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.
Welcome to /r/GameTheorists!
Make sure to read the rules and we also have a discord!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
It would be so cool if he did a theory on Albedo and the descenders.