The Wall Street Journal's Matthew Rose reports in the video below that bamboo has become a huge problem in Hillsboro, Virginia. A type of bamboo called running bamboo can be as problematic as kudzu. It grows extremely quickly and spread rapidly.
The complete genome of a moss has been sequenced, providing scientists an important evolutionary link between single-celled algae and flowering plants.
Just as the sequencing of animal genomes has helped scientists understand human genomic history, the sequencing of plant genomes will shed light on the evolution of the plant kingdom, according to Ralph S. Quatrano, Ph.D., the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and the corresponding author of the paper.
The accomplishment will "reveal insights into the conquest of land by plants," Quatrano says, including the identification of unique gene products and metabolic pathways as to how these diminutive plants protect themselves against stresses associated with living on land. The description of the genome is found in the Dec. 13, 2007, online issue of Science magazine.
The entire genome of the moss Physcomitrella patens was completed by scientists at the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) in Walnut Creek, Calif., a sequencing facility of the Department of Energy. The effort was coordinated by a consortium of international researchers from the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and Germany, and involved more than 100 scientists in the initial annotation of the genome.
An ambitious project called the Encyclopedia of Life, located at www.eol.org, aims to provide information about all life on Earth. The BBC reports that all life forms from aardvark to zorilla will be included. The goal of the project is to detail all 1.8 million planet and animal species in a massive database.
The Encyclopedia of Life project aims to detail all 1.8 million known plant and animal species in a net archive.
Individual species pages will include photographs, video, sound and maps, collected and written by experts.
The archive, to be built over 10 years, could help conservation efforts as well as being a useful tool for education.
"The Encyclopedia of Life will provide valuable biodiversity and conservation information to anyone, anywhere, at any time," said Dr James Edwards, executive director of the $100m (£50m) project.
"[It] will ultimately make high-quality, well-organized information available on an unprecedented level."
The vast database will initially concentrate on animals, plants and fungi with microbes to follow. Fossil species may eventually be added.
Here is a video for the Encyclopedia of Life.
The EOL database has been ongoing since 2006. The project was initially hosted at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The old website can be found here. Another project attempting to record information about species is called the Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD).
This is a photograph of world's largest flower, the Rafflesia arnoldii. The parasitic plant was photographed shortly after blooming. According to the Jan. 12, 2007 issue of the journal Science the flowers of this species measure up to one meter in diameter and weigh up to 15 lbs. One big downside of the gigantic flower is that they look and smell like rotting flesh. This is not a downside at all to the carrion flies that pollinate them. Unlike humans the carrion flies find the flesh rotting feature very appealing. The study, by Dr. Charles C. Davis and colleagues of Harvard University Herbaria in Cambridge, Mass., was titled "Floral Gigantism in Rafflesiaceae. (PDF)" The BBC has more on the study which found that the huge flower belongs to a family of tiny plants.
Fortune has an interesting feature about futuristic green buildings that behave more like an ecosystem than an environmentally-unfriendly steel fortress.
Buildings consume 40 percent of our energy and can have life spans longer than humans. Because we live, work and associate with others in buildings, they form part of the fabric of human life—and thus have an enormous effect not only on the quality of individual lives but also on the state of the earth.
In the pages that follow, we have configured a structure that is not just kind to nature; it actually imitates nature. Imagine a building that makes oxygen, distills water, produces energy, changes with the seasons—and is beautiful. In effect, that building is like a tree, standing in a city that is like a forest.
The article describes multiple aspects of these futuristic buildings including solar power, productive workspaces, recycling waste and heating and cooling. These green buildings are very much unlike the skyscrapers of today.
Scientists say the Earth is currently experiencing a catastrophic period of animal loss that will continue to worsen. The New Zealand Heraldreports that nineteen of the world's top biodiversity experts signed a joint declaration that ran in Nature to try and encourage would cooperationi to save animal and plant life here on Earth.
Earth is losing species faster than at any time for at least 65 million years, when it was hit by an enormous asteroid that wiped out thousands of animals and plants, including the dinosaurs.
Scientists say the rate at which species are going extinct is between 100 and 1000 times greater than the normal "background" extinction rate - and it's all because of human activity.
The call for action comes from some of the most distinguished scientists in the field, including Georgina Mace of the UK Institute of Zoology, Peter Raven, head of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis and Robert Watson, chief scientist at the World Bank.
"For the sake of the planet, the biodiversity science community had to create a way to get organised ... and together with one clear voice advise governments on steps to halt the potentially catastrophic loss of species already occurring," Dr Watson said.
The plea in Nature said that 12% of all birds, 23% of mammals, 25% of conifer trees, 32 % of amphibians and 52% of ancient tropical plants face imminent extinction. That is absolutely terrifying.
Wiredreports on a documentary project by National Geograpic to create fictitious alien life forms for a planet called Aurelia and lunar orb called Blue Moon. The creatures were created using scientific principles and knowledge of evolutionary patterns.
Sounds like a pair of scenes ripped from your standard off-world fantasy novel, except the science behind these alien planets isn't fiction. Aurelia and Blue Moon are based on computer models created by NASA and SETI Project researchers to help identify which stars among the universe's 70 sextillion are most likely to support life. CGI representations of the worlds first appeared in a National Geographic documentary; the film and related interactive simulations are on display through February at the London Science Museum. A US tour is planned for this fall.
Scientists began with the essential ingredient for life: They assumed both worlds in the exhibit contained water. They then used as blueprints two scenarios formulated by the SETI Project. The first is a planet orbiting a sun close enough to keep water from freezing out, yet far enough away to avoid evaporation. The other is a moon orbiting a gas giant and warmed by twin suns.
To make the worlds as realistic as possible, SETI astrophysicist Laurance Doyle and NASA researcher Manoj Joshi ran detailed climate simulations on a desktop Linux box. The sims allowed the scientists to observe the consequences on habitability of a range of complex atmospheric variables like thermal circulation and precipitation levels. Next, a group of life scientists, led by University of Cambridge paleobiologist Simon Conway Morris, applied the principles of natural selection and adaptation to populate the planets. They determined creature leg lengths and wingspans using biomechanics algorithms, and they established vegetation height and characteristics according to factors like available light and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
"Implicit in these biospheres is the concept of evolution," says Conway Morris. As a result, the inhabitants of Aurelia and Blue Moon look more like something that might be encountered on the Galapagos Islands than at the cineplex. The life-forms on these pages illustrate realistic adaptations to an environment. Adaptations that almost - but not quite - befit creatures right here at home.
Wikipedia also has an entry on this subject and says the creatures and planets were explained in a two-part series called Alien Worlds. However, the National Geographic website says the show is called Extraterrestrial. You can see photos and previews here.
An ambitious project called the 
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