Farewell and Best Wishes

As this research project is now in the final stages of wrapping-up, we wish to thank everyone who participated in this inquiry; the students, mentors, teachers and others behind the scenes. We appreciate all of your efforts and contributions to this online learning community.

Scientific exploration is a process of discovery that can be fun! There are many unanswered questions about plants just waiting for new scientists to consider, investigate, and share.

After the end of the session, we will be updating the platform and archiving groups and projects, after which time new updates/posts will not be able to be added to projects or groups. Please come back and visit the PlantingScience Project Gallery anytime to view this project in the future. You can search the Gallery by keyword, team name, topic, or school name.

Good bye for now.

Warm regards,

The PlantingScience Team

Hi team,

Thank you so much for your kind note. I also apologize for being unreliable with the Zoom connections--we have had some sickness at work this week and I have been dealing with this problem but I feel very fortunate to have worked with you this semester!  I wanted to make sure you knew how impressive I thought your work was on this project--I really enjoyed your photos and sketches that enhanced your work. You also demonstrated strong scientific thinking skills. I hope that you and all your friends and family are safe and happy as we move into this Thanksgiving season and that the rest of your semester goes smoothly.  Your team really stands out in terms of your diligence and creativity in your project!

Thank you Dr. Vrentas!

    We really appreciated working with you! All your advice was really helpful and we enjoyed it greatly. One of our favorite parts of our experiment was examining the celery and making observations. 

Thank you! -Some Humans (Yasmine, Jacob, and Stella) 

Hi team!

I understand you are coming to the end of your journey with your project, and I will be planning on attending for the presentation on Friday.

I went through your poster content again and I had a few quick notes related to your presentation--just some things to think about as you describe your results, extending from our discussion:

--Based on what we discussed about salt water, how might we be able to explain the celery getting flaccid in that condition?

--How might this experiment relate to the water the plant is taking up in the ground? (in other words, what might be in that water?)

Nice work everyone!  I hope these comments will help you to clarify things.  Good luck on your presentations on Wednesday.

Sincerely,

Cathy

Hi Dr. Vrentas! 

     Thank you for taking the time and meeting with us, we really appreciate it! I just put our poster in the files section if you would like to take a look. We have fixed our poster based on the suggestions. Thanks for the recap on everything we talked about. If you have any other questions or suggestions we would love to hear them. 

Thank you! 

-Some Humans (Yasmine, Stella and Jacob) 

Hi team,

It was great to speak with you on Wednesday!  I am glad we were able to connect on Zoom and I hope you have had a good week at school.

As a recap, we discussed a few things about your slides:

--The fact that mushy stems could be some bacterial growth over a couple of days, and that the bluish/greenish color was still probably the food dye

--The process of osmosis--water can flow out of cells to create a balance when the water around the cells is very salty.  This means that the cells will shrivel up, and the celery will become "wilty."

--Water in the soil may have some other chemicals, like minerals (like our electrolyte water!) dissolved in it.  Water with other dissolved chemicals can still move into the plant.  But it can be complex, since there is a balance of water flows in and out of cells!

--The plant will need water for its cells, so that it can stand up straight and also because water is needed for the chemistry of life.  The plant gets energy from a different source--it captures the energy from light in sugars through photosynthesis, and then the sugars are broken down in the plant cells through respiration to provide the plant with energy.

I know you were mentioning at the end that you might need some additional feedback--was it on the poster or the slides?  I just wanted to check to make sure I was looking at the right place and answering the remaining questions that you had :)

Sincerely,

Cathy

Looks like you are in the final stages of your projects.

It’s great to see that teams from your school are wrapping up and posting conclusions. Enjoy the final stages of your project, and feel free to post any final comments or questions you have for your mentors.

Hi Dr. Vrentas! 

All good, excited to meet with you on Wednesday! We wanted to update you on some of our information for our poster. We have concluded both our experiments with the celery too. I have put our google slides presentation in the files section if you would like to look at it.

-Some Humans (Yasmine, Jacob and Stella) 

Hi team!

I have been having some issues with getting the forum messages due to some of my messages going to spam, so I know I missed out on the opportunity to chat on Zoom last week.  I apologize for this!! (Just to clarify--it is nothing wrong with the Planting Science portal, which is great--but my email).

So I wanted to make sure we had a chance to "meet" on video and so I made a video that talks about my background as a scientist and some of the things I like most about being a scientist.  I hope it will be helpful to you--I wanted you to know that I have really enjoyed being your mentor this semester, that it is important to me, and that I want to make sure you have a chance to get as much as possible out of this experience!

**To find the file--you can go under the Files tab to the left and it is the new video.  (I actually split it into three, to make sure it uploaded with the size.).  If there are any problems with the video opening, I will work on sharing it in a different way that is consistent with the Planting Science rules.

I hope you had a fun Halloween!  Did you have a costume?  I must say I was pretty boring (no costume for me) but I saw some really cool plant-related costumes online.  My favorite was someone who dressed up as a slug. Garden slugs can certainly cause havoc among vegetables...

Please feel free to let me know what questions you have.

Sincerely,

Cathy

Happy Halloween! 

     We wanted to let you know that we have concluded our experiment. We will upload the slides with all of our information. Some of the results we got were very interesting. I will upload the some pictures too. We will have a draft of the poster we are making soon. 

-Some Humans (Yasmine, Jacob, and Stella) 

Hi team,

Some more great data and pictures/drawings as well!  I really enjoy all of the information you have recorded.  I personally find that having graphics in scientific papers is very helpful in terms of helping me understand what the other scientists have done, just like you have depicted your different cups with celery. Another thing I like here is how you have noted the variables you have kept constant across the experiment, in order to control sources of variation as best as possible.

Keep up the good work!

Sincerely,

Cathy

Thanks Dr. Vrentas,

     Those are some great observations. We watched the video and that does a great job representing how celery shrivels when it lets go of water. To answer your questions, I don't think the same thing happened in the other liquids but I do think something similar happened. I believe that since the celery blocked out the coke all together that it wasn't actually losing water. But since not getting water is similar to losing water due to transpiration it probably would have started drooping more  significantly if we gave it enough time.

We will also be doing another experiment on celery in different types of water. 

--Some Humans (Yasmine, Jacob, and Stella) :)

Hi team,

Looks like you have been hard at work--I am impressed!

I still owe you a good video with xylem and phloem...I am looking and I will let you know when I find one I like!

In terms of your data, one thing I am noticing as a trend is the liquids that had sugar in them (coke, lemonade) showed drooping and poor water transport...and only the water container had good water transport.  This reminds me of your salt water data from before, where you saw the celery becoming droopy.  I found a nice video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLhIpjsZIaw

Do you think that the same process that is happening with the salt water could be happening with the sugary beverages?  What might be the same between both the salt water and the beverages?

Keep up the good work!

Sincerely,

Cathy

Thanks Dr. Vrentas! 

     We have been busy planning and executing our experiment. We just finished now with lots of notes and observations. We put 3 celery sticks in each cup (coke, lemonade, and water). Some observations we made were: 

Coke 1. it didn't travel farther than 1/4 cm. 2. Vascular tissue was normal passed the black bottom 3. Flaccid 4. brown spots on the outside 5. Kept soaking in the ground tissue but not in the vascular tissue 

Lemonade 1. Very black on the bottom 2. No signs of black if you cut through the middle 3. Soft and bendy 4. Regular white on the inside 5. Clear at the bottom other than the xylem tissues 

Water with dye 1. Random spots of color in xylem tissues 2. lots of color in the xylem tissues 3. Turgid 4. Darker around the edges 5. Went up in less than and 1hour and 20 min. 

Our conclusion was that celery doesn't seem to take in anything other than water. Since coming to this conclusion, we have a few thoughts for the future. What would happen if we tried putting celery in different variations of water? Would it go up the vascular tubes? We could use waters like sparkling water of lemon water. 

We look forward to your thoughts, Some Humans (Yasmine, Stella, and Jacob)

*We averaged about an hour and twenty minutes between each look at the celery . The food dye was black and in each cup*

Thank you Dr.Vrentas! Stella is happy that you liked the drawings :). I didn't know that you couldn't post pictures, so Dr. Sohl helped me upload it to files. Sorry for any inconvenience. 

--Yes, we will have food dye in everything, just to keep it constant. It will also be in the control so we can compare results.

--To answer your second question, we will be getting celery that looks about the same. We will then be cutting it for the height to be the same (10cm). We can't control the width and mass so we will just measure those changes from the start. 

--We think that the orange juice since it is water, sugar, and citrus (essentially) it might clog and/or overload the xylem and phloem vascular tubes. We think this because xylem takes water and phloem takes sugar. We don't know how it will react to both in one liquid. Will it separate them? Or just reject it altogether? 

Sincerely, 

Yasmine, Jacob, and Stella :)

Thank you Dr.Vrentas! Stella is happy that you liked the drawings :). I didn't know that you couldn't post pictures, so Dr. Sohl helped me upload it to files. Sorry for any inconvenience. 

--Yes, we will have food dye in everything, just to keep it constant. It will also be in the control so we can compare results.

--To answer your second question, we will be getting celery that looks about the same. We will then be cutting it for the height to be the same (10cm). We can't control the width and mass so we will just measure those changes from the start. 

--We think that the orange juice since it is water, sugar, and citrus (essentially) it might clog and/or overload the xylem and phloem vascular tubes. We think this because xylem takes water and phloem takes sugar. We don't know how it will react to both in one liquid. Will it separate them? Or just reject it altogether? 

Sincerely, 

Yasmine, Jacob, and Stella :)

Thank you Dr.Vrentas! Stella is happy that you liked the drawings :). I didn't know that you couldn't post pictures, so Dr. Sohl helped me upload it to files. Sorry for any inconvenience. 

--Yes, we will have food dye in everything, just to keep it constant. It will also be in the control so we can compare results.

--To answer your second question, we will be getting celery that looks about the same. We will then be cutting it for the height to be the same (10cm). We can't control the width and mass so we will just measure those changes from the start. 

--We think that the orange juice since it is water, sugar, and citrus (essentially) it might clog and/or overload the xylem and phloem vascular tubes. We think this because xylem takes water and phloem takes sugar. We don't know how it will react to both in one liquid. Will it separate them? Or just reject it altogether? 

Sincerely, 

Yasmine, Jacob, and Stella :)

Thank you Dr.Vrentas! Stella is happy that you liked the drawings :). I didn't know that you couldn't post pictures, so Dr. Sohl helped me upload it to files. Sorry for any inconvenience. 

--Yes, we will have food dye in everything, just to keep it constant. It will also be in the control so we can compare results.

--To answer your second question, we will be getting celery that looks about the same. We will then be cutting it for the height to be the same (10cm). We can't control the width and mass so we will just measure those changes from the start. 

--We think that the orange juice since it is water, sugar, and citrus (essentially) it might clog and/or overload the xylem and phloem vascular tubes. We think this because xylem takes water and phloem takes sugar. We don't know how it will react to both in one liquid. Will it separate them? Or just reject it altogether? 

Sincerely, 

Yasmine, Jacob, and Stella :)

Thank you Dr.Vrentas! Stella is happy that you liked the drawings :). I didn't know that you couldn't post pictures, so Dr. Sohl helped me upload it to files. Sorry for any inconvenience. 

--Yes, we will have food dye in everything, just to keep it constant. It will also be in the control so we can compare results.

--To answer your second question, we will be getting celery that looks about the same. We will then be cutting it for the height to be the same (10cm). We can't control the width and mass so we will just measure those changes from the start. 

--We think that the orange juice since it is water, sugar, and citrus (essentially) it might clog and/or overload the xylem and phloem vascular tubes. We think this because xylem takes water and phloem takes sugar. We don't know how it will react to both in one liquid. Will it separate them? Or just reject it altogether? 

Sincerely, 

Yasmine, Jacob, and Stella :)

Hi Dr.Vrentas! Thank you for the feedback. We have planned out our experiment. Please tell us what you think. 

-Some Humans 

Hi Dr.Vrentas! We have updated our explore section if you would like to check it out.  

-Some humans, Yasmine, Stella, and Jacob 

Hello! For the first question, the celery is almost fully submerged in the cup of water when we put it in, when we took it out, they had shrunk to be fully submerged. The different types of variables we measured were height, mass, and salinity. We recorded lots of information for the salt water cups, like how it felt softer, how soggy and bendy it got in the salt water which we identified as flaccid, and the orange dots Jacob found on the cross-section. We also noticed in the regular water, the celery was turgid and did not change in height though it did change a little in mass. We also measured how much the celery shrunk in the different waters. We realized while recording that the celery in the salt water shrunk, and he control didn't shrink at all. We finished the experiment, but our hypothesizes were that the celery might die because of the salt in the water. Our other hypothesis is that the salt might clog the vascular tissue (phloem and xylem passageways).  

Sincerely, Some Humans- Yasmine, Jacob and Stella 

Hi everyone,

I also just wanted to say that I also read through the info you shared and I enjoyed learning about the things you like to do for fun.  It seems like everyone is an animal lover in this group!  I like cats, dogs, and pretty much all kinds of pets.  I have one cat.  It would be fun to have 2, but I am not sure if my cat would like to get along with a fellow cat.  She likes to be the one in charge of the whole house!

Hello! It is great to hear from you. We just did an experiment, we started off with planning in our lab notebooks, we included: our driving question, variables, data, method, and hypothesis. Our experiment is on the way celery reacts when placed in different types of water. The three types of water we used were Regular water (our control), 5% concentration salt water, and 10% concentration salt water. We are excited to share our results. Keep you posted :-)  -Some People

Yasmine, Jacob, and Stella

Hi team,

Welcome to Planting Science!  I hope you enjoy the journey.

My name is Cathy and I'll be working with you as a mentor this year for Planting Science.  I've been involved with this program for 4 years, which means I've been able to work together with students from all around the country on different scientific explorations.  I'm excited to see what you come up with.

My background is as a micro- and molecular biologist, which basically means I like to study small things.  I've studied the microbiology of the soil in different plant environments, and I also have done work more related to human health, but I definitely love plants and one of my areas of interest is horticulture (growing flowers and vegetables) and also plant science education, to teach folks about horticulture and also the genetics of plants.  My favorite part of being a scientist is that you can discover things that are brand new, that no one has discovered before.

I currently live in Richmond, VA but I'm from Pennsylvania and lived in some other states including Maryland, Iowa, and Wisconsin. When I'm not in the lab doing science or teaching others about it, I like to swim, ride horses, or work in my own garden.

I'll be back soon to comment on your own specific posts--

Sincerely,

Cathy

Inder--Thank you for telling us about yourself, we look forward to working with you! - Yasmine, Stella, & Jacob

Welcome to your PlantingScience project page!

Welcome to this community of plant researchers. As your team plans and conducts your own research project, you will be mentored by a scientist. The mentor's role is to encourage and guide you through the process of scientific discovery. The more you share your ideas and research information online, the more your mentor can help. You can also find out more about your mentor. What is their research about? Why did they go into science? What do they like to do when they are not working?

You may also hear from this classroom’s assigned scientist liaison. Liaisons work with several mentors and help make sure the conversations are going strong. They may also offer some extra advice or encouragement.

Two resources can help you get started:

• Student Roadmap
• Plant Investigation Toolkit

Best wishes as you start this scientific journey. We are all pleased to share this experience with you. Have fun!

To set up your project page:

• Choose your project team name. Need inspiration? Visit the project gallery to see other student teams.
• Upload a photo or avatar for your team.
• Introduce yourselves to your scientist mentor and get the conversation started!
• PLEASE ONLY CLICK "Share with team" ONCE. Sometimes the page takes a little while to refresh, so please be patient!
• In order to protect student privacy, please DO NOT share:
  • last names
  • social media handles
  • links to Google/Sharepoint documents, spreadsheets, or images
• We will remove these items as we find them in posts.

Hello Dr.Vrentas, we look forward to meeting you and collaborating! -Yasmine, Stella, & Jacob

Hi, I'm Jacob. I have chocolate cockapoo. I play hockey, do origami, and play video games for fun. Legends of Zelda Breath of the wild is probably my favorite.  I've read just about every single book ever written by Stuart Gibbs and have all of  his new books on preorder. I hope we can work well together!

Hello!

My name is Stella. I am excited to see how this website is going to work. I was born here in Virginia, and I love beaches, cats, and the muppets. My favorite band is Green Day, and some of my hobbies are Art, Softball, and learning German.  I have 4 cats and 2 dogs. I cant wait! :)

Hello! My name is Yasmine and I love dogs! I have a chocolate lab puppy at home. I also like to bake, be outside, travel, play soccer, and play piano. I look forward to working with you!