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Most of us have never heard of about tree power, but it turns out that it’s there, hiding in the shadows, in small but measurable quantities. A group of researchers tested this by using their local trees to run an electronic circuit. Will forests someday replace windfarms?

Researcher Babak Parviz says, “As far as we know this is the first peer-reviewed paper of someone powering something entirely by sticking electrodes into a tree.”

An earlier study found that plants generate a voltage of up to 200 millivolts when one electrode is placed in a plant and the other in the surrounding soil.
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The earth is changing, and so are the leaves (but not as fast as they usually do). Are you frustrated by your attempts to go leaf peeping this season, since those fall colors seem to show up later and later? Scientists put it down to the same problem that’s causing global warming: Too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which prolongs the growing season of trees.

Researcher Wendy Jones says, “Carbon dioxide fools the trees. They think they should still be growing when they ought to be going through autumnal senescence.” This was shown in an experiment where plots of trees were exposed to varying levels of carbon dioxide and ozone.
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For some things – Living trees are a vital part of the earth but fake ones can be important too. Engineers want to plant a forest of 100,000 “artificial trees” within the next 10 to 20 years to help soak up the world’s greenhouse gases by capturing the CO2 from the air through a filter. The greenhouse gas would then be removed from the filter and stored.

But this is basically what all trees do: Take in CO2 and breathe out oxygen. So why use fake trees? It turns out that an artificial tree could remove thousands of times more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than a real tree of the same size.
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Birds are doing it, now trees are too.

All over the world, trees are moving to new places to escape warmer temperatures. They are taking root at higher elevations as well. But this isn’t happening in response to hot summer temperatures: warmer WINTER temperatures are the cause.

In BBC News, Matt Walker quotes biologist Melanie Harsch as saying, “We expected growing season warming to be the dominant driver, but we found that it was not, winter temperature was.”

Walking outdoors in the fall in Europe, you can enjoy the lovely yellow leaves, while the US and East Asia, the turning leaves are mostly red. What causes the differences in autumn leaves around the world? The answer goes back 35 million years.
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