Monday, November 10, 2014

Temperature, Growth and Development

Photosynthesis

It would be nice to fill up the space with plants everywhere crowding one another to capture the most amount of sun rays as possible thus not loosing any of it. This could lead to lush vegetation and a great storage of energy. If a lot of such trees and vegetation are edible, then we would be supplying the world with lots of food too by making the most use of sunlight through maximum photosynthesis.

Reflecting Sun Rays

Reflecting sun rays on plants using ponds has been a technique used in permaculture to provide plants with heat in colder regions. In contrast, solar panels have been used in above vegetation in agricultural land in hot regions in order to provide shade for the plants and at the same time collect energy from the sun!

Red Leaves

Leaves of plants are not always green. Sometimes when the leaves are still young, for instance, they are reddish in color. This might be that those young leaves in this phase of their development need a specific wavelength of sunlight and thus they have their non-green color to absorb the wavelength of sunlight they are in need of.

Temperature, Growth and Development

The rate of development of an organism tends to increase faster than the rate of growth of that organism as temperature increases. This concept is interesting and can be considered when one wants to grow trees and wants them to bear fruit as soon as possible. Mango trees may take several trees to bear fruit particularly of planted using seeds. Similarly date palm trees take several years to bear fruit. It would be interesting to consider how temperature could speed up the development phase. Thus dates might be smaller in size, as a result of increased temperature, while the date palm tree starts bearing dates in a shorter period of time.

Complexion

It is interesting to reflect on the complexion of humans living in different geographic areas and to try to understand why each geographical region has its own complexion. People living in sun-stricken regions close to the equator in Africa tend to have dark complexions while those closer to the North Pole tend to have fair complexions. Why is this so? What results in this and what function does this have?

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