A recently, a team of investigators stopped a dismembered member carnivorous plant to a sensitive instrument in Berlin, in a room that turns off the magnetic noise of the world. It was a trap against the fly of Venus “jaw “—Actually a specialized blade— and when the computer turned on the heat, the jaw summoned the energy to try to close. At that moment, a magnetic field emanated of the trap.
The field was collected on an atomic magnetometer, an instrument that deduces a change in magnetic fields in the rotation of electrons. The team’s research has been recent published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“The novelty here is that we show magnetic fields of a multicellular plant system; specifically, action potentials of the multicellular plant system ” Anne Manufacturer, Atomic Physics at the Helmholtz Institute in Mainz, Germany, dit 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 had been previously observed in others plants; algae in one study, bean plants in another. The previous magnetometers, called SQUID, are large and operate at very cool temperatures and the equipment needed something more convenient to use. Different actions on or by a plant can cause fields, from being injured to trying to bite food at their fingertips, as was the case with the fly. The magnetic field does not correspond to the act itself but the action potential precipitated by the next movement of the plant.
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While a trap against flies usually looks like a cross between the mouth of the Kermit frog and the eyelids of others, the researchers one of its flaps for the study: the action potential would still occur and only one flap would be used kept still the object of the investigation. The team in increased the heat in the room as a non-invasive way to catalyze the same action potential that occurs when the trap tries to feed. When the action potential ran through the plant, the electrons of the rubidium atoms of the sensors changed their rotation — for the computer, evidence of the magnetic existence of the field.
Manufacturer, main author of the new article, he said there was not much doubt that a field would arise; the problem was how to pick it up. When there are moving charges in physics, electric and magnetic fields are produced. The problem it is to have instruments that can detect them, as the flytrap field was found to be about a million times weaker than the Earth’s magnetic field. That’s why researchers had to perform the search so magnetically quiet room.
“Yes [the field were] too small, then we couldn’t measure it with our sensors, “said Manufacturer, who added that if multiple fields were created however in opposite directions, “They would be canceled when we tried to measure the whole trap. There was a great risk that we would measure zero ”.
Fortunately, that didn’t happen. They picked it up magnetic signals with a 0.5 picotesla (very, very small) amplitude, provtests that the action potential of the plant results in physical phenomena similar to other flora tested previously. Being the most complex plant ever examined, the fly field provides a clue as to what the vegetable kingdom may have in store.