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Global warming could be the reason for tricking the world’s most stinky plant into an early bloom.

The Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanium) is also known commonly as the corpse flower. The one in the picture above is a native of Indonesia.

It is quite abnormal for this flower to bloom during winter. This could be because of a very warm 2006 and mild winter in the United Kingdom may be a factor in causing the giant plant to bloom early.

They might be small, spiky, and spineless, but they’re still part of our family. The California purple urchins and we have more than 7,000 genes in common, which makes them close cousins to humans.

This unexpectedly discovery of connection between the humans and sea urchins that are part of the few invertebrates seen on the branch of the evolutionary tree. This conclusion has been arrived at after a recent sequencing of the sea urchin genome.

Gary Wessel is a biology professor at the Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Sea Urchin Genome Sequencing Consortium. He had used the marine animals for decades as models to study human processes like fertilization and embryo development.

“We’ve already learned an enormous amount from the sea urchin, from something as basic as how identical twins form to in vitro fertilization procedures,” Wessel said in a university press release.
“With a complete map of the urchin’s DNA, we can now learn more quickly and easily how each process works during development.”

The results of the genetic sequencing also revealed some surprises for Wessel: The eyeless urchins can actually see! The Genes that are associated with vision are active in the urchins’ tube feet, suggesting that their limbs can actually sense light.

“Nobody would’ve predicted that sea urchins have such a robust gene set for visual perception,” Wessel said. “I’ve been looking at these organisms for 31 years—and now I know they were looking back at me.”

Like a poster that came to life, a group of bioluminescent fungi that were collected from Ribeira Valley Tourist State Park near São Paulo, Brazil, gave out a soft green glow when the lights go out.

The mushrooms are a part of the genes Mycena, a group that includes around 500 species all over the world. Out of these, only around 33 are known to be bioluminescent or capable of producing light through a chemical reaction.

Since 2002 Cassius Stevani, professor of chemistry at the University of São Paulo; Dennis Desjardin, professor of mycology at San Francisco State University in California; and Marina Capelari of Brazil’s Institute of Botany have discovered ten more bioluminescent fungi species, four of which are new to science and are present around Brazil’s tropical forests.