Quantifying plant hydraulic function becomes a tall order

The dynamic pipeline: hydraulic capacitance and xylem hydraulic safety in four tall conifer species.

Recent work has suggested that plants differ in their relative reliance on structural avoidance of embolism versus maintenance of the xylem water column through dynamic traits such as capacitance, but we still know little about how and why species differ along this continuum. It is even less clear how or if different parts of a plant vary along this spectrum. Here we examined how traits such as...

Plant Self-Incompatibility: Ancient System Becomes a New Tool

Expressing a pollen self-incompatibility gene from Papaver rhoeas (poppy) in Arabidopsis thaliana renders the latter sensitive to an exquisitely precise induced cell death response. This simple system may have wide application in biotechnology and research.

When “altering brain function” becomes “mind control”

Functional neurosurgery has seen a resurgence of interest in surgical treatments for psychiatric illness. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) technology is the preferred tool in the current wave of clinical experiments because it allows clinicians to directly alter the functions of targeted brain regions, in a reversible manner, with the intent of correcting diseases of the mind, such as depression, a...

Aerodynamic Admittance Function of Tall Buildings

The aerodynamic admittance function (AAF) has been widely invoked to relate wind pressures on building surfaces to the oncoming wind velocity. In current practice, strip and quasi-steady theories are generally employed in formulating wind effects in the along-wind direction. These theories permit the representation of the wind pressures on building surfaces in terms of the oncoming wind velocit...

Plant and Soil as Hydraulic Systems