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It seems counterintuitive, but new research suggests that it is actually the world's biggest trees that suffer the most from climate change and forest fragmentation. More »
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In between painting the Mona Lisa and idly designing flying machines for fun, Leonardo Da Vinci occasionally got outside and looked up every now and again. Because he was Da Vinci, the moment he did, he discovered a new natural law. This one was about trees, and after five hundred years, scientists are still trying to figure out why the law worked in the first place. More »
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Craziness en masse and high schoolers have gone hand-in-hand since the Great Sarsaparilla Kerfuffle of Umpteen-Lickety-Sixty. More »
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The world's tallest tree is found in northern California - it's a redwood that stands 379 feet tall. This tree and its relatives are the largest single organisms in the world, but just how big can these trees really get? More »
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I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues. More »
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The common mangrove, a tree that grows along most of the world's coastlines, could help us battle climate change. These trees usually live in tidal zones, and their tenticular networks of roots are revealed at low tide. More »
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As winter coats Japan, snow and rime ice cover the trees, creating armies of monsters and snow giants that loom over the landscape. And in some of these photos, they look ready to trudge to life. More »
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Even if humanity never returns to the Moon, veterans of the lunar missions will still be around for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. That's because the Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa brought hundreds of seeds with him to the Moon, and many of these were later planted to create the so-called Moon trees. The only problem? No one is exactly sure where they are anymore. More »
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Redwoods are the giants of the forest - huge trees that can reproduce even when eaten by forest fires or destroyed by lightning. And now we've discovered that they harbor parasitic mutants in their midst. Albino redwood trees are born without chlorophyll, which means they can't convert light to energy the way other trees do. Instead they spend decades attached to the tree that grew them, borrowing food and nutrients from it. More »
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Thanks to a new remote sensing technique, astronomers may soon be able to detect the presence of multicellular life (like trees) on planets outside of the Solar System. More »
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When Bill Johnson of Midway, North Carolina noticed a strange marking in the interior of a downed tree, he thought it resembled Jesus Christ. However, anyone who's seen Doctor Who knows that this mark has a much more sinister connotation. More »
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The Socotra archipelago is an isolated island chain in the Indian Ocean. One-third of the flora on Socotra grows nowhere else on the planet, including these curious dragon's blood trees (Dracaena cinnabari). More »
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This beautiful, century-old tree lives in the heart of Brussels. And now it has become an Entborg*, capable of transmitting data via the internet about air quality, weather, and wind. That's right - you can friend this tree on Facebook. More »
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One of the great mysteries of plant biology is a seemingly immortal tree called the Trembling Aspen (Populus tremuloides), which reproduces by growing clones from its root system. A new study suggests that the trees live for 20,000 years. More »
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NASA has created a global snapshot of the world's forests using satellites and LIDAR, a laser technology that measures the height of forest canopy using pulses of light. This map took seven years and 250 million pulses to create. More »
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This blurb from the November 1934 issue of Science and Mechanics offered a ray of totally bizarre hope for those suffering from food shortages during the Great Depression. Also, we were apparently at war with tyrannical goats. Whodathunk? [Modern Mechanix] More »
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Egad, look at this poor tree! Some bulbous, parasitic infection is leaching the life right out of it! Could this creature arrive at to your local park? Are we looking at the onset of an arboreal apocalypse? More »
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Most creatures on Earth have one sex that fertilizes and one that gets fertilized. Not so with olive trees. Last week scientists described how these trees evolved a system of males and a third sex which can go both ways. More »
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The BBC announced last week that it plans to remake The Day of the Triffids, the classic tale of flesh eating plants that prey on a blinded humanity. Plants may seem sweet and innocent, rooted to the ground or sitting in pots on your windowsill. But our list of the deadly plants found throughout science fiction prove that flora can be more dangerous than you’d ever imagined.
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Some of you may look upon trees as villains after our shocking exposé on the subject, but it turns out that scientists can cultivate trees to bend their branches to our will. Using the technique of aeroponics — growing plants exclusively in air, like tropical hanging orchids — a company called Plantware hopes to build homes like the one pictured above. Plantware's vision melds arborsculpture with architecture, giving us a whole new spin on green technology. What's in it for the trees? Well, they get to survive in our fast-growing industrialized world, and we get to lie back in their sheltering arms and enjoy our wind-powered laptops. More »
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Trees! Millions have trembled at the sound of their villainous name. And yet somehow, in spite of all their world-crushing power, you all voted trees the weakest recent villain in movies and TV. Blame M. Night Shyamalan, whose The Happening failed to capture the true menace of these arboreal conquerors. Clearly, it's time to give trees an edgy new look — and you can help! More »
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In Lausanne, Switzerland, people don't congregate under real trees. They sit under the branches and on the steel roots at the base of this giant metallic tree designed by Samuel Wilkinson and Swiss design firm Oloom. More »
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Massive quantities of helium were discovered leaking out of the ground in Nevada. This mysterious gas emission is even stranger because usually geologists only see this kind of thing near volcanoes. Is Nevada about to become a volcanic hellhole? [Discovery News]

10,000-year-old trees were discovered during a construction project on a farm in Michigan. They are among the best-preserved fossilized trees ever found, and scientsts speculate that they were crushed under the last glacier to stretch across North America. [Science Daily] More »
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