Can plants get cancer?

Pigs tried for murder, weevils expelled from heaven and how a bloke dressed as an executed French monkey became mayor of an English town.Topsy the elephant travelled the US performing for cheering circus-goers, but when her drunken trainer rode her into town wreaking havoc, was t ...  Show more

Dr Ann Jones is bringing true crime and natural history together with Nature's Most Wanted, a new series from What the Duck!? investigating when animals get on the wrong side of the law.From cats stealing underwear to roosters accused of witchcraft; human-eaters to parrots with o ...  Show more

In the past 18 months we have heard lots about the human immune system, as we all learn about how our bodies fight off Covid-19 and how the vaccine helps protect us. But this got listener John, in Alberta, Canada, thinking about how trees and plants respond to diseases and thr ...

Since their discovery in the 1970s, artemisinin-based drugs have become the mainstay of treatment for malaria caused by the Plasmodium falciparum parasite. Researchers have identified artemisinin-resistant malaria parasites in Southeast Asia since the early 2000s, but now, there ...  Show more

There are over 400,000 species of plant on earth, they’re on every continent including Antarctica. But humans only regularly eat about 200 species globally, with the vast majority of our nutrition coming from just three species. Many of the fruits, leaves and tubers that other ...

The tiny sap-sucking aphid, at just a few millimetres long, is the scourge of many gardeners and crop-growers worldwide, spreading astonishingly rapidly and inflicting huge damage as it seeks to outwit many host plants’ natural defences. With insights and guidance from aphid expe ...  Show more