How do Trees Really lift Water to their Leaves?

I am interested to learn if there is more evidence supporting Andrew's view that it is best to sleep on a slight decline. Since 1998 is their further emperical evidence in support of the claim? Have their been any tests undertaken in controlled circumstances?

In his 1998 article he explains that "Cattle and sheep, when given a choice all sleep facing uphill". To me this reads as if they prefer to sleep on an incline.

Hospital beds in order to encourage sluggish circulation and avoid thrombosis are designed to raise the feet above, not lower them below, head level. I assume the benefits of this have been endorced by hundreds of years of practical observation.

Andrew makes some big claims for sleeping on a decline of 5 deg. As the benefits claimed are considerable I would appreciate an update, so I can decide if I should copy it.

Robin

Hi Robbyn

I have been trying to enlist the cooperation of the medical profession since 1994, lots of broken promises, despite having convinced quite a few people within the health service that this would save them an awful amount of money and time, not to mention saving patients limbs and lives.

I am currently trying to get a simple study with varicose veins oedema and leg ulcer underway at the local prison. The Health Officer there is very interested and we have the support of a vascular surgeon from Torbay Hospital and Professor’s Urnst and Curnow, also invoved with local health service and universities.

The case histories are from my own attempts to demonstrate just how effective this simple cost free therapy is.

My telephone no is +44 1803524117 should you wish to hear this from the horses mouth, or have any questions which require answers.

Sincerely Andrew K Fletcher

Below is a thread where I have been asking on here for some help to conduct a study that will be accepted by the medical profession.
www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2262

Robbyn:
It seems there are two things to investigate:

1. The pumping action of a tree. Is it gravity aided?
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I notice that you were invited to put together a page length paper for a peer reviewed journal. I would suggest you follow that advice.

2. The medical benefits of sleeping on 5deg declined bed
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I have read the testimonials you kindly sent to me. They are remarkable and the results astounding. I can understand you wanting to pursue this discovery. It may be that the gravity theory does not account for the results. I am not qualified to comment. I know that many discovers of medical breakthroughs were broken by the system demanding explanations rather than results. I do not understand why bed manufactures are not happy to finance a study.


Robin

Its about time they started to give u some constructive comments dad! I've been watching these threads for a while now
I have watched and heard and seen thousands of people from doctors, professors, scientists to journalists and lamers on the net try to rip into my dad for years and try to take down his ideas and accomplishments and have all failed miserably .... he will get recognised in the end ya know!!! just keep motoring on dad!!! .. why is it so easy to spread bad news and it is so difficult to bring a ray of light to the world?

Jason

Wade:
It looks to me like the answer would lie in the active transport of cells... and that if the tree is completely dead when the water moves upward, something is pushing it. perhaps it is the process of death and decomposition that pushes the water upward into the leaves, if, for instance, the circulatory pathways harden and move water upward as they dry up. i admit, I only started researching tree circulation today, and except, of course, for photosynthesis, i have almost no knowledge of the anatomy of a tree, but i do know a significant amount about physiology and this entire topic seems to me like way too much energy put into something that could be found out with a little research. although i admit, i haven't read the entire topic either.

The Experiment at Brixham Overgang Cliffs where water flowed vertical up a single 6 mm bore tubing using 10 mils of salt solution, demonstrating that a tiny amount of denser solution can lift effortlessly many thousands of times it’s own volume in water without any artificial aids, demonstrating clearly a non living physical cause of bulk flow in plants trees, animals and humans. The 10 metre limit for lifting water clearly needs some serious revision.

@Rosy, have you seen the video experiments yet? Take a look at the scaled down version of the Brixham Experiment, here you will see a syringe filled with concentrated saline solution being sucked up under a negative tension. The weight of the salt +resistance of the syringe body shows there is a negative tension in the water and the same happens without salt solution. Mentioning this to advise you that your statement is not correct.

Sorry. It was a siphon in 2005 and it still is.
It still doesn't explain anything that wasn't better explained before.
And I have too little free time to go round the houses on this one with you. Again.

On second thoughts, I'm a sucker for an obvious explanation...

You have added n mL of a denser solution to your dilute solution. Say the density is 2 g/mL rather than 1 then thats added n g extra weight to the "down" arm.
All the water in the "up" and "down" arms is balanced from one side to the other so say your max tube height is 20 m and you inject 10 mL salt solution (weight 20 g), you've just aquired the ability *by siphoning* to lift 10 g, and therefore 10 mL water 20 m up. If the surface of the water under your your "down" arm were 1 m higher up than the surface of the water under your "up" arm I'd expect to see you siphon 200 mL water. If they're only 10 cm different in height it would be 10 times that, so 2 L water. If they were at the same height limiting factors would be things like friction as you're not actually lifting any water that isn't counterbalanced by water on the other side going down.
I can't see the heights of the containers on the Brixham cliffs experiment, but the scaled down version seems to show about 2 mL salt solution, so maybe 2 g of weight falling maybe 1 m, and two containers at near-as-dammit the same height (say 1 cm different), and maybe 3 mL water transferred across.
So you've got enough energy out of your SIPHON to move 2 mL water up 1 m (OK, maybe a bit less, depending on how concentrated your salt solution is) but you're actually lifting about 4 mL up about 1 cm, using maybe 2 % of the energy available from the conventional-physics based explantion in terms of a siphon.

Thank you for the reply Rosy, Ill try to get my head around your post in a bit, but the question that tension does not exist inside the inverted loop of tubing is dismissed because the salt solution is not initially injected into the tube but the syringe plunger together with the salt solution, which is hanging upside down is drawn into the loop of tubing by a negative tension which you said does not exist in your earlier post.

To activate this flow system all that is required is one grain / crystal of salt or sugar in one side, this induces the water filled loop of tubing to circulate. Even half a single crystal would do it. If you look at the other video showing salt crystals dropping into a clear water filled container you can see the flow generated by individual falling crystals as they dissolve, the sunlight shows the current created by this system.

there is no height difference between either of the bottles, the tubes are placed at the bottom of the two bottles. The recipient bottle overflows, the donor bottle level goes down rapidly as water is transferred from one vessel to the other, the displaced water = many times the volume of the added salt solution and should equate to the contents of the donor side of the tube. Which incidentally can be much larger in diameter than the downward flowing side. I have used an additional juxtaposed tube in the donor side to prove this capability and it runs perfectly. I did this to show that the flow is capable of delivering sufficient sap to the leaves to allow for the huge evaporation, which is known to take place at the leaf.

Changing the height of the arms as you put it at 24 metres does not induce a flow through siphoning. Possibly, the elasticity of water prevents this causing the bead of water to break and then water in both sides of the tube irrespective of the differences in levels will fall to the 10 metre level and the space above the water levels is vacuum.

This flow is different from a siphon effect. Because the water molecules are connected and under tension, by cohesion, the first denser molecule descends causing a chain reaction along the entire tube which drags all of the other molecules around much the same as if the water bead were made of elastic.

Andrew