Photo credit: Flickr user “brambleroots” (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Sounds like a silly question but, really, where does all the matter in a tree come from? Think about it for a moment.

Trees grow in the ground, so it’s intuitive to assume that the matter that makes a tree might come from the ground. But the truth is, trees are actually formed largely out of the air. (Yes, air!) Trees, and all photosynthesizing plants, use the energy of the sun to split atmospheric carbon dioxide into its constituents: oxygen and carbon. And carbon is the primary building block of the tree — and all of life on earth, too.

Ask Nature Nugget Ep 8: Plants and Plastic introduced how nature makes materials in ways vastly different from our own industrial heat, beat, and treat methods. We’ve found two additional videos that serve as a great starting point for a discussion on nature’s materials.  Read on for more.

The video first is from Derek Miller of Australia’s science video site, Veritasium.  In it he addresses the question of “Where Do Trees Come From” in a playful way, including on-the-street interviews in which he probes common assumptions with Socratic questioning.

The second features the late great Richard Feynman, theoretical physicist, nobel prize winner, and educator. His exuberance is palpable in a short clip from BBC’s 1983 series Fun to Imagine, in which he explains how a tree is made largely from sunlight and air, and how when you burn a log, you’re essentially releasing the sun’s energy that was captured by the tree.

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