Physics World April 2018

Plant physics: a blossoming field of research

In this special issue there are five features for you to tuck into, including one examining the ingenious disordered nanostructures that help flowers to become coloured and attract pollinators. You can also learn about the challenge of growing plants in space, a physics technique to image a plant’s roots, and a “pump-free” system for cooling hypersonic planes that mimics the “transpiration” that carries water from a tree’s roots to its leaves. We end by asking: could quantum physics explain photosynthesis?

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