Science fair

[Sbaskin]

Help!! My son is doing a science fair project to see which types of fabrics pick up the most particles in an untouched field. What is a good hypothesis for this? Also where are we going to get information on how to identify the particles under the microscope. Thank you!!

[SciB]

Hi,

Your project sounds very interesting but I’m a bit confused as to how you propose to do it.

Can you please clarify what you mean by ‘untouched field’. Do you mean a meadow or pasture where cows graze, a corn field or just an open area out in the woods or near your home? What do you mean by ‘untouched’ and how can you prove this?

As to a hypothesis, how about—natural fabrics like wool pick up more particles (or a greater variety of particles) than synthetic fabrics like nylon.

Identifying what adheres to the fabric is going to be the fun part! Sand and dirt should be fairly obvious under the microscope and bits of leaves, grass, moss, seeds, flowers, bark and twigs should also be clearly identifiable. Insect parts might be a little tricky to distinguish but hairs and feathers would be easy unless you mean to identify the species they came from.

It depends on how detailed an identification you want to make. Environmental forensics experts are very skilled at identifying specific types of soil, insects, plant or animal species and there is some information on the net about how to do this. I did a search for ‘microscopic identification of dirt’ and found several interesting sites:

http://makezine.com/laboratory-55-exami ... microscop/
http://www.westchestergov.com/labsresea ... ameset.htm
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... 7474,d.eXY

Let us know more about how you propose to do your project and we can try to help you in setting it up and doing the appropriate statistics.

Good luck,

Sybee