SKEPTICISM IS A VIRTUE: That’s the slogan under which Brill’s Content, the media-watchdog magazine, wages war on bias, cant, and sloppiness in the press. The magazine can be tough on journalists whom ...

Carl Linnaeus developed the Latin two-word system for organising the natural world that is still in use today, writes ENDA O'DOHERTY The botanist Carolus Linnaeus was born Carl Nilsson Linnaeus in ...

A gardener friend of ours used to object to calling a plant by its Latin name. She heard it as pretense and obfuscation. But after the sage incident, she conceded that there was some point to it.

Classification is a natural human propensity—we organize our clothes, our kitchen cupboards, and our toys. This applies to the natural world, too, where animals and plants are grouped based on ...

But in the 1730s, the self-proclaimed “prince of botany” made a contribution to taxonomy that, at the time, was just as profound as any of his other achievements. After realizing that floral sex parts ...

The relevance of taxonomy in our genomic era is greater than ever. Correct naming is crucial for developing new foods and medicines, and for understanding our changing environment. Amazingly, we do ...

You say tomato, I say Lycopersicon esculentum. You say potato, I say Solanum tuberosum. But Carl Linnaeus was the real plant buff. Often called the father of classification, Swedish naturalist ...