In Star Trek, characters carry a little handheld device called a tricorder that they can point at objects to analyze and identify them. When the show’s writers cooked up the idea in the 1960s, it was purely science fiction, but a new paper in New Phytologist takes the idea a step closer to reality. The researchers used a handheld device that looks a little like a ray gun to record how plant leaves on different Alaskan mountains reflect light. And, it turns out, different populations of plants of the same species—for instance, plants living on neighboring mountaintops—reflect light differently, in ways that echo their genetic variation from each other.
Click here for original story, ‘Ray guns’ let scientists use light instead of DNA to tell plant populations apart
Source: Phys.org