James Stewart
speaker
4,486 appearances
22 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 5d ago
James Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 17 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Astrum Space · The Science Fact You've Been Taught for Years Is a Lie | Astrum Earth · 28 Apr 2026
podcast
The 2011 study was designed to prove whether it was the terpenes that were signaling for wasp backup.
So the authors allowed the beetles to do their thing and lay eggs on the elm, whilst treating half of the trees with chemicals that stopped them from being able to make terpenes.
They then collected all the odours produced by the trees during this ordeal and presented them to the wasps to see what they'd do.
As the team suspected, the wasps spent significantly more time in the test field when the tree odours included terpenes than when terpene production had been cut off.
With these results, the authors concluded that it is the turkeys that attract the wasps, and that the trees are far more skilled at fending off beetle attacks than we may give them credit for.
So as it turns out, trees have some amazing ways of interacting with the world around them.
Like any living thing on Earth, trees can sense changes to their surroundings and have employed sweets of molecules that help them to respond, whether it's seeking out food, preventing attacks, or calling out for help.
So yeah, trees are amazing, but just maybe not in the way we thought.
And if nothing else, the pushback on the wood wide web should motivate us to understand trees better, as there are still so many fascinating answers to be found.
I'll be honest, I originally expected to tell a more traditional story of the wood wide web, exploring a forest of trees that are all for one and one for all, assisting each other with their intricate network of fungal friends.
But thanks to this new research, that is definitely not how the story unfolded.
But I hope you'll agree that this is still a tale worth telling.
Though they strive to be, scientists are not always right.
Ideas can and should be questioned, details revised and corrections made as their research unfolds.
Science is built on debate and continuous pursuit of knowledge and truth, no matter how long it takes to find what that truth is.
Sadly, the wood wide web may be one of those cases where our heads would turn before the real truth came out.
I hope this video can go some of the way towards setting the record straight, and show that the world of popular science isn't always as infallible as it may seem.
And who knows, maybe next week the world will be captivated by a new narrative with an equally catchy name.
But by then, hopefully we'll have learned from the wood wide web and we can start looking more closely at the results and where they come from before we start signing book deals and making calls to Hollywood.
So let's stay curious, look a little closer and keep giving the trees the attention they've always deserved.
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