#pothos ivy

[0i001010]

my luvs

[librastank]

My grandma has a pothos ivy named Esmeralda:.) isn’t that so cute ?

She said “ Your tia Suelema gave her to me!”

Wow , HER? I love that !!

[audley-and-cherry]

I've started referring to it as my biblically accurate ivy plant

[stephillustrations]

[populertarim]

Araştırmacılar, evinizin havasını temizleyebilecek yeni bir bitki geliştirdi

Araştırmacılar, evinizin havasını temizleyebilecek yeni bir bitki geliştirdi

Washington Üniversitesi’ndeki araştırmacılar, kloroform ve benzeni ortamdaki havadan uzaklaştırmak için salon bitkisi olan pothos ivy (salon sarmaşığı)’nin genetiğini değiştirdi.

Evlerimizdeki havayı olabildiğince temiz tutmayı seviyoruz ve bazen alerjenleri ve toz parçacıklarını uzak tutmak için hava filtreleri kullanıyoruz.

Ancak bazı tehlikeli bileşikler bu filtrelerde sıkışmayacak kadar…

View On WordPress

[rjzimmerman]

Scientists Combine House Plant With Rabbit Gene to Form 'Green Liver' Against Indoor Air Pollution

Scientists at the University of Washington may have found an unexpected way to tackle persistent indoor air pollution.

Excerpt from this EcoWatch article:

Scientists at the University of Washington (UW) may have found an unexpected way to tackle persistent indoor air pollution: a common houseplant modified with rabbit DNA.

Researchers wanted to find a way to remove the toxic compounds chloroform and benzene from the home, a UW press release explained. Chloroform enters the air through chlorinated water and benzene comes from gasoline and enters the home through showers, the boiling of hot water and fumes from cars or other vehicles stored in garages attached to the home. Both have been linked to cancer, but not much has been done to try and remove them. Until now.

"People haven't really been talking about these hazardous organic compounds in homes, and I think that's because we couldn't do anything about them," senior study author and UW civil and environmental engineering department research professor Stuart Strand said in the release. "Now we've engineered houseplants to remove these pollutants for us."

To achieve this, the scientists set out to create something Strand calls a "green liver." That's because they used a protein called 2E1 that exists in the human liver to help us process alcohol. It turns benzene into phenol and chloroform into carbon dioxide and chloride ions. This protein is also present in all mammals, including rabbits. Researchers made a synthetic version of the rabbit gene that produces this protein and introduced it to the common houseplant pothos ivy. According to lead author Long Zhang, pothos ivy was chosen because "it's a robust houseplant that grows well under all sort of conditions." It is also a tropical plant unlikely to flower in the temperate Pacific Northwest and spread the modified genes via pollination.

The results, published in Environmental Science and Technology Wednesday, showed that the gambit paid off. The researchers put both regular and modified plants in test tubes with the offending gases. The gas levels in the tubes with the unaltered plants didn't change at all. But the concentration of benzene in the tube with the rabbit-enhanced plant decreased by 75 percent in eight days. Chlorine levels fell even faster: by 82 percent after three days and to almost undetectable levels by day six.

[nobodysuspectsthebutterfly]

Since I mentioned it today, this is a photo of my pothos ivy of doom. I took a semi-dead ivy from my family house when I moved to this apartment about a year and a half ago, with the intent of getting it healthy again. And I succeeded. Dramatically.  I now have three pots of ivy, with four 5-foot-long vines, two 6-foot-long vines, and one 7-foot-long vine.

I... um... think it's time to trim it down to a more controllable length. The problem is, when you take cuttings, you just end up with more pots of ivy... and if those live, you just end up with more vines again... (Pothos is also called Devil's Ivy. I think I know why, now.)

Well. I'm giving some of my cuttings away, so I guess it'll be my brother's problem in a year or so. ;)

BTW, highly recommend pothos to anyone who's ever attempted houseplants but had a brown thumb. They like all kinds of light, only need watering once a week (you can even skip a week, they don't mind), help keep the air in your apartment fresh (they're recommended for air purification), and are just all-round good plants. I hear they're toxic to pets, though, so you have to be careful with that...