Author: Benjamin Blonder
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I went hiking in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson this weekend. It was a rare day, windy and snowing at some of the higher elevations – the first snow I’ve seen all this year. The cacti did not look particularly happy. In fact, the higher up the mountains, the fewer cacti there are…
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Why do leaves change color?
Even here in Tucson, autumn has arrived, and many plants are beginning to lose their leaves for the winter. Most leaves change color before they die – some turn bright red, others yellow, orange, and others just a sad shade of brown. Why bother? The answer I remember from grade school is that leaves are…
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The magic of x-rays
Have you ever thought about taking an x-ray of something besides your bones? Maybe a leaf? What if we could see the structure of a plant without damaging it in any way? The important issue is how to get contrast in the final image – do we look for x-rays to be absorbed (as in…
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A tale of two aspens
Here are two different aspen leaves I collected over the summer. One is a bit smaller (they are at the same scale) but how similar are they otherwise? What do they look like on the inside? Here are the vein networks for each, shown at the same scale: The smaller leaf seems to have a…