A tobacco plant showing slight signs of aging after three days of signal-to-noise ratio testing.
Researchers have designed an electrode that allows for a month-long, noninvasive method of studying physiology and health in a diverse array of plants.
Learn more in this week’s issue of #ScienceAdvances: https://scim.ag/4aay3yP
Very good point about the strain put on researchers as the overall average yearly output increases. That is indeed unsustainable if we want to avoid low-quality reviews (which we should!)
Camouflage 😶🌫️
A collection of newspaper front pages, "Assault on democracy," "Insurrection," and more.
The newspaper headlines. It's insane that he got away with this unpunished.
Project 2025 drives policy decisions in the US government, and I expect that to continue over the next year. I (unaffiliated) found this site that tracks their progress: www.project2025.observer/en
Already 50% of Project 2025's policy proposals have been implemented in Trump's first year.
Yes do it!! 😊 For the best videos that I managed to get of trichome rupture, I placed our microscope horizontally (1-5x mag) with a white LED panel in the background to illuminate, and imaged the top of the tomato stem w/ a digital camera on the output of the microscope bsky.app/profile/jare...
Fig. 3.Thrips nymphs rupture tomato trichomes. (A) Frames from a microscopy video (Supplementary Video S4) before, during, and after a thrips leg causes type VI glandular trichome rupture on an S. habrochaites tomato stem sample. Zoomed-in panels are shown below each frame, with illustrative labels for the leg, glandular head, and fluid filament formed afterward. The colors assigned to the frames indicate the time of the experiment in the leg position versus time plot of (B) The plot also tracks the formation and length of the filament over the course of the video, as the insect struggles to move.
🔬🪲 SPECIAL ISSUE RESEARCH 🔬🪲
Glandular trichomes function as ultra-fast biomechanical defense triggers in tomatoes, rupturing upon contact with insects and exposing them to sticky and toxic secretions - Popowski et al.
🔗 doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...
#PlantScience 🧪 @jaredpopo.bsky.social
The cover of Vol 76 | Issue 21 | 2025 of the Journal of Experimental Botany, Special Issue: Tomato. Purple banners border the top and bottom of the page and in the centre is an image of a ripe tomato fruit on its truss (credit: Marine Honoré).
📣 Check out the Journal of Experimental Botany's newest special issue 📣
🍅 Tomato - Issue 21 of 2025 🍅
📘 Guest edited by Yves Gibon, Diane Beckles, Sonia Osorio & Hiroshi Ezura
🔗 academic.oup.com/jxb...
#JXBspecialissues #PlantScience 🧪 @sebiology.bsky.social @dianemariabeckles.bsky.social
*lack of jetting haha. The fluid very clearly wets the trichome stalk!
Human breeding for larger yields/tastier fruits/etc has reduced trichome density & variety vs wild plants, reinforcing reliance on harmful pesticides. I hope our work inspires recognition of nature's natural pesticide factories and efforts to recover these micro-defenses for stronger future crops!
We can even use the trichomes as mini force-sensors! Modeling the stalk as a truncated cone and measuring its bending moduli, we estimated insect rupture forces from stalk deflection during contact. We find the same order of magnitude compared to our direct micropipette force measurements!
Finally, we wanted to test whether small insects could rupture these heads. We placed Western flower thrips larvae (a major tomato plant) on the plant surface and indeed witnessed rupture events in both tomato species!
Comparing two tomato species (the supermarket cultivar type vs wild-type), we found significantly higher rupture forces for cultivar stem trichomes. This indicates reduced defense ability for supermarket tomatoes against small predators, at least on the stem.
Since we poked trichomes with calibrated micropipette force sensors, we could extract force loading curves to rupture. We consistently find elastic loading followed by abrupt failure - characteristic of rupture in a brittle material.
Rupture consistently occurs at the junction where the glandular head meets the stalk, regardless of poking angle. We hypothesize this is due to how the head cavity gets filled with metabolite during development, concentrating stress at the junction where the cavity meets the stalk.
Poking plant surfaces with glass micropipette force sensors, we discovered that these glandular trichome heads rupture extremely rapidly. We needed high-speed cameras to resolve it! (This video: 28,000 fps). The lack of wetting shows surface tension dominates over gravity and inertia.
Trichomes are the little hair-like structures that you see here, on the side of a wild-type (S. habrochaites) tomato leaf. Trichomes play a big role in many plants' defense against insects, impeding movement and storing specialized chemicals that act as sticky insecticides upon mechanical contact.
The JXB Tomato special edition is out, featuring the first publication of my PhD! We found that glandular trichome head rupture in tomato is an ultra-sensitive defense against insect predation. 🧵on plant biomechanics, fluid dynamics, and plant-insect interactions! 🧪
academic.oup.com/jxb/article/...
Roses don’t just defend themselves. Their prickles are geometrically ideal for gripping surfaces, supporting vertical growth, and, when needed, creating lacerations that deter herbivores. Students - join us to investigate how biological form and physical law work together!
Link to the full NY Times conversation transcript: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/p...
Thanks @caseynewton.bsky.social for releasing this wild interview, and for all the reporting you and Kevin do on Hard Fork. Love the show!
Truly unbelievable responses here
I've never heard more business bullshitting than while listening to the CEO of Roblox, Dave Baszucki, trying to startup-speak his way around the problem of child predators on his platform during a planned interview on the subject
Ozempic, MRI machines and flat screen televisions all emerged out of fundamental research decades earlier — the very types of study being slashed by the US government
go.nature.com/47hn0n5
Success rates for Europe’s leading research grants are declining as a surge in applications far outweighs the funds available
go.nature.com/479Sni6
How about we don't tie fundamental research funding up with defense in the EU? The push for defense applications could take away spending in other critical areas like medicine or environmental science
Happy to share that our work on active phase separation by photophobic microalgae is now published in PRL!
journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...
When surrounded by multiple light sources, cells hide behind each other, leading to the quick formation of a macroscopic branching pattern.
A white crab spider stands prone with arms outstretched on a leaf.
Cool animal that I didn't know existed: this is a crab spider that I saw on a hike in Brittany, strategically positioned amidst the densest group of butterflies that I had seen on the trail
It's a fantastic one!!
Beautiful video!
