Lyra Merigold

She Was the Only Woman in a Photo of 38 Scientists, and Now She’s Been Identified 

The lost art of looking at plants

When Elizabeth Kellogg finished her PhD in 1983, she feared that her skills were already obsolete. Kellogg studied plant morphology and systematics: scrutinizing the dazzling variety of plants’ physical forms to tease out how different species are related. But most of her colleagues had already pivoted to a new approach: molecular biology. “Every job suddenly required molecular techniques,” she says. “It was like I had learned how to make illuminated manuscripts, and then somebody invented the printing press.”

Kellogg had graduated near the start of a revolution in plant biology. Over the next few decades, as researchers adopted molecular tools and DNA sequencing, detailed analyses of plants’ physical traits fell out of fashion. And because many geneticists worked with only a few key organisms, such as the thale cress Arabidopsis thaliana, they didn’t need expertise in comparing and contrasting different plant species. At universities, botany departments folded and molecular-biology departments swelled. Kellogg, now at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St Louis, Missouri, adapted: she embraced genomics, and combined it with her morphology skills to trace the evolution of key traits in the wild relatives of food crops.

But lately, Kellogg has noticed a resurgence of interest in the old ways. Advances in imaging technology — allowing researchers to peer inside plant structures in 3D — mean that biologists are seeking expertise in plant physiology and morphology again. And improvements in gene editing and sequencing have liberated geneticists to tinker with DNA in a wider range of flora, giving them a renewed appetite to understand plant diversity.

Plant biologists hope that, by combining new approaches to botany with data from genomics and imaging labs, they can provide better answers to questions that biologists have asked for more than 100 years: how genes and the environment shape the rich diversity of plants’ physical forms. “People are starting to look beyond their own system into plants as a whole,” says Kellogg. Plant morphology was once a science of form for its own sake, she says, but now, it is being pressed into service to understand how plant traits connect to gene activity across disparate species. “It’s coming back — just under different guises.”

3D imaging offers new views of these antirrhinum (snapdragon) buds. Credit: Karen Lee/Xana Rebocho/John Innes Centre

Pollen masses inside a ‘deceptive’ orchid (Orchis militaris), imaged using X-ray computed tomography.Credit: Yannick Staedler

A group of engineers are building softer, squishier robots—ones you might knowingly invite into your home to hang out. Instead of sporting bodies of rigid plastic and metal, biohybrid robots often consist of 3D-printed scaffolds laced with lab-grown muscles, sourced from the cells of mice, insects, and even sea slugs. 

“Once you can build robots that are soft and you can control them you have access to all these materials for machines that previously we never even thought about using,” says Barry Trimmer, a neurobiologist and roboticist at Tufts University. Natural materials also have a unique advantage: they’re biodegradable. “You just build the thing out of protein and after you’re finished with the robot, you throw it on the compost heap and it decomposes.”

Like regular robots, the biohybrid robots can be controlled with microcontrollers—but engineers are also building muscles controlled by neurotransmittersand light pulses. MIT engineer Ritu Raman has experimented with both types of biological machines, and has even created bio-bots that can heal themselves after an injury, and get back to work.What kind of work might we employ bio-bots for? Raman envisions her robots could be used in biomedical applications, such as fixing damaged muscles, or aiding the constrictive movements of the throat or intestine.

Vickie Webster-Wood of Case Western Reserve University, who has experimented with the sea-slug-muscle robots, says the aqueous origins of the muscles point to underwater applications, perhaps environmental monitoring, or hunting down leaks in an oil pipeline.

Watch a wound close with the help of fat cells

French Food Waste Law Changing How Grocery Stores Approach Excess Food

But giving leftover food to charity is no longer just an act of goodwill. It’s a requirement under a 2016 law that bans grocery stores from throwing away edible food.

Stores can be fined $4,500 for each infraction.

Cookiecutter sharks that glow in the dark, phallic peanut worms and uncannily displeased-looking blobfish were never meant to see the light of day.

And yet, they are among more than 100 deep-sea species recently scooped up off Australia’s coast in a mission to identify animals that live in these barely explored, extreme underwater habitats.

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