I was ready to be fascinated, but that didn't happen. If this man explained the science to which he is referring, his point might have some meaning. He didn't explain his theory at all. The experiment he is doing (at face value, letting a plant sit in a saucer of water,) has been tried millions of times, and if it was a good way to grow a plant, folks wouldn't show up here constantly with plants that are dead or dying from similar treatment.

That plant in the vid does look like it's dying. I hope he does offer an update. That vid is almost 2 months old.

I agree, I watched a few more of his videos, and wasn't convinced. One was using a hoop skirt, saying the copper hoops do something with energy. He said that plant was deformed (really it was just more green than the others) but the "controls" were experiments too. As a scientist myself, I didn't think the few videos I saw showed were proof of anything. Maybe he was duplicating larger scale studies, but I would not base a book off doing studies with one plant for each experiment. I may watch more later, but it was waaay too late last night when I came across them.

If he's one of the global warming crowd, it shouldn't be a big surprise that he makes giant leaps to reach his conclusions to the exclusion of simple explanations. He apparently prefers an excessively complex model and lots of statistical noise, rather than the KISS approach, even though this is a wonderful opportunity to apply "Occam's Razor".

Let me see .....

* Corn grow good

* It rain too much

* Field flood

* Corn die

* Reason: Must be electromagnetic radiation

Many terrestrial plants easily adapt to being grown in water or a saturated medium via their ability to change their root structure so a tissue called aerenchyma prevails instead parenchyma, parenchyma being a part of normal root structure when the plant is grown in soil or a well-aerated medium. Aerenchyma is a tissue with a greater percentage of intercellular air spaces than normal parenchyma, filled with airy compartments. It usually forms in already rooted plants as a result of highly selective cell death and dissolution of those cells in the root cortex in response to hypoxic (water-logged) conditions in the rhizosphere (root zone). There are 2 types of aerenchymous tissue. One type is formed by cell differentiation and subsequent collapse, and the other type is formed by cell separation without collapse (as in water-rooted plants). In both cases, the long continuous air spaces allow diffusion of oxygen (and probably ethylene) from shoots to roots that would normally be unavailable to plants with roots growing in hypoxic media. In fresh cuttings placed in water, aerenchymous tissue forms due to the same hypoxic conditions w/o cell death & dissolution.

Note too, that under hypoxic (airless - low O2 levels) conditions, ethylene is necessary for aerenchyma to form. This parallels the fact that low oxygen concentration, as found in water rooting, generally stimulates trees (I'm a tree guy) and other plants to produce ethylene. For a long while it was believed that high levels of ethylene stimulate adventitious root formation, but lots of recent research proves the reverse to be true. Under hypoxic conditions, like submergence in water, ethylene actually slows down adventitious root formation and elongation.

What the formation of aerenchymous tissues in roots does is allow the plant to obtain the oxygen it needs for normal root function via diffusion from the upper part of the plant (through all those air spaces in the modified root tissues). The problem is, once the plant has adapted, it can't go back and forth between hypoxic and well-aerated conditions as the soil changes from saturated to air-filled.

Al

BTW - that plant didn't look at all happy to me.

This post was edited by tapla on Sun, Jul 7, 13 at 14:28

Ha no it did not look happy. But the experiment was strictly to see if it would "kill" the plant. Therefore the experiment showed over watering did not kill the plant and the hypothesis was correct, according to the experiment. The problem is this was not a scientifically sound experiment. This was more of a correlation experiment. I had a coworker who was fond of saying this kind of science is the "a comet passed and my horse died, therefore comets kill horses" kind of science. She was awesome, I sure miss working with her. But anyway, the experiment was definitely not sound. There was no control, no consideration of other variables, no mention of any details such as was it the same water for the 6 weeks, or was it changed frequently but still kept at the same level, things like that would be useful.

That said, I didn't really mean to post this to bash the author, but rather to see if anyone else had heard of this theory?

In his other experiments where he subjected his Dieffenbachia to electromagnetic radiation, he could have forgot to factor in adequate light and fertilizer. Therefore, his plants that have deformed leaves could just be malnourished. I think if his theory was correct then lots of people on this forum would have deformed Dieffenbachias cause we commonly grow our plants in environments with high levels of electromagnetic radiation.