I’m currently working at the Annals of Botany to help out with their social media side. There’s a bit more to it than subtly dropping links to their site, like this one. At the moment I’m struggling with the Facebook integration, but there’s a fun side too. I wouldn’t have browsed AoB if I’d not been hired, and that means I would have missed out on papers like Phytoliths in woody plants from the Miombo woodlands of Mozambique by Julio Mercader and his team at Calgary. I’ll admit the article title doesn’t say much to the layman, but it’s actually something deeply cool that I didn’t find out about till my MPhil.

If megaliths are big stones and microliths are small stones like arrowheads, then phytoliths are clearly phyto-stones. Phyto- in this case meaning plant.

Phytoliths are microscopic stones formed in some plants. When a plant’s roots draw up water they also draw up the minerals dissolved within it. In the case of the silica this gets pulled out of the water and deposited either in the cells or between the cells. The exact shape of the phytoliths varies on the part of the plant the silica is deposited in, the availability of More >