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And of course, seeing if the seeds they sent back out are still viable is good too. I mean, we're talking backups here. And part of a good backup is knowing that your backup is restorable and leaves things the way you expect after they are restored.

That's a big part of the research at the Millennium Seed Bank in England, which has a much wider remit (all plants!) but stores much smaller quantities of seed per species. (Svarlbard has sacks full, the MSB may have as few as 10 or 100.)

The MSB has 13% of species banked so far. Withdrawals have been made, generally to "repair" areas devastated by mining etc.

http://www.kew.org/science-con...

I work for a botanic garden (we have very large, focussed collections, and over 150 research scientists). I started without any knowledge of the subject beyond what's covered in science at school, but that's no problem -- the scientists do the science, I write software to manage the data, learning what I need. The software used to be what I imagine are pretty standard bespoke database applications, like any business probably has, but in the last few years (since I started) has been much more about sharing the data (we're interested in semantic web, linked data, ontologies etc), and writing software to improve the way the research is done, replacing the older systems. It's still closer to standard database/web work than something specialised (e.g. physics simulations, bioinformatics, etc); though some of the research teams have software like this I'm not sure if anyone is employed specifically to write/use it.

A couple of positions are working their way through the system (we are part-funded by the government), and should be advertised at some point in the summer.

There are also two positions for web developers (not much science in these, this is for the public/visitor side), and two science-database placements for students at a British university doing a year in industry (part support, part development, depending).

http://www.kew.org/about-kew/jobs/

The Wollemia nobilis growing in Kew Gardens is protected by a cage. I think, when first planted, it had a security guard...

Botanists aren't surprised -- at least, not my colleagues at RBG Kew. (I'm not a botanist.)

"Uniqueness" is complicated in taxonomy. Take Coffea arabica , a name published in 1753. There are 5 "proper" synonyms (at the bottom of the list, the ones without a 'var.'). This means a botanist named the same plant later, and another botanist later said "actually, Coffea arabica and Coffea moka are the same". That's what this is a database of, and I understand it's the first time someone's tried to do this on a global scale.

It's important to know what's what if you're going to try and conserve plants, or write their names into laws, etc.

The original press release is here.

Well, there's a lot of details from the actual source of the study that are left out of the Fox News report. Like the fact that they used a taxonomic knowledge in a rulebase to reduce the set of unique plants. While fascinating, one must wonder how well an automated system could perform such a feat. Note: The part about putting "discovered" in double quotes is not found in the original source article but arises in the Fox News article. You might want to be careful as you could be insinuating gross incompetence in the field of botany across its entire history. It's also possible that this algorithm for reducing the list needs to be worked on.

Why not visit a botanical garden too?

I don't know which are the best to visit in the US, maybe the Missouri Botanical Garden.

(I work at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew [London, UK]. They're well worth visiting if you're in London.)

Kew Gardens news story, with lots more images and information.

Better pictures and more info at the Royal Botanic Gardens website:
http://www.kew.org/scihort/news/new_palm_genus.html

A house in Britain that was moved / removed. Underneath the stone and misc. flooring (which was all removed) a bunch of flowers sprouted that were totally unlike any in the area, but which matched descriptions from the middle ages of flowers at the time. But these flowers are long gone from Britain now.

This I haven't heard about. It seems unlikely to me, though. We have a reasonable idea as to what the flora of Britain was like during the Middle Ages, and where those species are now (mostly still there).

I wouldn't be surprised if there were windborne seeds and pollen in the Antarctic ice, but I'm not sure if much effort has gone into looking. It's not too likely that seeds would germinate (seeds are tough, but there are limits), but it might be possible to extract DNA. At the moment, we could compare that DNA to extant plants, but not do a whole lot else... the days of recreating "Jurassic Park" type plants is still waaay off.

Quake Mods aren't modular, they're monolithic. The level of granularity is so coarse, that designers need to perform a huge amount of tedious work, in order to make a good one. And you can only experience on at a time, so if you have 100 good mods, they don't synergistically add to each other's value.

Sims objects and characters are modular mods, so they plug together into a simulated environment and interact with each other. You can take objects and characters created by many different designers, and compose them together with stuff you created yourself, into your own higher level, monolithic "mod" (a family living in a house).

Sims object and character creators don't have to worry about achieving "balance" -- that's the fun part of the game that the players do for themselves, in Build and Buy mode.

Achieving balance is the hard part of making successful Quake mods. But achieving balance is the fun part of playing The Sims. This approach lifts the burden of achieving balance from the shoulders of mod designers, and repackages it as entertainment for players.

Games that support truly modular mods like Sims objects and characters, enable mod designers to create interesting, expressive, stand-alone objects that players love to plug together (and value enough that they'll pay for downloading), at a more prolific, finer level of granularity than monolithic game mods like Quake.

Modular mods work together at many different levels, and they're open-ended, so there's never any end to what you can do with them.

The Palm House, Kew Gardens is a great example how many different artists, designers, historians and botanists have colaborated together at different levels, to create an accurate representation of the Royal Botanical Garden, Kew.

With the permission of the Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, this theme celebrates the wonders of not only the Palm House, but the Temperate House, Dome and Formal Gardens of Kew in this prestigious time of it gaining World Heritage Status. You can read more about this important event here.

This exemplary historical recreation is not just the end-product of many people's colaboration, but actually a contributing source in a huge distributed feedback loop:

You can download the Royal Botanic Gardens, plug the lot into your game, move your own family in, furnish it however you like, rearrange the landscape and architecture, deconstruct and reassemble it again with your own collection of objects, direct the drama as it unfolds, take pictures with the built-in camera, write stories in your scrapbook, and publish your family and their story on The Sims Exchange, to share with other players, to download and play with all over again.

-Don

Quake Mods aren't modular, they're monolithic. The level of granularity is so coarse, that designers need to perform a huge amount of tedious work, in order to make a good one. And you can only experience on at a time, so if you have 100 good mods, they don't synergistically add to each other's value.

Sims objects and characters are modular mods, so they plug together into a simulated environment and interact with each other. You can take objects and characters created by many different designers, and compose them together with stuff you created yourself, into your own higher level, monolithic "mod" (a family living in a house).

Sims object and character creators don't have to worry about achieving "balance" -- that's the fun part of the game that the players do for themselves, in Build and Buy mode.

Achieving balance is the hard part of making successful Quake mods. But achieving balance is the fun part of playing The Sims. This approach lifts the burden of achieving balance from the shoulders of mod designers, and repackages it as entertainment for players.

Games that support truly modular mods like Sims objects and characters, enable mod designers to create interesting, expressive, stand-alone objects that players love to plug together (and value enough that they'll pay for downloading), at a more prolific, finer level of granularity than monolithic game mods like Quake.

Modular mods work together at many different levels, and they're open-ended, so there's never any end to what you can do with them.

The Palm House, Kew Gardens is a great example how many different artists, designers, historians and botanists have colaborated together at different levels, to create an accurate representation of the Royal Botanical Garden, Kew.

With the permission of the Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, this theme celebrates the wonders of not only the Palm House, but the Temperate House, Dome and Formal Gardens of Kew in this prestigious time of it gaining World Heritage Status. You can read more about this important event here.

This exemplary historical recreation is not just the end-product of many people's colaboration, but actually a contributing source in a huge distributed feedback loop:

You can download the Royal Botanic Gardens, plug the lot into your game, move your own family in, furnish it however you like, rearrange the landscape and architecture, deconstruct and reassemble it again with your own collection of objects, direct the drama as it unfolds, take pictures with the built-in camera, write stories in your scrapbook, and publish your family and their story on The Sims Exchange, to share with other players, to download and play with all over again.

-Don

Kew Gardens, in the centre of London, is probably the Victorian version of this. It has glass houses for tropical, hothouse and desert landscapes, and even managed to get a titan arum flowering last month for the second time. (I went to see it, damn it was huge)

Not as big a scale of course, but the Millenium Seed Bank project gives it a well defined purpose other than a simple tourist attraction; to collect and conserve 10%, over 24,000 species, of the world's seed-bearing flora, principally from the drylands by 2010 and to collect and conserve seeds of the entire UK native seed-bearing flora by 2000.

Here's a picture of six foot sex organ!
How'd you like to be on the recieving end of that? I bet that'd make your allergies kick in!

(And no, it's not some photoshop fake -- this is real!)

Little shop of horrors!

Damn scientists meddlin' in things man was not meant to know! Now they've gone and growed them Audry II!

Watch my enormous sex organ GROW!