Plants

New research is suggesting the claim that house plants improve indoor air quality is wrong. The research concludes it would take hundreds of plants in a small space to come close to the air-purifying effects of simply opening a couple of windows.

KFC plans to trial a plant-based chicken substitute from Beyond Meat, with an eye towards a potential national rollout.

Scientists are developing plant-based fire retardants, which should be less toxic and more eco-friendly.

Much of the world's soil is too salty for crops. There's hope, though, as scientists have developed a method of growing plants in "unusable" soil.

Herbicides hurt the environment, and they're costly. A new device could drastically reduce the need for them, while also providing crops with mulch.

Feverfew is a common flower easily recognizable either from a home garden or the shelf of the local health store. Now, researchers from the University of Birmingham have engineered a compound from the leaves of this plant that might be a potent cancer killer.

​As crop plants "breathe" through the pores in their leaves, they release an assortment of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into the air. A new smartphone-connected device analyzes those chemicals within a matter of minutes, detecting and identifying any diseases that may be indicated.

​Living in the soil, roundworms can infect plants via their roots, which is why many plants have evolved to produce an immune response when the worms are detected. Now, scientists have harnessed that response to create an eco-friendly form of crop protection.

​Although many smokers apparently don't realize it (or just don't care), cigarette butts are very much a form of litter – in fact, they're the world's most common type of litter. And they're not just an eyesore, as new research now indicates that they also dramatically reduce plant growth.

House plants can be a great way to add splashes of color to an otherwise drab interior, but they can also help to purify the air. But looking after them can be a guessing game. Lua is designed to help, turning plant care alerts into cute animated faces on the front of the pot.

Researchers at the Salk Institute are approaching gene-editing technology with some very big-picture thinking, looking to tweak the genes of humankind’s most commonly sown crops so they store more carbon dioxide underground as a way of fighting climate change

A Stanford University team is developing plants that can better absorb iron from the soil. By making it easier to ingest the trace mineral, it may be possible to open up the roughly one-third of the world's arable land that is unsuitable for growing staples like maize and soybeans.