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Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

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Re: Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

#121

Post by CyberDildonics »

karim79 wrote: post #60

I grow marijuana and chillies from time to time. I got good at it. I will say that plants are malleable in untold ways and so I find this article to be unsurprising. Plants will do what they need to do in the end. I've done stuff like co2 bombing, and increasing nutrients to the point to where I get a whole new ecosystem of insects and an entirely new situation. It is such fascinating stuff that it's actually the lif…

Anyone who sees that a giant trees leaves aren't dried out should find it unsurprising.

Re: Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

#122

Post by cwmoore »

hetspookjee wrote: post #89
cwmoore wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do wave in the wind, and evolution is likely capturing some of that motion for work.

Not sure if you’ve ever visited the groves in California where these huge trees grow but they seem to find the place where the wind doesn’t really seem to bother them, among other reasons (fog staying and little creeks terminating are others). And when the wind comes along it’s surprising how little they actually wave. Such tiny radii change I reckon cannot move much water like you’d need for a pumping notion. So I’d…

Watching trees not move much is a low standard for proof—maybe you misunderstood the intent of my comment.

If it isn’t upthread, the seminal research on the mechanism (Cohesion Tension Theory) is from 1894:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/91804

Re: Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

#123

Post by karim79 »

tryagainian wrote: post #92
karim79 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you sir. I actually got my CS from distance learning and somehow the combination of growing things and monitoring everything using CS just grabs me. I would work on any farm anywhere with appropriate agency.

Oooo, I get a bit excited about interdisciplinary techno-plant-and-livestock Another area that might be easier to break in to as far as work goes is labouring for an irrigation business, kinda agricultural plumbing. You’ve probably seen pivots[1] and side-roll irrigation systems. This would put you in more direct contact with the farm operators, expose you to a wide range of agricultural crops, and also tie neatly in…

[flagged]

Re: Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

#124

Post by tryagainian »

karim79 wrote: post #123
tryagainian wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oooo, I get a bit excited about interdisciplinary techno-plant-and-livestock Another area that might be easier to break in to as far as work goes is labouring for an irrigation business, kinda agricultural plumbing. You’ve probably seen pivots[1] and side-roll irrigation systems. This would put you in more direct contact with the farm operators, expose you to a wide range of agricultural crops, and also tie neatly in…

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

#125

Post by pkghost »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #64
theendisney wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I regretably didnt save it but there was a truly hilarious topic on usenet sci.physics long long ago. If we've gathered enough evidence against something or if the thing goes against accepted consensus you are forbidden from doing further research and new evidence is no longer allowed. The topic then invited others to list such topics. The list grew to hundreds of entries and people couldnt resist getting angry readi…

Be careful with that dismissal. The concept of an exclusion zone itself appears to be legitimate. More generally, there's lots of strange and surprising effects that crop up on the molecular level at interfaces in solution. However not all mechanistic explanations for such behavior are shall we say "widely accepted". And then there's homeopathy which is a largely unrelated and entirely nonsensical thing.

> And then there's homeopathy which is a largely unrelated and entirely nonsensical thing.

And be careful with that dismissal! Not that I'm helping my case, here, but Pollack doesn't think it's baloney (see related chapter in his book "The Fourth Phase of Water").

Re: Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

#126

Post by fc417fc802 »

pkghost wrote: post #125
fc417fc802 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful with that dismissal. The concept of an exclusion zone itself appears to be legitimate. More generally, there's lots of strange and surprising effects that crop up on the molecular level at interfaces in solution. However not all mechanistic explanations for such behavior are shall we say "widely accepted". And then there's homeopathy which is a largely unrelated and entirely nonsensical thing.

> And then there's homeopathy which is a largely unrelated and entirely nonsensical thing. And be careful with that dismissal! Not that I'm helping my case, here, but Pollack doesn't think it's baloney (see related chapter in his book "The Fourth Phase of Water").

While there is plenty of evidence of strange molecular phenomena occurring at interfaces in solution, there is to the best of my knowledge absolutely no evidence to support the claims made by homeopathy. Moreover the latter appear patently unreasonable at a glance (and only become increasingly so when examined with a critical eye) while the former fall well within the bounds of established chemistry and physics.

Re: Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

#128

Post by tomhow »

karim79 wrote: post #123
tryagainian wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oooo, I get a bit excited about interdisciplinary techno-plant-and-livestock Another area that might be easier to break in to as far as work goes is labouring for an irrigation business, kinda agricultural plumbing. You’ve probably seen pivots[1] and side-roll irrigation systems. This would put you in more direct contact with the farm operators, expose you to a wide range of agricultural crops, and also tie neatly in…

[flagged]

Please don't comment like this. We ask users not to post generated comments, but we also don't want snarky accusations like this. If a comment seems suspect, you can flag it or email us (hn@ycombinator.com).

Re: Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

#129

Post by hinkley »

taneq wrote: post #71
tenuousemphasis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if the tree were in a closed system with no solar input ... that would be the least of the tree's problems.

It’s like the pop sci fact that if you took all your blood vessels and laid them end to end… you would die.

This is still one of my all time favorites, although alveoli work the same way and are more fun to say.

The other day my friend said they wanted a new nervous system and my brain went down this route of pulling out the old one and putting in the new one.

Re: Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

#130

Post by hinkley »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #50
hinkley wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things Susan Simard proved was that deep rooted trees that had found subterranean water continue pulling that water at full speed at night when transpiration is low, and that water finds its way into the fungal networks in the soil and into nearby plants. Simard attributes intention to this, but osmosis is “fair”. It seeks to move water to where sugars are and sugars to where water is. So a plant giving up…

I don't understand how osmosis enters into this? Capillary action is sufficient to explain water traveling up the roots to a point where it was removed. Evaporation from leaves is sufficient to explain removal during the day. You'd need some other explanation for extraction by fungi or etc at night. As a largely unrelated aside, there will still be a chemical potential across a membrane that doesn't permit a solute t…

In retrospect what I wrote became a bit more of a non sequitur than I meant.

Trees aren't even accessing water at ground level most times but pulling it up from 5-30 feet down. Fungal distribution is also a capillary action network (with asterisks) and ends up making some of that pumping more horizontal, but at the expense that if a tree's root sap is high in sugar due to dehydration, then the fungal network both introduces water to those roots but also exports sugar at the same time. Simard tries to anthropomorphize this process. It's my only real complaint with her work.

The asterisks are that fungal networks can react to information faster than the documented transport mechanisms work so we don't really know how the heck they do their thing yet. So it's possible that they're also maintaining nutrient gradients to feed themselves beyond the straight arbitrage that osmosis represents.

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