With climate change causing longer and hotter droughts, there is ever-increasing stress on our ecosystems and food supplies, and it is more important than ever to understand how plants cope with droughts, and why some plants are so tough.  To answer these questions, we need to understand better how plants move water around, which they do through capillarity, osmosis and diffusion.  In this talk I'll discuss the physics of plant water movement, why there's still heated debate around the mechanisms used by drought-tolerant plants, and how 3D X-ray microscopy allows us directly observe water movement within plants under water stress. 

Co-authors: Marilyn Ball, Tomas Fuenzalida, Holly Beckett (RSB) and Michael Turner, Matthew Blacker (DMP)