For several decades, United States Department of Agriculture horticulturists have collected and studied apple trees from around the world. Their research focuses on disease resistance as well as similarities in DNA sequences among various strains. Their latest fruit finds have interesting implications for the origins of apple trees.

A coal mine in the Cerrejón Formation of Colombia has yielded a gold mine of fossils. This particular cache preserved a time in earth history when the tropical climate was quite different from today’s. Evidence indicates that it was warmer and wetter. But despite the different climate, the fossilized tropical plants were the same as today’s, albeit less diverse.

Venus flytraps are carnivorous plants. They have delicate, yet precisely engineered, trigger-activated leaves that can snap shut on insects in less than one third of a second. Their origin has baffled evolutionary botanists. If their exquisite and unique trap doors evolved, then what did they evolve from, and how?

United States lawmakers are considering a bill whose purpose is “to make energy more expensive, so people use less of it and to create a penalty for carbon-based fuels.”¹ Its intent is to reduce the emission of the greenhouse gases that are supposedly fueling global warming.

Phosphorus, number 15 on the periodic table of elements, is considered a basic component of all cell membranes. But the recent discovery of single-celled photosynthetic organisms surviving without the chemical element in their membranes is going to require some major rewrites to biochemistry textbooks.¹