"This bizarre world with its many hairs is an appearance very similar to a forest of baobabs." "Pores seem to open like hungry little mouths." "As strange as it may seem, this invisible nature observed for the first time under the environmental scanning electron microscope is quite familiar to you." "Plants feed on light." "They are masters of photosynthesis." "Some have been rooted into the Earth since almost 5,000 years." "Others have already visited outer space." "They purify our water and our air." "They may hide the secret to immortality and hold many world records." "Some animals even imitate them." "Plants are everything but powerless." "Humans are gifted with intelligence and creativity." "We are capable of moving, of remembering, of feeling." "We are also persuaded that we are omnipotent." "Yet the observation of the world of plants should incite more humility, as the genome of a simple grain of rice contains twice as many genes as that of a human." "Humans are still struggling to produce efficient solar energy." "Our green neighbors have been mastering this technique since way before we appeared on Earth." "Mysterious powers are at play and plants are hiding their secrets." "They transform sunlight into sugar molecules, a ready to use form of energy." "Scientists call this photosynthesis." "Chlorophyll is the key player in photosynthesis." "It allows the plant to absorb energy from light, the first step in converting energy from sunlight into a chemical form." "The pigment absorbs red and blue wavelengths of the spectrum." "Green light is less readily absorbed, giving the leaves or algae their overall general color." "Algae are the very first vegetal organisms to have appeared on Earth." "They can be found in all aquatic environments." "Enlarged by electron microscopy, they look very similar to jewelry." "They are diatoms, microalgae." "With over 100,000 species known to date, diatoms represent the most important group of algae in the vegetal plankton world at the base of the aquatic food chain." "In spite of their minute size, they possess genuine machinery for photosynthesis." "Photosynthesis is one of the most incredibly sophisticated, regulated" "biological machines that we know about." "Without the magic of photosynthesis, there would be no oxygen in the atmosphere." "Life would be rare." "Planet Earth is receiving enough solar energy per hour to power all of mankind's energy requirements for an entire year." "One hour of sun for an entire year of energy." "A humiliation to humankind still struggling to find efficient ways of capturing sunlight to produce energy." "Plants have had three and a half billion years to work out how to turn the energy from sunlight into food, so they're pretty good at it." "And how they do this is what we've found to be quite mysterious." "The sun's light is so powerful that plants have developed stop and start security mechanisms to avoid overheating." "The capture of this energy is so efficient that it needs to be highly regulated because it can provide too much energy to the other parts of the plant, so some of that energy needs to be dissipated when the sun's bright, and that happens" "by turning on safety valves." "These safety valves take the excess energy and dump it as harmless heat rather than destroying the plant." "It is these tiny pores called stomata that regulate the gaseous and energetic exchanges in plants during photosynthesis." "Plants undergo complex energy transfers at unbelievable speeds." "The capture of sunlight moving through space happens incredibly fast." "We can't even imagine this in our normal lives as femtoeconds, it's called," "10 to the minus fifteen of a second." "A femtosecond is to a second what a second is to approximately 31.7 million years, a staggering rapidity for these plants whose metabolisms seem so slow." "Gregory Scholes discovered that plants use quantum physics in order to optimize photosynthesis." "The sun's energy particles absorbed by the plant can be found in two different locations at precisely the same time." "Can actually take two pathways or three pathways simultaneously." "It was unimaginable just a few years ago that this could happen in something that just grows outside." "The tireless quest for light may well be the reason for the immense global surface deployed by plants." "While the skin of a human being covers an average of two square meters, scientists estimate that the leaves of a tree 15 meters high covers a surface area of 200 hectares, which is roughly the size of Monaco." "The immense surface of leaves optimize photosynthesis." "For each ton of vegetal biomass produced, nearly 1.4 tons of oxygen is added to the atmosphere and 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide is eliminated." "Plants have the power to absorb carbon dioxide, a greenhouse effect gas that participates in global warming, and as a byproduct, they release oxygen." "Plants have the power to clean the planet." "During photosynthesis, plants release oxygen from their roots." "These attract partners that are essential to plants, countless bacteria that will devour the polluting organic matter." "In 1974, a revolutionary and natural waste water treatment system was installed at the NASA Stennis Space Center to filter the waste water of both homes and laboratories." "We install plants, water hyacinths, floating, tropical, semi-tropical, with a beautiful flower, to treat all the waste at this large NASA facility, which houses about five, 6,000 people." "The research aimed to demonstrate the capacity of plants to transform dirty water into food, oxygen and water." "And this 1.2 hectare lagoon has largely met the waste water elimination requirements set out by NASA." "Today, hidden beneath its leaves are alligators and fish, and the life of the lagoon is humming with birds and insects, as in a natural environment." "The system has functioned for over 40 years." "Maintenance is limited to evacuating the large quantity of hyacinths once a year." "The plants have magnificently adapted to this environment." "These water hyacinths, if you take 'em out of a river or the natural environment, they will have a large root system because they're seeking the nutrients and minerals they need but once we put them where we have domestic sewage" "mixed with them, they have all the nutrients they need and you can see here, they are small root system because they don't need this massive root system that you will see if you pull this out of the river." "Biological stations using lagoon water hyacinths represent only 5% of installation costs and 10% of maintenance costs of industrial waste water treatment stations." "If these plants are so far ahead of us when it comes to depollution, why are today's engineers not inspired?" "One of the reasons it has been slow to be implemented is because it is simple and most civil engineers that design waste water treatment systems do not understand how plants have such magic and power." "Plants are not only capable of cleaning waste water." "In addition, they are incredible at cleaning and filtering air, each species having its own specialty." "Large trees are cleaning factories." "The more large trees you have, the cleaner air is going to be." "Bill Wolverton affirms that plants also give excellent results in the elimination of radioactive elements, like cesium-130, strontium-90 and cobalt" "found in contaminated soils." "In Japan, where they've had this serious problem, over the years, they've found that sunflowers are very effective so they are using sunflower plants now to remove soil from their fields near this horrible accident, nuclear power plant failure," "and it may take some time." "If plants have become our allies in depolluting the air and soil, they equally contribute to purifying the air of our interiors." "To test the capacity of plants to produce fresh air under shelter," "NASA led the BioHome experiment, an airtight building built of completely synthetic materials." "Before introducing the plants, the men inside the structure, devoid of plants, had stinging eyes, sore throats and respiratory difficulties." "After introducing plants covering half of the surface inside the home, the symptoms disappeared in just a few days." "If you're going to live in a permanent type of sealed building whether it's on Earth or in outer space, you're gonna have to have a bio-regenerative process, plants and microbes." "If you can't build a tightly sealed, energy efficient building with plants and maintain healthy air in it, that's step number one before you try to build a more complicated system on the moon, where you have to create all of the oxygen." "If fresh air is essential for astronauts, it is just as essential to earthlings." "The US Environmental Protection Agency has identified indoor air pollution as one of the most serious health problems facing the Americans." "Bill Wolverton encourages the use of plants in order to grow fresh air." "For him, all modern homes are concerned, as they are full of volatile and invisible chemical products." "Before the 20th century, chemical products were virtually unheard of." "Today, we use more than 80,000 and they have invaded our everyday lives." "Practically everything in your home is made of synthetic materials, that is, chemicals." "The TVs, your computers, the paint, the paneling." "With our modern buildings with synthetic materials, when we seal them up to make them energy efficient, we seal up hundreds of nasty chemicals that cause health problems." "In order to fight against energy loss, the tendency is to increase the construction of airtight buildings." "How do you build such a tightly sealed, energy efficient building and maintain healthy air?" "And the answer is plants." "The whole key is to educate the world on how nature can be used to clean our environment and make it a healthy environment, and nature has the answer." "If we will only look to nature and work with nature, we can get out of this mess that we're in." "But are we too arrogant to do it?" "Capable of helping us purify our environment, plants are also world champions of sustainable development." "By fabricating wood, plants create unbelievable quantities of primary materials." "Researchers estimate that 10 billion tons of wood are created each year by mother nature." "But where does it all come from?" "99% of this weight is made of air, is made of water and made of sun energy." "All these elements are barely or absolutely invisible." "It makes woods with cellulose and lignin, and this is a substance similar to concrete mixed with armed iron, but the difference is instead of taking iron from the mineral earth, making cement with very much" "fossil energy, it needs 150 degrees to make cement, the tree makes its wood with invisible elements and builds wood, which is as strong as reinforced concrete." "Perhaps one of the most mysterious forces used by nature is the gravitational influence of the moon on vegetal life." "It has been proven that the full moon has an incidence on the growth of plants or the conservation of wood used in the building industry." "The gravitational changes through a day mean just a change of the weight of the tree of not more than eight grams." "We have analyzed the changes of wood properties according to the felling date of many trees, 600 trees, and observed changes in drying behavior of the wood, changes in the density of the wood after drying process," "and all these changes, also the resistance to compression, are very significant, linked to lunar rhythms." "There is no life without rhythms." "Every life expression is linked to rhythms, and these rhythms provoke something like heartbeat in the plants." "Face to face with seasonal variations, plants cannot wrap themselves in a coat or discard it." "They have to face the elements." "Temperatures can vary from minus 30 to plus 40 degrees Celsius, and they are neither hot nor cold about it." "Plants orient themselves depending on the available light." "They grow straight up against gravitational forces." "Perpendicular to their trunks, branches grow horizontally, holding their weight in suspension." "What is the secret of this miracle?" "For me personally, after all these years, no clear answer how it is possible." "It's really a question." "Do we have only gravity as a factor?" "They are not only powerful against known forces but I have the impression that they work with other types of forces." "Just what forces is Ernst Zurcher referring to?" "Could it be that invisible and unidentified forces are hidden within our galaxy?" "Three, two, one, mark." "Sequence is go for auto sequence start." "The Atlantis STS-135 space mission transports several hundred rather special passengers." "They are green." "They are not aliens, but plants destined to play an essential role in the conquest of space." "NASA's long term goal is to reproduce the complex ecosystem of planet Earth in order to establish life in space." "After 11 days in space, this experiment investigates the symbiosis between plants and bacteria in a zero gravity situation." "341." "Check." "342." "Check." "343." "Check." "344." "Check." "Back on Earth, the whole team is impatient to know how the little green plants have survived." "Things under control." "Prior to opening that seal, we're removing the gas sample." "The carbon dioxide will give us a measure of the amount of growth and respiration and the ethylene, an indicator of distress that the plant has been under." "Can you get a photo of that?" "Alright, take another one, there you go." "These plants look quite good." "They seem to have stayed in place." "100% germination, no contamination." "Under zero gravity, the symbiosis between plants and bacteria is a success." "The bacteria created little nodules or pouches on the roots of the plants where they thrive." "It is now possible for plants to grow in space, seeds to germinate, seeds develop, produce flowers, pollinate and produce viable seeds." "It should even be possible to harvest more fruits and vegetables in space, and in a shorter time span than on Earth." "A four season potato typically will take 105 days." "We've been able to shorten that by optimizing light, temperature and nutrients to 85 days and get twice" "world record field yields in two-thirds the time." "But in order to survive, how many plants will space adventurers have to take with them on their mission?" "You would need about 20 square meters to produce all of the oxygen you need, roughly 40 square meters for all of your calories." "That would provide plenty of water, atmospheric regeneration and food production for one." "There is no most powerful plant." "There is no lesser plant." "Each has a role in its function." "A life without plants would be a very sterile existence." "I think it would be a noisy existence, where machines are removing my carbon dioxide, pumps are sending me fresh air, filters are moving the water." "It would be lacking in green." "It would be lacking the aromas, the textures, the colors that come through plants and life" "that surround us in my environment." "I can imagine a life without plants." "It's not one that I wanna live." "Some plants have their feet rooted in the Earth and their heads in the stars." "This little redwood tree is probably two years old." "It may become a full grown adult within 50 or 60 years, as tall as the ones behind us, but it will take hundreds of years for it to become as large as the biggest redwood trees on the planet." "Trees are the first to have invented skyscrapers, and redwoods are the masters of heights." "The tallest redwood tree is 115 meters tall." "It's pretty hard to imagine how tall that redwood tree is, but it's taller than the Statue of Liberty and roughly equivalent to a 30 story building." "Emily Limm is scientific counselor of the non-profit organization, Save the Redwoods." "Luckily today, she won't have to climb to the treetops to study their leaves." "A high branch has just fallen at her feet." "Redwoods make two different types of leaves on the same tree." "These here in my hand are from the forest floor." "They grow in the shady parts of the redwood forest, where they have plenty of water but very little sunlight, so the leaves must be bigger." "The leaves at the top of the redwood tree are much smaller." "They are trying to conserve water and have a lot of light, so don't need leaves that are quite as large to do photosynthesis." "The forest grows in California, near the Pacific Ocean, which heavily influences the area's local climate." "But just how do these trees hydrate during the hot season?" "Fog comes rolling in during the summer and it wets the part of the tree." "All of these shoots help to capture that fog water." "The fog water condenses on the leaves." "It drips down to the forest floor, but it also gets absorbed into these leaves." "It is incredibly hard for the tree to get water all the way up to the top of the tree, where it needs it most, and so fog allows the tree to become hydrated directly, meters above our head." "The secret of their hydration is revealed." "High up in the trees, water vapor is absorbed from the fog through millions of pine needles and their numerous stomata." "Redwoods have grown in this area for millions of years and learned to survive under extreme environmental conditions, frequent forest fires." "The trees have a super resistant bark that acts as a fire barrier." "This redwood tree here is about 300 years old, and you can see that a fire actually did get past the bark layer and burned into the inside of this tree." "Amazingly, it's still alive because these trees are incredibly able to resist fire." "Here, the bark is starting to grow over the fire scar on the inside, and the bark eventually will cover up the entire cavity." "The majestic giant sequoias of Sierra Nevada are also members of the largest trees in the world." "They have developed similar defense mechanisms, a natural fire barrier." "The bark at the base of the tree is really thick and that helps protect it." "It can be up to a foot or more in thickness, but that's only at the base." "As you go up the tree, the tree doesn't need thick bark further up." "The damage that's gonna suffer is always primarily at the base, so as you go up, the bark thickens and as you get up maybe 30 or 40 feet, the bark may only be an inch thick." "They have the power to resist decay." "They have the power to resist animal attack, insect attack." "They have the power to resist fire." "Virtually anything that is a threat to any other tree in the forest really is not much of a threat to the giant sequoia." "Even with their resistant bark, the giant sequoias are threatened." "For Wayne and Wendy, the park rangers, humankind has disturbed the natural cycles of forest fires." "Fires burn more intensely since we started putting them out." "We created a fuel load in the forest that creates a type of fire behavior that even giant sequoias have a hard time resisting." "They evolved in the presence of very frequent, low intensity fires." "Now they're getting very infrequent but very high intensity fires that can kill them." "But low intensity fires play a key role in the reproduction of these giants." "To me, it's really amazing that something so small can produce something so huge." "That's about the size of a grain of oatmeal." "And there are 200 seeds inside the cones, roughly, so if you figure that any given time," "there's 9,000 viable cones in a tree, that's 180,000 seeds that are sitting up in that tree, ready to be released at any opportunity." "The seeds contain few nutrients, sparing them from insect attacks." "The tiny little seed has to find fertile soil within a three centimeter radius from where it lands." "Otherwise, it dies." "Fires clean the forest and leave behind them fertile soil for the seeds." "The heat rises high above the canopy, a signal to the tree that will prepare to release thousands of seeds." "Their strategy of survival is in the quantity of seeds and the extraordinary longevity of those that reach adulthood." "The giant sequoias of Calaveras Big Trees State Park in California were amongst the first to be discovered in 1852." "The stump is about 24 feet in diameter right now, but just recently, we found an old record from 1850s, indicate that at that time when we still had the sapwood up, it was about 27 feet in diameter." "Such dimensions were truly inconceivable for the citizens of the 19th century." "The discoverers of the giant sequoias had a rough time convincing the general public." "They peeled the bark off, took it to the city, reassembled it in the shape of the original tree and tried to convince people that this is what the actual tree looked like, but no one believed it." "They thought it was a hoax 'cause no tree could be that big." "Today, researchers estimate that the biggest sequoia weighs 2,100 tons, roughly the weight of 30,000 human beings." "These extraordinary trees have even mastered the art of being totally useless to humankind." "Upon falling, the sheer pressure of their weight breaks the wood into pieces." "Virtually every other tree in the environment, we've tried to find some use for, whether it provides food, lumber, construction materials, whatever." "These trees have very little use." "For a while, they were being harvested and turned into grape stakes and fence posts, which is a shame for such a massive tree to end up like that, but because it has such limited use, there is never any economic benefit to these trees" "and so we can appreciate them just for what they are." "Visitors and locals speak of a powerful state of emotion when strolling amongst the giants, a spiritual voyage of body and soul, where all notion of time ceases to exist." "If I'm lucky, I may live to be a hundred years old and these things live to be 3,000 years old." "They have an enduring quality about them that to me is really inspiring." "They're powerful trees, and for me, it's almost like, and I think for a lot of people coming through, it's like a pilgrimage." "There's a sense of certainly inspiration, sense of awe." "The impressive longevity of certain trees may well intrigue us." "Could the power of green withhold the secret to immortality?" "Have some trees found the means to fight against cellular aging?" "In the White Mountains of California, perched at an altitude of 3,500 meters, in a lunar landscape, the bristlecone pines are recognized as the oldest trees in the world." "Their silhouette may resemble dead wood." "Nevertheless, they are alive." "THey've chosen to live here because there's nothing here to threaten them." "They're living in somewhat of a sterile environment." "It's free of a lot of pathogens and other things that would affect their health and eventual longevity." "The air is thin, the soil is dry and freezes almost every night, even during their short six week summer." "The oldest bristlecone pine tree is almost 5,000 years old and grows only two and a half centimeters per century." "Almost all the cones on this part of the tree died at the end of the first year of their growing season." "It takes a pine cone actually two years to mature and we only have two of 'em that are going to make it to the end of their development." "Could the secret of their survival be wrapped up within their DNA?" "David Neale, geneticist at the University of California Davis seeks to find out if these trees possess adaptive genetic particularities, genes that may be different from one branch to another of the same tree." "These trees are adapted to live in this very high elevation zone, but if there's warming and they're forced to move to cooler places, there's no place for them to go." "They can't go anywhere from me because there's no up from here." "They're at the top." "So the question is can they adapt to live in this very environment if it becomes warmer here or not?" "They don't have the ability to pick up and move if you don't like the environment like an animal does." "It just picks up and walks away." "These trees have to be able to survive right here where they are born, and do they have the genetic constitution to be able to do that?" "Surely, bristlecone pine trees hold an invisible secret to their immortality." "It's embedded within their genetic code and that's why it's invisible to us." "We have never been able to see or understand their genetic code." "We expect to look and find some unique bits of genetic information." "It may be very, very minor genetic changes, but that are uniquely held by this organism that allows it not only to live in this environment but to live so long in this environment." "What's interesting is they don't actually have to look old to be old." "Probably the oldest looking, the very oldest tree in this forest, you would never think it is the oldest." "Again, that's part of their longevity." "They don't seem to senesce or look old like humans and other organisms do." "It can be old but not look old." "If we can understand the genetic basis of longevity in a bristleclone pine tree, might we use that knowledge in order to increase longevity in other organisms, most notably humans, who seem to want to be able to live forever?" "True immortals are made of wood." "The age of a tree is not strictly limited to its appearance." "The key to the secret of longevity in plants could well be hidden underground." "With its massive root network, the aspen poplar could be the largest of living organisms on Earth." "And at first look, one would think that each one of these trees resulted from a separate seed that grew into an individual seedling and then a tree, but in fact, what we believe has probably happened here" "that each one of these trees results from a shoot emerging from the root of a neighboring tree, such that every one of these trees is actually connected to each other through the underground root system here and that in fact every one of these trees is not different" "but they are exactly the same, that in fact, this is a clone." "All of these trees are genetically identical." "If a fire breaks out, their root network is well protected beneath ground." "Even if the whole forest were to be destroyed, the roots would survive and trees would grow again." "The underground network of roots here is enormous in terms of biomass of these plants, that may in fact have all resulted from a single seed at one point in time." "Can you imagine this huge, you know, many, many megatons of biological biomass" "having resulted from just one seed?" "Here's an individual stem or tree that looks like it's emerged from a root right here, that's actually still staying in a lateral form like a root." "It hasn't even moved up into an erect form like the other trees." "And we believe that poplars may be an example of some of the largest, if not the largest living organism on Earth." "The race is on between scientists, each hoping to be the first to reveal the oldest aspen poplar of our planet." "Some colonies may have roots that originated 80,000 years ago." "It should not be long before genetic research reveals the truth." "On another dimension, the plant that appeared most recently on Earth is a genetically modified petunia." "I have created a new kind of life." "I added my own DNA to the plant and because now this plant has human DNA," "humans are animals, I call it a plantimal, a unique kind of plant that has animal DNA." "So whenever you see the red veins of the flower, my DNA went from my red veins, that is my blood, to the red veins of the flower." "You see red veins, my DNA is there." "When you realize that your DNA functions, actually works in a plant, it can only work in the plant" "if we have something in common, and if we have something in common with plants, that shows very clearly that life is a network and we're all connected." "What you are watching is a natural platimal." "Elysia clarki is half plant, half animal." "To be more precise, these sea slugs are animals that behave like a plant;" "they can photosynthesize." "The sea slugs have incorporated into their own bodies the photosynthetic cells of algae." "When they do not find algae to feed on, they can remain three or four months without feeding, producing their energy exclusively from photosynthesis, exactly as plants do." "It is surprising 'cause animals can't photosynthesize." "Animals have to have some sort of energy input other than carbon and sunlight." "Plants are the only organisms that can survive with just carbon and sunlight, and here's an example of an animal that does it quite well." "I mean, animals aren't supposed to photosynthesize." "That's a entirely plant-like characteristic, but here they are and they do it very well." "To his surprise, Sidney Pierce discovered another species of sea slug, Elysia chlorotica." "Even more efficient, this one can survive for an entire year without eating, producing all required energy entirely from photosynthesis." "As long as the food algae is around, these animals can continue to live very happily and they don't need to photosynthesize at all." "The trouble is, they're sort of like my son." "They eat constantly, and so if they run out of food, then they can photosynthesize." "While humankind focuses on solar panels as a prop for photosynthesis, these small sea slugs are well ahead in the race to a greener energy." "The way humans capture solar power is entirely mechanical and chemical, whereas the sea slugs are able to take the photosynthetic machinery already made right out of the algal cells and put it into their own cells." "So I don't know who's doing better, but sea slugs are doing pretty good." "Scientists are trying to figure out how these sea slugs have evolved with the plant world." "Could it be at all possible that one day, we humans could do likewise, that a share of our cells originates from the plant world and that some of our energy is produced through photosynthesis?" "That would be nice if humans could do it 'cause you could just go out and lay on the beach periodically and stop eating food and paying for groceries and so on." "Science is incessantly pushing back the boundaries that have risen between the plant world and the animal kingdom." "Such boundaries are perhaps not as strong as we once thought." "Researchers are revealing a whole new world, a world which is very much our world." "Life is a vast network and everything is connected."