Return to David's theory of evolution; food need (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, October 26, 2022, 16:37 (548 days ago) @ David Turell

This is one of new approaches to improve plant production:

https://phys.org/news/2022-10-uv-to-red-growth-global-food-issues.html

"An interdisciplinary team from Hokkaido University's Engineering and Agriculture departments and the Institute for Chemical Reaction Design and Discovery (WPI-ICReDD) has developed a europium-based thin-film coating that they demonstrated accelerates both vegetal plant and tree growth. This technology can improve plant production speed and has the potential to help address global food supply issues.

"Plants convert visible light to energy via a process called photosynthesis. In addition to visible light, sunlight also contains ultraviolet (UV) light. Researchers in this study aimed to provide plants with additional visible light to use in photosynthesis by employing a wavelength-converting material (WCM) that can convert the UV light into red light.

"Researchers developed a WCM based on a europium complex and made a thin-film coating that can be applied to commercially available plastic sheets. They not only showed that the film converts UV light to red light, but also that the film does not block any of the beneficial visible light from the sun. The film was then tested by comparing plant growth using sheets with and without the WCM coating. Trials were performed for both Swiss chard, a vegetal plant, and Japanese larch trees.

"In summer, when days are long and sun irradiation is strong, no significant difference was observed for Swiss chard when using the WCM films. In winter, however, when days are shorter and sunlight is weaker, Swiss chard plants grown using the WCM films showed 1.2 times greater plant height and 1.4 times greater biomass after 63 days. Researchers attributed this accelerated growth to the increased supply of red light provided by the WCM films.

"In summer, when days are long and sun irradiation is strong, no significant difference was observed for Swiss chard when using the WCM films. In winter, however, when days are shorter and sunlight is weaker, Swiss chard plants grown using the WCM films showed 1.2 times greater plant height and 1.4 times greater biomass after 63 days. Researchers attributed this accelerated growth to the increased supply of red light provided by the WCM films.

"'By using a coating of wavelength-changing material, we were able to successfully create a transparent film and demonstrate its ability to accelerate plant growth," said Sunao Shoji, lead author of the study published in Scientific Reports.

"'By rationally designing the light-emitting ion, we can freely control the color of emitted light to be other colors like green or yellow, so we expect to be able to create wavelength converting films that are optimized for different plant types. This opens a large avenue of future development for next generation agricultural and forestry engineering.'"

Comment: one example of the necessary research that continues to improve our plant food supply. The science behind food production has resulted in the following result: fewer people in agriculture are producing more food.