Relevancy of forest science according to Discover’s top 100 science stories of 2008?

The results are in, Discover magazine has released the top 100 science
stories of the year and guess how many tree / forest related science
stories there are? Well, actually only one story… and well… that
story is only about a fake tree, not a real one. And with all the
amazing unnoticed scientific announcements over the past year
regarding trees and forests, it says much about the current state of
the plight of the planet’s vanishing forests. –Editor, Forest Policy
Research

The world’s first synthetic tree consists of nothing more than a
super-skinny tube (the “trunk”) connecting two networks of
microcapillaries (one forms the “roots” and the other the “leaves”)
embedded in a porous polymer.

But this fake tree has managed a feat
that researchers have struggled for more than a century to duplicate
in the lab: transpiration, the process of pumping water from the soil
to leaves and then into the air. “This was an unsolved problem, and we
took it on as a biophysics challenge,” says chemical engineer Abraham
Stroock of Cornell University, who published the research in September
in Nature [subscription required].
Water is pulled upward in plants when evaporation from the leaves
creates a tension in the water column that reaches down to the roots.
The tension is maintained by bonds between water molecules that are
drawn up through the narrow channels of a plant’s plumbing. Stroock
created the same tension in his transpiring system by using a
high-tech fabric of cross-linked polymers called a hydrogel. With
pores little larger than the water molecules themselves, the hydrogel
stabilizes intermolecular bonds, allowing water to flow through the
synthetic trunk without breaking the tensile chain. Stroock showed
that the hydrogel roots of his tree can pump water from even a
partially dry medium, and the hydrogel leaves release water vapor the
same way real ones do. The synthetic tree proves that transpiration
can occur without any energy input from the plants themselves. “Plants
may use a hydrogel-like approach,” Stroock says.
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/068
http://discovermagazine.com/columns/top-100-stories-of-2008

— Posted to http://forestpolicyresearch.com via gmail to posterous and
also to forestpolicyresearch@yahoogroups.com

Posted via email from Deane’s posterous