A team of researchers recently tied up a dismembered carnivorous plant into a sensitive instrument in Berlin, in a room that keeps out the magnetic noise of the world. It was a flycatcher from Venus “jaw”– a truly specialized blade – and when the team turned up the heat, the jaw gathered the energy to try to close. At that moment a magnetic field came out out of the trap.
The field was picked up on an atomic magnetometer, an instrument that deduces a change in magnetic fields in the spin of electrons. The team’s investigation was recent published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“The new thing here is that we show magnetic fields from a multicellular plant system; specific action potentials of multicellular plant system, “ Anne Fabricant, an atomic physicist at the Helmholtz Institute in Mainz, Germany, said in a video call. “And also that we use atomic magnetometers, because the previous two experiments were done with a different kind of magnetic magnetometer.”
Magnetic fields had previously been observed in others plants; algae in one study, bean plants in the other. The previous magnetometers, called SQUIDs, are large and operate at very low temperatures, and the team needed something more convenient for their use. Various actions on or through a plant can provoke the fields – from getting injured to trying to nip for food within reach, as was the case with the fly trap. The magnetic field does not correspond to the action itself but the action potential that accelerates the plant’s next move.
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While a fly trap normally looks like a cross between Kermit the frog’s mouth and alien eyelids, the researchers cut one of his flaps for study – the action potential would still appear, and with only one flap stopped the object of investigation. The team iincreased 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 flowed through the plant, the electrons from the rubidium atoms in the sensors changed rotation – for the team, evidence of the magnetic the existence of the field.
Manufacturer, lead author of the new article, said there was not much doubt that a field would emerge; the question was how to collect it. When there are moving charges in physics, electric and magnetic fields are produced. The problem has instruments that can detect themas the flycatcher field was found to be about a million times weaker than Earth’s magnetic field. That’s why the researchers had to carry out the search so magnetically silent room.
“If [the field were] too small, we wouldn’t be able to measure it with our sensors, ”said Fabricant, adding: if multiple fields are created but in opposite directions, “They would destroy it if we tried to measure the entire fall. There was a great risk that we would just measure zero. “
Fortunately that did not happen. They answered magnetic signals with a 0.5 picotesla (very, very small) amplitude, providIng proof that results in the action potential of the plant in a similar physical phenomenon to other flora previously tested. Being the most complex plant explored to date, the field of the fly trap offers a hint of what else the plant kingdom has in store.