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The Return of Periodical Cicadas
So you may have heard a thing or two about “Brood X,” the trillion-strong army of insects genetically programmed to burst from the soil beneath our feet and drown us in otherworldly screams in a matter of weeks. Not to worry! Knowledge is power, and you can learn everything there is to know about the strange life cycles of periodical cicadas in a free online lecture courtesy of the United States Botanic Garden in collaboration with the National Arboretum. The lecture will be hosted by Dr.
Michael Raupp of the University of Maryland, better known as “The Bug Guy,” as curator of the
Gardens of the Cross Timbers: Plant zoos
Becky Emerson Carlberg
Contributing writer
The native spring flowers keep coming. The dewberries (Rubus species), close relatives of blackberries, form trailing vines close to the ground, not upright canes. Dewberries bloom before blackberries and are now producing five petaled white flowers. Soon, sweet little squishy purple raspberry-like fruits will be ripe and ready.
The black locust trees (Robinia pseudoacacia) are blooming. If planted near crops or trees, the nitrogen-fixing legume enhances their growth. Honeybees and bumblebees love the flowers. Another example of an American plant taken overseas. Hungarians imported black locust seeds in the 1700s. Through selective breeding, strong black locust stock was developed. Not only are Hungarian forests almost 20% black locust, the tree has become important in their commercial honey business.
Sapria himalayana.
This shocking finding has now been confirmed by an independent research team from Harvard University. The draft genome for another member of the Rafflesiaceae family that they recently published in
Current Biology is full of surprises, showing how far parasites can go in shedding superfluous genes and acquiring useful new ones from their hosts. It also deepens mysteries about the role of highly mobile genetic elements that donât encode proteins in enabling evolutionary changes. Perhaps the greatest lesson of the study is how much we still have to learn about genomics, particularly in plants, and in parasites â a category of organisms that includes more than 40% of all known species.