Up, Up and Over Nadine

NASA Global Hawk AV6 
HS3 Mission
by Sci5HS

We have been following the Global Hawk missions from NASA Wallops. These flights are collecting data about hurricanes and tropical storms. Data is collected by drop sondes, and the planes as they fly above the storms at 60,000 feet.

NASA Global Hawk

We have been chatting with Global Hawk scientists, asking them questions about the airplane, the data, the drop sondes, and the hurricanes themselves. We're now trying to figure out how tropical storms and hurricanes get started. We think it has something to do with warm sea surface temperatures, evaporation, cold air temperatures. We think this somehow links to wind speeds. We are now trying to design a lab to test this hypothesis.

Lawn Mower flight path (top)
Wind Speeds (green)
Latitude (red)
Tropical Storm Nadine AV6 Flight

Sci4: Seed Embryo Alarm Clocks

What triggers germination?
by Sci4HR

We are trying to figure out what conditions seeds need to germinate. We are using Brassica rapa (RCBr) seeds, a.k.a. FastPlants to test how seeds react to different conditions. We created an experiment to test germination triggers. Germination triggers are like the seed embryo "alarm clocks."

We did our control trial last week.

Control Conditions:

• room temperature and water temperature are 26°C
• room lighting, lights on while in class, lights off at night and when we are not in the classroom
• constant water
• tap water
• there were no nutrients or soil used

Set Up:
We put a filter paper disk in petri dishes to act as a wick to keep the seeds moist. We put three RCBr seeds in each petri dish. These are our "germination chambers." We put our germination chambers in a small container with a water 1cm deep. Put everything on a counter in the room and waited to see what happened. After only 2 days the root had started to poke out of the testa in all of our seeds. After seven days we have small seedlings with roots, some fuzzy root hairs, the testas have started to come off, they have a stem and 2 clover-shaped, bright green cotyledons.

RCBr Control Trial Germination Chambers Day 7