Thanks to Genshin Impact for sponsoring today's episode.
All right, class, your assignment was to demonstrate reactions incorporating the tree
based element of Dentro. Tartaglia, I see you're using your Hydro powers, very good there. Hu Tao,
Yours is, umm, burning. Not entirely sure what you expected there, but yeah, it's a
reaction. Yae Miko, how are you getting along? Show them
Sorry Yae, but you'll find that wood isn't a very effective conductor of electricity. I’m
going to have to lower your score. Emerge
A plus.
Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory. The show that loves its waifus but not as
much as it loves its science. And there is plenty of both to talk about today. Thanks
to our sponsor Genshin Impact, the game has just released their fourth country update.
In it, you'll be exploring the new region of Sumeru featuring a plethora of biomes ranging
from the lush rainforests around the capital city to a desert full of underground ruins
and buried lore. The main story quest focuses on a time loop where several characters start
to realize that they've been reliving the same day over and over again, which itself has some
fascinating scientific implications. But that's not what I want to focus on today. You see, each
new party member in Genshin Impact is associated with one of seven different elements: hydro, pyro,
cryo, electro, geo and anemo. But at the start of this new storyline, we're introduced to Nahida,
an Archon of a brand new element known as Dentro, which comes from the Greek déndron, meaning tree.
Now plant based powers, always fun to use in games. But there's more here than
just a vine whipping in razor leaves. Combat in Genshin Impact is based on creating elemental
reactions by combining different elements. Most do what you'd expect, combine hydro and cryo, and
you're getting yourself a freeze reaction. Combine cryo and pyro and you get the melt reaction. Makes
sense. But with these new dentro powers, things start to get a little bit more unexpected.
Sure, combining dentro with pyro causes burning and combining dentro with hydro
causes the growth of seeds, nothing out of the ordinary there. But what really captured
my curiosity was when I started mixing plants with electricity. Now I'm sure we all remember
second grade science class, where we learn that wood isn't the best conductor of electricity,
but it doesn't seem to be that way in Genshin Impact when you use Yae Miko’s electro attacks
with Nahida's dentro ones your attacks get stronger. Which at first might seem obvious,
combining two attacks equals one stronger attack, but it also produces a quicken effect.
And no, I'm not talking about personal finance software here. This is a base effect which
increases the damage of your next electro or dendro attack, creating either aggravate or
spread respectively. Now, that alone was unexpected, but even more interesting was
when you mixed three element:s dentro plus hydro equals bloom, but mixing in electro as the third
ingredient creates an elemental cocktail known as hyper bloom, turning the seeds into guided
missiles that seek out the nearest enemy. I don't care how many gigawatts you got.
You are not getting seeds to leap up into the air to become guided missiles, right? Right?
Well, I was curious about these reactions and whether or not they were based in some
form of reality. So I did a bit of digging only to find that there is way more to the
relationship between plants and electricity than our school science classes would have us believe.
So stick with me theorists, because I got a feeling that today's theory is
really going to grow on you. So outside of strapping some jumper cables onto my ficus,
where can I see the effects of electricity on plants?
Well, one of the most common occurrences are during lightning storms. Lightning
occurs when particles inside a cloud collide with each other, knocking electrons free,
which then attach to other particles. The particles that lose their electrons now have
a slightly positive charge and are lighter, thus they go to the top of the cloud. The ones that
gain electrons are now heavier and have a slightly more negative charge, causing them to go to the
bottom of the cloud. Those slightly negative particles also now need a way to equalize.
So when the positive and negative charges grow large enough, that's when you get lightning. It's
the discharges as everything equalizes. The ground is also positively charged,
which is why lightning is sometimes able to jump downwards towards Earth. But here's
where things start to get interesting. You see air isn't a very good conductor,
and lightning wants to take the path of least resistance. That's why it'll strike a lightning
rod or a tall building. they’re the fastest path to a positive charge and are often made of
conductive materials like metal. And while trees aren't exactly the most conductive, they are tall.
So they immediately become a much more attractive option than just traveling through plain old
air. And the relationship between trees and lightning doesn't just stop there. Trees are
made up of roughly 50% water, with a lot of that moisture contained just below the bark.
Meanwhile, a single bolt of lightning can generate temperatures of about 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit,
nearly 30,000 degrees Celsius. Believe it or not, that's about six times hotter than the
surface of the sun. And so what happens when you heat water really quickly in an enclosed space?
Well, it turns into a gas and expands. It needs a place to go in a hurry. In an instant,
the pressure inside the tree builds until finally the gas pushes so hard
that the bark can't handle it anymore, causing the tree to literally explode.
Wood and splinters are sent flying everywhere as if we didn't need more reasons to stay indoors
playing video games. Now, these splinters aren't exactly homing missiles, but it does show that
tree plus water plus electricity does result in flying plant projectiles that can do some
serious damage on impact. ON GENSHIN IMPACT!
But what about when a tree isn't filled with water? In the game if
you combine dentro and electro, one of the effects that you get is aggravate,
which boosts the power of your next electro attack. And that seems kind of weird, right?
Why would running electricity through a dry plant make your next electrical attack
stronger? It shouldn't have any impact, right? Or maybe even a negative impact?
Wrong. This actually lines up with real world science. In a 2004 Ukrainian study,
scientists tested the electrical resistance of a leaf as it slowly dried up. Now, you would
think that as the leaf dries up and slowly dies, that its electrical resistance would increase.
Less water left in the leaf would mean less ability for electricity to flow, right? But no,
the drier the leaf became, the easier electricity was able to flow through the parts of the leaf
that were still living. The researchers weren't exactly sure why, but they assumed that it might
have to do with a stronger concentration of water and salts in the tissue that was left remaining,
allowing for greater electrical conductivity. But regardless of the reason, it yet again proves
Gentian right in its scientific principles, the first shot of electricity through a plant
is basically paving the way for subsequent shocks to be stronger and more effective.
So currently the scoreboard is two for two, which means it's time to look at the final
elemental reactions spread to see if Genshin can run the perfect game. In combat, spread
is the opposite of aggravate. Basically it uses electro mixed with dentro to make your next dentro
attack more powerful. The game even gives us an in-universe explanation for this relationship.
We meet a child called Sudabeh who tells us that quote, “Electro is good. It makes
plants stronger and bear more fruit.” But that can't be true in real life, right? If
electricity truly made plants stronger and more fruitful, why haven't we heard of it before?
How am I able to go apple picking? Wouldn't every farmer ever just
electrocute their orchard to try and max out their harvests? Well,
when you start to look into it, there's actually a lot more here than meets the eye.
Loyal theorists, allow me to introduce you to the new world of an old science: electro horticulture.
This is an old study. But way back in 1746, a researcher named Dr. Von Miambray from Edinburgh,
Scotland took two myrtle trees and ran an electrical current through one of them to
see if it would cause it to grow any differently. Now, there aren't many details available about his
exact experiment, but from what I could gather, he used an electrostatic generator to pass a current
directly through the tree and back down to the ground. And because static electricity runs at a
much lower amperage than a lightning bolt, there was no risk of accidental splinter missiles.
Instead, after an entire month of being zapped, the tree appeared to have grown taller and had
more leaf growth than its non-electrical twin. This was a huge discovery and could be a great
justification for Genshin's claims that adding electro to dentro gives you more powerful dendro.
But again, if this was true, why aren't gardeners the world over putting power
grids through their fields? To be honest, his conclusions were kind of hard to replicate.
Naturally, other scientists saw these crazy findings and conducted similar experiments,
but they wound up with mixed results at best.
Some claim that they got the exact same results. Others saw no difference,
and even more said that their trees outright died due to the electric flow. But if you think a few
failed ferns were going to stop science, then clearly you haven't been watching my videos,
in which case you should probably just hit the subscribe button so you can be on top
of all the coolest scientific revelations as they relate to modern gen open world video
games. It is a very specific niche, but we are good at it. Anyway, at the very start of 2022,
scientists decided to take this very old study in a very new direction.
Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing attempted to prove
that electricity aids the growth of plants. But rather than electrifying the plant itself with
static electricity, they decided to instead put the plant inside of an electric field.
Basically, they placed the seeds on a metal plate that was connected directly
to a negative electrode. And above where the seeds were growing was a metal plate
connected to a positive electrode. This created an electric field between them
as the positive and negative charges tried desperately to come together.
After three days of germination, seed growth inside the electric
field was 40% higher than the control group when it came to seedling growth.
The electric field resulted in a growth increase of 15%. All in all,
the plants inside the electric field gave a crop yield that was 20% higher than the control group.
Seems bizarre, right? Like why would being in the presence of electricity change plant
growth so dramatically? Unfortunately, the research paper doesn't provide an
explanation. But you know what? I think I can. Science has shown that thunderstorms
tend to help with plant growth not just because of increased rainfall,
but also because their electrical energy helps separate the nitrogen atoms that are floating
around in the air. These atoms then fall to the ground where they're absorbed by the
soil and eventually wind up inside a plant's roots. The University of Melbourne, though,
has a different solution. Maybe electric fields act kind of like natural pesticides.
The electricity doesn't bother the plant, but it might scare away insects acting kind of like
a low level bug zapper. There's also the fact that within an electrical field, water tends
to have lower surface tension, resulting in faster evaporation after rainfall or watering.
Lastly, it might just be what electricity does to the plant itself, effectively boosting the
metabolism of the plant by accelerating the transportation of nutrients like calcium and
bicarbonates. Regardless of which explanation is correct, when it comes right down to it,
plant growth involves a lot of chemical reactions, and electricity appears to have
the ability to affect each and every one of them for the better. There you have it,
my friends. The electro-dentro effects that we see in the game are absolutely adhering to
real world science. Electricity appears to strengthen, grow and spread plants,
even causing them to sometimes spontaneously explode out like a bunch of low flying missiles.
Sure the results may be a lot more bombastic in the game than they are in real life,
but when the alternative is literally watching the grass grow, I think the choice is obvious.
But hey! Thanks again to Genshin Impact for sponsoring today's video. It's been really fun
to put the lore down for once and instead focus on some of the new cool sciencey aspects of the
game. So special thanks to them for letting us roll with something a bit out of the ordinary.
That said, it doesn't mean that there isn't a new lore for us to discover. In fact, in their
3.3 update, they just released a brand new five star character, The Wanderer. Once our enemy,
he's now an ally with a dark and mysterious back story full of sorrow and betrayal,
which sounds a lot like my kind of character. And if you're dying to understand these characters a
little bit more, well, you can now take part in their Wishes From Tayvat event,
where you'll receive postcards directly from the characters
themselves. Apparently there are plenty of hidden Easter eggs to find inside of them.
And you know what that means. LOOOOOOOOOOORE! I guess I'm just going to have to keep checking
in to see if Yae Miko has written me back. But if you just fancy something different,
there's also the brand new game mode Genius Invocation Trading Card Game.
That's right. Genshin now has itself a trading card game, collect cards,
build your decks and destroy your enemies. And oh, yes, my friends,
there is lore to be found in there, too. I'm not going to spoil it for you.
You'll just have to play it and find it for yourself. So if you want to desperately hear back
from your chosen waifu or you’re just interested in trying out the new dentro powers like we talked
about today, head on down to the description and click the link below to download the game on the
device of your choice for free in order to start your adventure. It is a huge, massive, open world
game with a robust story and all of it is for free. If you're looking for something cool to
do this winter, there it is. It'll keep you busy for a while. Now, if you'll excuse me. Stephanie's
got a vegetable garden that I think could use a little bit more juice. Time to break out the
car battery. In the meantime, remember, it's all just a theory. A GAME THEORY! Thanks for watching.