Nikisha Patel
Attributes
Hard working – putting all of your effort into finishing something.
Tenacious – sticking with a difficult task until it is completed.
Collaborative – working well in a team or pairs.
About Nikisha
Nikisha is a botanist who has recently graduated from a top American university with a first class degree in Biology. She is incredibly hard-working and this showed during her time at University in order to achieve such a high standard qualification. Nikisha now works with a team of Botanists studying some of the rarest plants in the world and has to be collaborative so she can work well with others and share new ideas. Her job also means she gets to travel the world to find some of the plants! Sometimes finding the plants she needs to study can be very tricky and once found the work she has to do is difficult and challenging but Nikisha is tenacious; so refuses to give up until she has solved the problem.
Science For Families: Plants
By now, you’ve probably already done some experiments with plants; growing seeds in a bag and dissecting the parts of a flower.
Seeds are amazing! They can hang around for years not doing anything at all, and then with just a little water and the right temperature, BOOM: they start to grow. One of the oldest seeds ever to grow into a plant was around 2000 years old.
Seeds are able to sense the environment around them, using systems known as tropisms. They have hydrotropism which allows the roots to sense water and grow towards it. Plants needs water to survive and they get it through their roots. The shoots have something called phototropism, which means they sense and grow towards the light. Plants need light in order to make food. To make sure that the roots grow downwards and the shoots grow upwards, the seed can sense gravity: it ‘knows’ which way is up and which way is down. This is called geotropism.
There are loads of experiments that you can do with hydrotropism, phototropism and geotropism. Here are just a few to get you started:
- Try growing seeds in different amounts of light and dark. This PDF will get you underway, but feel free to use whatever you have around the house. Old cereal boxes work well!
- Let your seeds start to grow. When the roots and stems have started to appear, turn the seed upside down and wait a few days. What happens? Try turning it the other way up again.
- Take two cups, and fill one with water. Make a paper towel bridge between the two and place some germinating seeds on the paper towel bridge. Cover the whole thing with a clear plastic cover, something like this. Watch which way the roots grow.
Colour-changing plants
Plants are pretty amazing all on their own, but if you want to have a go at customising your flowers, here’s a video that shows you how:
We decided to take it one step further and tried to make multi-coloured flowers. By carefully splitting the stems with a sharp knife (sound the adult assistance alarm!), and placing the ends in differently-coloured water, we managed to make some two-tone tulips (technically carnations, but who can resist adding alliteration?).
Check out our gallery:
The Botanist
The Botanist
So today you’ve been exploring the wonderful world of botany – the science of plants. I bet you’ve also got up close and personal with a strange and wonderful Venus Fly Trap.
Hopefully your plant and the little plastic tube made it safely home. If they did, it’s time to do a little experiment. Scroll down for instructions!
Botany is a pretty cool area of science. If you fancy finding out a bit more about the wonderful world of plants, head outside and have a look around – you’ll find thousands of different types all over the place!
An experiment: multicoloured flowers
For this experiment, you’ll need:
- Your white flower (its called a chrysanthemum)
- A cup half filled with water
- Some food colouring (blue is good)
What to do (scientists call this the Method):
- Add 6 drops of your food colouring to the water.
- Remove the flower from its plastic vial and put the stem into the coloured water.
- Leave it for a few hours.
- Come back and see what has happened!
- Take a photo and email it to us – we’d love to add it to our gallery below.
If you get stuck, try watching the video on the right – it’ll show you exactly what to do.
What’s going on?
Hopefully, after a couple of hours, you will see some of the colour from the water on the petals. Before you read on, stop and ask yourself this question:
How has the colour got from the water to the petal?
In humans, all the nutrients and waste is transported around our bodies through blood vessels. These are little (and sometime big) pipes that connect your entire body. If you close one eye and look in a mirror you can probably see these blood vessels on your eyelid, they are little red lines.
Plants also transport waste, nutrients and water around. They do this using a special tubes. Tubes so small you can’t see them with your eye. This is why your flower has turned blue (or green, or whatever coloured food colouring you use), water has travelled up the tubes into the petals. Because the water was blue, the petals turned blue!
The Think Physics Flower Gallery
