Trees go to sleep at night, study shows

The next time you camping in the forest sleeping in your tent, remember, the trees are sleeping as well.

That's the conclusion of a team of scientists from Austria, Finland and Hungary who wanted to know if trees followed day/night cycles similar to those observed in small plants. 

Using laser scanners pointed at two birch trees, the scientists recorded physical changes indicating a nighttime sleep, with the ends of the birch branches drooping by as much as 4 inches towards the end of the night.

"Our results show that the whole tree droops during night which can be seen as position change in leaves and branches," Eetu Puttonen from the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute said in a statement. "The changes are not too large, only up to 10 cm for trees with a height of about 5 meters, but they were systematic and well within the accuracy of our instruments."

A birch tree at night (left) experiences more branch dropping than during the day (right).

 (Photo: Eetu Puttonen/Vienna University of Technology, TU Vienna)

The scientists explained how they scanned two trees, one in Finland and another in Austria. 

Both trees were scanned independently, on calm nights, and around the solar equinox to ensure a similar length of night. 

While the tree's branches were shown to droop lowest just before dawn, they returned to their original position in only a few hours.

"It was a very clear effect, and applied to the whole tree," András Zlinszky of the Centre for Ecological Research in Tihany, Hungary, told New Scientist. "No one has observed this effect before at the scale of whole trees, and I was surprised by the extent of the changes."

Return To My Trees

Music of Tree Rings

Music in the rings inside a tree trunk?

It is well known that the rings of a tree trunk tell a lot about a tree, primarily regarding the water availability during each season of its existence.

Have the tightly packed circles ever reminded you of a larger version of a vinyl record, though? 

Well, artist Bartholomaus Traubeck thought it did. 

He was curious to find out what those rings would “say,” so he invented a type of record player that reads the color and texture variations of the rings inside the cross-section of a tree trunk. 

It interprets the rings into audible sounds, a type of music if you will.

How is something like this even possible? 

Traubeck’s “record player” uses light to interpret the color and texture variations of a tree’s rings into musical notes and instruments.

All it took was PlayStation eye camera and motor for the arm of the record player.

The data was first collected by the camera and then transferred to a computer. 

Using a program called Ableton Live, that data was interpreted into a piano track.

This video lets you listen in on what nature sounds like through Traubeck’s record player. 

If you think you would hear a bunch of crackling or other noises, you’re wrong. 

While these “songs” aren’t traditional harmonies and chords, it’s still eerily beautiful.

Since every tree’s rings are unique, this means that every tree has its own song. 

What this artist has done is essentially create a limitless library of records that are solely one-of-a-kind. 

It’s a completely new way to listen to nature.

People who live on tree-lined blocks have fewer health problems

New research reveals that people who live in tree-lined neighborhoods with an abundance of trees are less likely to suffer a heart attack or a stroke.

Making urban areas greener has many benefits, but researchers wanted to know whether it had any relationship with rates of heart disease. 

The team also examined whether planting more vegetation in a locality would be accompanied by reductions in heart disease over time.

Medical records were used to obtain the incidence of new cardiovascular conditions during the five-year study, including heart attacks, irregular heartbeat, heart failure, heart disease, high blood pressure, and strokes.

Satellite images were used to analyze the amount of sunlight reflected from the Earth’s surface. 

The researchers said that chlorophyll from plants typically absorbs visible light and reflects near-infrared light, so measuring both indicates the amount of vegetation. 

The “greenness” of city blocks was then classified as low, medium, or high.

“Higher levels of greenness were associated with lower rates of heart conditions and stroke over time, both when an area maintained high greenness and when greenness increased.

Trees

Trees

The More Trees We Are Surrounded By The Lower Our Stress Levels

Even though it’s something many of us already know, a recent study reveals how nature can help reduce stress levels. 

Researchers put people in stressful situations and then showed them 3-D videos of various “city”scapes, each with different densities of tree cover.

The thicker the tree-cover, the lower the subjects’ stress levels dropped.

The researchers, from the University of Illinois and the University of Hong Kong, subjected 160 participants to various stressful scenarios, including having them prepare to deliver a speech, or perform a math test, in front of judges and cameras.

Once the participants were fully stressed out, they viewed one of 10 six-minute videos of city streets that changed only in the amount of tree coverage, ranging from 0 to 70 percent.

What they found was the higher the density of trees, the lower the levels of stress the subjects reported. Inversely, the lower the density of trees, the less helpful the video was in helping the subject recover from stress.

The real story here is, spend as much time as you can surrounded trees. 

The Old Religion is the magic of Nature itself. It is the essence which binds all things together.

Trees

Trees

Take Me To The Trees

Trees are vital. 

As the biggest plants on the planet, they give us oxygen, store carbon, 

stabilise the soil and give life to the world's wildlife. 

They also provide us with the materials for tools and shelter.

Trees Are Living Things

Sadly, the Philippine nation has seen the unbelievable cutting down of 100 year old trees.

Government characters only care about the money that they would get from such destruction and not the massacre of hundreds of trees and the devastating loss to the environment.

 

The Pagan Kitchen salutes the protesters who have stepped in to make  a difference.

We want people to be aware of the greed and selfishness of political opportunists who could care less about nature or about you.

Trees are living things, trees consumes resources, gives off waste, grows, reproduces, and dies. All the qualities of life.

We actually heard someone say, "if trees are so smart, why don't they talk?"

We think they do, we just don't know how to listen, besides, there are a lot of people who talk who say nothing.

Someone once asked us that if trees were so important, how many hospitals have they built?

"How stupid", we responded, "how many wars have they started?"

Trees