A tree that bleeds metal | Hacker News Reader

A tree that bleeds metal

bbc.co.uk

94 pointsfunkylexoo35 comments

> Dr Antony van der Ent

Nominative determinism strikes again

reference from wikipedia[0]: Nominative determinism is the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism

With imaging help from Dr. Spiers

Came here to make the same comment, but in a less clever way. lol Thanks for the laugh.

Excerpt:

some scientists are hopeful that hyperaccumulators could be used to "clean" soil where there has been a build-up of toxic material due to human activity.

Other potential applications include phytomining - growing hyperaccumulator plants on nutrient-poor but metal-rich soils to extract the elements they take up.

They could mine contaminants from the WW! battlefields in the Zone Rouge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge

> They think it may use the nickel to defend against insects.

Wood(en) nickel!

Here's an informative and entertaining video that explains how the synchrotron light source works and how they use it to image things other tools can't. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16028723

It's pretty metal to bleed metal

It's pretty normal to bleed metal, since blood has iron.

Also, chlorophyll (what makes plants green) contains magnesium , which is a metal. "Mag wheels" are named after magnesium.

It's pretty metal to bleed heavy metal?

Yeah it would be for the short time you manage to do that.

"The term heavy metal refers to any metallic chemical element that has a relatively high density and is toxic or poisonous at low concentrations. Examples of heavy metals include mercury (Hg), cadmium (Cd), arsenic (As), chromium (Cr), thallium (Tl), and lead (Pb).

Slang, adjective. Loosely equivalent to "awesome" or "cool" or "legit", especially to fans of heavy metal music.

Why does no one ever talk about these with respect to Mars? It seems like a research-worthy pursuit to see if we can engineer plants (bacteria?) like this to modify the climate of Mars, or to make artificial superstructures self-sustaining.

Shouldn't it be a research-worthy pursuit to modify(fix) the climate of the planet we're already living on? I'm not sure what attempting to live on a desolate planet is going to do for us. Say we turn it into another Earth, now what? We ruin that one too?

We should research stabilizing our climate. Absolutely. But while we are at it, it would also be in our interest to make humans a multiplanet species, in order to protect us from a global extinction threat that isn't man made, as well. Super volcanoes, calderas (pretty much the same, I know), large meteor strikes.... none of these have anything to do with man made pollutants, and survival of the species is kind of a neat little concept, in my opinion =) Granted, we would probably become a new species in several thousand years, once we were off planet, due to the radiation and gravity differences, but hopefully the problem solving and intelligences would remain.

Because Mars doesn't have liquid water or an atmosphere, so most "efforts" (or at least pontificating) are on those primary problems that would preclude plant life.

Mars most definitely has an atmosphere... just not much of one.

Imagine doing a little genetic tinkering to produce a tree that bleeds gold or platinum.

Although I _am_ wondering if the three could incorporate enough metal to make increased lightning strikes a survival issue.

Just googling and that is exactly what some scientists are trying to do.

"Pycnandra acuminata is a large (up to 20m tall) rare rainforest tree, restricted to remaining patches of rainforest in New Caledonia," says Dr Antony van der Ent

If ever there was an appropriate name for a tree researcher!

This sounds like it could have multiple potential uses, if we can figure it out, and maybe if we can genericise it - Nickel is toxic, but its far from the only metal contaminant . If this could be adapted to, for instance, help process landfill sites, that could be big news.

Could this result in differently coloured amber? I found this [1], but it seems the colouration is due to a different mechanism not involving metals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_amber

> Other potential applications include phytomining - growing hyperaccumulator plants on nutrient-poor but metal-rich soils to extract the elements they take up.

Why nutrient-poor? Isn't it enough for them to extract metal?

Nutrient here means phosphorous and nitrogen, the main non-carbon elements that plants need to survive.

So is this actually metallic nickel or just nickel ions?

It’s not clear but I would hazard that it’s ions, as it would likely precipitate out of suspension otherwise. Also, as an ion it’s more likely to have a biological effect.

The ground ends up purified (somewhat) either way, I guess. If we want to use the nickel, will it make a big difference?

Ions, given the colour. Metallic nickel is silvery, but Nickel II and III are greenish and greenish blue respectively.

>Its latex has an unusual blue-green colour as it contains up to 25% nickel.

That's insane

Humans bleed metal too; there's iron in haemoglobin.

It's a different scale. Human blood is well under 0.08% iron, this tree has 25% nickel. So over 300x as concentrated.

PS: 4 grams of iron in a persons body, ~5kg of blood.

The fluids also contain various electrolytes, i.e. metal cations. But still nowhere close to those trees.

The hemoglobin molecule itself only has something like one iron atom per 1000 non-iron atoms.

Yea it's: C2952 H4664 O832 N812 S8 Fe4 so 2315:1.

Fascinating. Thanks.

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