Science Journal January 2015

SCIENCE JOURNAL

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Science

January 2015

SUPER LEAGUE OF SCIENTISTS

OUR LATEST PROJECTS

Successful Start for the Super Scientists

Hello Loyolans! This is the Super League by [Article Author] of Scientists first ever published scientific journal! The Super Scientists got started at the beginning of this year, thanks to the Super Awesome Scientists Mr. Joseph and Mr. Howell. The club was designed to bring those who enjoy the amazingness of science together to make some awesome science experiments. There are about forty students currently in the science club!

The Super Scientists successfully accomplished their first experiment of the year. Congratulations to them and all their hard work. They divided into Super Teams to work on quarterly projects. Each quarter throughout the year will have a different theme: the first quarter focused on biology. And so the club embarked on journeys into the mind-blowing world of biology. At the end of the marking period, the Super Teams produced some amazing work.

The club covered three important topics: soap cleaners, bacteria growth and phototropism. You may have run into

some of these projects during your daily strolls across the science floor.

The Super Scientists are just warming up to an incredible season. After midterms, some pretty cool stuff will be happening in the scientist’s den. The League meets every cycle on Day 2 during Activities period, so if you are interested in joining the coolest club in school, stop by the science office. All are welcome in the League and no previous science experience is needed. All we look for is an enthusiasm for some science. Our doors are always open, and if anything you should stop by to admire our really cool experiments.

Soap Ever wondered how much soap actually cleans your hands? This quarter four Super Scientists delved into the great world of antibacterial cleaners to answer this eternal question.

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On behalf of all the Super Scientists, I would like to thank Mr. Joseph and Mr. Howell for all their efforts.

We hope to see you soon!

Bacteria We’re all told constantly, sometimes too many times, that bacteria are everywhere. But how much bacteria is actually present in various location in our world? Five Super Scientists found some stunning answers in the first quarter.

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than the exposed side of the plant. This unequal growth causes the bending on the plant towards the light.

The objective of the plant maze experiment was to observe

by Perby Senal ’15, Reece Rodriguez ’15, Elliot phototropism under very specific Scarangello’15, Katarina Trubelja ‘16 conditions. A closed maze was built out of cardboard, with an open top where the light source would shine through.

Plants exhibit an interesting Little windows were cut out at specific phenomenon known as phototropism. points in the maze to let the light source Phototropism is the growth of a plant in shine through. The young sunflower the direction of a light source. Plants are plants were placed at one corner of the very sensitive to their environment, and maze and were watered once a day for have developed many different about three weeks. reactions to stimuli, such as light, Plants use phototropism to temperature and humidity. survive in very limited conditions. In this Phototropism is perhaps the most experiment, plants were placed in poor recognizable reaction to stimuli that conditions- little light, presumably little people observe. Many people have oxygen since the maze was closed, and noticed that their plant seems to “bend” water once a day. Yet despite all these towards the light. Plant physiologists obstacles, phototropism enabled the account this to auxin, a plant hormone plants to survive a three-week period. In whose workings as still not completely the first few days, it was clear that the understood. In the 1920’s Dutch scientist plants were bending in a specific Frits W. Went discovered the hormone direction. By the end of the second auxin, and with it how plants respond to week, plants in both mazes had made light. According to his research, plants their first turn through the maze. At the don’t actually move towards the light, conclusion of the experiment, the plants but rather grow in the direction that the had almost broken through to the light Chloroplasts detect. Auxin is distributed unevenly when the light source comes from only one direction. As a result, more auxin flows down the dark side, meaning that the dark side grows faster

Puzzling Plants

source. In fact, the only reason the experiment was truncated was due to the closing of the light source by someone outside the group. Otherwise, based on the data collected, it was very probable that the plants would have continued to grow. Thus, phototropism is a very useful response that plants have acquired over time to help them survive.

Bacteria

by Jules Almazar ’16,

Sara Timermans ’16, Sara Al Shaboot ’16, Jaime El Koury ’16, Alejandra Martin ‘16 Bacteria are the smallest living things on

earth, after viruses. Bacteria can be found anywhere; in the soil, air, water, and even inside your body. Bacteria multiply rapidly and form colonies including millions, and even billions of bacteria in a space as small as a drop of water. Bacteria are classified in kingdom Procaryote, stemming from the fact that they contain prokaryotic cells that lack a nucleus. Bacteria are generally classified in three groups based on their shape.

They are described as spherical (coccus), rod like (bacillus), and spiral or corkscrew (spirochete).

Procedure: 1.We came up with three locations to swab for Bactria samples (a classroom microphone, a door handle, and a hand sanitizer) 2.We setup the agar in a sterile Petri dish. 3. We placed the swab of bacteria from the three locations on the agar 4.we waited until the bacteria grew to analyze the results.

We swabbed the handle of a hand sanitizer bottle, a door knob, and a microphone. We then placed these swabbed samples in a jar gel and cultivated them for 3 weeks. In the end the agar gel was covered in bacteria and smelled awful. The end result shows brown-like bacteria spreading inside the dish.

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SCIENCE IN THE NEWS

Soap

by Arielle Brutus ‘17, Natalie Constante ‘17, Francesca Marini Fichera ‘17 and

Sabine Ollivier ‘17 Background

Poker Dominance Even the best poker face won’t work against a superhuman card chip. For the first time, computer scientists at IBM developed a computer algorithm that can solve poker games. In the long run, this algorithm will always beat any human player. Wow. -Science News

The purpose of our experiment was to discover how effective different types of soap were. Upon some research, we found that anti-bacterial soap was more effective than bacterial soap. According to the research, this is due to the added chemicals in anti-bacterial soap that kill the unwanted bacteria. So we set on a mission to see if this was really true.

Experiment

Self-Driving Cars Cars without drivers are the new trend for 2015! Google launched this technology last year, and now major car companies have joined the bandwagon. Audi, BMW and Mercedes have all projected their models for the New Year. As of now, three states proclaimed it street-legal: unfortunately, New York is not one of them…yet!

RANDOM FACTS

65 billion About 65 billion neutrinos will pass through your finger every second

42 min, 12 sec If you drilled a tunnel straight through the Earth and jumped in, it would take you exactly 42 minutes and 12 seconds to get to the other side

To start off, we took a sample of bacteria from the Chemistry Lab. We placed the sample in an agar plate and added anti-bacterial soap, Purell, regular soap to three plates, and left one plate untouched. The experiment tested how fast and how much the bacteria would grow over a period of time. Thus the plate that exhibited the least bacteria by the end of the experiment would be the most effective.

Conclusion Our results were surprising; we had predicted the antibacterial soap would be the most effective. To our astonishment, the regular soap took actually seemed to hinder the growth of bacteria the most. Even more ironically, the Purell sample was the worst out of all the samples. This is most likely due to the alcohol content in Purell. Alcohol evaporates quickly, and therefore does not play a significant role in stopping the growth of bacteria.

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Our Next Projects There is a lot more in store for the Super League of Scientists this year!

Our next endeavors will take us into the amazing world of engineering.

Each group of Super Scientists will become a team of Super Engineers that will face each other off in an engineering competition. The guidelines are to be announced by the one and only Mr. Howell. This week, practices for the Biology and Chemistry Olympiads will be held after school for any life science enthusiast. If you like biology, chemistry, or problem solving, you should consider taking this challenge! Perhaps our greatest project of the year will be participating in an out-of-school science fair. Over Christmas break, Mr. Joseph was inspired when he ate a gyro off the street and scientifically hypothesized that due to the taste, it was not possible that the meat contained inside was actual lamb.

Thus the Super Scientists hope to take a sampling of the meat content of multiple gyros throughout the course of the next few weeks and run it to a DNA analysis center. This would tell us if the meat in the gyro on the street was really lamb. The Super Scientists wish this to be their major project of the year. For now, keep recycling, and happy midterms!

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