Week 1: Plant noises🌱🔊


 This semester I plan on getting on being focused and on top of my responsibilities. I am doing 18 credits this semester and I'm mostly in person, which I was super worried about. Last semester I was completely online but the transition to hybrid classes hasn't been too bad. I've talked to each instructor about my concerns and am working to get accommodations since I also found out I have ADHD. I don't think I'll have too many problems so long as I communicate about it and accept help.

Aside from that, I finalized my decision on what I wanted to do this semester. I settled on expanding on Alex's project from last semester, where he recorded the acoustics of plants that were put into stressful situations. I will be mostly copying what he had done but adding some more variables to it, along with a new detector. I will also be building the new detector next week, so I'm excited to do that. 

I didn't want to do the exact same things as Alex so I asked Josh if I could introduce new stressors to the plants. I wanted to add micro plastics to one plant, since I've been seeing more new headlines saying that humans are consuming more microplastics and it's now showing up in bloodstreams. I wanted to see if adding microplastics even affected a plants growth, if it did then does the plant create more sound? As for biodegredables, I've been seeing a lot businesses (both big and small) advertise on how eco friendly they are by switching to biodregredable materials. Though they don't include any sort of certification or even explanation on how it is sustainable, plus the supposed eco friendly materials usually have a plastic coating, which seems hypocritical. I am really looking forward to set up the experiment and even more excited about the results from it. 

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