New answers tagged flora
3
votes
Accepted
Flora of Radiotroph-Dominated World
Ramifying subsurface hyphae.
https://symsoil.com/mycorrhizal-fungi/
Plants maximize surface area exposed to light, balanced against needs to conserve water and preserve structural stability.
For an ...
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4
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Flora of Radiotroph-Dominated World
They would likely take the form of lichen or slime mold, sprawling over the ground and other surfaces. Most trees or shrubs have the form they do to compete with other plants for their food source (...
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Design of a piezoelectric tree to harness the wind?
This is under development...
From McCloskey, 2017:
...In previous efforts, Oh et al. (2009) built a miniature wind energy-harvesting tree of ten plastic leaves bearing polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) ...
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1
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Design of a piezoelectric tree to harness the wind?
You asked two questions.
1- "How can this design be improved upon to make it more effective?"
There is no original design. The picture you have shown has nothing to do with piezoelectric ...
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2
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What kind of star would allow for red plant life?
To continue from my last post on this subject, if you want red plants, then you probably want to have a star that emits plenty of light in shorter wavelengths. If most of the emitted energy is red or ...
- 62.8k
2
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Viable alternatives to lignin and cellulose for cell walls and wood?
Polycarbonate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycarbonate#Construction_materials
lexan sheets
There are many types of plastic. Above is polycarbonate; the stuff is strong, light and durable. ...
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0
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How would I modify a coffee plant to grow outside the tropics?
Why would you need to? How many readers do you think would see a problem with coffee plants growing anywhere you said?
Of those readers, how many might see any problem with "… the plants were (...
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11
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Accepted
Viable alternatives to lignin and cellulose for cell walls and wood?
The space of possible structural chemicals, as AlexP observed, is Quite Big.
Cellulose is a polysaccharide, for example. Chitin is another, and is used for the cell walls of fungi. You don't have any ...
- 62.8k
8
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Viable alternatives to lignin and cellulose for cell walls and wood?
Chitin or Keratin
From Wikipedia:
Chitin $(C_8H_{13}O_5N)$ is a primary component of cell walls in fungi, the exoskeletons of arthropods such as crustaceans and insects, and the radulae, cephalopod ...
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2
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How would I modify a coffee plant to grow outside the tropics?
It's probably fairly straightforward to use GM splice in a "natural antifreeze" gene to give the plant some frost-tolerance. I suspect the reason it hasn't already been done in the real ...
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