GMU:DIY Biolab “Driver’s License”/Christian Wiegert: Difference between revisions

Set up several boxes to grow plants under artificial light. Vary color, duration or other aspects of the light and see, if it changes anything in the growing of plants.

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Grow plants in different substitues for soil, e.g. agar-agar-murishage-skoog-medium and see how they do.

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I build and set up a box, seperated in 4 sections. Each section containing one 1 Watt LED to support the inhabitants with light. The boxes have fans, so the air inside will be interchanged from time to time. To control the amount and - for the first experiment -  the duration of the light and the fans i wrote a little script that is running on an arduino. this script also counts the time (and in case of a powerdrain stores this information on the eeprom).

I set up the box in my shared-working-room, which was probably not the best idea, as people there tend to be heating a lot, which results in very dry air.

The Plants are already sprouting. No real difference. Neither between colors of light nor between durations

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The plants are growing well. the look a bit leggy, which might be a hint, that the light is not enough. but as i forgot to plant some reference-plants i can't be sure as "gartenkresse" is quite leggy anyway

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The plants are still growing, but they definitely seem weak. i guess it might be due to the fact that they get not enough motion by the fans. probably its also due to the lack of light.

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Shortly before Christmas I decided to end this experiment, as i knew the university would shut down electricity during the holidays i took the plants out of there boxes and placed them under sunlight.

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File:day0_jelly.jpg

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File:day2_beginning.jpg

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The Rise of the mould

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Mold seems to be winning

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Interestingly the pots, that i kept in my room at home grew some very interesting molds and probably some kind of algae. I took some closeup pictures.

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As i ended the experiments before, i wanted to start the next kind of experiment. Wich was tot try to grow algae under artificial light. To start off, i searched the internet for some instructions or tips on growing algae. I found a tutorial, that showed the most basic way to grow algea was to just add plants fertilizer to some tap water, put it to a sunny place and then wait. As this was the most simple thing to do, i started right before leaving weimar for christmas holidays.

For the beginning i added 5ml of fertilizer to 1L of water and then filled 3 different jars with it. I had one with the lid on top, so this was fully sealed and only algae already inside the water could grow. On the other hand i was sure, that the water inside would not evaporate totally no matter what happened while i was away. I added a second one with an opened lid and a bottle which was somehow the step inbetween the others.

Sadly i noticed that no visible algea had grown during the last 3 weeks. Either there are none in the tap water/ air or there is simply not enough sunlight during the wintermontsh to make them grow.

But interestingly enough there were lots of dead flies in solution. Of course not in the closed jar, but in all the others. I allready noticed this kind of flies beeing around for the past few weeks and i think the might be some kind of flie living in plants pots, so that could be the reason the go to the fertilized water, but i will try to find out more about those flies, during the upcoming days.

The flies, seem to be some kind of mourning mosquito (Trauermücke). Thats basically a fly, that lives in the soil (inside planting pots) that might be the reason why they mass-killed themselves in a jar filled with water and fertilizer. I found some information at wikipedia[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trauerm%C3%BCcken]

As algea from Tapwater were growing really slow, I decided to speed things up a little bit. So i got some water that should be well contaminated already from places, that are known for that. And the best place for growing algea is, as we all know: aquariums so i went to two places that everyone knows keep aquariums: