In the damp understory of forests in Taiwan, mainland Japan, and Okinawa, a plant called Balanophora can fool you at first ...

Some plants bend the rules of plant life so far that they barely resemble plants at all. Balanophora is one of them - a ...

Spruce bark is rich in phenolic compounds that protect trees from pathogenic fungi. A research team at the Max Planck ...

Revolutionary fossil evidence from Ethiopia is challenging decades of scientific consensus about human origins. New discoveries suggest that the famous Lucy fossil, long considered a direct ancestor ...

Plants that drop all their leaves at one time and enter a leafless, dormant state are called deciduous. In climates that ...

“Many people equate plants with photosynthesis, yet Balanophora illustrates that being a plant does not require being green,” ...

In short: more carbon in the air does not guarantee more carbon in the wood. Between those two lies a living network of ...

Benjamin Barakat’s award-winning astrophotograph reveals Socotra’s surreal bottle tree beneath a pristine Milky Way ...

A rare fossil plant reveals how early plants moved water and food, helping to explain the secrets of tree growth.

Scientists have long known that mutations in certain genes affecting microtubules in plants can cause plants to grow in a twisting manner. In most cases, these are “null mutations,” meaning the ...

Balanophora plants represent an extreme example of this shift. They do not produce their own food through photosynthesis but ...

Balanophora is a plant that abandoned photosynthesis long ago and now lives entirely as a parasite on tree roots, hidden in ...