Spruce trees stumped (sigh) when it comes to predicting eclipses

Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com

Astreenomers

Feedback is shocked – shocked – to learn that a grove of trees in northern Italy did not, in fact, predict a solar eclipse.

Now, we know what will be going through most readers’ heads at this point: “Are you saying somebody thought trees really could predict a solar eclipse?” To which the answer is “surprisingly, yes”.

The partial solar eclipse in question occurred on 25 October 2022. Ahead of this, botanists led by Alessandro Chiolerio had inserted electrodes into Norway spruce trees to monitor their bioelectrical activity. In April 2025, they reported their findings: “Trees anticipated the eclipse, synchronizing their bioelectrical behaviour hours in advance. Older trees displayed greater anticipatory behaviour with early time-asymmetry and entropy increases.”

With graceful inevitability, here comes the debunking, published in Trends in Plant Science on 6 February and flagged to us by reporter Matthew Sparkes (who should get some sort of honorarium for the number of items he has contributed to Feedback).

Authors Ariel Novoplansky and Hezi Yizhaq point out that the drop in sunlight during the partial eclipse was too small to affect the trees: their leaves were still saturated with sunlight. Furthermore, eclipses of this type recur on a cycle of just over 18 years. The oldest trees in the study were about 70 years old, so they could only have lived through three, which doesn’t seem like enough to have learned the pattern, especially since eclipses take different paths over Earth’s surface.

Feedback has read the original study and we aren’t sure it was necessary to go this in-depth to debunk it. The team only wired up three trees and five stumps. Size isn’t everything, but sample size does matter.

Also, there is a lengthy section in the paper about “Quantum field theory theoretical analysis”. Yes, it’s the Q-word! “Trees are open, and hence dissipative, systems, continuously exchanging (releasing and receiving) matter and energy in various forms with their environment,” it explains. “Moreover, they are aging systems, the origin in the time of their life cannot be moved and their time evolution (the arrow of time) cannot be inverted…” There is a lot more, but after the first paragraph Feedback felt ourselves leaping quantumly into a state of not wanting to read any more.

Still, there is the coincidence of the trees’ electrical activities syncing up in the 14 hours before the eclipse. How can we explain this? Novoplansky and Yizhaq have a suggestion. “A total of 664 lightning strikes occurred from October 22 to 25, 2022,” they write. That includes three strikes within 10 kilometres of the site and within the 14 hours prior to the eclipse. Maybe that had something to do with it.

Don’t spill

Continuing our themes of “people foolishly send us press releases” and “they would say that, wouldn’t they”, Feedback has been told some excellent news about tea.

“The latest scientific research reveals that drinking a cup of tea daily benefits the heart, as well as growing evidence to support cholesterol levels, blood pressure, inflammation and blood clotting,” it seems. This is positive news for Feedback, as we consume rather a lot of tea, and even better for Mrs Feedback, whose bloodstream is about 70 per cent tea.

Who are the bearers of these beneficent tidings? Why, the Tea Advisory Panel, of course. Feedback wasn’t previously aware of the Tea Advisory Panel, but its website informs us it is “supported by an [sic] restricted educational grant from the UK TEA & INFUSIONS ASSOCIATION, the trade association for the UK tea industry”. The panel exists “to provide media with impartial information regarding the health benefits of tea”.

Hence the statements that conclude the press release: “Previous research has shown that the sweet spot is four cups of tea a day… Yet, only a third of Brits (35%) said they drank three to four cups of tea a day … Therefore, our challenge as tea experts and nutrition scientists is to ensure the message about the heart health benefits of tea is clearly communicated to the general public.” Feedback would say more, but we really fancy an espresso.

Universal and free

In our ongoing quest to find the best and worst examples of technical acronyms, Feedback came across a delightful initiative started by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania.

The basic idea is simple enough. There are an awful lot of construction-based toys, from Lego to Stickle Bricks. However, they aren’t interoperable: with a few exceptions, you can’t connect pieces from two different systems.

Hence Golan Levin and Shawn Sims’s decision to create open-source 3D-printable adapters, which can join the parts from different construction systems. If you have a 3D printer, you can download the designs for free and make your own chimeric toys.

It’s all rather lovely. The designers explain that their purpose was to enable “radically hybrid constructive play, the creation of previously impossible designs, and ultimately, more creative opportunities for kids”, providing “a public service unmet – or unmeetable – by corporate interests”.

It seems to Feedback that this kit deserves to be widely used. However, we suspect its appeal to parents is somewhat limited by the creators’ decision to call it the Free Universal Construction Kit.

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