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This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I’m Karen Hopkin. This will just take a minute.

For worse or for better, humans are changing the course of evolution. On February 26, we talked about how fishing practices may be driving the evolution of smaller harder-to-catch trout¹. And this week brings news that urbanization has influenced the way weeds make seeds. The results appear in the current online edition of the Proceedings² of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists in the south of France were studying the sort of weed you see cropping up around the base of trees planted along city sidewalks. The plant called Crepis sancta can make two different kinds of seed, one that's light like a dandelion seed with a feathery little parachute that gets carried by the wind and another that's heavy and just drops to the ground. The scientists compared weeds that were growing in these small urban patches to ones growing in an open field. They found that the urban weeds produce fewer of the fluffy³ seeds than their country cousins which makes evolutional sense because in a city setting drifting seeds are more likely to hit pavement than soil. In the long run though that strategy might not be healthy because plants benefit from spreading their seeds. So that’s bad news for the weeds but may be not so bad news for the sidewalks.

Thanks for the minute, for Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I’m Karen Hopkin.