Hey Jenn,

Thanks a ton for passing along Aria and Ava's message and their experiment!

Hey Ava and Aria,

Wow, your experiment was super cool! I'm seriously impressed by your awesome ideas and the results you got. I checked out the pictures, and they look great, just like expected. I am impressed with your hypothesis. I have to say your hypothesis is good and a part of the reason of what you have observed in the celery in carbonated coke and non carbonated pepsi. So compared to pure carbonated water, coke and pepsi have a lot of other additions like sugar syrup, several acids, flavor chemicals and others. So this additions start pulling water from celery due to the osmosis process. And again that is another part. The next part is acids that affect the cell walls and cell membranes. these acids  very slowly degrade the cell walls and membranes internal and external cells in celery and thus you see the filmsy results in the after case. the coke coloration that celery got is due to movement of those color chemical compounds inside the stem of celery. this video will help you explain this with some more cool colors:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIug9Foou3s&ab_channel=SciShowKids

This might confuse you guys with opposite result expected from osmosis but i will say at the moment lets think of these process independently and i brought this only to explain the color movement. there are much more to learn and we can discuss these things in next classes ​​​​​​
But why was the results different in coke and pepsi. This can be due to carbonation. The carbonation is carbondioxide. carbondioxide mixed with water makes a weak acid called carbonic acid and the carbonated coke might be more acidic compared to pepsi. next the pepsi has very different ratio of ingredients than coke so they are technically different solutions and thats why we see the different. the recipe of coke and pepsi is a top secret and very few people in the company knows the recipe so its hard to guess how much of compound is in the drinks. Anyways i hope this should help you understand what you saw. 

Oh, and here's a fun fact: since you mixed celery with cola drinks, let's call it "celery cola"! Did you know there was actually a drink called Celery-Cola way back in 1887? Crazy, right? I don't think we can find it now, but hey, you guys basically made your own version! Haha!

You guys are seriously amazing, and I loved being your mentor through this experiment. Keep those awesome questions and ideas coming. Thanks a bunch! :)

Hey Ellie and Aria,

Thanks for checking out the video! I hope you found it helpful.

Aria, I really liked your experiment idea. It sounded awesome! From what you explained, it seems like you tried soaking the celery in salty water and then putting it back in regular water to see if it would recover. That sounds like a smart plan! But sometimes, even when we plan things out, unexpected stuff can happen. For instance, maybe the celery lost too much water and couldn't bounce back, or maybe the water wasn't as clean as we thought and had some extra stuff in it. Trying the experiment again with super clean water or maybe tweaking some things might give us better results.

Ellie, I'd love to hear more about your experiment! Can you share some more details with us?

Thanks again, you two!

Thank you so much for sharing the pictures of the experiment! They look amazing and really help us see the results visually. And wow, you successfully bent the celery – that's fantastic!

To understand why the celery bends, we need to learn about two important processes: osmosis and diffusion. Today, I'll explain osmosis.

Osmosis is like when tiny molecules move from where there are lots of them to where there are fewer, through a special barrier called a semi-permeable membrane. In our experiment, the salt solution, the leftover liquid from the volcano experiment, and the orange juice all have lots of stuff dissolved in them, so they have high concentrations. But the water inside the celery stem has fewer things dissolved in it, so it's lower concentration. The membrane of the celery cell acts like a gatekeeper, letting some things pass through and keeping others out. As we observed, the water from inside the celery moved out into the surrounding liquid, causing the celery to shrink and bend.

There are more processes involved in water movement, but osmosis explains a big part of it.

I think you'll enjoy watching this fun YouTube video that explains osmosis clearly. Take a look when you have some free time! :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v80w3htJNyQ&ab_channel=PeekabooKidz