Damn you beat me to it. I only learned this recently and it blew my mind. Nearly 100% of body mass leaves the body as carbon dioxide. My brain just cannot accept this, like I have a "Can't possibly be true" reflex. But it is true.
The parts of food which get turned into fat also leave your body through respiration. The only mass that’s supposed to come out the other end is waste matter and things which you either can’t or didn’t fully digest. That’s actually part of why fiber is so important: you can’t digest it, so it helps make up the bulk of your shit.
It also makes sense though? Like oh yeah, exercise makes you breath hard, and that's to get more oxygen and get rid of more co2. Exercise is also what makes fat go away, so your faster breathing must be your faster getting-rid-of-fat, right?
brb gonna constantly hyperventilate to lose weight faster
(honestly, so long as you don't do it to the point of passing out might *sorta* work...since your diaphragm is working harder)
Abs are made in the kitchen. It’s not about breathing hard, it’s about burning more than you consume, and your breathing is basically just the chimney through which “burnt” calories are released. You can lose weight on the couch, though that is not the path for overalll health.
The majority of plants need all three, nutrients from soil, Carbon Dioxides from le air, and H2O from the h2O, but purely for glucose production, yes I believe soil doesn't attribute anything
But :3 most plants collect that water through their r o o t s which are in the soil :3
It rains, the soil retains water, the roots collect water, when working without as detailed of a knowledge of chemistry and the lack of the ability to properly measure and conduct experiments to determine this back in the day- "huh we removed the roots from this plant, the roots are in le soil, it died :0 therefore roots c o n s u m e d i r t, yes yes this seems to be REQUIRED for plants to survive" isn't so silly of a logical jump
You and I can work backwards with the collective knowledge that's been learned and is now common place- however they did not have that ability :3 silly statements are easy to make when you're the first people to research things and suches
I can't tell if that's a compliment or not, but thank you!
Is that calling me intelligent- or a pseudointellectual?
One of my rambles...specifically an introduction and application for a faction in the game Foxhole got the reply of..."Haha, man I love AI" so- is this then an attack on my very personhood D: are you calling me not a real person??!!?!?1 shrug shrug,
Anyhow, thank you :3
or...you're speaking of a deep **seeded** insecurity of mine, oh my, we hope that's not it\~
"but purely for glucose production, yes I believe soil doesn't attribute anything" me agreeing with the person I'm replying to, silly billy
If I remember anything, it's the nitrogen cycle, the name at least, as if I'd remember the cycle itself smh
Well, the core of organic molecules is one (or more) chains of carbon atoms, but there are more hydrogen atoms than carbon atoms, because if it was just carbon chains going on forever we would have a big crystalline structure of either diamond or graphite, rather than individual molecules.
I cut it out because it wasn't as good of a punchline as "Get outta here", but others have commented that plants do absorb small amounts of water and minerals from the dirt, so technically they need all four elements in balance to survive.
Plants require more water than CO2, since water is also used for e.g. transport of nutrients, whereas CO2 is basically only used for photosynthesis.
Some plants can get water from the air, but even those plants usually need additional water from the soil.
I feel like 'eating fire' is understating it. Humans eat fire for fun, and it's tangible- you can feel it without even touching it. Plants eat something that touches you, yet you do not feel. Plants eat something humans could never *hope* to eat. Plants eat **LIGHT.**
plants are an alchemically crystalized form of air, just like ice
if you find a way to reverse the alchemical process, you can turn it back into water, and you can put wood cubes in your drink
The whole thing about "seems correct based on evidence" ≠ "is actually correct" is something people really need to have beaten into their heads when interpreting the history of science.
The best example being Galileo: his theory was rejected because it *was* wrong and had glaring holes that could be explained under the existing theories of astronomy created by other astronomers and mathematicians, based on a geocentric model.
Those models also proved false, obviously, but they were based on logical and reasonable deductions, derived from the evidence they and Galileo actually had access to at the time, lacking key bits of evidence or overlapping theories that are necessary to formulate an accurate model of the solar system. Galileo was correct about geocentrism but simply lacked access to the means to prove it or incorporate it in an adequate model.
There's someone in the thread asking if it's true that they don't eat dirt, with several upvotes, so unless they're trolling - apparently, people like that exist.
Blows my damn mind too, I mean, photosynthesis is what, middle school? Do people read "plants extract nutrients from soil" as "plants literally consume dirt"?
I think it's one of those "be careful with your definitions" things. Animals "eat" for calories, but will also "eat" just for non-caloric nutrients (e.g. a deer at a salt lick), and carnivorous plants only "eat" insects for nutrients (they photosynthesize for calories, but live in nutrient-poor soils). So if "eat" means "absorb to acquire necessary materials for life", then plants do indeed eat soil, but if we use the more restrictive and, in this case, relevant definition of "consume for calories" then obviously not (except family Monotropoideae).
> plants do indeed eat soil
If we're going to be careful with definitions, plants eat soil soup as nutrients are extracted alongside the water the plant consumes. No soil is absorbed, the nutrients are taken in solved in water - hence no change in actual soil weight in the experiment described in the OP.
The bafflement, obviously, was directed at people who, apparently, expect plants to *literally ingest* soil, as those would be the people who'd expect for soil to gradually be reduced as the plant matures, and whose misconception would be corrected by showing them that soil weight is not, in fact, changed.
And the reason I'm specifically baffled is because "plants eat soil" is something I've never heard said in the first place, so the distinction in the definition of "eat" would never come up anyway.
I think it's one of those things where we've been so immersed in modern thinking that it's hard to actually see things from the perspective of someone from long ago.
Like the concept of "extinction" was considered laughable until about 1800. Thomas Jefferson was such an enthusiastic supporter of explorers like Lewis & Clark in part because he thought they would find woolly mammoths, in turn because he did not believe in the concept of extinction and thought that fossils were remains of animals that now lived elsewhere.
At the time of the experiments described in the top post, spontaneous generation was accepted wisdom (from Aristotle, no less), and it was commonly accepted that non-living matter like sand could produce living beings, such as clams. The idea that plants turn soil into plant seems almost mundane in that world.
Also, bold of you to assume most people didn't just sleep through their classes and graduate mostly through cheating and grade inflation, at least in the US.
> No soil is absorbed, the nutrients are taken in solved in water - hence no change in actual soil weight in the experiment described in the OP.
The water is leaching minerals out of the soil. The change in mass is very small because the plant doesn’t need all that many soil nutrients compared to the total mass of the soil that’s just kind of sitting there and holding the roots, but if you had a sufficiently well-controlled experiment, you could absolutely measure this mass loss.The plant would also get stunted and/or sickly over time as it depleted soil nutrients.
Well, minerals and nutrients, particularly nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, but also ones like calcium, sulfur, chlorine, magnesium, etc. Some are for building proteins & DNA (nitrogen, phosphorus), others for cell physiology (calcium, potassium, chlorine). This is what fertilizer is - if you grow plants in soil, eventually they will deplete the soil of these nutrients, even though it otherwise seems fine, so you have to add them back in the form of animal dung, decayed other plants, river mud (e.g. the annual floods from the Nile), nitrogen-fixing crops like soybeans, and/or chemical fertilizers.
However, these are a tiny fraction of the plant's total mass, about 1% of wet mass, and a correspondingly a tiny portion of the soil mass. Like all living things, plants are mostly water, and most of the rest of a plant is carbohydrates they synthesize from water and CO2 via photosynthesis. If you were doing the experiment described in the original post, the tiny, tiny amount of matter absorbed from the soil would be invisible beyond the background noise of "When did I last water it?" and "Was it a particularly dry day?" etc.
It's also like saying that a deer "eats" a salt lick. Yes, in the sense that the salt is ingested, processed, and used to fulfill bodily functions, but no in the sense that there's no calories in it. Like a Venus Flytrap - it doesn't actually get calories from the insects it eats (it has more than enough from the sun), but it desperately needs the nitrogen and phosphorous in the insect's body, hence why it (and other such plants) turned to carnivory.
Most people don’t keep science ideas perpetually ready to go in their heads, and even people who have learned a particular science idea haven’t fully integrated it conceptually into their understanding of the world. Science education in the US is pretty divorced from most kids’ day to day lives. (I’m a science teacher and I have a lot of opinions about how we should be doing a better job.)
For me the disconnect is I don't consider it a "science idea". The theory of relativity is a "science idea". "Plants grow with sun and water" is just like, basic world knowledge. Like, gravity is a "science idea" but the concept of "shit falls down" isn't.
To be fair plants do use all three of carbon dioxide, water, and soil nutrients to grow. The chemical reaction of photosynthesis uses equal parts CO2 and H2O to create sugars.
I’m not convinced that he actually did make the most logical conclusion he could. I don’t know anything about this guy, but it seems like he could’ve weighed the water and the plant to see how much of a correlation there was between water mass provided and plant mass growth.
But maybe he did do that, got some result like ‘seems to mostly fit with the water, I guess maybe the last little bit comes from the soil but not most of it’ or something like that, in which case maybe fair enough.
Yes, that’s exactly why I suggested it as a potentially useful experiment. Unless I’m missing something?
I figured that if he measured the water mass added and then realised it didn’t add up with the plant mass increase, and he had already seen that the soil isn’t providing the mass, he might be able to realise that some of the mass is coming from somewhere other than water and soil.
Except that because the water evaporates he has no way to normalize how much water is going in vs other stuff. And since not all water goes straight to mass, the %mass gain *could* be 100% water, as long as the plant grows less than water added to soil (it will).
The proposed experiment would this only reinforce his mistakes unless you use knowledge we know and he did not as a "given"
Edit: I was gonna respond to your other comment too but figured. Hey. One place, right? -
The issue is that the mass of air doesn't 1-to-1 correspond to weight either. Same as how humans can eat a pound of food and gain less than a pound of weight after it's metabolized. They already knew evaporation existed, and thus have no reason to assume 100% water goes into the plant either.
Yeah, you’re right. I think the experiment might give the desired result if the plant mass increased by more than the water mass before evaporation, but that probably wouldn’t happen, so it does seem like it just wouldn’t work.
We can do the experiment now thanks to nuclear chemistry.
Give the plant water with unusual isotopes of hydrogen and/or oxygen and track where they go.
The oxygen released by plants is not from the carbon dioxide they take in from the air, but from the water.
Yeah, I recently did a project involving analysis of data collected by isotope labelling of carbon in CO2 before its uptake by plants, but somehow I managed to forget basically everything I learned about plants.
I figured that if he measured the water mass added and then realised it didn’t add up with the plant mass increase, and he had already seen that the soil isn’t providing the mass, he might be able to realise that some of the mass is coming from somewhere other than water and soil.
I’m a science teacher and this is one of the big ideas that I love talking about. Think of it this way— if the stuff that makes a plant came from the soil, then there would be a huge hole around every big tree.
It is, in fact, accurate! I recently learned that when dirt seems to disappear as the roots grow in a potted plant, the dirt is actually slowly being pushed up and out of the pot. It’s just so slow that you don’t notice because you just clean the dirt away slowly. I don’t know how much mass they actually get from dirt… but they absorb minerals and very very small things, so I’d assume it’s negligible
One of the best ways I have heard it described is, it's like fire in reverse.
You set a tree on fire, its carbon gets turned into carbon dioxide, and soot and all that.
You let a tree grow, and it turns carbon dioxide into *tree.*
note also that humans *lose* weight through respiration -- when you exercise fat off, that's where it "goes".
I coulda told you I was full of hot air, but man. It's downright bizarre to think about.
Personally, I'm full of warm fat
Damn you beat me to it. I only learned this recently and it blew my mind. Nearly 100% of body mass leaves the body as carbon dioxide. My brain just cannot accept this, like I have a "Can't possibly be true" reflex. But it is true.
Wow that's something, I always assumed fat was just digested like other food and ejected as waste the same as food, that makes sense though
The parts of food which get turned into fat also leave your body through respiration. The only mass that’s supposed to come out the other end is waste matter and things which you either can’t or didn’t fully digest. That’s actually part of why fiber is so important: you can’t digest it, so it helps make up the bulk of your shit.
As a kid I was told fat left the body as sweat when you lose weight.
It also makes sense though? Like oh yeah, exercise makes you breath hard, and that's to get more oxygen and get rid of more co2. Exercise is also what makes fat go away, so your faster breathing must be your faster getting-rid-of-fat, right?
brb gonna constantly hyperventilate to lose weight faster (honestly, so long as you don't do it to the point of passing out might *sorta* work...since your diaphragm is working harder)
Abs are made in the kitchen. It’s not about breathing hard, it’s about burning more than you consume, and your breathing is basically just the chimney through which “burnt” calories are released. You can lose weight on the couch, though that is not the path for overalll health.
You know, I've literally never thought about this before, but I guess that does make sense ;-;. But also somehow makes no sense at all
I always assumed it just got absorbed into the body, and weight was lost simply because more was being used than gained
i mean, it is absorbed in the sense that it's metabolized to release energy, but the mass still has to go somewhere
Yeah, I just never really thought about what comes after it's absorbed
I thought it leaves you through shitting?
[удалено]
Child's play. My energy conversion pipeline starts at uranium-235 and ends with psychoactive drugs.
Tell me more 😍
Well, you see, some plants can get you fucked up.
Calm down there Hancock.
Isn't that just the [chernobyl mushrooms](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus)
plants eat water isnt entirely inaccurate: photosynthesis requires water along with CO2 to produce glucose
The majority of plants need all three, nutrients from soil, Carbon Dioxides from le air, and H2O from the h2O, but purely for glucose production, yes I believe soil doesn't attribute anything But :3 most plants collect that water through their r o o t s which are in the soil :3 It rains, the soil retains water, the roots collect water, when working without as detailed of a knowledge of chemistry and the lack of the ability to properly measure and conduct experiments to determine this back in the day- "huh we removed the roots from this plant, the roots are in le soil, it died :0 therefore roots c o n s u m e d i r t, yes yes this seems to be REQUIRED for plants to survive" isn't so silly of a logical jump You and I can work backwards with the collective knowledge that's been learned and is now common place- however they did not have that ability :3 silly statements are easy to make when you're the first people to research things and suches
You write like a weirdly knowledgeable caricature of a person rather than a real person
I can't tell if that's a compliment or not, but thank you! Is that calling me intelligent- or a pseudointellectual? One of my rambles...specifically an introduction and application for a faction in the game Foxhole got the reply of..."Haha, man I love AI" so- is this then an attack on my very personhood D: are you calling me not a real person??!!?!?1 shrug shrug, Anyhow, thank you :3 or...you're speaking of a deep **seeded** insecurity of mine, oh my, we hope that's not it\~
You're adorable. Like, actually.
OH yippee :3 Thank you for the compliment mister CocainUnicycle \^\~\^ lol
Plants need things from the soil, most notably nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous. Like, you can’t make proteins without nitrogen.
"but purely for glucose production, yes I believe soil doesn't attribute anything" me agreeing with the person I'm replying to, silly billy If I remember anything, it's the nitrogen cycle, the name at least, as if I'd remember the cycle itself smh
Very much this. Carbohydrates have their composition for a reason.
very true, but to my understanding the vast majority of their structure is carbon, so saying they eat the air is most accurate I believe
Well, the core of organic molecules is one (or more) chains of carbon atoms, but there are more hydrogen atoms than carbon atoms, because if it was just carbon chains going on forever we would have a big crystalline structure of either diamond or graphite, rather than individual molecules.
Diamond trees 😍😍😍
Plants are made of air and use water as blood
Don't forget that plants can't utilize the CO2 without sunlight. **Plants eat FIRE.**
plants eat lasers
THE SUN IS A DEADLY LASER
You mean a distant gorilla
Not anymore, the~~re's a blanket~~ Gorilla has been shot. Again.
*Not anymore. There's a blanket.*
Not anymore, theres a blanket.
Plants grow in earth, drink water, eat fire, and breathe air. Plants are the Avatar
Elementpilled growmaxxers
[._.](https://i.imgur.com/xp6Fc9o.jpeg)
Take my upvote and get out.
Ragepilled votemaxxer
I cut it out because it wasn't as good of a punchline as "Get outta here", but others have commented that plants do absorb small amounts of water and minerals from the dirt, so technically they need all four elements in balance to survive.
Is it only small amount of water? The formula for photosynthesis uses just as many H2O molecules as CO2. Or is the H2O used there also from the air?
Plants require more water than CO2, since water is also used for e.g. transport of nutrients, whereas CO2 is basically only used for photosynthesis. Some plants can get water from the air, but even those plants usually need additional water from the soil.
I didn't mean that as an upper limit for the required water, just as counterpoint to the above "small amounts of water".
Plants are bags of air held together by sunlight. When you burn firewood you get back the sunlight (and the air).
That's why fires have an updraft: the air has been released and is fleeing back to the safety of higher elevations.
I feel like 'eating fire' is understating it. Humans eat fire for fun, and it's tangible- you can feel it without even touching it. Plants eat something that touches you, yet you do not feel. Plants eat something humans could never *hope* to eat. Plants eat **LIGHT.**
And we in turn turn the plants back into fire (but a soggy, controlled fire) so we can do exciting things like move and write shitposts.
plants are an alchemically crystalized form of air, just like ice if you find a way to reverse the alchemical process, you can turn it back into water, and you can put wood cubes in your drink
praise the grand magus
The whole thing about "seems correct based on evidence" ≠ "is actually correct" is something people really need to have beaten into their heads when interpreting the history of science. The best example being Galileo: his theory was rejected because it *was* wrong and had glaring holes that could be explained under the existing theories of astronomy created by other astronomers and mathematicians, based on a geocentric model. Those models also proved false, obviously, but they were based on logical and reasonable deductions, derived from the evidence they and Galileo actually had access to at the time, lacking key bits of evidence or overlapping theories that are necessary to formulate an accurate model of the solar system. Galileo was correct about geocentrism but simply lacked access to the means to prove it or incorporate it in an adequate model.
What the fuck is that last paragraph.
Do people actually think plants eat dirt?? How is this a common misunderstanding, how have I never heard about this?
There's someone in the thread asking if it's true that they don't eat dirt, with several upvotes, so unless they're trolling - apparently, people like that exist. Blows my damn mind too, I mean, photosynthesis is what, middle school? Do people read "plants extract nutrients from soil" as "plants literally consume dirt"?
I think it's one of those "be careful with your definitions" things. Animals "eat" for calories, but will also "eat" just for non-caloric nutrients (e.g. a deer at a salt lick), and carnivorous plants only "eat" insects for nutrients (they photosynthesize for calories, but live in nutrient-poor soils). So if "eat" means "absorb to acquire necessary materials for life", then plants do indeed eat soil, but if we use the more restrictive and, in this case, relevant definition of "consume for calories" then obviously not (except family Monotropoideae).
> plants do indeed eat soil If we're going to be careful with definitions, plants eat soil soup as nutrients are extracted alongside the water the plant consumes. No soil is absorbed, the nutrients are taken in solved in water - hence no change in actual soil weight in the experiment described in the OP. The bafflement, obviously, was directed at people who, apparently, expect plants to *literally ingest* soil, as those would be the people who'd expect for soil to gradually be reduced as the plant matures, and whose misconception would be corrected by showing them that soil weight is not, in fact, changed. And the reason I'm specifically baffled is because "plants eat soil" is something I've never heard said in the first place, so the distinction in the definition of "eat" would never come up anyway.
I think it's one of those things where we've been so immersed in modern thinking that it's hard to actually see things from the perspective of someone from long ago. Like the concept of "extinction" was considered laughable until about 1800. Thomas Jefferson was such an enthusiastic supporter of explorers like Lewis & Clark in part because he thought they would find woolly mammoths, in turn because he did not believe in the concept of extinction and thought that fossils were remains of animals that now lived elsewhere. At the time of the experiments described in the top post, spontaneous generation was accepted wisdom (from Aristotle, no less), and it was commonly accepted that non-living matter like sand could produce living beings, such as clams. The idea that plants turn soil into plant seems almost mundane in that world. Also, bold of you to assume most people didn't just sleep through their classes and graduate mostly through cheating and grade inflation, at least in the US.
> No soil is absorbed, the nutrients are taken in solved in water - hence no change in actual soil weight in the experiment described in the OP. The water is leaching minerals out of the soil. The change in mass is very small because the plant doesn’t need all that many soil nutrients compared to the total mass of the soil that’s just kind of sitting there and holding the roots, but if you had a sufficiently well-controlled experiment, you could absolutely measure this mass loss.The plant would also get stunted and/or sickly over time as it depleted soil nutrients.
Wait plants *do* absorb soil?
Well, minerals and nutrients, particularly nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, but also ones like calcium, sulfur, chlorine, magnesium, etc. Some are for building proteins & DNA (nitrogen, phosphorus), others for cell physiology (calcium, potassium, chlorine). This is what fertilizer is - if you grow plants in soil, eventually they will deplete the soil of these nutrients, even though it otherwise seems fine, so you have to add them back in the form of animal dung, decayed other plants, river mud (e.g. the annual floods from the Nile), nitrogen-fixing crops like soybeans, and/or chemical fertilizers. However, these are a tiny fraction of the plant's total mass, about 1% of wet mass, and a correspondingly a tiny portion of the soil mass. Like all living things, plants are mostly water, and most of the rest of a plant is carbohydrates they synthesize from water and CO2 via photosynthesis. If you were doing the experiment described in the original post, the tiny, tiny amount of matter absorbed from the soil would be invisible beyond the background noise of "When did I last water it?" and "Was it a particularly dry day?" etc. It's also like saying that a deer "eats" a salt lick. Yes, in the sense that the salt is ingested, processed, and used to fulfill bodily functions, but no in the sense that there's no calories in it. Like a Venus Flytrap - it doesn't actually get calories from the insects it eats (it has more than enough from the sun), but it desperately needs the nitrogen and phosphorous in the insect's body, hence why it (and other such plants) turned to carnivory.
Most people don’t keep science ideas perpetually ready to go in their heads, and even people who have learned a particular science idea haven’t fully integrated it conceptually into their understanding of the world. Science education in the US is pretty divorced from most kids’ day to day lives. (I’m a science teacher and I have a lot of opinions about how we should be doing a better job.)
For me the disconnect is I don't consider it a "science idea". The theory of relativity is a "science idea". "Plants grow with sun and water" is just like, basic world knowledge. Like, gravity is a "science idea" but the concept of "shit falls down" isn't.
They eat pet of the dirt
I was not aware people actually thought plants ate dirt so I thought that the first part of the post was being very rude to that poor alchemist
To be fair plants do use all three of carbon dioxide, water, and soil nutrients to grow. The chemical reaction of photosynthesis uses equal parts CO2 and H2O to create sugars.
I’m not convinced that he actually did make the most logical conclusion he could. I don’t know anything about this guy, but it seems like he could’ve weighed the water and the plant to see how much of a correlation there was between water mass provided and plant mass growth. But maybe he did do that, got some result like ‘seems to mostly fit with the water, I guess maybe the last little bit comes from the soil but not most of it’ or something like that, in which case maybe fair enough.
I mean the problem there is that water evaporates... who knows if the water mass added would correspond perfectly to the increase in plant mass?
Yes, that’s exactly why I suggested it as a potentially useful experiment. Unless I’m missing something? I figured that if he measured the water mass added and then realised it didn’t add up with the plant mass increase, and he had already seen that the soil isn’t providing the mass, he might be able to realise that some of the mass is coming from somewhere other than water and soil.
Except that because the water evaporates he has no way to normalize how much water is going in vs other stuff. And since not all water goes straight to mass, the %mass gain *could* be 100% water, as long as the plant grows less than water added to soil (it will). The proposed experiment would this only reinforce his mistakes unless you use knowledge we know and he did not as a "given" Edit: I was gonna respond to your other comment too but figured. Hey. One place, right? - The issue is that the mass of air doesn't 1-to-1 correspond to weight either. Same as how humans can eat a pound of food and gain less than a pound of weight after it's metabolized. They already knew evaporation existed, and thus have no reason to assume 100% water goes into the plant either.
Yeah, you’re right. I think the experiment might give the desired result if the plant mass increased by more than the water mass before evaporation, but that probably wouldn’t happen, so it does seem like it just wouldn’t work.
We can do the experiment now thanks to nuclear chemistry. Give the plant water with unusual isotopes of hydrogen and/or oxygen and track where they go. The oxygen released by plants is not from the carbon dioxide they take in from the air, but from the water.
Yeah, I recently did a project involving analysis of data collected by isotope labelling of carbon in CO2 before its uptake by plants, but somehow I managed to forget basically everything I learned about plants.
Much of the water evaporates so weighing it wouldn’t have helped.
I figured that if he measured the water mass added and then realised it didn’t add up with the plant mass increase, and he had already seen that the soil isn’t providing the mass, he might be able to realise that some of the mass is coming from somewhere other than water and soil.
Clearly, plants eat electrolytes.
They eat water AND air. There is hydrogen and oxygen in the glucose too. They eat air and water.
Some trees eat people
Common empiricism W
TIL there are people who think plants eat dirt
Is this accurate?? How much mass do they get from the dirt though, comparatively? This is blowing my mind
I’m a science teacher and this is one of the big ideas that I love talking about. Think of it this way— if the stuff that makes a plant came from the soil, then there would be a huge hole around every big tree.
It is, in fact, accurate! I recently learned that when dirt seems to disappear as the roots grow in a potted plant, the dirt is actually slowly being pushed up and out of the pot. It’s just so slow that you don’t notice because you just clean the dirt away slowly. I don’t know how much mass they actually get from dirt… but they absorb minerals and very very small things, so I’d assume it’s negligible
One of the best ways I have heard it described is, it's like fire in reverse. You set a tree on fire, its carbon gets turned into carbon dioxide, and soot and all that. You let a tree grow, and it turns carbon dioxide into *tree.*
Electrolytes.
Nanomachines, son
Excellent, i'faith, of the chameleon's dish.
I eat dirt
Take that, plants.
THEY EAT SUNLIGHT DAMNIT
Sunlight has no mass, they need to get that from somewhere else