Medicinal uses of Rauwolfia

Rauvolfia serpentina, or 'snakeroot' or 'sarpagandha' is a species of flowering plant in the family Apocynaceae. It is a evergreen trees and shrubs. The genus is named to honor Leonhard Rauwolf. The approximately 85 species in the genus can mainly be found in tropical regions. Rauvolfia caffra is the South African quinine tree. Rauwolfia serpentina is a small erect glabrous shrub about 1 to 3 feet in height, bearing white or pinkish flowers. It grows fairly wild in the United Provinces, also in Bihar and Eastern and Western Ghats. It is called ‘Sarpa-gandha’ in Sanskrit and ‘Chota Chand’ in Hindi. The roots, the leaves and the juice have been considered of medicinal importance from the very early times and have attracted the attention of the practitioners of the indigenous system of medicine. It has been used as an anthelmintic, as an antidote against snake bite and bites of other poisonous insects, in diarrhoea, dysentery, cholera and also as an ecbolic. In recent years interest has been stimulated in this drug, because of its well marked hypnotic and sedative properties.

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capsicum frutescens medicinal uses

Shrubby perennial plants; branches angular. Leaves broadly ovate, acuminate, usually wrinkled, more or less pubescent. Pedicels slender, usually 2 or more together. Calyx embracing the base of the fruit, usually cup shape. Corolla white or greenish white. Fruit red, ovoid, obtuse or oblong, acuminate.

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Algae as a fuel /biofuel

Algae are a very large and diverse group of simple, typically autotrophic organisms, ranging from unicellular to multicellular forms, such as the giant kelp (large brown alga), that may grow up to 50 meters in length. Most are photosynthetic and "simple" because they lack many of the distinct cell organelles and cell types found in land plants. The largest and most complex marine forms are called seaweeds. The lipid, or oily part of the algae biomass can then be extracted and converted into biodiesel through a process similar to that used for any other vegetable oil, or converted in a refinery into "drop-in" replacements for petroleum-based fuels. The algae's carbohydrate content can be fermented into bioethanol and biobutanol.

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Plumeria rubra medicinal uses

Small tree with milky latex. Leaves large, leathery, obovate, oblong, acute, glabrous above, ciliate at the base. Flowers showy, red or reddish white, fragrant in terminal corymbose cymes; bracts minute, deciduous. Calyx very short, green. Corolla lobes broad.

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Chemical structure of Chlorophyll

Chlorophyll is a chlorin pigment, which is structurally similar to and produced through the same metabolic pathway as other porphyrin pigments such as heme. At the center of the chlorin ring is a magnesium ion. At the time of its discovery in the early 1900s, this was the first time that this element had been detected in living tissue. For the structures depicted in this article, some of the ligands attached to the Mg²⁺ center are omitted for clarity. The chlorin ring can have several different side chains, usually including a long phytol chain. There are a few different forms that occur naturally, but the most widely distributed form in terrestrial plants is chlorophyll a. After initial work done by German chemist Richard Willstätter spanning from 1905 to 1915, the general structure of chlorophyll a was elucidated by Hans Fischer in 1940. By 1960, when most of the stereochemistry of chlorophyll a was known, Robert Burns Woodward published a total synthesis of the molecule. In 1967, the last remaining stereochemical elucidation was completed by Ian Fleming, and in 1990 Woodward and co-authors published an updated synthesis. Chlorophyll f was announced to be present in cyanobacteria and other oxygenic microorganisms that form stromatolites in 2010; a molecular formula of C₅₅H₇₀O₆N₄Mg and a structure of (2-formyl)-chlorophyll a were deduced based on NMR, optical and mass spectra. The different structures of chlorophyll are summarized below:

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X-Ray Laser Observes Photosynthesis in Action

Opening a new window on the way plants generate the oxygen we breathe, researchers used an X-ray laser at the Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator

Laboratory to simultaneously look at the structure and chemical behavior of a natural catalyst involved in photosynthesis for the first time. The work, made possible by the ultrafast, ultrabright X-ray pulses at SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), is a breakthrough in studying atomic-scale transformations in photosynthesis and other biological and industrial processes that depend on catalysts, which efficiently speed up reactions. The research is detailed in a Feb. 14 paper in Science.

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Top 19 funny trees

Hello friends, today we are sharing a beautiful funny article which is completely different from all this articles. In this article we saw you some artificial and natural tree which

looking funny. I hope you like this. So take a look

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Artemisia absinthium

A perennial, silky pubescent, herbaceous plant, very aromatic. Stem erect angular, ribbed. Leaves ovate or obovate, unequally 2-3-piunnatifid cut into spreading linear or lanceolate,

obtuse segment, hairy on both surfaces; radical and lower cauline narrowed into winged petioles. Head numerous, but hardly crowded, pedicelled, hemispheric in drooping, second racemes terminating the branches. Flowers yellow. Ray-corolla dilated below. Outer involucral bracts oblong, hairy, narrowly scarious, linear orbicular, broadly scarious. Receptacular hairs long, straight. Anthers acuminate, not aristate. Achenes elliptic oblong, or somewhat obovoid.

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The reef home: How algal and coral cover affect the microscopic life

A new study by biologists at San Diego State University and Scripps Institution of Oceanography shows that inhabited coral islands that engage in commercial fishing 

dramatically alter their nearby reef ecosystems, disturbing the microbes, corals, algae and fish that call the reef home.

The study's lead author, Linda Wegley Kelly, is a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of SDSU virologist Forest Rohwer. She's been involved in some capacity with Rohwer's lab for the past 13 years, beginning as a lab technician.

For the study, she looked at seawater samples collected from the surfaces of reefs surrounding all 11 of the Line Islands, a chain of atolls in the central Pacific Ocean. Over the past five years, Kelly and her colleagues have made sporadic trips to the islands, collecting the samples with a specially adapted bilge pump that sucks up approximately 100 liters of water in a given area.

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Tallest Fossil tree found in northern Thailand

Fossil trees that approached the heights of today’s tallest redwoods have been found in northern Thailand. The longest petrified log measures 72.2 meters (237 feet), which suggest the original tree, towered to more than 100 meters (330 feet) in a wet tropical forest some 800,000 years ago.
The trees appear to have been closely related to a species alive today called Koompassia elegans, which belongs to the same family as beans, peas and black locust trees, explained lead author of the study, Marc Philippe of France’s University of Lyon. That is to say, the ancient trees are not closely related to today’s tallest trees, which are the Eucalyptus (gum trees) of Australia and Sequoia (redwoods) of California. Both of those living trees can reach about 130 meters (425 feet) in height.
Interestingly, there are no trees living today in Thailand that approach the size of the ancients.
 “Highest trees nowadays in Thailand are almost 60 meters (200 feet). To my knowledge the highest tree yet recorded in Thailand is a Krabak tree, belonging to the Dipterocarpaceae (‘tropical oaks’), 58 meters (190 feet) tall.”

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