Science Buddies
Science Buddies: How Many Letters?
Can you remember all of your ABC's? Computers need to "remember" letters too. Every time we use a computer to write a story, the computer needs to "remember" the letters in the story by saving them to the computer's memory as a file. In...
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Science Buddies: Getting More Out of Less : Google Hits and Search Terms
Google is the name of the most often used search engine on the Internet. "Googol" is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. It's a very large number. This experiment will help you test different search terms and find out.
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Science Buddies: Getting Carried Away: Measuring Soil Erosion
When you think of environmental challenges facing the world, the first things that come to mind might be global warming, or loss of biodiversity, since these are often in the newspapers. A serious problem that you may not have heard...
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Science Buddies: How Does Soil Affect the P H of Water?
Did you know that soils can be alkaline, neutral, or acidic? Most plants grow best in soil near neutral pH, but some plants prefer slightly acidic and others slightly alkaline soil. What is the pH of the soil in your garden? What happens...
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Science Buddies: Cd Burning: Take It to the Edge
Did you know that you can tell how much information is on a CD-R without even using a computer? Find out how in this "reflective" experiment.
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Science Buddies: I'm Trying to Breathe Here! Dissolved Oxygen vs. Temperature
To survive, we need oxygen in the air we breathe. Oxygen is also essential for most aquatic organisms, but there is much less oxygen available in water than in air. Learn how to measure dissolved oxygen and then see how oxygen...
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Science Buddies: Image File Types and Size
There are so many different ways to save an image file it can be mind boggling. If you want to know whether to save your favorite photo as a jpeg, bmp, gif, or tiff then try this simple experiment.
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Science Buddies: Acid Rain and Aquatic Life
Chemicals from the Earth's atmosphere are making their way down to the planet. Not in spaceships, but in rain. The acid rain can infiltrate ground water, lakes, and streams. How does acid rain affect aquatic ecosystems?
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Science Buddies: Something's Fishy About That Fertilizer
Did you know that when you use fertilizer in your garden, it can eventually reach a lake, stream, or pond? There are many different chemicals present in fertilizers. Learn how they affect the aquatic organisms in the ecosystem within...
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Science Buddies: Heavy Metals and Aquatic Environments
You might know that lead can be toxic, and that you can get lead poisoning from eating or inhaling old paint dust. Lead is called a heavy metal, and there are other sources of heavy metals that can be toxic, too. Silver, copper, mercury,...
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Science Buddies: Computer Sleuth: Identification by Text Analysis
Here's a project where you can try your hand at being a detective with your computer. In this project you'll write a program to do some basic analysis of features of written text (for example, counting the length of each word in the...
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Science Buddies: Program to Check a Sudoku Solution
Sudoku puzzles have become extremely popular over the past couple of years. You can find books of puzzles for beginners to experts, and many newspapers print Sudoku puzzles daily. This project challenges you to write a computer program...
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Science Buddies: Mapping Troposhperic Ozone Levels Over Time
Ozone in the stratosphere protects the earth by absorbing harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. However, when ozone occurs in the troposphere, it is harmful to health. In this project you can use data from EPA monitoring stations...
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Science Buddies: Recycling Greywater: Can Plants Tolerate It?
Water is a valuable resource many often take for granted. This exercise however gives you the opportunity to learn about and discover how greywater (water that has been used for washing or bathing) can be used for watering ornamental...
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Science Buddies: The Perfect Marriage of Computer Science & Medicine
Find out the real explanation for why your parents are so weird. Here is a project that lets you explore the internet to find out why your "DNA blueprint" is so important to health and disease. In this project you will use methods that...
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Science Buddies: Which Fruits Can Ruin Your Dessert?
Here is a basic project for investigating enzymes that prevent gelatin from solidifying. This way you can understand why it is some fruits are not recommended for inclusion when it comes to making gelatin.
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Science Buddies: How Much Baking Powder Do Quick Breads Need?
If you like to bake, this could be a good project for you. There is a purpose for each of the ingredients in your recipes, but not everyone is always aware of what that purpose may be. Though this lab takes multiple days, you will...
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Science Buddies: Can Baking Soda Substitute for Baking Powder in a Recipe?
There's nothing quite like the smell of fresh-baked muffins for breakfast on a Saturday morning. If you're into baking, you might want to try this insightful project that lets you witness the chemistry behind making muffins. You'll get...
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Science Buddies: Determining Iodide Content of Salt
In this week long "kitchen chemistry" project you will use chemicals from the supermarket to test for the presence of iodine and iodide in salt. These are common micronutrients added to some preparations of table salt. A materials list,...
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Science Buddies: How Much Energy Is Stored in Different Types of Food?
In this project you'll learn a method for measuring how much chemical energy is available in different types of food. You will build your own calorimeter to capture the energy released by burning a small food item, like a nut or a piece...
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Science Buddies: Lowering the Freezing Point of Water
When it comes to making ice cream, in order to make the mixture cold enough to freeze, you surround the container with ice and rock salt. This experiment helps you learn how the addition of salt (or other substances) affects the freezing...
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Science Buddies: Using Daphnia to Monitor Water Toxicity
In a bioassay, a living organism serves as a detector for toxins-the same way canaries were used in coal mines to detect invisible toxic gases. In this project, water fleas (Daphnia magna), a freshwater crustacean, are used in a bioassay...
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Science Buddies: Tough Beans: Which Cooking Liquids Slow Softening the Most?
Beans are important to the diets of many people, that is why you always find it cooked a specific way or in a specific dish in different cultures. Here you will learn how the liquid that beans are cooked in affects how quickly or slowly...
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Science Buddies: Image Compression vs. Image Quality: Finding the Best Tradeoff
In this project you'll learn about how digital image files are encoded, and how digital images can be compressed so that the files take up less storage space and can be transmitted more quickly. You will also measure the quality of...