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Where Do Trees Get Their Mass?

Veritasium · 2.5M views · 2012-03-12 · 4:10

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Overview

Veritasium asks people where a tree's mass comes from, then explains that most of a dry tree's mass originates from carbon dioxide in the air. It combines street interviews with a short explanation of photosynthesis.

On Hacker News

HN uses it as the go-to demonstration of how unintuitive mass conservation is, especially in weight loss and burning threads.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2015–2021

Topics

Scientific method & science communicationBiology & biotechnologyEveryday physics & science demos
Search by tags
treesphotosynthesiscarbon dioxidemisconceptionsscience education

What people said

lathiat · 2021-04 · Strong recommendation

"Where do trees get their mass?" - [VIDEO] This was highly enlightening the first time I watched it :)

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JshWright · 2017-11 · Recommendation

An interesting corollary to this is "Where do trees get their mass?" Veritasium has a fun video demonstrating how unintuitive this is: [VIDEO]

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lkbm · 2015-04 · Recommendation

There's a nice Veritasium episode wherein he asks people on the street where a tree's mass comes from: [VIDEO] (This isn't just one of those "let's laugh at how dumb people on the street are" videos; it's done explicitly as a learning exercise. His PhD looked at how addressing misconceptions and going from there to correct explanations works much better than simply providing explanations: [LINK] ) I thought of it upon seeing the first chart in the BMJ article.)

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Sources

Video by Veritasium, played through YouTube.

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