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Veritasium
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These resources have been reviewed and selected by STEM Learning’s team of education specialists for factual accuracy and relevance to teaching STEM subjects in UK schools.
The most amazing thing about trees
This video applies physics to explain how trees can move water up their trunks over 10m, which is the natural limit of sucked water. The ideas of transpiration, osmotic pressure and capillary attraction are considered. The explanation shows how a negative pressure is be obtained from the intermolecular forces and those of water molecules with their surroundings. The large negative pressure would normally suggest that water should be in the gaseous phase, yet the tree overcomes this by offering no activation sites for phase change.
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