Fascination of Plants Day is a chance to celebrate plant scientists working to feed the world, improve health and develop sustainable energy supplies

Today is the first ever Fascination of Plants Day. The day's festivities are aimed at raising awareness of the importance of plant science to the future of our food and energy supplies, and our health.

Public events are taking place in 39 countries and UK partners include the John Innes Centre, Rothamsted Research, Kew Gardens and Cardiff University. The latter has organised two days of research demonstrations, tours and exhibitions.

In honour of this special day, here's my pick of some of the fascinating ways plant science is shaping our future.

On your plate

In a changing climate, securing our food supply will be a big challenge. Finding new staple foods will be a vital part of that. At the Crops For The Future Research Centre (CFFRC) in Malaysia, scientists seek out local plant species that have the potential to become important global crops.

Right now, they're particularity interested in the bambara groundnut. This is a legume grown by subsistence farmers in the drier parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The research centre has mapped the DNA of the plant and created a hybrid variety that should produce greater yields.

CEO Professor Sayed Azam Ali believes bambara is "just the sort of climate-resilient, nutritious and potentially productive crop that should be a crop of the future." His colleague, Dr Sean Mayes, adds that, "By learning what works – and what doesn't – in a few exemplar crops [such as bambara] we can improve the chances of successful intervention with many other crops."

In your car

Biodiesel is old news: sunflower, rapeseed and soybean oils have all been pressed into service as sources of automobile fuel. But how about coffee-fuelled cars? Zayed Al-Hamamre and colleagues at the University of Jordan think that spent coffee grounds – which typically contain about 10% oil – could be a novel source of biodiesel. They're working on the best way to extract and process the oils in spent coffee grounds, and their latest results were published in a recent issue of the journal Fuel.

Under optimal conditions, Al-Hamamre argues, we could get around 1,000 tonnes of biodiesel from coffee grounds each year – without using up more precious arable land.

Those coffee-powered cars might once day be constructed from Cannabis sativa, also known as hemp. James Meredith and his colleagues at Warwick University believe hemp fibre could replace carbon fibre in automobile bodywork.

High-performance cars are constructed from carbon fibre composites, which are lightweight yet able to absorb high-energy impacts. But carbon fibres are energy-intensive to make, and so scientists are looking for natural replacements. Earlier this year, Meredith's team reported that hemp composite material performed as well as expensive carbon fibre composites in impact tests.

Hemp cars aren't just a laboratory curiosity. Canadian company Motive Industries Inc has created a prototype car built from hemp composites. They call it the Kestrel and the designers are looking for manufacturers to get the vehicle into production.

Heating your home

As the cost of gas and electricity soars ever skywards, many of us are considering installing solar panels. While great in theory, solar panels have their flaws, one of which is a tendency to lose efficiency as the temperature rises. The leaves of plants, though, have adapted to deal with this problem of baking sun and, as reported by the Guardian last week, the science of artificial leaves is (cough) a growth area.

The Australian fan palm tree, Licuala ramsayi, has spurred a team of German scientists into action. The fan palm has a huge, circular leaf area, but the leaves are cut into tilting blades (hence the name), an adaptation that allows for optimal airflow. This cools the leaf and keeps photosynthesis running at maximum efficiency.

The German team, led by Matthias Zähr, were inspired by the thermal properties of L. ramsayi leaves to build what they call a bionic photovoltaic panel – essentially, an artificial fan palm. Their hope is that this robo-palm will act as a portable, economical and highly efficient way to generate electricity.

Your health

Plant-based medicine has been with us for millennia, and even today, many "conventional" pharmaceuticals are derived from natural products. The breast cancer drug Taxol, the antimalarial artesunate and the Alzheimer's drug Reminyl are all sourced from plant chemicals.

Chemists are working with molecular biologists to take the science of plant-based medicine even further. Last year, Dr Paul Long's team at King's College London discovered that coral-dwelling algae synthesise their own sunscreen and are able to transport that sunscreen to their coral host.

Dr Long's team hope to isolate the algal gene responsible for making this sunscreen compound, and then add that gene to bacterial cultures grown in the lab. In that way, unlimited amounts of the compound could be made for human use.

Finally, the humble lettuce may help us to manufacture vaccines against influenza. A team of Taiwanese scientists led by Cheng-Wei Lu announced in a recent issue of Scientia Horticulturae that they'd produced the neuraminidase (NA) protein – a segment of the H1N1 strain of influenza – in the leaves of Lactuca sativa, otherwise known as lettuce. Mice given an extract prepared from these lettuces produced an immune response when exposed to the neuraminidase antigen.

According to Lu and team, this novel vaccine production and administration technique could prove faster and simpler than conventional ways of mass-producing and administering vaccine.

Fascinating as the research described here is, much of it is still in the early stages of development. So let's finish with a wonderful piece of plant technology that's ready to go.

Mike Schropp's Bio Computer is a desktop wheatgrass farm that uses the waste heat from a bog-standard PC and is easily recreated by following Mike's step-by-step instructions.

Happy Plants Day!

The associate editor of Genomics says its publisher Elsevier effectively denies developing world access to research findings

Today I resigned from the editorial board of a well respected journal in my field – Genomics. No longer can I work for a system that provides solid profits for the publisher while effectively denying colleagues in developing countries access to research findings.

It has not been an easy decision. Some may feel that I'm grandstanding or making a futile gesture. And it may be a toxic career move. Scientists are expected to contribute to the community by reviewing papers and serving on editorial boards. But I cannot stand by any longer while access to scientific resources is restricted.

My work on biomedical research in developing countries has shown me that lack of access to current publications has a severe impact.

The vast majority of biomedical scientists in Africa attempt to perform globally competitive research without up-to-date access to the wealth of biomedical literature taken for granted at western institutions. In Africa, your university may have subscriptions to only a handful of scientific journals.

In reality, the modus operandi is "please can you send me a pdf". Alternatively some researchers spend part of their research grant to buy a subscription to the journal they need.

I know this well, as this was what I did for 10 years while at Africa's sixth-ranked university in my native South Africa – the University of Western Cape. Unlike colleagues in developed countries with access to well-stocked libraries and online subscriptions, I have requested pdf articles from Elsevier, and other for-profit publishers, many, many times.

The open access movement in science represents a wind of change – or at least the promise of one.

As associate editor at Genomics, I have managed, reviewed and edited many manuscripts. The majority now come from China. I do not know how accessible the Elsevier journal Genomics is in Chinese universities, but I do know that institutions worldwide pay significant and frequently insurmountable fees for bundled access to this, and the publisher's other journals. It seems unfair to edit and review articles from scientists who will likely never see their work in the actual journal in which it is published.

So I'd prefer to devote the limited time I have available to an open access journal that provides its work at no cost to researchers who urgently require its contents to improve their environment.

Winston Hide is associate professor of bioinformatics and computational biology in the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard School of Public Health, where he specialises in the bioinformatics of genomic approaches to public health

The history books are full of William Herschel's achievements, but say little about his sister. Stella tells a different story

One of the least expected successes in London's West End last week was Stella by the Take the Space theatre company. The three actors wore their own clothes, hadn't learned any lines, and there were only about 20 people in the invited audience who met in a circular room high above the Aldwych.

Moreover, the show was hardly a barrel of laughs, being about female astronomers – notably the tiny, forgotten, angry 18th century Caroline Herschel. But I have to admit, the audience choked on the bared emotions and the wonderment of people seeing deep space for the first time.

This was a performed, one-off reading of Stella, a new play by Irish actor-playwright Siobhán Nicholas, who appears to be inventing a new theatre form that we might call "revelatory early science". After their show about 18th century Royal Society chair and diarist Samuel Pepys, she and Chris Barnes – a former National Theatre actor and Barnum and Bailey circus clown – have been touring a play about "England's Leonardo": Robert Hooke.

By going back to early sources dug out of the Royal Society archives and elsewhere, Nicholas fleshed out the life of the natural philosopher and inventor, detailing the injustices he faced at the hands of the British scientific establishment, his rivalry with the grim Isaac Newton, and his friendship with Christopher Wren. The show was acclaimed at festivals and theatres around Britain and, fittingly, finally played at the Royal Society, where Hooke was curator of experiments for 20 years.

Stella is different. It explores the fevered world of women astronomers, especially the 18th century brother and sister relationship of Caroline and William Hershel. William discovered Uranus and its two moons and conducted the first systematic search of the heavens. Caroline – nominally his assistant – not only made his tea and telescopes, but discovered eight comets and 11 nebulae and won the Royal Astronomical Society's Gold Medal. Between them, they could be said to have laid the foundations of modern astronomy - a point made with Nicholas's parallel story of a modern woman astronomer.

But while the history books are full of William's achievements, William's thoughts and William's point of view, they are remarkably silent on Caroline's life work, referring to her "meek devotion" to him and, grudgingly, to her role as his assistant.

Nicholas went directly to her journals and found not just the mystery of eight missing pages, but a remarkable, rueful, humorous woman who came to Britain and, in just a few years, mastered a new language, learned mathematics, became a professional soprano singer, and ended up a far more rigorous cataloguer and arguably a greater discoverer of the cosmos than her brother.

Early European science is brilliantly funny, intellectually revolutionary and intensely passionate. But this is a part of the scientific and historical cosmos that is barely recognised and even less explored. Hopefully, someone will now commission this work and we will all get the chance to see it in full costume and with all the bells and whistles of a major theatre. I can think of nowhere better for it to start than at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.