Name: Joshua Choi Class: 826

How does Magnetic Fields Affect the Growth of a Garden Bean Plant?
Science Exit Project 5/09/11 5/30/11

Methods & Materials

Starting from May 9, 2011 through May 30, 2011, I have been experimenting on how magnetic fields affect the growth of a garden bean plant in my house/backyard garden. In order to experiment on this topic, I had first bought one pack of Burpee garden beans, four plastic plant containers, one pack of Magcraft Rare Earth Ring Magnets, and one cubic foot pack of Miracle-Gro Organic Choice Garden Soil. Next, I had read all of the instructions on the Burpee garden bean pack to properly grow the plants without any trouble. Laying down a newspaper on the ground, I had put the four containers and the pack of soil to not spill any soil on the floor. Listening to the seed packet instructions, I had first put three inches of soil gently into the each container. I had then put two garden bean seeds in each container, just in case if one seed did happen to grow. After laying down the seeds in every container, I had put another 2 inches of soil on top of the seeds in every container, and gently firmed the soil. After finishing this process, I had evenly distributed out 3 spoons of water to every container and left them at the window that received the most sunlight in my house. Since the weather was pretty warm during the days, the average temperature in the room was about 65-80 degrees.

After the Seeds Began to Sprout!

After the seeds had begun to sprout, I had gotten a piece of string and measured each plant from the soil line to the apical meristem. Using that measurement from the piece of string, I had then measured that measurement from each plant, that the string had measured using a ruler in centimeters (cm). Once I had gotten all the results, I wrote it down on a data table, in order to keep record of the growth of each plant in every container. Finally, I had taken out two ring magnets, and placed them around two plants in separate containers. I had labeled the two plant containers that had the ring magnet as the variable group, and the two plants without a ring magnet the control group. *For 3 weeks, I had repeated the process of watering the plants every day, and measuring & recording it, in the same process as the after the seeds began to sprout procedure This is the procedure of how I had finished my project

Results

Week(s)/Date
5/09/11 week 1 5/16/11 week 2 5/23/11 week 3 5/30/11 week 4

(Control) Plant #1 height (cm) 3 cm 7.2 cm 8.7 cm 13 cm

(Control) Plant #2 height (cm) 3 cm 7 cm 8.3 cm 11.8 cm

(Variable) Ring (Variable) Ring Magnet Plant #1 Magnet Plant #2 height (cm) height (cm) 3 cm 3 cm 9 cm 9.6 cm 13.2 cm 14 cm 19.6 cm 20.4 cm

Result (Observations)

During the four weeks, the garden bean plants from all four plant containers became very healthier and stronger as they grew. In the first week, the soil cracked open for some reason. It appeared that the seeds began to sprout and pushed up the soil with very strong force. The average growth of the plants quickly rose after the ring magnets were placed on the variable group on the first week. Because the variable plants grew so high, they began to bend over a little when they reached about 13-14 centimeters. As a result, the growth of the variable group sky-rocketed as the control group grew very slowly. Looking at the line graph, the trend of all the plants is increasing. But even though the lines are all increasing, the variable group lines on the graph are increasing way more than the control group.

Discussion
After conducting this experiment on How does magnetic fields affect the growth of a garden bean plant, I had discovered a very interesting and important finding. My hypothesis for this is experiment was that if I put a magnetic field around the garden bean plant, then the plant will not grow higher. After growing the garden bean plants for 4 weeks, the result had finally appeared. It appeared that the experiment failed to support my hypothesis because the garden bean plants that had the ring magnets (magnetic fields) around them grew much higher than the garden bean plants that did not have a ring magnet around them. According to my line graph, all the plants height did increase higher, but the height of the variable group plants was still much higher than the control group. But in weeks 2-3, it appeared that the control group was trying to catch up a little bit to the previous height of the variable group. The factors that may have influenced my results were probably the warm weather and the amount of sunlight provided to them. Since the garden bean plants have been in the garden outside for 2 weeks, they must have received a lot of sunlight. The water was already provided by me every morning. I also think that the warm weather may have influenced the results because according to http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4927243_magnetic-fields-affect-plantgrowth.html, A 2007 study presented at the sixth International Conference of the Balkan Physical Union showed that when bean plants were exposed to higher levels of static magnetic fields, the plants in fact grew at a faster rate than without the magnetic fields at warmer temperatures. In addition, these plants grew larger. These are the factors that I believe may have influenced the results of this experiment. If I were to conduct this experiment in the future again, there would be many changes that I would make. I would first test out this experiment on not just only one species of plants, but on a variety of more species (of plants. I would also test out this experiment in a longer amount of time, such as 3 months or so. In order to get more answers for this experiment, I would test out even more experiments such as does magnetism on other plants have the same affect as on garden bean plants? and what effects would occur if you were to place the ring magnet in a different location (for example, above or sideways of the plant)? The use of all this information can help others such as helping plants grow faster, decreasing the time it takes for a plant to fully nurture. This can also help in producing food sources and in the environment. These are the answers I would like to find if I were to conduct this experiment again in the future.