Botany Mysteries of the New Tree of Life Believe it or not, man and mushroom now share the same branch on the tree of life. Their revolutionary classification system, unveiled in August at the Botanical Congress in St. Louis, tells a story different from what we've ever known. DNA analysis indicates that green plants, from the tiniest single-celled aquatic plants to the grandest redwoods, are related to one another. Even more amazing, amborella, a little-known flowering shrub that grows only on the island of New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific, has turned out to be the closest surviving relative of the first flower, a living fossil from which all other flowers evolved. Scientists also learned that plants invaded land not from the sea, as originally thought, but from freshwater ponds, where they'd acclimated to the sometimes wet, sometimes dry environment.
Some people dream of building a better mousetrap.
Princeton neurobiologist Joseph Z. Tsien did them one better. In September he announced that he'd built a better mouse by altering a gene that affects learning and memory. A similar process of gene manipulation might conceivably be used one day to boost intelligence in humans. The secret lies in a feature of brain cells called the nmda receptor, which Tsien likens to a cylindrical tube or window that mediates the flow of information. When the window is open, chemicals called neurotransmitters flow through easily and memory is registered and stored.