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Why cultivating drought-resistant plants disappoints: Soil physics may be the real bottleneck
Water uptake in plants is primarily limited by soil properties, specifically capillary and viscous forces in soil pores, rather than by plant physiology. As soil dries and water potential drops below -1.5 MPa, plants cannot extract water efficiently, regardless of their internal adaptations. This explains why breeding for drought resistance by altering plant traits has had limited success.
Most water in the soil exists in pores of varying sizes. These pores exert a capillary force that holds water.
Soil physicists discovered that when the soil water potential falls below -1.5 megapascals, plants are unable to extract water fast enough to meet their needs.

In other words when soil dries, capillary and viscous forces in the pores increase—and plants find it harder to draw water from the soil.

Stomata are super sensitive. Plants have special structures on the underside of their leaves known as stomata that function as an interface for gas exchange. These are small valves that the plant opens and closes in response to fluctuating environments.

When they are open, carbon dioxide from the air can flow into the leaf while water can escape into the atmosphere as vapor.

When the plant closes it stomata, it conserves water. This prevents it from dying of thirst. However, when the stomata are closed, the plant faces starvation because less carbon dioxide enters its leaves, meaning it produces fewer new sugar molecules. As a result, it grows more slowly.

Ultimately, the behaviour of these tiny valves determines how much carbon from the atmosphere enters the land plant biomass.

A plant requires considerable energy to draw water from soil pores. For example, the cell walls of the tubes through which water rises in shoot stems or tree trunks are thickened.

This enables them to withstand the tension in the vascular system and not collapse.

Further up in the leaves, dissolved substances in plant cells generate osmotic pressure, which keeps cells turgid despite the high tension in neighbouring vascular tissues.

The agricultural industry has long attempted to breed plants that store more solutes in their cells, hoping this would help them absorb water more efficiently from the soil and thus better withstand drought. Although a substantial amount of money has been invested in such breeding programmes, these hopes have never been realized.

The new results explain this failure: the limiting factor lies not in the plants but in the soil.

The physics of capillarity not only predicts the extent to which soil pores empty but also what occurs high up in the leaves.

Andrea Carminati et al, Soils drive convergence in the regulation of vascular tension in land plants, Science (2026). DOI: 10.1126/science.adx8114

Bird‑like robots promise greater flexibility and control than drones

Engineers have developed a bird-like ornithopter with flexible wings powered by piezoelectric materials, eliminating the need for motors, gears, or mechanical linkages. This solid-state design enables flapping and twisting motions, offering greater maneuverability and potential for applications such as search and rescue. Advanced modelling integrates flight physics, aiding future design optimization.

Xin Shan et al, Multi-physics finite state fully coupled modeling of mechanism-free induced-strain actuated ornithopters, Aerospace Science and Technology (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.ast.2025.110573