Science Buddies
Science Buddies: Measuring Your Threshold of Hearing
How your ears and your brain turn the sound waves out there in the world into the experience of music in your head, remains a mystery to many, but yet we all experience and even enjoy sounds and music. If you're interested in doing a...
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Science Buddies: Measuring Your Taste Threshold
Some people are more susceptible to flavors than others. This experiment asks you to test your threshold for the three types of taste our tongues are capable of experiencing: salty, sweet, and sour.
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Science Buddies: Twirls, Whirls, Spins, & Turns: Reflexes & Dizziness
Tilt-A-Whirls, Merry-Go-Rounds, Spinning Tea Cups. Just the thought of these rides is enough to make someone dizzy, or queasy. Learn about spins, turns, and the mixed signals that fire in our brains when the sensation of dizziness takes...
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Science Buddies: Can Garlic Prevent Crown Gall?
Crown gall is a plant disease caused by the soil bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens. This project uses tomato plants to investigate whether garlic extract can prevent crown gall infection. Though this is a lengthy experiment, a...
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Science Buddies: Make Your Own Electric Guitar Pickup
If you like playing electric guitar, this could be a cool project for you. In this project you'll wind one or more of your own electric guitar pickups and test them out in an inexpensive electric guitar to understand just how electric...
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Science Buddies: Make Your Own Piezoelectric Pickup for Acoustic Guitar
In this project you'll learn how to make a piezoelectric pickup for acoustic guitar using inexpensive components. You can then connect your acoustic guitar to an amplifier, and record your own music. If you are interested in electronics...
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Science Buddies: Pick This Project!
This lab will help you understand the physics of vibrating strings, and find out why the tone of an electric guitar changes when you switch between the different pickups. If playing guitars is a hobby of yours, this experiment makes an...
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Science Buddies: Blowing Bottletops: Making Music With Glass Bottles
This is a musical project about the resonance of closed-end air columns. Organ pipes, flutes, and brass instruments are examples of musical instruments of this type. In this project, you'll learn how the pitch of the note produced...
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Science Buddies: Singing Wine Glasses
Making a glass sing is not always as easy as it looks. This project explains the science behind the interesting hobby. You will be asked how the amount of fluid within a glass affects its pitch.
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Science Buddies: Guitar Fundamentals: Wavelength, Frequency, & Speed
This is a rockin' project for guitarists with an interest in the physics behind music. If you have ever wondered why the pitch of the note changes when you fret the string, this project will help you understand by applying basic...
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Science Buddies: How to Make a Guitar Sing
This is a great project for musicians interested in the physics of stringed instruments. If you have ever played an acoustic guitar, you may have noticed that picking a single string can make one or more of the other (unpicked) strings...
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Science Buddies: How to Make a Piano Sing
The renowned pianist Vladimir Horowitz once said, "The most important thing is to transform the piano from a percussive instrument into a singing instrument." In this lab, you will learn about sympathetic vibrations, a method used to...
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Science Buddies: What Material Makes the Most Resonant Soundboard?
If you like music and musical instruments, this project might resonate with you. You will investigate materials that could be used to build acoustic musical instruments. You can then use a music box mechanism and a sound level meter to...
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Science Buddies: Do String Players Have Longer Left Fingers?
Physical activity is needed for maintaining normal bone strength and mass. But whether physical stress on finger bones during development leads to an increase in finger length, is something you will discover in this project not by...
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Science Buddies: Correlation Between Pitch & Age, Gender, Musical Background
Music can be a great way to learn more about science. This project uses music to examine whether there is a correlation between age, gender, or musical background and being able to sing with perfect pitch.
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Science Buddies: Artificial Intelligence Teaching a Computer to Play Tic Tac Toe
This is a more challenging JavaScript project. You will have to figure out a way to translate game strategy into a computer algorithm. Directions will show you how to create a working Tic-Tac-Toe board on a webpage. Just by showing the...
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Science Buddies: Most Effective Treatment for Whitefly Infestations on Plants?
Whiteflies are a group of closely related insect species whose larvae live on plants. Like aphids, they suck nutrients from the plant's circulatory system. You will be asked to find the most effective method for fighting a whitefly...
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Science Buddies: Caffeine and Heart Rate: A Pharmacological Study Using Daphnia
In this project, water fleas (Daphnia magna), a semi-transparent freshwater crustacean, are used to study the effects of caffeine on heart rate. You do not have to learn how to take a crustacean's pulse though, because you can actually...
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Science Buddies: Earthworms: Nature's Tiller?
Everybody knows that worms are good for the soil, but not everybody knows why. This lab shows you how to efficiently measure earthworms within units of soil to determine their affect on decomposition and reduction of surface residue.
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Science Buddies: Paper Chromatography: Basic Version
Many substances are actually mixtures of different things. For example, milk, which looks like it is one substance, is actually a mixture of many different solids and liquids. Chromatography is a technique that is used to separate...
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Science Buddies: Bomb's Away! A Ping Pong Catapult
With this project you'll send ping pong balls flying through the air with a rubber-band powered catapult. This catapult makes it easy to reproduce the launch angle, and to measure the amount of force applied to the projectile. Armed with...
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Science Buddies: Circumscribing a Circle About a Triangle
Here is a project that combines Computer Science and Mathematics. Prove a method for circumscribing a circle about a triangle (as shown). You'll also learn how to create an interactive diagram to illustrate your proof, using an applet...
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Science Buddies: Taking Off on a Tangent
This is an interesting geometry project that goes back to the time of Archimedes, the famous Greek mathematician. You can combine this mathematical project with computer science and take this ancient problem into the twenty-first century...
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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...