Room 229

My Science blog post -_- By Juliana
In my old school (since I didn’t spent much time in ISB) this semester and what I learned about in science from my ‘Old School’ (also known as Orchard Elementary School from Sylvan Union District web site is http://www.sylvan.k12.ca.us/orchard/). I learned about planets. And here is some part of what I learned about planets.
First we learned about the sun and that the Sun was mostly made of hydrogen we learned that the surface core temperature is 5,000 degrees Celsius. The inner core temperature is 15,000,000 degrees Celsius and that the sun gives life to almost every animal in the world. The age of the Sun is 4.6 billion years old!
Next we learned that the Sun is a star and that the sun is the biggest mass of body in the solar system. And that in which the Sun is a star well something happens inside these stars around the solar system. And that is called Nuclear Fusion. In nuclear fusion the nuclei of the atoms fuse together forming a larger nucleus and in that process lot’s of energy is produced and given off.
Next we learned about the cycle of stars. My class and me learned that the very start of a star is a Nebula then it turns into a protostar (and well whoever out there is reading my blog post these steps take a hecka’ long time to reach these steps). Then after that the protostar becomes a main sequence star. Then after that it turns into a red giant! So after a long time this is what happens it becomes another nebula but not just any nebula but a Planetary Nebula. And well it turns into a white dwarf (which are the little stars you see in the sky). And well then after a long time it just looses all it energy to perform Nuclear Fusion for itself well the heat and light dies off and it becomes a Black dwarf. And at the end it’s a tragic ending when a star goes ‘Boom’ and I don’t really think it’s necessary to tell what happens to the end because it I just a tragic ending for a star to go ‘boom’.
And now just right before I went to the ISB I learned about the about that Au means gold and so on and now for the conclusion. I have learned all these stuff in my old school Orchard Elementary in 5th grade by my teacher Mrs.Stone and please feel free and do not hesitate to type your opinions on my blog post and I hope you liked reading my science blog post. -. -

Cereal experiment

I’m going to talk about a science experiment we did in science class this semester. What we were trying to find out was , how much sugar do different types of cereal contain.

#1. What we did 1^st was took three Ziploc bags and put 3 grams of different cereal in each bag. For example we put cheerios in on bag and koko crunch in another and so on.

#2. Next we took 2 spoons of yeast and put that in each bag (2 spoons per bag).

#3.Then we took a syringe filled with 50ml of water and put that in each bag (50ml per bag).

#4.then we mashed the cereal up.

#5.What we did next was filled a medium size container with water at 35-50 degrees Celsius.

#6.Then we put all 3 bags of cereal in the water for 10 min then we took one bag out at a time after 10 min and measured the amount of air that was in the bags, because (sugar+yeast=air) the more air there is means the more sugar there is.

#7.Then we put all the bags back in for another ten minutes and did the same thing. And that’s how we found out how much sugar different types of cereal hold.

The materials you need to do the experiment are:

· Water

· Yeast

· Water boiler

· Balancer

· 3-4 Ziploc bags

· Medium size container

· 3-4 different types of cereal(they can be the same type but should be a different brand )

Hi! It’s Olivia. (Again.)

Lately in science class we’ve been experimenting with Brine Shrimp. (Sea Monkeys) One of the activities we did with the Brine Shrimp was we wrote a “letter” to Dr. Bryan, a scientist who studies Mono Lake. Mono Lake is a salt lake in California. A salt lake is a lake that is filled with salt water.  But it wasn’t always like that. A really long time ago it was a huge lake. But over the years it shrunk so the salt concentration expanded. As a result Mono Lake became salt lake.

Now, getting back to the Brine Shrimp. Brine Shrimp can only live in salt lakes and salt ponds. So Mono Lake is very important to the ecosystem.

But Mono Lake isn’t only important to the Brine Shrimp. It’s also important for the birds. Birds come to Mono Lake and nest there. It’s a very good nesting ground because there are plenty of Brine Shrimp for the birds to eat and there are lots of rocks sticking up out of the lake for them to put their nests on. The rocks in the middle of the water are a good place to nest since being in the middle of the lake protects the nest from predators.

In our letters to Dr. Bryan we wrote about how we learned how the salt concentration in the water is very important. We had containers with 6 spoons of salt, 4 spoons of salt, 2 spoons of salt, and 0 spoons of salt. The 4 spoons and 2 spoons of salt were the only containers that hatched Brine Shrimp. 4 spoons did best. We learned a lot from this experiment and even more when we read about Mono Lake. For more fun stuff about environments click on this link. Or for more information on Brine shrimp (referred to as “sea monkeys”)  click on the other link. I hope you learned something new from reading this post!!!!

Olivia

We haven’t finished this experiment yet, but I can tell you what we have done so far. At the very beginning, we started out with four cups of water. One had six spoons, two spoons, four spoons, and zero spoons of salt. After a few days, when the brine shrimp started to hatch, my group noticed that the two spoons of salt had hatched more brine shrimp than the others did. A few more days went by and we noticed that some more had hatched but yet, some had died. The ones with the six and zero spoons of salt didn’t hatch at all. On day eleven, we added 50 ml to the six spoons of salt, which makes the water 200ml now. We also added five spoons of salt to the zero spoons. The next day the six spoons, was all hatched. The zero spoons didn’t really have that much luck on hatching, but at least we got something to hatch. I thought it was amazing how fast it took to make them. The week was almost over. Last week all of the brine shrimp died over the weekend. So, this time we decided to bring back some bigger homes for them. Monday we were going to restart the experiment all over. So we got some bigger bottles, and put some salt and water into it. Then the next day we decided to put the brine shrimp into it. We still have the bigger containers but I don’t think it is doing very well. You should really try it sometime. It’s fun!

Image Source

Hi all, Jacob here talking about our brine shrimp experiment. Well when we started we were learning about the mono lake story. It was about the water level being lowered and the salt level rising. This process was killing the brine shrimp eggs. The experiment we were working on was to see what amount of salt can a brine shrimp egg hatch in. Our first tests weren’t working but when we tried one more time it seems to be going well. I hope our shrimp survive this time.

Image source

I will be telling you about our celery experiment we did in class.

My thoughts were about how the xylem and phloem are like veins and arteries but with different things too. The xylem, like arteries take what the cells need to the cells. Phloem, like veins take what the cells don’t need given to the cells that don’t make there own food but for humans it’s different. Veins take the CO2 to the heart to go back to the lungs to be exhaled. The phloem and xylem make a vascular bundle. The green part of the plant makes its own food during photosynthesis. We eat food to get the sugars we need. We both need food to survive. But mostly we need water to survive. We have one system that circulates around our body and plants have two systems. We set different variables to test. But I think the one we put red dye in it showed the best result. I learned a lot from this unit.

Image Source

Image Source

In room 229, we were experimenting about environments and how water tolerance affects the plants. We observed the plants and find the optimum environment and the range of tolerance.
We have set up the experiment like this:
Dry soil/ 0ml of water
Moist/ 0ml
Wet/ 40ml
Very wet/ 80ml
And finally, Swamp-Very wet/ 120ml
Our table chose each seeds to observe. I was observing barley.
11 days after planting, the data was: 2 barley seeds germinated (out of 3) in the Moist/ 0ml condition. No seeds germinated from other environments.
Since there was no data to compare to, so there was no optimum for barleys.
I think there was more surrounding environments that affected the growth of barley. The temperature and the humid weather might change the result.
More information:
Moist/0ml     Tallest plant; plants with most leaf; length of the leaf; longest root
Day 5-                    4cm                        -                                            -                               -
Day 8-                    7cm                        1                                            -                               -
Day 11-                  9cm                        1                                        1.5cm                         3cm

Barley Result

Plants we Experimented

Pig Heart Dissection

Blood was dripping from the non-beating heart and it had the worst smell. We had to wear gloves and I was glad we had to because, why would someone want to touch a pigs heart? We stabbed the heart with scissors and started to cut around the outside. We could now see the inside, we also located the right atrium, left atrium, right ventricle, and left ventricle. A lot of blood was stored in the atriums. We pulled the atrium out and heard lots of veins and things snapping. We rolled the atrium around in our palms, and so much blood went on our gloves. It was fun and a bit gross.

This is a Picture of a pigs heart. In the middle you can see one of the atriums.

We also blew into the lungs, But we blew into a straw that went down the pigs esophagus, into the lungs. When we blew in, the lungs expanded.

Here is a picture of the lungs.

Brine Shrimp experiment

This experiment was my favorite because we actually got to raise Brine Shrimp! A lot of them died (I don’t think ANY survived at all!) So we only got to see baby brine shrimp. In this experiment we wanted to find out the tolerance that brine shrimp had for salt. We set up four cups with bottled water, one with no salt (0 spoons), one with 2 spoons of salt, 4 spoons and 6 spoons of salt. We waited a couple of days to see how many hatched in each container. Here are our results: None hatched in 0 spoons some hatched in 2 spoons, most hatched in 4 spoons and none hatched in 6 spoons. So we figured out that the tolerance that Brine Shrimp is 2 spoons of salt to 4 spoons of salt in a container with 50mls of water.

I hope that this post helps you to understand what we have been learning in science!!

BY Tasha

Click here to buy your own Brine shrimp also known as Sea Monkeys

Brine Shrimp eggs (magnified60x) Adult Brine Shrimp (magnified30x)

Recently in Science we did an experiment for water-tolerance. We experimented on the range of tolerance and the optimum of four plants. Radish, corn, barley, and pea. Each table group planted three of each kind of seed in 4 cups with different amounts of water. We also had a special class cup. These are the amounts of water:
Dry-dried out soil
Moist-normal soil
Wet-40 ml added to moist
Very Wet-80 ml added to moist
Swamp-120 ml added to moist (class cup)

We found out that radish grew best in Swamp, corn and barley grew best in Moist, and pea grew best in Wet. We also found out that barley only grew in Moist.
Here are some pictures of the plants:

Peas-class picture

All plants-class picture

Corn-class picture

Radish-class picture

Barley-class picture

Want to know more about enviorments? Click here.