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There are a lot of surprisingly long-lived species out there, from the Greenland shark that can live to around 400 years old, to a clam that could have survived much longer than its 507 years if it wasn't accidentally killed. Now, scientists have discovered the world's oldest known marine plant, and it’s a whopping 1,400 years old. Found in the Baltic Sea, the plant in question is a seagrass clone of the species Zostera marina, also known as eelgrass. The team used a ground-breaking genetic clock to discover the age of the marine plant.  The seagrass clones produce ramets, individual members of a clone that can separate and become capable of independence. "Vegetative reproduction as an alternative mode of reproduction is widespread in the animal, fungal, and plant kingdoms,” explained research leader Dr Thorsten Reusch, Professor of Marine Ecology at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, in a statement.Genetic variation within these ramets can be used to age them. During the growth of the main body of the organism, mutations can occur and these can end up becoming fixed and accumulating in the descendant ramets. The clock works by comparing the plant that is to be aged and the descendant ramets, and aging it based on their differences.The team had access to a 17-year-old seagrass clone that had been kept in a lab and was used to calibrate the genetic clock for use on the wild sample. The differences between the two revealed that the clone was 1,402 years old, making it the oldest known marine plant. Testing out the new method also identified multiple other clones that were several hundred years old.Eelgrass can cover a vast area; Z. marina is a widespread species found in the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean. The term eelgrass, however, encompasses many other species too, which may also reach impressive ages.“We expect that other seagrass species and their clones of the genus Posidonia, which extend over more than ten kilometers, will show even higher ages and thus be by far the oldest organisms on Earth,” concluded Reusch. "These will be the next objects of study," added fellow study author Dr Benjamin Werner.The researchers suggest that the clock might also be useful for other species such as raspberries and reeds, but also in the conservation of corals.The paper is published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

There’s something rotten in the kingdom of Great Britain. One of the smelliest plants on Earth is about to bloom in London. Not in the street, but in the tropical rainforest glasshouse of Kew Gardens, which hosts the "largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world". Among the gems of this collection is an absolute stinker (said with love), so we popped down to see it for ourselves, and to ask the experts about this one-of-a-kind plant.Titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum), whose Latin name translates to misshapen phallus due to how the flower looks before it blooms, has the largest unbranched inflorescence in the world, but its notoriety doesn’t come from its size alone – it comes from the smell it produces when it opens. There's a reason it's called the "corpse flower". It smells "like there is a dead rotten animal somewhere," Solène Dequiret, Princess of Wales Conservatory Supervisor at Kew Gardens, told IFLScience. But there’s a fantastic evolutionary reason for it. Titan arum comes from Sumatra, an island in Indonesia, and is not a particularly common flower. In fact, the nearest titan arum in the wild might be kilometers away.“ [Titan arum] has to be quite big and pungent in order to attract a pollinator, which would be a fly that has visited a previous flower kilometers and kilometers away, in order to have the cross pollination,” Dequiret told IFLScience. “It takes a lot of energy to share that smell across the island. And it needs a lot of energy to be that big.”   The large spike-like spadix of the plant acts "like a chimney," Dequiret tells us, "so it heats up and that helps to spread the smell even further."The life of this flower is quite ephemeral. It comes from a tuber from which a bud develops. When the bud is out of the ground, it can go in one of two directions. "They always keep us guessing," says Dequiret. It can become an enormous leaf, so big and peculiar that it is easily mistaken for a tree, an approach developed to dissuade herbivores from snacking on it – most of the time, the tuber results in a leaf. But once every seven years or so, it grows into a flower. And it grows fast. When we have to do the pollination ourselves, we do have to go and stick our head right in there when it's smelly with the pollen.Solène DequiretTitan arum grows about 10 centimeters (4 inches) per day, getting to a height of around 2 meters (6.6 feet), and that’s in a matter of weeks in some cases. Then it will open, releasing its noxious gas for all the carrion-eating insects of Sumatra to smell. Or in a botanical garden, for the workers to rush in and collect the pollen. "When we have to do the pollination ourselves, we do have to go and stick our head right in there when it's smelly with the pollen we've collected from our previous flowers," says Dequiret.Rushing is key – the flower stays fully open for a day, begins closing the next, and within a few days it collapses."It's all that effort and that momentum for just an opening, and then a collapse," Dequiret told IFLScience. While the flower is endangered in the wild, botanical gardens work hard to protect this species and make it thrive. Kew Gardens has several titan arum plants in its collection - "We need to bring them [into the glasshouse] when they're a bud because if not they can't go through our doors!" – and they tend to get at least one flowering every year. But this year was a particularly good one – just last week one of their specimens flowered, with a second due to bloom any day now.If you want to smell it for yourself you better get to Kew fast (or check if your closest botanical garden has one if you are not in London). 

This week on Break It Down, elephants have names, the ISS just scared the bejesus out of everybody, how to Benjamin Button yourself in space, grolar bears remain extremely rare, “alien signal” from Mars finally gets decoded, and why London’s Kew Gardens are about to reek of corpses. Available on all your favorite podcast apps: Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, Podbean, Amazon Music, and more.Sit back, relax, and let’s Break It Down…           LinksElephant namesISS audio whoopsieBenjamin Button’ingGrolar bearsMars “alien signal”Corpse flowerCosmic ray factoryCURIOUS magazineSign up for CURIOUSA Little Gay Natural HistoryQueer animals talk

Given that humans have a fair few body parts, it’s understandable that anatomists had to get a bit creative when it came to naming them. That being said, some of those names are downright odd – so where did they come from?CoccyxBetter known as the tailbone, the coccyx is the final segment of the spine, and a reminder of how evolution doesn’t always know how to tidy up after itself. It’s made up of between three and five bones fused together into a curved triangle shape that points at the end.The ancient Greeks thought this looked a bit like a cuckoo’s beak, though their word for it was “kokkux” and over time, that transformed into the Latin word coccyx.HippocampusThe ancient Greeks seem to have had a thing for naming body parts after what they looked like, and in the case of the hippocampus, that appears to be a seahorse. Their term for it was “hippokampos”, which is an amalgamation of “hippos”, meaning horse, and “kampos”, meaning “sea monster”.The anatomical snuffboxOk, the anatomical snuffbox isn’t actually called that if we’re being technical about it – anatomists would call it the foveola radialis – but why on Earth would that dent you see below your thumb when you flex your hand be called that?It’s one of those terms where it’s what it says on the tin – or in this case, a snuffbox. Back in the day when snorting snuff was a thing, this little depression made a handy (wahey) place to pop your ground tobacco.TragusThe tragus is that little flap of cartilage on the ear that’s connected to the side of the face, but the origins of the word have far more to do with the tuft of hair that can appear behind it than what it’s actually made of.Tragus is the Latin transformation of the Greek word “tragos”, meaning goat. According to 18th century Flemish surgeon Jan Palfijn, it came to be associated with the little nub on the ear because “it is the site of hairs similar to those of a billy goat”.PhiltrumFor the trivia fans out there, you probably already know what a philtrum is. If you’re not a walking encyclopedia, however, it’s that small groove between your nose and your mouth – and in times gone past, people thought it was sexy as fuck. The earliest known example of the use of the word philtrum is in the early 1600s and in this form, it’s a Latin word. However, its origins lie in the Greek word “philtron”, meaning “love potion”. That’s because the ancient Greeks considered the philtrum to be one of the most erogenous spots on the body. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.

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