Research Page for Emporia State University, Team 1

4/5/05 4:59PM - T1: First upload of our journal is complete.
4/13/05 7.54PM - B. Schulz: Can you tell me what you will use to create the various colors of light, why you chose those materials and how you know what wave lengths of light are to which the seeds are exposed?
4/13/05 8:27PM - T1: - Our sprouts have died! Since we’re in between seasons, the University has not turned on the air conditioning in our building. Our botany lab has windows, but very few of them actually open! Last week, the weather was very warm which made the temperature in the lab extremely high- I think it was about 90 degrees at one point. We went to the lab to measure our seeds on Thursday the 7th, only to find that they had dried up! We are restarting the experiment and this time, we are going to place a damp piece of cheesecloth under the seeds, to see if that will help!
4/19/05 3:56PM - Dr. C. Hemingway: Even the best-planned experiments can fail. Adding a damp cheesecloth to your seed growth chamber is a good idea.
4/21/05 11:22AM - T1 Response to B. Schulz: To produce different colors of light for our experiment (white, blue (wavelength: 450 nm), green (wavelength: 545 nm), red (wavelength: 650 nm) & far-red (wavelength: 650 nm)), we are using filters provided to us by our instructor, Dr. Sundberg. All of the filters are marked with their specific wavelengths except the far-red filter. Dr. Sundberg is looking through his catalogs to find the wavelength for that particular filter.
4/29/05 11:39AM - Dr. M. Sudberg: First, I can tell from your data that you've had some problems with your seeds dying, but you've obviously been making some changes in your procedures and trying again. It would be good to include in your journal the problems you ran in to and how you tried to solve them - - it would be useful information for anyone else who runs into similar problems.
Second, You have a nice set of baseline data to compare against when your experimental results start coming in. How would you describe the growth you observed? e.g., was it constant over time or did it change?
4/30/05 12:19PM - Dr. Jenny Archibald: You listed several potential methods for measuring the sprouts in your journal - which did you end up choosing?
5/3/05 7:54PM - T1: Here is our last bit of data! We’ll have the rest of our journal together and to you by Thursday.
5/5/05 10:29AM - T1 Response to Dr. Jenny Archibald: In the beginning, we marked each seed (dry) with a number using a permanent marker (India ink). We were planning on using a random number table to determine which seeds would be in the measuring sample each day, but most of the numbers washed away. We then tried remarking them after they had soaked overnight. More numbers stayed on, but most were lost. In the end, we just pulled a sample from the seeds without looking!