Need Help Deciding On Science Project: FAST!!!

[KountryKat]

I want to do something on sleep, animals, or something else within those boundaries, maybe even water shocks would be a canidate. I am ver much into the animal topic, but I am very unsure on whether or not I want to do something that relates to my animal camoflauge project from last year. Also, I am doing it with a partner and I could do with an idea before Thursday. I know this is a little late, but I am not having much luck!
Any ideas or suggestions will help

[carolinethorn]

Sleep is a fascinating subject and there are lots of aspects of it that you could study. Remember though that you will need to fill out the appropriate paperwork for a study with humans or animals and if that is due thursday too it might be too tough to get it done on time.

Some of what you might choose to study might be influenced by what types of measurements you can make, what equipment you can get and what kind of conditions you can vary. Think about things that are fairly easy to measure, and give numbers which are good to analyse (quantitative measurements) and other things are more difficult or more subjective or qualitative measurements where you rely on someone telling you how they feel. Qualitative measurements are hard to deal with for scientific analysis and it might be better to avoid it.
A fairly simple quantitative measurement you could make would be duration, or length of sleep for humans - you can ask them how long they slept for and get a number of hours/minutes. For caged animals you could video tape them and then sample the tape at regular intervals to see how many times they were sleeping when you looked at the tape. You could measure something about the human or animals physiology before and after or during sleep. These could be things like temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, foot size, weight, response time.
Conditions that you could change are things like temperature, duration of sleep, light, exercise, food intake.
There are some common old wives tales that you could look at like warm milk helps you sleep or cheese before bedtime gives you nightmares or your feet are smaller in the morning than the evening.
What was your idea about water shocks? You could look at heart rate before and after a water shock. I am not quite sure how yuo would relate any of this to camoflage though.
I am sure you can come up with something! Post back with some of your ideas.
Best of luck,
Caroline

[MelissaB]

In addition to what Carolinethorn said, I'd suggest you take a look at the link up in the left-hand corner of the page that says 'Science Fair Project Idas.' There are some great ideas for projects in that guide, including some on animals!