OSMOSIS 8, SPRING 1995
Contents
An Introduction from the Director
Noticeboard
Your Questions Answered
Jargon Generator
SAPS on CD-ROM
Thin Layer Chromatography for leaf pigments
Introduction from the Director
Dear Colleague,
In this issue there is news of SAPS on the CD-ROM, SAPS on the World Wide Web, and a Botanical Word Spinner.
Richard Price
Director
Noticeboard
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT - Capillary matting.
It has come to our notice that a number of brassica kits supplied by Philip Harris contain capillary matting which does not give satisfactory results. This matting is easy to identify because it is black instead of green. If you have bought a kit which contains black capillary matting, please return the matting to Philip Harris, who will immediately send you a replacement free of charge. Similarly, if you have received replacement matting which is black, please return it to Philip Harris and ask for it to be replaced by green capillary matting.
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Your questions answered.
Q Some of our brassicas have rather thin stems and small leaves - is this a fertiliser problem?
· It could well be. The Osmacote slow-release NPK rtiliser pellets, which are supplied in the brassica kits, are designed to release their nutrients over 3 - 4 months under 'garden conditions'. However this release is, to some extent, temperature dependent and, under your light-bank at 22 - 24çC, their release will be much faster. If you add a liquid NPK fertiliser such as General Purpose Algoflash to the reservoir, you may see a dramatic increase in growth (e.g. you could try 1 cm3 of concentrated Algoflash per litre of water in the reservoir in addition to NPK fertiliser pellets in the pots). However, be careful not to overdose your plants. Also you should remember that one way to make plants flower rapidly is to expose them to stress. In the case of the brassicas, the growing system does this by restricting root growth (small soil volume). Restricting the amount of NPK fertiliser may also help to promote rapid flowering - plants grown without NPK are very small but always flower. Clearly there is plenty of scope for investigations here.
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Your own jargon generator
by Gillian Lomas,
Science Designs.
Potential plant scientists are often confused by the words - the jargon - used by botanists in pursuit of their profession. Your own Botanical Word Spinner can help you to de-mystify the terminology and you can use it to create new words for your own scientific work.
Science Designs Ltd. a company established early in 1994 to make hands-on scientific exhibits, has produced an inexpensive version, on card, of the popular wall-mounted word wheel, designed and built by Richard Johnson, which is in Hands-on Plants at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
The Word Spinner has two concentric wheels, one with prefixes and one with suffixes. By lining up a prefix and a suffix you can make a complete word. Many thousands of words can be constructed from the Word Spinner, ranging from the well known such as 'gymno - sperm' (naked seed), 'myco - logy' (fungus knowledge) or 'hydro - phobic' (water hating), to the more fanciful such as 'gyno - fuge' (female avoiding) or 'anemo - dynamous' (wind powered). The Word Spinner is educational and entertaining.
Prefixes and suffixes are in different colours to distinguish between Latin and Greek origin, and meanings are given for each one. On the reverse of the Word Spinner is a short informative essay about the use of words - and jargon - in science.
Enquiries and orders to Science Designs Ltd., Unit 27, Kirkhill Place, Kirkhill Industrial Estate, Dyce, Aberdeen AB2 0ES Scotland. Tel: 01224 773320.
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SAPS on the World Wide Web. SAPS has been collaborating with the Wisconsin Fast Plants Programme in the USA and with the Plant Science Centre at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia. We have now begun to put together information about our respective programmes on the Internet under the heading PHYTOS which is the Greek word for a plant. Some of this information is available on Gopher and some on our other sites on the World Wide Web (WWW), but it is gradually being incorporated into this site. If you would like to view the SAPS material on PHYTOS, the address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is http://nasc.nott.ac.uk:8100 and this also provides access to information about the Wisconsin Fast Plants Programme and about the ANU Plant Science Programme.
The information in PHYTOS, which is still under development, is primarily intended for those who are devising educational resources for plant science and molecular biology.
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SAPS on CD-ROM
Science is about asking questions. Good scientists are those who ask good questions.
But what is a good question and how can students learn this skill? One way is to encourage students to pose and try to answer their own questions. Individual student investigations are becomeing increasingly important in modern science courses but they place great demands on students and teachers.
· How do I plan my investigation?
· What is the name of this plant?
· Where can I find more on this topic?
· How can I measure this?
· What does that word mean?
· How do I pronounce it?
· What do other people know about this?
· How do I grow this plant?
· What are the variables?
· What sort of controls will I need?
· How should I analyse my results?
· Are these differences significant?
In order to help teachers and students to develop the skills they need to address these problems, SAPS has collaborated with the IT Unit at Homerton College and Attica Cybernetics to create an extensive package on CD-ROM, Investigating Plant Science. This fully integrated resource provides a stimulating and challenging setting in which students can develop their information handling and investigation planning skills.
There are 10 sections on the CD-ROM:
· Stories will capture students' interest in plants.
· Flora is an ingenious key to 150 of the 'weeds' most likely to be found in school and college grounds. There is an optional audio track for those complicated Latin names.
· Plan takes students through the stages involved in planning, carrying out and evaluating an investigation. At any stage the user may review all the information entered up to that point and the plan can be edited, saved or dumped to a suitable printer.
· Data gives information about plants such as stomatal densities, seed storage compounds, photosynthetic pigments, plant genome sizes, etc.
· Glossary gives the meaning of many technical terms. An optional audio track gives the pronunciation for each term.
· Studies Browse through the Studies to see what other students have done and pick up ideas for investigation.
· References contains abstracts from widely available sources which provide background information and ideas for investigations.
· Plants gives detailed information on how to grow plants which are easy to culture in schools, with suggestions for investigations.
· Tips is an index of techniques and includes advice on data presentation and statistical analysis.
· Images There are Images throughout the resource, many of which have been specially drawn.
· Investigating Plant Science was compiled by practising teachers working alongside plant scientists and we hope that it will ease the burden on teachers while enabling their students to become more independent investigators.
Minimum hardware requirements: 80386-20MHz (486 preferred), PC compatible with 4MB of RAM. 4MB free hard disc space, DOS 3.1 or later. Windows 3.1 256 colour 640x480 SVGA display. MPC-compatible CD-ROM drive.
Available from: Homerton College IT Unit, Cambridge CB2 8PH England. Tel: 01223 507111 (ask for IT Unit).