A. recently a team of investigators arrested him dismembered a carnivorous plant to a sensitive instrument in Berlin, in a room that shuts off the magnetic sound of the world. It was the “flytrap” of Venusial ”– especially a special leaf – and when the team turned the heat, the hook called the energy to try to close. During that time, a magnetic field came out from the trap.
The field was built on an atomic magnetometer, a device that changes magnetic fields in electron spinning. The team’s research was recent published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“The new thing here is that we are showing magnetic fields from a multi-species plant system; in particular, the functional potential of a heterogeneous plant system, ” Anne Fabricant, atomic physicist at the Helmholtz Institute in Mainz, Germany, said in a video call. “And also that we use atomic magnetometers, because the two previous experiments were done with a different type of magnetic magnetometer. ”
Magnetic fields have been observed before in other fields plants; algae in one study, bean plants in another study. The previous magnetometers, called SQUIDs, are large and run at very cool temperatures, and the team needed something more suitable for their use. Different activities on or with a plant can affect the fields – from being injured to trying to get hold of accessible food, as was the case with the flytrap. The magnetic field does not correspond to the act itself but the ability to act that causes the next movement of the plant.
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Although a flytrap usually looks like a cross between Kermit the frog’s mouth and alien eyelids, the researchers simply apologized one of the flaps to explore – the action potential would still occur, using just one flap he still maintained the subject of the investigation. The team increased the heat in the room as a non-invasive way to capture the same action that occurs when the trap is trying to feed. When the ability to act passes through the plant, the electrons of the rubidium atoms in the sensors changed their rotation – to the team, evidence of the magnetic any field.
Fabricant, lead author of the new paper, he said there was little doubt that a field would grow; the question was how do you build it. When moving costs in physics, electric and magnetic fields are made. The trouble there are instruments they will find, because a flytrap field was found to be about a million times weaker than the Earth ‘s magnetic field. That is why the researchers had to conduct the study in such a magnetic way quiet room.
“If so [the field were] too small, we would not be able to measure with our sensors, ”said Fabricant, adding, if only several fields were created in another direction, “They would put off when we tried to measure the whole trap. There was a real risk that we would just measure zero. ”
Fortunately, that is not what happened. They built magnetic signals with 0.5 picotesla (very, very small) amplitude, providevidence ing that is the product of the functional capacity of the plant in a physical phenomenon similar to other previously tested plants. This is the most complex plant yet studied, the range of the flytrap suggests what else the kingdom of plants might have.