A a team of researchers recently tied up a dismemberment carnivorous plant to a sensitive instrument in Berlin, in a room that closes the magnetic noise of the world. It was a Venus trapmaxilla ”– indeed a specialized leaf – and when the team turned on the heat, the jaw summoned the energy to try to close. At that moment, a magnetic field emanated out of the trap.
The field was taken on an atomic magnetometer, an instrument that deduces a change in magnetic fields in the rotation of electrons. The team’s research was recent published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“The novelty here is that we show magnetic fields from a multicellular plant system; specifically, the action potentials of the multicellular 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 previously observed in others plants; algae in one study, bean plants in another. Earlier magnetometers, called SQUIDs, are large and run at very cold temperatures, and the team needed something more convenient to use. Various actions on or by a plant can cause fields – from injury to trying to break food at his fingertips, as was the case with the trap. The magnetic field does not correspond to the act itself but the potential for action that precipitates the next movement of the plant.
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While a fly trap normally looks like a cross between the Kermit frog’s mouth and foreign eyelids, the researchers only excised one of its study flaps – the potential for action would also appear using a single flap kept the subject of the investigation motionless. Team increased the heat in the room as a non-invasive way to catalyze the same potential for action that occurs when the trap tries to feed. When the action potential flows through the plant, rubidium atom electrons in sensors changed rotation – to team, magnet proof the existence of the field.
Manufacturer, main author of the new work, said that there is no doubt that a field will appear; the problem was how to take it. When there are moving tasks in physics, electric and magnetic fields occur. The trouble it has tools that can detect them, because the field of fly traps has been found to be about a million times weaker than the Earth’s magnetic field. That’s why researchers had to perform the search in such a magnetic way silent room.
“If [the field were] too small, then we could not measure it with our sensors, “said Fabricant, adding that, if multiple fields were created but in opposite directions, “It would cancel out when we tried to measure the whole trap. There is a high risk that we will measure zero. ”
Fortunately, that’s not what happened. They picked it up magnetic signals with 0.5 picotesla (very, very small) amplitude, providevidence that the result of the action potential of the plant in a physical phenomenon similar to that of other previously tested flora. This being the most complex plant examined so far, the fly field provides an indication of what else the plant kingdom might have in store.