culi18 hours ago
Fun fact. Lightning strikes stimulate fungi to produce more mushrooms. Some shiitake and nameko cultivators in Japan have started using electrical shockwaves and gotten dramatically improved yields (sometimes over 200%). Interestingly enough the idea came from Japanese folklore rather than this science
It's possible that this is an evolved response. Lightning hitting a tree will turn it into bark which is an excellent medium for white rot fungi. Lots of mushrooms might maximize the chance to get your spores there. Alternatively, it might mean you're dying soon and should seed out while you can.
We think of lightning strikes as rare events but when it comes to late-successional trees, they are actually one of the main disturbances. Some trees like Dipteryx oleifera have shown fascinating adaptations to lightning strikes. This tree is highly resistant to its negative effects and promotes the growth of many lianas (woody vines) that make it so when the tree is struck, so are many of its neighbors. After being struck it shows dramatically increased growth to outgrow its now-damaged neighbors
andai9 hours ago
Ozone: the fast life history signal for the mycelial mind!
colanderman21 hours ago
There is in fact no photograph of treetops glowing.
There is a digital UV-wavelength video of the corona, and a visible-wavelength video of the trees.
The paper [1] contains a sole picture with tiny circles indicating where the UV-video detected corona events, overlaid over a frame of the visible-wavelength video.
The paper does also contain a video [2] which overlays a somewhat processed version of the UV video over the visible wavelength video, where UV photon events are indicated by decaying red dots.
[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025GL11...
[2] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSuppl...
raincole19 hours ago
That's some weird semantic nitpicking.
Wikimedia has a category of "photographs of the Sun":
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Photographs_of_t...
Do you think they are not photographs of the Sun because these are not what I see if I look at the sun with my eyes? (In which case I'll see pure white then perma black, I assume.)
pavon10 hours ago
Sure, a photo taken in non-visible spectrum is still a photo. And stacking photos taken with different wavelength filters or sensor can also be considered a photo. For example the headline image of the spruce tips taken in a lab is photo. And based on the description of the UV camera in the paper, they did generate UV video of the tree tops.
However, the linked article and associated paper don't have any such photos (or video) of the corona in the treetops. Instead the UV video was processed with a detection algorithm, and then the visible-light photos and video were annotated with graphed dots of where detections were seen. Those dots aren't a photo of the corona by any reasonable definition.
latexr19 hours ago
YeahThisIsMe17 hours ago
What he explains sounds exactly like what you (or at least I) see when you close your eyes and then put pressure on them.
doubletwoyou16 hours ago
The way I had it explained was trying to look out one eye while the other’s closed
steve19777 hours ago
While reading I thought this is basically visual tinnitus and then the author used exactly that term. As someone with tinnitus, I can definitely understand the longing for "absolute darkness".
dugidugout18 hours ago
This was a very depressing read.
colanderman9 hours ago
Can you point me to the images of corona in the paper which I missed?
t-3op18 hours ago
They're the same as looking at the sun with your eyes. You won't go blind looking directly for a short time. It's just best not to stare for a long time.
moralestapia18 hours ago
Lol.
At work, some guy has been pushing a 2-day feature into its 5th week now, with questions like "what do you mean by (database) table?" "Is <not_a_database_table> a database table?"
Etc...
We have to fill-in RFDs to answer those kind of questions, so the process is massively slow and st...(expunged due to HN guidelines).
So yeah, some people really love their semantics and are willing to do whatever it takes to keep it that way.
[You can take a guess at where this startup will be in 2-3 years ...]
em-bee10 hours ago
wrong thread?
addaon20 hours ago
Sorry, in what way is this not a photograph? Are you saying that a video is not a sequence of photographs, that UV photons captured by a sensor don’t count because human retina sensitivity is low in that range, or some hopefully-less-semantic argument?
clickety_clack20 hours ago
The headline suggests that people have seen treetops glowing and it just hasn’t been captured on video before. The actual pictures and video is of something that nobody could have seen with their eyes.
eel18 hours ago
This reminds me of a chat room interaction I had maybe 25 years ago. The other person was adamant that humans can't see the infrared from TV remotes, and I was adamant that I could. It was pretty a widespread belief (even in school science books) at that time that humans couldn't see infrared. Since then more science was done to prove that, in fact, some humans can see some infrared under some conditions.
I share that mainly to state that humans are amazing and have a wide and inconsistent range of capabilities (and sometimes even mutating into new capabilities!) Personally, I will always hesitate to say "nobody" and I lean towards "no typical human" instead. :)
lukan15 hours ago
I suppose this also depends on the types of remote controls? There are some where I can see red and some where I cannot.
MisterTea14 hours ago
The faint red glow is actual red light as many IR LED's (esp the ones used in cameras for night illumination) are close to the visible spectrum and have some visible light emission.
formerly_proven14 hours ago
850nm is easily visible, but most remotes are 940nm, which is also visible as a faint purple glow but the source needs to be really bright.
dtgriscom14 hours ago
Isn't infrared, by definition, wavelengths beyond what people can see?
jibal9 hours ago
Which people? And no, it's not defined that way: "radiation having a wavelength between about 700 nanometers and 1 millimeter"
WarmWash20 hours ago
You can absolutely see corona discharge like that with your eyes.
If you come to my day job, and we shut off all the lights in the test room, after your eyes adjust in the dark for a minute, you'll see the soft purple glow coming from the edge our 160kV test rig.
Definitely emits UV, but there is enough visible to see it for sure. It comes from the electrons exciting nitrogen in the air.[1]
1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nitrogen_discharge_t...
yetihehe19 hours ago
> (1:If you come to my day job), and (2: we shut off all the lights) (3:in the test room), (4:after your eyes adjust in the dark for a minute), you'll see the soft purple glow coming (5:from the edge our 160kV test rig).
So, 5 different things that make it glow "not coming from treetops". Parent poster wanted to see glowing treetops in a forest, where we might not be adjusted to dark for a minute.
You can also see such corona discharge with benchtop tesla coils even in lighted room, but those are not trees in forest glowing from a storm.
MisterTea14 hours ago
Even a smallish Tesla coil easily produces voltages north of 160kV. I built one using 4" PVC for the secondary with a wound length of maybe ~2 feet of secondary? From memory of the calculations I did at the time I think it was around 350 kV peak? Might have been higher. Threw 24 inch sparks quite easily.
clickety_clack14 hours ago
I’m not saying it can’t be seen, I’m saying that you can’t prove something can be seen by showing me a photo that captures light that I can’t see.
ajkjk19 hours ago
what's the job?
chrisfosterelli20 hours ago
I don't really blame the researchers here but this is yet another article that is happy to have a clickbait headline which any reasonable reader is going to assume will include a picture of "treetops glowing".
At least personally I scanned the article for it and only found the picture at the top, which I was then frustrated to learn that's just a lab photo, and I came here wondering where the actual image is of it in the field so I found OPs comment helpful to indicate that the suggestion there would be a beautiful picture of glowing canopy somewhere is basically a result of editorializing.
colanderman9 hours ago
Which photograph? The one in the article is not from the paper. The paper contains no photographs of corona.
adammarples20 hours ago
Maybe they take issue with the word "glowing", which doesn't usually refer to invisible electromagnetic radiation
Brian_K_White18 hours ago
I was going to say the same.
It's true that the image isn't fiction or a purely fabricated "artists rendering" from data. But it's also true that "filmed" and "glowing" are unusual ways to refer to what happened.
You don't usually say filmed when talking about recording uv or microwaves etc. You technically could, and probably back when film was actually how uv was recorded a few people working in the field probably did, but almost no one else does, or no one at all since decades, which means the author of the title is the one out of step, not the people reading it.
They actually recorded something, and this title is misleading. Both things are true.
amluto16 hours ago
When I worked in a lab that took videos with a UV camera, I still called them videos, and I would absolutely have said that I took a video of the subject (a methanol flame in this case).
Essentially every color photograph you have ever seen is a composite of a red photographic, a green photograph, and a blue photograph.
dang18 hours ago
I've taken the "captured on film" out of the title above and used representative language from the article. If someone can suggest a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again. (But the subject is interesting whether on film or not, let alone "for the first time".)
_Microft8 hours ago
Half of the comments are in this subthread which derailed the discussion on this submission before it even started. Here the damage is done but maybe, please, refrain from doing so elsewhere.
Bjartr18 hours ago
While we're being unreasonably pedantic, it also wasn't caught on film because it was a digital camera.
aaron69521 hours ago
[dead]
chankstein3819 hours ago
I once was about 30-50ft from where lightning struck, standing on my porch looking towards my neighbors' house. I didn't see the actual strike happen but I did feel my hair stand on end and then see basically this coming off of the leaves reaching up towards the sky. Little purple tentacles all reaching upwards.
But then I got to the point in the article where they seemed to explain this wasn't visible to the naked eye.... What did I see?
fooqux16 hours ago
The article said "nearly invisible to the naked eye" (emphasis mine). Between that and the fact the researchers weren't that close to an actual lightning strike (meaning you presumably would have seen a stronger effect), I would believe you saw something.
stronglikedan19 hours ago
> I did feel my hair stand on end
I've experienced this when a strike hit power lines above my head. I didn't see the actual strike either - my friend a the other end of the driveway said it was right above me, but that sounds a little hyperbolic to me despite the ringing in my ears. I think we'd both be dead if it were that close. Either way, it gave me a lifelong respect for lightning.
chankstein3813 hours ago
Same here! I still love watching it but that moment sent me inside and has definitely made me realize it's better to get inside in some instances!
BizarroLand17 hours ago
I've been indirectly hit by lightning, it struck my mom's house while I was running inside from the rain and at least part of it went through the wet iron handrail I was holding and hit me too.
I was super lucky as so much of it had bled off that it felt more like a slap that left me all tingly for hours.
lightedman16 hours ago
You saw it, the human visual response curve is horribly uneven between individuals. Some can see fairly good into the UV range (especially those who have had cataract surgery,) while some can't even see 415nm violet but can see blue and red-mixed purple all day.
ihsw19 hours ago
This article describes ("corona discharge") what is the prelude to what you are describing ("upward streamer".)
mlhpdx21 hours ago
Having lived in the PNW all my life, and worked closely with our friend Doug (the fir trees), this article brings up old mental images of otherwise healthy needles with browned (dead) tips in the crowns.
Coincidence? Probably.
Very cool phenomenon to catch visually.
t-3op20 hours ago
Maybe not a coincidence! The previous research linked in the article mentions this in lab testing:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022JD03...
> Visually, the corona discharges generated on the leaves were either small purple-blue point discharges or elongated purple-blue discharges, and usually formed on the tips of the leaf closest to the source of the electric field (Figure 1). Sometimes the corona discharges were steady and constant, but other times they would dim and brighten in an unsteady pulse. When the corona was turned off, the tips of the leaf where the discharges occurred were often burned and browned, even for the weakest electric fields applied to the leaves.colanderman21 hours ago
[flagged]
arrowleaf20 hours ago
Human eyes can be sensitive down to 380nm, the UV range goes up to 400nm. Birds and insects can see this. We can see this, using UV filters such as shown in the article. I get that it's fun to be a pedant sometimes, but come on.
colanderman9 hours ago
I did not state that humans cannot see corona.
Nor is the paper is about humans seeing corona.
It is about detecting UV photons using specialized equipment.
Lalabadie21 hours ago
Great time to read about St Elmo's Fire!
_joel20 hours ago
Sounds like a man in motion :)
ortusdux20 hours ago
It would be amazing if there was an electrical mechanism behind crown shyness.
calibas21 hours ago
I notice the article, the paper, and the "plain language" summary of the paper don't mention the common term for this phenomenon, St Elmo's fire.
JumpCrisscross4 hours ago
Is there a hypothesised purpose? Do discharges from plants that evolved in biomes with frequent lightning strikes differ from those that evolved without them?
antimora19 hours ago
> “This just goes to show that there’s still discovery science being done,” said McFarland, lead author on the paper. “For more than half a century, scientists have theorized that corona exists, but this proves it.”
"proves it" ?? What kind of science is that?
dlcarrier18 hours ago
The lines about oxidizers cleaning the air reminds me of the aspects of late 1800's and early 1900's product marketing oversimplifying hygiene. Bleach everything, whether it needs it or not; anything that indiscriminately kills all bacteria can only make the world a better place!
GolfPopper20 hours ago
Reading the article about the unknowns here, how the electrical field interacts with the trees, and what role the produced hydroxyl plays in the atmosphere, makes me think about how daunting the idea of building a sustainable, human-friendly ecosystem off-Earth is.
dreamlayers20 hours ago
What is new here? I thought corona discharges during storms had already been well known for a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Elmo%27s_fire
none258520 hours ago
Article claims it had never been seen outside the lab before (for trees specifically I guess)
imzadi20 hours ago
I've seen these images before, or some very similar images. So this is based on old photos or it has indeed been done before.
colanderman9 hours ago
The images in the article are not from the paper. The paper contains no images of corona.
dylan60418 hours ago
A lot of the PopSci sites rotate articles so that one will publish something followed by another some time later.
Also: "made their way down the nation’s eastern coast in June 2024", so it's possible the PopSci articles were based on early releases about this study and this is the actual study being finalized and released officially????
867-530918 hours ago
> They chose the Sunshine State because of its propensity to produce frequent thunderstorms
made me giggle
subw00f15 hours ago
Reminds me of Hyperion Tesla trees.
wildylion21 hours ago
Storm troopers, but not the kind you'd expect.
brador20 hours ago
Will head hair on humans do this too?
dlcarrier18 hours ago
It's not very conductive, so it won't have any appreciable discharge, but the hairs will repel each other, which is easy to see. Search for "Van de Graaff generator" and "hair", to see lots of pictures.
dylan60418 hours ago
Wouldn't we smell it if it did?