 So something I want to tell you about something. I think you should all know is how plants have sex It's really important. It's really interesting. And so it's something that I think Everybody should know now. I'm going to limit just to angiosperms, which is the fancy way of saying plants with flowers So we've got a plant with flower up here And some of you may know that all of the sexual organs of the flowering plants are located inside the flower So that green vase looking structure in the middle that's called the carpal tissue And that's the female bits on the outside of that you can see a sort of cotton bud looking stalk That's the male bits labeled here is the filament. It's actually called the stamen and at the end of the stamen You find the structure called the antler The antler contains even more specialized structures inside and those structures make pollen This plant that flower Cannot make sperm It makes pollen and pollen makes sperm pollen is Individual it is distinct and is completely separate from the flowering plant. It is a new plant It is not a plant that will grow leaves or flowers or anything else of its own But from a botanical point of view from a technical point of view pollen is a plant On the female side we can go up to the carpal tissue and inside the carpal tissue You have this structure called the ovary and inside the ovary you have the ovules the ovules are like the pollen They are a distinct an individual plant technically Now there's a lot of stuff going on inside the ovule you don't need to worry about most of those labels What you do need to know worry about is down the bottom You can see the egg and in the middle of the of the ovule you can see two red dots Called the polar nuclei the polar nuclei like dud eggs. They didn't quite make it But they are very very useful But this highlights a problem. We have an egg inside an ovule inside an ovary inside a carpal tissue inside a flower and We have a we have sperm inside pollen on a different flower somewhere else How on earth do plants have sex? Well, it's actually really really important that we understand this and the way that it works is that the pollen is more than just a grain of pollen Inside it there are three cells two of them a sperm and one of them is called a tube cell and When an insect or a bird or you walking through a field brush the pollen onto adjacent plants The pollen itself will sit on that carpal tissue and the tube still start to grow and grow and grow and burrow deeper into that Carpal tissue. We're not really sure how but we think it's driven by plant hormones And as it does that it eventually finds the ovule and as it finds the ovule it scoops up underneath the ovule and Breaks into it breaks into the ovule itself and delivers the two sperm directly inside the ovule The first one hits the egg and you get the embryo you get a baby plant out of that The second sperm is not there as a backup It has a very very important job its job is to find the two dud eggs in the middle and hybridized fused together and become endosperm Was it which is a fancy botanical way of saying plant food? That embryo then sits in the end of sperm and it sits there and it grows just a little bit And it needs the end of sperm there to germinate once it gets under the right conditions to become a plant again The outside of the ovule hardens and becomes a seed But now we're still stuck in this problem the seed We've got a baby plant but the seed is inside the carpal tissue inside the flower Perhaps at the top of a tree. How do we get a new plant? Well, the flower can die in the sea the seed can fall to the ground The the flower itself might actually explode its carpal tissue shooting seeds everywhere Or in fact that carpal tissue might fatten with sugars and become fruit and so the seed can be dispersed That seed will eventually germinate and become start becoming a new plant and that's how plants have sex Now why have I wasted three and a half minutes of my Ted talk talking about how plants have sex when really I should have been talking about you know, Ted Well, the importance for this for me is that understanding how plants have sex Under makes helps you understand a whole range of things genetics genetically modified foods huge Geo and political situations on ha for exactly for for example Exactly how we're gonna feed everybody on this planet if you understand how plants have sex That helps all of those helps you understand all of those things helps bring up your basic level of science literacy I think it's part of the collection of stuff you should know So I'm starting a project. It's gonna start with a website There are a couple of the things that I've got in development as well And it's called stuff people should know and what I'm doing is I'm contacting scientists and science communicators and asking them to Tell a story. I don't want to invent a new wikipedia What I want to do is connect the passion of a scientist for his subject or her subject To that page that wikipedia page of facts So you get the passion of that story to help convey that message Traditional media does not do a good job of telling science stories But I think if you can connect the passion to a subject then that will do a much better job of talking about these sorts of ideas In the time I have left. I just want to leave you with one thing when I've been reaching out for people to contribute content I've been asking them to think about a situation and that situation is this if a person were to come up to you and ask What is the most interesting or important thing that you know? What would you tell them? If you can work that out I want you to write it down I want you to send it to me because I want to help you tell that story Thank you