Articles

Live things in Antarctica’s Victoria Land arctic desert must be very special indeed. The 2,000 square mile arctic desert appears to be home to no living things. There is neither soil nor plants. All that seems to exist there is lifeless, windswept, ...

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Have you ever wondered how you could get cut by a blade of grass or the edge of a palm leaf? Plants have a nasty secret. They absorb silica, the same stuff of which glass is made, and store it in their cells. Some plants, like corn, store large mounts of ...

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We usually identify plants by their appearance. Palm trees can be identified because the many different kinds of palms have some common identifying characteristics. Pine trees, likewise, have common features that help us identify them. However, one plant ...

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Throughout the open markets of Kenya, shopkeepers sell leaves and strips of bark from the warburgia bush. The leaves and bark are used to relieve toothaches, fevers, constipation, and the taste of meat gone slightly sour. Medical researchers have been exa...

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Celery is an old Asian folk remedy for mild cases of high blood pressure. In one unscientific test, the father of a University of Chicago medical student lowered his mild hypertension simply by adding a quarter pound of celery to his diet every day for a ...

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The environmental movement has rightfully shown concern about the South American rainforest. While it is true that the entire rainforest system is a delicately balanced harmony of thousands of subsystems, it is generally believed that it has taken million...

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Nearly everyone has heard of the giant fungus in Michigan’s Iron County, near the Wisconsin border. The 38-acre fungus weighs as much as a blue whale. Scientists estimate that it is about 1,500 years old, based on its current rate of growth. Strange lif...

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In many ways, a plant is like a machine that changes the energy of sunlight into food energy that is needed by the rest of the living world. The energy which runs the plant is light. Now, if you were going to design a better, more efficient plant, how mig...

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As bees go about their business of gathering nectar, they also pollinate the flower, making possible the next generation of flowers. Now, there is a certain crafty fungus that doesn’t have flowers, nectar or pollen but makes use of the bees to repro...

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When penicillin was first used as an antibiotic, it was considered a wonder drug. Infections which had been fatal for thousands of years were all of a sudden curable. Man has long known that some natural substances have a natural ability to fight infectio...

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