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Similarly, female trees are charged to attract pollen to them. In most cities (in the US) trees planted on streets aren't allowed to be fruiting (because of ra
by nanomonkey 2y ago
Similarly, female trees are charged to attract pollen to them. In most cities (in the US) trees planted on streets aren't allowed to be fruiting (because of rats?). Most fruitless/litterless trees are just the Dioecious male variety. This causes air quality issues as there is an over abundance of pollen in the air, which causes allergies and increased respiratory problems.
- pfdietz 2y agoThis suggests installation of electrostatic air cleaners, perhaps solar powered.
- HPsquared 2y agoOr fake plastic trees.
- surfingdino 2y agoOr planting more female trees and hiring cats to hunt rats?
- kurthr 2y ago"I don't know why she swallowed a fly"
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ozim 2y agoWhat do we do with cats? They breed too much as well.
- surfingdino 2y agoIntroduce a natural predator?
- willcipriano 2y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY
- aziaziazi 2y agoTo much cats already, they hunt the birds that used to hunt mosquitos. Suburb tragedy.
- SkiFire13 2y agoThen genetically modify the mosquitos to prevent them from reproducing.
- wdh505 2y agoEvolution selects against this. You would have to release millions on a regular basis to consistently fight the "biological fitness" of self reproduction
- ben_w 2y agoThere's a thing called a "gene drive", which I don't really understand, but it is claimed to get around that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_drive The toy model of this that fits in my head, is the prisoners' dilemma as a gene: every generation has a local preference for that gene, but overall it destroys that population. Ages ago now, and I think it's been debunked anyway, people were looking for a "gay gene" and wondering how it might remain in a population; one suggestion was that it would cause hypersexual andro-philia, making both men and women with that gene very much more into guys than normal — if that actually existed in that particular form, then (modulo both contraceptives for the women, and sperm banks for gay men who want to start a family) it would count as such.
- dennis_jeeves2 2y agoAre they paid minimum wages? Is there diversity?
- isoprophlex 2y agoShe looks like the real thing She tastes like the real thing My fake plastic love
- lm28469 2y agoInfinitely complex solutions to self inflicted and completely trivial issues, humans are amazing!
- noah_buddy 2y agoI think you may have missed the subtle joke in: > electrostatic air cleaners, perhaps solar powered AKA trees.
- loceng 2y agoIf only it wasn't impossible to design cities for streets to maintain tree cover to help air stay cooler near ground level, etc..
- barrenko 2y agoSomething something dog pee excerbates the number of male trees, also a HN fact.
- scentoni 2y agoThat's a myth started by one guy. https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/botanical-sexism-viral-idea-myth.html https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/botanical-sexism-viral-...
- jojobas 2y agoWith the benefit of hindsight, how could this even work? Trees are wet and grounded.
- nanomonkey 2y agoTree's are made of fairly well insulated materials and contain a vast amount of chemical reactions going on, they are also elevated from the ground, so they can experience the tribolectric effect (transfer of electrons through friction), as well as ionic charge due to moving nutrients up through their cambium. It's really not hard to imagine how they could become electrically charged at their extremities.
- jojobas 2y agoSomeone measured tree branch tip to root resistance and while I don't quite understand the poor quality chart it's in kiloohms. The tree would need to radically change some of its biology. Like no capillaries from roots to branches. I'd say no chance. https://sci-hub.se/10.1109/EE.1956.6442015 https://sci-hub.se/10.1109/EE.1956.6442015
- derefr 2y agoAs a sci-fi author, I love thinking about this kind of "what-if biology." I presume, if such a phenomenon was possible, that it would work the same way electric eels work: by electrochemical (dis)charge. You don't need the whole organism to be ionized relative to its medium; you just need to form an ionic gradient at the surface of the organism, by using active metabolic processes (ion pumps) to hold ions — and thus electric charge — on the "wrong" side of a membrane. Of course, electrochemical flux is an active process that takes work; it's not something any organism can do constantly forever. I imagine a tree that (hypothetically) did this, would only do it as a periodic "tug", maybe once a minute or so — sort of like taking a breath. Its evolutionary goal behind evolving such a feature, would presumably be to just to catch enough pollen, not all of it, and even a low-duty-cycle pull would work toward that goal. Note that the ability of a thing to create an electrical discharge, is inextricable from the ability of the same thing to induce electrostatic forces on charged particles. Electric eels move charged particles in the water as they discharge into the water. And a tree that charged itself up to act as an ionic air-purifier, would (probably lightly) "zap" anything that touched it. --- Alternately, if we let go of the constraint that this is something all trees supposedly did, and instead assumed that this was something only some specific trees did — then those trees could do it by growing some electrically-insulated — and so likely dead-matter — tissue, near each pollen receiving organ (pistil). In other words, the tree's flower petals could act like mammalian hair does: able to be charged up with static even when the animal themselves is grounded. (And then they might not even need explicit charging — just interacting with the air while being electrically insulated from the rest of the always-grounded tree around them, might be enough to leave them with a slight constant charge.)