News from Cfleesia

The enzymatic reactions that plants and bacteria use when they take up or form carbon dioxide have been slowly and relentlessly messing with the isotope ratios of carbon for hundreds of millions of years. And since decayed plants are food for other plants, and the living plants are food for animals, which are food for other animals and fertilizer for still more plants…over all this time, biological systems have become enriched in the lighter, faster-reacting C-12 isotope, while the rest of the nonliving world has become a bit heavier in C-13. You can sample the air next to a bunch of plants and watch as they switch from daytime photosynthesis to nighttime respiration, just based on the carbon isotope ratios. Ridiculously tiny variations in these things can now be observed, which have led to all sorts of unlikely applications, from determining where particular batches of cocaine came from to figuring out the dietary preferences of extinct herbivores.