“I think that I shall never see / a poem as lovely as a tree.

Indeed, if they were all this small / we’d never see no trees at all… “

Proving a long-held theory that transpiration in trees is a physical process rather than a biological one, the world’s first synthetic tree isn’t much to look at… hell, you’d need a microscope to really make out the detail.

What use is a synthetic tree, anyhow? Well, it:

… should also be a useful platform for the study the properties of metastable liquids and a starting point from which to design new technologies for the management of water in chemical processes, heat transfer, and environmental engineering.

Water management, eh? Euphemistically speaking, I think that may be a fairly big business in a few decades. [image by SweetOne]