lusty, C., Yazbek, M. et al. Safeguarding a global seed heritage from Syria to Svalbard. Nat. Plants 6, 1311–1317 (2020). 
• Genebanks
  • Germany has the Genebank in Gatersleben 
  • Most famous is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the permafrost of Spitsbergen, Norway
• Pre-symptomatic detection of COVID-19 from smartwatch data
• Kate Petrova on Twitter: “https://t.co/LHYpwYN4Aw” 
• COVID-19 #CoronaVirus Infographic Datapack — Information is Beautiful
• Machine Learning method DeepMind resolves protein structures
• Turns Out, Lots Of Australia’s Mammals Glow Under UV Light
• Plants react to painkillers
• In a study that surprised no one, researchers found that slow-blinking at a cat makes them react more nicely and slow-blink back right at you.

Check out the Plant Book Club on Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart!

All views are our own. If you want to comment or correct anything we said, leave a comment under this post or reach out to us via twitter, facebook or instagram.

Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

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After a week off, we’re back with some cool facts from the world of plants and gulls. Did you know that gulls know your every move? There are probably some on the roof as we speak. They see you when you’re sleeping, they know when you’re awake. You better not pout, you better not cry. Sea gulls are coming to town. 

• Spanish moss is not a moss.
  • Story about the evil man
  •  Usnea
• Thekla Resvoll, her photo in pants
• Uncertainty enhances the preference for narcissistic leaders
  • Uncertainty enhances the preference for narcissistic leaders BARBORA NEVICKA*, ANNEBEL H. B. DE HOOGH, ANNELIES E. M. VAN VIANEN AND FEMKE S. TEN VELDEN University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• The controversy of the Nature Comms article on mentoring, summarised
  • How to avoid gender bias in your recommendation letter
  • Men in Global Health, Time To ‘Lean Out’
  • Sponsorship vs Mentorship

• COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool
• Growing plants on mars is not as easy as in the Martian
• The temperatures they are a-changing paper 
• Gulls track us
• There is no such thing as a sea gull
• The paper about ecology and evolution and their political statements in the funding section 
• YIMBY
• Giant Virus genomes found in algae
• Pandora Virus
• Black in Science Communication
• Atomic Kitten (by Randall Munroe)

Check out the Plant Book Club on Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart!

All views are our own. If you want to comment or correct anything we said, leave a comment under this post or reach out to us via twitter, facebook or instagram.

Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

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It’s good news week! Not only was Trump kicked out of office, we also have major news regarding the Covid and AIDS pandemic. Of course we won’t forget our passion for plants over all that joy, so tag along for a deep dive into the biology of sorghum – plus some cool facts from last week’s science. 

Sterile Spikelets Contribute to Yield in Sorghum and Related Grasses, Taylor AuBuchon-Elder, Viktoriya Coneva, David M. Goad, Lauren M. Jenkins, Yunqing Yu, Doug K. Allen, Elizabeth A. Kellogg, The Plant Cell Nov 2020, 32 (11) 3500-3518; DOI: 10.1105/tpc.20.00424

We talked about sorghum before on the blog.

• We have a Covid vaccine?
• We have an AIDS preventive drug
• Europa glows in the dark 
• Scientist 3D print Star Trek Space Ship that moves on its own; alternative story 
• Remember when we talked about the lack of learning in pea plants, as demonstrated by a reproduced experiment? The original authors responded and said that the problem is that the reproduction study did leave the light on or that the individual Y mazes were too close to one another. 
• Let it grow 
• Spider believed to be extinct found on UK military base
• Honesty signals
• The blog article where we talk about beating up bees 
• Massive study maps the reasons for tree death across the Amazon basin
• new glider species discovered in Australia
• Feathertail glider (very cute)

Check out the Plant Book Club on Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart!

All views are our own. If you want to comment or correct anything we said, leave a comment under this post or reach out to us via twitter, facebook or instagram.

Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

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Joram came so well prepared, it made Tegan angry. The two work through their disagreements though in another episode filled to the brim with tales from the (plant) science world. 

• Joram’s favourite plant is  Franciscan manzanita (Arctostaphylos franciscana), based on a really great article on plants believed to be extinct
• Tegan presents Luciana Leite and Luisa M. Diele-Viegas. 
  • Too intelligent for the life sciences in Brazil
  • CV of Luciana Leite and her google scholar page
  • Website of Luisa M. Diele-Viegas
  • Article by Luisa M. Diele-Viegas on supporting transgender scientists post Covid

• Joram presents the False Consensus Bias 

• Joram’s Firewatch playthrough photos
• The dominance of the English language in science, research paper
• How we can learn from plant disease spread to fight Covid (press release)
• Accents of frogs
• Ants are tools 
• transparent soil helps research on bacteria and fungi. Our post on transparent soil
• Publishers let transgender researchers change their names; blog post on the update
• Women did hunt (probably)
• Glowing Platypus, link 2, link 3
• Plant Book Club on Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart

All views are our own. If you want to comment or correct anything we said, leave a comment under this post or reach out to us via twitter, facebook or instagram.

Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

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While Joram is running at 1% brain battery, Tegan makes up for the lack of a decent podcast partner by bringing a really cool paper: researchers found a 30 second timer within venus fly traps. Plus more sutff!

Paper of the week: Suda, H., Mano, H., Toyota, M. et al. Calcium dynamics during trap closure visualized in transgenic Venus flytrap. Nat. Plants 6, 1219–1224 (2020). 

Article about the paper in sciencenews (with video)
Article on transformed Mimosa pudica by the same author

More about touch in plants on Plants and Pipettes
Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch me
Hungry caterpillar sends vibrations through leaves
Our very first podcast episode, including a paper about touch in plants

• Sick bats naturally social distance themselves which makes mask deniers officially dumber than a bat
• Cool bat content on instagram at @batsforlife_kristen 
• Newts are cool 
• Time Warp by Tenacious D
• Cutest Dinosaur baby
• New research shows that we underestimated the carbon sink capacity of some chinese forests
• Pandas mate on video in the wild
• The worst name for bacteria
• Restoring indigenous names in latin nomenclature
• What does the electron transport chain look like in the cell?
• Nazcat

All views are our own. If you want to comment or correct anything we said, leave a comment under this post or reach out to us via twitter, facebook or instagram.

Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

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In this episode, Joram gets really upset. Tegan offers her services as an apocalyptic seamstress. And somewhere, a pallas cat is looking regal. 

• How to ask for pronouns
• Gympie gympie, aka Dendrocnide moroides; new study
• Pamela Ronald was just awarded the World Agricultural Prize 2020 and is the first woman in the history of the prize (which exists for over 20 years). Interview with Pamela
• Ben Franklin effect
• Pink pineapples, FDA approval, official website 
• Rubisco Activase pushes and pulls on the enzyme to release the inhibitory sugar
• Weird prion senses temperature: article, news & views
• Nature really wants to make crabs, explanatory article
• Wheel of Power/Privilege 
• Pallas cats look great, and also attack cameras (watch this video!)

All views are our own. If you want to comment or correct anything we said, leave a comment under this post or reach out to us via twitter, facebook or instagram.

Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

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This week, we’re talking about a cool process in trees where they all flower and set seeds in sync to produce a massive wave of fruit. Also general news from the world of science!

• Navigating virtual conferences 
• Eba
• Bogdziewicz M., Pesendorfer M., Crone E.E., Pérez-Izquierdo C., Bonal R. (2020). Flowering synchrony drives pollination success in a wind-pollinated tree. Ecology Letters, Link to Researchgate with Full Text, Author Website
• Nobel prizes have been awarded
  • physics to Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, Andrea Ghez for the discovery of the black hole at the centre of our galaxy
  • medicine to Harvey Alter, Michael Houghton, Charles Rice for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus
  • chemistry to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for the development of CRISPR/Cas9
  • No No Nobel on the disregard for plant science in the Nobel prize decisions
• Trump’s impact on science
• 167 year old grass sample was sequenced and helped to create a better image of the phylogenetic relationships between grasses
• If you wanna smile, go look at puffins 
• Why salt and sugar go so well together
• Comedy wildlife photography award

Check out the Lonely Pipette!

All views are our own. If you want to comment or correct anything we said, leave a comment under this post or reach out to us via twitter, facebook or instagram.

Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

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Joram is tired, Tegan has been singing – a perfect storm for some (plant) science! We discuss the story of Artemisia absinthium, talk about the woes of single-named scientists and bring you the hottest science facts from the last seven days. 

• Tegan’s favourite song of the day  
• Beastie Boys – Fight for your right (revisited)
• Joram’s favourite plant is Artemisia absinthium
• Tegan talks about the struggles met by scientists with non-Western names
  • Nature article
  • Shera’s blog
  • Ardiantiono on researchgate
  • Give South Indian Authors their true name (Nature article)
  • Names dropped to avoid prejudice (Nature article)
  • Scientific publishing: Identity crisis (Nature article)
• Naïve realism & Naïve cynicism

• Scientific American endorses Joe Biden 
• Why are birds so smart?
• Alexa, do I have Covid-19?

• How to measure the speed of light using a microwave and a chocolate bar
• Fish eggs can survive being eaten by ducks
• Cat imitating human?

It’s Black in Microbiology Week!

Make sure to check out The Plant Book Club in your podcast app!

All views are our own. If you want to comment or correct anything we said, leave a comment under this post or reach out to us via twitter, facebook or instagram.

Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

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We’re really happy to welcome Dr. Florencia Yannelli on the podcast. She is an ecologist and plant researcher who was not stopped by Corona to do science – she simply did the experiment at home!

Florencia’s research interest lies in invasive species and how they influence the community of plants and microbes in their habitats. We talk about her academic and home research and what role scientific outreach plays for her. You can learn more about Florencia on her website and get in touch through her twitter: @floryannelli.

Links:

• YouTube Channel of father and son doing science (Suisse German)
• Flor’s original article in nature: The lockdown walk that inspired an experiment 
• Bad Project
• Article on women’s impact on bird research
• Simple Writer 
• Hi Knowledge: Interactive visualisation tools for a better understanding of science and nature
• Soap box science
• Cortaderia is a beautiful invasive plant
• Treetalk.co.uk
• @Morethanweeds on twitter
• @curiouswilds on twitter
• Korina (app/website to find neophytes in Germany)

Thanks again to Florencia to be a guest on our show!

Make sure to check out The Plant Book Club in your podcast app!

All views are our own. If you want to comment or correct anything we said, leave a comment under this post or reach out to us via twitter, facebook or instagram.

Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

Support Us!