Nine-year-old Elise wanted to do a science experiment to find out how long it would take a sweet potato to grow vines. So she went to the grocery store with her grandmother, bought a sweet potato, and put it in a glass of water. But, as she explains in this video posted to YouTube by Suzanne Bartlett, no matter how long she left the sweet potato in the water, it wouldn’t sprout vines, even after she tried multiple potatoes.
Elise says, “We talked to the produce man at the store, and he said, ‘Well, these will never grow vines. At the farm, they spray them with a chemical called Bud Nip. You should try one of our organic sweet potatoes.” She did, and in a month it sprouted vines. She tried the experiment with an organic sweet potato from another grocery store, and it worked too. Before she knew it, a simple science experiment had turned into an important lesson about pesticides for the precocious little girl.
But Elise didn’t stop there—she continued her research, reading up on Bud Nip, also known as Chlorpropham, and learned that it’s routinely applied to onions, blueberries, tomatoes, and other produce, and that some experiments have shown it to cause tumors in animals. According to the Pesticide Information Project, long-term exposure “may cause adverse reproductive effects.” Elise concludes her video with the question, “Which potato would you rather eat?”
MORE: Meet the Scientists Who Are Tackling Our Disappearing Bee Problem
Tag: Kids and Science
This Is the Brainiest Way to Inspire Young Scientists
When Stanford neurobiology professor William Newsome’s kids were in middle school, he had a smart idea. What better way to get young students interested in science than showing them some real preserved brains? Brain Day has been an annual event for more than twenty years now. On February 3 Stanford neuroscience students Ivan Millan and Sammy Katta packed up some brains at Newsome’s lab and took them to middle schools in Palo Alto and East Palo Alto.
From its beginnings as a visit to one school, Brain Day has expanded to serve ten area middle schools. The graduate students ask the middle schoolers to be respectful of the brains that have been donated to science, and then they all get a chance to observe them. They compared human brains to the brains of monkeys, dogs, and sheep, and learned about their functions.
Amy Adams writes for Stanford News Service that one student was so inspired by Brain Day that he went on to study neuroscience in college. The student wrote to teacher Terry Noeth, “After adjusting to the awful smell of the brain slices, all I could think was: Woah. This strip of tissue used to be someone. This piece of brain used to think and love. I was so fascinated that I knew that when I grew up, I wanted to do something, anything, that related to the brain and how it makes us who we are.”
MORE: When People Said Minorities Weren’t Interested in Science, This Guy Proved Them Wrong