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MAGIC

Mentee Presentation

Menlo School

5/27/22

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Agenda

Caroline Baccus

The effects of sound and light pollution on plankton behavior

Isabel Cordon

Building an Autonomous Car

Natalie DeCherney

Food Allergy and Epigenetics

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Caroline Baccus

9th grade, Menlo School, Atherton

Emily Introducing Caroline

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The effects of sound and light pollution on plankton behavior

Caroline Baccus

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Emily Nazario

UC Santa Cruz, Evolutionary biology, Ecology
Studies marine mammal physiology
Designs models to predict marine species distribution
From Davis, CA
Trail running, surfing, yoga, cooking, photography
Has a dog

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My project

Does light and sound pollution affect zooplankton?
Interested in marine biology
To study how humans influence plankton, the basis of the food chain
Collected and tested plankton in areas of varying human influence from different beaches on the San Mateo coast

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These are some of the plankton species I observed.

Copepod

Shrimp

Polychete worm

Cumaceans

Barnacle larvae

Polychete worm and cumaceans

Fish larvae

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Can plankton even sense light and sound?

Some can sense and move towards light, called phototaxis

Coral polyps can move toward sound, called sonotaxis
Generally not known whether zooplankton react to sound

Lecchini, David, et al. "Boat noise prevents soundscape-based habitat selection by coral planulae." Scientific reports 8.1 (2018): 1-9.

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Procedure

Collected plankton from 5 different beaches
Categorized species with microscope
Exposed plankton in a dish to sound and light

Step 1:

Step 2: Light and sound experiments

Light :

Sound :

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Procedure Pt.2

Analyzed videos in Tracker software to track the path of individual zooplankton
Counted plankton in light and dark regions
Data analysis in R

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Does sound affect the movement of plankton?

Boat motor sounds (70 - 90 dB) cause plankton to alter their movement patterns.

P1

Angular velocity

Velocity

P2

P4

P3

P6

P5

Slows down

Speeds up, turns more

Speeds up, turns less

This is a result that has not been tested or seen before

I asked the question does sound affect the movement of plankton? I exposed dished of plankton to boat motor sounds ranging from 70 - 90 dB and tracked the movement of individual plankton by clicking frame by frame over thousands of video frames. From these tracks I computed angular velocity which is how much it turns, shown in the top row, and velocity, shown in the bottom row. Each color is a different individual plankton, and the dotted line in each graph shows when the sound turned on.

I saw a few different effects. In the graphs at left in green, you see that the plankton slowed down, with the velocity decreasing after the dotted line, and it also turned less. The blue graph shows the same slowing down, but with a delay. All of these four plankton in the group at left slowed down. The plankton shown in dark green in black moved differently because they were a different species.

At right you can see different effects. In purple, you can see the plankton sped up and turned more in response to sound, and in red, the plankton sped up, but turned less, having a more straight path.

Overall I saw that in fact sound at levels seen from typical sound pollution does in fact change the behavior of plankton. To my knowledge, this general effect of sound pollution on plankton that make up the food chain has not been reported before in scientific liteatue and papers, so this is s=actually a new finding.

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Does light pollution influence phototactic plankton ?

Dark sample

Light sample

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Does light pollution influence phototactic plankton ?

Plankton collected from light-polluted areas prefer light more

than plankton collected from dark areas

Collected from light water

Collected from dark water

Light preference

% increase of light side over dark side

100

50

0

Light side of dish

Dark side of dish

Collected from dark water

p = 0.24

Dark side of dish

Collected from light water

Light side of dish

p = 0.018

So I put plankton collected from light water in a dish that was half light and half dark, and found that twice as many plankton preferred the light side of the dish. I made 7 measurements and this difference was significant as measured with a paired t-test, so there were phototactic plankton in the light part of the water.

In the next graph, you see that plankton collected from the dark part of the water preferred light less, the difference between the light and dark halves of the dish was smaller.

In the graph on the right, you can see that plankton in light regions of the water preferred light more than from the dark regions.

So I concluded that plankton collected from light-polluted areas prefer light more than plankton collected from dark areas, meaning that

light pollution does influence the food chain by concentrating the phototactic plankton

P value. If the result is random (the null hypothesis) it’s the probability that you get the difference that you observed, or greater.

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Do different environmental parameters affect speed and diversity of plankton?

Harbor�

Ocean

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Conclusions

Sound pollution influences the behavior of multiple species of zooplankton
Light pollution concentrates zooplankton that display phototactic behavior
Sound and light pollution introduced by humans could influence the entire food chain

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My MAGICal Experience

I had such an amazing experience in the MAGIC program and learned so much. I was so lucky to have Emily as my mentor, and she was so wonderful and helpful and positive.

Highlights: Meeting Emily in person, Sea lion biting plankton net,
Lessons learned: Learning how to design and set up experiments, and code in R
Challenges: Working with the ocean, technical problems figuring out light and sound experiments�

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Thank You!

Emily Nazario
Dr. Arnberg
Everyone at MAGIC

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Questions?

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Autonomous Car

Isabel Cordon

Menlo School, Junior, San Francisco CA

Bibit Introducing Isabel

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Bibit Bianchini

She is currently a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania. And before she did an undergraduate in engineering at MIT. She also did her masters at Stanford
She likes robotics because it combined she skills of mechanical and electrical engineering, and computer science
She likes in Pennsylvania
Some of her hobbies include doing personal STEM related projects, hiking, drawing, playing the drums, and hanging out with her sisters and dog

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Project Goal

My goal in this project is to make a self driving car that can run through a variety of obstacle courses

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Accomplished

Sensors working and able to signal to external light
familiarized with arduino

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Video Demo

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Hardware Used

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Software

The sensor has a trigger pin that serves to get the arduino to tell the sensor to send the measurement and it also has an echo pun that serves as the connection trough which it send that measurement

In the arduino there is a set up section which is code that gets run once before the loop code starts. In my code this section id determining all the pins, the trigpin is set up and an output and the echo as an input on the arduino side.

The “Serial print ” lets the arduino send types characters to the computer it is connected to, this helps us see exactly what the arduino is programing and helps us program the arduino to print what we want. In this case it records/ prints distances because my code specifies it as a part of the steps (distances seen in the second picture)

The “loop” code stars running after the setup section and never ends because one it gets to the end of the code it just starts over again that that process is repeated. In this loop section there is an if then statement. This statement if saying that if the distance is less than 10 then the LED pin is high meaning it should turn on and if the distance is anything else, meaning greator than 10, then the LED is set to LOW meaning the LED should be turned off

Talk about the logic for how the car should move based on the sensor reading on a track (such as the image above)

How it was going to have 4 sensors, 2 on the sides, one in front, and one in the back.

Sides detect the walls and front and back would detect an object in the way such a person or animal

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If I Had More Time…

Do more experimentation with the motors and get them to work
Laser cut wood and/or 3D print an exterior for the car

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Thank you!

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Questions?

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Natalie DeCherney

9th grade, Menlo School, Atherton

Namrata Introducing Natalie

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Namrata Raut

She is originally from Nepal
She works at Cincinnati Children’s hospital medical center
She works on Epigenetics, and how pain should be handled differently between adults and children
She enjoys driving and MCU/DC

Mentor photo, preferably with mentee, goes here

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Food Allergies

Increasing problem
8% of children
3% of adults
Gender plays a role

Use as opening slide for final presentation

Food allergies and Epigenetics

The reason I chose my topic is because I have severe food allergies to Peanuts, tree nuts and sesame. My project is about seeing if/ what is the relationship of food allergies between parents and their children. So far I have read 7 papers and 1 book on food allergies and what are the epigenetic and genetic factors.

Food allergies are an increase problem, reaching around 8% of children and 3% of the adult population. Allergies, such as cow’s milk allergy are increasingly persist until later age. At an early age there is a strong sex bias in favor of males in the development of asthma and other allergic diseases including food allergy, which is inversed after puberty and through out adulthood with a higher prevalence in women [10–14].

Talk a little abt my food allergies.

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Epigenetics

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Papers and Books used for research

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IRB (institutional review board)

Make questions
Reviewed with mentor
Had meeting with Ms. Jinnett to get it approved
Sent it to all the class deans/students

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IRB Questions

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IRB Questions

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IRB Questions

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My MAGICal Experience

Lessons Learned

Reading Papers
Critique Papers
Slideshow about Science

Highlights

Researching/doing a project that actually interests me
Sending out a survey and getting responses
Learning more about a topic that interests me

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Thank You!

Andrew Farmer
Nina Arnberg
Ira Pramanick
Ms. Jinnett
Menlo
Nam
Everyone who responded to my survey
Everyone at GetMagic

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Questions?

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