Aswin Singaram Natarajan rolls a stem of wheat in his hands. It looks perfectly healthy, but the senior experimental scientist at CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, knows his eyes can deceive him. A plant could look green and vital and still be losing—losing too much energy or losing too much water or filling its grain to ripeness too slowly. And while these weaknesses are invisible to the human eye, they're plain as day to the right instrument.
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