What’s Trending: Suicidal Plants? So Metal.

0:00It is time now for what's trending sponsored by dynamic electric quality workmanship outstanding service and prompt response for all your electrical needs. Reach out online at dynamic dash electric dot com here in the studio with Victor Lewis. Good morning, low. I did a little bit of pre work for trends. So I've got a few in the chamber. I'm going to do the thing that I do where I give you a choice. All right, do you want to talk about exactly how much metal a plant can have inside of it? Do you want to talk about its champagne? But it's not. Are you going to talk about saxophones? I want to talk about metal plants. Cool. The metal plant ones is fascinating. Yeah. So a key question plaguing the world. Can you shove a saxophone into a Venus flytrap? Yes, you can. It won't go well with a flytrap, but it can take place. A key question plaguing the world these days is how exactly we're going to extract important metals from the earth. I know that's an uncomfortable way to phrase that, but it kind of is the reality of the situation. We got metals in the in the dirt. God get them out because we need them for other stuff. And a lot of

1:00mining solutions, extraction strategies are to put it very gently in elegant and damaging. And one of the potential solutions being brought up right now that typically is, you know, reserved for stuff that is going to absolutely obliterate your local environment. We got some data and some experiments suggesting that we ought to add plants into the mix for our various mining strategies. There's about 721 species of plants, according to Sarah DeWert writing for biographic, where the G is capitalized or a fun way to make your grand title pop a little bit. That's a good title for like a nature journal. I agree. Biographic is really good. This is over 700 species of plants that hyperaccumulate, meaning that they extract a given element from the ground. And most of the time for more than 500 of these plants, the element in question is nickel, which it's not perfect as hyperaccumulating plants can become 5% metal by weight before dying. There's how much more to have plants 5% metal by weight before dying.

2:02I was tempted to look up the number that it would be for humans by weight. But I decided not to because I didn't want to know. And I feel like that would be inject even more bad stuff into my search algorithms. Before you continue, let me just point out that a ground like fern that is 5% made of metal, but cannot be any more metal is the worst marvel superhero ever. What's your superpower? Well, I can accumulate mercury in my liver. And one day I will die in this way. We're all X man. But this hyperaccumulation is obviously not something that is I guess purposefully evolutionarily selected for. It's not great for the plants, right? But we are currently studying plants that would desire seek out in the same way that you can get carbon monoxide poisoning. Your lungs as a human being love carbon monoxide,

3:05but you're not supposed to be breathing that these some plants have specific root systems that attract and seek out these metals. arsenic, cadmium, cerium, copper, cobalt, lanthanum, manganese, neodymium, nickel, selenium, thalium, zinc, all of these are metals that we need that are an increasingly short supply. And there seems to be a non zero chance that if we find extremely polluted places, welcome to earth. And we just see them with the appropriate plants that are destined for death. We can harvest the metals from the plants and extract them from the ground. Why am I getting real hard Douglas Adams vibes from this? Isn't he the one who has the the animal that like actively wants to die? That's Douglas Adams, right? Or am I thinking of Pratchett? I think Pratchett is the one where it's a Pratchett. The livestock that you raise and you can feel good about eating it. Yes, that's the goal because it actively wants to me. Is that Pratchett there? That sounds like a very Pratchett-esque thing. It also kind of sounds like a Douglas Adams thing. My problem is I've only read

4:07like one Douglas Adams book and a couple of Pratchett books. So I'm getting this like second hand from other people, but that whoever did that someone's listening who knows text me. Hey, if you know, get in touch. I would love to know exactly what this is so I can check it out because I was just thinking about we've got like a minute left, but I wanted to make this point to you off mic anyway. So I might as well do it now. I just had a conversation with someone that going along with our earlier conversation about what we're doing with LLMs and like wearing things and how it's affecting our brain that we are gradually getting to the point where we can keep track of like the electrical signals and interpret the electrical signals in our brain and translate them directly into like what are you thinking? What are you experiencing? What are you seeing? And then the reverse is also true that if we know that then we can go into the brain and ping things to make you think and make you see and make you believe in whatever. I was like, man, of all the science fiction novels and movies that have tried to predict the future who would have thought

5:07inception would turn out to be the one that's most accurate. And now it's inception and freaking Terry Pratchett of all things. I mean, I've everyone thought it was going to be Arthur C Clark, but no, it's Terry Pratchett and Christopher Nolan, the two voices of our time out there. Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clark are backing all smart with their spectacles, but no turns out they were dummies all along.