Mimicking Edison’s experimental setup, Eddy attached the light bulb to a 110-volt direct current electricity source. He allowed it to flow for 20 seconds, as bouts of heating longer than that can form ...

Although we’re in the middle of winter, soon we’ll witness the unveiling of springtime and all of its joyous colors: brilliant orange poppies, deep purple iris and vivid yellow tidy tips. And after ...

Houseplants that bloom indoors are often treated like décor: once buds fade, the instinct is to refresh the pot, give more soil, and help the roots. For many bloomers, that kindness backfires. A ...

THERE is nothing like the sight of snowdrops pushing through the wintry ground to remind us that spring is on its way.

Flowers emit scented chemicals to attract pollinators, but this perfume—and how pollinators interact with the plant—can go ...

The black-bulb yam excels at mimicry, producing small clones of itself that look like the dark, shiny berries of seed-growing ...

A rare yam species, Dioscorea melanophyma, spreads its clones by fooling birds with fake berries, helping it survive without seeds.

Evolutionarily speaking, the ultimate goal of a lifeform is to reproduce and stave off extinction. Many plants and animals ...

Black-bulb yam’s mimicry tricks birds into spreading its berrylike clones. The plant's novel strategy helps it spread without ...

We’ve been calling tulips soft for so long that we forgot they were built to outlast cold, obsession, and neglect. The tulip’s modern reputation is almost entirely aesthetic, framed as soft, polite, ...

Cycads are the oldest living group of seed-producing plants — and it seems they use infrared heat signals to attract specialized nocturnal weevils that deliver their pollen 1. Wendy Valencia-Montoya ...

DENVER — Food, family, friends. All lovely traditions and I’ve got one more: this is the time when I pot up bulbs to bloom on my patio in the spring. If you haven’t managed to plant the bulbs you ...