Wood that has been separated from a tree is considered dead because it is removed from the source of nutrients, much in the same way as meat from a butcher's shop is considered dead because the meat is not receiving nutrients from the animal because it is dead. However, the difference is that the tree is still alive and can regenerate the branches. To recap, wood that is attached to a tree is alive. However, wood that is separated from the tree is dead. I hope this explanation helps!

Wood is not alive in the same way that a chicken bone is not alive after the chicken is dead. Plant cells have tough cell walls that allow them to stand up. Certain plants, like bushes and trees, also make wood so they are even stronger. When someone cuts the tree down, the cells don't have a way to deliver sugar and oxygen to the cells anymore. The cells die, but the wood they made doesn't disappear. Bones also have cells in them, but when the cells die, the bone is still around.

Bamboo is actually a type of grass, but it makes a type of wood that is very strong and light. I recently saw a video about a company in Ghana that makes bike frames from bamboo bamboo bikes . The founder wanted to help her community by providing transportation, jobs, and a healthy environment.

How would you tell whether something was alive?

If you are interested in questions like this, you may want to study biology.

The biggest part of the bark of a tree or the wood that makes your kitchen table is not alive, but once it used to be.

For something to be alive, we usually mean that it has mechanisms to reproduce. The young wood (sapwood) is a collection of plant cells, just like our cells which are alive and make us alive. The cells have protoplasm inside them and also make a form of structural box around them, made out of proteins. When the die, the protoplasm dries out, but the protein box stays and makes the wood as we know it. It is dead in all senses. All that remains is the skeleton of it, just like in our case.

Good question! What defines life? How do we distinguishing living things from non-living things? A living thing can transform materials from the environment into energy to grow and reproduce. A piece of wood is not alive because, once it is not part of a tree, it cannot use the energy from sunlight to grow, produce seeds, and make more pieces of wood. Using this definition, see if you can decide: is a bone alive?

Living organisms like plants and animals generally need all of their parts to survive. Wood is part of the tree and before the tree is cut down, it is very much alive. But wood can’t get water and energy on its own. It requires the roots of the tree to get water and nutrients form the soil and it often requires leaves to conduct photosynthesis to make sugars from sunlight and CO₂. What makes an organism an organism is that it requires all of its different parts to survive because every part has an important different job.

When wood is cut from a tree, it will be alive for a short time afterwards, but will quickly die because it won’t get any nutrients, energy, or water. Also, a lot of wood is treated with chemicals to preserve the wood which will instantly kill the wood. A side note is that bark on a tree is already dead, just like our skin is to protect the tree from the excessive weather, ultraviolet rays, and diseases. If you took wood and planted it into dirt it would not grow. However, there are ways to take a cell from a leaf and regrow the plant into an entirely new tree. When wood is cut from a tree, however, it is not treated with this kind of care and the cells in the wood all die.

I disagree--I think wood can be alive. It's not a living organism, though: think of wood similarly to skin. Living skin still receives nutrients and grows. On the other hand, the outer layer of skin is dead: it can no longer grow. Similarly, some types of wood are dead, and some are living.

Dead wood and dead skin are still important. They provide structure to support the shape of the organism, and protection from the environment (like hot, cold, wind or water).

The cells in wood have lost their cytoplasm, DNA, organelles, etc. and have no living tissue inside of them. They do conduct water though for living tissues above them, so saying that wood isn't alive is like saying that bone or shells aren't alive in animals: they were made from living matter and perform a function for the living tree.

Wood is alive when it's still attached to a tree, so it's only not alive once it's been cut down.Scientists often use the characteristics of life ( life ) to classify what is and isn't alive. Cut wood can't meet some of those requirements, and therefore it isn't classified as alive. Most notably for wood, it's no longer performing the chemical reactions involved in "homeostasis" (actively keeping its internal environment at a constant state) and metabolism, it's no longer responding to stimuli, it's unable to reproduce. You might find interesting, though, that the characteristics of life are still debated. For example, these characteristics say that viruses are not alive. Yet, some scientists still classify them as living. Life is not perfectly clearly defined, and there's always debate.