17 replies
21h5m
Imagine how much digging went into drawing those pictures
11 replies
20h53m
Funny, 1.18k is more characters than 1180 and usually I think of using the k form for less approximate values, e.g. 1k
6 replies
19h48m
1.18k implies +/- 5, whereas 1180 implies exactly 1180. Maybe the count isn't precise, or is changing?
4 replies
15h29m
If I remember my high school math “1180.” with the decimal implies exactly 1180
“1180” without the decimal implies only 3 significant digits.
1 replies
14h43m
nobody adds the decimal digit to integers, though
1180 can be 4 significant digits if the count is precise
0 replies
13h46m
Nobody really uses 1.18k outside of math, engineering, and scientific contexts either.
A kagi or Google search for 1.18k in quotes returns this very HN thread and mostly a bunch of resistors, very few organic uses (some youtube videos about subscriber counts is all I see).
0 replies
13h56m
Never heard of such notation.
For me ≈1180 would mean that it's not exactly 1180.
But a better title would be something like “Over a thousand plant root system drawings”.
0 replies
12h22m
where did you go to high school?
0 replies
10h24m
If it were to imply an interval, then it would be [1175, 1185).
3 replies
19h9m
In EE this problem doesn't exist, it's 1k18.
2 replies
14h34m
interestingly, in Chinese you would say 1k1h8 when pronouncing the numbers
1 replies
11h38m
But then they have that annoying rule about saying a "zero" when there is a 0 for a magnitude between non-zero digits, for example 108 is one-hundred-zero-eight.
0 replies
3h37m
That's because in Chinese it's the higher digit having priority in emissions - if you don't specify zero the it means 180
8 replies
20h54m
The significant digits in that title a killing me. They’ve really gone out of their just to obscure the final digit.
they should have just given the full number (1,18x) or rounded to the hundreds (1.2k)
4 replies
15h46m
RIP my friend. Good thing you found the energy to warn us before dieing. By the way, your first sentence is missing a verb. Your second sentence is missing the word "way". Your third sentence should end with a period and the first word should be capitalized. I hope you can still use your last breaths to correct these mistakes. We must give our everything to avoid further casulties in future generations.
0 replies
13h30m
Nit: casualties
0 replies
12h23m
it's not about mistakes, it's about style over substance
0 replies
12h25m
It's "R.I.P.", not "RIP".
0 replies
13h46m
Is dieing a correct word? Should it not be dying? :)
1 replies
17h24m
1.18k is more characters than 1180. Who came up with this title?
0 replies
4h24m
But not more characters than 1,180
0 replies
17h0m
Originally, there were 1030 drawings. So it was titled 1k.
Then, 110 drawings were added. The title needed to change, so it was titled 1.1k.
Then, 42 drawings were added. The title needed to change, so it was titled 1.18k.
In 2 weeks, 6 more drawings will be added. The title will need to change, and this can be resubmitted as 1.188k.
7 replies
14h32m
Absolutely fascinating stuff, love it!
If you're doing any kind of gardening, you can find the root system of many common plants and weeds. Some examples:
- bindweed: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/193/rec/1 the white meaty rhizomes go at about 10 cm but the actual roots can go much much deeper (2.2 meters in this example)
- horsetail: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/753/rec/1 also grows deep roots; extremely sturdy - resists many herbicides and can spread through spores.
- goutweed: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/1435/rec/... dense network of thin roots
- dandelion: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/676/rec/2 this example has roots reaching 4.5 meters!
- potato: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/1014/rec/... was looking for a tomato plant but found this instead (they are the same genus); you can see the tubers too.
- carrot: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/1049/rec/... the edible taproot is not the only part
4 replies
11h24m
The dandelion root is 450 cm?! That explains why pulling up the sprouts does nothing to prevent it from sprouting again.
0 replies
8h9m
To add to what aszantu said: plants with deep roots can be very healthy for a garden because they essentially draw nutrients that have soaked deeper into the soil back up. So one way of looking at them is that they are basically mining soil nutrients from below for your garden for free. Perhaps that will make repeatedly mulching them a less frustrating task.
Also, while there are of course legitimate reasons to consider certain plants weeds (e.g. they maybe be poisonous, toxic, or displace other plants that you like more), dandelions are mainly the victim of marketing from pesticide manufacturers half a century ago.
0 replies
6h47m
Those are extreme examples, most probably in sand or a loose mix. Roots need oxygen also so can grow a lot in this conditions as long as they are watered.
Most dandelions live in heavy clay. There will be much shorter, reaching just the phreatic level.
0 replies
8m
This was an extreme example that I found in this collection. Here's something more common (20 cm): https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/576/rec/1
But there was also a specimen with over 2 meters: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/550/rec/3
It varies, but yeah, they are surprisingly deep.
0 replies
9h21m
they're amazing, you can make salad with lemon and salt, or fry in butter and eat with your steak. Also the roots are edible. And dandelion pulls nutrients for other plants from below, once the nutrients have been used up, the dandy will leave on its own.
0 replies
10h58m
Thanks for links to some of the more interesting ones.
This could be useful for understanding compatibility of plants below ground. The dandelion for example seems totally innocuous, whereas goutweed leaves no space for others.
0 replies
13h20m
Bejeezus how do I unsee the bindweed one!? No wonder it takes so much time to keep it at bay.
2 replies
20h17m
Project idea for someone sufficiently motivated: Some of the drawings show rhizomes in root systems, but I don't see a way to search for that.
1 replies
17h25m
search for any known plant w/ rhizobia symbiosis
0 replies
9h4m
Rhizomes are underground plant stems that propagate a plant, different than rhizobia which are root symbionts of plants.
2 replies
12h35m
Wow, these are astonishing. The trees have much shallower roots than I thought. I assumed they went down as deep as the tree is tall! And the smaller plants have much deeper roots than I thought.
1 replies
11h28m
And much wider that most people think. Generally the roots of trees are 1,5x to 2x the crown.
Roots need oxygen, going more than a few meters down in the soil and conditions aren't very beneficial anymore. Most of the soil life (and nutrients) are in the top few inches.
0 replies
5h40m
Yes, also wider! Do the smaller plants only look like they have longer roots because they're going to about the same absolute depth?
1 replies
20h6m
Somewhere an AI is pumping it's fists in excitement
0 replies
17h31m
I'm a human pumping my fists in excitement on AI's behalf
1 replies
19h5m
Why 1.18k and not 1180?
0 replies
13h4m
1k18
1 replies
19h28m
A massive effort led by Herr Dipl. -Ing Dr. Erwin Lichtenegger going from 1960 up till 2009 was what I looked at. Was interested for a while to get these into a 3D format but never got a reply from the library or the Pflanzensoziologisches Institute. I think these would look great animated and can only wonder what the good doctor would have achieved archiving with today's tools. Effort and dedication like that applied over time is a rare thing I am glad they are well preserved as works of art as much as science.
Ps also the workbooks of Dr. Santiago Ramon y Cajal on brain neurons are museum quality pieces with some startling similarities to these roots from a distance.
0 replies
7h38m
Shame that the book is over 200€
0 replies
7h8m
Too bad it does not contain any of the grape (genus Vitis) varieties.
0 replies
14h8m
Is this available as a dataset?
0 replies
9h26m
In a way this reminds me of the neuron cell trace database from the Allen Brain Atlas...
0 replies
2h18m
Wish they the images was available at even higher resolution. The highest resolution is decent, but not close to fully sharp in the details.
0 replies
12h38m
As above, so below, as below so above
0 replies
20h48m
USDA Pomological Collection is another set if you want to see the fruiting bodies.
https://search.nal.usda.gov/discovery/collectionDiscovery?vi...
0 replies
3h11m
How were these drawings made? It seems the only accurate way would be to painstakingly excavate soil around the root systems a few tiny clumps at a time so as to record how the root system really is shaped prior to any disturbance. This would mean slowly observing the root system from shallower to deeper levels, then reconstructing the side views seen in the drawings.
Growing the plants in some sort of 2D glass observation vessel in order to observe the roots from the side would cause the roots to grow more unusually than in nature.
Very curious how these were done.
0 replies
18h52m
Great way to view what is normally hidden, really makes me appreciate plants.
0 replies
11h38m
These are amazing and very informative. There is an important caveat to consider: how roots actually grow depends a lot on the soil. Sand or clay, moisture and especially if and where there is compaction has a huge impact. A lot of root systems can't even penetrate heavily compacted soil, so you can imagine there is a lot of variability.
0 replies
16h2m
And then people think root cause analysis means finding the one root cause.
How was this captured? I mean they are just drawing but they seem relativly new.
I'd kinda guess they were lab grown with some sort of imaging on the 2 sides, but they are 2d drawings.
Did they really dig them up and and map them out... Maybe water them with a fluorescent dye to get depth info...
Super curious.
My initial ideas were injecting the tree with a chemical and zapping it with radar, and growing it hydroponically in translucent gravel. But this seems wildly impractical.
They probably just have a team of students dig them up with a brush, one layer of soil at a time.
I imagine that too. How would you map the root system of a tree. Can’t grow a tree in the lab.
(Someone’s gonna reply with a link where someone grew a tree in a lab but you know what I mean)
https://www.ediblegeography.com/rootstock-archaeology/
There's some detail here about how British researchers developed apple tree rootstocks, including photos of whole trees that have been excavated and reassembled.
Couple it with this documentary:
https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Apples:_British_to_the_...
Aren't all the drawings just one 2d slice? You would just have to cut the soil in a line through the plant with a sharp spade and remove enough on one side to make the drawing.
In gravel won't work, as the structure of the ground has a high impact on the shape of roots.
As I can confirm, trying to grow carrots in heavy clay ground for example.
There's a computerphile video [0] that looks at one way people take 3d x-rays to look at plant roots (I haven't re-watched it yet so unsure if it's related to the article)
Edit: Look at about 6:50 in the video for a render of a root system.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qrl__J4vYok
With the gravel thing, you wouldn't necessarily even get the same structure as in the wild. Plants can grow to fit their surroundings.
They're pen drawings, done by hand. Most of the history of Botany was done this way - Drawings by skilled artists, using life samples painstakingly removed from the soil, as was most of the history of biology and physiology.
You can grow plants specifically for this purpose, using less dense soil so that you can more easily extract the root system without damaging it.
Wouldn't the soil density affect the root system?
Yes. There aren't two root systems identical. I assume that this plants were cultured in a sandy or hydroponic mix.
But the main goal is the generalization and to know how long roots can grow. For trees they wanted to know also if roots can grow up the hill against gravity (they do it all the time). This is useful to understand how stable is the structure and how useful to fix soil in place and fix erosion processes.
The dune melon root is particularly funny. You can almost hear the root sniffing water right and left in the Namibian desert
Imagine the patience required, first to wait years until the roots are established, then painstakingly unearth them.
It's fairly amazing the amount of labor that went into projects in the past.
Now as the value of someone's time went up, it feels not economically feasible to do these anymore.
Not to mention that half of the people doing the projects, at least in Britain, were rentier aristocrats who didn't need to work
The Baumol effect [1] all over again, I'm thinking about it more and more lately.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Luckily it's a University project. And economic feasibility does not apply.
Or should not. Unfortunately some universities do take this into consideration, rather than just scientific value.
Yeah, the methodology here is bothering me. Did they really dig 4m+ deep? Must be really hard work, but impressive nevertheless. Maybe they did use some water spades to ease up the digging?