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why do you sometimes see unburnt trees

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next to a burnt down house conspiracy

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theorists would say that is because the

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houses were actually vaporized with

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beams of energy from space but the

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actual reason as many people have

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pointed out is simply that the wood in

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the houses is dry and the wood in the

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trees is wet now if you don't have a

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ward fire in your house this might be a

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bit hard to understand so I set out to

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do an experiment to demonstrate this the

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first stop was my attic which like most

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new houses in California has an internal

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frame of two-by-fours there was a bit of

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scrap wood leftover from construction

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this was the same wood as the frame of

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my house so it was ideal for testing and

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then went out back to chop a live branch

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off a live tree and then chopped both

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the attic wood and the live wood into

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pieces about the same size when I

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weighed the acid water came out at about

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a pound and a quarter I then weighed the

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same sized piece of tree wood and it

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came out to be nearly twice as much most

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of that extra weight is coming from

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water and then built a symmetrical fire

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from kindling and put the live wood on

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the left and the acid wood on the right

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I lit the fire and fed it more kindling

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when he went out it was very obvious

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during the process that the live wood

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never caught on fire whereas the attic

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ward started burning almost straight

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away if you look at the twigs and the

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lead in the back you see they do

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actually flare up at one point but most

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of the live wood remained unburned the

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attic wood on the other hand was on fire

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for several minutes and was charred

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partway through

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in fact when I chopped the two pieces of

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wood in half you could see that the dry

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wood was nearly half burnt and the wood

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from the tree only had a bit of

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blackening around the edges was

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essentially undamaged and remember these

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were subject to essentially exactly the

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same fire since the pieces were a bit

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large I did another experiment that was

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more to scale with my small fire

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I used a live twig and a small piece of

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dry attic scrap since the wood was small

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then any burning will be more sustained

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and complete and what happened again was

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the live wood just got a bit city but

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this time the dry wood burned up

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completely in fact the live wood was

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just as strong as it was before