Carlos Magdalena, Maarten Christenhusz and colleagues have named Victoria colombiana, one of three new giant waterlily species found in a few years. As far as the team knows it grows in one small area, where, Christenhusz says, a single pollution spill could wipe out the whole species.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishers
- Builder
- Builder 40%
- Operator
- Operator 53%
- Investor
- Investor 7%
Reality
- Evidence70
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives
- Not scored
- Confidence72
Conservationists dispute that lab-made copies of endangered plant scents will protect wild trees
Osmo, a Google Brain spin-off that has raised $130m, says its AI recreated a rare tree's scent from a piece of bark the size of a finger. A Kew botanist says such copies do not completely take the pressure off wild species, because buyers still prize wild-sourced agarwood.
Reality
- Evidence35
- Adoption20
- Hype gap+45
- Incentives70
- Confidence40
Predatory wasps move into Bornean ant-plant stems far more often in oil palm plantations
Predatory wasps are nesting in the stems Macaranga trees have grown for ants for at least 10 million years, most often in Borneo's oil palm plantations. Trees with wasps had smaller ant colonies, but nobody has yet tested whether the wasps are evicting the ants.
Reality
- Evidence40
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+40
- Incentives45
- Confidence45
A 50-tree ash pangenome places 16 of its 211 dieback-resistance candidates in dispensable genes
Kew and Forest Research built the first European ash pangenome from 50 trees, then screened more than 1,000 for dieback resistance and found 211 candidate genes, 16 of them in DNA that only some ash carry.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption15
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives58
- Confidence60
Kew's plant report ran a flowering detector over 8 million herbarium sheets in a week
A model trained at NTNU did work its authors estimate would take a person 40,000 hours. The output: flowering times have moved 2.5 days a decade, and the tropics moved most.
Reality
- Evidence42
- Adoption38
- Hype gap+14
- Incentives58
- Confidence44