| Title | From Air to Arbor |
|---|---|
| Contributor | David H. Silver(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0526.35 |
| Landing page | https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0526/chapters/10.11647/obp.0526.35 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | David H. Silver |
| Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
| Published on | 2026-04-08 |
| Long abstract | Ask where a tree’s mass comes from and intuition points downward: soil, water, nutrients drawn up through roots. This is almost entirely wrong. Trees are made of air — ~95% of their dry mass comes from atmospheric CO₂. Through photosynthesis, plants build themselves from carbon dioxide, converting invisible gas into solid wood, cellulose, and lignin using sunlight. Van Helmont’s 1640s willow experiment demonstrated this: a tree gained 164 pounds (~74 kg) while the soil lost only 2 ounces (~60 g). Isotope labeling confirms the molecular accounting — carbon in wood comes from air, not earth or water. When trees burn, they simply return their borrowed carbon and sunlight to the atmosphere, completing a chemical cycle that temporarily crystallizes air into living architecture. |
| Print length | 10 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
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| Landing Page | Full text URL | Platform | |||
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| https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0526/chapters/10.11647/obp.0526.35 | Landing page | https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0526.35.pdf | Full text URL |
David H. Silver is an industrial researcher whose career bridges computer vision, computational biology, and science communication. He studied mathematics, computer science, and biology at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology as a Rothschild Scholar, and was awarded a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship for his doctoral work in computational biology at Cambridge, UK. Silver’s peer-reviewed publications span multiple domains: computational biology in Nature and PNAS; computer vision systems in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence; medical AI in Human Reproduction and MIDL; and entertainment analysis in PLoS One. He holds over a dozen patents in depth sensing, medical imaging, and generative AI. His industry positions include Algorithm Engineer at Intel Corporation, ML Researcher at Apple, and CTO/co-founder roles at several technology startups. Silver maintains academic collaborations with researchers worldwide and serves as a peer reviewer for Image and Vision Computing and PNAS.