When I started this blog, I explained wny I called it The Quiet Branches. It was in part about how many people are blind to plants, how they’re just a medium we walk through without fully understanding just how deeply they show up in our lives every day. The blog is meant to inspire a … More Welcome to The Loud Branches
In what are now the Northern coastal oceans started getting greener ~65 million years ago, around the time when most dinosaurs went extinct. A distant relative of grasses was put on the evolutionary path to colonize the oceans. This new colonizer may have been the result of something plants routinely do to form new species: … More A Flowering Plant Under the Sea.
The Quiet Branches turns 1 year old in a few days. According to wordpress I had 9400 views this year. And readers from a total of 109 countries. Of course, I know most of my readers are from the US, but still cool to have breadth of countries. I started off this blog talking about … More One year of The Quiet Branches
Perhaps think about photosynthesis as you look at an evergreen tree if you’re reading this in December (maybe even your Christmas tree), or new budding growth in springtime, depending on where you are in the world. Last week, I mentioned how some new research suggests that light harvesting complexes used by some bacteria and plants … More Essential Genes in Light Harvesting.
The Quiet Branches is joining the SciLogs network. I’m excited to be a part of it! I’ll continue to crosspost here too. I look forward to continuing to share the world of plant science and the picture of the plant world revealed by plant science there. This first post will discuss some thoughts on communicating … More Plant Biotechnology, black boxes, and the Complex World.
Plants have roots. And a new way of imaging them was recently published in eLife. It’s called GLO-roots and is a way to monitor roots growing in soil as well as track gene expression in those roots via glowing reporters detectable by a very sensitive imaging camera. The story of GLO-roots is clever and new, … More Roots of Modern Plant Biology.
Under a canopy of trees, akin to looking up at the night sky, there is a sense of being a small part of something bigger. Unlike the night sky, there are more immediate ways of experiencing the forest than the night sky. More accessible sounds, smells, sights, and textures to immediately experience. And if you … More Bringing back a forest.
Nature published an astonishing paper this week with an estimate of the number of trees that live on Earth (1, link goes to Nature’s release describing the work & a great video): 3,040,00,000,000 trillion (± 96,000,000,000 billion/0.096 trillion 95% confidence intervals). That’s a lot of cellulose (the most abundant molecule in plant cell walls & most abundant … More 3,040,000,000,000 Trees
This is the first guest post on Quiet Branches. An account of the recent FASEB meeting on Mechanisms of Plant Development. If you want to be a guest contributor, you can get in touch with me (@IHStreet on Twitter, ihstreet at gmail). Self-Interview Post-Meeting 2015 Federal of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) Mechanisms in … More FASEB: Mechanisms of Plant Development, 2015
This is my final wrap up of #plantbiology15. My previous posts from before and during the conference (pdf) are here, here, here and here. There was a lot to take in. The final impression of Plant Biology 2015, now that i’ve had a chance to reflect, is that it was a lot. A lot of things to see, do, … More Plant Biology ’15 wrap up.
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