The Scientist Guy

Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Alva Edison was a deaf person. He was removed from school by his teacher as his mind always kept wandering. He was taught at home by his mother and according to him, he learnt the most from a book by RG Parker, ‘School of Natural Philosophy’.

He is known for inventing the first commercially practical light bulb. He failed a thousand times before inventing it but he never said that he failed. Instead, he said,

” I have not failed a thousand times, but I have successfully found a thousand ways how not to make a light bulb.”

Google Science Fair Project Ideas

The Google Science Fair is a competition for students of age 13-18 where they can submit their research projects online. It was started in 2011. Below are some good topics for you to research on if you wish to participate in it. These topics are common to all age groups. You can pickup any topic and choose what you want to research on.

• Generating electricity from new sources
• Concentrated solar power
• Water supply and purification
• Energy from sewage
• Biofuels
• Purifying atmospheric air
• How to reduce pollution from cars
• Testing the effect of different factors on plant growth
• Solar powered everyday use devices
• New methods of recycling waste objects

I am trying to search for more topics and will update this list with detailed project ideas very soon. Keep checking this post.

Gregor Mendel & his experiments on pea plants

Gregor Mendel was an Austrian scientist who gained fame only after his death when other scientists verified his findings. Mendel showed that inheritance in an individual follows certain patterns of traits from its previous generations. This is now called ‘Laws of Mendelian Inheritance. He did his experiments on pea plants and found the two laws-

Law of Segregation- It states that every individual has a pair of allele(one of a group of genes). The allele are received from parents. For example, one parent has ‘AA’ and other has ‘aa’ phenotypes. Then the offspring may have either ‘AA’ , ‘Aa’ , ‘aA’ or ‘aa’. ‘A’ occurs most frequently and its presence gives the offspring a certain trait, so ‘A’ is the dominant trait and ‘a’ is the recessive trait.

Law of Independent Assortment- This law states that separate genes are there for separate traits and any two traits have nothing to do with each other. For example, an individual’s eye color may be of his father and his height that of his mother. These two traits are independently passes.