 I couldn’t do much collecting.”
After the trip, Wahlert showed the specimens to Dutch botanist Wilbert Hetterscheid of Wageningen University. Hetterscheid, an expert on Amorphophallus, said they were a new species, and is co-authoring the descriptive paper with Wahlert.
In October 2007, Wahlert went back to the islands at the end of the dry season, and once again the new species were in full bloom. He collected 15 tubers – the roots – so he could grow the plants.
Wahlert kept the live plants at various institutions where he worked and gave others away, ending up with one left when he moved to Utah last fall.
Why should anyone care about a stinking plant with a suggestive shape?
“It’s not high-tech, but it’s still important to describe new species, to document biodiversity, particularly in a place like Madagascar, which is one of the world’s great biodiversity hotspots,” Wahlert says. “It’s been severely deforested and is continuing to be deforested. So it’s important to document new species before they go extinct.”University of Utah Public Relations
Lee Siegel | Newswise Science News
Discovery of a Key Regulatory Gene in Cardiac Valve Formation
24.05.2017 | Universität Basel
Carcinogenic soot particles from GDI engines
24.05.2017 | Empa - Eidgenössische Materialprüfungs- und Forschungsanstalt
Physicists from the University of Würzburg are capable of generating identical looking single light particles at the push of a button. Two new studies now demonstrate the potential this method holds.
The quantum computer has fuelled the imagination of scientists for decades: It is based on fundamentally different phenomena than a conventional computer....
An international team of physicists has monitored the scattering behaviour of electrons in a non-conducting material in real-time. Their insights could be beneficial for radiotherapy.
We can refer to electrons in non-conducting materials as ‘sluggish’. Typically, they remain fixed in a location, deep inside an atomic composite. It is hence...
Two-dimensional magnetic structures are regarded as a promising material for new types of data storage, since the magnetic properties of individual molecular building blocks can be investigated and modified. For the first time, researchers have now produced a wafer-thin ferrimagnet, in which molecules with different magnetic centers arrange themselves on a gold surface to form a checkerboard pattern. Scientists at the Swiss Nanoscience Institute at the University of Basel and the Paul Scherrer Institute published their findings in the journal Nature Communications.
Ferrimagnets are composed of two centers which are magnetized at different strengths and point in opposing directions. Two-dimensional, quasi-flat ferrimagnets...
An Australian-Chinese research team has created the world's thinnest hologram, paving the way towards the integration of 3D holography into everyday...
In the race to produce a quantum computer, a number of projects are seeking a way to create quantum bits -- or qubits -- that are stable, meaning they are not much affected by changes in their environment. This normally needs highly nonlinear non-dissipative elements capable of functioning at very low temperatures.
In pursuit of this goal, researchers at EPFL's Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurements LPQM (STI/SB), have investigated a nonlinear graphene-based...
24.05.2017 | Event News
23.05.2017 | Event News
22.05.2017 | Event News
24.05.2017 | Physics and Astronomy
24.05.2017 | Physics and Astronomy
24.05.2017 | Event News