Plants and Pipettes

Hey! Ho! Hey! Ho! It’s a new episode of your favourite podcast about plants and pipettes. This week, we’re talking about C3 and C4 trees, the sounds of forests and how women disrupted bird research. Let’s go!

Sophie N R Young, Lawren Sack, Margaret J Sporck-Koehler, Marjorie R Lundgren, Why is C4 photosynthesis so rare in trees?, Journal of Experimental Botany

Please note: we’re using ‘malate’ for ease of communication. We get that it doesn’t always have to be malate, there are other 4 carbon compounds that can do the job as well.

• Sound of forests
• women have disrupted bird research 
• The ghosts of hedgerows past
• Tea by sea, cha by land
• Electronic pregnancy tests are an incredible waste of resources. Different example.
• hidden accents, paper
• Gamers help to fight Corona. Other gamers help to dissect the microbiome of humans.
• How a plant saved a Japanes island
• Woodrats have nests with antibiotics

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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!

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Hello! We have a podcast for you. We talk about the plant that made creamy icecream possible, awesome plant scientists from Ethiopia and stone cold birds.

Tegan’s favourite plant is Elecampane (Inula helenium). Vegan honey is made with inulin

Segenet Kelemu is an Ethiopian plant pathologist. Here is a short video portrait on her.

How to miss a gorilla in a data set. (Original gorilla video experiment)

• Our post on CRISR, Greepeace, and plant research
•  Poppies are beautiful
• Thin, printable solar cells: 2016, 2020
• Flavour of wine, chocolate and hops: Terroir, or genetics, or microbes?
• Live fast, die young – trees are James Dean fans, unfortunately
• Flowers growing out of flowers are not a good sign
• Hummingbird popsicle. Birdstrips on instagram

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!

Welcome to this struggle-episode! We had bad connection problems which meant that we spent most of our time blaming each other for having terrible internet. In between the blame game, we talked about a molecular sensor for microviscosity, nerd tattoos and why Joram won’t get any of them. 

Complete microviscosity maps of living plant cells and tissues with a toolbox of targeting mechanoprobes, Lucile Michels, Vera Gorelova, Yosapol Harnvanichvech, Jan Willem Borst, Bauke Albada, Dolf Weijers, Joris Sprakel

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Jul 2020, 117 (30) 18110-18118; DOI:10.1073/pnas.1921374117

• Clinical validation of a Cas13-based assay for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA
• Apparently, you don’t have to be a jerk to advance your career
• Why do Scientists Get Tattoos? Should Joram get a tattoo even if it means he can never go in an Onsen again
• Conservative logic to defend bad people
• Unearthed: Mysteries from an unseen world is the new podcast from Kew Gardens, hosted by James Wong. It’s only got a few episodes so far, but it’s a fun listen. It also reminds us a bit of our friend Ellen Airhart’s Plant Crimes Podcast 
• Wild pollinators are adding 1.5 billion $ worth of yield in the US alone
• Releasing Wolbachia-infected mosquito reduces Dengue rates by a whopping 77%. Here is how it works.
• New Guninea has the most plants

Study sorts cat owners into 5 categories

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!

After an uneventful week, our two main protagonists meet yet again to discuss the ups and downs of current plant research. Tag along as our heroes discuss the true meaning of succulent, how to mine Nickel and why blue plant outlines are so hot right now*. 

*in the 19th century

Joram’s favourite plant is: Alyssum murale – A Ni hyperaccumulator

Tegan presents the life and work of Anna Atkins 1799 – 1871, one of the first women to take photographs ever, the first woman to use photograms as an illustration tool to document plants. Source 1, Source 2 

The Semmelweis reflex is when we are opposed to new ideas that go against our current beliefs. 

• Genomes on Canvas; Trends in Plant Science Review
• Keep an eye out for rebittering squashes!
• New succulent
• researchers boosted tobacco productivity by 27% in the field
• Robeetle powered by methanol 
• preserved “mummified” leaves give a glimpse into the past, when temperatures were high and CO2 levels were elevated. The iflscience article leaves out some important parts, but see for yourself. Here is the press release.

Figure captions involving cats; Follow Veronica!

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!

What would happen if you stacked ten layers of indoor wheat on top of each other – and then stacked ten of those stacks? We’re discussing the highs and lows of vertical farming, talk about terrible naming schemes and the rediscovery of an animal that’s neither elephant nor shrew.

Wheat yield potential in controlled-environment vertical farms; Senthold Asseng,  Jose R. Guarin,  Mahadev Raman,  Oscar Monje,  Gregory Kiss, Dickson D. Despommier, Forrest M. Meggers, and  Paul P. G. Gauthier; PNAS August 11, 2020 117 (32) 19131-19135; first published July 27, 2020 

Make sure to check out Vikram’s podcast Planthropology!

• Astrophysicists must be stopped
  • To fully address the scientific questions evoked above and to alleviate the current post-processing limitations, we propose a source separation pipeline, the Morphological Analysis Yielding separated Objects iN Near infrAred usIng Sources Estimation (MAYONNAISE or MAYO for short).
• Physics in a second language
• Occlupanid research
  • Taxonomy
  • Morphology
  • Growth and Development
• Nonbinary wiki
  • Per Tegan. Because we need a title that doesn’t define our gender, marital status or hierarchy. Because it’s none of your darn business.
  • Sweden introduced a gender neutral pronoun
• Is that what we’re gonna do today? We’re gonna fight? (Published call to change Gene names so that Excel won’t mess them up)
• How old are you in carbon dioxide?
• A guide to scientists on giving comments to journalists
• Witness tree, here it is on twitter 
• Why keep people testing positive for Covid-19?

The rediscovered an Elephant Shrew after 50 years; Elephant vs Shrew metabolic rate

Fox steals shoes in Berlin.

Naked man chases wild boar who stole his laptop. 

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!

Some weeks we talk a lot about plant science, some weeks we explore a lot of plant-science-adjacent topics. You be the judge of what happened this week. 

Tegan’s favourite plant is Chlorella ohadii which is extremely resistant to excess light. New paper, old paper and news article.

Joram presents the work of Maria N. Miriti.

• Hidden figures in ecology and evolution, Nature correspodence
• Intersectional feminism, UN women
• Related: Too many senior white academics still resist recognizing racism, by Namandjé Bumpus

Bias: Zeigarnik effect; (related) Ovsiankina effect

• 10 tips when talking to people about conspiracy theories
• Hygiene theater, The Atlantic
  • “Masks, social distancing, and moving activities outdoors. That’s it. That’s how we protect ourselves. That’s how we beat this thing.”
• Smallest dinosaur is actually a lizard
• Publishers: let transgender scholars correct their names 
• BlueBeets
• Drought deciduous plants
• Mola Mola Meme (don’t trust this) 

Andrew Lloyd Webber annoyed at James Cordon’s ad libs  in his song as Bustopher Jones.Awesome Getty museum challenge photos. The cat picture in question.

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!

Don’t you dare disrespect our favourite model organism, Arabidopsis. No wait, we love tobacco and hate Arabidopsis. No! Both are the WORST, we love Chlamydomonas above everything else! Or were we team sunflower? 

Paper of the week: Massive haplotypes underlie ecotypic differentiation in sunflowers; Blog post “behind the paper”: Adaptive alleles stick together

• Worm Twitter is angry
• Unequal effects of Covid-19 pandemic on scientists
• Racism in science is real
• Snails under threat
• Why even smart people fall for bad science
• Music for plants (found in this article)
• 1 Million seeds in vault 
• Disruptive cat tail
• Cat brings swimming goggles

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!

You know the drill: we talk about our favourite plant (it’s drilling itself into the ground), a cool researcher (she travelled to Antarctica to study lichen), a cognitive bias (the end will please you) and fun stuff (a lot of it). Please enjoy. 

Joram’s favourite plant is Erodium cicutarium, closely related to Geranium. Video of the action

Tegan presents the life and work of Elke Mackenzie, a British explorer and botanist. 

Joram presents the Peak-End rule

• Zucchini photo from Tegan 
• Bleak financial outlook for PhD students in Australia
• Mothers in academia face extra challenges during the pandemic: LINK 1; LINK 2
• Fish version of a liger: paddlefish and sturgeon make sturddlefish.

• Bioluminescence evolved 84 times, but not in humans
• Microplastics are found in fruit and veggie produce, two studies report
• Penguin poop studies, old and new, and a blog post on the matter
• Kyoto Aquarium maps out complicated relationship between penguins (and caretakers)
• All the ways the Hydroxychloroquine study was cr*p

Cat fact: ancient cat skeleton found & cats domesticated themselves

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!

This week, we’re talking about plant intelligence and whether or not a pea plant can be conditioned like a dog.

Markel, K. (2020). Lack of evidence for associative learning in pea plants. ELife, 9.

• Fans of end-of-the-world films deal better with Covid 
• New Zealands response to a careless jerk  
• Simpson’s paradox is a statistical fallacy where incorrect pooling of data leads to false conclusions of the overall trend. Here is a good video on it
• Complaint about the snakes
• JANE is a tool to identify reviewers based on your abstract/title of your work.
• Problematic Pier Paolo Pandolfi 
• Facebook Fact Checking Example
• Assisted migration in trees could help mitigate the damages of climate change
• Dinosaur ancestors may have been tiny
• There is a virtual cat 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!

This week, we’re talking about Tegan’s favourite plant, Elizabeth Mrema, the end-of-history illusion and many fun things from the world of science!

Check out Angela Saini, she gives great talks!

Tegan’s favourite plant is Prasinoderma coloniale. The plant’s genome lead to the description of a new phylum.

Joram presents the work of Elizabeth Mrema. Here is the interview on protecting biodiversity.

Bias: End-of-history illusion 

According to a preprint published on arxiv, papers downloaded from sci-hub get 1.72 times more cited than papers not downloaded from sci-hub

Funny names of papers: 

• A little SNP of this, a little SNP of that 
• The E2 Marie Kondo and the CTLH E3 ligase clear deposited RNA binding proteins during the maternal-to-zygotic transition

How to make STEM a safe place for trans and non-binary people

Pride in Stem

Looking for giant things

• Doppelganger’s Of New Zealand’s Giant Penguins Found In Northern Hemisphere
• Giant Extinct Wombat Relative Like Nothing Paleontologists Have Seen Before
• Giant Single-Celled Organisms Discovered In The Deepest Regions Of The Pacific

The angiosperm explosion explored

A mother’s tale about her journey away from the dangers of scientific evidence

Movie special episode that we watch together – Little Joe 

The plant book club

Join us and form a group for ASPB 2020 conference

Organizing a virtual conference changed the way we think about academic exchange

CUTEST images of baby squirrels

If you have questions, send them our way! 

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!