On January 6, 2016, The New York Public Library enhanced access to all public domain items in its Digital Collections so that everyone has the freedom to enjoy and reuse these materials in almost limitless ways (read more about the collection and the ways you can use it here). The images are browsable, searchable, and … Read more
Note: Sadly, these videos have been removed from public view. See more about this decision here. Have you been looking for high-quality, university-level introductory plant biology videos? There are not many available on topics other than photosynthesis and pollination. The University of California at Berkeley publishes videos from many of its course lectures on YouTube. … Read more
Attending Plant Biology 2016? The conference starts in six months, but if you want your work to be considered for a minisymposium or lightning talk, you need to submit your abstract now (or by 25 Jan, EST). You can read more about the conference, including major symposia topics and speakers, and the countless networking opportunities … Read more
Learning to read a scientific paper is an important skill for undergraduate students to acquire, but selecting a suitable paper to read with undergraduates can be challenging (see this for example). The chosen research article should be accessible (meaning not too much specialized terminology or methodology), interesting, and meaningful. A new Plant Physiology paper by … Read more
The Martian I don’t know if the book/film The Martian will have a lasting impact on plant science, but it certainly added some thrills to the plant scientists’ year. The story features a space-stranded botanist (although some argue he should have been described as a horticulturalist) who had to grow plants to feed himself until … Read more
Early in 2015, ASPB established a partnership with Wiki Edu. This post features some simple, yet critical details for understanding and using Wiki Edu to help your students think and write more effectively about plant science. The insights shared here come from Barbara Alonso (photo), Lab Manager for the Lemaux Lab at University of California-Berkeley. … Read more
We’re delighted to announce that the latest Teaching Tool in Plant Biology article “Light-Dependent Reactions of Photosynthesis” is published. This article was written by me (Mary Williams), as well Ru Zhang (Carnegie Institute of Science) and Johnna Roose (Louisiana State University). Ru and Johnna are both educators and researchers who specialize in the study of … Read more
Last year, Alastair Culham (@BotanyRNG) and Jonathan Mitchley (@Drmgoewild) from the University of Reading teamed up to create a series of blog posts called Advent Botany (advent is the season leading up to Christmas and is traditionally a period of waiting or counting days). This year Advent Botany 2015 features guest contributions. Today’s post, written … Read more
Guest post from Sonja Dunbar, PhD student at the University of Cambridge Plants need nutrients and they have a lot of different ways to acquire them from the soil, as the 2nd year undergraduate students I teach at the University of Cambridge recently discovered in lectures. One thing our lecture courses try to emphasise at … Read more
ASPB collaborates with www.PlantingScience.org, a learning community where scientists provide online mentoring to student teams in middle school through undergraduate settings so students can design and think through their own inquiry projects. Scroll to the end of this post for an impressive list of who is doing what. The fall 2015 online meeting space was … Read more
New visions and multi-faceted collaborations to creatively, efficiently, and collaboratively remaster STEM higher education and its K-12 pipeline. The Disruptive Innovation in Higher Education Summit presented by the STEMconnector® Higher Education Council and sponsored by Cengage Learning, myCollegeOptions®, and Monsanto was a dynamic event aimed at advancing a national (US) effort to meet the education … Read more
Normally, our Friday posts highlight plants featured in the news over the past week, but this week we take a short break to make an appeal for your thoughts on the most notable and newsworthy plant-related events, resources, breakthroughs and headline makers of the past year. Here are the stories we featured last year as … Read more
Plants that do the unexpected or that don’t conform to stereotype command attention and serve as portals to the diversity of the plant kingdom. Litter-trapping plants have an unusual and interesting strategy for obtaining nutrients. Zona and Christenhusz (2015), writing in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, describe plants that have evolved specialized adaptations … Read more
Recent fires in Indonesia have been making headlines around the world and raising concerns about their impacts on wildlife, global carbon emissions and health problems for local people. Fires have been a recurring problem for many years, but this year they are exacerbated by drought conditions caused by a strong El Niño event. Since September … Read more
It’s critical to consider the education of those who will teach STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) in the K-12 pipeline. One resource for supporting the development of effective STEM teachers is UTeach. Here is an overview from their About page: UTeach is an innovative university-based teacher preparation program working to increase the number of qualified … Read more
As noted in and blogged with permission from Friday Notes, CAST: Reports, surveys, loud headlines–Who Will Feed the Nine Billion? After observing young people in FFA, at the World Food Prize, in university activities, and at many other occasions, we have confidence that Generation Agriculture will rise to the occasion. In the meantime, the stories … Read more
This week we celebrate pineapples, in honor of the completion of the sequencing of the pineapple (Ananas comosus) genome and the insights it provides into an important metabolic pathway (Ming et al., 2015). Pineapples are more than just tasty tropical fruit, they’re also one of many plants able to carry out a special form of … Read more
To support ASPB’s ongoing partnership with Wiki Edu (see this blogpost) and encourage the successful adoption of Wiki Edu resources, here is some hard-earned insight on what works (and what needs work) when you are… Teaching (more than just) writing with Wikipedia Original post by Eryk Salvaggio Zach McDowell, who has taught with Wikipedia at the … Read more
The 400th anniversary of the founding of plant science at Oxford will be celebrated on July 25 2021 (see its history). As a celebration and count-down to this anniversary, the University of Oxford Botanic Garden and Harcourt Arboretum, together with the Oxford University Herbaria and the Department of Plant Sciences, are highlighting 400 plants of … Read more
ASPB collaborates on this science teacher training and development program. The Botanical Society of America (BSA), the American Society of Plant Biologists and the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) have been awarded a $2.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Discovery Research PreK-12 program for further development and support for the middle and … Read more
