Today's 60 Second Science Podcast is brought to you by The Palms Casino & Hotel in sunny Las Vegas:
Palm's Magnificent Death May Save Its Life
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Madagascar, the land of weird lemurs, can now add strange palm trees to their list of ecological wonders. An as-yet-unnamed palm tree discovered by scientists from London's Kew Gardens flowers only once every 100 years and promptly dies. This habit probably doesn't help its cause much, since only about 100 are left.
Media sites are making a big fuss about how you can see the palm from space via Google Earth, but I can see the shoe I left on my old apartment doorstep with Google Earth, so I don't get the big deal. But the massive palm grows to 66 feet tall, and possesses 16-foot wide leaves, some of the biggest in the plant world, so I guess it's pretty cool.
