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What “Pine” Cones Reveal About the Evolution of Flowers

*Research genetically traces flowers to a single common ancestor*

From southern Africa’s pineapple lily to Western Australia’s swamp bottlebrush, flowering plants are everywhere. Also called angiosperms, they make up 90 percent of all land-based, plant life.

New research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides new insights into their genetic origin, an evolutionary innovation that quickly gave rise to many diverse flowering plants more than 130 million years ago. Moreover, a flower with genetic programming similar to a water lily may have started it all. (more…)

Cloud-Based Computing System Helps Scientists Study the Breathing of the Biosphere

By Guest PostOctober 13, 2010Environment, Technologybiometeorology, biosphere breathing, california, carbon dioxide, carbon-climate science, chloroplast, climate change, climate science, cloud-based dataset, cycles, dennis baldocchi, ecosystem, evapotranspiration, factors, fluctuations, global scale, ground-based sensor data, humans, microsoft research escience workshop, modisazure, planet, plant life, sacramento river delta, satellite imagery, state-of-the-art biophysical modeling, water systems

*Researchers at University of California, Berkeley, work with Microsoft Research to analyze vast amounts of data without supercomputers.*

BERKELEY, Calif. — Studying the environment would be simple if it weren’t for one thing: Even an isolated ecosystem is unbelievably complicated. Factors to study include water systems, plant life cycles, carbon dioxide fluctuations, resource use by humans, and far more — and each can be studied at the scale of a plant or of the planet, and measured in an instant or over decades. (more…)

Tag Archives: plant life

What “Pine” Cones Reveal About the Evolution of Flowers

Cloud-Based Computing System Helps Scientists Study the Breathing of the Biosphere