Research Page for Sisters Middle School, Team 19
Purple Smurfs

Thurs 5/26/2005 1:10 PM - Dr. C. Hemingway: Hello, Purple Smurfs. You have chosen a fun and interesting research question. What do you expect to see? I am looking forward to following your findings. Good luck with your research.
Thr 5/26/05 3:03 PM - T19: The first upload of our journal is complete.
Sat, 5/28/05 11:03AM - Dr. S. Russell: Hi there.  Music is kind of an interesting project for a plant biology research project.  I was just wondering how the plants will be able to hear the music?  What would be the control?  For that matter, some people I know have problems telling the difference between different kinds of music patterns, and we have brains.  How will plants be able to figure that out, since they don't?  Just thinking about humans for a moment, if you had an exact twin and each wore separate iPods for a whole year hooked up two different kinds of music non-stop but otherwise led normal lives, would you expect them to weigh more or less, be shorter or taller? -- and if so -- how would you know that music was involved (as opposed to eating more fast food or Cokes or just playing more)?  Just something to think about.
If you have some other plants there, you might try a second experiment that I was wondering about.  Maybe you could turn some of the plants upside down for a couple of days, then turn them right side up for a couple of days and then upside down again and see what happens.  A really cool experiment would be to see if you can totally confuse the plant, like by rotating it using a motor so it never knows which direction is up, but that takes redesigning some equipment, so maybe next time....    Good luck.