If we want to dismiss something as irrelevant, we'd say that it's "as boring as watching the grass grow." And yet grasses—including corn, wheat and rice—make up most of the plant-based calories humans eat, as well as most of the calories fed to livestock. Perhaps we should have been paying attention to such an important plant, because we now know, thanks to new research led by biologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and published in Current Biology, that grasses grow according to temperature—not light, like other plants.

If we want to dismiss something as irrelevant, we’d say that it’s “as boring as watching the grass grow.” And yet grasses—including corn, wheat and rice—make up most of the plant-based calories humans eat, as well as most of the calories fed to livestock. Perhaps we should have been paying attention to such an important plant, because we now know, thanks to new research led by biologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and published in Current Biology, that grasses grow according to temperature—not light, like other plants.

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