The Osmosis Experiment (10/3 - 10/7)

Image Source: https://goo.gl/18VsrL

Summary: 

     Osmosis is the movement of cells from a lower concentration to a higher concentration. For example, if you put an egg into a certain liquid, the egg will grow or shrink depending on the solute-solvent ratio on the outside the egg and inside the egg. If the egg has more solutes in the inside than in the outside, the water or liquid will go in the egg to make the solute-solvent ratio equal to the outside. If the egg has less solutes in the inside than the outside, the water inside the egg will go out of it to make the solvent-solute ratio equal. If the solvents in the inside of the egg is equal to the solvents on the outside, nothing will happen since they are already equal. Another thing kind of related to osmosis is mitosis, which is the splitting of cells. When you get injured, how does your body heal itself? Mitosis is the answer to that. In an injury, cells split and create more of themselves to fill in the cut/injury. If the splitting malfunctions, it non-stop rapidly grows into the body and causes what is known as cancer.

SP3 - Conducting Investigations:

    This week, I conducted investigations when I first identified the question : Is a skinned egg soaking in Gatorade a Hypertonic, Hypotonic, or Isotonic solution. Then my team and I created the hypothesis that the answer to my question was a hypotonic solution where the Gatorade goes inside the egg and the egg gets bigger. After that, we identified the variables. The manipulated variable was the liquid we were soaking the egg in, which was the Gatorade. The responding variable was the size of the egg. The controlled variable is the jar since nothing would happen to it since it is holding everything. After my team and I gathered all this information, we started on the experiment. We first recorded the initial weight of the egg and recorded it. We then put it in a jar and filled the jar with Gatorade. In the past 24 hours, the egg got bigger, just as we predicted.

XCC - Cause and Effect:

      A Cause and Effect relationship I noticed with the Egg Experiment was why the egg got bigger. The reason the egg got bigger was because it had more solutes (salt, sugar, etc.) inside. The Gatorade, however, had only about 30 calories inside it which meant that it had not a lot of solutes. When we put the Gatorade and the Egg inside the jar, the Gatorade went inside the egg to equalize the amount of solvents inside of it. This makes sense because if you add more of a solvent that has very little solutes in it to an egg with more solutes but very little solvents, the solvent-solute ratio will dilute in the poured in solvent. This is how the egg got bigger after being put in the Gatorade.