A Computer With a Great Eye Is About to Transform Botany

My dad is a wildlife biologist, and during road trips we took when I was growing up he spent a lot of time talking about the grasses and trees along the highway. It was a game he played, trying to correctly identify the passing greenery from the driver's seat of a moving car. As a carsick-prone kid wedged into the back seat of a Ford F150, I found this supremely lame. As an adult--specifically, one who just spoke with a paleobotanist--I now know something about my father's roadtripping habit: Identifying leaves isn't easy. "I've looked at tens of thousands of living and fossil leaves," says that paleobotanist, Peter Wilf of Penn State's College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.