alex's homework blog of the week 10-2

This week in science we had touched on other different topics like Komo News, How Big, and Surface Testing of different bathroom objects.

Komo News
Summary: This article was about a 12 year old boy who has come up with an invention to save solar cells.
Question 1: Why did Mr. Finley ask us to read this article?
Mr. Finley had asked us to read this article for many important reasons. He might want us as students to start up our own environmentally friendly project as well as William Yuan. Also Mr. Finley might want us to start reading this since we might start learning about saving solar cells, sun, and energy in class. Lastly, Mr. Finley might want to prove something to us. Even though William Yuan is a very smart, but we as many other 12 year olds can do the same thing he is. We are all very smart kids and we are all just people, it’s not like Yuan has a special power that makes him better than the rest of us. We are all just young people who can do what they want to do if they try and never give up.

How Big
Summary: We had discussed our online simulation and also learned about different science words to tell if something would be either, macroscopic, microscopic, or sub-microscopic underneath looking through a telescope.
Question 2: How do you think this online simulation will help you?
This simulation will help me by now knowing and understanding that bacteria is actually very large and a large cell so bacteria can spread more since its so big and it can effect more people. Also this has allowed me to visualize bacteria on objects in different size proportions to see how much bacteria was on the item.
Question 3: Name two objects that go in each category that were used on the online simulation. (macroscopic, microscopic, and sub-microscopic)
In the macroscopic category the finger and pin would be categorized there. In the microscopic the two objects would be yeast and the red blood cells. And lastly, the objects in the sub-microscopic category would be Rhino virus and Ebola virus.
Question 4: What do the terms, macroscopic, microscopic, and sub-microscopic mean?
Macroscopic- Big
Microscopic- Small
Sub-Microscopic- Really Small

Surface Testing
Summary: We tested different objects and are going to see how much bacteria they hold, but the objects are from our school bathrooms.
Question 5: Which objects in the bath room are more contaminated?
Definitely the toilet seats/flushers, the door handles/locks of stalls, sink knobs, and paper towel dispenser handles since they are all touched by different people who all have germs.
Question 6: What would be your hypothesis?
My hypothesis would be to test the one sample of the object that I think is germy and one that I think is not so dirty. Then we would figure out which object really has more bacteria. Afterward we could also compare our new data with our other findings with the other students in the class.
Question 7: How can you tell the amounts of bacteria on the object that is being tested?
You can figure out if there is bacteria or not within and object by using a petri dish. On this petri dish we would have to put this special kind of food that is called agar. This is food for the bacteria so when the testing of the object has bacteria the food is being eaten away so we can notice and gather our new observations.