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Summary of Contents for Thames & Kosmos TK2 Scope
- Page 1 Experiment Manual...
- Page 2 Warning! Only suitable for children at least 8 years of age. Instructions for the parents or other persons in charge are enclosed and must be followed. Keep the packaging, since it contains important information. Not suitable for children under 3 years of age due to small parts that can be swallowed.
- Page 3 Experiment Manual by Jan Haller and Chris Scrogum Thames & Kosmos, LLC, Portsmouth, RI USA Franckh-Kosmos Verlags-GmbH & Co. KG, Stuttgart Germany...
- Page 4 Table of Contents What’s Included in Your Microscope Kit ..............2 What You Should Know A word to the parents and supervising adults .
- Page 5 What You Should Know them immediately after use. It is necessary here that a strict separation be made between household and experimental accessories. Dear Parents and Supervising Adults, 6.) Some of the suggested experimental plants (e.g. box tree, Children are curious by nature. They want to explore, study, ivy, etc.) are mildly toxic.
- Page 6 I See Something That You Don’t See What do a bottle cork, a carrot, and an elephant have in common? In 1665, Robert Hooke apparently did not know that he was making one of the dis- coveries of the millennium when he ob- served that a common bottle cork consists of tiny hollow spaces.
- Page 7 Your New Microscope Regardless of whether you are sitting in front of a microscope for the first time or have already used another microscope before and know how it works, use the following sections to get to know your new microscope and to find out what is in it.
- Page 8 an object much more closely and clearly at higher powers. With this microscope, you can determine the magnification with which you are observing an object quite easily in the following way: You multiply the number on the ocular lens (the eyepiece lens) by the number on the objective lens that is pointing perpendicularly downward.
- Page 9 Using the Microscope with Transmitted Light In the last section, you learned quite a lot that will help you with using the micro- scope. Nevertheless, we suggest that you still read this section carefully in order to avoid mistakes later when you start your microscopic explorations. What do you need for the next exercise? Of course, the first thing is an object.
- Page 10 Understanding Optics Why does a straw that is inserted into a glass of water suddenly have a break where there was none before? This is because light diffuses differently in air than in other environments — water in this case. When light strikes the surface of water, a portion of the light is reflected at the water’s surface.
- Page 11 The Basic Equipment Your new microscope set contains almost all of the essential things to get started immediately. How to use them will be explained either later on or in the chapter in which the part or tool is used for the first time.
- Page 12 slide. After use, always rinse the pipette out several times with clean water so that it is ready again for new experiments. The cleaning of the lenses was already mentioned in the previous chapter. For this purpose, use the special cleaning cloths (so-called lens papers) that are included in a little pad in the kit.
- Page 13 The following things are not included in the kit, but are useful when using the microscope: To absorb excess liquids and to clean all of the equipment, it makes sense to always have a few paper towels handy. Some sheets from a kitchen roll, paper tissues, or even paper from a roll of toilet paper fulfill this purpose terrifi- cally! To cut objects for your preparations, you are going to need razor blades.
- Page 14 Cells — If You Know One, Do You Know Them All? It’s mind-boggling when you try to imagine that our body consists of teensy weensy cells from our head to our feet. After all, about 70 trillion cells (that’s a 7 with 13 zeros!) make up our bodies along with their organs.
- Page 15 individual cells from the mucous membrane in your mouth come loose and stick to the cotton swab. You should rub with plenty of pressure but not too hard; you don’t want to hurt yourself! Rub the cotton swab in the water drop on the prepared slide.
- Page 16 at crime scenes (skin cells or blood residues of the culprit, for example, which also contain DNA) with the DNA of possible perpetrators. To do this, the police obtain DNA for comparison from the mucous membrane skin cells in the mouths of the suspects.
- Page 17 Life in a Shoebox — The Plant Cell Suppose for a minute that you ate a won- derful pizza covered with heavily salted cheese and pepperoni for lunch. After a while, you might get terribly thirsty. Is that a coincidence, or is the pizza (or its topping) responsible for this? To find out, perform the following experiment at dinner: Cut a radish into two halves...
- Page 18 membrane. Cells have evolved to retain their water and not dry out under normal conditions. As you saw in the experiment with the radish, however, sometimes conditions make it impossible for a cell to retain its water. Cells don’t have any quick defenses against concentrated solutions of salts or even sugar and other sol- ids.
- Page 19 pull away from the cell wall. The salt or sugar solution slowly penetrates in between the cell wall (light-colored lines) and the red cell. Perhaps you can even observe how the cell contents turn a darker red over time. This is because the red colorant in the cell becomes more concentrated after the loss of water and hence becomes darker.
- Page 20 Chlorophyll You will find chloroplasts in all green plant parts. It is especially easy to study the chlorophyll in the leaves of some typical aquarium plants because the leaves are only two layers thick. Different species of egeria are frequently used in aquariums (elodea is another scientific name for it).
- Page 21 Cutting, Part 1 — First Tips Theoretically, the number of objects that you can look at with your microscope is unlimited. However, all microscopic preparations must fulfill one condition: They need to be thin enough so that light is able to pass through them. As a rule, excessively thick specimens do not let enough let through and they also usually contain several layers of cells on top of each other.
- Page 22 Absolute Power After every breath, you exhale carbon dioxide. Anytime anything is burned, regardless of whether it is gas inside an automobile mo- tor or grilled hot dogs, this colorless gas is produced. Perhaps you’ve already heard carbon dioxide referred to as a green- house gas.
- Page 23 It will work well for all of these specimens to stain the starch granules with io- dine. To do this, you can either place the specimen directly into iodine solution or you can subsequently exchange the water under the cover slip for iodine solution (see “Exchanging Solutions”...
- Page 24 The World on a Tiny Scale Up to now, you’ve used your micro- scope to look at small sections of large organisms. But there is another, otherwise invisible world for you to discover. Invisible to the naked eye, a colorful and fascinating variety of microscopic plants and animals can be found in water barrels, flower vases, and ponds.
- Page 25 Many plant and animal species settle as so-called aufwuchs (from the German term meaning “upgrowth”) on rocks or underwater plant parts. Many algae and even some animals prefer a permanent, fixed home. The advantage is obvious: The danger of simply being washed away by currents is lessened. But what does an animal do that has grown in place but feeds on other animals? Precisely —...
- Page 26 You can keep the pond samples alive for an extended period of time. Cover a jar or bucket containing the slide and the original water loosely with a piece of cardboard. This is just to protect against dust. However, oxygen needs to be able to get in;...
- Page 27 Food Detectives on the Case Pretend for a moment that you are an archaeol- ogist excavating artifacts at an Aztec pyramid. The Aztecs were an indigenous people who lived in what is now Mexico. Their power- ful empire had its heyday more than 500 years ago in the 14th and 15th centuries.
- Page 28 Did You Know? Pollen Grains in Honey In order to dive into the bizarre world of pollen grains, you will need: The honey bee is not only one of the oldest but is also one of the • a slide and a cover slip most useful animals in the world to- •...
- Page 29 The Salt in the Soup The following wouldn’t be a investigation for an Aztec archaeologist, but rather for a chef or baker: Suppose there is a crystalline, white substance in a bowl in the kitchen. Is it salt or sugar? One easy way to answer that question would be to taste it.
- Page 30 The Vast Kingdom of the Insects Insects are by far the most successful group of animals in the world. There is almost no living space that they have not occupied since their emergence about 300 to 400 million years ago. From the snow- and ice-covered Hima- layas to the hot, dry deserts of Africa, from the Antarctic with temperatures...
- Page 31 long distances. So if the insect were too large, then all of the body parts would be constantly under-supplied with oxygen. Consequently, insects’ size must remain within certain limits. Insect Wings It goes without saying that we only use already dead animals for the examina- tion of insects.
- Page 32 The Fascinating Structure of Insect Legs The legs of insects have come to be every bit as varied as the mouthparts. In many cases, it would be presumptuous to regard insect legs as being mere means of transportation. For example, the honey bee has three different tools on the rear- most of its three pairs of articulated legs: a brush to brush the pollen from its fur, kneading tools for processing the collected pollen into transport packages, and a little basket consisting of bristles in which the pollen packages are transported.
- Page 33 Mushrooms: Plants or Animals? At first glance, the question in the chapter title may strike you as silly. The closer one looks at a mushroom, however, the harder it becomes to answer this question. In a very strict sense, mushrooms fall somewhere between animals and plants.
- Page 34 The Inner Life of Fungi To explore the inner life of a fungus, you will need: • a slide and a cover slip • water and the pipette • the dissecting needle • a kitchen knife • a button mushroom or another kind of culinary mushroom Cut the entire mushroom using a knife along its length into two halves and use the tweezers to pluck a bit from the inside of the stem.
- Page 35 You can also study these spores and the lamellas using a button mushroom or another culinary mushroom. For this, pluck the lamella of a mushroom that is as young as possible and place it under the microscope. Or try to make a thin cross-section of the cap of a young button mushroom.
- Page 36 When observed more closely, a lichen is a community consisting of a fungus and Did You Know? many single-cell algae. The algae converts energy from the sun into food for the fungus, and the fungus makes it possible for the algae to live out of water in the first place.
- Page 37 How Does Water Get into a Watermelon? A watermelon is made of up to 95% water. So it’s the ideal thirst-quencher for hot summer days. But have you ever wondered how the water gets into the melon in the first place? From the Ground into the Roots Have you ever seen a tree that was uprooted by a storm? Thick, twisting roots are visible.
- Page 38 result, then simply press on the cover slip carefully with the butt end of a pen. The root will be pressed flat a bit by this. The root hairs at the edge of the root will not be harmed much by this. Root hairs are actually protuberances of a cell in the outermost layer of a root.
- Page 39 Bionics — Ingenious Phenomena of Nature “I’m sitting on the uppermost floor of a high- rise building. The wind is blowing relent- lessly and makes the skyscraper rock omi- nously back and forth. At some point, it happens: The tip of the skyscraper bends down so low that it even touch- es the ground.
- Page 40 But a blade of grass is not the same thing as tree trunk. It has to achieve as much stability as possible with minimal material. Let’s have a look at a blade of grass under the microscope. Cutting, Part 2 — The Styrofoam Trick Producing a good microscopic preparation is truly an art in and of itself and re- quires some practice.
- Page 41 Anchorage in the Ground Even the greatest of bending strength won’t do the blade of grass any good if its anchorage in the ground doesn’t hold. Whether the base of a tower or the roots of a plant, extreme reliability is a must. It’s apparently most favorable to change the construction principle in comparison to the stem, since the stabilization tissue of a root, which also serves as a vascular duct, is not wrapped around the rest of the root as a sheath, but rather as a central strand in the middle of the root —...
- Page 42 The surfaces of practically all plants are more or less structured. The silky appear- ance of the petal of a pansy, for example, comes from the fact that the petals have lots of small protuberances on their surface which reflect the light differently than a smooth surface would.
- Page 43 Leaf-by-Leaf Task Distribution Aside from the impressive stature of some tree trunks, leaves are certainly the most conspicu- ous plant organs. And there’s a reason for this: While the pollination of blossoms, for example, only takes up a limited portion of a plant’s life, the leaves are used through- out the year.
- Page 44 You can also make impressions of leaf surfaces using nail polish (see page 40). Very beautiful growth patterns on the epidermal cells then often become visible. Death By Thirst or Hunger? At the same time as the chloroplast-containing cells on the inside of a leaf have to absorb carbon dioxide from the air, the leaf cannot allow water to evaporate from inside it in an uncontrolled manner.
- Page 45 Did You Know? The Fine Art of Leaf-Cutting In order to gain an overview of all of the tissues in a leaf, it’s best to make a The inner surface of the lung of cross-section through it. You will need: an adult human is as large as a 4-bedroom home? In fact, the inner •...
- Page 46 Hair-Raising Sights While they’re not an exclusive characteristic of mammals, hairs are certainly one of their typical traits. In contrast to fish, frogs, and lizards, mammals are warm-blooded (or ho- moiothermic) animals. This means that their body tempera- ture is independent of the outside temperature. Mammals maintain a more or less constant temperature in their bodies.
- Page 47 You can also make a quiz with your friends or family. Prepare lots of different objects ranging from cat hair to human hair, from artificial fibers to a couple of fibers from a cotton bag to plant hairs from leaves or fruits. Now, it’s up to the others to try to match the microscopic images of the hairs to the objects of their origin.
- Page 48 The Dream of Flight Time and time again, nature has brought forth creatures that have been able to lift themselves off of the ground and glide through the air. But birds are the only ones among them that have truly been able to conquer the skies. There move- ment is like a beautiful art form to us humans.
- Page 49 Even Smaller and Finer How were the wonderful, colorful pictures on this page produced? As you read in the introduction, there are limits to the resolving capacity of a light microscope. What’s more, only very thin objects or thin sections can be observed using a light microscope.
- Page 50 Seeing Better with Electrons Just like light, electrons can be bundled and shot at an object. Researchers have already used this characteristic of electrons in several inventions, such as electron microscopes that can magnify objects up to 2 million times. One of these micro- scopes is the scanning electron microscope, or SEM for short.
- Page 51 Make Your Own Microscope Logbook One of the most important tasks in any scientific endeavor Option 3: If you feel comfort- is keeping detailed, accurate, and complete records of all able with word processing the findings. What good is an experiment if you cannot re- or layout programs on the member the results well enough to apply the information? computer, you can create...