Biology Innovative Uses

Michele Perin of St. Louis, Missouri gets pretty creative with her Vernier labs. She doesn’t have a lab for EVERY season yet, but she has written some tasty experiments for Thanksgiving! How Quickly Does Your Potato Cool? Have you ever sat down to a Thanksgiving dinner only to find that the potatoes have gotten cold…

Subjects: Biology

Two of the 13 teams awarded grants by the Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams program in 2005 used our products extensively. The West Salem HS, OR team developed several methods of testing the ripeness of watermelon. One method was to measure the frequencies in the sound of the “thump” when the watermelon was hit by an object. They…

Subjects: Biology

Half life graph from Kinsey’sradiation treatment Richard Taylor (The Hockaday School, Dallas, TX) has a cat (Kinsey) that needed radiation treatment for feline hyperthyroidism. Richard used our Student Radiation Monitor, LabPro, and a TI-84 to monitor the radiation from Kinsey over several days. Kinsey was injected with I-131, which has a half life of about…

Subjects: Biology

Carolyn Purington, a student of Jacklyn Bonneau at Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science, Worcester, MA, did a study of the effectiveness of sports chest protectors in preventing commotio cordis, which is the sometimes fatal damage caused by a blunt impact to the chest of young athletes. She studied various materials and designs, using our…

Subjects: Biology

Check out www.jug.net/wt/jgpl.htm for a remarkably complete collection of information about the science of juggling. William V. Thayer, (St. Louis CC at Meramec, Kirkwood, MO) even includes this sample graph made with Logger Pro showing the position of the balls during a juggling session. He made this graph using special gloves with aluminum-foil strips wired…

Subjects: Biology

Steve Abitz and John Sebranek (Southwest HS, Green Bay, WI) took our LabPro, a calculator, and a temperature probe to Death Valley, CA in July. The average temperature in the air was 118°F (47.8°C). The average temperature on the ground was 125°F (51.7°C).

Subjects: Biology

Gus Frederick with the Oregon Public Education Network has come up with a fascinating idea that ties into the Millennium Mars Project, a project supported by NASA and the U.S. Department of Education. The goal of this project is to design a viable Martian colony. Participants are further required to produce a visual representation of…

Subjects: Biology