Around 470 million years ago, plants began to conquer the terrestrial surfaces. The first examples had a small axis terminated by a structure capable of forming spores, almost like current mosses. The ...

A common French weed known as Crepis sancta underwent a form of superaccelerated evolution to cope with the difficulties of spreading their seeds in cities. Scientists studying C. sancta discovered ...

Scientists have discovered a sexual reproduction process in microalgae that helps them better understand algae and plant evolution. Their discovery could lead to new industrial applications for ...

Penn researchers and colleagues have discovered how plants respond to seasonal flowering cues while protecting the stem cells at their growing tip, enabling continuous reproduction in changing ...

At the base of mossy trees, deep in the mountains of Taiwan and mainland Japan or nestled in the subtropical forests of Okinawa, grows what most might mistake for a mushroom—but it is actually a very ...

Once a seed germinates, it is committed to one location. Plants are sessile—stuck where they started out—forced to cope with whatever conditions arrive next. The only way out of trouble is to rebuild ...

You might think flowers don’t have much choice about who they mate with, given they are rooted to the ground and can’t move. But when scientists from Nagoya, Japan used powerful microscopes to study ...