A beautiful illustration of a plant cell by Russell Kightley
http://tinyurl.com/c6qa625
(via scientificillustration)
This is a set of scans of some fruits and vegetables in a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).
- Cucumber.
- Pomegranate.
- Onion.
- Tangerine.
- Starfruit or Carambola.
- Kiwi (axial slice).
- Kiwi (sagital slice).
- Tomato (axial slice).
- Tomato (sagital slice).
Magnetic Resonance Imaging is a medical imaging technique to acquire images from the human body —vegetables and fruits also =) —, and it is completely harmless (no radiation). If well applied, you can virtually scan any part of the human body.
Those scans were made, when I was in college, being able to play around with an MRI. Yeah MRIs are fun =)
Stinging nettle, ouch!
“Stinging nettles are easily recognised and, unfortunately, often easily felt as the whole plant is covered in stinging hairs. This is an effective way to avoid being eaten and makes patches of stinging nettles an important haven for many caterpillars and other insects. Cooking destroys the venom, and produces a pretty tasty vegetable or nutritious soup. Nettles contain more iron than spinach and are a rich source of vitamin C. Nettle tea is a favourite herbal medicine used to treat conditions such as gout and rheumatism.”
Common nettle Urtica dioica - Corstorphine - February 2011
Nettles are poking their heads up everywhere now. Look at those spines… they inject a chemical cocktail that includes histamines and formic acid.
Miner’s Lettuce - once I read about it, it was hard not to miss it on my walk! Bright green cups with tiny white flowers nestled inside - almost looks like a candidate for one of those Victorian era fairy illustrations, doesn’t it? I didn’t eat it.
“The common name Miner’s lettuce refers its use by California gold rush miners who ate it to get their vitamin C to prevent scurvy. It can be eaten as a leaf vegetable. Most commonly it is eaten raw in salads, but it is not quite as delicate as other lettuce. Sometimes it is boiled like spinach, which it resembles in taste.”
The Yareta plant grows at a rate of approximately one millimeter per year, and thus many yaretas are over 3,000 years old.
Within its tiny white flowers, thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) does what most plants avoid: It fertilizes itself. Heiti Paves of Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia took this photograph of the flower with its pollen grains and ovaries stained blue to show the process in action. From the six pollen heads, the grains grow thin tubes toward the bean-shaped ovaries in the flower’s stigma to fertilize them. Because of the microscope technique used, polarized light turns the normally white flower yellow and the background blue. Scientists have used A. thaliana in many genetic studies because its self-fertilization makes experiments clearer. Gregor Mendel used a self-fertilizer, the pea, to build his genetic theories, Paves notes.
so cool
(Source: sciencecenter)
