Jimmy L. Turner has accepted the offer to serve as executive director of Red Butte Garden at the University of Utah, effective March 23, 2020. Turner replaces Gregory Lee who will retire from the Garden after 17 years of leadership. “Jimmy joins the Red Butte Garden team with 30 years of experience as a leader […]

To understand the environmental pressures that shaped human evolution, scientists must first piece together the details of the ancient plant and animal communities that our fossil ancestors lived in over the past 7 million years. Because putting together the puzzle of millions-of-years-old ecosystems is a difficult task, many studies have reconstructed the environments by drawing […]

Plants have important things to say, and University of Utah electrical and computer engineering associate professor Hanseup Kim wants to listen to them. He leads a team of U engineers who have received a $2.2-million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to design and build small chemical sensors that can “sniff” out when a […]

If humanity is going to push the boundaries of space exploration, we’re going to need plants to come along for the ride. Not just spinach or potatoes, though—plants can do so much more than just feed us. A science experiment aiming to demonstrate plants’ capabilities in space has arrived at the International Space Station and […]

As wildfires burn across the western United States, people are asking why does the West burn so frequently? Was it like this in the past? To piece together ancient landscapes, paleoecologists act like biological sleuths by digging through layers of sediment in search of clues. Traditionally, they analyzed pollen grains to infer what types of […]

Drought-stricken areas anxiously await the arrival of rain. Full recovery of the ecosystem, however, can extend long past the first rain drops on thirsty ground. According to a study published August 10 in Nature, the length of drought recovery depends on several factors, including the region of the world and the post-drought weather conditions. The […]